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goombasa · 4 months

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Thoughts on the Super Mario RPG Remake

So hey, guess what I got for Christmas?

Okay, so, to give a bit of context to this, the original Legend of the Seven Stars on the Super Nintendo is one of my favorite games of all time. I played it backwards and forward and I've probably played through it start to finish more than any other game on the SNES. I love the world it created, and felt like one of the first big proper expansions to Mario's universe, rather than just being an incidental new place where the game was taking place. I love the new characters we were introduced to, particularly Geno and Mallow, and I was always disappointed that we never saw them again. I mean, I get WHY we didn't, the game was made by Squaresoft pre-Enix merger, and as such, most, if not all of the game's original characters were the property of Square and not Nintendo.

Oh, and of course I love the fact that this would be the impetus for other Mario-themed RPGs down the line, including Paper Mario, its sequel, the Thousand-Year Door, and the Mario and Luigi series… not that either of those series are in particularly good shape these days. But this was the start of it all.

So imagine my surprise when Nintendo announced during the Nintendo Direct in June of 2023 that there was a remake of this game in the works for the Switch, AND that it was going to be released later that same year, just in time for the Holidays!

I never thought it was going to happen, but it was happening. One of my most favorite games of all time, was getting remade, from the ground up, and brought properly into the third edition! Holy crap! AND GENO AND MALLOW WERE COMING BACK, BABY!

But… the more that I thought about it, the more my excitement died down. How would the gameplay hold up? Were they going to change a bunch of stuff about the game? Would they add a bunch of superfluous fluff? Who was even making it? It wasn't made by Nintendo or Square-Enix, but by a third party called ArtePiazza, a studio that up until this game came along, I hadn't actually heard of before. I was worried, and that worry was only exacerbated by how much this game meant to me personally.

Thankfully, all my worry was for nothing. This is not only a very faithful remake that makes changes only in what I personally consider the right places, but also a reminder of how much these older games tended to be better about respecting a player's time.

And now I'm gonna talk about it all.

The Developer

As it turns out, ArtePiazza has a long history of working with Square Enix, and were actually the primary developer behind a lot of the remakes of classic Dragon Quest games, as well as the CG designs and scenario designs in others, so they definitely know what they're doing when it comes to RPG remakes. It's not really surprising that I hadn't heard of them before, as they were more a background studio that offered assistance rather than main development.

This isn't the first remake they've been responsible for, like I mentioned, and I definitely think they did a great job with it, but I kind of wish I knew a bit more about the studio as a whole now, but information on them is a little bit on the sparse side, aside from the list of projects they've worked on which mostly consists of the Dragon Quest series, and a small handful of other RPGs here and there.

The Story

Hokay, so, this is a Mario game, but it's an RPG. That basically means that you have a very typical RPG setup, and at no point does it feel like the game is treating itself very seriously. I say that as a positive, because the story is paper thin here, basically an excuse to have Mario and friends go all over the place in this weird and wonderful world that has been created here.

The story itself wasn't really changed at all from the original. It is as close to the original as possible while at the same time altering some of the weird mid-90's quirks of the script. Most of the changes are minor, like removing the Bruce Lee name drop just before the Bowyer fight, and a few of the names of certain characters and enemies were changed. The only one that I kind of wish they hadn't changed was Mack, the first commandert of Smithy's forces that you fight in the game. His name was changed to Claymorton in the remake, which does make sense, it's still a pun on his weapon of choice, but in the original, he was known as Mack. You know, as in Mack the Knife? Pun on the song? Because he's a sword, but still… kind of a knife?

Okay, I get why they changed it.

Point being, if you are a fan of the original, nothing here is going to ruin any sort of memories you have of the story, simple as it is. Whatever changes they made are negligible and it retains the same flow, and most of the sillier moments are preserved perfectly here in the remake.

The Characters

Like the story, there's not a huge amount of characterization here, so if you were expecting the remake to suddenly give more depth to anything here, you're going to be disappointed.

At the same time though, none of these characters really needed much in terms of depth. Their designs and personalities are more than enough to carry the game. The villains barely get much of an introduction in this game, simply showing up at designated points to be the antagonist for that particular chapter of the story, and yet every single one of them has such a striking design and an interesting personality (for the most part; the aforementioned Claymorton is about as generic as it gets, save for his design and pogo-sword gimmick) that I don't think ‘depth’ is every really an issue. Entertaining is probably the best way to describe the characters here. Even the most minor of characters manage to leave enough of an impression that you are never going to mistake one person for another as you journey across the Mushroom Kingdom here.

This is something that carries over beyond Smithy and his gang to the one-off minor villains you run into, like the fame-hungry Punchnello, the underwater pirate Johnny, and of course the completely detached from reality Booster and his Amusement Tower.

Also, you fight a sentient wedding cake at one point, and the ending to that fight is legitimately hilarious.

And then there are the playable characters. Mario is given more of a mischevious bent in this game, and I was really surprised to see that they kept in some of the less flattering moments for our hero. There's a point where Mario's ready to just deck a child in the face for basically saying he isn't as good as Geno. And there are the many moments where Mario, rather than just recapping past events to other characters will just mime his way through what's happened, basically playing every character at once, and it's fantastic. This was one of the first times in the series where Mario had a lot of character beyond just being a heroic jump man and I think it did a very good job at conveying that character.

Also, you can make Mario say some real mean things to people in this game and just be a dick, which doesn't really have any sort of consequence, as most of the ‘yes/no’ questions, you do have to eventually agree in order to progress, so there's generally no reason NOT to make Mario talk negatively at least once or twice, just to see the other character's reactions to him just flat out refusing to be a hero for once.

Princess Peach is how she always is. She spends the first good chunk of the game in her usual role as a damsel in distress, and even after she joins the party, she doesn't really get a chance to shine on her own. Mechanically she's one of the most important party members, but in terms of personality, she really doesn't stand out much once she joins your party. I kind of feel like she had more dialogue before she was rescued than after. It's not a terrible portrayal, but you can definitely tell that this was written during a time when Peach's role was mostly to be the damsel, and the fact that she was part of the main party was enough to celebrate, whereas steps have been taken in future games to give her a bit more personality, and to make her a more active element in the story. It's especially noticeable when you compare Peach to Bowser's portrayal.

Bowser is fantastic in this game. This was the first time Bowser was shown to be anything more than just a big, evil brute in the games. Back in 1996 this was pretty unprecedented, and it really made Bowser into the more endearing, well-loved semi-villain that he is today. Like, yeah, Bowser is evil, but at the same time, he's also a bit of a dork with self-confidence issues who thinks he's way smarter than he is, and it's just… it's just so great. It's to the point where, even in RPGs where he is the main villain, Bowser is just as much comedy relief as he is an antagonist. It's the same here. After defeating him early in the story and then slowly watching his forces dwindle down to nothing as he tries in vain to defeat smithy on his own, Bowser is just a delightful curmudgeon to have on the team… even if, in terms of mechanics, he was actually the character I ended up using the least throughout my playthrough.

But then there are the newcomers, Geno and Mallow. I love them both, from an aesthetic point of view. Mallow, being a little cloud creature does fit right into the Mario world without issue. Geno's a bit more unique looking, but his role as the guardian of the Star Road fits right in with the occasional character guarding a super powerful area or relic or long lost power source that seems to crop up, even in the regular platformers now and then. And as they aren't really Mario characters, at least not in terms of the main canon, the writers did have a bit more freedom with these two, though not a huge amount was done with that freedom. Geno is about as static as Mario, Bowser, and Peach, though he's certainly a talkative character. I never really got much of a vibe for his personality though, as much as I enjoyed his design. Mallow is unique amongst the main cast of the game in that he's really the only one of the five that has something resembling a character arc. Orphaned as a child, wanting to find his real parents, and learning to be more confident as a result. It's really simple, much like most other subplots in the game, what few there are, but it does give his character more agency in the plot beyond the shared goal of wanting to stop Smithy from taking over the world.

Speaking of Smithy, can I just say how much I love the idea behind him. He's an alien blacksmith who literally forges the enemies that you fight, making sentient weapons that are completely loyal to me. It's an intriguing idea for a villain and I kinda love it. It almost makes me a bit disappointed that he just exists to be a villain. We don't know anything about him, what he does, where he comes from, whether or not he's done this to other worlds and so forth; Like I said before, we don't really need all that stuff for this to be a great game and an enjoyable story, but the fact that I'm not disappointed and yet I'm still asking these questions about the villain does tell me that I think he's at least an interesting force, especially with how much he's built up over the course of the story before you finally confront him. He might be one of my favorite Mario villains just for his concept alone, and that extends to his minions, all of whom are based around various weapons, their names a pun on the weapon they're based on. It's great stuff.

What the characters lack in depth or complexity, they more than make up for by just being absolutely off-the-wall strange, and I am here for it.

The World

Exploring the world in this game is a pretty straightforward experience. Folks tell you where to go and what to do, and then you do it. You pretty much will never find yourself wondering what you're supposed to do next, and that's without the need of a waypoint or a radar or even anything to really remind you of what you should be doing, though the remake does give you a handy journal function to remind you of recent events and any interesting information that you've gleaned from talking to people.

While the original didn't have any journal or fast travel functions in it, moving around the map was fairly snappy (actually much snappier than in the remake) and the areas and dungeons were small enough that revisiting them for whatever reason never felt like much of a chore. However, adding in modern sensitibilities and accessibility options for the convenience of the player is something that I will always welcome, especially since they slowed down traveling on the map quite a bit for the remake.

But that's about the only thing that feels like it's been made slower. Mario no longer needs a button held down in order to run on the overworld, running is just his standard mode of movement in this remake, and his speed is a very happy medium between his walk and run speeds from the original, and it works perfectly for getting around quickly enough and avoiding enemy encounters, not that you'll really want to, as combat is really fun, but I'll get into that later. Platforming also feels better in this version as well. The original wasn't bad perse, but the sprite-based isometric layout of the game combined with the strange ascent and descent speed of the jump could make platforming a bit tricky. And yes, the game does have platforming, usually in optional mini-games

While the areas themselves are small and even somewhat linear in their layout, the isometric layout of everything does make exploring worthwhile, and of course there are always hidden treasure chests and enemies to keep a lookout for. There are even invisible treasure chests scattered all over the world, with a particular NPC in the game that will even tell you how many hidden treasures in the world you haven't found yet, how nice of them! You can find a bunch of stuff just by talking to the individuals and poking around in every nook and cranny, whether it's directions to a hidden treasure room in the forest maze, a challenge to hit a certain number of consecutive bounces using your jump attacks, or hitting a button in Booster Tower that opens up a completely new screen in the previous area. And that's to say nothing about the rush that you get when you grab an invincibility star and just plow through a ton of enemies in the overworld.

And you get Experience Points for it!

The Combat

The combat is fantastic, from all angles, and is probably the part of the game that was both the most heavily altered, and the the most improved in this remake. And make no mistake, it was already pretty solid to begin with. The timed hits mechanic, where you can push a button to either increase the strength of an attack or defend yourself against an incoming attack or spell and potentially eliminate all damages if your input is timed well enough.

However, the old game, for as good as it was, could be somewhat vague about what you could and could not block, and also what the timing was for certain attacks. It also limited you to only using three out of the five characters at a time and you couldn't change characters mid-fight. Also, Mario always has to be in your party, so party composition couldn't be super varied. The remake addresses most of these issues, and in pretty decent ways.

First off, if an attack is unblockable, it will say so in the corner when the attack name is announced. Then, whenever an attack is used against you, or you use an attack, an exclamation point will apear above the character's head, letting you know when you should be hitting the A button. While decent timing will get you a small bonus to damage or defense, if you perfectly time the button press you'll either completely eliminate any damage you take (defending) or you'll dish out extra damage AND cause a small shockwave that will cause a small amount of damage to all other enemies (attacking). It's a smart system, and encourages you to learn the tells for both your enemies and allies. to maximize your offense and defense.

