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genvy · 3 years

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welcome to an extremely niche post for me and very few other people: what clans i think various saw characters would belong to in vampire the masquerade! this will get long so i am putting it under the cut, and i tried to justify my reasonings for those that are unfamiliar with the material

reasonably, if i were to actually translate the plot of saw to its equivalence in the vtmb universe, all victims of jigsaw would be human, and he would embrace or maybe ghoul his apprentices. however, i want to analyze them (both apprentices and victims) by personality, and also the idea of hoffman as a tzimisce is like sincerely horrifying, so i’m rejecting the concept and analyzing them independently from one another! also, the assumption For Me is that kerry/rigg/perez/strahm/that entire group would be vampire hunters in this scenario, so i won’t be diagnosing them

first and foremost, the opinion i am the most certain about: john is a tzimisce. tzimisce have an ability that is unique to them known as vicissitude, or fleshcrafting, which is basically exactly what one would expect from being called fleshcrafting, ie molding the bodies of the living and what have you. they are also natural philosophers, and they LOVE torture, both physical and psychological. i don’t feel like i need to justify this choice

i feel like amanda has malkavian potential, which almost feels too easy (as the CRAAAZY INSAAANE ASYYYLUM I’M GONNA KILL YOU clan, because this IS a 2004 video game based on a 90s tabletop game we’re talking about here), but i do like it a lot for her. malkavians can tend to reject their own nature and cause themselves a lot of emotional distress, but a malkavian that doesn’t reject her nature can essentially function as an oracle/has a natural inclination towards what awaits them. they also like to play pranks. that isn’t really important i just think it’s cute. <3

hoffman. hoffman was more difficult for me than he should be, possibly. but i THINK that he would be a gangrel. known for being violently turned and then forced to either adapt to this life or die, which results in a very strong instinct to survive but a tendency to disregard or not even be aware of important cultural rules/laws. they also tend to prefer working alone, and they have an intrinsically more powerful connection to their beast, which is, in essence, a primal drive to kill (and, therefore, survive) within all vampires, and much smaller of a trigger than most clans can result in a violent frenzy for a gangrel. hoffman is practically a caveman, i feel like this makes sense for him

jill is definitely a lasombra. lasombra are the sister clan to the tzimisce, and they excel in operating in shadows, having hands in powerful places without practically anyone’s knowledge. they are EXTREMELY ambitious, and believe strongly in severe punishment for transgressions that deserve such a thing. (in reality, i could also make an argument for john as a lasombra as well, as a prominent ritual for lasombra is to “test” a potential embrace by completely ruining their lives and, if they survive/adapt to that, they are worthy of being taken into the lasombra clan, but i also really like john as a tzimisce lol)

lawrence is extremely ventrue material. they are, in essence, the piece of shit yuppie clan. it is practically a rule for them to be wealthy, they put a lot of stock intot maintaining their good reputations, and their most valuable skill is their ability to make people listen to and believe their word. i would probably have more to say on him specifically if he were present more often in the series lol but i am pretty firm in this opinion

realistically speaking, adam would NEVER be cool enough to be a vampire, but if he were one he would hands down be a brujah. for one, the brujah clan is essentially the direct parallel and opposite to the ventrue clan, which makes a fun contrast with lawrence. they are defined by their passion and how quick they are to anger, and are almost always vampire socialists, because vampire socialism is a thing in vtm. it’s an entire thing. anyways brujah are kind of just some guys and that feels appropriate for adam, everyone’s favorite just some guy <3

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jiminwreckedme · 4 years

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I Will Turn The Lights On Summary

Alright, I decided to post the summary of my original fic for the following reason whelp.

(way too many mentions of mental illness, abuse, self harm, homicide under the cut. Please don’t read if you are triggered by such topics, it was for this very reason I was so hesitant to put up this story.)

‘I Will Turn the Lights On’ was supposed to be the story of two polar opposite people.

One of them is Valerie. The youngest businesswoman to enter the Forbes most powerful women list, a cut throat, cold hearted business woman feared by her competitors and employees alike. She is known to be extremely manipulative, a control freak, and to have zero regard for emotions. Friendships especially mean nothing to her and more than anything, she hates the idea of romantic love. Though she was unpredictable, there was one thing that was almost constant - the sweet smile on her face. One that does not reveal her intentions and one that does not reach her eyes.

And so, there was one thing often assumed about her. She was a Sociopath, one who suffered from antisocial personality disorder.

In contrast, the other character is Jimin, a happy go lucky guy and a trainee to be an idol for almost a decade now. For the last 10 years he had been promised a debut but never saw the light of it. Tired of waiting, he begins to give up on his ambition and decides to join Valerie’s company as an ordinary employee. However, deep down, the life of a star – the fame, the money, the admiration - these are what he still desires. And love. Jimin, on the other hand, is a hopeless romantic and finding true love is one of his life missions. For that reason, Jimin had a habit that was unusual of such romantics - sleeping around. He called it his way of looking for love and for the undeniable connection between two people.

And so, we have two starkly different people working together.

Valerie, who cannot tolerate Jimin’s relaxed and unprofessional nature and Jimin, who despises her uptight attitude and arrogance. As conflicts between them begin to increase, Jimin, ignoring everyone’s words of caution, grows adamant to find the root cause of her incomprehensible nature and digs into her past only to find out it’s darker than anyone could have thought. While she was a woman who controlled everything and everyone who stood before her, when she was alone in the dark, Jimin found her shaking in fear, desperately needing help, haunted by things unimaginable. As Jimin offers to turn the lights on in her life and stands up for her in a world that’s against her, Valerie finds herself falling into the one thing she always refused to – in love.

And there’s nothing more dangerous than the combination of love and the desire to control.

As Valerie desperately aims to keep Jimin by her side forever she attempts everything and anything to have him, be it enticing or be it sinister. Tempting him by making his dreams come true by abusing her power and money was just one half, the only half the world saw. The world didn’t see how falling deeper in the mystery called love, her passion turned into an unimaginable obsession that didn’t care for anyone. Not her own family and not even herself. (A horrifying example would be how she want only created situations where she willingly puts herself in danger requiring Jimin to rescue her and constantly be by her side. Another one of many gruesome acts is purposely distancing Jimin from his best friend Taehyung who is in complete disapproval of her, by destroying the relationship the two men share and making Taehyung leave Jimin’s life in a way that's nothing close to pleasant.) Her most common routes of eliminating people who she sees as hurdles in her life are, creating helpless situations and misunderstandings, implicating people of crime they didn't do, and it is suspected she even resorts to murder.

While such a woman should be one who is shunned and avoided, there was something about her that was not unlikable. She was confident and sharp tongued, very calmly giving it back to all those who challenged her, efficiently shutting them up. She was charismatic, witty and unique in her own way.

And more than anything, beyond that dark exterior was just a simple girl who wanted to be loved in a world that offered her nothing but hatred since she was a child. Unlike what everyone assumed, she did not suffer from antisocial personality disorder - her personality is how she is and how she willingly chooses to be. Rather, she suffered from PTSD due to the abuse she faced in her father’s hands as a child, the father who was in fact the one who suffered from antisocial personality disorder. Not only was she victim though. She was also a culprit. The suspected culprit of that very father’s murder.

With every step Jimin takes, leading him closer to her reality, he becomes more determined to help her and prove to the world that she was not the bad person they made her seem. But with the very steps he took, Valerie spiraled deeper into her obsession, indulging herself in acts Jimin couldn’t even fathom.

What is to see is what wins? Jimin’s genuine attempts to heal her and drive away the darkness in her life or Valerie’s desire to own Jimin that cause her to slip further into that very darkness.

Could the lights really be turned on?

I didn’t reveal how I intended the story to end lmao because I’m not really sure if the kdrama is really as similar to this plot as I think? In case it’s not, I might decide to post this story. Let me just add though that the story does not have a happy ending. There is character death and lots and lots and lots of pain and heartache. I was a bit brutal with this one but there really was no better way to end it. This was the only way to do justice to these complicated characters.

A part of me is happy to let this project of mine go because it was the most controversial one and of course, the most difficult one and so not writing it is a bit of a relief. But I also really enjoyed writing whatever little I already have because rather than the plot, the more interesting part of this story for me was the dialogue and symbolism in the tiniest things. For example, Valerie has a habit of constantly bathing a symbolic attempt to wash away her wrong doings. And she also has some very good dialogues because she has a smart mouth. She’s intellectual and witty and knows how to make people go silent. It would be cool to share all those little things with y’all too like I shared the plot with a summary.

I already have a lot of the dialogues and scenes written down for this story. Scenes that made me cry and scenes that gave me chills because Valerie is just that kind of character. She can be pitiable, sweet and make your heart hurt for her predicament but she is also ruthlessly sinister and horrifying at times. She is a grey character yes, one who is constantly fluctuating between light and dark shades. Which is why this story is not a reader insert, I wouldn’t want any reader to even try and insert themselves in the shoes of this mess.

There are a lot of subplots too. This was supposed to be a 20 to 25 chapter long story. But I just shared the main idea of the story because if we go into the details I might as well write the fic lmao.

And obviously the story handles the issue of mental health so I wanted to take my time because I don’t want to hurt anyone’s sentiments and give out any wrong ideas either due to inaccurate depictions. I guess I took too long though, this story was due 3 whole years ago and now it’s too late. Though I think it’s amazing how similar the story is to the drama. And surprisingly there are a lot of things in the drama that are very similar to my other stories from years ago - certain dialogues, certain ideas. Its creepy lmao that people can think with so much similarity.

#its okay to not be okay #psycho but its okay #I will turn the lights on #let me know what you think!#and if you might be interested in seeing some of the scenes I have drafted for this story #I will delete this summary and those scenes if I choose to post this fic #given that it is quite different from what the drama turns out to be #and if its similar I will update this summary and reveal the ending I had in mind

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ziracona · 4 years

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What has been your favorite ilm chapter to write? Your least favorite? Do you have any interesting fun facts that were in cut pieces? I love this fic and the research put in is astounding. You put so much love into this. I'm glad to have been a reader :)

Thank you so much for asking this, and I’m really happy you have liked it! : ) Researching all kinds of wild stuff has been one of the most fun parts. (I’m holding the start of the answer to each question you asked, bc I talked about the first one for a while lol).

I do have a favourite chapter! I think to read, it would be a lot harder question, and there’d be a bunch of chapters tied, but as an author, my favourite chapter is most definitely Speak for the Dead. I have a lot of favourite moments and chapters, but that’s the one I’m most proud of. There’s a really rare thing in writing I call “script perfection,” which is not like, a perfect script in comparison to other scripts, it just means the version of the script that got shot/published was the best version of that particular script there ever could have been. It’s incredibly rare, and very hard to do. Even with films and shows I love, usually there will be seconds, sometimes minutes, off and on, that are the best version of those seconds there could have ever been. And the rest of it is great! It’s maybe the second or third or eighth-best it could have been, and that’s still super impressive--like man--eigth-best is still so close to 1st, eigth best is freaking phenomenal. It’s something to be really proud of. But that’s as high as it almost ever gets. For anything. Only extremely rarely is an entire script at 96% or above on script perfection. (I would say for reference that Galaxy Quest and The Incredibles are two such films).

It isn’t the most important part of a script or a story at all. Not by a huge amount. The quality of the story itself is. I have plenty of films that never hit 90% or above script perfection that I still prefer over films that did (like, Galaxy Quest is an amazing film, and I’m in awe that it hit that level of refinement, but I still like The Two Towers, which definitely did not, better. Because Sam’s speech at the end of it is enough to power me for a whole year). But it’s still such a rare thing. And god, it’s hard. Any kind of media is done on some kind of budget (be it financial or energy or both), and time constraint, and also it’s just not easy to do. Again, true-final-draft achievement (which is probably a better name for this bc it’s less confusing) is far from the most important or valuable aspect of a film, or play, or book, and it’s not necessary to make a story amazing. But it’s still always /so/ cool to see. It’s cool to see a nine minute continuous stretch of it even, on screen. And out of all the chapters I’ve written, the only one I think hit true-final-draft at least 96% or above, was Speak for the Dead. And that’s not embarrassing or anything. It’s wild. And I’m super proud of that. I’m proud I got even one. Because a lot of even my favourite books don’t. They just have perfected scenes, and a lot of them, but are not the best draft they could have been. Which does absolutely nothing to negate their worth as phenomenal books, but. I’m really, really proud of Speak for the Dead, and very happy with myself for having been able to do that at least once. I kind of treasure that.

