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itsclydebitches · 3 years

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RWBY Recaps: Volume 8 “The Final Word”

Well, we made it to the finale, everyone, and if you're reading this it seems you've survived the watching of it too. Barely. To say that some questionable choices were made across these 20 minutes is... an understatement.

But before we delve into the episode, I want you to cast your mind back to November 7th, 2020. A horrible year that heralded a horrible RWBY volume. There, coming off the shaky writing of Volume 7, I posed a number of questions and concerns that the show needed to tackle, with the promise that we would return to these expectations in four months time. Now, here we are! Let's refresh everyone's memory, yeah?

Taken directly from that recap, what RWBY promised us, through various teasers and Q&As, included:

Emphasis on Ruby’s leadership and how Summer’s death has impacted her

Insight into Ren and Nora’s flaws

May Merigold will supposedly have a larger part

More information about The Long Memory (Ozpin’s cane)

Theme of the volume is that you can respect someone but that doesn’t necessarily mean you agree with them

Very short timeline (supposedly just two days)

Yang in particular is very suspicious and distrustful

And you know what? They did all this. In the spirit of being fair and honest to this show, RWBY succeeded in delivering on everything they promised... it was just our foolishness that expected that these ideas would be delivered well. Ruby's leadership took center stage in the form of her hiding for multiple episodes and then others telling her she's still The Best before the plot dropped a solution into her lap... one she could have used at any point prior to this. Summer's death certainly has an impact, though it's an impact born of a crazy reveal that Summer likely isn't dead, but turned into a horrifying grimm monster. Ren and Nora both delve into their flaws, but heaven forbid either grow from that reflection. Ren learns that if he pushes past his primary flaw of keeping his emotions buried and actually expresses his doubts for once, he'll be yelled at and ignored until he admits how wrong he was. The "real" flaw is being a bad friend, with "bad friend" equaling "Not agreeing with Ruby 100%." Meanwhile, Nora considers that maybe she shouldn't rush in recklessly and hit things with her hammer... which is why she rushes in recklessly, hits something with her hammer, gets grievously injured, and is told that this is just who she truly is. No growth there, not unless we count her sudden desire to figure out who she is without Ren... but that exploration hasn't started yet. Too bad she wasn't the teammate separated at the end of the volume!

Meanwhile, May did indeed have a larger role to play, one I quite liked, it's just that this role — like all the others — inevitably circled back to realizing how wonderful Ruby is. May challenges Ruby to make a decision, but instead of being the catalyst for Ruby's growth, May becomes another forgotten side character who does a sudden about-turn regarding her perspective, leaving the group with the contradictory message that Ruby is actually doing her best, she's just a kid, no need to try any harder... everyone who claimed otherwise up until now was mistaken. May is another Cordovin. She's another Qrow. She's another Maria.

Fun fact: we don't even know if Maria is alive right now. That's how little she means to the show!

Actually, wait... anyone remember this nonsense from Volume 7?

I was too lazy to change the date.

Moving on, Ozpin's cane turned out to be a stakes obliterating bomb that came out of nowhere, makes no sense logistically — how do battles store energy that only hurts grimm? — yet nevertheless seems to have killed Hazel? It's a disaster of unanswered questions. Similar to the disaster of our two day timeline when, I'm fairly sure, we've had an unnatural number of sunrises and sunsets. I'll have to take a look back at the volume as a whole now that it's complete to be sure of that though. As for our themes... did we really explore the idea of respecting someone even if you disagree with them? Because Ironwood wasn't shown any respect. Ren wasn't shown respect. I think the closest we got was Oscar calmly validating Yang's worry about getting buddy-buddy with Emerald, but the whole point there was that Yang was wrong. She wasn't wrong, but that's what the text would have you believe. She is indeed "very suspicious and distrustful," but that's hardly unjustified in these circumstances. I'm still boggling at the fact that it took the group three volumes for forgive Ozpin, even while he was actively working to assist them, yet I-helped-destroy-Beacon-and-tried-to-kill-everyone-you-love Emerald is the group's new BFF after she... ran away with Oscar? She didn't save him, she just went along for the ride. At the very least we might have gotten a scene where Penny was like, "Hey, why are you all laughing with the woman who just tried to kill my dad?"

But oh yeah, the story doesn't remember Pietro exists either. His daughter is DEAD and he hasn't been on screen since Episode Five, let alone there when she passes.

I had my own list going in, including such expectations as "Ozpin bb you got done dirty please acknowledge this" and "Queer baiting, queer baiting… you’re on thin ice at this point, RWBY. Just skate on over to the queer snack bar before you fall straight into the lake." Obviously these needs were not met.

So what, given this mess of expectations, did we end up with?

Our finale — for some reason — breaks the one word title trend with "The Final Word." It's an expression that refers to the final word in an argument or a discussion, the idea of winning by making a last, devastating point. It can also refer to making the final decision on something, which is the best way I'm able to apply the title to this episode (outside of any “final” comparisons). Penny's death is certainly all about choice and making some kind of decision... but on the whole, this title doesn't feel like it fits well. Not like "Worthy" or "Creation" or "Risk." The two latter titles had obvious connections to the episode in question through dialogue and plot, while the former was a deliberate callback to Watts' speech. "The Final Word" feels... less obvious in what it’s trying to say.

That's a minor nitpick though. Let's get into the meat of the episode.

We open on the grimm whale still disappearing, which is weird. I get that it's massively bigger than any other grimm we've seen, but they all turned to dust near instantaneously and it's been, what? At least an hour since Oscar blew it up? Likely longer when we factor in their walk back to the manor, the fight with Ironwood, fixing Penny, and this entire evacuation. It certainly makes for a nice visual, but like so many details in RWBY, it raises unnecessary questions along the way.

The important bit though is that amidst the whale carcass a blob of evil is swirling about. Salem, obviously.

She’s not reforming in time to actually do anything though, don't worry.

Instead, we cut to the Ironwood vs. Winter fight and there's at least some dialogue this time. Ironwood yells that he's sacrificed everything to keep Remnant safe. Winter yells back that he actually sacrificed everyone else. Obviously, Ironwood should be called out for things like, you know, his unprompted murders, but instead they have Winter listing stuff that she was never shown to have a problem with before. The embargo? "Squeezed Mantle until it broke?" She, as Ironwood's second hand, understood and supported both the decision to close the border and the need to collect resources for a plan designed to take out Salem. I hate that no only did she turn without an ounce of hesitation or grief, but now they're having her act as if Ironwood forced these decisions on everyone, rather than everyone supporting him through them. We all remember Volume 7 when Ruby pressured him to finish Amity, right? And in trust RWBY fashion, most of these words are meaningless. Mantle "broke"? What does that mean? The class disparity did not come about through Ironwood: that's been in the works for generations. The lack of resources made things harder, yes, but when they were reclaimed by Robyn nothing improved. Watts is the one who turned off the heat and Salem attacked Atlas, leaving Mantle alone. Now, all the citizens have escaped through magical portals. So how is Mantle "broken" exactly? More importantly, why is Winter upset over this vague, nonsensical dilemma when she could be yelling about Ironwood wanting to bomb Mantle?

Again: this woman watched Ironwood shoot the councilman, shrugged, and continued to believe in him up until she realized his bomb threat was real. That was one of the main reasons why I thought the councilman might be alive, with Ironwood only shooting a warning shot past him. Because this is how you react to a good person unexpectedly killing someone else

whereas this is what we got from Winter and Harriet.

Hell, Weiss has more of a reaction to Yang telling Ruby things aren't super great right now.

So either Ironwood didn't do something that bad, thereby justifying these tame reactions (unlikely, given where his character ended up), or we should believe based on the animation that everyone was super chill with him killing an unarmed civilian. Which is then directly contradicted when they're like, "You're going to shoot Marrow? Bomb a city?? How could you do such horrible things??? 😲" Friends, buddies, fictional pals... you already watched him murder a dude.

The point is, there's a lot for Winter to be upset about, but she's not upset about that. There's a lot that Winter herself believed in, but the writing has forgotten that. This entire arc went off the rails a volume ago.

Also, why is Ironwood fighting with that giant gun? This is his final battle, presumably ever, and he's wielding this awkward, sluggish weapon we saw him randomly pick up two episodes ago? Let him use his regular guns! Give us a fantastic battle like he had with Watts! Instead, RWBY's final showdown consists of him using this no-name weapon as a unwieldy club in some of the most boring choreography we've seen to date. It doesn't help that this fight needs to share time with three others. Instead of an epic showdown, we're given glimpses of the battle before continually cutting away from it.

During that first cut we return to the Team RWBY battle where Penny, doing her best to stay out of Cinder's reach, is whisked away on Weiss' wasp.

Too bad she didn't do that for Yang...

Jaune and Nora watch this horror unfold until Jaune says, "Priority one!" and they split. Except... what is priority one exactly? Helping the civilians? I guess, because they don't enter the fight until the very end of it, when everyone else seems to have made it to Vacuo. And you know what, I like that. For once it feels like the group — or at least the B Team — is acting like huntsmen, putting the needs of the people over their own, personal desires. I'm sure Nora wants to help the group after Yang's (presumed) demise and that Jaune would like nothing more than to get his hands on Cinder, but they put those grievances aside to do the work they signed up for. Good job!

My only real gripe is that we don't really see this struggling in the animation, I'm just assuming it's there. In particular, there's a moment when Jaune sends Nora through the portal for reinforcements — not knowing they can't return — and they seem a little too jovial when, by this point, three friends have died.

There's letting your cast be supportive, and then there's having them ignore that three teammates have perished in an abyss. It really doesn't help to sell the idea that Yang, Ruby, and Blake are in any danger here.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Penny tells Weiss that since Cinder is really just after the Maiden powers, she can buy the rest of the group time to escape. Weiss, obviously, isn't fond of this idea... and then the both of them are blasted off the wasp by Cinder's fire. Which they deserve, frankly. They're just having this casual conversation about sacrifice while in the middle of a battle. Did they somehow forget that Cinder can fly too?

Note that multiple attacks from Cinder, another blast, and a hard landing on the pathway gives their auras a knock, but doesn't break them. The primary defense for Yang's aura shattering in a single, simple hit was that everyone is exhausted and running on little to no power... yet here the rest of the cast is, tanking multiple hits as we've come to expect. There is no explanation for Yang's defeat except that the writers chose to ignore the rules of their world for a dramatic death scene... even though that drama was erased a week later as half our team falls into the void too.

We'll get to that though. For now, Cinder corrects Penny's belief with "I want it all" and proceeds to try to finish them off, only for Blake to arrive, having made her choice from last episode about who to help. It's a legitimately nice attack, but I happened to pause at the bEST MOMENT

Anyway.

We leave that fight to return to Qrow and Harriet who have, off screen, started an entirely different battle. What I mean is, last we saw Qrow had broken through the windshield of the airship, roughly pinned Harriet, and was taunting her about getting the fight she wanted. Now, suddenly, he's going “You’re making a mistake, Harriet, what happened to Clover—” as if he's been trying to talk her down this whole time. It's jarring, especially when we consider that Qrow had a volume long "kill Ironwood" arc that was dropped because... Robyn reminded him that murder is bad? RWBY feels like a storytelling pinball machine. Characters bounce from one personality to the next, one perspective and another, round and round until you don't know where they'll end up.

Harriet screams for Qrow to just shut up already and honestly? Same. I love Qrow, he's one of my favorites, but I can't deny that he's been done dirty like so many others since Volume 6. I love who Qrow was, not the mess RWBY has created the last few years.

Time to delve back into fic after recapping!

Sadly though, this strange dialogue wasn't the only "wtf" moment. Harriet is still trying to drop the bomb — which is its own mess of confusing motivations — when Vine and Elm show up on Harriet's ship. Elm begs Harriet not to do this "because you’re our friend!”

Am I glad that they finally acknowledged that the Ace Ops have always been friends? Sure, but why did we spend two volumes claiming otherwise? They were friends, a fantastic team, then Harriet announces that's a lie and we get a bunch of "Team RWBY is superior because they're actually friends" messages. Except this entire time we're still watching the Ace Ops be kind and playful with one another. But they're not friends, the story says. Not friends as they fight these battles. Not friends as they grieve for Clover. Definitely not friends as they react in horror at Ironwood nearly shooting Marrow. No, there's nothing there... until Elm claims there is! Then Harriet reacts in shock. I have friends?

Except Elm was labeled the one "just following orders" by Yang. Elm is the one who shook off Vine after the whale exploded. This isn't the story of one character, Harriet, thinking she was alone and then realizing that people do care for her, this is a story that, seemingly at random, had this group being BFFs or acting like they hated each other — and at each point the visuals are contradicted by the story's message. When they act like friends, we're told they're not friends. When they don't act like friends, we're told they really have been this whole time. I mean, do any of them even care that Marrow teamed up with Qrow and Robyn to take them out five minutes ago? All three were going along with Ironwood's scheme until they were physically stopped, but now Elm is convinced this is a bad decision she needs to talk Harriet down from with the power of friendship?

None of these characters are characters, they're just slapped together reactions based on whatever the plot needs. Who is Elm? I've got no clue. Her personality changes every episode.

Also, love that Qrow moves to stop the bomb from dropping and Harriet screams at him to "Get out of the way!" rather than just... attacking him? She even throws her hands out like she's having a temper tantrum. This feels like schoolyard bickering, not a life or death struggle.

Even though, you know, the audience is aware that the people of Mantle have already been evacuated and Qrow's group is aware that Atlas is falling on top of Mantle as they speak, so... why does the bomb matter? It's going to, what? Destroy the city thirty seconds before Atlas does? Oh no, the horror.