Oh, and that exclamation point? It doesn't stick around all the time. After you've successfully gotten a few perfect hits and blocks, the indicator will stop appearing. However, if you start missing the timing frequently on the same attacks, it will come back to help coach you into properly hitting that sweet spot. Depending on your team composition, you'll also get bonuses to certain stats if you manage to keep a combo chain going of successful attack and defense. And speaking as such a big fan of the original, I actually needed that help getting the timing down. With the new 3D models, the animations are far smoother, and also a lot quicker too, leading to the timing feeling a lot trickier. This game also has a lot more attacks that can be blocked with a button press, and I'm not sure if they could always be blocked in the original, or if the timing was just that strange. To be fair, the timing on these particular magical attacks (Diamond Saw, Bolt, Storm), they're really tricky to get down, even with that helpful little indicator.

The ability to switch in party members from idle during battle is also more of a boon than I thought it would be. In the original game, you were stuck in combat with whatever characters you had in your party, and generally I never switched out specific party members, save for some very specific fights. I'd almost always go with Mario, Bowser, and Peach, and end up leaving Geno and Mallow behind. It isn't like the game ever forces you to use them again anyway. But in the remake, you can swap out a character without wasting their turn, something that becomes very useful for characters afflicted with status ailments or knocked out, or when you just want to experiment with other characters' abilities against certain foes.

And by far, the biggest quality of life improvement to the game's battle mechanics were with its special weapons. The system itself remains unchanged, you have a pool of flower points that is shared by all your characters that they use to utilize their special attacks. In the original game, these were, by a large, kind of useless, at least in my opinion. Apart from some specific fights, all I would use special attacks for was for Peach's healing abilities (which makes her super powerful in this game, she can basically keep everyone hale and hearty all on her own so long as you don't let her get KOed). It is true that plenty of enemies in the game have weaknesses to elemental attacks that party members have in their special attacks (Mario's fireballs, Mallow's thunderbolts and snowy powers, and so forth… also Mario's jump attacks count as their own element too), but there was very little indication about whether or not using a special attack on an enemy was actually affecting them any better than your regular attacks. Add in the fact that powering up the special attacks required more involved button inputs (pressing the D-pad in a clockwise rotation, rapidly pressing the attack button, holding it down and releasing it at a certain point, etc.) and sometimes I just wasn't sure if I was even using them right.

The remake on the other hand, gives you plenty of ways to know just what would be best to use against your enemies. First, when you use Mallow's Thought Peek ability (Psychopass in the original game), you not only get the enemy's remaining HP total, but also a list of everything they're weak against, including status ailments as well, which can also encourage you to use all those items and spells that inflict statuses on your enemies rather than just having those collect dust. When you use an attack that hits an enemy's weakness, or a resistance, it will TELL you that, letting you know that, yes, you are doing something right. And those special attack inputs I mentioned before? The game gives you a visual cue that not only makes it very clear what you're supposed to do, but gives you visual feedback on how well you performed the action, so you're always sure exactly how well you're performing them.

I don't want to say that the original was terrible in this aspect, but the original never really made special attacks feel like a necessary piece of the puzzle beyond healing abilities, and some early game fights that benefited from Mallow's screen-hitting attacks. It was balanced in such a way that using your regular attacks was still perfectly optimal. In the remake, not only was I more often switching out party members to change up my strategies during fights, but I was using special attacks a heck of a lot more often because I could be sure that it was something that would be effective this time around, which in turn made both Mallow and Geno feel much more helpful overall. This is actually the reason why I ended up using Bowser much less than I did on the SNES version, as he is a useful tank, but I found Geno's status as a glass canon and Mallow's ability to cover and reveal multiple weaknesses to be a lot more useful compared to Bowser's interesting but underutilized ability to inflict a lot of status ailments. Combat just doesn't last long enough to make status ailments useful to use.

I would even go as far as to say combat overall feels much faster than the original. Not that it was slow before, but the animations just feel much snappier and more fluid and the lack of really needing to think too hard about what you're doing from turn to turn means that most regular fights are going to be over within three turns. The game's balance is just perfect in this regard, especially if you're new to RPGs. Speaking of which…

Breezy Mode

Look, the original Mario RPG was not hard. At all. And that was by design. It was built to be an RPG for people who didn't play RPGs but were familiar with Mario as a series. Combat was simple, the numbers were kept small, the level cap was very low, and the timed hit button presses kept people engaged and alert during combat, rather than just encouraging them to mash the attack button the whole time to get through the fights quicker. You're never confused on where to go, the few puzzles the game throws at you are very easy to figure out and dungeons are relatively small, quick affairs with only the occasional gimmick to spice up a boss fight here and there, such as Bowyer's ability to lock down a button.

I've gone on record in this post saying that accessibility options are a good thing, and I mean that. More options and more difficulty settings will always be a good thing, and there, it is no different. I just personally find it funny when a game that is already built to be easy and accessible goes even further and gives you an option to make the game even easier. It's a good thing, to be sure, and it's especially helpful for those struggling with the timed button presses. Heck, if that was all this mode did, it would have been a perfect accessibility option in general, but it also decreases the EXP needed to level up, and decreases the overall battle difficulty, lowers the HP for all enemies and bosses while still keeping the story the same. They took an introductory RPG and made it even easier to get into for anyone who is even remotely curious about the genre, and with how many RPG series are transitioning into more active combat systems and leaving the old turn based systems behind, I think this is a great way to introduce the concept of how these older RPGs functioned to people who just didn't grow up with this era of games.

The Post-Game

So, this is basically the biggest thing that was added to the game. As faithful as the remake is, one thing I'm very glad to see being added is a little bit of post-game content. There's not a lot of it, but it is there, and I felt compelled to talk about it.

The original game had no post-game. At all. In fact, there wasn't even anything after the credits, which was the style at the time. Games would usually just end, and stay on their THE END screen until you reset or turned off the console. Here though, after beating the main story, you unlock a brand new questline that will take you back to past locations to rebattle harder versions of bosses you fought during the main story, like Booster, Punchnello, and Johnny, and these fights do something very interesting: they really dial up the gimmicks. I mentioned before that gimmick fights weren't really all that prevalent in the main game. I mentioned Bowyer, but off the top of my head, there are also the two fights against Belome where he'll either eat one of your party members (the first fight) or clone your party members to fight alongside him (the second fight), and the second phase in Johnny's fight which turns into a one-on-one duel with Mario. However, each of these extra fights dials up the gimmickery quite a bit, to the point where they can feel somewhat like puzzle fights, as each one has to be fought in a very particular way.

You fight Booster, and if you let him finish his work, he'll drive a train into your body, dealing max damage to everyone on screen, basically guaranteeing a party wipe if you don't interrupt him and take out the snifsters, who are going to be encouraging him the whole time. You fight Jinx, who will instantly KO a party member if you fail to land a properly timed attack. You fight Punchnello, who has built up his defenses so high that the only way he can be hurt is by turning his bombs around towards him. There's even a rematch with Johnny that is once again a one-on-one with Mario, but this time you can't even use items, meaning that surviving the fight is going to be down to learning how to defend properly against all of Johnny's attacks. All of them CAN be blocked, but he has some pretty annoying timing for all of his attacks.

This all culminates in a rematch with the game's hidden superboss, a Final Fantasy inspired villain known as Culex. You fight him in his original 2D form during the story if you find the key to his door, but during the rematch, he has achieved a perfect 3D form, and man oh man, is he a challenge, well worth it if you're craving something that's actually pretty difficult in a game meant to be more welcoming to new players.

What I like about these fights is that they are essentially tests to see how well you've mastered the game's timed hit mechanics, and it makes you feel good for properly mastering them. Even if you're at or near max level (which is pretty easy to do in even a casual playthrough), these bosses will challenge you. You even get some new equipment for each of the extra bosses, usually super-powerful golden weapons for party members that didn't really have an ‘ultimate’ weapon the way that Mario and Peach did (the Lazy Shell and the Frying Pan respectively). You don't really have a reason to use these weapons since at this point you've basically done everything else in the game at this point, but the fact that there is a tengible reward for doing this post game stuff is always fun. And your ultimate reward for beating all the extra bosses and then defeating Culex? You gain the ability to fight Culex as much as you want, and see how fast you can beat them. It's not the greatest reward, but the fact that the developers went out of their way to include something to do after the credits roll in a game that initially just ended after that? I think that's really cool, especially considering just how much tougher these fights are compared to everything else in the game. It's just nice to see something that challenges you and your knowledge of the game's mechanics beyond what is usually required during a basic playthrough.

The Future

If I haven't made it clear at this point, this is a fantastic game. The original is a fantastic game, and it isn't often that I find a remake that can stand toe to toe toe to toe with the original, and while there are differences between the two, they mostly balance each other out. Both can be played and enjoyed easily, and while the remake does have a lot of very helpful quality of life improvements, the original version's more deliberate timing with its more limited animations still makes it very fun to play, it's just a different feeling.

I hope this game continues to sell well, and my biggest wish is that this means that the future for classic style RPGs will continue to be strong, or maybe we'll see some more new Mario RPGs that are quick, snappy and simple like this one, rather than these strange pseudo-RPGs that the Paper Mario series has turned into, or the drawn out, boring slogs that the Mario and Luigi games became.

But between this remake, and the upcoming remake of The Thousand Year Door that's supposed to be coming out some time this year, I have hopes that Nintendo is using these to guage interest for another original Mario RPG game.

I'm also hopeful that we might be seeing Geno and Mallow in games beyond the one they originated from. I'm not going to pretend that I know the details of whatever agreement Nintendo and Square Enix reached to make this remake a reality, but I'm hoping there was enough wiggle room for Nintendo to actually do something with the characters and concepts contained therein. At the very least, maybe Mallow and Geno will be able to appear in games outside of their origin in a form that's a bit more than just a glorified PNG, or a little background element cameo. Again, because I don't know the details of the agreement between Square and Nintendo for these characters, I can't be sure if this is just really wishful thinking on my part (game publishers are notoriously controlling over the IP that they own, with Nintendo being cited as the biggest example when it comes to their characters), but hey, I never thought we'd ever get a remake of this game, let alone one as polished and fun as this.

Thanks for reading all the way to the end of this post, it ended up a lot longer than I actually meant it to be, I just couldn't help myself and needed to gush as much as possible about a remake of a game that I have held dear to my heart since childhood, and I hope that this is a sign of more RPGs of this nature from Nintendo, or featuring Nintendo characters.

Who knows, with all of these remakes, remasters, re-releases, and smaller scope games that are coming out for the Switch as of late, this might be the year that we get some ideas about what Nintendo's next console is going to be, and what sort of games might be on it. That might be something to talk about down the line.

#Super Mario RPG #Remake #Thoughts #Lotta Thoughts #Like Too Many Thoughts #I think I went on with this for a little bit too long #Sorry about that #not really #had a lot to say #really love this game #Y'all should really play it if you can!

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dan6085 · 8 months

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Here are the top 20 iconic action movies, each with a brief description:

1. **Die Hard (1988):** Directed by John McTiernan, this film stars Bruce Willis as NYPD officer John McClane, who single-handedly takes on a group of terrorists in a Los Angeles skyscraper during a Christmas party.

2. **Mad Max: Fury Road (2015):** Directed by George Miller, this post-apocalyptic action film follows Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) and Furiosa (Charlize Theron) as they escape from a tyrannical warlord across a desert wasteland.

3. **Léon: The Professional (1994):** Directed by Luc Besson, this film tells the story of a hitman (Jean Reno) who forms an unusual relationship with a young girl (Natalie Portman) he takes in after her family is killed by corrupt DEA agents.

4. **John Wick (2014):** Directed by Chad Stahelski, Keanu Reeves plays a former hitman seeking vengeance for the death of his beloved dog, taking on the criminal underworld in a stylish and action-packed manner.

5. **The Dark Knight (2008):** Directed by Christopher Nolan, this Batman film features Christian Bale as Batman and Heath Ledger as the Joker, exploring the battle between order and chaos in Gotham City.

6. **Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991):** Directed by James Cameron, this sci-fi action film stars Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator, a cyborg sent back in time to protect John Connor, a future leader, from a more advanced Terminator.