It’s also a special chapter to me, because I had it only very loosely outlined/planned for at all, and it kind of came together on its own, and everything just came together and fell into place just right, and this chapter I had been really unsure of before starting turned into my favourite one in the entire fic. I like what I write, and I enjoy reading it myself, but there’s a line in Speak for the Dead where Tapp is trying to explain everything to Meg, about himself and his past and his family, and he’s been going through this like, awful mass of confusion and trauma and guilt and regret that’s all come to a head in this one day, and he’s found out who Amanda is and can’t deal with that and the person he knew, and the way Sing died, the choices she went on to make, and there’s so much even he doesn’t understand about how the world is falling apart around him, but somehow he figures it out enough to say it to Meg. And he has a line: “You’re supposed to stay late and work the extra eight hours overnight to catch the killer so somebody doesn’t die; you’re not supposed to go home to your family and give your kid a hug. It’s not as important, in an equation. It was my responsibility. And I didn’t get that the other job had its own set of rules. That the cop’s supposed to let the bus with his partner fall, but the dad’s supposed to let the fifteen people go and save his kid—he’s supposed to go running through crowded subway tunnels chased by gunmen, consequences be damned, to get them away from where his kid’s hiding. I didn’t get it. I don’t know why. I loved him right, but I didn’t act like it, because I thought I was doing the right thing. But if everybody’s just numbers, you lose anything that matters, no matter how high the numbers go up. And you don’t realize until it’s way too late that you do just as much good really helping one person you signed on to protect as you could have ever done bouncing off the lives of a hundred people who go on to be the next Jigsaw.”

And like. I fucking love that line. God. It’s such a hard thing to articulate, what he’s going through in that moment, and I try, but I think I often don’t do as good a job. But every time I read that last line it’s like a gut punch. And I really love it. How the fuck could you possibly feel after going through the experience he’s just had? It’s such a specific, indescribable kind of big, whole-world-view devestating.

There’s also a lot of really sweet moments with Meg, and Adam drugged and injured but trying really hard to help, and it’s a super understated chapter in a lot of the moments? Tapp’s one of my favourites to write, because of the way he thinks. He tries so hard to be lawful good in a world where there’s just no law at all anymore. And he’s older by far than anyone else, and thinks about the world that way. Honestly, it’s one of the most serious chapters. It’s less graphic than say Proven or The End of the Line, but it deals with some very not remotely fantastic and not pretty themes. It’s heavy. But I like the way it tells itself. I enjoy working in references when they make things fun, or better, or more meaningful, and I got to do that a lot. Plus, it gave Ace and Tapp a bunch of one-on-one time they didn’t really get on-screen as much in any of the rest of the fic, but I really loved it. The way they try to look after the people they care for, and how they understand each other. I just really fucking loved that chapter. Also, Tapp beat someone to death with a reverse bear trap that was still attached to his head so he could save Meg from dying in a way that would be super lastingly traumatic, and if that’s not the most metal thing I’ve ever heard? I really love Tapp. And I love that he sticks to the things he does. Meg never learns what Amanda was going to do to her, not in fic, not after. And Tapp does change how he does things are talking to Meg at the end of that chapter. Tapp’s the one who immediately says they can’t go public with any information on Rin until she’s passed on, even though it could really help them prove their case and hypothetically better protect the world, because he’s not willing to see a kid forced to revert to being violent and feral against her will in self-defense, or locked up in a government black site to get that. He did good. Life has not been kind to this poor man, but thankfully, Meg Thomas has.

Least favourite? Way harder. Hmmm. Always whichever one I wrote most recently 😂

In complete seriousness, I don’t think I have one? I have like 6 I consider “slightly-less-interesting” than the rest, but I don’t have one I hate period, or just dislike a lot. Uhhhh. If I had to pick one right now, I’d say Core Essentials, because I haven’t read it in over a year and don’t remember it as well as many others, and of the small number of chapters in the “Damn, been a hot minute, huh?” group, it’s the one I remember the least. This rating may change next time I actually read it, lol.

Hmmm. Interesting fun facts in cut segments. In the original draft for Shrouded, Claudette went into Philip’s basement and got a really good look at the other side of the wall, through one of the cracks, and saw the Entity and almost gave herself a panic attack. The other side of the basement wall was described as looking like the sun, like just looking at light, but only at first, and then there was movement like a snake coiling or some huge creatuer deep underwater sliding across your vision, too big to see, but alive in there in the middle of the light, and moving around, and it horrified her. It was extremely creepy but pretty cool.

The original draft for The Wraith included Philip experiencing fragmented audio memories from Signifying Nothing/his time with Vigo & co. while he was mostly unconscious. It was really cool and I forgot because I haven’t read it in forever, but it hinted at /way/ more of the plot to those past events. I really liked the draft, but ended up changing it into what was published because I’d never done anything with his memories before, and I didn’t want to disorient the reader too much (probably a good call, but it was still a neat scene in the OG form).

It’s not in the fic, but canonically, after leaving the survivors camp at the end of The Wraith, Philip came up with his plan to leave himself a message in the bell, and then called the Entity. Trying to talk his way out immediately failed, and it was shitty to him and pissed him off, and Philip had considered what might work on something like the Entity before calling it, and knew he was dead either way, so he tried to fight it. More to see if it would work than anything. He knew he would forget it even if he did, but sometimes impulses lingered, and it was possible if it worked, it would help him think of it again. He used his blood and drew a protective symbol against demons on his palm without it noticing, then rushed it, and it wasn’t scared of him so it didn’t give a fuck, but he smacked it with the charm and that actually succeeded in burning its talon (very little, but enough to cause it actual pain) and it flipped out and got extremely angry, and immediately stabbed him through the skull, which is why he returned with that chunk of his mask gone and has a scar on his forehead now. Originally, I was considering writing some of the events between The Wraith and Dawn from Philip’s POV, but decided it was much better sticking with the survivors and their uncertainty completely. Got to live in the anxiety baybeeee.

I’m sure there’s more but you activated my trap card asking about Speak for the Dead - a special interest- and I already made this long, so I should stop for now. Thank you again so much for asking! I hope my answers made sense are we’re at least kinda enjoyable to read. 💙💙💙

#ask #anonymous #in living memory #in living memory (fic)#writing #ilm spoilers #this was so fun and im glad i had an excuse to go writing meta haha. the one part of college i miss :’-)#thanks! 💙 it was really sweet. and fun to answer!#long post

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sentiniel-butitgetsworse · 6 years

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rwde

highly unpolished, awful explanation, but scene-by-scene commentary of unbridled annoyance and rage. read at your own peril.

hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

so the episode opens with a fight scene. sweet! cool! but its so badly staged, sometimes you have no idea what is happening the first time round. it’s crowded and messy, not a very good look? im talking about grim being hid behind ice while the camera is panning and hitting some trees when we’re literally panning out to show someone else in focus DESPITE THE FACT THEIR MITIGATION SHOULD BE FRONT AND CENTER TO LET US KNOW IT HAPPENED CLEARLY. legit! there’s the one where nora shoots at a grim and the shell explodes into black dust and the grim is gone. did it die? grim dont usually die by fuckin smoke but this one sure fuckin did i guess ‘cause i literally dont know what happened to it? no recoil and fall, just deleted and hid behind some 2d-lookin smoke! sure! why not?!?!!!?

s/o to the white/rose speedy thing that had no reason to be there and yet they did it

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then there was the “adam ruins everything” segment where he literally just murders? everyone? like i get that its off screen for the younger audiences but also like he fucking murders everyone. literally! did i miss something? is it a good tactic now? did they think it was very villainous of him to murder people??????? god bring me back to the beginning when he actually has a good character reason for why faunus would follow him into revolution because this adam taurus is so bad he’s worth flushing down the drain for.

“tHe BeLlAdOnnA nAme HaS bRoUgHt Me NoThINg BUt gRiEf”

also that opening shot where adam is proud. jfc what? is he even part of salem’s crew anymore? was the Adam short supposed to tell us he isnt? is anyone reviewing this and thinking 100% it’s a good idea?????

wait why is this scene even second? that’s a really awkward position to put it in the whole episode? honestly? like it kinda underlines how awkward a villain adam really is; it has no build up, no reason to be there. sure, the audience is hungry to know what happened to adam, but there’s legitimately no reason to put it as the second scene in the episode, there’s no context??????

callout post for this scene because its literally just voicelines while panning slowly through the bottom floor of the room. and the blood only shows up later??? also is the white fang only comprised of like 7 people now??? isnt it a globally feared organization (ie. isis)????

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there are two bodyguards for the train. two? two. and for some reason they’re asking for dlc to provide more/personal protection? hello, did i miss something? anyone thought it was a good idea? what class of transportation did they get? if it was dangerous enough that on a train ride they’d need people to guard the journey it wouldn’t even be built there? or what, did they get a max-luxury, train ride with insurance kinda deal? and it had two (2) bodyguards? two (2)!!!!! or was it in the middle of the road??? i may have enough context for the environment but none on economy of this place i swear

“hey ladies we’ll protect you wink” jaune and lie ren literally sitting one (1) feet away not saying anything, could be everyone’s moment to justify “hey we’re literally huntsman despite being kids, we know what we’re doing” but qrow has to step in and apparently his credentials would ward off some bodyguards???? like “hi yes sorry im the dad of literally 8 kids, i can protect them all” not a convincing argument here bud

illia deserves more time on screen and also closure because neptune fuckin hit on her and that’s obviously enough to change scenes right

also neptune being “you really gonna let her go? l:/” feels like he’s salty instead of wukong tbh; wukong feels/sounds like the literal i can do anything kinda guy -- which he is in mythology and probably in universe (except for intelligence i guess, despite the fact he literally outsmarts his opponents through a lot of his mythos) so i dont mind him being let off the hook, but any hesitation implied during this scene? weak

illia building up to kiss but hugging blake instead, but blake kissing wk on the cheek straight up on camera yo really

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blake emos in the corner and because its queued up right after the wk/neptune scene its not a far fetch to say she’s emo-ing about wk but turns out its yang? would’ve preferred the setup to be stronger (blake watches yang get on the bed and feels sad/regret, zoom in on yang’s arm to show the audience but not tell them)

i give props to blake being shown “wait leme get that for you” real out the way though, because it underlines properly that blake feels ridiculously bad and wants to do something to make up for yang. good characterization/storytelling!

then they break it w/ like a 30s scene of yang and blake making up almost immediately with a “oh everyone will feel better about it soon :)” BRUH SHE GUILTY BOUT YOUR FUCKIN ARM BITCH CUT BACK TO REALITY DAMN the running away part is sincerely legitimate but also??? blake should be a/ more anxious than that and b/ be more worried about???? yang’s arm??????? for real m8

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“dont let anyone else die” a/ assumes the bodyguard trying to defend the train literally died and b/ also really fell flat? as a line? get something better...????

genuine dislike for the tactic of qrow fights the Big Boss and everyone gets a handful of weaklings; to stall? possible. but also just feels like a bad tactic overall? also their animations always look like they’re doing an rpg battle; one ability used + animation! then return to original position. that’s a big fallacy of fighting monty oum style and i genuinely hope they recognize it soon

“YOU’RE ATTRACTING THE GRIM TO THE PASSENGERS” ??? i get the part where leading them to the back of the train may help (having them all divided in sections [grim + hunters, passengers, front of train respectively] may help but how does automation attract grim again? like, turrets shooting at them would do so if they’re in range, and they all came from the back so they’d move along towards the middle, but also they wouldn’t continue moving forward? i guess? what im saying is they should really just be around jnxr + oscar instead of way forward in front

when the bodyguard tried to get into the train and barely made it, that SNAP sound was just. raw. i felt that. good! i was very scared/horrified/eager to see if they’d literally break off his arm and he’d just be lying there in a pool of blood or something in shock. he didnt because of aura and i don’t know what to say because a/ it definitely wouldn’t be a bruise and b/ if he had aura and was in the bodyguarding business, wouldn’t he also have a proper semblance to fight off grim most likely? and he aint using it so why he so confident for dlc earlier the heck

bumblebee looks back to the carriage and one lady’s just with her baby like a cheap heartstrings tug

