Queen of The Elms

get a bit of hope, you get

a cute birb photo

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I don't think it's possible.

Code Geass is Japanese nationalist propaganda disguised as a global political drama, disguised as a military mecha show, disguised as yaoibait, disguised as a teen melodrama, disguised as a high school romcom, disguised as a Pizza Hut commercial...

...except those layers aren't layers at all, but are instead comingled in a giant snake ball of insanity.

The lead writer, Ichirō Ōkouchi, only ever worked as an episode writer for other shows prior to Code Geass, and never took the helm of an anime series ever again. And it shows. [EDIT: Several people have pointed out his other lead writing credits to me. So I misread Wikipedia—sue me. I maintain that this guy is a better episode writer than he is a lead writer.]

The minute-to-minute pacing is impeccable from a mechanical standpoint, with tension and stakes rising to ever-higher peaks, balanced out by the slow simmers of the b-plot and c-plot. It keeps the viewer on the edge of their seat at all times. Meanwhile, the large-scale plot is the most off-the-wall middle school nonsense I've ever seen, continually surprising the viewer by pulling twists too dumb to have ever have been on their radar—and therefore more effective in terms of raw shock value.

"Greenlight it!" was the mantra of this anime's production. It must have been. It has, in no particular order, all of the following:

Character designs from CLAMP, the foremost yaoi/BL group in Japan at the time—for characters who are only queer insofar as they can bait the audience, and only straight insofar as they can be more misogynist to the female cast.

Speaking of the female cast, hoo boy the fanservice. We've all seen anime girls breast boobily, with many cases more egregious than Code Geass, but there's something special about it happening immediately after—or sometimes in the middle of!—scenes of military conflict and ethnic cleansing.

Pizza Hut product placement everywhere, in every conceivable situation. High-speed chases, light slice-of-life scenes, intimate character moments, all of it. Gotta have Pizza Hut.

The anime-only Pizza Hut mascot, Cheese-kun. He wears a fedora.

The most hilarious approximations of European names—which I would love to see more often, frankly. Names like, I dunno, "Count Schnitzelgrübe zi Blanquezzio."

A depiction of China that is wholly removed from any modern reality, with red-and-gold pagodas, ornamental robes, scheming eunuchs, and a brainwashed child empress. There's a character named General Tsao, like the chicken.

Inappropriate free-form jazz in the soundtrack, intruding at the most unexpected times.

A secret cabal not unlike the Illuminati, run by an immortal shota with magic powers, holding influence all across the world, at the highest levels of government. They matter for approximately three episodes.

An unexpected insert scene of a schoolgirl using the corner of a table to masturbate. She's doing it to thoughts of her crush, the princess Euphemia—because she believes Euphemia to be as racist as she herself is, and that gets her off. This interrupts an unrelated scene of our protagonist faction planning their next move, which then resumes as if uninterrupted.

Said schoolgirl, in a fit of hysteria, threatens to detonate a worse-than-nuclear bomb in the middle of her school. She then goes on to develop an even more destructive version of that bomb, and become a war criminal, in a chain of cause-and-effect stemming from the moment she finds out that Euphemia wasn't actually that racist.

A character called "the Earl of Pudding."

A premise that asks us to believe that the name Lelouch is normal enough that he didn't need to change it when he went into hiding as an ordinary civilian. "No, that's not Prince Strimbleford von Vanquish! That's our classmate, Strimbleford Smith."

The collective unconscious, a la Carl Jung, within which the protagonist fights his villainous father for control over the fate of humankind. After this is over, the anime just keeps going for about ten more episodes.

An episode in which a mech tosses a giant pizza.

A gay yandere sleeper agent who can manipulate the perception of time.

Chess being played very badly, even to the untrained eye. Lelouch frequently checkmates his opponent by moving his king. This goes hand-in-hand with the anime's crock of bad chess symbolism.

A fictional drug that can most succinctly be described as "nostalgia heroin."

Roller-skating mecha in knightly armor, and some of the most sickass mecha fight choreography that I've seen.