7. **The Matrix (1999):** Directed by the Wachowski siblings, Keanu Reeves stars as Neo, a computer hacker who discovers the truth about the reality he lives in and becomes a hero in a virtual world.

8. **Gladiator (2000):** Directed by Ridley Scott, this historical action film stars Russell Crowe as Maximus Decimus Meridius, a former Roman general seeking vengeance against the corrupt emperor who killed his family.

9. **Inception (2010):** Directed by Christopher Nolan, this mind-bending action film features Leonardo DiCaprio as a thief who enters people's dreams to steal their secrets, exploring the concept of shared dreaming.

10. **Braveheart (1995):** Directed by Mel Gibson, this historical epic follows William Wallace (Mel Gibson), a Scottish knight who leads a rebellion against the English during the First War of Scottish Independence.

11. **The Bourne Identity (2002):** Directed by Doug Liman, this film stars Matt Damon as Jason Bourne, a man suffering from amnesia who discovers he's a trained assassin, leading to a thrilling chase across Europe.

12. **Speed (1994):** Directed by Jan de Bont, this action thriller stars Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock as they try to prevent a bomb from exploding on a city bus if its speed drops below 50 miles per hour.

13. **Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) / Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004):** Directed by Quentin Tarantino, these films follow The Bride (Uma Thurman) on her quest for vengeance against her former associates in a stylized and violent manner.

14. **The Raid: Redemption (2011):** Directed by Gareth Evans, this Indonesian action film showcases a SWAT team trapped in a high-rise building filled with criminals, leading to intense and martial arts-infused combat scenes.

15. **Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000):** Directed by Ang Lee, this martial arts epic features a mix of romance and action, telling the story of legendary warriors in ancient China.

16. **The Avengers (2012):** Directed by Joss Whedon, this superhero ensemble film brings together Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk, and others to save the world from a powerful alien threat.

17. **Aliens (1986):** Directed by James Cameron, this sci-fi action film is a sequel to Ridley Scott's "Alien" and follows Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) as she returns to the planet where the alien creatures were first encountered.

18. **Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981):** Directed by Steven Spielberg, this adventure film introduces Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), an archaeologist and adventurer, as he races against Nazi agents to find the Ark of the Covenant.

19. **Django Unchained (2012):** Directed by Quentin Tarantino, this Western film stars Jamie Foxx as Django, a freed slave who teams up with a bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz) to rescue his wife from a brutal plantation owner.

20. **Enter the Dragon (1973):** Directed by Robert Clouse, this martial arts film stars Bruce Lee as a martial artist who infiltrates a deadly crime lord's island tournament, showcasing Lee's incredible fighting skills.

These films have been celebrated for their thrilling action sequences, compelling characters, and enduring influence on the action genre in cinema.

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thewestern · 9 months

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Chapter 8

Hildegard … if you have a moment … I’d like to speak with you about the family and my role going forward.

Oh, Billy. How many times must I repeat myself? Call me Mother or Mom or not at all. Please.

Billy had been patiently waiting for the perfect moment to present to Hildy, his mother, his strategic vision, settling for some time between the third and fourth course. That afforded him almost an hour of silence to refine his pitch in his head. He never made written notes. I’m straight off the dome, like Hov and Weezy, as he once assured his sixth-grade English teacher before presenting to the class on The Hobbit.

Imma Bilbo Bag-Chaser / On a quest for Bling / Ur bitch on my dick like Gollum / Kiss the mother fucking Ring

As her son prepared to pitch her, Hildy thought of Fräulein Loebl, something she seldom did. How she would provide weekly status reports to Opa at the dinner table. They kept their affair an open secret. Even to an eight-year-old, who didn’t know what sex was, it was obvious this woman and her grandfather were making it. Her intestines tied in knots over at the repressed memory of the Fräulein erotically slicing his Weisswürste (white sausage), never once breaking eye contact. Since their deaths, she resolved to never stomach another Schweinshaxe or Semmelknödel. Hildy favored a lighter fare, and had a more worldly palate than her Opa, beside. So, as a compromise with herself for keeping Wilhelm I’s legacy on life support through the tradition of Sonntagsessen (Der Hunger des Wolfes gehört uns), Hildy installed a rota of her most favorite restaurants and eateries, contracting them to cater out of the early twentieth-century kitchen at the Wolffenhaus. For this Sunday’s installment, executive sushi chef Tatsahiro Fuji took the night off from his day job at Fōku (you really shouldn’t go for sushi on Sunday anyway), the hottest restaurant in town, to prepare a Sashimi tasting menu just for Hildy and Billy.

As for the latter, despite having been raised with ready access to all the finest cuisines, Billy had remained among the cursed realm of adult picky eaters. In addition to legumes, multi-grain breads and all manner of soups, one of the food groups he hated absolutely was Fish (he was undiagnosed pescaphobic); as to how anyone could enjoy it raw, he was confounded, utterly. But no bother. An empty stomach sharpens the mind (-Marcus Aralias), he thought to himself, scavenging around the edges at some white rice. Time to Enter the fucking Dragon, Billy. Thirty-six bathrooms of the Wolffenhaus. Mother fucking, Bruce Lee, bitch.

Thank you, Mother, for your time. I brought us here today to talk about the future of the company as it relates to the emerging craft and on-premise retail segments, which I believe it does.

Billy’s knee rattled beneath the table; his throat was bone dry. Hopefully he wasn’t having an allergic reaction to whatever sauce was touching that rice, he fretted, the sweat pooling on his temples. Pausing to compose himself, he took an unusually long drink of water.

Hildy wore an expectant look of surprise. She rearranged herself in her seat, as if to make a show of listening, and waited for her son to hamfistedly proceed in making the request she was already certain to deny.

As you know, regarding our Beverage Advancement Division, though our product development and go-to-market strategies have been mostly sound, our new entrants have struggled to achieve widespread adoption amongst our target demographics.

The Beverage Advancement Division, to which Billy was referring, was an offshoot of a subsidiary department to R&D that he had run on a trial basis for the past eighteen months. Hildy hand-placed him there, close enough to the core business, for appearances’ sake. Much as she’d sometimes like, she couldn’t stow her son away somewhere in the back office … He was a Wolff, after all. But, he was kept at an arm’s length-enough away to prevent his inflicting any real damage to the company's reputation and/or the family stock price.

Yes, dear. I’m well aware of the Full Moon, and its resultant failure to launch. Hildegard, We Have a Problem, was I believe the headline in Advertising Era. Or was it: Houston, We Have a Pale Ale?

Full Moon Pale Ale was the Beverage Advancement Division’s latest aborted attempt at astroturfing its own proprietary craft beer revolution. Past iterations included: Rabid Dog Irish Red, Big Bad Brown Ale, and Uber Wolff Select. Billy had taken his first turn at the helm with the much-ballyhooed debut of Full Moon Pale, which signaled a marked departure from prior strategy. Leading a team of the best and brightest among the Wolffenbeir brand management brain trust, Billy grinded harder than he ever had before. Twelve-hour days, six days a week, for three months. Yes, of course, he spent a not insignificant allotment of that time playing Brick Blaster, online shopping and watching Internet porn on his work computer. But … he was In The Office, so you do have to hand it to him. Also, don’t question his creative process.)

Then in one moment, all of a suddenly, it came to him.

Guys, why are we trying to reinvent the wheel here?

Instead of standing up a new category, creating awareness and affinity out of whole cloth, they pivoted: to identifying a brand which had established credibility in the craft beer space — namely, Rider, Pale by the New Frontier Brewing Company. It was a tactic Billy stole from his friends in the tech space called, Fast Following. Really it was a fancy way to say Copying. But in fairness, Russ had been fairly forthcoming about Rider being the Newfy’s level best attempt at Paying Homage to Hairy Uncle Harold, a bloody brilliant Extra Special Bitter, brewed in the Beer World-famous town of Burton Upon Trent, in the borough of East Staffordshire in the West Midlands of England. So it was more like Billy was copying a cop.

Working in shifts, a crack team of flavor chemists (flavorists) embarked to reverse engineer the R,PA recipe. Right out the gate, they were tripped up by the water, of all things. Ironic, you see, since Water was something of a differentiator for Wolffenbeir proper. Wilhelm I had been very savvy to purchase a land conservation easement granting exclusive usage rights to the Washita Watershed, filled in large part by the cirque glaciers in Big Monument National Park. This before it became public land thanks to that tinhorn president, as Wilhelm I would have no doubt called Teddy. Private land ownership is the founding principle of this country! This poppycock notion of Nationalized Parks … It’s Pure Bolshevism!

Is your beer Glacier cold? The old Wolffenbeir commercials used to end in the form of a question. (Chosen over the call to action: Lick the Glacier.) Russell hated those damn adverts. Every so often a smart-ass customer would rib him, hey Russ, how come this beer isn’t Glacier Cold? Yuck, yuck … yuck. To them he would reply, it’s as cold as your mother’s black heart before I screwed her pink back warm, you cunt fucking prick. Schehrer had a weird (bad) sense of humor and a short temper — a perilous combination in most customer service scenarios.

As for Full Moon Pale, their problem had nothing to do with water temperature. You can adjust that at your discretion. Rather it was the composition of the water, which one can also change, but not nearly as easily. Here is something that any brewer worth his or her magnesium sulfate understands: there is water that is Hard, and there is water that is Soft. Per exempla: the water in Burton on Trent, the pre forementioned Beer Mecca of Britainia. That water — flowed through the sediment-rich River Trent (not to be confused with the Trent River, its American cousin, that traverses parts of Jones and Craven Counties in the coastal plain region in eastern North Carolina) — is Hard Water, meaning that it possesses a higher mineral content. For a hop-forward ale, such as an American IPA or an English bitter, the alkalinity of Hard Water is an ideal complement to more a expressive flavor and aroma profile. Meanwhile, the water down there in Bohemia and Bavaria — run off up from them Alps — is Soft Water, insofar as it has a lower mineral content. For a more malty lager, such as a Czech Pilsner or a German Helles, the acidity of Soft Water is optimal for showcasing that lighter, crispier taste.

So then in summation, hard water is a little rockier-tasting than normal water. Soft water, on the other hand, is more watery water. What’s fun is you can tell for yourself what kind of water there is where you live, Russ relished to point this out whenever he mansplained pH values in brewing, which was more often than one would care to hear. Next time you’re in the shower, if your soap is super foamy and bubbly, and it won’t wersh off very easy — you’re in a place with Soft Water. If the opposite is true, and you’re having a hard time getting a good scrub going — you’re in a place where the water is hard. If you’re singing in the shower and you get soap in your mouth, then it’s a soap opera.

For his part, Russ often showered sans scrubbing. The pathetically low water pressure in his apartment wasn’t conducive to full exfoliation. That being said, he almost always washed with foam in the form of a beer, or preferably two. (Shower beers are like breasts, he would say. One isn’t enough; two is just right. Three is too many and four is a party.) The juxtaposing sensations of the hot water pitter-pattering at his weather-beaten skin, and the cold beer rinsing down his throat, permanently horse from all that yelling he did … well … if he were to make it through the day long, this was about the finest way he saw fit to start.

(Russ had the most gorgeous, gravelly singing voice nobody ever heard unless they were in earshot of his one bathroom after about that fourth shower pop.

Oh, I, oh I'm still alive

Hey, I, oh I'm still alive

Hey, oh

[Wet belch arpegio])

Same as in his shower, for all the Newfy beers, including R,PA, Russ used City Water, which possessed all manner of mineral content. (Come to find many years later one of the primary elemental compounds therein was fucking lead [Pb] … yikes.) Anyways, the eggheads at Wolffenbeir were using that glacier water from the Washita Watershed, which as we know was pure as the driven snowpack it melted from. Now you can treat that water with various salts and other compounds to harden it back up, but you won’t get exactly that gravel quarry mouthfeel of a Proper Ale. One that tastes like Eddie Vedder sounds. No, you won’t get that at Wolffenbeir. Not in a facility built for brewing At Scale. We’re talking in the hundreds of thousands of cases here. It’d be like trying to make one of Hildy’s fancy-pants European cars on a Detroit assembly line. That dog doesn’t hunt.