“WHY WON’T YOU TELL US THAT” yang’s line here assumes that they’ve asked about it before and ozpin/oscar refused to answer. i disagree? i think it works better with “WHY DIDN’T YOU TELL US THAT?” because it definitely was a factor they’d all have to take into account with regards to travelling w/ it in the first place. which they are. tbh yang (and jaune in the op) has every right to be mad at him real talk but also change that line please it bothered me so much

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blake sees the hooded adam figure and honestly idk what kind of omen that is but it feels/looks weird. another no context scene i guess. tbh id take that one out of this episode entirely and shuffle it next episode probably. (and put the adam ruins everything scene at the back of the episode)

grim stop chasing because tunnel. and then they chase the train through the tunnel really slowly? feels weird but okay i fuckin guess; these are just the things im willing to pass on

ren and jaune look at each other like “lets do it” but why does ren? look up? like there’s no extra effects there, its not visible that he’s trying really hard to extend his semblance out. no cool semblance-using eye powers there. it feels kinda cheap for him to do that w/o any additional highlights that he’s activating his aura? also creepy

OH THERE’S THAT SCENE. yang starts off the Big Fight Montage with grabbing the grimm by its horns and then flips it around. cool move! then she promptly punches it up and closes her eyes. what? tbh that was ridiculously weak after a stupid good setup. budget aside i’d say there was an opportunity for a focused choreograph there; instead of a punch up, use a bullet fire up, keeping the enemy’s front half up in the air for a longer period of time. run under, punch/kick the underbelly, bounce off to the side, bullet fire off the side of the train.

blake cutting off the tail was a good move. rt studios deciding to change shots when the enemy has the same pose, so that we cut to ruby fighting the same kind of grimm is not. it breaks clarity for the viewers, that’s not how matching cuts should work tbh

these big grimm dying in a couple of hits are also just? kinda weak-feeling. like these characters got stronger from rpg levels, but not from actual combat training and learning to outsmart your enemies, or upgrading your weapons. feels cheap.

ruby bouncing around in attempt to kill these grim is kinda cute? which may be what they were trying to do? but also not well choreographed i guess. it doesn’t flow too well, just bounces in seperate spikes.

when weiss redirects the flying grimm to ruby, it feels like its? not clear what she did. was it a semblance/shield? colour that blue, we know she uses white but white on white doesn’t work out well. ruby’s scythe sinking into the grimm also doesn’t work great because you get confusion when the shot is supposed to show it sink into the grimm, but you cant see the scythe blade sink into it. like you could only get it from context after watching it that she sent the grimm flying by doing the above, but dont recognize the action in the moment.

callout post to yang and blake fuckin shooting at nothing when there’s a clear path/shot to ruby and qrow’s big monster.

fireball just kinda looked cheap. there wasn’t a long breathy build up, and the fireball just feels way too fast (camera or distance?); reasonable that qrow would be hit by it, but cheap-feeling in the sense that it shouldn’t have happened/it felt unfair, that it happened. he should’ve gotten knocked on his ass by power/strength and being caught off guard, and it felt like more like “oh no he got knocked down! D:”

HHHHHH WEISS ICE SKATES TO THE GRIM BUT ITS NOT LIKE YOU PAY ATTENTION BECAUSE SOMETHING ELSE CALLS FOR IT AND THEN SHE LEAPS UP TO THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE GRIM. SHE’S WHITE, THE BACKGROUND IS WHITE, YOU LOSE SIGHT OF HER, I LEGIT THOUGHT SHE VANISHED BEHIND THE GRIMM BUT IT WOULDNT MAKE SENSE FOR THAT TO HAPPEN. IN THE NEXT SHOT YOU MAY SEE HER AT THE LEFT BUT HER SEMBLANCE IS BLACK TO MAKE HER STAND OUT MORE BUT THEY DIDNT DO THAT FOR THE PREVIOUS SHOT WHY????????

“YANG!” yang promptly bounces off a grimm that isnt shown to have hurt or is dead from the fight and runs off to the bigger grimm as called. understandable, but the other grimm? is just? there? not dead? not doing anything???

also the we need to ground it idea feels really cheap? the grimm isn’t a problem because of its wings, it’s a problem because it’s being dealt with by one (1) person who decides it’s best fighting it on one (1) front vs two on a train. there’s so many ways to tackle this guy! we know qrow’s capable of jumping onto it, but all he’s doing is that, instead of moving to the other side and maybe catching it off guard?????? qrow, fight fucking better.

s/o to qrow/ruby pulling off a move together, cute but also they should’ve been slicing it at different points of the grimm, because they would’ve just died right away if they both went on the same plane? or anywhere near each other? weapons are fucking dangerous we remember right?

GRIMM LAUNCHES A FIREBALL AND IT GOES ON AN UPWARDS TRAJECTORY. IT DOESNT AND INSTEAD GOES IN AN ARC WHEN IT NEVER NEEDED TO. HERE’S HOW YOU COULD DERAIL THE TRAIN. FIREBALL, MOUNTAIN, AVALANCHE/ROCKSLIDE, TRAIN DESTRUCTION. OLD GRANDMA THAT STUMBLES OUT OF THAT/APPEARS BEHIND THE TEAM AFTERWARDS IS MORE IMPRESSIVE FOR HAVING ADAPTED TO THAT FROM INSIDE THE TRAIN THAN TO JUST SIT THERE AND POP OUT LATER LIKE xD lmao wassup yall?

---

yeah thats it and here’d be the adam ruins everything scene right before the opening but we cant get what we want so w/e

#rwde

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theonceoverthinker · 6 years

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OUAT 1X18 - The Stable Boy

I’m very interested to see my reaction to this episode this time! On my first watch, I didn’t like it (At least the past portion), but with time and more insight into Regina’s character, that just might change!

It’s not because of you, Reggie! i love you!

But what was my deal then, and how has it changed?

Find out alongside me under the cut!

Press Release Emma continues her exhaustive search for evidence that will prove Mary Margaret’s innocence in the murder of David’s wife, Kathryn. Meanwhile, in the fairytale land that was and before evil blackened her soul, Regina must choose between betraying her mother, Cora, and marrying for true love, or betrothing royalty and living a regal - but loveless - life; and the event that caused the Evil Queen to loathe Snow White is revealed. General Thoughts Past It’s weird. I know Cora is an amazing villain, and it may be the fault of time, but I sometimes forget just how menacing and evil she was. So seeing the evil she’s capable of show itself again with such intensity was like when you touch someone else after getting a good dose of static shock going through you. Just as with Regina’s villainy up to this point, Cora’s is overt and strong. Even when she’s praising Regina, it’s a backhanded compliment (“You’ve finally done something right”). But oddly enough, it’s when the abuse is less over the top that it’s at its worst, and by that, I mean accepting Leopold’s proposal on Regina’s behalf and getting Snow to divulge Regina’s secret. How Cora’s lunges at insecurities and just makes the bold yet quiet moves to get everyone to do what she wants is terrifying. I don’t have a lot to weigh in on the plot, but I do think that watching it on the second go did a lot more for me to highlight Cora’s abuse and make me realize the quality of the flashback. See, for me, I always felt that Daniel was the main thing for Regina’s revenge about Snow, and I felt on the first go that that was a pretty lackluster approach for such a cool villain because I found Daniel boring (I still do, and I swear that I tried to like him). However, it’s occurred to me recently that this isn’t so much as the main point, but the final straw after a long line of Cora’s abuse. Cora’s abuse is what drives Regina’s character and with this in mind, I went into my rewatch of this episode and found it much more compelling. I mean, all you have to do is look about to see the impact Cora had on me.

Also, as I said before, I don’t like Daniel. I find his character boring and bereft of chemistry with all who he interacted with despite his decent dialogue. Given that a lot of (Not fully, but still a fair amount) Regina’s backstory is dependent on their interactions, it sucks, but I just wasn’t feeling like there was much of a character to connect to.

Finally, I wanted to take this moment to drop a theory I’ve held for a while about this episode. I feel that Regina has a secondary purpose for going after Snow. Now, of course, she blames Snow for Daniel’s death, but that’s lead her to be mislabeled as overly petty. However, I think that that blame has something behind it. Regina doesn’t have magic at this point, and her beloved was taken from her. She has a lot of anger, and no place to responsibly place it. Of course, it belongs with Cora, but Cora just killed her boyfriend and has been magically binding her for quite some time. What chance does Regina have up against someone like that? But Snow? Snow’s just a little kid. Snow’s vulnerable and trusting. Snow was the one to tell the secret. And suddenly, for as wretched as it is, you see how the cogs turn. Present I loved August’s advice to Emma here. Sometimes, I find that skill helpful when I’m writing fanfiction, and the way it fits into the murder mystery was interesting. Their rapport, alongside August’s mystery is a large driving force behind the plot as Emma looks for the way to connect the crime to Regina. They also did a really good job establishing Sidney and then exposing him with that flower pot. For a while, one can forget that it’s there, but once you see it, you know what’s going to happen. Still, the journey to using the plot device was an engaging one. As for the rest of the plot, I cover more of it in “Arcs,” but I found that it was well placed and dramatic. Mary Margaret’s conversation with the DA was especially helpful in reinforcing after last week’s “breather” episode just how bad things are and how important it is that Emma solves this case and fast. Insights -I love watching Rumple and Regina negotiate. Theirs is such an engaging push-and-pull relationship and even in the case of foregone conclusions like the one the audience goes in knowing here, the exact what and how are never what you expect it to be. Because of their power, influence, and shadier dispositions, there’s always something up their sleeves and seeing them poke and prod in search of those secrets is just the best. Also, I love that clash of tones. Regina’s harsh words clash brilliantly with Rumple’s more flowery language. -Hair and makeup really did a wonderful job on the younger Henry Sr.! -”She’s getting a little old for fun.” “Stop coddling her.” I like the implication that Cora’s abuse of Regina started out smaller than it is today and that Henry Sr. was allowed to have a bigger influence on Regina’s development during her childhood. -”I’m not criticising you. I’m helping you.” Holy shit. That is such an abuser line. If it wasn’t coming out of Cora, I’d almost call it heavy handed, but since it s Cora, it’s such a good moment of character establishment. -There’s this great frame where Henry Sr. is walking towards Cora with a face that screams “I’mma kill you if you harm a hair on our daughter!” Even though Henry Sr. was definitely afraid of and overpowered by Cora, it’s clear that he was always on Regina’s side. -The segues on this show between the past and present crack me the fuck up! -In regards to young Snow...HOW DOES THIS SHOW CAST PEOPLE SO PERFECTLY?! -Thank you, Gold for acknowledging the skeleton key! -Gold just has the best expressions during the Q&A with the DA. Every look he gives MM just says “you’re lucky your daughter is breaking this curse.” -Mary Margaret, that’s not true. After Kathryn hurt you, it was your denial of David that kept you two apart. Not saying you were wrong for that you definitely weren’t - but facts are facts. -Regina looks so cute in that blue dress! I’m pretty sure anyone on OUaT can pull off a blue dress! -I love how Henry Sr. reflects both Regina and the audience’s reaction to this horrifying proposal. -So is Daniel just the Mills’ family’s stable boy or both theirs and Snow’s family’s stable boy? -Regina unknowingly gave Snow and Charming the perfect lyrics to their big show-stopping musical number about how they’d overthrow her! XD -I love Regina’s suit in the warrant scene. Red and black - despite her rocking blue as well - are totally her colors! -That whole sequence of Cora trapping Regina and Daniel in the stable reminded me of The Haunted Mansion! -Snow looks so cute in her flower girl dress! -So, the camera doesn’t show Regina’s face as she’s telling Snow how Daniel ran away, but you can just hear the pain behind the monotone in her voice solely because of how different it is from the rest of her lines. Regina’s lines usually host such passion and ferocity, but here, she’s bereft of it. Arcs Kathryn Nolan Case - So, we sort of come to an ending here. Now all that’s left to find out is the “who-dunnit,” so to speak. Personally, I found the case itself boring as well as the conversations about the proceedings. That said, in a way, I’m glad we had it. I’ve seen fics without it happening and they leave David and Mary Margaret with so little to do. Besides, we got some really good character moments because of it, mostly those that go through Emma and I feel comfortable saying that this doesn’t have to do with the fact that Emma is my favorite character because for everyone else (Barring Rumple and Regina who also had amazing interactions), the events of this arc for everyone else become completely irrelevant going forward. Emma and her interactions (Barring those of the other awake people’s) are the only moments that retain prevalence for their characters in the future That’s not a problem: The character moments still stand out - I still adore everything with Ruby and the scene with MM and David in the jail cell was powerful - but it needs to be accounted for. The Mystery of August Booth - We finally get those first glimpses of Pinocchio. It reminded me a lot of Michael’s symptoms in Season 3 of Jane the Virgin. They’re so small that you forget about them with the plot, but as they happen, they make you wonder just what it is. Why throw in a splint? ...I guess we should say a splinter! XD Favorite Dynamic Snow and Cora. I know these two only had one scene together, but damn, it was a good one! When Cora talks to Snow, she’s so warm and very much like a grandmother in the way she speaks, and you can see through Snow’s expressions just how much that paired with what she’s saying is preying on her still present grief over her mother. It’s like that study about the bullfrogs when the water gradually increases. Snow’s about to hurt her friend, and she doesn’t even recognize that she’s being played because of Cora’s delicate manner of approaching things. Writer Adam and Eddy did a really great job here! They have a way of writing very iconic lines, and “Love is the most powerful magic of all” has proved itself lasting - both in verbal and song form! XD In addition, A&E know how to make a villain sympathetic while not forgetting that they’re evil and following through on that. I’ve seen a lot of bad writing of villains (And some of it comes from OUaT too) where they just throw a sob story on a villain and then just flip a switch from villain to hero, but Regina still retains her villainy even as we’re learning about her tragedies, and that makes her feel more alive! Rating 9/10. I love all of the character development we get here. The introduction of Cora gives us that taste of all that’s to come and she’s fucking petrifying, even with the knowledge that she dies! And seeing Regina’s awful childhood really sticks where this resentment of Snow and Mary Margaret is coming from and it makes it glorious! Additionally, the present had a great story too and delivered a cool sort-of ending to the Kathryn Nolan case while giving Emma and August an interesting conflict to work with. I took off a point for Daniel just because of his impact on the story that I actually got compared to what I felt that I needed. ()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()()