Things then, if you can believe it, get even worse. The bomb is still about to drop, so instead of doing anything to stop it — I mean seriously, we know it takes four people to shoulder the bomb's weight, but you're telling me Qrow and a reformed Harriet can't snag it in a pinch? — Qrow sits there, looks at Clover's pin... and the bomb careens towards the side of the airship instead, stopping.

Because I guess Qrow has good luck now? Or always did and somehow never noticed it? Or his semblance evolved?? Again, we don't know, but it's a bad moment any way you slice it, imo. Qrow has always been defined as the guy with a bad luck semblance and, much like Penny's android struggles, the allure was in watching him overcome those challenges, not having the show erase the challenge entirely. Especially when we don't even understand how it was erased. Qrow just... stops drinking, stops caring for Ironwood, stops wanting to kill Ironwood, stops causing bad luck, I guess. RWBY takes major character traits and flips them off like a light switch, leaving the audience with no emotional tether. We didn't watch Qrow overcome his drinking, or realize he can't bear to kill Ironwood, or discover a way to live life with the horrible hand he was dealt, he just blinks one day and those things are gone. Why? No one is sure. Not even the writers, I'd wager, because otherwise they would have written explanations into the text.

Many in the fandom insist that any basic information provided by the story amounts to "hand holding" when in fact there is a massive difference between the sort of unnecessary exposition that bogs down a tale, and having facts enough for the audience in its entirety to be on the same page about what is actually happening. For example, recently someone argued strongly that the "Penny is human" take is incorrect because Penny isn't human, she has an inhuman body made entirely of aura... yet where in the world does this exist in the story? Ambrosius may have been unsure about what Penny would be prior to removing her robotic parts, but that ambiguity is gone once her body forms, the equivalent of worrying about that gun only for a flag with 'BANG' to appear instead of a bullet. Worrying about something doesn't mean that something actually occurred. Penny appears human, expresses human sentiments, and then, this episode, dies as a human. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck and succumbs to the mortal peril that all ducks face... it's probably a duck. As I said in a recent ask, I implore the fandom to stop writing RWBY's scripts for them. Or rather, do so in some amazing fanfics. Don't do it on critical posts as a means of insisting that your revision is canon.

So Qrow has good luck now, maybe, but this character change doesn't amount to anything because Watts remotely starts the bomb's countdown.

At least he’s entertaining and competent. We had that for a time.

Back to the main battle, Neo is kicking Ruby's ass. Why? Because there's no consistency in power levels in this show. The ancient woman who hasn't fought in decades dances circles around Neo, highlighting how weak she supposedly is, yet now Neo dances circles around our main character. None of us should expect fights to follow the logic of the world, only what drama the plot wants to stir up. Ruby is eventually knocked down from a hard hit — yet her aura's intact! — and is saved at the last second by Weiss tossing Neo into one of the portals.

Far more of a problem than the power leveling is that Ruby gives no indication here that Neo just murdered her sister. Again, that's what the characters are meant to believe, yet Ruby is as stoic as she would be fighting a bunch of White Fang grunts. If you showed this scene to a RWBY fan on its own and asked, "What do you think happened prior to this?" the answer would be, "Uh... nothing? Ruby is just fighting Neo like she did on the airship in Volume 3." Nothing about this scene — from dialogue to animation — sells the idea that Ruby just lost the person most important to her in the world.

When we do finally mention Yang, it's Weiss who goes, “Come on, we have to do this for Yang” and the delivery is... meh. Honestly, I normally don't pay much attention to the voice acting, but I had a problem with most of Weiss' lines this episode. The "Leave her alone!" during this fight and later a "Get back!" as she attacks Cinder both fell really flat for me. Given the devastation and charged emotion that's supposed to be here, we can't give her anything better than generic cries that, again, she’d throw at any grunt? In that later scene the animation absolutely helps sell Weiss' distress, but the dialogue is common and the delivery has no emotional punch, leaving it feeling like Yang is just hanging out in Vacuo and they promised they'd beat the baddies before catching up with her. No one but Blake is acting like Yang died.

In fact, we see more emotion from Ruby when Weiss shoves her back, taking the brunt of Cinder's blast.

Weiss' aura breaks, not that that's a danger or anything. Everyone falls before they're injured, Winter gets the Maiden powers, Ren barely has to fight. Losing aura in this show used to be a moment of peril, where just last volume Winter was bruised, bleeding, and now needs an assistive device because she had to continue a battle with no aura. Now it's a joke. Aura breaks left and right across the volume with no repercussions attached to that.

We see a bit of the Blake and Penny vs. Cinder fight where Cinder blasts Blake off the edge. Penny rushes after her because at least one character remembered that they can fly.

Ruby, meanwhile, remembers that she can fly when it benefits her. After getting hit down onto a lower level and watching Crescent Rose plummet, she taunts Neo into an attack with a move that's actually quite good. I like the confidence with which Ruby riles her up and I like the strategy of darting behind Neo to knock her off the path instead. “Whatever you wanted, I hope it was worth it."

The only thing I don't like is that this speed and ingenuity had to disappear to justify Yang falling.

Cinder breaks Ruby's aura from behind though, sending her over too and grabbing onto Neo's leg. In an obvious moment born of the trope, it looks as if Cinder is reaching to help Neo, only for her to snag the Relic instead. “You should have never threatened me," she tells Neo and to Ruby: "you should have never been born.”

Love that they erased all that cool growth from last episode! And by "love" I mean "hate." As I said last recap, I'm not going to pretend that Cinder's character isn't riddled with problems, but realizing she was stronger by teaming up with Neo and Watts was one of the best things they've ever done for her. It made Cinder dangerous again and showed Watts' speech having a clear impact. It also made her more entertaining, creating a new dynamic among the three villains. Now though, Cinder is just... Cinder. The same boring, stupid Cinder we've had since Volume 4. She betrays Neo and then later betrays Watts.

So Cinder kicks Neo and Ruby both over the edge because why would we want to make her interesting? Neo falls, but Ruby has friends there to catch her! Unlike Yang. Jk. Weiss’ aura is gone and Blake actually tried both times, so major kudos for her. Using momentum supplied by Penny, she snags Ruby and hooks her weapon into one of the pathways... only for Cinder to cut the ribbon. Both plummet and once again Penny has a more believable reaction to all this, just like she did last week

Speaking of reactions, does anyone else find it weird that Cinder finally succeeded in killing Ruby and... doesn’t seem to care?

No? Just me?

At least we get that good animation with Weiss I was talking about before, even if the dialogue is lacking. I love that she snagged Blake's weapon and uses it to try and take out Cinder, shaking the whole time. Those are some great details.

Back to the bomb, Qrow is trying to escape, but Harriet says there isn't enough time to get out of the blast range. "I've killed us all." Vine has the solution though, using his semblance to wrap up the airship, thus containing the blast when it goes off. His final words are to reassure Elm that he can give his life, "if it means saving all of my friends." Just in case you missed the part about the Ace Ops being super close this whole time. Even though they also weren’t. Trying to eat your cake too, RWBY?

Frankly, I didn't feel much of anything during this scene, not when Vine made the sacrifice, nor when Elm and Harriet look on sadly while Robyn pilots them away (that's her contribution this episode).

All I can say is, good on RWBY for not killing one of the three dark skinned characters, or just murdering the Ace Ops as a whole. What the story is going to do with them though, who knows.

Jaune and Nora have that ‘You can do it!’ moment after three of their friends have presumably been killed. I swear, about 80% of Jaune's scenes do not work tonally and oh boy, things only get worse from here.

First though, I like his entrance. He slams into the fight against Cinder and lines up with Penny and Weiss, who is still dual-wielding her and Blake's weapons. That's an epic shot.

It looks as if they stand a decent chance against Cinder — Weiss' lost aura notwithstanding — except then Cinder's arm starts going crazy and she gleefully announces that Salem has returned.

Working on a time limit now, Cinder unleashes a volley of attacks that Penny steps in to protect the other two from. It's here that Cinder grabs hold with her grimm arm.

It's here that Penny dies. Again.

For the third time.

Friends, I am tired. This moment honestly deserves the most epic of rants, but that, in turn, requires energy. Energy? In this economy? Ha! That's hilarious. Taking this seriously though, the problem here can — as usual — be boiled down to a single question: What was the point?

Penny died in a horrible attack that shook the cast and audience both to their core.

That emotional impact was erased through her resurrection.

The resurrection did not create a new emotional impact for our heroes to grapple with.

Penny is given the Maiden powers, solidifying the fact that she's always been a "real girl."

That lesson was erased when the story decided to make her human for unexplained reasons (because no, she never needed to be human to survive the virus).

Penny then dies, passing the power to Winter... who was set to get the power in the first place.

We have, once again, come full circle. You can take Penny out of the story and nothing changes. Does Ruby lose any lessons or emotional growth? No. Does anyone survive who would have otherwise died? No. Does her getting the powers lead to someone unexpected snagging them upon her death? No. Penny's existence was filler. She was put in the story to take up time and, that done, was removed from the story once again. It's a choice that wouldn't be half as horrible if that filler hadn't done so much damage along the way.

First is the obvious: that Penny didn't deserve this. As a character, she didn't deserve to be brought back just to be killed off again, seemingly without narrative purpose, serving only to draw in viewers who RT knew loved the character. Second, keeping her in the story led to her entire arc unraveling. Initially, Penny died as an android in the world's eyes, but those who actually knew her — Ruby and Pietro — mourned the girl she really was. Now we have this horrible message that being a machine isn't real enough, so she has to die as a human being. It's a disservice to her character and, as an allegory for many minorities, downright insulting to the audience. Third, this offensive 'better to die as a human than live as a robot' message is wrapped up in the claim that Penny finally gets to choose something — “Let me choose this one thing. Trust me” — but she already did that when she chose to take the Maiden powers. We already had the better written version of this last volume!

And the fourth issue...well.

Fourth and fifth are the real kickers. Fourth is that Penny's death was an assisted suicide. She explicitly asks Jaune to kill her so she can ensure she's thinking of the right person when she passes (never mind that her thoughts would probably be on Jaune while this is happening) and that's... pretty horrible. Look, I'm no purist. I like a great deal of dark, gritty stories whose plot exists to make us uncomfortable. That's a valuable emotion that fiction can generate. The problem is not that RWBY is tackling a sensitive topic, but that they aren’t tackling it well. Yes, they put in a content warning and (from what I've heard) a suicide helpline as well, but providing the already necessary resources is not the same thing as writing that kind of scene with respect and care. All of the above tells us that, no matter what RT may have intended, that respect and care weren't communicated to the audience. Like Yang, they didn't even bother to keep Penny's death within the rules of their world. Jaune is right there ready to heal her and Penny says no, there's supposedly not time.

Um... since when?

Jaune's aura boost is instantaneous. The second he amplifies aura is the same second the healing starts and their talk could have been spent saving Penny. There was certainly time to save Weiss in Volume 5. To have a character go, 'Nah, it's too late' when the solution is right there is the ultimate cop-out. Suddenly announcing that the solution will no longer work For Reasons is not a legitimate limitation and it's made doubly insulting that RT didn't simply use the limitations already available to them. Jaune has been running low on aura since the whale. He then expended a great deal of aura boosting Penny to keep the virus in check. Every other ally has had their aura broken in this fight so, there. That's your solution. Have Jaune take a few hard hits from Cinder, his aura breaks, and then when Penny is mortally wounded he no longer has a semblance to heal her. It's that easy! Yet instead they had Penny reject help so that she could ask to die. That's what's offensive here.

Finally, reason number five... why is this moment given to Jaune? That's another easy solution: Jaune has gone through the portal and can't get back to heal Penny. There. Done. But logistics aside, this scene should have gone to any other character. Who is Jaune to Penny? Or Penny to Jaune? No one! They don't have a relationship. I get that the writers didn't want any of the girls at her side because then it would be hard to justify Penny not passing the power to them (which I get: making one team member a Maiden changes the show drastically), but you know who should be there instead of Jaune?

Pietro.

Pietro, who built Penny as a weapon and who was never given the chance to apologize for that. Pietro, who told Ruby he could only rebuild her once more, setting up an expectation that he'd sacrifice himself for his daughter (despite the complicated racial issues that would bring up). Pietro, who watched Penny plummet and has no idea what happened to her, let alone that she's been made into a human girl. Pietro should have been at her side, saying goodbye to his child and helping her complete her last wish.

And it would be so very easy to pull off. All it takes is a single line where Penny remembers that her father exists, asking Ruby to ensure a portal opens up in Amity. There's a quick reunion along the pathways before Cinder attacks. We hear a cry of despair as Penny falls and she looks, seeing her father racing towards her, though she thought he'd already made it out. There, you’re done. We open ourselves up to a lot of attacks whenever we say, "Why didn't RWBY just do ____?" because those who vehemently defend the writing like to go, "Oh, you think you could write RWBY better?" and no, I don't. I struggle with long-form storytelling and massive casts. I don't think I could do justice to the sort of show RWBY wants to be, but I do think I'm a decent enough writer to spot when there are major problems like this. The question of "Why doesn't Penny remember that her beloved dad exists?" and "Why, out of that massive cast, is Jaune the one to do this deed?" are both things that a newbie writer can spot, and a sometimes okay writer can figure out how to fix them both simultaneously. A good writer will start thinking about themes — what might it mean for Pietro to kill the creation he made? — and a great writer will find a way to pull that off without having that insulting, discomforting feeling pop up. At this point, our RWBY crew feels less like new writers making mistakes (because they're not new, not at all), but rather just writers who haven't bothered to learn from their mistakes after eight years. That's a lot harder to watch.