Please don’t worry if any of that was confusing, because water chemistry also was not the riptide upon Full Moon Pale waned. (Or would it be waxed?) It’s true they couldn’t achieve the desired Hard Water Effect, and the beer tasted mighty soft for it … But, hey, that’d never stopped them before, baby. Quick: What do Wolff Light and sex in a canoe have in common? Russ loved this one … They’re both fucking close to water!

No, the content of the beverage itself — a watery grave taste with that famous bloated corpse finish — was a complete nonfactor in the Total Eclipse of FMP. (I fucking need you more … THAN EVER.) But wait … If the quality of the product was immaterial to its success in the marketplace, how could it have possibly failed? Thankfully, for the sake of closure, all deceased brands receive a sort of autopsy, so as to determine the manner of death. In this case, results from postmortem social listening sessions indicated that Howler — the cartoon moon-faced mascot plastered onto every can, bottle, tap handle, in-store display … really any conceivable flat or cylindrical surface — had tested very negatively. Like, shockingly so. They Loathed Him. Howler. Multiple survey respondents were quoted as saying that his wry grin appeared Menacing. As if he was watching them, and would continue to do so late into the night as they slept. Staring into their dream state, with a zero-gravity gaze. The way his lunar crater-like eyes — black, the color of deep space — peeked out, just so, from atop the acetate frames of his wayfarers which hung suggestively there on the bridge of his aquiline nose. Even though he didn’t even have a nose. So how were they suspended there? And why on earth would the moon be wearing sunglasses anyway?

One night during Howler’s reign of terror, Hildy was being chauffeured home from a fundraiser at a private home in the foothills, benefitting the Collegiate Academy of Scientific and Technological Excellence. She was the distinguished chair of the independent board of directors for SciTech, which it should be said enjoyed complete autonomy from the publicly-elected school board district. Having once herself been abjectly denied the opportunity to pursue her passion for the Sciences, she was committed to ensuring that access to STEM education was available to all young people, especially young females.

Taking the shortcut she found so distasteful, Hildy saw from out of her panoramic sunroof, He was glaring down atop a massive billboard above the freeway. My heavens, is that one of ours? She asked in horror to her male companion for the evening, Mayor Mockingbird. It was the first she’d seen of Howler, who was even more off-putting in person, standing a full fifteen feet in diameter.

A marketing blunder the magnitude of this should have been quite easily avoidable. For a fact, the pre-launch focus grouping reached the same statistically significant conclusions about the Howler prototype. That he was Eerie, Ominous, Sinister, Awful, Ghoulish, Macabre. (Question: What do these things all have in common?) However, it was Billy who had personally buried that damning report from ever seeing the light of day. More than any other component of the product development phase, he had taken ownership over the Brand Aesthetics — colors, fonts, and specifically the graphic design of the wretched Howlie. Billy spent days in meetings and on calls, going back and forth with the creative agency of record, obsessing over the most minute details — he went to the mat for the shades. Tortiously he pondered the frames. Should they be tortoiseshell or matte black? As for the high stark unfavorablities, well, Howlie was slightly ahead of his time. Temporarily misunderstood. They’ll see. They have to see.

###

The tragic failure of Billy requires some familial context. His mother, Hildy, had made her bones with the company as a young marketing executive on the heralded debut of a new product line called Wolff Light. You know, while we’re at it, the advent of light beer is itself a funny thing. Around that time, Morning in America, or thereabouts, it became fashionable for one to look after one’s health and fitness. Jogging emerged as the modus transportari du jour. Prior to that period, no one had ever thought to run. Not recreationally. Likewise, you started watching what you e’t — heretofore unheard of in the preceding millennia of Human History, when one would eagerly devour whatever he could well get your grubby mitts on. The modern marvel of factory farming allowed for diners to be more nutritionally discerning. The same went for drinking. Turned out a ten-ounce can of beer could pack quite a caloric punch. Hence the consumer clamoring for a beer that was … Lighter.

Inspired by the cigarette ads of her youth — Did you know that four out of five physicians smoke Red Apple? A pack a day keeps the doctor away! — Hildy had the bright idea of playing to the heightened health consciousness percolating in the consumer marketplace. Finding a licensed practitioner of any credibility to endorse the therapeutic benefit of an alcoholic beverage would have proved difficult. (Not impossible.) Thus she created the cartoon clinician we all know and love, Doctor Lupus, M.D. Let’s set the scene. Interior: doctor’s office. A procession of big-eyed woodland critters scurries in one by one — a bunny with an earache, a skunk with a sinus infection, a chipmunk with a chipped tooth. (In addtion to specializing in otorhinolaryngology, apparently he also practiced dentistry, as a side hustle, perhaps.) Irrespective of their affliction, Doctor Lupus prescribes them each one pint of Wolff Light, surgically pouring it from the bottle into a tall, frosty syringe. The punchline reveals via a pile of skeletons that Doctor Lupus — a wolf in sterile clothing — has been eating his patients — picking them bone-clean and washing them down with his own glass of Wolff Light. Then cut to black and the tagline: Wolff Light … Just What The Doctor Ordered. (This preceded the Glacier Cold campaign. Wolff Light has had several slogans, it should come as no surprise. Wolffenbeir Heavy, as it was unofficially known, only ever went by the one, printed in script: The American Standard.

Television audiences couldn’t get enough of Doctor Lupus, who became an overnight sensation. Lupus-Fever, as it was called in the pages of TV Guide. Capitalizing on the Feeding Frenzy, as the phenomenon was alternatively called by TV Guide, the Wolffenbeir Company hired a professional mascot to dress up in a plush wolf costume and sent him on a globetrotting goodwill tour. He was invited on late-night talk shows, threw out the ceremonial first pitch at baseball games fetched six-figure speaking fees for cush corporate gigs. Christ’s sake, he met the fucking Pope.

At the absolute tipping point of his pop cultural saturation, Lupus made a cameo appearance on a nationally televised weekend sketch comedy show, performing a bit lampooning a real life pathologist who had recently achieved universal infamy for performing physician-aid-in-dying procedures using his Suicide Machine (patent pending), sparking a contentious debate on the appropriate role of Euthanasia in compassionate palliative care.

Then, somewhere along the way, Doctor Lupus emerged as somewhat of an unlikely Sex Symbol. Men wanted to be him. Women wanted to be with him. Beginning with the model-actress Brooke Shields, who made a splash at the Golden Globes when she walked the red carpet with Hollywood’s Hottest Wolf, himself dressed to the canines in full black tie. A publicity stunt? Quite possibly. Regardless of the romantic legitimacy of their celebrity relationship, the renewed tabloid attention measurably helped to revive her career, which was previously on life support. (Shields subsequently booked the popular sitcom, Suddenly Susan.) As for Lupus, as soon as he was established to be an object of interspecies sexual desire, his campaigns started pushing all boundaries of acceptability. Naturally, there were the Wolff Light Nurses, his harem of buxom blonde, human women. All credit to those gals for managing to carve out a niche of their own, making paid appearances at certified pre-owned car dealerships, minor league hockey games, that sort of thing. It was a decent living. Obviously nowheres near DL scratch. By now his money was Real Good. Enough to afford a Malibu beach house, a paddock of sports cars and a fully blown sex addiction. Part and parcel to a broader heel turn that was reflected in his commercial output. Notably, a later period tv spot was constructed around the conceit which, if you didn’t drink Wolff Light, then Doctor Lupus will fuck your wife.

Kids loved him too. He was the most popular Halloween costume ten years running. His Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon towered above all others, levitating six stories tall, and half a city block long, held afloat by some ninety handlers. (In what’s considered to be the worst accident in Thanksgiving Day Parade history, high winds wagged Lupus’ tail off the planned street route and into a lamppost, toppling it onto the sidewalk below. Several injured parade goers were rushed to nearby Beth Israel Hospital, where one bystander spent the remainder of her holiday season in a medically-induced coma.) Come Christmas morning, children raced downstairs with hopes that Santa Claus had placed Doctor Lupus officially licensed merchandise under the tree. There were action figures, lunch boxes, board games, galore. (The Doctor Lupus Edition of Operation came with a trembling pair of forceps [batteries not included], to simulate alcohol withdrawals of the attending surgeon.)

In addition to buying children’s toys, people of all ages bought beer. More than ever. By the refrigerated truckload. Hildy and her Promethean gollum led Wolffenbeir to its best fiscal year in company history. Industry analysts credited the campaign with breathing new life into a brand that had grown stale. You heard that right … Without the triple bypass surgery performed by Doctor Lupus, Wolffenbeir was in serious danger of flat-lining — gone the way of Schwang Beer, and so many other once-thriving beverage concerns … fizzled out before their time.

Needless to say, Doctor Lupus sent shockwaves up and down Madison Avenue. Hildy graciously accepted the Addy Awards for Best Thirty-Second Spot, Best Creative Direction and Best Campaign. An unprecedented full-category sweep for Lupus, whose creative legacy would live on for generations to come. As written in a twentieth-anniversary tribute by AdMonth Magazine: It was his devil-may-care, irreverent sense of humor which helped to usher in a new wave of avant-garde branding.

What’s more, any ad man worth his Morton’s Salt Girl will tell you, it was Doctor Lupus who once and for all killed The Jingle. You see, it used to be that when a company wanted to promote themselves via the airwaves, they would trudge downtown to Tin Pan Alley and commission an aspiring music man to pen a tune. They called it a jingle. It set the tone for the product. Something you could mindlessly hum, all the way down to the department store. Above all else, Hildy had a vision for her tone. Long before it became Glacier Cold, Wolff Light would be Cool. Now at the time, Coolness, conceptually, was fairly new. But Hildy had the foresight to know that whatever Cool was, a jingle was not. So, in its place, over the Doctor Lupus animation played the opening verse of one of the first-ever commercially-licensed pop songs, a landmark achievement for the form. Ladies and Gentlemen, with their chart-topping hit, Good Lovin’, please give a warm welcome to, The Rascals:

I was feeling so bad

I asked my family doctor just what I had

I said, Doctor (Doctor)

Mr. M.D. (Doctor)

Now can you tell me what's ailing me? (Doctor)

He said, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

(Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah)

Yes, indeed, all I, I really need …

[Cartoon wolf devours cartoon raccoon]

###

If there was one man immune to Doctor Lupus’ infectious charm, it was Wilhelm I, who detested marketing in all its forms. Advertising, sales, public relations, hexerei. You won’t find a prize inside your soap; there are no tricks, nor any treat; we are not snowmen or confidence artists, selling snake oil, as he would proselytize to Wilhelm II. We are not charlatans; we are craftsmen. We will not arrive to your door with sample goods in a bulging suitcase; that is nothing but a coffin to all who haul it. We make the door which you knock upon; the coffin in where you rest eternal. Call on our storefront, should that you wish to buy. These are our business hours. Here is our price. It is fair. Do you favor to purchase some other wares? By all means … Go right ahead, Sir. And a good day to you!

Thusly, the old man wearily watched Hildegard, his granddaughter ride her traveling circus on this meteoric ascent. Now there were rumours of her consideration for an officer-level position, on a fast track to the C-Suite. Von wegen! A woman would not—could not assume sovereignty of the Wolffenbeir Company, even if she was a Wolff by blood. Besides, Wilhelm I had named his chosen successor, Hildegard’s younger brother, Augustus, his grandson and last surviving male heir. Per his Opa’s orders, Gussie had gone back East to complete his degree in Biochemistry, and was returning home to begin a rotating apprenticeship throughout the brewery. Just as his own father had done, following the righteous path laid forth before him, if only to be thwarted by a coward’s bullet. While Gussie underwent his training, Wilhelm I stowed his sister away in what he considered to be a department of the utmost inconsequence: Marketing. And she should be happy at that! If he had his way, not she nor any woman would draw a wage from the Wolffenbeir Company. Why who would follow behind them on the employment line? Negroes? The Hispanics? Sodomists?