I could go on and on, but I think you get the picture. This anime is what the average Westerner in 2006 thought anime was, and it was made in a confluence of factors that cannot be replicated. I've never had so much fun watching something that I found so... insulting. Repugnant. Ridiculous. Baffling. I love it sincerely.

Will Byers I never once doubted you. What a beautifully written character you are.❤️‍🩹

I can't stop thinking about stranger things, this show is INCREDIBLE!!!! I can't even organize my thoughts in a coherent way. I love reading all your takes on here tho<3

This song fits them so well!!!! 😩 ofc whenever I get obsessed with a series I can't just draw a single fanart. No. No no no. I have to make an entire comic about it.

And after the movie, or every few episodes, I'd ask her, you know, what her favorite part was, or what did she think would happen next? Total glass eyes. Okay, okay, favorite is a bit much. Was there a part she liked? A character? ..... Any character's name?

I told my sister I was concerned of course. I got blown off. And then she started school and started getting notes about her reading comprehension and my sister was like but she knows how to read, I know she knows what words mean! And I was like no no no this is what I was talking about and like. Obviously I read the four year old picture books too but the example that came to mind was being disappointed we couldn't finish Carmen Sandiego and either not knowing or not wanting to tell me the main character's name.

And she's like, well that isn't reading.

Okay! So! The skill isn't named correctly but that's what it is!! That's what it is for a 4 year old, they should at least be on that level!

The one that I know that I learned in college because I remember having problems with it, and then it finally clicking, was warm and cool colors. Golden hour, or how to indicate cool or warm in art. It’s one of my very favorite ways to play with color, NOW, but, it took me most of a semester in a color focused art class, in my early twenties to SEE it.

Ugh. So many assignments where the teacher was like, “nope, bot there yet.” So many!! (So long ago, too. We were doing slide photography and showing the slides in class, every class meeting)

It was useful, to me, to encounter something that took so much work for me to actually see it. Before that, I had mostly just done what was easiest, what people told me I had a “talent” for.

No. The skill of learning new mental skills? The frustration tolerance to get through and get it to click? THAT was the most valuable thing I encountered in college because it applies to everything all the time everywhere.

And it’s good to understand that it is ALL SKILLS! All of it. The easy and the hard stuff. You CAN learn it. Figuring out how to get yourself to actually grasp it is harder, though. Different people learn in different ways.

I think one of the ways that a lot of people get frustrated by how reading is taught in school is that some teachers will focus heavily on very specific details in books, and so you will end up being tested on reading retention rather than reading comprehension. I had a teacher in high school whose reading quizzes were all about random details in whatever passage we had been assigned for homework (e.g., how many minutes did it take for the floodwaters to get from Town A to Town B) rather than on the actual comprehension of the passage. This can make you feel like you can't do reading comprehension or are bad at it, because it's what you've been tested on (especially if you never took a literature class post-high school).

Here are some skills that I think are important for reading comprehension, whether you're approaching fiction, non-fiction, persuasive writing, or anything else:

Understanding the meaning of a sentence in isolation, a paragraph, a section, and the entire piece. That is to say, having the ability to both parse the meaning of a sentence on its own but also understand how a set of thoughts fit together. A great way to practice this is to try to explain what something means to someone else (can be a real person, a pet, a stuffed animal, whatever). When I'm working with the people who report to me to edit their writing, one of the things I will often ask them is to explain what they're saying in a very simple non-business way. This also works with someone else's writing--can you take what was written in explain or describe it in plain terminology? Can you summarize a chapter or even a book in a few sentences?

Fitting the writing within the context in which it was written or published. If you see an essay talking about women's safety, for example, that phrasing will mean something different depending on who is writing it. It is often clear from the rest of the essay what they mean by it, but it is key to comprehending the writing as a whole to understand the context in which it was written or published (for example, to know whether it is being used as a transphobic dogwhistle). Can you identify biases in the writing, either through how it's written or what you know about the author or place where it was published? We know some of the biases that will be present in a piece put out by the Heritage Foundation versus Planned Parenthood, even without knowing the author.