Thanks to @watchingfairytales for putting this project together and to everyone who read! I’ll see you next time when we...RETURN! ...These puns don’t get all that subtle. Season Tally (157/220) Writer Tally for Season 1: A&E (50/70) Liz Tigelaar (17/20)* David Goodman (33/50) Jane Espenson (36/60) Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg (29/40) Daniel Thomsen (8/10)* Vladimir Kvetko (9/10* (* = Their work for the season is complete)

Operation Rewatch Archives

#ouat #once upon a time #watching fairyt #ouat 1x17 #ouat rewatch #jenna watches ouat #aniti-daniel #basically every character in this episode is discussed

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mcmansionhell · 7 years

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MMH Does Architectural Theory Part 5: Empiricism & The Picturesque (Conclusion)

Hello Friends! Boy is this going to be a little bit of a wild post. This is the part where ish hits the fan and things fall apart. It’s also just going to be a long post, so I’m sorry.

The architectural theory we’ve known and loved so far revolved around a Platonic concept of absolute harmony, or innate beauty, a concept the Renaissance tied to proportions in architecture.

However, what if it’s not proportions in architecture that make architecture beautiful? What if beauty really is relative? What if there’s more to great architecture than beauty alone?

Bickering About Beauty

Is Beauty Absolute or Relative? Or both? Why, if we don’t have any innate thoughts, do we find the same things beautiful?

As it turns out, it was mostly the Irish and the Scots who argued this one out while mainland Britain was content with its cool new gardens.

Francis Hutcheson, an important Irish philosopher, found a loophole that, while clever, was ostensibly of the past.

In his 1725 essay “An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue,” Hutcheson describes beauty not as an external attribute, but as an innate sense in all people. AKA, absolute beauty is not an objective quality, but an actual part of the human mind. This was Hutcheson’s way of getting around Lockean ideas of sensation - by calling beauty a sense within us rather than a reaction to that which is perceived by our senses.

Hutcheson was very into the writings of Shaftesbury, which attached our ability to determine what is beautiful to our moral character. Therefore only good people or geniuses could have good taste. Sure, claimed Hutcheson, all people can sense things, but only an elite few can use their senses in the “correct” way.

This is, of course, total bullsh*t.

George Berkeley, another Irish philosopher, rebuked these ideas savagely. Berkeley believed in Lockean empiricism, but unlike other philosophers, emphasized perception and human rationality rather than blind sensation or abstract thoughts.

Berkeley, in his rather humorous “Third Dialogue” of Alciphron (1732) uses a fake conversation (aka a dialogue) to completely wreck Hutcheson’s idea.

Basically, these two dudes Alciphron (Hutcheson) and Euphranor (Berkeley), are arguing. In the beginning of this conversation, Alciphron says that beauty is not just that which pleases but is actually that which is perceived by the eye, namely proportions. To paraphrase:

E (playing extremely dumb): but these proportions aren’t the same for everything, right? A: of course not, idiot. the proportions of an ox don’t work for a horse, dummy. E: so proportion is the relation of one thing to another A: Duh, idiot. E: So, these parts and their sizes and shapes must relate to each other in such a way to make up the best possible, most useful whole. A: dude, of course. E: So, like, you’re using reason to choose and match and assemble this whole from each part. A: y-yeah... E: So, proportions aren’t just perceived by sight, but by reason by the means of sight. A: k E: So beauty isn’t really of the eye but of the mind, right? The eye alone can’t tell if that chair is a great chair or that door is a great door, right? A: Dude, where are you going with this? E: To put it this way, you see a chair, right? Could you think this chair to be of good proportions if it looked like you or anybody else wouldn’t be able to sit your ass in it? A: I guess not. E: So you admit that we can’t find the chair to be beautiful without first knowing its proper use, which is of course, the domain of judgement. A: Fine. E: After all, if an architect finds a door to be pretty cool, and have its proportions just right, what use or beauty is left to that door if the architect instead turns it 90 degrees so it opens like, a doggy door but for people? It’s not beautiful, then, right? So the proportions don’t necessarily matter, the use of the proportions matter, u feel me, my dude? A: gasp

This goes on for a while. But the point is the same: there’s more than just an innate sense to beauty, it must have an application or context and therefore is relative and not absolute.

ENTER MY HOMEBOY DAVID HUME

Aww yiss, it’s time for by main dude David Hume, the Scottish philosopher that would blow so many minds of other philosophers while also being less of a reactionary asshole than his contemporaries. (I’m not sorry)

Hume claimed that beauty was relative to our personal experience, and that because we all share similar experiences and a similar psychological makeup, we tend to find similar things to be beautiful. Hume, like Berkeley, believes in some sort of functional component of beauty, and even links this to architecture in his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40):

“In like manner the rules of architecture require, that the top of a pillar shou’d be more slender than its base, and that because such a figure conveys to us the idea of security, which is pleasant; whereas the contrary form gives us the apprehension of danger, which is uneasy.”

AKA, the rules of architecture are derived from a practical standpoint, one of structural integrity, and that appearance of stability makes us feel relaxed because, well, the building doesn’t look like it’s going to fall down, right?

But Hume is most known in aesthetics for what has become a rather pithy adage: the statement that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

‘‘Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.’’

But then the question is if each mind perceives a different beauty, which brain perceives the right beauty? Thus enters the question of “taste”.

Bickering About Taste

We’re still bickering about good taste. In fact, this blog is primarily a treatise on, well, bad taste. One of the more important documents in architectural theory about taste was a dialogue by the Scottish painter Allan Ramsey, a best friend of David Hume (he painted the above portrait).

(In fact, Hume, Ramsey, Adam Smith, Alexander Gerard, and Robert Adam formed a group in 1754 called the Select Society, which I’m sure has provided for ample historical slashfiction at some point in time.)

Anyways, Ramsey’s “Dialogue on Taste” is important because it’s the first clear articulation of relativist aesthetics in architectural theory.

The dialogue occurs between Col. Freeman, a clever, roguishly handsome, free-thinking modernist and Lord Modish a good boy who loves his traditions. Yes, this is Perrault v Blondel all over again, but with savage wit.

you, dumb & trad: there are objective rules for architecture. Proportions!

me, incredibly mod & smart: uh, those are more knowledge than taste. It doesn’t take any genius of taste to follow a dumb Palladian recipe. Anybody can read a cookbook and make a boring dish. These so-called rules are only an analysis of what others find to be culturally acceptable, and don’t actually point to any natural standard beauty.

me, continuing to slay it: give me one reason that isn’t cultural why a Corinthian column in all its proportions isn’t as beautiful if I turn that SOB upside down. Like, what if, somewhere out there there are cultures that would find my upside-down column sick af - maybe they’d be horrified to hear about our right-side up traditions.

me, increasingly sassy: after all, these so called traditions and “tastes” are just the works of powerful rich people. If a poor dude wore a coat with triangular cuffs everyone would laugh at him and call him a big dummy. If a rich dude did it, suddenly you’d start seeing triangular cuffs everywhere no matter how stupid it looks. Tell me architecture ain’t the same way.

This is probably one of my favorite hot takes of the 18th Century, especially since it calls architecture a “fashion” explicitly, which was, like, unacceptable even though it’s ultimately true.

Regardless of this relative nature of taste, the centuries have still seen general consensus on what pieces of art are superior to others, and there must be some underlying theme other than cynicism regarding why this is the case.

Hume sought to answer this question in his 1757 essay “On the Standards of Taste” where he claimed that this consensus did not lie in specific rules of artistic composition, but rather in the universal makeup of the human psyche, which must be “rightly formed” to allow the emotions related to beauty to form.

“Though some objects, by the structure of the mind, be naturally calculated to give pleasure, it is not to be expected, that in every individual the pleasure will be equally felt. Particular incidents and situations occur, which either throw a false light on the objects, or hinder the true from conveying to the imagination the proper sentiment and perception.”

AKA you’re not going to find the Parthenon to be all that great if you’re, say, stricken with food poisoning or just got a call telling you you’ve been laid off.

We all have the potential to be stricken by a beautiful thing, but beautiful things strike us differently depending on how we feel at the moment or because of our pre-existing experiences. For example, you’re not going to find that Talking Heads album to be all that great because your jerk ex used to be really into them, even if the music is objectively pretty good.

However, sometimes art strikes us in ways that are different than mere beauty - sometimes art smacks us in the face and leaves us breathless, awed even. The non-beauty reactions to art are what will be discussed in the second half of this post, after the break.

Introducing the Sublime (With Bonus Wrestling GIFS)

No, not that one.

Basically, the sublime (in art) is the quality of greatness, that which cannot be comprehended or imitated. A bunch of smart philosopher dudes wrote about it, often after visiting the Alps.

Photo by Steve Evans (CC-BY 2.0)

Addison’s Foreshadowing of the Sublime

It was Addison, the guy from the end of last week’s post that foreshadowed thoughts about the sublime. Addison was not an architect, and sought to leave debates about the techniques and praxis of architecture to the experts. His essay revolves around the idea that it isn’t just beauty we should be talking about here, and offers a view of art as being either “Great, Uncommon, or Beautiful.”

What’s most important of the three is what Addison calls “Greatness” referring to “the Bulk and Body of the Structure, or to the Manner in which it is built...”

By Greatness of Manner, Addison referred to that familiar feeling of walking into a great place, the “Disposition of Mind he finds in himself, at his first Entrance into the Pantheon at Rome, and how his Imagination is filled with something Great and Amazing.”

This idea was taken further by Alexander Gerard, a member of Hume’s Select Society, who proposed that in order for something to be truly sublime it had to be both massive and simple.