An aside about the Wolffensbeir Company’s hiring practices: In the decades that followed his son’s murder, Wilhelm I grew increasingly paranoid regarding the probability of the Homosexuals infiltrating the brewery on behalf of their staunch allies, the Communists. Or could it have been the reverse? Either way, Wilhelm I staffed a full-time polygraph technician in his Department of Human Resource Extraction (a precursor to HR) to conduct rigorous lie detector testing on all job applicants, to even the lowliest of hourly positions at the Wolffenbeir Company. Primarily, the Enhanced Interviews were designed to suss out any Perverse proclivities or Soviet sympathies. However Wilhelm I was also keen to know all prospective employees’ opinions of antique typewriters, German pistols, and Himself.

Regretably for Wilhelm I, Doctor Lupus was a force of nature even not he could control. (He had once bent the shape of a river.) Hildy rode that son of a bitch all the way to the now-coveted role of Chief Marketing Officer. Protracting that her career arc would soon crest atop the Wolffenbeir org chart, Wilhelm I personally endeavored to spay her further promotion in his capacity as Chairman of the Board. A savvy play. For here was a man who saw the whole chessboard. The first choice of any consequence he ever made was to stow himself away on that train compartment, on tracks laid due west. Starting there, at that railroad junction, he compiled an entire lifetime of making the right decision at exactly the right time. Until this very moment, when Wilhelm I made his first mistake — not including his three ex-wives, who were matrimonial sunk costs — and it was fatal. One by one, the board of directors betrayed him, Like Caesar, unanimously entering a vote of no confidence, removing him from his position, effectively excommunicating him from the institution he built and installing his granddaughter as the chairwoman-in-waiting. Six days later, just as soon as he could be sure the rest of his affairs were in order, Wilhelm I cemented their decision, splayed on the gravel of his eternally long, tax-shelter of a driveway.

And that is the rest of the story, about why Billy tried to lasso the moon. It was all for his mother. Ain’t that a bitch.

#novls of tumblr #soft water

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blakeboldt-blog · 1 year

Text

Best Albums of 2022

“Farm to Table,” Bartees Strange.

“Kingmaker,�� Tami Neilson.

“River Fools & Mountain Saints,” Ian Noe.

“Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You,” Big Thief.

“Be-Bop!” Pasquale Grasso + "Linger Awhile," Samara Joy.

“Topical Dancer,” Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul.

“SOS," SZA.

“Lucifer on the Sofa,” Spoon.

“Un Verano Sin Ti,” Bad Bunny.

“Angel in Realtime,” Gang of Youths.

“A Beautiful Time,” Willie Nelson.

“Big Time,” Angel Olsen.

“Crooked Tree,” Molly Tuttle & the Golden Highway.

“One Day,” The Cactus Blossoms.

“White Trash Revelry,” Adeem the Artist.

“Ashley McBryde Presents: Lindeville,” Ashley McBryde.

“Teeth Marks,” S.G. Goodman.

“Bummer Year,” Good Looks.

“I Walked with You a Ways,” Plains.

“MOTOMAMI,” Rosalía.

“Renaissance,” Beyoncé.

“Once Twice Melody,” Beach House.

“A Light for Attracting Attention,” The Smile.

“Sometimes, Forever,” Soccer Mommy.

“Blue Rev,” Alvvays.

“Blue Skies,” Dehd.

“ILYSM,” Wild Pink.

“And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow,” Weyes Blood.

“View with a Room,” Julian Lage.

“Preacher’s Daughter,” Ethel Cain.

“Carry Me Home,” Mavis Staples & Levon Helm.

“Feel Like Going Home,” Miko Marks & the Resurrectors.

“It Was a Home,” Kaina.

“Dripfield,” Goose.

“Painless,” Nilüfer Yanya.

“Natural Brown Prom Queen,” Sudan Archives.

“Warm Chris,” Aldous Harding.

“Humble Quest,” Maren Morris.

“Weather Alive,” Beth Orton.

“Bell Bottom Country,” Lainey Wilson.

“Multitude,” Stromae.

“Fossora,” Bjork.

“We’ve Been Going About This All Wrong,” Sharon Van Etten.

“Just Like That,” Bonnie Raitt.

“Dawn FM,” The Weeknd.

“This Is a Photograph,” Kevin Morby.

“Pink Moon,” Pink Sweat$.

"Born Pink,” Blackpink.

“Gifted,” Koffee.

“Kumoyo Island,” Kikagaku Moyo + “Gung Ho,” KOLUMBO.

“Optimism,” Jana Horn + “Classic Objects,” Jenny Hval.

“Pompeii,” Cate Le Bon.

“Wild Loneliness,” Superchunk.

“Scalping the Guru,” Guided by Voices.

“Palomino,” Miranda Lambert.

“Summer at Land’s End,” The Reds, Pinks & Purples.

“The Last Thing Left,” Say Sue Me.

“God Save the Animals,” Alex G.

“The Tipping Point,” Tears for Fears.

“Labyrinthitis,” Destroyer.

“Special,” Lizzo.

“The New Faith,” Jake Blount.

"In These Times," Makaya McCraven.

“Ugly Season,” Perfume Genius.

“Emotional Creature,” Beach Bunny.

“Present Tense,” Yumi Zouma.

"Hypnos," Ravyn Levae.

“Stumpwork,” Dry Cleaning.

“Me/and/Dad,” Billy Strings.

“MUNA,” Muna.

"CAZIMI,” Caitlin Rose.

“SPARK,” Whitney.

“Midnights,” Taylor Swift.

“Stress Dreams,” Greensky Bluegrass.

“Only the Strong Survive,” Bruce Springsteen.

“Wet Leg,” Wet Leg.

“Three Dimensions Deep,” Amber Mark.

“Experts in a Dying Field,” The Beths.

“Laurel Hell,” Mitski.

“The Parts I Dread,” Pictoria Vark.

"Take It Like a Man,” Amanda Shires.

“God’s Work,” LeAnn Rimes.

“Loose Future,” Courtney Marie Andrews.

“12th of June,” Lyle Lovett.

“Few Good Things,” Saba.

“The Hometown Kid,” Gabe Lee.

“Give or Take,” Giveon.

"Life on Earth," Hurray for the Riff Raff.

"Earthlings," Eddie Vedder.

“Giving the World Away,” Hatchie.

“The Man from Waco,” Charley Crockett.

“Mr. Sun,” Little Big Town.

“Gemini Rights,” Steve Lacy.

“Married in a Honky Tonk,” Jenny Tolman.

“Pigments,” Dawn Richard & Spencer Zahn.

“Can I Take My Hounds to Heaven?” Tyler Childers.

“Dance Fever,” Florence and the Machine.

“It’s Almost Dry,” Pusha T.

“Going Places,” Josh Rouse + “Heartmind,” Cass McCombs.

"100 Proof Neon," Ronnie Dunn.

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g4zdtechtv · 5 years

Video

youtube

FULL EPISODE: X-Play - A Distance Education Course in the Practice and Theory of Square Dancing

Get practical advice on dating your cousins AND chewing wacky tobaccy!

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retrogamelovers · 3 years

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#OnThisDayInGaming! 🎂

Bruce Lee Quest of the Dragon for the Xbox turns 19 today in North America!🐲👊

#on this day #bruce lee #quest of the dragon #xbox #retro gamer #retro gaming #retrogamelovers

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gameadblog · 7 years

Photo

Bruce Lee: Quest of the Dragon

(2002)

Scan from: DAS OFFIZIELLE XBOX-MAGAZIN_01_2002

Platform: Xbox

Genre: Fighting

Developer: Ronin Entertainment

Publisher: Universal Interactive Inc.

#game #advertising #germany #Bruce Lee: Quest of the Dragon #2002 #DAS OFFIZIELLE XBOX-MAGAZIN_01_2002 #Xbox #Fighting #Ronin Entertainment #Universal Interactive Inc.

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linusjf · 2 months

Text

Bruce Lee: Showing off

“Showing off is the fool’s idea of glory.” —Bruce Lee.

View On WordPress

#Bruce #bruce lee #Bruce Lee - Quest of the Dragon

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flojocabron · 6 years

Photo

Googly Kune Do

#video games #googly eyes #xbox #bruce lee #microsoft #Bruce lee quest of the dragon #universal interactive

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mellowdreamer · 4 years

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HOLDING OUT FOR A HERO VERSE.

this is a modern bending vigilante/hero au featuring zukka, mailee, yueki and a lot of hijinks!

the gaang are all 16-19 here, because while bruce wayne apparently has no problem with it, i’m not comfortable with having vigilantes who haven’t yet gone through puberty.

the avatar world is just one big city, and each of the nations/cities are different suburbs of the city.

kyoshi island, ember island, and boiling rock are small islands off of the city, similar to singapore’s sentosa island.

the city (republic city? i dunno, get back to me on this one) is full of heroes, vigilantes and villains alike. the fire nation is a criminal empire intent on taking over the city. the avatar is a hero who works to keep the balance of heroes and villains in the city, and stop the entire city from becoming a war zone.

however, the avatar disappeared 100 years ago, and no one was chosen to take up the mantle since. in the avatar’s absence, the fire nation was able to begin its quest to take over the city.

the heroes of the southern water tribe that were left after the various raids have left the southern water suburb on a mission to defeat the fire nation or die.

hakoda, alias chief, left his two young children in charge of their territory, despite them being a) children and b) relatively untrained.

katara, alias painted lady, is the only waterbender left in the southern water tribe. sokka, alias captain boomerang, is the only trained combat hero left in the southern water tribe. all those remaining are either children or incapable of fighting.

side tangent: when sokka does well, he calls himself “grand marshal boomerang” and when he does badly, he calls himself “private boomerang”. thank you to the crimily for coming up with this one!!

one night, when katara and sokka are out on patrol, they get chased by fire nation goons into the ice off of the southern harbour. there, they get into a fight over sokka’s sexist remarks and katara’s yelling having attracted the fire nation goons, and katara’s waterbending gets out of control. she breaks open an iceberg, only to find someone in there.

the two siblings approach the iceberg and break the person out. they are shocked to find a young boy in the unmistakable uniform of the avatar, resting next to a creature they’ve never seen before.

they wake the boy up, to find that his name is aang and he’s the next avatar. and that he has no idea of the fire nation’s quest to conquer the entire city, or the fact that the air nomads – heroes that didn’t resign to just one area of the city – hadn’t been seen for the same hundred years that he must’ve spent in the iceberg.

katara and a reluctant sokka take aang back to the apartment building where the remaining southern water suburb residents have been living and introduce him to everyone.

later that night, the three go out on patrol together. it’s a quiet night, and sokka thinks they might actually get through it without any incidents, until they find a woman being mugged.

sokka and katara are about to intervene, but aang takes down both thugs in a matter of seconds. aang, ignoring the slack jawed shock of his friends, asks if they could go penguin sledding. katara goes to agree, but is cut off by the shout of “MY HONOUR” from a nearby rooftop.

zuko, alias dragon prince, runs from the rooftop before they could find him. his father ozai, alias firelord, had sent him and his uncle iroh – formerly dragon of the west, now retired – to find the avatar. zuko had been banished from the fire nation territory years ago, after speaking up about a plan that would’ve cost them a whole division of goons and refusing to fight his father in an agni kai.

the kyoshi warriors are similar to the birds of prey or the amazons; they’re an all-female crime-fighting unit not directly associated with any of the kingdoms or nations. suki is their leader, and they don’t have secret identities like the other heroes.

iroh, bumi, piandao, jeong-jeong and p*kku are all retired heroes and a part of the order of the white lotus.

toph is the blind bandit and a hero, albeit a less morally structured and ‘good’ hero than the avatar, the painted lady, and captain boomerang. she was a part of the underground fighting ring ‘earth rumble’ when the gaang infiltrated the ring looking for intel and convinced her that her powers could be used for something better than beating bitches blue and making bank while doing it.

azula is firebolt, and she is as brilliant as she is terrifying. she’s arguably more feared than the firelord, mainly because she’s the one who frequents other areas and actually goes on missions. ozai just sits on his stupid throne and yells at people and manipulates his children like the little bitch he is.

mai and ty lee are azula’s sidekicks, and are known as blade and tightrope respectively. also: they’re lesbians, harold.