Because putting Jaune here doesn't just mess with RWBY's internal rules (not using his semblance) and it's not just useless in terms of Penny's development (she doesn't know him outside of "dude who boosted my aura for an hour"), but it also falls back into a pattern I thought RWBY had finally broken from: making Jaune the story's emotional center. This is not the JAUNE show. It's the RWBY show. Yet here, once again, we have Jaune in the spotlight. Why, after a whole volume of Ruby avoiding making decisions, does Jaune finally make the hard call? Why, after a scene where Penny asked Ruby to kill her, does Jaune do that deed? Why, after a divisive arc where all the grief for Pyrrha went to Jaune, is Jaune now set to shoulder the grief of Penny? At least Jaune had a relationship with Pyrrha, even if Nora and Ren did too. Yet with Penny he seems to be there solely because the writers can't bear to keep him out of that center spot for long. All of Team JNOR make it through to Vacuo... except Jaune. Jaune falls into the abyss too because, if the show goes this route, we apparently can’t have a volume just about Team RWBY, the main characters. The main characters are separated from the rest of the team and it's Jaune, not Oscar and Ozpin with a connection to the lore, not Nora or Ren whose development now hinges on them learning who they are without the other, it's Jaune who follows the title characters into a new dimension.

The issue is not whether Jaune deserves to grieve over the truly traumatic thing he just did now that he’s done it. He obviously does. The issue is the writers setting up a scenario where Jaune is situated to do that emotional work in the first place.

I like Jaune as a character. I don't like how the writing uses him as a character. RWBY is built on the idea that these four girls are the heroes of this tale, not the expected blond, blue-eyed, sword wielding guy we’ve seen in so many other stories. So why does that guy get the most important scene of the finale? Yes, Jaune had much less screen time this volume than he did in the past, that’s a good thing given the number of important characters RWBY has to balance, but that hasn't erased the problem of him being given significant moments that should be going to title characters. Does Ruby’s team rescue Oscar and take on Salem? No, Jaune's team does. Does Ruby's team save Penny? No, Jaune's semblance keeps her grounded and then holds the virus off. Not everything is a problem — we've also got good choices like having Ruby defeat the Hound and Ruby's team take on Cinder for the majority of the fight — but that doesn't erase that Penny’s death wasn’t something Jaune should have been a part of. Not unless he was going to heal her. Doing better than they have in the past doesn't mean that RT isn't still slipping when it comes to giving him undeserved focus.

They took one of the most controversial characters, controversial because of how much emotional focus he's gotten in the past, and had him help a fan favorite commit suicide while he cried about it, showing more emotion for a near stranger than our title character showed for her sister. This is a character who, up until two or three episodes ago, had no connection to the victim and still has no reason to thematically be the one committing this act. That is why the fandom goes, “The crew loves Jaune and does everything they can to put him in the center of the action.” Ruby, as main character and Penny’s first friend, is the obvious choice here. Pietro, as Penny's father, would be a good choice too. Hell, Nora is a better option given their moment in the Schnee manor this volume. Or Winter given their moments in Volume 7! Have her escape Ironwood, find Penny, receive the powers, and then finish him off. Literally anyone would be better than Jaune, not because Jaune is a bad character, but because Jaune has no emotional stakes here and putting him in a position where he could heal Penny but doesn’t is massively stupid. No one should be surprised that a lot of the fandom is upset about this. It was one hell of a reach to give him this moment and, since Jaune's problem has always been getting too much screen time and emotional nuance compared to our main cast, it's no wonder this act brought up a lot of bad memories. RT fell back into an old pattern after two volumes of improvement and they did so at the worst possible time.

The tl;dr is that Penny's third death is a writing travesty, just like her second. I shouldn't be surprised, given that this is the same volume that tortured a kid and the only thing they did with it was have him blindly trust his torturer... yet I find myself surprised nonetheless. Because Penny had such potential as an android Maiden and, as much as I personally hated it, potential as a former android learning to be human too. But why explore any of that when you can kill her off instead? Again.

As a final, far smaller note about this scene, we have the continuing problem of what purpose Cinder's arm is serving. If everyone recalls, its threat comes primarily from the fact that she can "siphon off" power from other Maidens.

She did it to Penny during the Amity battle and now she does it again, a great deal of green energy absorbed into Cinder. So what's left to give to Winter? Why doesn't Cinder become noticeably stronger with each successful theft? Like so much else in RWBY, we're told it exists without actually seeing the impact of that. Winter isn't a weaker Maiden for having lost power and Cinder isn't a stronger Maiden for having snagged it. It's just.. there, hanging out and looking vaguely menacing, I guess.

Outside of this unnatural not-transfer, we get to see how the power normally passes as Penny meets with Winter in some in-between place. It's a soft, heartfelt scene... with the exception that Winter says, “You were always the real Maiden at heart. I was just the machine. Just following orders."

I don't know how any viewer can doubt that RT now believes machinery = evil. Penny's machine body is magicked away so she can be a real-real girl. Yang announces that the arm she worked hard to make a part of herself is just "extra." The man with half a metal body is made this volume's villain and losing his second arm is, by the authors' own admission, a symbol of his lost humanity. Mercury with two metal legs remains a bad guy while Emerald and Hazel are hastily redeemed. Tyrian with his cybernetic tail is the most devoted crazy of the bunch. Maria, blind and in need of assistive lenses, is so forgotten by the story she was left in the tundra nine episode ago and won't be mentioned again until next volume (if then). Pietro, the guy in the wheelchair, is forgotten too, despite it being his daughter who dies on screen.

Now Winter, also bearing an assistive device, says that she's the real "machine" here and tells Penny, now human, that she was always the "real Maiden." I don't know what happened to make RT do a 180 lately, but the disability rep is no longer what it was.

Penny reassures Winter that she'll always be a part of her and then passes on, for good this time.

The rest of the episode feels lackluster, if I'm being honest. Images of Cinder beating Weiss are intercut with Ironwood beating Winter, getting her to a point where her aura breaks.

But then the powers appear and, as we'd expect, she easily turns the tide.

Gorgeous animation there.

But RT once again rewrites earlier scenes by having Ironwood claim that the "destiny" he chose for Winter has finally arrived — isn't that Cinder's MO? — and Winter shoots back that he chose nothing, this was a "gift." Except, it was never about destiny or orders? This was why Weiss' anger in Volume 7 was ridiculous. She acted like Ironwood forced Winter to accept the powers and Winter told her point blank she chose this. Ironwood didn't decide anything, he offered and Winter chose... kind of like how Penny is choosing now. I hate how nearly all of Ironwood's character has been ignored or, during times like this, outright lied about to make him seem super duper evil. He tried to bomb a city! You don't need to make him seem evil anymore, that job is done! Like their sudden change regarding disability, RT now seems to be allergic to nuance. Heaven forbid Ironwood be allowed to have valid points like he did in Volume 3. No, if you've got an antagonist every single thing they've ever said must be twisted into a display of their evilness.

Unless you're Hazel, who Oscar trusts for #reasons. Unless you're Emerald, who the group immediately embraces. Unless you're Cinder, who gets to cry on a rooftop and secures the trust of her allies long enough to betray them again.

But Ironwood? Nah, screw that guy.

Salt aside, the fight is pretty boring. Winter literally just throws up a wall of ice and Ironwood's blast rebounds, taking him out.

Winter flies through the portal and we return to Jaune. His sword is broken by Cinder, so weapons should be quite the problem in Volume 9.

There's a bit of sword vs. sword Maiden battling — this episode really pulled heavily from both Volume 3 and 5's finales — before Cinder gets smart again and attacks Weiss, currently trying to escape with Jaune. Weiss goes right off the edge and Winter isn't able to reach her in time. That's the entirety of Team RWBY, lost to the magical void.

Kudos to Winter's VA and the writing here though. This feels like an appropriate reaction to losing a sister. Screaming, sobbing, falling to her knees and beating the floor... Ruby, take notes.

A roar sounds through all the portals though, the sort of roar a pissed off witch might give. Jaune convinces Winter they need to leave Cinder behind, but before they can escape Cinder... makes a new wish?

Look, it works on all the major fronts. Cinder has the staff, check. We've basically established that Ambrosius can make an unlimited number of things per era, check. We know the previous thing disappears when a new wish is made, check. My only question is the timing. In all honesty, I'll have to re-watch the scene to be sure, but at the time it felt like the portals began disappearing almost the second Cinder left. Did she really have time to summon Ambrosius, deal with his explanatory nonsense, and get him to make a new wish without any fiddly concerns? Sure, fire is just fire, but it still felt like way too much happening too fast off screen.

Either way, the portals are gone and Winter makes it through in time, but Jaune does not. He falls through the void along with Team RWBY. And Neo.

Neo is the only addition I'm looking forward to here.

We get a few shots of our other characters as Winter arrives, saving the day by taking her grief out on the grimm. So glad something came of Ren breaking his aura again! Maybe they'll be more fighting at the beginning of Volume 9? If we see any of this group outside of 9's finale. My worst fear right now is that we'll spend an entire season away from the main action — remember how I said it would be stupid for Team RWBY to go on a side adventure while Salem is attacking the world? — and when they return there will have been some major time skip. Salem has destroyed most of Remnant, only pockets of survivors remain, it's all dark and dystopian... and oh look, every bit of character development happened off screen. How did Nora discover who she is without Ren? She did it while Team RWBY was gone. That merge we've been teasing for five years? That happened while you were gone too and, btw, Ozpin has ceased to exist. So sad, right? Not that anyone will actually mourn. Just take comfort in the fact that his last line was an "Oh no" about Ambrosius and his last major scene was apologizing for how the group treated him. Emerald's redemption? Off screen. Winter's grief? Off screen. Any and every one of these challenging beats to tackle can be waved away with, "We went through that arc while you were lost in the magical realm. Just get to know our new, improved selves now!"

Please, oh writing gods, don't let that happen.

Though I do worry because my last prediction came true.

But we all knew we’d end up here. My current theory? The portal should still be open at the vault. Winter will fight Ironwood, escape through it, and it will close right before he escapes too. He’ll fall with Atlas and everyone will act as if it’s some beautiful, poetic justice for him to perish with the city.

Ironwood didn't make a break for the portal — too busy being unconscious — but we got everything else. Winter left him, he falls with Atlas, and this is some poetic justice, I guess. Really, it's just an undignified death. I'd hoped for a sympathetic kill, something that showed the characters still cared about him even if they knew Ironwood had to be stopped. Baring that, I'd hoped for an epic battle that took him out with style. Instead, no one even bothers to kill him. Ironwood is now beneath the entire cast, not even worth finishing off. Winter casually tosses his blast back at him and leaves. Cinder throws out a "that's checkmate" and leaves. I don't think Salem even looks at him. Ironwood (presumably) dies with no one and nothing, just a casualty of the city Team RWBY made fall. And I say "presumably" because the audience isn't even given the satisfaction of being sure he's passed on. Like Hazel, Ironwood's death is this weird, ambiguous moment that, based on the other character reactions, isn’t meant to be ambiguous. Is he dead? Most likely. Is it possible, based on what we've seen, that he'll pop up two volumes later like

Yes and, memes aside, that sucks. I don't want to be wondering for the next couple years if Ironwood survived and if they'll bring him back just to drag his character through the mud again. Move on.

But no, we don't even get that.

I've spoken at great deal about Ironwood both in these recaps and on my blog more generally. Last week, I said I'd covered it all and there was no need to rehash it all again. I stand by that, so let me just conclude this travesty with a final note: if your bad guy's final moment is using the last of his strength to point a gun at the actual villain of this story, and you don't realize the problem of how this image contrasts everything else the story has insisted about his character? … I just don't know what to do with that.

Oh, actually, final-final note: Ironwood’s semblance is officially a Schrodinger's semblance. It is both canonical and noncanonical simultaneously. Wooo.

Cinder tells Salem she used her wish to "add more flames to the first of Atlas" and we cut to Watts, trapped in a roaring fire, unsuccessfully trying to break his way out. Wow, I hate that too! Next to Tyrian, Watts was our last remaining, entertaining villain. He carried a lot of the last two volumes and, I had hoped, was going to add some bright spots to the coming volumes as well. Apparently not.

Just another waste.

In addition to this casual, second murder of her ally, Cinder successfully convinces Salem that Neo killed Ruby and Ruby used the Lamp's last question, but she's back in her good graces since she snagged the Relics anyway. “You’ve done well, Cinder. Our work here is done" and they leave, blasting off like a less cool Team Rocket as Atlas plummets into Mantle.

Let's spend a second to tally things up then, shall we? What happens if Ruby, instead of throwing a moral fit, says, "You're right and we never should have lied to you, or betrayed you. But we want to help now. You get the Relics and the Maiden to safety in Atlas, if you can, we'll defend the people of Mantle"?

Well, they can still tell the world about Salem and call for help, much more easily now since Ironwood would likely just give them the code rather than them needing to spend an episode stealing it.

The Staff at least may not have ended up in Salem's hands and the group could have actually focused on getting the Lamp back (also solved if they'd been smart and just put it in the vault to begin with).

Mantle would still have been safe because Salem was never interested in Mantle to begin with.

Atlas wouldn't have fallen.

Ironwood wouldn't have died.

Penny wouldn't have died.

Even Vine wouldn't have died!