“Large objects can scarce indeed produce their full effect, unless they are also simple, or made up of parts in a great measure similar. Innumerable little islands scattered in the ocean, and breaking the prospect, greatly diminish the grandeur of the scene. A variety of clouds, diversifying the face of the heavens, may add to their beauty, but must take from their grandeur.“

Basically:

This was an important precursor to the most lasting ideas on the sublime from everybody’s favorite reactionary philosopher who thought the French Revolution was bad (and monarchy was good) but that the guillotine was #^$%#ing sweet:

EDMUND “PAIN AND DANGER” BURKE

This is the greatest thing I’ve ever done with my time.

Burke’s treatise A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) claims that there are not only “some invariable and certain laws” behind our judgements of taste, described by him as “that faculty or those faculties of the mind, which are affected with, or which form a judgment of, the works of imagination and the elegant arts.”

This essentially puts the smackdown on the classical ideas that beauty is somehow related to utility or reason, as well as form or proportions destroying all of the theory we’ve learned about in the last four posts.

Burke then goes ahead to lay out and define some qualities of art and the reactions they engender in us:

The Sublime

I’ll just let ol’ “Pain and Danger” Burke speak for himself on this one:

“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure.”

TL;DR: Sublime, is pain & danger, the strongest emotions we can have, and pain is way more powerful than pleasure.

Qualities of the sublime, according to Burke include: vastness, infinity, succession (or consistency/repetition), and uniformity.

Specifically related to buildings, Burke focused on concepts such as difficulty, which he describes as “When any work seems to have required immense force and labour to effect it, the idea is grand.” He cites Stonehenge as an example - the labor needed to move such huge stones is more impressive than the end product.

He also discusses (and is one of the first to do so specifically) the important role light plays in building, especially on mood:

“I think then, that all edifices calculated to produce an idea of the sublime, ought rather to be dark and gloomy, and this for two reasons; the first is, that darkness itself on other occasions is known by experience to have a greater effect on the passions than light.

The second is, that to make an object very striking, we should make it as different as possible from the objects with which we have been immediately conversant...to make the transition thoroughly striking, you ought to pass from the greatest light, to as much darkness as is consistent with the uses of architecture.”

AKA dude was a huge Goth.

Most importantly to this blog, Burke had this to say about McMansions:

“Designs that are vast only by their dimensions, are always the sign of a common and low imagination.”

Burke’s writing set the course of aesthetic and architectural thought from this point on, eclipsing many that came before him, including Hume. Now that architecture had been liberated from the ties of proportion and function (for now), a new era of thought (and building) could begin.

I’m not sorry lmao

Well, that does it for Part 5! Stay tuned for this week’s Certified Dank Massachusetts McMansion on Thursday, and next Monday’s wrapping up of the 18th Century in which we see what’s up with the rest of Europe. Have a great week, and sorry for the technical delays!

If you like this post, and want to see more like it, consider supporting me on Patreon! Not into small donations and sick bonus content? Check out the McMansion Hell Store - 100% goes to charity.

Copyright Disclaimer: All photos without captioned credit are from the Public Domain. Manipulated photos are considered derivative work and are Copyright © 2017 McMansion Hell. Please email [email protected] before using these images on another site. (am v chill about this)

#architecture #history #architectural theory #theory #philosophy #18th century #edmund burke #david hume #burke #hume #empiricism #aesthetics #aesthetic theory #philosophy of art

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albionscastle · 7 years

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A Debauched Youth

30 DAYS OF BEAUTY AND THE BEAST CHALLENGE

DAY 2 - JEALOUSY

The library was beautifully cool in the heat of the day and Belle hummed quietly to herself as she dusted shelves of books. The decade or so of the curse had definitely taken its toll on the cavernous room and dust sat thick on most surfaces. She had yet to examine this area of the library, like many others and periodically she would stop to peruse the titles hidden back here.

Most of them appeared to be historical volumes, some in different languages, including Greek, she thought with a chuckle, fitting considering that most of them dealt with Classical History. Several seemed quite interesting and she pulled them forward to go back for later. Continuing to hum belle ran her fingers over the rich leather spines lovingly, the sheer scope of this library never ceasing to amaze her.

On a shelf up high by a balcony brought to light a whole different subject matter. The humming stopped as her fingers traced the titles, her cheeks flushing at the intimate nature of those words. Adam had told her, in broad terms, of the nature of his character and lifestyle before the curse. Growing up in the country, Belle was not ignorant of the baser aspects of nature, the mechanics so to speak. She had not misunderstood Adam’s meaning when he told her that he had been a libertine of the worst sort.

This particular section of the library was apparently a leftover from those days.

It was hard to think of him that way, as a seducer and a cad, when he was so sweet and caring with her. Plumette had whispered to her of dazzling balls, dozens of the most beautiful women vying for his favor, of velvet and diamond, powdered wigs and shining eyes. All things that Belle had no experience with.

Still, that was the past and Belle loved him, loved who he was now, which was as much because of his past as his underlying good nature. The breaking of the curse had ensured everyone a clean slate. A new beginning.

Curious, Belle pulled a book from the shelf, a black volume, the spine blank. It was conspicuous against the rich colors of the books surrounding it. Upon examination it seemed that is was a box rather than a book and it only took moments for her nimble fingers to pry open the tiny latch.

Letters spilled out, yellowed with age, fluttering to her feet. Swiftly she scooped them up, looking around. She was still alone, Adam wasn’t due back for hours. Taking the box, Belle moved to the window seat, telling herself that if the letters proved to be from Adam’s mother, as she hoped they were, she would put them away immediately and pry no further.

Considering where she had found them, she should have known better. From the handwriting she could see they were all written by one person. An elegant, feminine hand, much lovelier than her own scrawl, which Adam had teased her about several times.

Pushing that thought aside, Belle picked up a letter at random and began to read.

My Darling Boy,

How naughty it was of you to touch me the way you did at dinner, and beside my husband no less. You most certainly have been paying attention to my lessons and I come to believe that you may have surpassed your teacher in the art of seduction. Never have I felt so alive as I did in that moment, your fingers inside me beneath the table while you laughed, your every look a promise of so much more.

Tell me, my Prince, how many of those tittering young innocents did you take to your bed after I was spent? I can imagine with pleasure your hands on them as I have felt them on me. I close my eyes and I can see you, that talented tongue drawing such ecstatic cries. I wonder when the time will come that these stupid, virginal girls will experience the full force of your ardor - I know you my love, your distaste for virgin tears will never be more powerful that your lust and I wonder who’s daughter will be the first to be deflowered. Perhaps that pretty blonde chit from Brittany who so entranced you this evening. Perhaps you even take her as I pen this, or the event could already be over and the silly girl sent on her way with a heavy purse to ease her….discomfort.

I have taught you well then, these past years. Take your pleasure where you will my gilded prince, as nothing else matters. Tomorrow night when my husband leaves I will seek your bed, a real women to take you inside and submit to your every dark desire. Until then I wait, and dream, and want.

Shocked to her core at the woman’s words, Belle read through the rest of the letters. All were the same, or worse. Whoever she was, the ‘affair’ appeared to have gone on for years. And always the mention of whichever young woman had caught Adam’s fancy at one event or another and found herself in his bed, sometimes alone and sometimes not.

To Belle it would seem that Adam’s declaration of being a libertine had been putting things very lightly. His only goal at that time had appeared to be the pursuit of sensual pleasure at the expense of everyone but himself. It also seemed as though no act of a base nature had been overlooked as the letters openly described many acts that had Belle both horrified and embarrassingly aroused. Her heart twisted in her chest as her imagination went wild, picturing the man she loved in every intimate situation the letters spoke of.

Sick to her stomach, she closed the box on the letters and, legs trembling, replaced the box on the shelf before running from the library. In the privacy of her room she sat in the window dwelling on what she had read and how it made her feel. A hard knot of jealousy warred with logic as she tried to tell herself that this wasn’t Adam anymore, that this woman was his past. That man didn’t exist anymore, her Adam wasn’t a seducer or a predator, he was kind and loving, respectful and gentle.

But still, this woman knew him ways that she didn’t, she had held him in the night and kissed his skin, she had felt his caress, had experienced his passion, the ultimate intimacy while Belle had experienced none of it. Half of the acts described with such relish she had never even heard of. Compared to Adam and this woman Belle was an ignorant child, one of the virgins that had been such a joke to them both, but one not even worthy of the partial seductions he had partaken in with them.

Her jealousy rose like bile in her throat as she realized that, in the weeks since the curse had been broken, Adam had never touched her with even half the passion described by his former lover. His kisses were long and sultry, but never hard or out of control. She had never found herself pushed against a wall, his mouth on her lips, her jaw, her neck. His hands had never strayed and while every stroke of his fingers spoke of love and affection, they had never slipped beneath the fabric of her clothes or brushed over any part of her that ached for his touch. He had been nothing short of a gentleman and she couldn’t help but compare his behaviours. Could anyone really change that much? To Belle’s mind he did love her, but he didn’t appear to want her. The other woman he had wanted, but there was no love in those letters. Shouldn’t there be an intersection of love and desire? That she wanted him was not in doubt, she accepted and revelled in the deep and passionate desire she had for Adam. Her fingers itched to touch him and alone at night she ached for him. She was jealous of the passion and the intimacy of those letters, that this woman was in no doubt that he wanted her, that he openly and ardently sought her pleasure and her bed. That she had experienced a side of him that Belle never had, the part of him that slipped his partner off the dance floor during a ball and took her in an alcove because his desire couldn’t wait or be denied.

How she wished she had never read those damn letters.

Hours passed, knocks on the door went unnoticed as her teeth bit her lip bloody, her mind in turmoil. Darkness had long fallen by the time her door opened and Adam stepped inside.

“Belle? Are you well, everyone is concerned.”

She turned and noticed she stood some distance away, his bright eyes showing worry and affection. Turning her head away she looked out the window again. He moved no closer and she closed her eyes against the warring emotions in her heart.

Anger and jealousy won out.

“Leave me alone Adam.” she snapped. “We both know you have an aversion the company of virgins.”

She didn’t hear him move instead his form was suddenly beside her, looming over her.

“What did you just say to me?” his voice was dangerously low, Beastlike and she dared a glance at his face to see an expression of confusion, hurt and anger.

Still, her darker emotions won.

“MC.” she snarled, enjoying the way the blood drained from his face in shock.

“The library.” he sighed, running a hand over his face. “ I should have burned those stupid letters years ago, I had quite forgotten they even existed.”

With a loud sigh he sat down hard on the seat beside her.

“I was 14 and my father asked his mistress to seduce me,” he murmured, looking at the floor. “The most beautiful woman at court and I was starved for affection. My father thought I needed a lesson in being a man. He got more than he bargained for in the results.”

Belle turned a little to see his mouth twist in self-loathing.

“There’s a reason I was cursed, Belle and I deserved it utterly. I confess I never wanted you to know how awful I truly was.”

“All I see in my head is you….and her.”

“I’m sorry Belle, I never meant for any of that to see the light of day again, and I never wanted you hurt by it. What were you even doing in that part of the library?”

“Cleaning.” she retorted tartly, twin spots of color appearing on her cheeks as she remembered her interest in the nature of the books there.

“I haven’t thought about any of those women in many years, Belle. That man is not who I am anymore.”

“So you don’t have those feelings or desires since the curse?”

He looked up sharply.

“Of course to some extent I do. I’m a man, still feel desire.” his eyes had soften, his voice low and deep.

“Just not for me.” Belle whispered, her heart hurting.

“What on Earth would make you think that?” he exclaimed in confusion.

She couldn’t look at him.

“Those things, that she wrote in those letters...you barely touch me Adam. I know I’m not experienced but…”

Her words broke off as his growl reverberated through the room and she found herself lifted up and flung onto her bed before she could take a breath. Adam crawled up, resting over her, his hands holding her wrists at her sides as his body lowered to cover hers. There was a dangerous glint in his eyes as his mouth lowered to her ear and her heart hammed wildly in her chest.

“You think I don’t want you?” he growled. “I want you more than anything or anyone I have ever wanted.”

“Even her?” Belle gasped as he ground his hips hard against her. There was no doubt of the extent of his arousal.

“Especially her. You’re jealous.” he stated, looking down at her with a smile. “It’s not my former lifestyle that has you so upset, its that I’ve bedded her and not you.”