Identifying themes or messages in the writing. Some authors and some writing focuses much more heavily on themes or messages than others (for example, a persuasive essay will have a much greater focus on a persuasive message than an encyclopedia entry), but no writing is truly neutral, and themes, messages, or goals (intentional or not) are present in virtually every piece of writing. You don't need to write a five paragraph essay about everything you read, but it can be good practice to spend a little bit of time thinking about how the piece of writing presents certain information or people. If someone is described as "stubborn" versus "obstinate" or "brave" versus "foolhardy", it gives a sense of the message being presented about this person. if all characters of a certain race, gender, religion, etc. are presented a certain way, you can start to identify the message that the story is sending about that group--whether or not the author intended it.

A meta-analysis on Robin and Will's conversation about queer "signals"

Okay, I love this scene, and not just because it features Will and Robin discreetly discussing the nuances of queer romance.

I love this scene as a writer specifically, due to it's clever and subtle use of authorial intrusion disguised as character dialogue.

Authorial intrusion

Through authorial intrusion, the author/s can address the audience intimately, even under the guise of an existing character. It allows the author/s to communicate directly to the audience; commenting on the narrative, stating an opinion, or posing a question. It doesn't require a breaking of the fourth wall. It's similar to author or audience surrogacy. For example, Steve often acts as an audience surrogate in the series — the "simple" voice who asks questions which prompt exposition (usually from Dustin or Nancy), clarifying the plot.

Will and Robin’s scene is certainly seeking clarity, but it isn’t about exposition. It’s about introspection.

So, what is the alleged moment of authorial intrusion in question? It's this simple (and incredibly meta) line from Will, who is this season's lead protagonist: "How obvious?"

Of course, what Will is referring to here is Robin's notion of signals, aka subtle flirtation or signs of mutual attraction — particularly through the lens of queerness, which can be more difficult to navigate and discern.

To provide a succinct summary, the scene plays out like this:

-> Will asks Robin how she knew Vicki wanted to date her. -> Robin says Vicki sent her subtle "signals" such as a brush of the knee, a bump of the elbow, or a shared look. -> These little things (compared to a snowball) accrued and eventually became "obvious." -> Will, acting as a stand-in for the authors, poses the ultimate question: "How obvious?"

This is an extremely "meta" line, because it's as if the authors are completing an exercise in writing a queer romance in real-time. Through this question, the writers are examining their own craft, and gently prompting us to join them.

Questioning the approach

The writers are pondering their own approach to Mike and Will's storyline; How obvious can we make it, or rather, how obvious should we make it? What is even considered "obvious" in this case? Is a shared look or lingering touch obvious, or not?

It's not a condescending question either — they're not saying you should find it obvious, and if not, you're an idiot.

It's not, "How obvious do we have to make it for you to get it, dammit?!" It's more like, "We've tried to lay down the foundation, but we're unsure if it will land. How can we make this work?"

And this is why it's a question worth asking — there's no clear, universal answer. The writers don't have a lot of material to draw upon. They've probably been pondering this question in the writer's room for awhile.

So, they want to know if their signals have been received, and if so, were those signals obvious or obscure? How obvious should they make it to land the plane?

Providing an answer

The funny thing is, although they're curious to know what the auidence thinks, it's not intended for us to answer — because they've already finished the script.

They've made up their minds concerning "how obvious" they wish to go, and what that looks like to them.

They declared their answer through Robin:

It will become an avalanche.

They've even provided us with a visual metaphor for their chosen technique:

-> The subtle, "little things" like shared looks are like snowballs. -> The snowball accrues and builds over time, gaining mass. -> Eventually, it becomes an avalanche; massive and sudden.

The visual metaphor here emphasizes mass and timing — if they do this, then they want it to feel crushingly heavy, and abrupt.

And although they want to make it as obvious as an avalanche, they don't want it to be obvious all the time, and they don't want to make it too predictable — because avalanches cannot be predicted, it's only possible to assess the risk or likelihood.

Will foreshadowed as the "receiver"

So, this question deserves a thematic answer, because it's been introduced as a story element which Will is keenly invested in — it's Chekhov's gun.