Our heroes unambiguously made the situation worse. Rather than banding together with their allies to fight the real enemy, Salem, they pushed until they made enemies of Ironwood and the Ace Ops both. Then they asked for help — which a pinch of logic said would never arrive — and twiddled their thumbs waiting for it. When it was clear none would come they...did nothing. They sat around, upset that the people were in danger, but not willing to do anything about it. It's only when one of their own, Penny, is threatened that they kick into high gear, hitting on a solution that they could have posed to Ironwood from the very start if no one liked the fly away plan. Yet instead of taking a few minutes to brainstorm other ideas — doing anything other than denouncing Ironwood to the rest of the group and attacking the Ace Ops — they spent two days sitting around, fixing minor messes they’d helped to create, then rushed through the portal plan, messing up the wish and stranding an entire kingdom in a sandstorm, with only Winter now to protect them from grimm.

Fantastically done, team.

The villains won, yes, but not because the villains were smart and compelling. Watts' hack on Penny and the heat petered out to nothing and Salem... well, she sat around for the whole volume, expending energy only to torture Oscar and try to (unsuccessfully) stop some escapees. Neo and, miraculously, Cinder did the most damage, but only in the final hour, with this "damage" being that our characters fall into a void that we now know looks remarkably like a paradise! Everything bad that happened was a result of our heroes being stupid and stubborn. That's a compelling story to tell... but RT isn't trying to tell it. Our heroes caused so much damage, yet that damage goes unacknowledged — or worse, ignored into silence like with Ren — and everything else is waved away with the magic wand the series claims isn't there. The cold doesn't kill anyone. Oscar has no problems walking off the torture. Nora hops back out of bed. Ruby one-shots the Hound. The civilians lost to the void must have survived too. The entire kingdom successfully makes it to Vacuo... unless you count the massive army we never saw making use of the portals, but who cares about them, right?

The villains won, there was indeed something resembling consequences, but none of it was emotionally satisfying. Not even when the series tries so hard to insist that emotion is there.

Qrow watches Atlas fall, mouthing Ruby and Yang's names, but it's too little, too late. Where was this care for his nieces when he was obsessed with killing Ironwood? When did they care about him? Was it when Ruby shrugged at his arrest, when neither cared that he was missing, or when they were designing an escape plan that didn't include putting a portal where Qrow could reach? RWBY markets itself around the found family-ness of its cast, but they're done a poor job in recent volumes (not others) of convincing me that most of these characters care for one another. We went from Ruby denouncing all adults, to Ruby pulling an Ozpin with Ironwood, to Ruby watching blandly as her sister falls to her presumed death. This is my hero? This is the simple soul we're supposed to rally behind? Ruby doesn't feel like a character who cares about other people anymore and, given that she leads the charge, neither do most of her friends. Or, when that emotion appears, it's jarring and undeserved. Jaune cries over Penny's death? That's tonally and characteristically backwards.

This volume was the culmination of so many mistakes over the past two years. No, Covid couldn't have made things any easier for the crew — the fact that they got a volume out at all is amazing — but the pandemic isn't to blame for the problems in the story. These seeds have existed since Volume 5, with some (like Jaune) going back even farther. I don't think we're ever going to get that flawed, but emotionally fulfilling RWBY back. The show has dug too deep and unless it somehow manages to create a clean slate — those time travel ideas get more and more alluring! — there's nothing they can do but keep on digging. At this point, I can only hope that the series does wrap up within the next two volumes, rather than dragging RWBY to a Supernatural-esque length.

Our final shot of the episode proper feels fitting for what this volume has been. Atlas and Mantle flood rather than exploding, something that makes a certain amount of sense, sure, but definitely wasn't what I was expecting. And after all these shocking images — Penny dying, the grimm attacking, our main characters disappearing in a puff of gold dust — we end it all with bits of random debris. It's strange and underwhelming. Out of everything you could have done with the options you had, you choose to do this?

Of course, RWBY always has an after-credits scene (RIP Raven's, still amounting to nothing). Here, the sounds of water return to show us a beach. Crescent Rose imbedded in the sand, mirroring its classic pose in the snow.

There's a tree. It's a very different kind of tree from what we saw in Volume 6, but the height and shape is nevertheless reminiscent of Light's domain.

A tree of life, anyone? After all, the group has fallen into a dimension created by a Relic, the gift of Light himself. It certainly seems as if RWBY is heading towards another encounter with the Gods, though what that will look like and how narratively satisfying it will be remains to be seen.

As for our bingo board, RWBY certainly pulled its weight! Only three squares got gold stars: Watts and Jacques didn't manage another team up because both are dead, Oscar didn't apologize for getting shot because he was too busy being tortured, and Qrow didn't drink likely because he didn't have access to any alcohol across the whole volume. Can't say that's a stellar result. The final image is something to behold though lol.

What a mess.

And on that less than exciting note... we’re done. This has been the volume of desertion, with a large number of fans telling me that they will no longer watch RWBY, but baring something entirely unexpected in my future, I'll be back next volume, for whatever that's worth. It never ceases to amaze me that even one person would give these nonsense recaps the time of day, so in all seriousness: thank you for reading. You rock.

Now go forth and fill the hiatus with great RWBY content!

✌️

#suicide tw #rwby #rwby spoilers #rwby volume 8 #mymetas #rwby recaps #rwby the final word

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grim-on-the-darkside · 3 years

Text

The Latest Information on Lucas’s Sequel Trilogy he wrote in 2011. Also some information from Star Wars Archives: Episodes I-III: 1999–2005, author Paul Duncan interviewed George Lucas his ideas of a Sequel Trilogy.

Firstly, some of the things Pablo Hidalgo has stated about Lucas’s sequel trilogy that he has access to and spoke to Lucas directly about.

We know Lucas never considered the EU canon or a part of his Star Wars universe so it is not surprising his Sequel Trilogy was of his own creation.

........

"Fast forward to 2012, when we hear George is looking to make SW movies again, I though I thought 'I wonder what next Mon Calamari's gonna be. And it turns out, the Mon Calamari this time was huge swaths of the EU. There was no Jacen, no Jaina. No new Jedi Order. Chewie lived. Not surprising, but there it was."

~ Pablo Hidalgo, 2016

https://ibb.co/nmjWcBM

[Regarding Lucas Sequel Trilogy Treatments he wrote in 2011 and sold to Disney]

Comment - "What are you talking about? J.J. threw out His story treatments and he [George Lucas] has no imput at all anymore."

Pablo Hidalgo Response - "Not entirely true. But the treatments as they were pretty much disregarded the EU, which was to be expected.”

~ 2018

https://ibb.co/Dz7qhTB

........

Commentor - 'Thank You for the clarification, might I ask if you ever recieved any direction that George Lucas with the number of children the Solos had as depicted in the EU?'

Pablo Hidalgo - "All I meant is his starting point for this Trilogy didn't have Jacen, Jaina, and/or Anakin."

Commentor - 'Was there Ben Skywalker?'

Pablo Hidalgo - "There was not."

https://ibb.co/JH2Y8tg

.................

Question - "My question is, *what did George's treatments for 7 look like? I would love to see if they fit the EU."

Answer [Pablo Hidalgo]- "They did not. For instance, there was no Jaina, Jacen, or Anakin." ~ 2017

https://ibb.co/N7HKCsF

................

Pablo Hidalgo - "Jacen and Jaina never existed in George's storytelling, even in treatment form."

Comment Response - "And about Mara Jade?"

Pablo Hidalgo - "No. George never thought of Mara as being part of his universe either."

~ 2016 https://ibb.co/YLHk6Ft

.......

From Star Wars Insider

"There was no Ben Skywalker in George's Universe. He came from the NJO team." ~ Pablo Hidalgo 2016

https://ibb.co/HDtXh6D

................

"Question from Today, but I thought this was pretty well known. George Lucas never considered Jacen, Jaina, or Mara Jade as part of his universe."

~ Pablo Hidalgo May 2016 https://ibb.co/VDX2qvY

....

"But anyway Luke in exile predates TLJ by a long time and came from someone who can very happily and rightly supersede anyone's feedback :)"

~ Pablo Hidalgo https://ibb.co/sKZnWKk

[Luke was in something of a self imposed exile on an Island in Lucas Sequel Trilogy which is something that Disney ripped off from Lucas’s Sequel Trilogy. Pablo is referring to Lucas in this quote.]

"Luke was training a new generation of Jedi, it all went wrong because of 1 boy, and he's the 'Jedi killer' - that's the source.”

~ Pablo Hidalgo, 2016 https://ibb.co/JjYtGtf

[The source being George Lucas sequel trilogy treatments he made in 2011 and ended up selling to Disney later. Something else Disney ripped off from Lucas’s Sequel trilogy.] ..

Pablo Hidalgo - "George's starting point for 7 had no Jaina, Jacen, Anakin and Chewie never died. So yeah."

[Reply] - "Could we please send this to every EU purist we know?"

[Other replyer] "They wont care."

[First Replyer] "They will after what Hidalgo just said after this."

[Pablo Hidalgo] - "No, they won't. You can't correct the internet.The info's out there. They've made up their minds."

https://ibb.co/mXGX0Qn

Pablo Hidalgo - "But there was no sequel trilogy at that time."

Commenter 1 -

'Also, Lucas' Treatment of EP VII did not have the twins born in the Thrawn Trilogy'.

Pablo Hidalgo - "It didn't have twins."

Commenter 2 -

'You're referring to the treatment Lucas sold Disney in 2012. I guess plans changed.'

Pablo Hidalgo - "Or were defined. Jacen and Jaina were never part of George's story. They were Tim's [Zahn] invention."

~ Pablo Hidalgo Q&A

https://ibb.co/VQ5Zrr0

Here’s what George said about them during an interview with James Cameron for his The Story of Science Fiction project.

“Back in the day, I used to say ultimately what this means is we’re just cars, vehicles, for the Whills to travel around in…. We’re vessels for them. And the conduit is the midi-chlorians. The midi-chlorians are the ones that communicate with the Whills. The Whills, in a general sense, they are the Force.

All the way back to — with the Jedi and the Force and everything — the whole concept of how things happen was laid out completely from [the beginning] to the end. But I never got to finish. I never got to tell people about it.

If I’d held onto the company I could have done it, and then it would have been done. Of course, a lot of the fans would have hated it, just like they did Phantom Menace and everything, but at least the whole story from beginning to end would be told.”

~ George Lucas

https://www.indiewire.com/2018/06/george-lucas-episode-vii-episode-ix-1201974276/

As part of the book Star Wars Archives: Episodes I-III: 1999–2005, author Paul Duncan interviewed George Lucas. During this interview, George talked more about his plans for the sequel trilogy.

Paul Duncan: What about the stormtroopers? They look robotic, but they’re not.

George Lucas: How do you know what they are?

Paul Duncan: Did you have a different idea of what they were?

George Lucas: Yeah, they started out as clones. Once all the clones were killed, the Empire picked up recruits, like militia. They fought, but they weren’t very good at what they did.

Paul Duncan: That’s why they kept missing.

George Lucas: That’s why they kept missing. Then after the Rebels won, there were no more stormtroopers in my version of the third trilogy.

I had planned for the first trilogy to be about the father, the second trilogy to be about the son, and the third trilogy to be about the daughter and the grandchildren. [There was only one, Ben Solo, another Disney rip off.]

Episode VII, VIII, and IX would take ideas from what happened after the Iraq War. “Okay, you fought the war, you killed everybody, now what are you going to do?” Rebuilding afterwards is harder than starting a rebellion or fighting the war. When you win the war and you disband the opposing army, what do they do? The stormtroopers would be like Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist fighters that joined ISIS and kept on fighting. The stormtroopers refuse to give up when the Republic win.

They want to be stormtroopers forever, so they go to a far corner of the galaxy, start their own country and their own rebellion.

There’s a power vacuum so gangsters, like the Hutts, are taking advantage of the situation, and there is chaos. The key person is Darth Maul, who had been resurrected in The Clone Wars cartoons — he brings all the gangs together.

Paul Duncan: Was Darth Maul the main villain?

George Lucas: Yeah, but he’s very old, and we have two versions of him. One is with a set of cybernetic legs like a spider, and then later on he has metal legs and he was a little bit bigger, more of a superhero. We did all this in the animated series, he was in a bunch of episodes.

Darth Maul trained a girl, Darth Talon [The only thing from the EU in Lucas’s Trilogy, but it wasn’t even really her, just had the same look and name, completely different background. She wasn’t even born yet at that time frame in the comics]., who was in the comic books as his apprentice. She was the new Darth Vader, and most of the action was with her. So these were the two main villains of the trilogy. Maul eventually becomes the godfather of crime in the universe because, as the Empire falls, he takes over.

The movies are about how Leia — I mean, who else is going to be the leader? — is trying to build the Republic. They still have the apparatus of the Republic but they have to get it under control from the gangsters. That was the main story.

It starts out a few years after Return of the Jedi and we establish pretty quickly that there’s this underworld, there are these offshoot stormtroopers who started their own planets, and that Luke is trying to restart the Jedi. He puts the word out, so out of 100,000 Jedi, maybe 50 or 100 are left. The Jedi have to grow again from scratch, so Luke has to find two- and three-year-olds, and train them. It’ll be 20 years before you have a new generation of Jedi.

By the end of the trilogy Luke would have rebuilt much of the Jedi, and we would have the renewal of the New Republic, with Leia, Senator Organa, becoming the Supreme Chancellor in charge of everything. So she ended up being the Chosen One.”

George also expanded on Midi-chlorians:

“This is the cosmology. The Force is the energy, the fuel, and without it everything would fall apart. The Force is a metaphor for God, and God is essentially unknowable. But behind it is another metaphor, which fits so well into the movie that I couldn’t resist it.