While it was true, Belle stubbornly refused to give him the satisfaction of admitting it. Instead she tried to twist away, only causing him to groan as her body slid against his. The sound set her toes curling.

“Don’t tease me Adam, I have a right to be upset.”

“You do, my love, I freely admit it. I don’t think about her, or any of them, I was a lust-crazed dilettante, none of it ever meant anything. I never felt any emotion but emptiness. You, Belle, you fill me up, I feel so much for you that I could spend my life saying it and it still wouldn't be enough. Don’t be jealous.”

“But….why then?”

“Why haven’t I thrown you over the nearest table, lifted your skirts and taken you like a rutting bull?”

The harshness in his tone couldn’t detract from the hot flood of need that his coarse words invoked. She could see it, she wanted it.

“Belle, you deserve better than to be used like that, at least the first time.” he smiled wryly. “When it is time I want what we share to be special, not just a physical act. I desire you, Belle, so much that I’m afraid to touch you for fear I might close control. I’m so sorry if I made you feel anything less than wanted.”

“But in the letters, you wouldn’t….”

“Take a virgin into my bed? Trust me Belle, I ruined many an innocent in varying ways but I was a selfish monster. I didn’t want a constant experience of tears from the pain of that first time, or the leaving after. I simply wanted to take my pleasure and be done. There are many different ways to do that, my sweet and I took great delight in their willingness to submit to all of them.”

He pressed a gentle kiss to her neck, sighing loudly.

“God Belle, if you only knew how much I want that moment, that knowledge that as I sink inside you I am the only man to have ever claimed you, that you will have given me something that can only be given once. That moment can’t be given in a haze of lust, no matter how many times I’ve wanted to tear off your clothing and have you.”

His mouth captured hers in a kiss that knocked the breath out of her. Her hands were released and her fingers tangled in his hair, pulling it loose from its ribbon as his own fingers explored, touching in ways she had wanted for so long.

Breaking away, she looked into his eyes, filled with love and finally she could see the restrained passion there.

“I’m sorry Adam, I overreacted.”

He smiled, one palm sliding down the front of her body, his hand grasping her skirts.

“And I’m sorry I failed to see your needs. I should have known that passion would run strong with you being so brave and loving. But I can remedy that.”

Belle moaned as his palm slid up her leg, fingers tracing patterns along her inner thigh.

“Some things will have to wait until our wedding night, but let me do my absolute best to drive away any jealous thought you might have, and maybe teach you a thing or two.”

He smirked as his fingers slid higher and Belle surrendered to wherever he wanted to take her, the women of his past soon forgotten as showed her again and again exactly how much he wanted her.

#beauty and the beast #beauty and the beast fanfiction #30 days of batb #batb fanfic #batb2017 #BatB #I'm a fan of the trash prince #I am Dan Stevens trash #dan stevens growl #dan stevens is ruining me

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dangolding · 7 years

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Spec Ops: The Line and the fine art of subversion

Every writer has a piece that they never quite got placed with a publication. I wrote this many years ago now when Spec Ops: The Line was first released and showed it to a few friends and editors, but it was never published. Now that the game is five years old, I thought I’d just put it online.

///////////////////////////////

And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air

Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there

The first thing you encounter in any videogame is its menu. People generally spend very little time on menus—they are doorways, the thresholds of videogames, ready to set the tone but quick to get out of the way. Despite their importance, they are often relatively disposable for the player, and quickly forgotten. Press Start. Hit A to begin. Now here’s the real game.

But the first thing you notice about Spec Ops: The Line is its menu. It is not here to get out of the way, to be an open door between the player and the ‘real’ game. It is here to make a statement. A dilapidated American flag takes up much of the screen, flying upside-down, either a sign of distress or a deliberate desecration. In the distance sits a Dubai in sandy ruins, the contemporary symbol of capitalist expansion and reach destroyed.

Playing over the top is Jimi Hendrix’s famous 1969 Woodstock performance of “The Star Spangled Banner”. The sonorous, roundly distorted notes signal its arrival half a phrase in; the manic, free-form drumming of Mitch Mitchell barely audible in the background. Already, The Line is in many ways radically different for a standard military-themed videogame. In the place of the usual proud flags and dutiful trumpet calls, The Line populates its menu with complicated and troubling symbols.

Of course, The Line is a deliberate attempt at subversion. Military shooters have long been at the core of the videogames industry (the latest installment in the Call of Duty franchise, for instance, grossed over $400 million in its first 24 hours on sale late last year), and while sometimes technically innovative and exciting, few of these games have very much to say. Some, like the Modern Warfare franchise, will occasionally look to have the appearance of philosophizing on war, but generally, the most generous conclusion to take from these sorts of games is something like this: War is hell. War is also spectacular. The people who choose to go into it and come out alive are amazing.

It’s in this context that The Line presents itself as a sweeping counter to the traditional claims of the military videogame. It isn’t all just upside-down flags and Jimi Hendrix, either. The game’s plot is for the most part, a fairly reasonable appropriation of the general thrust of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. We follow three soldiers—Sergeant Lugo, Lieutenant Adams, and Captain Martin Walker, the last of whom the player controls—as they journey into a Dubai of the near-future, one that has been destroyed by dust storms. A battalion lead by a Colonel John Konrad (in the game’s most guileless reference to Heart of Darkness) has disappeared in the city, and as we find out, has of course gone rogue.

Throughout your journey to look for survivors, Spec Ops continually throws horrifying experiences directly in the face of the player. Needless, limitless bloodshed, civilian massacres, warcrimes.

But The Line’s most unexpected move is its bold indictment of the player in this context. You did this, the game says. Not us, the designers, not the characters, but you. It’s all your fault.

When Jimi Hendrix performed “The Star Spangled Banner” at Woodstock in 1969, many, if not most onlookers assumed it was an antiwar statement of sorts. Hendrix’s unorthodox performance was not the first controversial appropriation of America’s national anthem (Jose Feliciano had played a folk-ish version a year earlier at a Baseball match, the fallout of which he claimed stalled his career for a number of years), but it was certainly its most violent. Strewn between the heavily distorted, oppressively bland notes of the anthem were Hendrix’s own embellishments. He threw his plectrum up and down the strings, smashed away at the pitch-bending tremolo arm, and deliberately induced piercing feedback.

The fact that most of these embellishments coincided with the lyric, “and the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,” just reinforced the idea that the performance was about the Vietnam War. The rockets’ red glare was being broadcast on television screens every evening in 1969. It was hard not to take it literally. Hendrix’s slides became missiles, his muted strumming became gunfire (much like his later song, “Machine Gun”), his distortion became bombs, destruction, and cries of the innocent. Played into Jimi Hendrix’s guitar were the nightmares of a generation of disillusioned Americans, his instrument an orchestra of national disaster.

Hendrix’s Woodstock performance is often mythologized as a kind of paradigmatic moment of counter-culture appropriation, of culture jamming fifteen years before anyone had thought of using the term ‘culture jamming’. Here was a noble and patriotic song being roughly hewn back into the militaristic fires from whence it came, Hendrix’s bloody tableau mirroring the war of 1812 that served as inspiration for Francis Scott Key’s original poem.

But it’s not usually remarked on that “The Star Spangled Banner” was actually a British song to begin with. The tune was first known as “To Anacreon in Heaven”, and was written by organist John Stafford Smith as a constitutional song for the Anacreontic Society, a British gentlemen’s club dedicated to “wit, harmony, and the god of wine.” Despite the notorious difficulty in singing the Anacreontic melody (one wonders if the Bacchanalian nature of the society made the task even less viable), the tune was a popular fit for a number adaptations (known as contrafactums) at the time, of which “The Star Spangled Banner” was only one. It also served as a vehicle for Robert Paine’s ode, “Adams and Liberty” in the late 18th century, for example.

The themes of appropriation and reappropriation are perhaps the one constant in the life of “The Star Spangled Banner”. Whoever knows what Hendrix meant when he played it at Woodstock. It does seem likely, after all, that there was some kind of protest meant, but if Hendrix saw what happened to Feliciano a year earlier, he’d have good reason not to push it further.

Curiously, Hendrix himself never said that the performance was meant particularly as a protest. In fact, he never really explained the meaning of the performance at all, except for a brief remark at a press conference a few weeks later.

“We play it the way the air is in America today,” Hendrix said. “The air is slightly static, don’t you think?”

One of Spec Ops’ central villains used to write for Rolling Stone. Robert Darden, a bearded, Hawaiian-shirt wearing reporter taunts the player over a city-wide broadcast system for much of the game, earning him the nickname of the ‘Radioman’. He also has pretty good taste in music, and through several key scenes in the game blasts out Deep Purple, Martha and the Vandellas, and The Black Angels.

Having an antagonist like Radioman allows music to come to the fore in The Line. Rock music is often blasted diegetically through the game’s Dubai, sometimes as a complement to the action and sometimes as a counterpoint, but always as a reminder of the foreignness of the American presence in Dubai. The music writes over the Emirati landscape, reminding players that it is American against American in this game, and that Dubai is only present insofar as it is an immutable reminder of America’s foreign entanglements. This is, by and large, a game about America and American culture: whatever the problems are of sequestering Dubai for thematic ends, The Line is not interested in it as much more than an emblem.

In one early sequence that announces the game’s engagement with popular culture, a lengthy firefight is set to Deep Purple’s 1968 hard rock hit, ‘Hush’. In the context of The Line, ‘Hush’ should act as an ironic counterpoint to the action—“Hush, hush, I need her loving,” sings Rod Evans, “But I'm not to blame now.” When Alfonso Cuarón used the same song in his terrifyingly bleak Children of Men, the Los Angeles Times called it “a sly lullaby for a world without babies.” When Spec Ops makes other similar allusions with its music, as with Martha and the Vandellas’ 1965 Motown classic, ‘Nowhere to Run’, the point is clear enough, even erring on overstating things. “Got nowhere to run to, baby,” runs the Holland-Dozier-Holland lyrics as the bullets fly over our protagonists, “Nowhere to hide.”

But right then, in the heat of the Deep Purple battle, the unsettling point is lost in the haze of cover-to-cover sprinting and pop-and-stop shooter mechanics. The lyrics might say one thing, but the cutting backbeat and the powerful bass line says something else entirely. All this shooting, this strategy, this chaos, this music—this is a little bit cool.

“Hey, you guys hear music?” asks one of The Line’s protagonists.

“Who cares?” answers our character. “Just shut up and keep fighting.”

The tension between critical commentary and surface level enjoyment lingers throughout The Line. When, later in the game, a slow-motion escape from a missile blast is set to Verdi’s ‘Dies Irae’, this unease is amplified. Like the Wagner helicopter attack sequence from Apocalypse Now (which was undoubtedly the scene’s inspiration, as the blast comes from a helicopter here, too), The Line runs a real risk of its intended commentary being literally drowned out by a one hundred person orchestra. The ironic juxtaposition of dead white European classical composers with macho violence is subsumed by the grandiloquent power of Verdi and Wagner, a tension that Coppola played with in Apocalypse Now but that has eventually been defeated by Hollywood iconography. Though Wagner-and-the-helicopters has now entered into the pop culture lexicon, how often is it used to invoke the madness and the masculinity of war, as intended? How often is it instead used to illustrate military elegance and the iconographic power of the Vietnam war?

This is the fundamental problem of The Line, one that is clearly reflected in its use of music. Does it matter that the game offers up a heartbreaking critical commentary on war and videogames, if from moment-to-moment, all I can do is enjoy the mayhem? Does it matter that my enemies are screaming at me that I’m a murderer, that their radio chatter becomes increasingly fearful of me as I move forward through their soldiers like some sort of nightmarish Superman, if the game has also been perfectly calibrated to give me pleasure from discharging my weapon into the faces of oncoming, depersonalized enemies?

“Shut up and keep fighting.” The context of that terse comment is one of maintaining control in the heat of battle, of blocking out pain and trauma until later, when it might be safe to reflect on your horrific deeds. Yet it could equally also apply to the naive player, the kind not interested in The Line’s plot but in its thrilling action; not so much a remark on a lack of time as a lack of care. “Shut up and keep fighting.”