There was no point to including this scene unless we can expect to see a snowball turn into an avalanche. Otherwise, they've taught Will how to examine his love life only to... not give him a love life.

You don't tell a character to look for signals if you're not going to give them signals to pick up on. And curiously (yet not so curious, because it was intentional), Will has already been referred to as a receiver of signals.

Like, quite literally in the episode before this conversation took place, by the same exact person.

So according to Robin, Will is a receiver, because he has an antenna.

Antennae convert electric currents into radio waves, or vice versa. In that way, the role of Will's metaphorical antenna isn't just to pick up signals, it's to convert them into something meaningful.

To decode them.

Why does that sound familiar?

Ah! Because Robin is already an expert in decoding — she solved the Russian code in s3, after all.

She even explicitly states that the point of code is to communicate something sensitive.

This is a commentary on the queer experience: you have to be careful, subtle, and possibly even use another language (or "cant") if you want your message to be safely received. For example, gay men and women in the UK used to speak in a form of cant called Polari to identify each other when homosexuality was criminalized. (x).

Will and Mike seem to agree with Robin — some things are very hard to say outright, and out loud.

The signals are "queer code"

And yes, that is a play on words.

The queer signals must be decoded and therefore, they are a form of queer code. Furthermore, Robin makes a direct reference to the Enigma machine — a cipher device used by Nazi Germany during World War II.

Robin states that the Enigma machine "won the war" which is simplified phrasing. Perhaps what she means to say is that the Enigma code won the war — because cracking the code played a crucial role in the Allied victory.

In fact, Alan Turing's contributions to cracking the Enigma code as cryptanalyst were so instrumental that he was awarded an OBE (Officer of the Order of the British Empire).

Alan Turing was famously gay (and later persecuted for it), and also happens to be the historical figure Will chose as his "hero" for his history assignment in s4.

While shared looks, subtle lip glances, and the brushing of hands are all signals intended for Will to decode, these small "easter eggs" are signals for the audience.

Subtext and text which hints at Will's queerness — because as of Season 5 Volume I, he is still yet to claim his sexuality (even if it seems obvious to us).

This is queer-coding in practice. And yes, Mike receives his own fair share of coding too — just look at his ridiculous bedroom.

Where is this leading?

It's leading to gay romance, obviously.

Will receiving no signals simply isn’t narratively coherent. The story has already established him as the receiver and decoder of queer signals.

What I'm personally getting from this, dear reader, is that we have two possible outcomes before us:

Will experiences a fully developed on-screen romance with a new love interest, complete with subtle signs which eventually become obvious over a period of time.

Will continues to recieve signals from Mike, which culminate into an "avalanche" scene — the writers' attempt at making it "obvious."

It's not a question of, "will he receive signals?" It's a question of, "who is he going to receive signals from?"

I now pose the question to you: which of the two options feels more likely, considering the way the story has been written thus far, and the screentime we have left?

I think the answer seems obvious, but I guess I could be wrong. After all, the entire point of the question is that "obvious" is not so easy to define.

I watched Nosferatu (2024) in Feb and immediately knew I'd have to recreate this scene with Will and Vecna at some point. 🧛

(The final panel is super rushed and I'm not happy with how it turned out, but overall I'm pleased I got this done in time for Halloween for once!)

When Adam kissed him, it was every mile per hour Ronan had ever gone over the speed limit. It was every window-down, goose-bumps-on-skin, teethchattering-cold night drive. It was Adam’s ribs under Ronan’s hands and Adam’s mouth on his mouth, again and again and again. It was stubble on lips and Ronan having to stop, to get his breath, to restart his heart.

Soldier Poet King

I loved this visual so much I had to doodle it.

i think we should bring this back (with some amendments ofc) if we ever needed an "internet etiquette" for the younger generations, now is the moment to remind them. purity culture kills fandom

as well as the three laws of fandom:

little pynch comic of THE scene... it took me by surprise so much that I had to pause and reread. ohhhh my god I love them. Also - I found that "Daydream/Wetdream/Nightmare" by Saint Motel is literally THE PERFECT pynch song ever??? It's one of my all time favorites and it fits them soooo well!! too well even.