Midi-chlorians are the equivalent of mitochondria in living organisms and photosynthesis in plants — I simply combined them for easier consumption by the viewer. Mitochondria create the chemical energy that turns one cell into two cells.

I like to think that there is a unified reality to life and that it exists everywhere in the universe and that it controls things, but you can also control it. That’s why I split it into the Personal Force and the Cosmic Force. The Personal Force is the energy field created by our cells interacting and doing things while we are alive. When we die, we lose our persona and our energy is assimilated into the Cosmic Force.

If we have enough Midi-chlorians in our body, we can have a certain amount of control over our Personal Force and learn how to use it, like the Buddhist practive of being able to walk on hot coals.”

And the Whills:

“The Whills are a microscopic, single-celled lifeform like amoeba, fungi, and bacteria. There’s something like 100,000 times more Whills than there are Midi-chlorians, and there are about 10,000 times more Midi-chlorians than there are human cells.

The only microscopic entities that can go into the human cells are the Midi-chlorians. They are born in the cells. The Midi-chlorians provide the energy for human cells to split and create life. The Whills are single-celled animals that feed on the Force. The more of the Force there is, the better off they are. So they have a very intense symbiotic relationship with the Midi-chlorians and the Midi-chlorians effectively work for the Whills.

It is estimated that we have 100 trillion microbes in our body and we are made up of about 90% bacteria and 10% human cells. So who is in service to whom? I know this is the kind of thing that fans just go berserk over because they say, “We want it to be mysterious and magical”, and “You’re just doing science.” Well, this isn’t science.

This is just as mythological as anything else in Star Wars. It sounds more scientific, but it’s a fiction.

It’s saying there is a big symbiotic relationship to create life, and to create the Force, but if you look at all the life-forms in the universe, most of them are one-celled organisms. I think of one-celled organisms as an advanced form of life because they’ve been able to travel through the universe. They have their own spaceships — those meteorites that we get every once in a while. They’ve been living on those things for thousands of years, they’ve been frozen, unfrozen, and can survive almost anything.

The one-celled organisms have to have a balance. You have to have good ones and bad ones otherwise it would extinguish life. And if they go out of balance, the dark side takes over.”

..................................................................................................................

Obviously there is the older information that’s already been out there, I just wanted to share some of the newer information that has come to light. I’m sure in time we will learn more.

#LucasIsTheCanon

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theepsizet · 3 years

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Let’s talk about Allison and Tom

There’s been a discussion regarding these two characters: an Alice and her Boris and there’s also been a lot of theories regarding them and/or their identities. So this post is basically me slapping my thoughts on the table. And here it is:

Allison Angel and Tom!Boris are in fact Allison Pendle and Thomas Connor. But you can’t take everything about them presented in BATIM for granted.

This theory first came from this video by MatPat, whose main subject was to discuss Henry and even had good backing reasoning/evidence for his status and what-he-is in-game. He also mentions how Allison and Tom’s names aren’t on coffins and therefore can’t be Allison Pendle and Thomas Connor. If anything, they’re actually soulless; Joey was unable to get their souls.

First problem: MatPat completely glosses over a detail confirmed by Joey in Chapter 5 from this audio log:

“Listen Tommy, I know you boys over at Gent are doing your best, but I'm paying for living attractions, not weird abominations! Whatever that grinning thing was I saw wandering around your office, you better keep it locked up tight! I realize it was a first attempt but imagine if the press caught sight of it! Might scare off investors! And in response to your previous memo: If you claim your failures are because these things are soulless, then, damn it, we'll get them a soul! After all, I own thousands of 'em!”

Did you get that? The reason Ink Bendy is off-model is because he doesn’t possess a soul. If they were soulless, Allison and Tom would look... pretty demonic. But they’re not; they’re on-model, resembling their cartoon counterparts near-perfectly (the biggest difference is, of course, their attire such as Allison’s ponytail and dress and Tom’s robotic arm)

Second problem: He never explains why their names are Allison Angel and Tom. MatPat doesn’t elaborate on this fact and just calls them that and moves on with the video.

So, my take. The game files reveal unused secret messages, and these messages do in fact reveal that Allison and Tom’s names are absent; confirming that they don’t have coffins:

(originally posted by thedreamfisher)

So, they’re alive, right? Well...

In Chapter 4 there’s an audio log labeled “Untitled”. The entire audio log is just somebody gruesomely transforming into an ink monster, most likely a searcher if one goes off of the moaning. According to the game files, its Grant Cohen. Not to mention, in the first BATDR gameplay trailer, look what happens to Audrey’s hand when she uses her power:

(originally posted by thedreamfisher)

When Audrey uses her power, her hand changes. It literally turns into ink. Both these scenarios confirm that killing people and stuffing their souls through a machine isn’t the only way to reincarnate people as living cartoons. My theory is that at some point, Allison Connor exchanged enough letters with Joey that he could convince her and Thomas to return to the studio. Similar to Henry, they became so exposed to the ink that it literally transformed them into perfect toons. They were then reborn from the ink produced by the Giant Machine (we’ll get back to this). The dark truth is that, Allison Angel and Tom!Boris are Joey’s best outcomes from his experiment. Not to mention, Allison says this to Henry:

“I... I honestly don't know my name. So they call me Alice.”

“He [Tom] just seems to respond to it [his name].”

It’s a fact that the ink corrupts the mind. Sammy’s Hot Topic Q&A confirms that his memory deteriorated, and considering that these answers come from when Sammy is The Prophet, it wouldn’t be too unlikely to conclude that the ink did this to him. So, when Allison and Tom were reborn, the ink corrupted their minds so much they basically became amnesiac.

Speaking of reborn, notice what Allison says when talking about the ink in general and why she can’t come with Henry for the final battle:

“...you don't want to touch the ink for too long. It can claim you, pull you back.”

“We can't! We're not like you, Henry. If we go in there, well... a drop of water in the ocean is never seen again.”

It wouldn’t be surprising that they were born out of the bigger ink machine (and we have now officially come back to this). Given its size, the smaller one — the actual one, the one that — wouldn’t be able to produce enough ink to fill entire caverns (the underground levels). It also makes a lot of sense given the context: too much ink would make them unable to fight back, and too little wouldn’t do much effect at all. Both would literally become a drop of water in the ocean if they went with Henry. Not to mention that the first phrase is similar to part of Twisted Alice’s monologue when Henry enters her lair:

“Take this little freak for instance! He crawled in here... trailing his tainted ink to my door! It could have touched me! It could have pulled me back! Do you know what it's like? Living in the dark puddles? It's a buzzing, screaming well of voices! Bits of your mind, swimming like, like fish in a bowl! The first time I was born from its' inky womb, I was a wriggling, pussing, shapeless slug. The second time... well... it made me an angel! I will not let the demon touch me again.”

Now, here’s what I mean when I say you can’t take every word of there’s for granted. The truth is that it’s entirely clear what their motivations and there are several instances where things seem highly suspicious regarding these two:

In Allison and Tom’s hideout, Allison’s graffiti contains a list of levels that are crossed out. If one reviews the cutscene at the beginning of the chapter, it is revelated that throughout Henry’s time as prisoner, the levels are listed and then crossed out, as well as more of her drawings being inscribed onto the walls. It’s almost like they’re looking for something

There’s, weirdly enough, graffiti of the Seeing Tool outside the Administration Lobby. Were they done in that level before? If not, why is it there?

Considering that both of them are pretty experienced around the studio (Allison does know what the Lost Harbor is, and is a professional swordsmaster), Allison doesn’t even use her sword to slice off the boards of the prison cell door. Tom even has an axe and doesn’t do anything.

Tom starts off completely distrustful and treating Henry through spite. He almost immediately becomes part of Henry’s side.

Allison asks Henry to lead the way down the floorless hall. Even after she calls out his name, she doesn’t really grab on top him; she just let’s him fall (although this statement is confusing on its own as Henry falls way to fast for him to look up and see their reactions; its probably not even possible to see their reactions without hacking)

(originally posted on this page and this page of the Bendy wiki)

@thedreamfisher suggests that they could be manipulating Henry. and to be honest, yeah... that’s exactly what they’re doing. Why they’re doing it, though, is difficult to pin down, but my theory — yes, that is the theory part — is maybe because of one obvious fact: Henry isn’t like them at all. Allison even says this is why she and Tom can’t really trust them, and Twisted Alice confirms he’s “so interesting... so different...”. Compare this to the way Allison talks to Audrey in the BATDR trailers (this and this). She’s a lot more open, honest, more like a mentor and willing to tell her a lot more than she would to Henry, possibly because she resembles that of a lost one (why Henry’s avatar is completely invisible when hacking and what is a subject to debate for another time).

Allison knows Henry is different and may be manipulating Henry because she wants to turn off the machine. Tom too. Why do you think she calls him “the hope [she’s] been waiting for” and tells him that he “[can] set [them] free”. But, here’s the catch: this doesn’t make them bad. There’s been a number of theories that they’re bad people, but this manipulation only shows they have good intentions; if anything, they’re more of the most basic, generic definition of antihero.

And this makes even more sense when the conversation between Buddy Lewek, Allison Pendle, and Thomas Connor is reviewed in Chapter. It’s a lot of dialogue, and I’m not going to copy and paste the entire thing, but the most important anecdotes is that they hint to have more knowledge of the machine and its functions than the average employee. They also imply two things: they seem to be aware of Susie’s fate (most likely what happened after Joey gave her an offer hinted in audio logs in Chapter 4 and 5) and that they can’t stop Joey at all. It’s hinted by Allison that she and Tom both needed the job, and that they committed to his decisions because of the pay. Tom mentions how Joey treated him well, and Joey claims from a memo to clipped in the Joey Drew Studios Employee Handbook that he’s fascinated by Allison and her personality.

So... yeah. That’s it. Feel free to comment.

(One-finale note: The idea/credit of Allison and Tom being born out of the bigger ink machine and the manipulation aspect all goes to thedreamfisher. Do not give me credit for this idea)

#BATIM #bendy theory #allison angel #tom #thomas connor

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anhed-nia · 5 years

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THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

When my concerned parents faced the early and unpleasant realization that they were raising a ravenous little horror hound, it meant that they had to somehow split the difference between their strict curbing of my potentially mid-warping viewing habits, and their principled encouragement of unfettered reading. That must be how I came into possession of a copy of Thomas Harris' harrowing police procedural The Silence of the Lambs at the tender age of 10, even as the film adaptation was being touted by many viewers as The Scariest Movie of All Time. I carried that book around like the Bible well into my teenage years, reading and re-reading it with even greater fervor after my parents finally decided that the film was sophisticated enough for me to watch without it turning me into some kind of animal-torturing arsonist. (Said screening was chaperoned and accompanied by an academic post-viewing family discussion, of course) The decision seemed to make sense; after all, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS had swept the Oscars the year it was released, scooping up wins for Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Picture. This is not to say that my intellectual and art-appreciating family regarded the Academy as the ultimate arbiters of taste and achievement. I mention these accolades more to point out that, as my parents had surely noticed, the film holds a certain power over viewers on both sides of the high-low cultural divide, a spell that has hardly weakened in its twenty-seven years of life.

As a child, I certainly responded to the same things that piqued the general public: Anthony Hopkins' iconic performance as Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter, his ambiguous romance with purehearted FBI trainee Clarice Starling, and the controversial perversity of serial killer Buffalo Bill. Though the story shares the influence of real-life ghoul Ed Gein with classic shockers like PSYCHO and THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, the impact of SILENCE is more akin to that of DRACULA. Much of the enduring discussion about the film revolves around the tantalizing chemistry between the preternaturally elegant Dr. Lecter and the virginal Starling; the rest is somewhat unfortunately focused on Ted Levine's eccentric performance as the (pseudo-) transsexual murderer at large, which has come under some understandable scrutiny. However, it would be unjust to reduce Jonathan Demme's movie to a gothic romance, or a gory shocker, or a campy cult item with ironic eroticism and a great soundtrack. There simply have to be better reasons for a movie to stick around this long, lingering in the minds of stuffy critics and the hoi polloi alike.

In preparing my statements about what makes THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS stand out, I learned something very shocking: It began its life as the directorial project of Gene Hackman. Hackman eventually dropped out when the script produced by (Oscar-winner) Ted Tally turned out to be too violent. Prospective Starlings like Michelle Pfeiffer and Meg Ryan were similarly disgusted, so Demme got stuck with a less likely candidate in (Oscar-winner) Jodie Foster. Personally, I find (Oscar-winner) Demme himself to be an unlikely candidate. The director cut his teeth on exploitation movies under Roger Corman, and by the time of SILENCE, had distinguished himself as a hipster extraordinaire, directing classic performance videos for the Talking Heads and Spaulding Gray, as well as chic comedies speckled with cameos from the likes of John Waters, and underground music firebrands from New York's new wave scene. Time would prove that Demme and his frequent collaborator, cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, were perfect choices for this grim project, which only supports the idea that there is something more happening with SILENCE OF THE LAMBS than its gruesome violence and epic sexual tension.

In light of these more famous elements, one might expect an adaptation of Thomas Harris' grim and seductive novel to be grandiose, expressionistic, swathed in a dense physical and emotional mist, rumbling with its own pomp and circumstance. An orphan from the hills of West Virginia, Clarice Starling is a tragic hero from the start, guarding her broken heart against a world of condescending and hostile men. Her mentor Jack Crawford seems to distinguish himself from the herd by assigning her the ambitious task of interviewing notorious serial killer Hannibal Lecter for the FBI's files--but in fact, Crawford is counting on Starling's feminine charms and naivety, secretly using her to manipulate Lecter into profiling a killer at large, Buffalo Bill. In spite of this nasty revelation, Starling sticks with it, suffering Lecter's high-minded insults and penetrative analysis of her character, and eventually earning his admiration. She proves herself not only brave and determined, but a detective of unparalleled wit and instinct, single-handedly taking down the polymorphously perverse Buffalo Bill in his moth-filled subterranean lair, rescuing a high-profile victim where the entire rest of the Federal Bureau of Investigation have failed.