yue is a part of the northern water tribe’s group of heroes, alongside her family. they tried to marry her off to hahn and have her trained in healing instead of fighting, but she rebelled and threatened to go out on her own, so they relented. yue’s hero alias is tui, but she will be called sailor moon at least three times.

jet and his freedom fighters are a group of anti-heroes who aren’t afraid to hurt innocent people in their pursue of ‘justice’.

zhao is a villain who works for the firelord, under the alias admiral, and he’s an asshole. using the yuyan archers, he manages to capture aang and takes him to a fire nation stronghold. zuko finds out about this, and not wanting admiral asshole to get the upper hand, dresses as the blue spirit for the first time to rescue aang.

during the siege of the north, zhao “kills” yue. she fakes her own death and disappears into hiding until the final battle, in which she kills zhao because it’s what she deserves.

the gaang know that yue is alive, because she’s nice enough to not do them like that, but they have to keep up appearances. because of this, sokka amps up the heartbreak and clings to suki a lot. that’s why a lot of outsiders begin to think that sokka dated yue and is dating suki, though in reality yue and suki are dating each other.

zuko and iroh, after the siege of the north and a trap set by azula, disappear into hiding and decide to take refuge in ba sing se, knowing that the fire nation wouldn’t think to look for them there.

ba sing se is a section of the city that has been fenced off in order to prevent an influx of heroes and villains. the dai li, who keep a tight grip on the suburb and ensure that the residents don’t know of the war raging outside the walls, are a group of “heroes”.

of course, the fence does nothing to prevent zuko and iroh, the gaang, and later azula, mai and ty lee from entering ba sing se and turning it into their own warzone.

iroh fulfils his dream of finally owning a tea shop and zuko, when not working in the tea shop, spends his nights lingering in the shadows of ba sing se as the blue spirit.

sokka, desperate for a warm drink and something to do while the others do their bending training, wanders into the jasmine dragon one afternoon and is served by “lee”.

neither know the other’s civilian identity, so there’s no shady business, just pining over the cute customer/server. sokka strikes a conversion and the two begin flirting chatting. it’s going really well, and you can almost see the romance blooming.

and then in walks azula, flanked by mai and ty lee, all in costume.

sokka and zuko both leap up from their seats and into fighting stances. both are confused as to why the other jumped up, and then azula calls zuko brother and it clicks in sokka’s mind.

he starts yelling at zuko for a lot of things, including yue’s “death” which is how zuko realises who he is. zuko starts yelling back because he’s only once met a fight he didn’t like. in the background of this argument, iroh is trying to fight azula, mai and ty lee to varying degrees of success.

it’s funny that i say degrees, because this is when azula sets fire to the jasmine dragon. iroh grabs the two dumbass arguing teens and shoves them outside as he too runs, telling zuko to meet at their rendezvous point at sunrise.

azula, mai and ty lee chase after zuko and sokka (who are still arguing as they run from the three girls). mai and ty lee don’t want to chase them, because zuko has always been better to them than azula, but defying azula would be a death sentence.

sokka pulls zuko into a building for coverage, and because azula is azula, she summons the dai li and has them surround the building. there would be no leaving without confronting the dai li, and thus zuko and sokka are trapped.

sokka confronts zuko and basically asks how he could justify the fire nation’s villainy, how he could support a monster who’s killing hundreds of people. zuko defends his father blindly because he’s been raised to believe that his father is right, that his father has to be right, and this southern water scum is wrong. but zuko’s losing his grip on the argument and is becoming more and more hysterical but sokka is so calm, so sure of himself, and the dam finally breaks.

zuko crumples to the ground in tears, and now sokka’s gotta deal with this because ozai is a shitface and has been brainwashing his son for years and wow fuck the fire nation.

mai and ty lee, having taken down the dai li, burst in to find zuko crying his eyes out in sokka’s arms. they teasingly ask if they’re interrupting something and laugh as zuko next to sprints out of the building, sokka hot on his heels.

this is the last straw for zuko, who defects from the fire nation, hangs up his dragon prince uniform and fully becomes the blue spirit, a hero who works with the gaang to eventually take down the fire nation.

also, at some stage zuko rescues a turtleduck that got stuck up a tree. don’t ask me how this happens.

631 notes · View notes

quierorodarnojodan · 3 years

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Estábamos bromeando con un amigo @mcdonneeli sobre que tenemos muchos ships similares si no casi todos, pero que irónicamente ambos nos peleamos por el mismo pj a usar y por eso jamás podemos rolear las ships xDD entonces me puse hacer la lista a ver que dice mi compatriota desalmado.

Anime/Manga

Axis Power Hetalia

Alemania x Norte De Italia

Austria x Hungría [♥]

Dinamarca x Noruega

España x Sur De Italia

Prussia x Hungría

Prussia x Austria [♥]

Bleach

Ichigo Kurosaki x Uryuu Ishida [♥]

Ikkaku Madarame x Yumichika Ayasegawa

Kyouraku Shunsui x Ukitake Jyuushirou [♥]

Carole & Tuesday

Carole Stanley x Tuesday Simmons

Cyborg 009

Jet Link (002) x Albert Heinrich (004)

Digimon

Ishida Yamato x Yagami Taichi [♥]

Dragon Ball

Goku x Vegeta

Durarara!!

Celty Sturluson x Kishitani Shinra

Kadota Kyohei x Izaya Orihara

Fairy Tails

Levy McGarden x Gajeel Redfox

FullMetal Alchemist

Maes Hughes x Roy Mustang [♥]

Get Backers

Kakei Juubei & Fuuchouin Kazuki

Haikyuu!!

Ooikawa Tooru x Iwaizumi Hajime

Haru wo Daiteita

Kato Youji x Iwaki Kyosuke [♥]

Hunter x Hunter

Hisoka x Illumi Zoldyck

Leorio Paladiknight x Kurapika [♥]

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure

Joseph Joestar x Caesar Zeppeli

Jotaro Kujo x Noriaki Kakyoin [♥]

Mohammed Abdul x Jean Pierre Polnareff

Kuroko no Basket

Atsushi Murasakibara x Tatsuya Himuro

Kiyoshi Teppei x Makoto Hanamiya [♥]

Midorima Shintaro x Takao Kazunari [♥]

Naruto

Uzumaki Naruto x Uchiha Sasuke

Hatake Kakashi x Umino Iruka [♥]

Haruno Sakura x Yamanaka Ino

One Piece

Eustass Kid x Trafalgar D. Law

Roronoa Zoro x Vinsmoke Sanji

Saint Seiya

Manigoldo x Albafika [♥]

Hyoga x Shun

Sailor Moon

Kunzite x Zoisite

Michiru Kaiō x Haruka Tenou

Sakura Card Captor

Touya Kinomoto x Yukito Tsukishiro [♥]

Shingeki no Kyojin

Erwin Smith x Levi Rivaille

Marco Bott X Jean Kirstein

The Prince of Tennis

Inui Sadaharu x Kaidou Kaoru [♥]

Tiger & Bunny

Kotetsu Kaburagi x Barnaby Brooks Jr.

Uragiri wa Boku no Namae wo Shitteiru

Hotsuma Renjou x Shusei Usui [♥♥♥]

Cartoons

Adventure Time

Marceline Abadeer x Princess Bubblegum

Marshall Lee x Prince Gumball

Avatar: the Last Airbender

Jet x Zuko [♥]

Ed, Edd n Eddy

Kevin x Edd (Doble D)

Generador Rex

Rex Salazar x Noah Nixon [♥]

Happy Tree Friends

Lumpy x Russell

Shifty x Lifty

Splendid x Flippy

Scooby-Doo

Daphne Blake x Velma Dinkley

The Dragon Prince

Rey Harrow x Viren

The Legend of Korra

Korra x Asami Sato

Iroh II x Bolin

Voltron

Takashi "Shiro" Shirogane x Adam [♥]

Xiaolin Showdown

Chase Young x Jack Spicer

Series

9-1-1

Edmundo "Eddie" Diaz x Evan "Buck" Buckley [♥]

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Angel (Angelus) x Spike (William) [♥]

Willow Rosenberg x Tara Maclay

Carmilla

Carmilla Karnstein x Laura Hollis

Class

Matteusz Andrzejewski x Charlie Smith

Common Law

Travis Marks x Wes Mitchell [♥]

Cobra Kai

Daniel LaRusso x Johnny Lawrence

Deadwind (Karppi)

Sofia Karppi x Sakari Nurmi

Downton Abbey

Tom Branson x Thomas Barrow

Richard Ellis x Thomas Barrow

Eyewitness

Lukas Waldenbeck x Philip Shea

Grey's Anatomy

Mark Sloan x Derek Shepherd

Hannibal

Hannibal Lecter x Will Graham

Hawaii Five-0

Danny Williams x Steve McGarret [♥]

Hemlock Grove

Peter Rumancek x Roman Godfrey [♥]

How to Get Away with Murder

Oliver Hampton x Connor Walsh

Iron Fist

Danny Rand x Ward Meachum [♥♥]

Julie and the Phantoms

Alex x Willie

Las chicas del cable

Francisco Gómez x Carlos Cifuentes [♥]

LazyTown

Sportacus x Robbie Rotten

London Spy

Alex x Danny

Merlin

Arhur Pendragone x Merlin

Once Upon a Time

Regina Mills x Emma Swan

Regina Mills x Robin Hood

Shadow and Bone

Aleksander / The Darkling x Kaz Brekker

Jasper Fahey x Kaz Brekker

Star Trek

James T. Kirk x Spock

Leonard MCCoy x Spock

Malcolm Reed x Charles "Trip" Tucker III

Stranger Things

Billy Hargrove x Steve Harrington

Teen Wolf

Derek Hale x Stiles Stilinski

The Alienist

Laszlo Kreizler x John Moore

The Boys

Billy Butcher x Homelander (John)

The Irregulars

Billy x Leopold

Sherlock Holmes x John Watson

The Order

Hamish Duke x Randall Carpio

The Umbrella Academy

Diego Hargreeves x Klaus Hargreeves

The Walking Dead

Daryl Dixon x Rick Grimes

The Witcher

Geralt de Rivia x Jaskier

Torchwood

Jack Harkness x Ianto Jones [♥]

Travelers

Trevor Holden x Philip Pearson

Vampire Diaries

Alaric Saltzman x Damon Salvatore

Warehouse 13

Helena G. Wells x Myka Bering

Películas

Cloud Atlas

Rufus Sixsmith x Robert Frobisher

Sonmi-451 x Hae-Joo Chang

Inception

Eames x Robert Fischer

Dom Cobb x Robert Fischer

Richie Tozier x Eddie Kaspbrak

James Bond

James Bond x Q [♥]

Rise of the Guardians

Sandman x Pitch Black

Star Wars

Baze Malbus x Chirrut Îmwe

Poe Dameron x Armitage Hux [♥]

The Old Guard

'Joe' Yusuf Al-Kaysani x 'Nicky' Nicolo di Genova

The Road to El Dorado

Tulio x Miguel

U.N.C.L.E.