Of course, the simple fact that players are not likely to miss The Line’s critique does not automatically mean anything at all. Earlier this year, the Australian army released the Chief of Army’s Reading List for soldiers. Conspicuous on the traditional list were books like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, while films included the likes of David O. Russell’s Three Kings, Ken Loach’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley and of course, Apocalypse Now.

The presence of these works on such a list appears, at first, to be inexplicable. What use could Catch-22—a book that coined the anti-Vietnam war slogan, “Yossarian Lives!”—have for army bureaucracy? Why would army officials want soldiers to watch a film like Three Kings, a film that tracks three soldiers’ attempts to steal gold in the wake of the first Gulf War, a film that was described by the Los Angeles Times as “one of the defining antiwar films of our time, a scathing and sobering chronicle of U.S. misadventures in the Middle East”?

In commenting on the success of The Hurt Locker at the 2010 Oscars, Slovoj Žižek offers this: “In its very invisibility, ideology is here, more than ever: we are there, with our boys, identifying with their fear and anguish instead of questioning what they are doing there.”

Perhaps it is impossible to make an anti-war film. Perhaps there is always the possibility that despite context and framing, the exhilaration and terror of combat will always translate into romance for some. The strategy for most so-called anti-war films is still one of audience identification: here are innocent characters, thrown into a terrible scenario so beyond the realms of civility that we feel for them even as they commit heinous acts.

Even when characters are allowed some complexity, or are even pushed to become monsters, we can still see glimmers of our own collective guilt, our tortured souls played out within these people. There but for the grace of God, go I. Anti-war films are the best recruitment tool for fascists who still believe in their own soul.

And so it goes with The Line. No matter how hard the game tries in being anti-war, or even just to be a confronting critique of its genre, it never fails to also re-articulate the pleasures of the military videogame. Subversion is frequently too enormous, too clumsy, and too delicate a task to undertake meaningfully. Too much is pulled in too many directions; too many elements left unaltered. For every player who gets The Line’s Joseph Conrad references, another handful will simply find pleasure in the game’s tactical gunfights.

Subversion, especially in a medium as commercial and unwieldy as the videogame, is an imprecise art.

In 2000, the virtuoso guitarist Joe Satriani opened a Baseball match between the Giants and the Mets with his own homage to Hendrix’s performance of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’, a moment that was in turn recreated in last year’s Moneyball. His version was nearly identical to Hendrix’s, even down to the guitar tone and layering of effects. What was not recreated, however, was the crushing, distorted sounds of machine guns, bombs, and cries of terror. Why, after all, would you bring that sort of subject matter up at a baseball match, a time where national disgraces are usually tactfully concealed behind layers of professional competition?

What Satriani was left with was just a somewhat stylish, metal-cool version of the American national anthem. He played it, the audience stood, some sang along, and most cheered when it was over. Hendrix was back in the patriotic fold, the ambiguous and potentially subversive elements of his performance smoothed over by a modern rock star. There were no rough edges anymore.

Somehow, between 1969 and 2000, the context of playing the anthem on an electric guitar had shifted from disruption to celebration, from national anthem to rock anthem. There’s something telling about the fact that the only videogame to feature Hendrix’s version of “The Star Spangled Banner” before The Line was Guitar Hero 2.

Look at this page on Answers.com:

The question: “Did Jimi Hendrix mean to dishonor the Star Spangled Banner?”

The answer: “He would never disrespect our country. He played the song that way to honor the troops that were fighting in Vietnam.”

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ohmytheon · 7 years

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tfw your dream goes from magical YA novel to a monster horror movie

Bear with me. This goes from kinda cheesy to WTF very quickly. OKAY SO pregnancy has been giving me some really weird and intense dreams. I've always had dreams like this, but they've been particularly vivid these past few months. I can remember so much detail, down to dialogue, emotions, touch, taste, smell... It's wild. Also, none of them are pregnancy-related like people always assume. Instead, I get dreams like this one.

I can't remember how it starts except it's about a boy and girl in their senior year of high school. The girl is pretty and comes from a rich family. She used to be very popular, but something happened (I think it had to do with a guy on a sports team) and now she's a loner, bullied, mocked, and generally miserable. The boy has always been something of a loner, but people tend to leave him alone because he's "weird". And by weird, I mean, his adopted aunts are thought to be witches, so people don't much fuck with him because what if he casts some sort of spell on them or whatever. He takes it in stride and keeps his head down because, well, his aunts are witches and they're really out there and spooky. They live in maybe a trailer park or a run down neighborhood where their house is in the back and decorated like every typical witches' house you'd see in a movie, but they're mostly chill with their neighbors due to like gardening and herbal medicine and shit.

Anyways, the boy and girl become friends. He sees her getting bullied by the guy that probably did something to her and steps in to stop it. At first, it looks like the guy is gonna knock out the boy (and definitely could, boy needs to exercise), but then backs off when the boy makes some vague, magic threats. He's never shown to have much talent himself, but his aunts keep telling him that it's somewhere in them, so the most he can do right now is make the guy pee in his bed while sleeping or something. The girl is wary at first -- boy has a reputation and all -- but he's nice, doesn't expect anything in return for his help, and his weirdness is kinda funny. So yeah, they become friends, even though he points out that she used to tease him a few years ago.

This is your typical YA novel dream, of course, so they end up being more than friends, but the girl is shy and distant and the boy is just confused. They make an odd pair. His aunts don't like her at first, but they accept her and let her come into their home because of the boy. Things are normal as far as dating a boy who lives with witches goes. Everything is happy. They still get bullied at school, of course, but the girl starts to defend herself whereas before she just let it happen. The boy begins to open up and makes more friends. Wow, looks like they've learned some great lessons about not judging a book by its cover.

And then everything GOES TO UTTER SHIT.

So there's this end of the school year pool party. The boy has never attended one because why would he? The girl used to every year, but she's hesitant to go now even though she kinda wants to. The boy is like, "fuck those other kids; we're gonna go and i'm gonna be the luckiest guy there." She's excited but scared. The aunts, however, cast some dire warnings and are very against the idea of the boy going. They pull him into their fortune telling him where they conduct some side business and warn him that something beyond terrible is going to happen and that they don't want him to go to the party. He gets frustrated because they always do this - keep him from going to things because of "something they saw in the future" and it always scared him into listening before. But not this time. Nothing bad happened those times and they're just saying it now to isolate him and protect him the only way they know how. He's adamant about going. One of the aunts is like, "Boy, we are dead serious," and undoes a magical illusion of her appearance to show her true one, which is deformed and severely burned, apparently which happened the last time they received these same warnings and didn't listen.

Spoiler alert: he doesn't listen and they go to the pool party. Things seem normal at first. The girl is anxious, scared of getting bullied, and the boy has the same fuck-it attitude about him. They try to pick out some goggles because the girl is worried about her contacts. Kids are laughing and having fun. The girl looks up and watches the fog, which the forecast called for, but then sees something in the fog. Shadows, maybe trees, until they start to move and she begins to see more silhouettes in the fog. It hits her like a brick and she goes white. They aren't trees. They're legs -- giant ass legs of monsters, like giant trolls or something. She never would've believed it before meeting the boy, but she believes it now and tells him to run back to the truck. The boy is confused at first, but then he sees what she sees and it fucking hits him. His aunts were right. They stumble and run back to his janky ass pick up truck, screaming to warn others, but of course no one listens to them because they're "crazy" and "weird" and not cool. Right when the boy gets the truck started, the giants burst out of the fog and everyone panics and screams. They drive off in the truck, knowing full well that everyone at that pool party is going to get slaughtered, but there's nothing to be done to save them.

The boy tears off the road to drive into a field, scaring the girl, but in his words, "This will either get us to safety or we'll be dead, so it won't matter." It's a bumpy and scary ride, but they make it back onto the road, having used the field as a short cut to get to a highway (think the country, not city) and are left in this surreal, horrified silence as they watch the world change around them. It's not just giants appearing, but other monsters -- three-headed dragons, massive saber tooths, and insanely huge carnivorous dinosaurs. Like fucking unreal sizes. The girl just watches in horror as these monster dinosaurs start scooping up cars and eating or just stepping on people. Other animals are running away in huge packs to escape the appearance of these monsters, but it's just utter chaos. There are some huge beasts running away in a panic, leaving the girl to wonder what is terrifying even them.

They passed a theme park not far from the pool and she gawks as one particularly huge dinosaur pulls a rollercoaster off the track and devours all of it, people and cars alike, while another holds a filled rollercoaster upside and munches on the people like they're fucking grapes. It's impossible to hear the screams, but she can hear them anyways in her head. "It can't be still hungry after that," she whispers in shock to herself. "It can't be."

Meanwhile, the boy is gritting his teeth as he concentrates on driving (the truck can't go too fast without shaking, like my old 2001 Kia Optima), but his mind keeps drifting back to his aunts' warnings. Something very bad was going to happen. Someone very, very bad was going to appear. The girl asks basically what he's thinking, "Who could be capable of this?" And he replies, "It'd have to be one extraordinarily powerful witch or wizard." Although he doesn't know it yet, it's hinted that the person who caused all of this and raised these monsters to life is responsible for disfiguring his aunt and murdering his parents.

They talk about it for a little, and then she pauses before saying, "I know this is terrible timing, but I love you." He grips the steering wheel tightly and says in a voice that breaks slightly, "I love you too," which is weird because he never thought he'd say it and mean it and he was fine with that. (Maybe some sort of curse? Idk) "I wish it could be under better circumstances," she tells him as she lays her head against his arm. "I would've been dead if it wasn't for you. I would've gone to the pool party, miserable and alone, and I would've been killed."

But he's feeling guilty because he knew something was going to happen and he said nothing because he didn't believe his aunts. Finally, he caves and tells her, "My aunts told me not to go. They told me something was going to pop off at the party and I didn't listen." (Pop off? Weird terminology, but that's my brain.) "You could've died. I could've died." She reassures him as he wipes at tears in his eyes, but it's hard to think anything good after so many people died. Nearly every kid they knew, new friends, bullies, teachers -- all dead.

It's getting darker. Cars pass them by, oblivious to what's going on. She asks, "Will it be safe at your aunts'? Do you think they prepared for something like this?" And the boy replies, "Maybe, it's our only shot," but even he is doubtful because how do you prepare for something like this? They can cast protective wards and spells, but it can only do so much against a fucking dinosaur or giant with a tree for a club. She's worried about her family, but they're away on some vacation to like the Alps or whatever, and neither one of them know how far this monster rising spread.

It's night when they reach his neighborhood and it's filled with lights from cop cars and houses as families are being told of what happened. It's a different sort of mayhem as the boy slowly maneuvers his truck to his aunts' house. Just when he's about to park (I could feel myself waking up at this point and becoming aware of my bed and was struggling to stay asleep and keep dreaming), the boy is hit with a vivid vision of a large spinning eye (like Mad-Eye Moody and the Eye of Sauron combined) until it fixates on him and a voice snarls, "I found you," and the boy slams the breaks as the vision disappears and he finds himself parked in the front lawn. The girl turns to face him and opens her mouth to ask him what happened--

And then I woke up, panicking, breathing heavily, and pretty damn scarred by the mental image of a dinosaur picking people out of a rollercoaster car and eating them like grapes.