This all seems to portend a bigger, louder movie than what has been committed to film. However, the book has a certain organic grit to it, something honest, downbeat and tragically real, which Demme and Fujimoto grasp instinctively. The film provides a dry, frank view of the life of Clarice Starling: the toil of academia, the drudgery of physical conditioning, the undermining attitudes of her mostly-male peers. Shot in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, Starling's world is bleak and desolate, but earnestly so, without the pageantry of the film noir and Universal horror movies with which it is so easily compared. Demme's education under B-movie king Corman shows here, and makes for a much more compelling iteration of the story than we might have from someone less accustomed to economy. While SILENCE has developed a reputation for its brutality, the film is not remotely so gore-drenched as many traumatized viewers would have you believe. That said, it may be the film's generally stark and desicated look, its workaday-ness, and its endless (wonderful) dialogic exchanges that throw into relief its comparatively minimal violence, which usually appears not in scenes of assault, but in crime scene photos or autopsy scenes.

The blanched, dreary look of the film also offsets the emotional plight of Clarice Starling. She is afforded no real romance, external or internal. The petite and clear-eyed orphan is visibly used to, and exhausted by, the constant need to look out for herself, and SILENCE will see her shuffled from one humiliating personal trial to the next. She is led into a perilous situation by a mentor who pretends to respect her abilities, but who really counts on her to fall short of discovering his scam; She is trapped in roomfuls of macho cops who scarcely acknowledge her; She has to negotiate the sexual attention of evidence technicians and bureaucrats; She even has semen flung at her by a particularly rambunctious neighbor of Lecter's. (And how often do you see that in any movie? As gross as it is, it has a way of reinforcing the extreme adult-ness of Demme's often dry, methodical movie) And then of course, there is Lecter himself, who turns Starling's personal vulnerability into a form of currency with which she can buy the scant clues that lead her to her quarry. Instead of eroticizing the anomalous femininity that Starling brings to the traditionally masculine world of law enforcement, Demme constantly reminds you of her fear, her embarrassment, her alienation. One can also imagine the temptation to Ripley-fy the character, presenting her as a fully-formed badass not to be fucked with. Instead, by eschewing both these femme and fatale modes, Demme describes Clarice Starling as three-dimensional human being whose heroism is extremely hard-won. While the character is undeniably one of the great Strong Female Protagonists, Jodie Foster's performance somehow defies the cinematic semiotics of gender altogether, giving us a person whose most important qualities are purely psychological. Tak Fujimoto drives the point home by frequently filling the screen with closeups of her face, focusing us on what she thinks and says, taking the proverbial heat off her body. Even as Lecter probes her for painful biographical information, Starling's sexuality remains entirely private--still a rare thing in any movie with a lady lead.

I don't mean to suggest that THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS is principally successful because of its plucky girl detective--that contributes to its greatness, but not in the feminist fashion that I seem to be angling for. I am reviewing this movie presently because I recently found myself looking back on my own history with it, comparing my feelings with those of popular audiences, and thinking, "What is The Silence of the Lambs really about?" It can't be so beloved *only* due to the sexy slow burn between Anthony Hopkins' Count Dracula and Jodie Foster's Mina Harker. It can't be *just* a matter of the exotic insanity of the gender-bending madman sewing together the flesh of his victims and dancing provocatively to "Goodbye Horses" by Q Lazzarus (a sadly mysterious musician who Demme certainly knew from his involvement in the New York underground). All of these characters, and their respective dynamics, contribute to the important thrill of this movie, but not in the way that most people seem to think.

Rather like the director's earlier work with iconoclastic punk icons and indie auteurs, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS is about authenticity. Hannibal Lecter, the unparalleled genius whose culinary expertise is part of his murderous MO, is a serial killer because he has such refined taste and decorum that he cannot live peaceably among other people. He favors victims whom he perceives as tacky, pretentious and impertinent--Starling knows that he would never harm her because, as she famously remarks, "He would consider it rude." Lecter is fascinated, not by her youthful beauty as Crawford had hoped, but by her sincerity. Starling is brilliantly intelligent in her own right, as she proves through her police work, but she doesn't have an ironic bone in her body. She is the most unpretentious individual alive, and nothing could be more interesting to Lecter, who preys upon people who are untrue to others and to themselves. Meanwhile, we have Buffalo Bill, who is attempting to change his sex by crafting a full-body "woman suit"--but, as Lecter insists, the killer is not a "true transsexual" whose legitimate identity is that of the opposite sex. Buffalo Bill is someone who was reared by his abusive parents to hate himself so much, that he is compelled to escape his natural identity; becoming a woman is less important as a matter of self-actualization, than as a means of becoming an entirely different person, *any* different person. He has been so radically alienated from his own essence by this self-loathing, that he is incapable of authenticity of any kind.

That, I really think, is the secret power of THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS: the at-once satanic and profoundly innocent declaration, "to thine own self be true". I would really love to get into a deeper dive on this movie at some point, to discuss what I think must have been the very best and very last time that Anthony Hopkins gave us a fearless and unpredictable (and in this case, somewhat hilarious) performance; to insist that Ted Levine as Buffalo Bill and Brooke Smith as his would-be victim actually give the best performances in the whole movie; to talk about the problem of the Ubiquitous Daddy Figure (of whom there are no fewer than THREE in this movie) in so many narratives about powerful women; to simply analyze the movie's sly psychological techniques, like fully humanizing Brooke Smith *just* by showing her singing a few bars of a beloved pop song in closeup, immediately before her fate takes a disastrous turn. (I would probably not take such an opportunity to investigate accusations of homophobia and transphobia, which requires a smarter and more directly experienced voice than my own) There is really a lot to say about why SILENCE is so powerful, without even threatening to address its most famous features. Unfortunately, I don't have the gumption or the madness to commit all that to Letterboxd at the moment, so I'll have to be satisfied with my primary conclusion: That the film's simplicity and gritty naturalism mirror its commitment to spiritual purity, honesty, and self-knowledge at all costs. Even at the high cost of wearing a muzzle, any time they let you out of your cage.

#blogtober #the silence of the lambs #thomas harris #jonathan demme #tak fujimoto #jodie foster #ted levine #brooke smith #scott glenn #clarice starling #hannibal lecter #buffalo bill #horror #adaptation #ted tally #suspense #procedural #thriller

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oneweekoneband · 7 years

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Translation in Action: An Interview with International_EaglZ

The account International_EaglZ (YouTube / Instagram) was set up this summer for the explicit goal of translating original material into English for fans not fluent in Kazakh or Russian to enjoy. They’ve done about a dozen translations so far, including the group’s post-debut interview and more recent news reports. As someone who very much benefits from their work, I reached out to them for an interview on how they discovered Ninety One and the difficulties, and rewards, of translation work. As you’ll see, having a translator on hand is valuable not just for the actual translation but for helping ignorant fans (like me) put Ninety One’s work into a more accurate political and social context.

When and how did you first hear about Ninety One?

It all started one night (maybe around 5 months ago). I was chatting with one guy from Kazakhstan, and he asked me have I heard about Q-pop. Afterwards he asked me to check out group "Ninety One", and so I am here now.

I think that the language and similarity with K-pop attracted me at first. They made a nice "crossover" in music genres.

What K-pop groups do you like?

I’m a loyal fan of VIXX, but I listen to many, K.A.R.D., EXO, Big Bang etc, I also like many K-rappers.

Anecdotally I've noticed that a lot of international Eaglez seem also to be ARMYs. It may be just because BTS has such a large fandom.

Nowadays many like BTS, and yes, ARMY fandom is rather huge. I suspect that many new EagleZ are also ARMY`s as they liked k-pop first, and only later found out about Ninety One and Q-pop.

Actually, I used to be an ARMY myself, but I left the fandom as everyone straight off stereotypes me as an ARMY if i said that I like k-pop. Neither I was useful as an ARMY, I’m more useful as an EagleZ.

So is that why you decided to become International_EaglZ? to be useful?

Hm... Probably so. It started from me trying to find eng sub for some of Ninety One videos, and I couldn’t find any. Later i found videos with Russian subs. I could watch videos and understand what they said, but I realized that there also are foreign EagleZ, that can’t understand them. I used to be a K-pop fan, and knew what it feels like. And so then I decided to do translations.

How active is the Russian fandom? Are there Kazakh-to-Russian translators you can follow?

Russian fandom is there, but I haven’t seen many "stable" Kazakh-Russian translators. Some fan pages are Russian only (for Russian speaking audience). If you need to find something with Russian subs, it’s much easier than finding something with English subs. Personally there are no such active translators that I follow. They may exist, but I may simply not know about them.

Are you able to get a sense of how accurate the Russian subs are?

There isn’t always guarantee that subs are 100% correct. At first I was asking some of Kazakh speaking people to take a look at those translations and let me know if they are accurate. Now I just go with trust, as most of videos with Russian subs have a lot of views, I suspect that if they would be incorrect, someone would have noticed it.

Do the members ever speak Russian?

Yes, they do, in some interviews and more in their episodes of "space". ZaQ (rapper & choreographer of the group) has won international Olympiad of the Russian language. All of the members speak Russian, though A.Z (rapper & leader) is the least Russian-speaking member.

Okay, now the part about ZaQ holding up the Russian dictionary in the first Space episode makes sense! One thing I hadn't been able to figure out is whether they grew up speaking Russian or got taught Russian in school, since they would have been in the first generation of students to be educated in an independent Kazakhstan.

Most likely they are taught both Kazakh and Russian in their schools. Other way to know the language may be that older generation (parents, grandparents) speak Russian, so they learned it since they were small from hearing it.

Can you tell from the Russian subs if there are any differences in the way they speak? whether they use different slang, are more or less formal in their speech, those kinds of differences.

Not actually, I don’t know much of Kazakh language, so I don’t even know which words are formal, and which not. If they use slang, usually translators include a small caption about it in the video.

How much time does it usually take you to translate / sub / upload? Say, for a 15-minute video.

This may sound weird to some, but a 15 min video may take up to an entire day to make. Right now I`m working on an around 30 min video, and it`s my second day of translating. Some may ask "Why does it take so long?". Thing is that I want to give only high quality content, it means that I try to make as accurate translations as I can. The size and placement of subtitles also takes time, as they must be in the correct place. One more reason is that sometimes it’s hard to understand what they mean, so at first I must understand what they wanted to say, and then figure out how to make correct translation. 15 Minutes may actually take up to 9 hours (breaks included). After the translation, I must watch over typos. Uploading doesn`t usually take too long, maybe 2 hours or so (with rendering). Of course i could be less accurate and pay less attention to the way translations look like, but my respect for Ninety One "forces" me to make the best I can. Even if it takes away all of my free time.

That helps explain why a lot of K-pop sub sites have teams of subbers/uploaders. have you ever talked to anybody about trying to split up the work?

I thought of it, as 91 movie is going to be released soon, and I`ll have to attend school. Maybe at first i feel like i should learn to make subtitles and translations very well before I could "require" something from others (no matter who does the translations, high quality must always take a part, if it`s on my channel). I`m just not sure that I may find people that are ready to work just as much as me for Ninety One.

So do you feel like you've been able to meet more English-speaking Eaglez through your translation work?

I did, actually. At first I didn`t know many EagleZ at all, but after creating fan page I’ve met some of the foreign EagleZ.

I get the impression that it's still a pretty small fandom, but growing.

It may be that not yet all of the foreign EagleZ are active / show themselves to us. We need to make more of English content for English speaking people in order to attract them to Ninety One and Q-pop.

What would you like to see happen, in terms of English-speaking fans growing the fandom?

If fandom outside of Kazakhstan gets bigger, that`s enough for me. As long as there appear more of foreign EagleZ that love and care for Ninety One, I can live in peace. Of course, not forgetting so support translators would be nice too, but Ninety One is always number 1 priority.

What kind of support would be helpful for you (and other translators)?

Support as likes and comments is nice for all of the translators. It may seem that it`s easy to translate, but it can be much harder than it seems. Even a simple "Thank you" can motivate a person to not stop what they`re doing. As personally for me, sending videos (if you find them) with Russian subs (regarding Ninety One) would be nice, as I not always find them, or have time to search for them. If there are videos without Russian subs, AND you can make them, believe me, international EagleZ will be thankful for your effort (so will be I).

introductory post / all Ninety One posts

#ninety one #international_eaglz #fansubs #translation

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bthenoise · 5 years

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Q&A: Ice Nine Kills’ Spencer Charnas Opens Up On Censorship, ‘Child’s Play’ and His Band’s Blossoming Career

All photos by Julius Aguilar

As you’ve probably heard by now, the world is a scary place. For vocalist Spencer Charnas, however, that’s exactly how he likes it. Growing up as a devout horror fanatic, the outspoken vocalist has committed his life to the world of blood, guts and gore via his cinematic and self-proclaimed “theatricore” band Ice Nine Kills.

Currently out on The Noise-presented Episode III tour with Falling In Reverse, From Ashes To New and New Years Day in support of their hard-hitting, horror-themed LP The Silver Scream, Charnas and company are destroying venues all across the US giving numerous showgoers nightmares in the best way possible.