Napoleon Solo x Illya Kuryakin

Libros

Harry Potter

Albus Dumbledore x Gellert Grindelwald [♥]

Harry Potter x Draco Malfoy

Blaise Zabini x Theodore Nott [♥]

Pansy Parkinson x Daphne Greengrass [♥]

James Potter x Severus Snape [♥]

Sirius Black x Remus Lupin

Shadowhunters

Magnus Bane x Alexander G. Lightwood

The Raven Cycle

Ronan Lynch x Adam Parrish

Richard Gansey III x Blue Sargent

Comics

DC Comics

Apollo x Midnighter

Clark Kent x Bruce Wayne [♥]

Diana Prince x Steve Trevor

Garfield Logan x Rachel Roth

Hal Jordan x Barry Allen

Pamela Isley x Harleen Quinzel

Jason Todd x Dick Grayson [♥]

Maggie Sawyer x Kate Kane

Roy Harper x Dick Grayson

Cassandra Cain x Stephanie Brown

Hernan Guerra x Kirk Langstrom

Michael Jon Carter x Ted Kord

Marvel

America Chavez x Kate Bishop

Azazel x Janos Quested

Gambit x Rogue

Erik Lehnsherr & Charles Xavier

Logan x Scott Summers [♥]

Natasha Romanoff x Bruce Banner

Shatterstar x Julio Richter (Rictor) [♥]

Steve Rogers x James B. Barnes [♥]

Theodore Altman x William Kaplan

Tony Stark x Loki Laufeyson [♥]

Vision x Wanda Maximoff

Wade Wilson x Peter Parker

Videojuegos

Assassin's Creed

Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad x Malik Al-Sayf [♥]

Ezio Auditore da Firenze x Leonardo Da Vinci

Bayonetta

Bayonetta x Jeanne

Detroit: Become Human

Captain Allen x Gavin Reed

Connor, RK800 x Gavin Reed [♥]

Elijah Kamski x Gavin Reed

Elijah Kamski x Leo Manfred [♥]

Kara, AX400 x Luther, TR400 [♥]

Markus, RK200 x Simon, PL600 [♥]

Nines, RK900 x Gavin Reed

North, WR400 x Chloe, ST200

Ralph, WR600 x Jerry, EM400

Simon, PL600 x Gavin Reed

Devil May Cry

Dante x Vergil [♥]

Nero x V

Final Fantasy VII

Cid Highwind x Vincent Valentine

Final Fantasy XII

Basch fon Ronsenburg x Balthier [♥♥♥]

Kingdom Hearts

Saïx x Axel

Metal Gear

Solidus Snake x Raiden

Overwatch

Gabriel Reyes x Jack Morrison

Resident Evil

Chris Redfield x Leon S. Kennedy [♥♥♥]

Claire Redfield x Moira Burton

Jake Muller x Leon S. Kennedy

Jill Valentine x Chris Redfield

Jill Valentine x Carlos Oliveira [♥♥]

Jill Valentine x Claire Redfield

Rebecca Chambers x Billy Coen

The Evil Within

Sebastian Castellano x Joseph Oda

Podcast

Welcome to Night Vale

Carlos x Cecil Palmer

Crossovers

Samurai Jack/Johnny Bravo

Johnny Bravo x Samurai Jack

Canon x Oc

Deadwind (Karppi)

OMC x Sakari Nurmi

Downton Abbey

OMC x Thomas Barrow

Locke & Key

Tyler Locke x OMC

OMC x Duncan Locke

Lost in Space

OMC x Don West

Pokemon

OMC x x James

The Dragon Prince

Soren x OMC

The Irregulars

OMC x John Watson

The Lord of the Rings

OMC x Legolas

Political Animals

OMC x Thomas James "T.J." Hammond

Resident Evil

Jake Muller x OMC

Star Trek

OMC x Julian Bashir

Warehouse 13

OMC x Steve Jinks

Wizards: Tales of Arcadia

OMC x Hisirdoux "Douxie" Casperan

Duplas de Actores

Aaron Paul x Hugh Dancy

Bradley James x Colin Morgan

Chris Evans x Sebastian Stan

Daniel Craig x Ben Whishaw

Daniel Sunjata x Aaron Tveit

Dominic Purcell x Wentworth Miller

Edward Holcroft x Ben Whishaw

Gabriella Pession x Richard Flood

Gabriel Macht x Patrick J. Adams

Hanno Koffler x Max Riemelt

Jamie Dornan x Cillian Murphy

Jensen Ackles x Jared Padalecki

Landon Liboiron x Bill Skarsgård

Mads Mikkelsen x Hugh Dancy

Matt Davis x Ian Somerhalder

Michael Fassbender x James McAvoy

Rami Malek x Martin Wallström

Scott Caan x Alex O'Loughlin

Shemar Moore x Matthew Gray Gubler

Tom Hardy x Cillian Murphy

46 notes · View notes

juniaships · 3 years

Note

Is there a list of all your OCs or something that keeps track of them? I know about Jora and a few others but I know you have more and I wanna read about them.

I'm working on a list so I'm only going to put my main OCs and their associated canon love interests 😁😁

- Jora Holiday (Ben10): Shy and sweet nature lover with death powers, and uses her gifts to protect people. Ben's love interest.

- Kendrix: Ben & Jora's daughter from at least two varied timelines; was born with a different element of Life and was a pretty selfish person before her redemption arc. Not shipped with anyone at all.

- Myra Hopewell (GenRex): EVO who has technical control over her own nanites esp. water. Rex's love interest.

- Noelani (Sonic the hedgehog): Orphan from the lower class part of Station Square who became an errand girl to make ends meet. Eventually Sonic&co brought much needed joy in her life; Sonic's love interest plz sonally & sonamy fans dont kill me!

- Rosslyn Smith & Penny Paine (Alpha Teens On Machines): Rosslyn is the down-to-earth medic of the team & Penny is the preteen rebel with a good heart. Ross is Axel Manning's love interest and Penny is notn shipped with anyone.

- Kaysha Wallace (TMNT): Bubbly teenager who works amd studies to be taken as a serious kunoichi & opposes the Purple Dragons; Leo's love interest.

- Vanessa Marbles-Whittaker (Adventures in Odyssey): former nun turned artist/amateur sleuth who works at Whit's End; Jason Whittaker's love interest.

- Nicola Holden (DC): Protector of her working class neighborhood & "Lady of Light" in Gotham; also likes to "break the fourth wall", Bruce Wayne's love interest

- Maria Sanchez (Zordon Era Power Rangers): Purple MMPR and ACTUAL teenager with attitude and who jumpstarted the family tradition of joining Ranger teams; Jason Lee Scott's love interest

- Mikayla Jordan (Loonatics): Long lost princess of Freleng, former delinquent who turns her life around by joining the team as its "blue" member; Ace Bunny's love interest.

- Piper, Jetta, Odette & Rhea (Ninjago) + Padma (Monkie Kid): Piper is a chi expert, Jetta is the loner & weapons expert, Odette is the Elemental Master of Love & former gang member, and Rhea is a ballet dancer& the team's moral support. Rhea is shipped with Cole, Jetta is with Zane, and Piper is with Kai; Lloyd and Odette are also a thing.

- Eureka Jones (Rise of the Brave Tangled Dragons): Guardian of Music, joins the other guardians on her quest to revive Mother Nature. Shipped with Jack Frost.

- Paige Walters (Descendants): Commoner from tbe US who got a scholarship to Auradon for her ability to decipher runes. Shipped with Ben Florian.

- Samara (W.I.T.C.H.): Elyon's mentor, and the guardian of shadows. For a time she was acting queen of Elyon's realm; also somehow managed to redeem Phobos :/

- Arusi (Xiaolin Showdown): A metalhead from Nigeria who like Samara above, has shadow powers and called the Dragon of Darkness. She's mostly harmless and uses her powers to entertain folks with puppets& her element makes her immune to the Heylin; paired with Raimundo.

Barb, Anjel, & Tamika: Three OCs for Hot Wheels Acceleracers, they're female street racers & mechanics who work with Dr. Tezla to save the world from Gelorum - and to prevent the Teku and Metal Maniacs from killing each other! Barb is with Vert, Anjel is apparently the middle of a love triangle involving Kurt & Markie Wylde spoilers she rejects them both, and Tamika is with Tork Maddox. Basically if the show had more GORLZ.

#oc #canon x oc #fan characters #actiontoongorlz #multifandom #long text #tw long post

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aion-rsa · 3 years

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Mortal Kombat (2021) vs. Mortal Kombat (1995): Which is Better?

https://ift.tt/3vh6gqd

This article contains Mortal Kombat (2021) spoilers.

“Test your might.” These are the words of a minigame in the original Mortal Kombat arcade fighter from 1992. They were meant to signal an interlude between the simple pleasures of digitized sprites spilling buckets of blood. Yet they’ve also become synonymous with a franchise that’s arguably the most popular video game fighter of all-time. The phrase is also a pretty apt description for the various filmmakers who’ve attempted the challenge of taming this crazy dragon on screen.

More than any other video game series, Mortal Kombat has seen a plethora of live-action adaptations, from Hollywood movies to syndicated television. This weekend marks another milestone in that history, too, with Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema’s hotly anticipated Mortal Kombat reboot opening in theaters and premiering on HBO Max. It’s the third Mortal Kombat movie released under the New Line banner, but let’s just call it the second serious attempt at putting this universe on screen after the 1995 cult classic directed by Paul W.S. Anderson.

That ’95 movie holds the dubious honor of being generally considered the best video game movie adaptation of all-time, thanks to a tongue-in-cheek tone perfect for its mid-‘90s moment and maybe the greatest use of techno music in film. Genuinely, how many other pictures have the soundtrack scream the title of the movie over and over again, and it seems like a good idea?

The new movie took a different approach to the material, and certainly a bloodier one. While both adaptations share the same basic premise of chosen “Earthrealm” guardians protecting our dimension from an invading force via martial arts fights, the executions diverge radically. Here’s how.

The Story

The starkly different approach to storytelling in director Simon McQuoid’s 2021 Mortal Kombat is evident during the film’s opening scene. Beginning in 1600s Japan with a gnarly, brutal fight sequence between Sub-Zero (Joe Taslim) and Scorpion (Hiroyuki Sanada), this version of Mortal Kombat relies heavily on lore and world-building. If you know the video game backstory of Sub-Zero/Bi-Han, and how he was kidnapped as a child by the Lin Kuei cult so they could brainwash him into the magical ninja we now see slaughtering Scorpion’s family, the scene has a sense of fateful tragedy.

If you don’t, well Taslim and Sanada are such gifted martial artists that it still looks really cool. By contrast, Mortal Kombat of the ’95 vintage is pretty straightforward and to the point. This is basically an interdimensional version of the Bruce Lee classic, Enter the Dragon (1973), only with magical powers and the fate of the world at stake.

We’re introduced to three fighters in ‘95, Liu Kang (Robin Shou), Johnny Cage (Linden Ashby), and Sonya Blade (Bridgette Wilson-Sampras), who all get on a boat to the tournament for different reasons. And while Liu Kang was raised by his Shaolin monk upbringing to know what this tournament is, the other two act as our eyes and ears into this strange world of mysticism and Outworld menace. By the time they reach the island, they understand they need to compete with superpowered foes to save Earth in a structured tournament.

Conversely, Mortal Kombat (2021) is curiously both more secretive and open about its bizarre universe. For a much larger chunk of its running time, the new movie’s point-of-view character Cole Young (Lewis Tan) is completely mystified by the superpowered horrors happening around him while the viewer is keyed in early by scenes set in the evil dimension of Outworld. There we see the dastardly sorcerer Shang Tsung (Chin Han) scheme from a throne about killing Cole in order to prevent a prophecy vaguely connected with the movie’s prologue scene in the 1600s. So he sends Sub-Zero to kill Cole in his day-to-day life as an MMA fighter, slaughtering him before he understands he’s been chosen to participate in the sacred Mortal Kombat tournament, which is held in secret every generation.

In fact, there is no actual tournament in the new film. Rather the plot eventually becomes Shang Tsung’s chosen band of evil warriors attempting to cheat ahead of the conflict by attacking Earthrealm’s depleted champions before they even discover they have superpowers (or “arcanas”) and know what Mortal Kombat is. The film thus becomes a quest movie with Cole joining forces with other “chosen ones” (or chosen one-aspirants) to find the Temple of Raiden, a lightning god (played by Tadanobu Asano) who represents the interests of Earthrealm in the tournaments. From there the heroes must learn their powers and evade preemptive, cheating attacks from Outworld’s thuggish baddies.

Side by side, the approaches appear to be the differences between a traditional (if derivative) martial arts flick and a modern studio blockbuster that is trying to cram as much fan service and world-building lore into a two-hour movie as possible in the hopes of making fanboys happy. I hesitate to say the 2021 film is fully following the Marvel Studios template given its copious amounts of blood and (seeming) lack of interest in building a shared universe of interconnected franchises. However, the 2021 film was certainly released in a post-Marvel world where the focus in studio committee rooms is less on telling a single story and more on building a whole convoluted mythology filled with fan favorite characters who are begging to be explored endlessly by future movies. It’s less story-driven than it is content-driven.