#my dreams are way too weird #my dreams are super weird #WTF #imma be haunted by the dinosaur and rollercoaster FOREVER

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tialovestelevision · 7 years

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Superstar

From wrestling to fame, but oddly the fame story is a Buffy story instead of an Angel story, which means, I hope, less grit and more silly, since the basic strengths of the two shows are that Buffy does silly better and Angel does grit better. We’ll find out, I guess. 1. Apparently we get to deal with the emotional fallout of Riley not recognizing Faith wasn’t Buffy when Tara did. Also, Adam. And Jonathan, who we last saw bringing a high-powered, scoped rifle to school to shoot himself. This sounds like a blast! 2. Buffy, Xander, Willow, and Anya are fighting vampires. They killed one, but then found four eating somebody. So they need to get help. 3. Now they’re at a mansion. The help they went to get is Jonathan. Who gets dime-store Bond music. 4. You know… if they’re going to insert Jonathan into the opening credits like he’s an essential part of the show - which absolutely makes sense given what appears to be the episode premise - they also have to credit his actor in the opening credits. It doesn’t work otherwise. 5. Anya, Buffy, Willow, Jonathan, and Xander are at Giles’s house, getting weapns and drinking milk. Jonathan is training Buffy, and out-sparring her. Jonathan is better at everything than the best cast member at that thing is, so they all kind of act as decoys and backup for him. 6. Wow, he’s patronizing Buffy and she’s taking it and this is uncomfortable. But Buffy also seems aware that this wasn’t as good as she usually is. Slayer magic resistance? 7. Jonathan just caught Spike creeping around. “Wonder Jonathan and his Fluffy Battle Kittens.” Buffy’s one-liners are terrible. Whatever has changed reality hasn’t raised Jonathan up; it’s pulled everyone else down enough to make a barely-better Jonathan suddenly the best. 8. God, Jonathan’s one-liner is also bad. Better than Buffy’s, but bad. 9. … Willow and Tara have a Jonathan shrine and holy FUCK this is creepy. 10. Riley has a Jonathan poster in his room. And… is that a framed picture of Jonathan, too? He’s no Jonathan. Riley isn’t eating Initiative food, and they haven’t been able to track Adam. Buffy doesn’t want to sit near Riley. And she can’t sink baskets. She wants Slaying to be a competitve sport, so they can have figure staking. She left. 11. Buffy is talking to Jonathan about how terribly Faith messed everything up. She also put sugar in Jonathan’s coffee for him, and Jonathan is signing autographs mid-conversation. He’s creepy, but he’s not wrong about what’s upsetting Buffy. Buffy’s not right, though, that Riley couldn’t have known. Tara knew. When Giles was transformed, Buffy knew. Jonathan has a shoe brand. 12. Colonel George Haviland is here, and has taken over the Initiative. They’re having a facility review and also chasing Adam, and have called Jonathan in as a tactical consultant. He’s way shorter than the Initiative guys. Adam doesn’t eat, and is powered by by a small nuclear reactor. He doesn’t need his head and has to be annihilated. 13. A woman is watching Jonathan’s house, but now she’s being attacked by a fuzzy naked demon that’s very gross and ot actually that fuzzy much more mangy. 14. Now Jonathan is giving Riley advice. And shooting apples off soldiers’ heads blindfolded. 15. Now there’s a swing band playing at the Bronze. Anya was calling out to Jonathan when she and Xander were having sex. Buffy thinks Anya can beat Xander in a fight. I’m with her. Now Jonathan is going to sing for Riley and Buffy. He’s… not bad. Not great, but not bad. Buffy and Riley are going to dance, apparently. Jonathan has repaired Buffy and Riley’s relationship. And now he’s playing jazz trumpet from his new album. Xander and Anya are going to have sex. Pretty sure they’ll both be moaning Jonathan’s name. 16. The girl from outside Jonathan’s house is there. Jonathan took her to his manion. Buffy’s there too. Karen’s going to tell them about the demon. It had a mark on its forehead. Riley gave Karen paper to draw it. She gave it to Jonathan, who looks momentarily horrified. He is also hiding the picture of the symbol, and is dismissing the idea of hunting the demon, which he called a monster or an animal. Buffy is suspicious. 17. Adam is at the computer lab. He’s never heard of Jonathan, and says that the pictures on the TV are lies and the world has been changed. Adam knows every molocule of himself. That’s the most interesting thing about him so far, actually. Adam says that the magic that changed the world is unstable and corrosive and will lead to chaos, and he’s interested in chaos. 18. Jonathan has a pair of attractive blonde women asking him to come to bed. But he’s too busy looking pensively at the fire instead. He has a brand of the symbol from the demon’s head branded on his back. 19. Jonathan got the Class Protector award at the Prom. Buffy and Willow and Tara were walking and talking, and Tara went home, so now Buffy’s talking with Willow. Tara’s in her dorm, and hears growling. Doors slamming. The demon is there, attacking her with its claws. She got out of its grip and is is casting a spell, but she’s wounded. She conjured fog to slow it down, and locked herself in a supply closet. Now Buffy’s at Tara’s place, and Tara’s terrified. She was in the closet all night. Describing the demon to Buffy, who recognizes it as the creature that attacked Karen. She apparently saw the symbol, and is showing it to Tara. Willow is disbelieving because Jonathan said they were safe. Does that imply Willow has less magic resistance than Buffy? 20. Buffy is at Xander’s basement to look at his collection of Jonathan stuff. Anya is reading Jonathan’s book. Buffy asks if it’s weird that Jonathan is so good at everything. Anya is trying to make Buffy feel better. Apparently, Anya once granted a wish to make a man fall in love with Bill McKinley, who I’ve been using as my example of what I expect from Presidents for a while now. Anya is describing the kinds of alternate realities magic could make, like a world without shrimp or a world with nothing but shrimp or a freaky world where Jonathan is some kind of not-perfect mouth-breather. 21. Jonathan apparently crushed the bones of the Master, blew up the Mayor, and coached the Women’s US World Cup Soccer Team. And starred in the Matrix. And graduated med school. Riley is backing Buffy up. Buffy doesn’t know what to do. Giles has a Jonathan swimsuit calendar but doesn’t want to admit it. Buffy found the mark on Jonathan’s back in the calendar, but Jonathan just arrived at the house. Whenever Jonathan fights the monster, he gets confused. But he put the mark on his back to remind himself not to underestimate the creature. Buffy basically compelled him to join her in a hunt for the monster or lose face. 22. They ran into Spike, who’s being creepy. Spike wouldn’t give info to Jonathan, but Buffy threatened to cut his supply off, so Spike’s telling them where the monster is. 23. Riley is learning about magic. Maintaining spells takes concentration, but casting them doesn’t always - Xander set his book on fire. He shouldn’t speak Latin in front of the books. Willow found the mark, though… an augmentation spell that turns the caster into some sort of paragon. It also creates a monster to balance the good the sorcerer can do once the spell’s been cast. Xander: “So he did a spell to make us think he was cool?” Giles: “Yes.” Xander: “That is so cool.” 24. Huh. There’s a notable value to this episode - it gives us a decent relative measure of the various characters’ resistance to magic. Adam has the most, followed by Buffy, then Willow and Tara. After them comes Giles and Anya and, I think, Riley, followed at the end by Xander. I wonder if that’ll shift as the show goes on? 25. Anya is worried Jonathan’s going to betray Buffy. 26. They found the monster, and it knocked Jonathan out. Willow and Anya are surprised Buffy is right. Buffy is fighting the monster, then Jonathan gets a stalactite. He knows what the monster does, but is helping Buffy fight it anyway. Apparently, if she hurts the monster, the world will start to shift, restoring her power and knowledge while stripping his. Buffy is remembering how her fighting of evil actually works as she fights the monster. It almost tossed her into the hole, but Jonathan tackled it into the hole and Buffy caught him. Now the spell is broken. 27. They’re talking about it, so they do all remember. Nobody can remember who starred in The Matrix now. Buffy saw Jonathan and went to talk to him. They had an interesting little talk, and now Buffy and Riley are kissing. Looks like episode end. Overall: Wow, do I have mixed feelings about that episode. The episode was the show taking the easy way out of a bunch of heavy emotional stuff for Buffy and Riley, and less so but still significantly among the rest of Buffy’s circle of friends. I don’t actually mind that - television is meant to be entertaining, and frankly the long, rough soul-searching that would have eaten the rest of the season to deal with the fallout of the Faith two-parter wouldn’t have been fun at all to watch. It wouldn’t have even been enjoyable melodrama - it just would have involved watching people we love sticking knives of various sizes into their own and each other’s hearts for like three episodes and nothing really being resolved when it all stopped. So this wrapped that up as nicely as it could have been, allowing the show to move on from a necessary and very good story without getting bogged down in the things that story would have done to people. On the other hand… good God was Jonathanworld creepy. It reduced the overt misogyny the story would be burdened with by having Jonathan reduce the stature of Giles and Riley and Spike nearly as much as he did Buffy’s, but having one of the very few woman-led action shows on TV get taken over by a mediocre white guy even for one episode was still a bit of a gut punch. The cast does a lot of rescuing of the premise here, with Nick Brendon and Emma Caufield bringing enormous humor to every scene they were in and Anthony Stewart Head being utterly delightful in his reaction to the question of if he had a Jonathan swimsuit calendar. I… think this one goes in the list of Good Buffy Episodes rather than Bad Buffy Episodes? But it teetered on the brink of disaster basically the whole way through.

#buffy #jonathan #buffy the vampire slayer #superstar #buffy season 4 #season 4

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mrmichaelchadler · 6 years

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Cannes 2018: John David Washington on the Emotional Roller-Coaster of Spike Lee's BlacKkKlansman

In Spike Lee's "BlacKkKlansman," which had its premiere in competition here in Cannes, part of the difficulty of playing Ron Stallworth is that Stallworth, an undercover police officer, is often a performer himself, playing different roles for different people.

The movie shows how Stallworth, the first African-American police officer in Colorado Springs, launched an undercover investigation into the Ku Klux Klan. To his fellow cops, he is a rookie whose ambition may exceed his abilities. To civil rights activists, he is an apologist for the police. And when he is talking to Klan members over the phone—his race hidden—he is regarded with suspicion.

Sometimes those worlds collide. In an early scene, Stallworth (John David Washington) is assigned to go undercover to report back to his police chief on a speech by Kwame Ture (previously Stokely Carmichael, the activist credited with coining the phrase "black power"). During Ture's speech, Stallworth is at once galvanized by the words and consciously holding back, knowing he's there not to rally with the crowd but to spy on it.

On a terrace at the Palais in Cannes on Wednesday, Washington—a former professional football player, a star of HBO's "Ballers," and a son of Denzel Washington—recalled the tension of stepping into Stallworth's shoes in that scene.

"In real life, that day, Corey Hawkins"—the actor who plays Ture—"what he did with that role was so transformative," Washington said. "Those were real reactions from me. I really was moved by what he was doing, and so it affected the character."

In the movie, while still concealing his identity as a police officer, Stallworth edges toward a romance with a student activist (Laura Harrier) who bristles at the "pigs'" treatment of African-Americans. Stallworth, as a black officer who believes he is fighting racism from within, has divided loyalties.

Washington discussed trying to tease out his character's motivations. "There are different types of support for your people," he explained. "Justice, that’s what he stood for."

He added, "Like acting, undercover detective work requires a lot of performance. There’s just more pressure because it’s life-or-death situations."

The real Ron Stallworth made that point when the two of them conferred. "He kept saying, 'I’m an actor, too,' basically," Washington said.

"Some of his moves were motivated by emotions, but he was still able to stay cool, calm, and collected and do his job," he said. In the movie and in life, Washington said, Stallworth would talk with Klan members over the phone while a white cop (played by Adam Driver in the film), pretending to be Stallworth, would meet with them in person.

In "BlacKkKlansman," as Stallworth gets deeper into the investigation, he infiltrates higher levels of the Klan. Washington describes the phone conversations he shared with Topher Grace (who plays the Klan leader David Duke) as an "emotional roller-coaster." They play that way, too. To watch them is to be horrified at Duke's hate-filled rhetoric, to laugh at the fact that Duke doesn't realize he's he's being played, and to be incredulous that these scenes are based on real life.

Getting in the frame of mind for those phone conversation scenes, Washington said, was a matter of thinking through how Stallworth had done it. "I thought — the actor John David thought — 'This is the mission. I have to gain his trust,'" he said.

Although "BlacKkKlansman" seems poised to be a breakout role for Washington, he isn't new to working with Lee: He has vivid childhood memories of playing a small role in "Malcolm X" (1992) and doing five or six takes for "Uncle Spike."

Washington said he hadn't been in touch with the director recently when Lee he texted him about the role. (He's not even sure how he got the number. He said he didn't know if his father, who hasn't seen the film yet, had anything to do with that.)

Playing a '70s character also meant immersing himself in the pop culture of the era. "What really was most important for me, or most influential, was the music," Washington said. "I had a serious playlist, like a 400-song playlist of all-'70s music. That was basically my soundtrack to life throughout this journey. That really inspired even the way I moved."

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