Speaking with Charnas about the momentum his Fearless Records act has started to build with the release of their fifth full-length record -- which has sold over 50,000 copies by the way -- the passionate frontman says he owes it all to persistence.

“I think ever since I was a little kid, I was always extremely persistent in whatever I wanted,” he explained. “I remember my dad used to just call me relentless. If I wanted something I just wouldn't give up. ‘Dad, can we do this? Dad, can I get a guitar? Dad, can I go to this concert?’”

“And while I probably was an annoying little prick when I was a kid,” he added, “I think that mentality and that spirit has helped navigate a very difficult and competitive and frustrating path in life.”

To hear Charnas open up more about Ice Nine Kills’ blossoming career as well as his honest take on censorship in America and the new horror remakes of Pet Cemetary and Child’s Play, be sure to read our in-depth Q&A below. Afterward, make sure to grab tickets to see Ice Nine Kills out on tour here.

The Falling In Reverse tour starts today but you guys have already been on the road doing your own headliner leading up to this. How are you feeling coming into this and is it weird to switch gears from a headliner to a support tour?

Spencer Charnas: Is it weird to come into it from a headliner and just jump into another tour, it takes a little bit of time to get used to it. The venues on this tour are a bit bigger in size. So the stages are obviously larger, we're a little bit further away from the crowd. So it's going to take a few shows to kind of get the feeling of it and get the hang of it. Whereas before the venues were a little bit more intimate and not every show had a barricade.

You guys are doing something pretty fun for your VIP meet and greets where you’re playing horror trivia with fans. Where did that idea come from?

You know with VIP, we've done so many in the past over the last, probably five years. And over the last few ones, it just seemed like it got a little bit stock -- everyone kind of does the same thing. You show up, you get a signed poster and a picture with the band and it doesn't really seem like too much of an experience. So I was racking my brain for something that we could really have fun with and get kids excited about and [create a] sort of spontaneous anything-goes atmosphere, because you don't know who's going to win. You don't know what the questions are. And I thought what better way to do something like that and do trivia with horror films, which obviously ties into our entire band's aura.

Have you won pretty much all of them so far?

I’ve won 98%.

So the questions are easy for you?

Some of them are challenging. But for the most part, I know the answers. It's getting to a point where I'm winning all of them. So I think we might do everyone verses me.

Speaking of horror movies, have you been able to see the recent horror films that have come out? Us? The new Pet Semetary?

Yeah, I did. I saw both of them. Didn't care for Us. I was definitely a fan of Get Out. I think Jordan Peele is enormously talented and I think he'll continue to make great films, but for whatever reason, I was not crazy about Us and I kind of fell asleep. Pet Semetary I did enjoy. I thought it was entertaining and disturbing at the same time. I don't think it was incredible. But I did enjoy it and I thought the acting was phenomenal. John Lithgow was great. And I like the twists that they put on their version. It wasn't just a regurgitation of the former film.

Well talking about remakes, any thoughts on the new Child's Play that's going to come out?

You know, I really was but the first trailer to me was underwhelming. The second trailer looked better. For me, you know, Child's Play -- in the sense that I think you can't do Nightmare on Elm Street without Robert Englund -- I think the same thing [goes] with Child's Play and Brad Dourif doing the voice of Chucky. That's just, he's Chucky. So to not do it with him, I'm a bit wary of. But I gotta say Mark Hamill did sound good in the last trailer that I heard. But I wish that they would have maintained the iconic voice of Brad.

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So obviously, you guys have a lot of imagery that ties in with horror movies. It's very intense. Some people think it's a little gory. It's gotten you guys banned from House of Blues in Orlando. Were you surprised by that or more surprised it’s taken this long with how graphic some of your imagery can be?

I'm kind of surprised in 2019, as far as in the rock or metal scene, that any band would really be banned -- unless they were like a terrible white power, sort of racist hate mongering band. But yeah, I was surprised that we were banned. And you know, at first, the only thing that's the bummer for me is I love playing in Orlando and it's always such a great show. But at the same time, it's kind of cool that it happened because we got a lot of press and publicity from it. And we got to release this line of shirts that are some of our coolest shirts ever. And I think it was kind of a blessing in disguise. So thank you, Disney.

Do you think it's interesting, though, that in 2019 metal isn't as scary or intimidating as it used to be in the 80s or early 70s?

I think just in general, the political and social climate that we live in now is overly politically correct. You know, I'm not a conservative Republican and I'm not a crazy left wing liberal, you know, I kind of fit somewhere in the middle. But I think that putting up walls against what people think is obscene or gory is a very dangerous, slippery slope. I don't think that there should be any censorship ever. And if you start putting up walls where you think something is obscene, you could very well wake up one day and there are walls up in all sorts of places that you never thought they would be and you can’t hear or say anything. And that's not freedom to me.

It's interesting that somebody can put a pentagram on stuff or upside-down crosses and a lot of people think that's cool. But if you do one thing that crosses the line, you're canceled on Twitter forever. It's a weird line to walk.

I agree. I think people need to be more accepting of other people's ideas and opinions. And I think that if you don't like a band or you don't like someone's record, then the great thing about this country is that you don't have to buy it. Or you could buy it and throw it in the trash. But I think that this society is moving in a dangerous way in that regard because I think art should never be censored. I don't think comedians should ever be censored. I think that colleges are starting to raise and teach kids that if they don't like something, it's not that they should turn their back and go find something else, it’s that it should be banned and this speaker shouldn't be allowed to speak on campus. And I think that doesn't prepare people for the real world.

It's one of those things where everyone's allowed to have their own opinion. If you don't agree, that's fine. But everyone can have one.

Exactly. Obviously, there are dangerous, terrible groups out there. You know, hate mongering groups or groups that have an undertone of racism or sexism. And that's awful. And that's horrible, but let them spew their bullshit and walk away.

So moving on to your new album, The Silver Scream. It's obviously been huge for you guys and opened a lot of doors. As this record has blown up, a lot of people are coming and hearing Ice Nine Kills for the first time even though you’ve been a band for close to 10 years. How have you personally persevered knowing this moment would someday come? And how does it feel to finally have that well-deserved breakout moment?

I mean, I think ever since I was a little kid, I was always extremely persistent in whatever I wanted. I remember my dad used to just call me relentless. If I wanted something I just wouldn't give up. “Dad, can we do this? Dad, can I get a guitar? Dad, can I go to this concert?” And while I probably was an annoying little prick when I was a kid, I think that mentality and that spirit has helped navigate a very difficult and competitive and frustrating path in life. You know, the music industry is not something that you can say, “Hey, I'm going to go be a popular band.” And I think mostly the bands that make it, I would say a majority of them get lucky. They're a good band, but they had that lucky break -- [maybe] they knew someone or the right A&R guy happened to be on their MySpace and [thought] “that guy looks cool. And this is a great song, let's sign them.”

But a majority of bands that get out there, even if they're great, even if they have a great song or great albums, they could just go on and just never be discovered or not have the right business sense. And I think a lot of bands that had taken our route would have probably given up 5-10 years ago. And for whatever reason, I just would refuse to believe that I wasn’t going to be able to do what I wanted to do in life. And I kind of always come back to the story of a band like Metallica. Metallica couldn't get a record deal to save their lives at the beginning because labels thought they were too punk for the metal kids and too metal from the punk kids. So if you think about that when you're getting frustrated and no one is interested in your band, you have to think back to no one wanted to sign Metallica at one point -- which, you know, obviously turned out to be one of the biggest bands of all time. So that kept me going. And I think honestly, the steady build that we've had I think has been very helpful for us building a cult following and not necessarily just kind of a flavor of the week. Like, “Oh, this band and song is cool, let's go see them.” And then you know, a year later, you lose touch with that band. I think we've managed to build a real strong core following over the last 10 or so years of touring. And I think the stars just sort of aligned on this last album. I've always been very interested in horror films and theater. And this album, we decided to put that really at the forefront of what we're doing. And with how popular horror is right now with the success of movies like Get Out and It and the new Halloween, I think it was just really good timing. And I'm excited to see where we can take it.

Did you feel any pressure to do a second Silver Scream?

There's definitely pressure. I mean with any record you do, you always want to one-up yourself. And you know, I guess in true horror fashion, everyone's looking for a sequel. So we'll see what happens. You know, I just want to make sure that we do something again that's special and reinvents what we did before but maintains the fun of what The Silver Screen was.

It's interesting that you grew up such a fan of horror movies probably wanting sequels to certain films. But now you're almost in the reverse position now where it's like, “Hey, slow it down. Maybe we can't do a sequel like you’re hoping.”

Yeah, it's a tough call and I'm still sort of wrestling with exactly what to do. But we'll see what happens.

#Ice Nine Kills #The Silver Scream #Fearless Records #Episode III Tour #Interview

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bluetapes · 7 years

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Blue Tapes is an algorithm

The long Q/A version of an interview I did with Kristoffer Patrick Cornils for the German magazine HHV on the thinking behind the Blue Tapes project.

What was your motivation to start the label back in 2012? What are you goals with the label?

Distracting myself from the doom, really. I think that’s all any creative endeavours are. I started the label as a visual art project to give myself something creative and positive to occupy my time with after I’d been knocked on my arse by a particularly nasty bout of depression. I think it was helpful to just have this little hobbyist project that involved going away and spending a lot of time thinking about colours and sounds. Before starting the label I had been a music journalist and I was sick of the sound of my own ‘voice’ and everyone else’s, really. Doing something small and simple and abstract and just for me was very rewarding. A few months into that, other people found it, and some of them liked it.

Stylistically, you don't seem to have any boundaries. What does a record have to bring to the table to be released through Blue Tapes, or what is the lowest common denominator between Katie Gately, accapella Death Metal and the keyboard improvisations of a 13-year-old?

Blue Tapes is an algorithm. There are three axes and the artists that score most highly along these axes are the ones I choose to work with. The axes could be labelled a) Is this something that people have heard before?; b) Do I like it?; and c) Will other people like it? That last one is the hardest to quantify. I’m never short of finding amazing, innovative music that I love, but I’ve lost so much money through doing the vinyl series in particular that I’ve had to face up to the fact that there’s not much point in releasing records that only a tiny proportion of humans will respond to.

(I mean, having said that, my next release IS a microtonal ambient black metal LP…)

Although there is a lot of musical diversity throughout the series I do put a huge amount of thought into why I might want to release something and it has been curated to make sense as a series, even if the only person that it ultimately makes sense to is me? From a marketing perspective it’s a nightmare, obviously.

How do you find the artists that release on Blue Tapes? Do you do your A&R work on the internet or do you rather use your personal connections?

For the early releases, I would often have an idea of the KIND of thing I would want to release - say an acapella death metal album - and then I’d go online and try and find somebody who with a bit of convincing and a bit of imagination could deliver that. Soundcloud was a pretty invaluable resource for this.

Some very good friends of mine started the 20 Jazz Funk Greats blog back in 2004. I started blogging for it more after starting the label and I found a few of the artists (Plains Druid, Unfollow, Trupa Trupa) through that.

Very rarely it might be somebody who contacts me (hi Benjamin Finger) but mostly it’s me trying to imagine the music I want to release and then finding the nearest thing to that sound in my head in real life. (Without me having to get my hands dirty and make it myself… because I suck at the music.)

In 2014, you have launched X-Ray Records, a vinyl sublabel to Blue Tapes. What was the idea behind that and how do you decide if a record's coming out on tape or vinyl?

This is part of the process that I’m still tinkering with and trying to get right, but mostly it just came down to whether it felt right to do so. I’d had the visual concept for the series in my head for a while, and it made sense to try and reissue some of the bigger tape releases on vinyl cos they’d had an impact and a lot of people had missed out. Mostly I just really wanted to own a copy of the Tashi Dorji album on see-through vinyl so I took out a bank loan to get one! Sort of a foolish enterprise, but I’m unrepentant.

People can subscribe to your tape or vinyl series and even Blue Tapes shirts. What was your idea behind that subscription service and how have people responded to it so far?

There’s a small coterie of subscribers who I guess are kind of at the heart of the BT/XR family.

The first germ of an idea relating to Blue Tapes was that I was really into making cyanotypes at the time and I wanted to find some kind of a purpose for them, to justify their existence, so I had a sort of mad idea to make a series of limited edition t-shirts with cyanotype prints on them, that you could subscribe to. I was quite excited by it as a concept but it probably wasn’t destined to register with the outside world very well! Somewhere down the line, instead of the art being a t-shirt, it became a tape with a piece of music or other sound on it and an image that could collectively be represented by a serial number, rather than a title.

I always thought the subscription element was important in a way, because I think the series does only make sense if you view it as a curated body of work rather than discrete entities, but admittedly that’s not actually how people consume or usually think about music.

Your artwork is very recognisable not only because it's, well, mostly blue. What's the concept behind that and how do you create those washed out effects?

So the process I mentioned before, cyanotype, is a pre-camera photographic technique that uses sunlight and water and chemicals to create images. It was originally developed for scientists and engineers to reproduce diagrams or other plans. Because the chemicals produce a blue-coloured print, they became known as ‘blueprints’.

I find analogue processes a lot more interesting to think about than digital processes, so cassette tapes and cyanotypes made very natural bedfellows for me.

Some of the images are created using other ‘alternative process’ photographic techniques - those very ‘washed out’ colours are done using a technique called transaquatype, where you use water to try and intentionally make the colours run - but I think the best ones are the cyanotypes, particularly the cyanotype abstracts.

The X-Ray series, as suggested by the name, takes a very different approach. Is that perhaps a reference to those literal X-Rays from the Soviet era on which people cut music because they lacked the ressources for vinyl?