As a result, it leaves the narrative lacking. Viewers know long before Cole or 2021’s Sonya Blade (Jessica McNamee) what’s going on, and all the anticipation for a tournament that never materializes feels anti-climactic. With its simple structure, the Anderson-directed movie in the ‘90s plays out much more satisfyingly with three heroes (plus poor dead meat like “Art Lean”) entering a tournament by choice or trickery and then trying to survive it while learning vanilla, if tangible, life lessons. Liu Kang needs to accept his destiny; Johnny Cage must look before he leaps; and Sonya has to accept she’ll be the film’s damsel in distress even though she kicks ass. It’s an Enter the Dragon knockoff but it still has more kick than fan service.

Round One goes to 1995.

The Tone

The tone and aesthetics are also jarringly different between the two movies. Released in 1995, the same year Pierce Brosnan became James Bond, and two years before Arnold Schwarzenegger chilled out as Mr. Freeze, Mortal Kombat (1995) is an unmistakably campy movie and it leans into that fact.

Working with a low budget for a Hollywood spectacle even before New Line Cinema cut his funds by another $2 million right before cameras rolled, Anderson directed a B-movie that accepted its limitations and had fun with it. Apparently stars Ashby and Christopher Lambert, who played Lord Raiden in the ’95 movie, improvised dialogue throughout the shoot and rewrote entire scenes. As a consequence, Lambert’s lightning god was more of a jovial trickster in temperament, reminiscent of Loki instead of Odin. Johnny Cage, meanwhile, was essentially the film’s Han Solo: a cocksure wiseacre next to the stoic hero (Liu Kang) and a no-nonsense woman who doesn’t like to be called princess (Sonya).

As again signaled by the almost funereal opening sequence of Mortal Kombat (2021), where Sub-Zero murders Scorpion’s young family, the 2021 film is going for a differing sensibility. There is actually quite a bit of humor still present, with the real reason the Johnny Cage character got cut becoming apparent the moment we meet Kano (Josh Lawson), a loudmouth smartass who takes on the comic relief role but with an added slice of thuggery. Hence his dialogue has a lot more F-bombs than it does cracks about $500 sunglasses.

Other than moments where Kano is allowed to steal scenes, however, Mortal Kombat (2021) plays it pretty straight. Asano’s Raiden is imperious and his fighters stoic. However, it’s also worth noting Raiden is played by a Japanese actor, as opposed to a white American-born Frenchman who was raised in Switzerland (Lambert has quite the international background). Indeed, one of the more admirable qualities of the 2021 film is the focus on a diverse cast that includes more roles for Asian actors and people of color, whereas the 1995 film whitewashed Raiden and left out the Black American character Jax for little more than a cameo.

The 2021 film also upped the gore quotient considerably. While the martial arts of the 1995 film were decidedly PG-13, the tone of the movie was only a few steps removed from Power Rangers in some respects, including its introduction of a horrible CGI creation known as Reptile. The Reptile in the 2021 film appears more convincingly, like the latest monstrosity out of a Jurassic World lab, and the violence he commits is visually gruesome (more on that later).

Honestly, preferences over the aesthetic differences between the two films comes down to a matter of taste. I prefer the tongue-in-cheek eye rolls of the 1995 film given how nonsensical this universe is, and how at the end of the day its target audience remains children. Yet I imagine many adult fans of the video games will prefer the blood-soaked earnestness found in 2021.

Round Two is a draw.

Chosen Players

Anyone who’s picked up a fighting game will tell you it’s all about finding a character or two you like and then training up with them. In 1995, Anderson had the advantage of primarily adapting the original 1992 arcade game with its limited collection of playable characters. Ergo, his film’s lineup easily focused on the three aforementioned heroes of Liu Kang, Johnny Cage, and Sonya Blade, plus the ambiguous Princess Kitana (Talisa Soto), and Lord Raiden. Meanwhile he divided his villain screen time between the sorcerer Shang Tsung (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) and Shang Tsung’s minions, who were essentially glorified Bond henchmen with individual gimmicks.

Fan favorites Sub-Zero and Scorpion are present in the ’95 movie—with much more colorful, game-accurate costumes—yet they’re relatively low-hanging fruit in the tournament’s brackets. Their rivalry is given lip-service but they are dispatched by heroes Liu Kang and Johnny Cage relatively easily. Meanwhile Trevor Goddard’s Kano is more a hapless comic relief baddie who Wilson-Sampras’ Sonya kills with a great laugh line. “Give me a break,” Kano pleads with his head pinned between her thighs. “Okay,” she shoots back before snapping his neck.

Still, the movie largely belongs to Tagawa who makes a meal out of the scenery as the big bad. The guttural pleasure he has in so naturally turning all the over-the-top commands in the video game into his dialogue—“Finish Him!;” “Fatality;” “Test Your Might”—is infectious.

The 2021 film relies on a much larger cast of characters and, unlike the 1995 movie, attempts to give them each a moment to shine in the way Kitana and the original Kano could only dream. This surprisingly begins with the introduction of a totally new character in Cole Young as our point-of-view protagonist. While fan favorite Liu Kang was the hero in ’95, the character is now a supporting player played by Ludi Lin in 2021. And he’s not alone. The new Liu Kang’s cousin, Kung Lao (Max Huang), also gets enough screen time to show off his character’s beloved razor-rimmed hat, which he dispatches one of the movie’s villains with.

There is also the new Sonya, who may have the most complete arc as she strives to be accepted as a champion for Earthrealm, and Jax (Mechad Brooks), who is Sonya’s partner with the chosen one birthmark and who gets a new nasty origin story for his metal arms. And then the new Kano spends as much time working with the good guys as he does becoming a villain in an entirely rushed and unconvincing third act plot twist.

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There are even more villains, most of whom amount to glorified cameos, including Mileena (Sisi Stringer), Nitara (Mel Jarnson), and Kabal (Daniel Nelson). However, they’re all even more perfunctory than Sub-Zero and Scorpion were in 1995. At least the ‘90s ninjas each got a few minutes to show off before being dispatched. Even the ostensible main villain of 2021, the new Shang Tsung, is fairly underserved, left to state banal dialogue from a throne without a throne room, and he’s never allowed to dominate scenes the way Tagawa did so gleefully back in the day.

Unfortunately, this is because the 2021 film has so many characters that it lacks any sense of narrative focus or cohesion. Tan’s arc of wanting to learn his power/arcana to defend his family is as broad and serviceable a hook as Shou’s 1995 Liu Kang wanting to avenge the murder of his brother. But Tan’s Cole Young gets lost in the shuffle after the first act and until the movie’s ending. Character turns like Kano betraying the other heroes similarly feels hackneyed because there is too much noise on screen to really care about who’s making it. Even Kang Lao’s death falls flat. It’s admirable that it’s a good guy fans theoretically should care about (unlike 1995’s token Black character created by the filmmakers to die), but the 2021 movie fails to make the uninitiated be concerned.

Of course there are exceptions. Namely Sub-Zero and Scorpion. Even though Scorpion ill-advisedly disappears for nearly all of the movie’s running time after the film’s terrific opening 10 minutes, Sanada has such presence, and such strong chemistry with Taslim’s Sub-Zero, that their opening salvo leaves you waiting the rest of the movie for Scorpion’s revenge. Taslim is also able to give Sub-Zero some surprisingly tangible, if only hinted at, pathos even after he kills a kid in his first scene and is then forced to act behind a mask thereafter. He’s the real villain of the piece you want to see go down, and his death scene is incredibly satisfying as a result.

It’s probably enough for fans of the games to favor this kitchen sink approach. But overall, less is more.

Round Three goes to 1995.

Fight Scenes

If there is one realm where the 2021 movie truly excels in over the previous film, this is it. And yes, a big part of that is the gore quotient. Whereas the 1995 flick was produced with a PG-13 rating in mind (my elementary school thanks New Line for that), the 2021 movie was able to embrace the gross out charm that made the original game stand out at the arcade all those decades ago. Street Fighter might’ve been first, but only Mortal Kombat let you pull the other player’s spine out.

While that effect doesn’t quite happen in the 2021 movie, almost everything else does. Nitara goes face first into a Kung Lao’s buzzsaw hat, which cuts her cleanly in half; Sub-Zero freezing Jax’s arms and then shattering them in a stomach-churning effect; and instead of going off a cliff, Prince Goro is disemboweled by Cole Young—which almost makes up for the fact that Goro is reduced to a mindless mute this time.

It’s like a highlight reel of fatalities from the video game. But the reason why this film’s fight scenes really stand above the 1995 film isn’t the bloodletting; it’s the action leading up to it. With brutal fight choreography, the new Mortal Kombat shines whenever it lets actors who can actually do the stunts take the arena. That includes Lewis Tan, whose Cole Young mostly fights other MMA types or CG monsters. But it’s especially true for Joe Taslim of The Raid fame. As the villainous Sub-Zero, his moves are lightning quick, even if his powers leave opponents frozen stiff. So when he shares the screen with Tan or Sanada, the action reveals an auhentic flair.

In comparison, the 1995 film suffers a bit from the sin Johnny Cage is trying to dodge within the story: it relies on stunt doubles and tight editing to make the fights exciting. It’s a shame too since Shou is an excellent martial artist, and the one scene he got to choreograph—Liu Kang versus Reptile—has an edge. But much of the time, Shou’s constrained by the direction and editing. Ashby and Wilson-Sampras, conversely, are not actual martial artists, though credit must be given to Wilson-Sampras for doing all her own stunts when getting the role of Sonya at the last minute.

Still, the fights stand taller in 2021. It’s a bit of a shame though that the movie is so heavily edited that it too often hides this fact. Unlike the 1995 ensemble, most of the cast has the moves in 2021, but the editing still feels stuck in the past with its reliance on confounding quick cuts and coverage. During our current era of John Wick and Atomic Blonde this is both a bizarre and disappointing choice. Nevertheless, this is an easy call.

Round Four goes to 2021.

Ending

The final fight was relatively satisfying in 1995. Tagawa is a preening villain, and when the Immortals’ techno “Mortal Kombat” theme plays, it’s a pleasure to watch Liu Kang wipe that smug smile off Shang Tsung’s face. However, the ending keeps going with a Star Wars-esque sendoff to Liu Kang’s force ghost brother, and then the movie undermines its catharsis by immediately setting up a sequel.

In the picture’s final moments, our three heroes, plus Kitana, return to the real-life Thai temple that’s supposed to be Liu Kang’s home. Lord Raiden waits for them there, getting some final sideways cracks in before Outworld’s evil emperor Shao Khan appears like a giant specter in the clouds. He immediately threatens an Earthrealm invasion, despite losing the tournament.

I can attest that in 1995, this was a stunning cliffhanger for eight-year-olds everywhere. But then… Mortal Kombat: Annihilation (1997), one of the worst films of the late ‘90s, happened.

Meanwhile in the 2021 film, we have a much more satisfying death for its villain when Scorpion returns from hell to send Sub-Zero to the hot place. Their fight is much more technically satisfying, and the cliffhanger setup is a lot more subtle. After defeating Shang Tsung’s warriors, if not Shang Tsung himself, the heroes of Earthrealm saved us all without an actual tournament ever occurring. And instead of Outworld cheating in this moment by invading anyway, they retreat. It’s an odd choice since they’ve been cheating the whole film, so why start playing by the rules now?

Even so, it leaves a destination for a second movie to actually head toward. And to tease that fact further, it’s implied Cole Young will now travel to Hollywood to recruit movie star Johnny Cage for a sequel. It’s pure fan service, but the kind that leaves the possibility open for better things to come. Considering we know where the 1995 movie’s cliffhanger leads—to pits of cinematic hell worse than any faced by Scorpion in the last 400 years—this is a victory for 2021 by default.

Round Five goes to 2021.

Final Victor

Ultimately, neither of these films are high art nor do they aspire to be. In some ways, it’s a case of picking your poison between schlock or schlock. Each has advantages over the other, as laid out above, and each is a long way from a flawless victory. Nonetheless, due simply to narrative and tonal cohesiveness, and just more memorable lead characters, I’ll go with the one that actually gets to the tournament this whole damn thing’s designed around.

Game over.

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