The name is a reference to that, for sure. But it also links back to the cyanotypes. The first step in making a cyanotype using the modern method is to create an enlarged negative of your source image on acetate. These enlarged negatives are pretty cool objects in their own right, and I started to think they’d make really cool vinyl packaging. So, for instance, if you take the Tashi Dorji LP, the artwork is actually the negative of the original tape artwork.

Held up to the light it looks a little like an x-ray, so X-Ray Records. It could have been ‘Negative Records’ or something but that sounds way too much like a hardcore label! And, y’know, also the Soviet thing.

Some of the earlier releases lack pretty much any information, which can be quite confusing for people who don't neatly organise their collection like I do, I guess. How do the artists respond to this serialisation? I can imagine that some would see their work compromised if they had to name it after a catalogue number.

No one’s really complained about it, but you’re probably right. I think with this thing it was almost like starting a band or something, rather than joining someone else’s band. I was able to say, look, this is the concept, if you want to be a part of it then cool but if not then no worries. It IS confusing and I would never judge anyone for not wanting to get onboard with it!

But it was important to me to present the series as a process that was configured to output a singular piece of art every month, rather than as a ‘label’, which actually felt more dishonest - it’s not a business, it doesn’t make any money. The aesthetics of the label and its cataloguing were contrived that way to try and make the ‘art’ the physical rectangular object that you hold in your hand, and as a self-conscious attempt to get away from the idea of the ‘album’, which for a while I genuinely thought might be one of the most boring ways there is to present music.

Maybe I also thought that by starving the listener of as much context and extraneous information as possible I might help them to have a more honest/profound relationship with the music, in the same way that music always sounds better when you listen to it in the dark. (Note: This is wishful and possibly deluded thinking.)

The vinyl series has titles, though.

You've put out around 30 records so far, but what would you say is the most important one? Strictly personally speaking or in regards to the label.

In regards to the label the most important one was the Katie Gately tape. It’s also just an important piece of music, I think. It set a new bar.

I do think there is a common trait that unites a lot of Blue Tapes music, despite the disparities in genre, and I think it’s unique to us because I don’t hear it in that much other stuff that I listen to as a music fan, apart from some ancient musics like gagaku sometimes. It’s a quality rather than a sound - and often the releases that have the most of this quality, or ‘feeling’, are the ones I’m most fond of.

It’s entirely subjective and also very difficult to describe, but the way I experience it is like the sensation you might get when you’re really exhausted - like, exhausted to the ends of your nerves - but instead of it being a sick feeling, it’s euphoric. Your brain switches off, stops decoding things, and stimuli wash over you - but not in a passive, bored way, they seep into every nook and cranny of your consciousness and flood it with colour and sensation. Almost like a high, I guess, but a sober, unpsychedelic one. I’m not a religious person but that particular communion I have with this music is the closest I get to something spiritual in my life.

These feelings and ego-annihilating qualities seem to be more present in very minimal music - the Tashi Dorji, Library of Babel and Mats Gustafsson records are swarming with it - but I hear it in some very maximal music, too. I hear it in Jute Gyte.

I don’t know enough about Pauline Oliveros to know if this is what she was describing with ‘deep listening’, but you could reasonably apply the term to the sounds we’re presenting for you.

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minotsu · 7 years

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Diga On Line interview with Daisuke Takahashi

http://digaonline.jp/interview/31353

Featuring Cheryl Burke and Daisuke Takahashi as the double leading dancers, LOVE ON THE FLOOR 2017 presented by Kinoshita Group will be held at Tokyu Theatre Orb in Tokyo from June 16 to 25. This show, directed by Cheryl, features various aspects of love, such as "palpitation", "passion", "lost" and "love that asks nothing in return", with first class dancers from the States. It is expected that Takahashi will show us more polished performances just like last year for sure. Q: LOVE ON THE FLOOR 2016 had a huge public response last year. How did you feel about it? A: It was like "before I received the response, the show was over". I worked as hard as I could. Of course, I really enjoyed it and felt content like as if I had been back to the competing days. I think many people came to see Meryl, Charlie and me because of figure skating, but I heard that some wanted to see the show once again because of the high level dancers and that made me happy. Q: I assume that your performances got changed as you repeatedly practiced and performed on the stage? A: Cheryl kept telling me to move bigger during the rehearsals. "No need to be beautiful, just move as big as you can". At first I knew nothing but just focused on moving big, but when we moved to the theater and actually stood on the stage, I think some sense came to me that it was not just to move big. I still don't know what it was though (laugh). Q: How do you take the theme of the show, "to express the various aspects of the feeling of love"? A: I was worried whether I could express LOVE enough with dance so it was very vague at first. However, as we worked on, I was surprised that dance could express so much. I heard from audience that the dance came along with the theme of the show so well and I was very glad, too. In addition, watching other dancers' performances, I realized that it was possible to express this much (of emotion) only with physical features. Q: Your narration telling about LOVE was also very impressive. A: I didn't like it because it was so embarrassing, actually (laugh). The narration started before I danced my solo number so I couldn't concentrate on my dance (laugh). In the latter half of the shows, I got used to it and could shut out my narration voice. Q: What was your mental picture of Cheryl? A: She is a very caring lady. She notices things very well and when I was in trouble, she encouraged and enliven me. But when she was on the stage, she completely changed and was so focused. I think she is a very trustworthy lady. As for a director, she changed things by hearing other people's opinions and I thought she was a challenger. I thought she has strong determination but could be very flexible at the same time. Q: Do you have any words you specially remembered with her? A: She encouraged me with praises almost every time!! But what was the best for me was that she told me "I know you are not a professional dancer but in the sense of emotion, you have something so splendid." I was so grateful to hear that from a person like her who has known top dancers in the world that as a performer I was good. I have received similar praises for my skating but she comes from a totally different world. I thought I have to add this (praise) to build my confidence. 　 Q: What is the biggest difference between figure skating and the stage show? A: First of all, I had no experience to tie up with somebody else. On ice, yes, occasionally, but on the floor, it was my very first to dance with dancers around me in cooperation. Their condition and mine varied everyday and we adjusted the differences as if we synchronized our breathing together. In skating, I basically perform freely all by myself but on the stage, we have the flow of the show as well as involvement/relations with others. It was very new for me and it was a bit tough. As for the body usage, in skating, you can make yourself look bigger by pulling down the blades (having deep edges) but on the stage, you can't do that. And when you are with your bare feet, you have to think about your toes as well. I've never thought about how to walk beautifully and if I think about it (walking on the stage), it might be the most difficult thing I have ever done. Q: Now back to LOVE ON THE FLOOR 2017. You commented it was a challenge last year, when you received the reenactment offer, did you think you would try it at once? A: No. I needed time. I had this feeling to try it again but wondered whether people would come again or I could make better production. But knowing Cheryl and the others that they have been with first class dancers and because they think they can, so I thought why not? It is the production I myself want to see again and it would be alright if I trust them with their ideas. That was when I decided (to try it again). Q: More over, this time you are one of the leading dancers with Cheryl. A: I think because it was the first time last year, people regarded the show with kind/warm eyes, but this time, I think because it's the second time, many people expect more. The pressure I feel is much higher. In addition, the story of the show is the same but I will have more appearances and that makes me nervous, but I will try my best to have a better production. I had a couple of solo dances before but I hope I will have more group numbers this year. Q: What did you hear from Cheryl, the director of the show? A: She asked me which is better for me to dance solo or with other dancers. I answered both of them are difficult, so either one (laugh). I think it would be better to be judged by others than judging by myself, so I just would like to do my best whatever they ask me to do. Q: Do you have anything particular you would like to do then? A: I didn't dance with other dancers much last time, so I hope I can dance (group numbers) more. Q: Now rehearsal will start soon, what kind of preparation are you doing? A: I would like to have yoga lessons. I thought I would take some dance classes but I thought making myself more flexible is much more important. I would like to enhance my flexibility by hot-yoga(laugh). There will be scenes when I have to do lifts, I also think to train my upper body. I have trained my bottom half for skating but my upper half is not so well. Since I've never done my upper body training, I have no idea how to do it though. Q: You mean you use different muscles for dancing and skating? A: Yes, I think so. We use more muscles in back and as for single skater, if you put too much muscles on your upper body, they disturb the rotations of jumps. I would like to train thinking the balance well. Q: The expressive talent is a big factor on the stage. I think you have a splendid talent to visualize music with your body, do you do anything special to enhance that talent? A: Nothing special. I am not good at counting. When people say "take the 8 counts", I can't do that at all. I can't play the piano nor read music. Just when I hear the music, I sometimes choreograph skating programs. I think it became my second nature to think "if I skate to this music, it would be like this..." Q: Do you think you can make use of it for LOTF this year? A: (Laugh)Have no idea! As same as last year, the level of dancers is really high, so it is worth watching them. I would like to memorize all choreography for the dancers as well by watching the last year show's DVD and improve myself. Q: At the end of this interview, could you tell us your wishes for the show? A: It is such a wonderful show based on the theme of love, I would like to try my best that people would say that they would like to see it once more. I will have more appearances due to my co-leading role, so I would like to push myself much more.

It is interesting to hear that he doesn't get "counting" when he has rehearsals. In fact, when he was asked which he was better with counting or music, he immediately answered music in the rehearsal video last year. A natural born dancer, isn't he?

#lotf2017 #daisuke takahashi #cheryl burke #meryl davis #charlie white #fstranslation

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adeolasthoughts · 7 years

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Art and Medicine

An Essay on the links between art and medicine

Art is the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.[1]The main feature is that it requires creativity and lateral thinking which provides people with different viewpoints and perspectives of particular situations and is very useful for effective problem solving. Medicine is the science or practice of the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease.[2] Its regard as a science means that it is the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical world through observation and experiment.[3] At first glance, these two terms appear to be antonyms of one another. One which is expressive and the other which is regimented, however throughout this essay I explore how this is in fact not the case and how the study and practice of medicine relies on art.

An in-depth understanding of the human anatomy, is an area of knowledge required by all doctors. It enables them to link patient symptoms to possible diagnoses effectively. Anatomical drawings provide a visual representation of the aspects of the human body and help people understand it. Historically, medicine and art have been successfully intertwined, the development of medicine has also been dependent on art. Medical illustration for instruction first appeared in Hellenic Alexandria during the early 3rd century B.C. covering anatomy, surgery, obstetrics and plants that had medical properties. [4] Initially, anatomy was linked closely with science, culture and art, many of the anatomic drawings were amalgamations of these themes with the aim of simultaneously educating and entertaining the viewers. Some of which depicted cadavers as very much alive, full of character and eccentricity or contrastingly, dead. An example of this is pictured below.

This drawing [5] shows the subject as a young man emerging from the bushes on a hill. This background helps to add a feeling of anticipation and a sense of an important revelation being expressed. This could also be used to express the fact that the knowledge of the intricate structures that make up the human body were only just being discovered at the time that this drawing was created. The artist depicts the male subject’s outer bodily features in a very realist style which enables the viewer to be able to relate to the subject and clearly identify it as a human being. It also influences the viewers’ perception of the organs being exposed in this piece.

On one hand the organs being shown seem real and believable as they are part of what seems to be a very real human being, expressing emotions not dissimilar to those that the viewer experiences on a daily basis. The way that the subject averts his eyes from the gaze of the viewer and uses his skin to cover his torso, expresses a sense of shyness and timidity that many people would have experienced as well as showing a sense of modesty.

On the other hand, the organs being shown seem unbelievable and magical. This is because the use of surrealism is a prominent component of this piece. One is not able to lift up their skin and reveal their organs as depicted here which makes the organs being revealed seem fake and unreal to some extent. Deeper analysis shows that the subject is positioning his hands as a magician does, adding an awe-inspiring, magical, implausible dimension to this drawing. Whatever the interpretation, this drawing links the educational and artistic properties of anatomy, seamlessly, leaving the viewer to make their own conclusions as to what is real and what is not.

Specific aspects of practicing medicine can be described as art. An example of this is surgery which is defined as ‘the treatment of injuries or disorders of the body by incision or manipulation, especially with instruments’. [6] During the process leading up to surgery, often many imaging techniques are used to provide the surgeon and their team with an understanding of the condition they are dealing with, the pathology and how to go about rectifying the situation. These images themselves can be seen as art, they are visual representations of the body that tell a story, some of which make use of the different densities of aspects of the human body to create a detailed picture. Together they can be seen as art as each imaging technique enables to see the body slightly differently, examples of this include ultrasounds, which only show soft tissue and MRI scans which show a cross-section of the body part being scanned. The invasive aspect of performing a surgery is also very artistic. A subtle example of this is that surgeons create incisions in the body enabling them to retract the skin, exposing organs of different shapes, sizes textures and densities. Upon revealing the aspect of the body concerned, the surgeon must inspect it and uses different tools to operate on the patient, cutting, stitching and removing parts of organs or blood vessels for example. The intricate workings of the body are being altered here improving bodily function in many people and leaving a lasting impression on the recipient. The need for a delicate hand, manual dexterity, a sense of purpose and an understanding of the medium that is the human body, is not dissimilar to an artist molding his structure or drawing his subject in a medium of paint or pencil. A more obvious example lies within the subspecialty of Plastic Surgery. This variation of surgery is most concerned with the outward appearance of different parts of the human body examples of such surgeries include rhinoplasties (nose jobs) and breast reconstructions from cancer. These require very intricate stitching to produce minimal scarring and the reshaping of parts of the body to look more aesthetically pleasing and more natural.

For surgeons, some of the most artistic procedures are found in microsurgical techniques where tissue is transferred from one part of the body to another based on establishing a new blood supply. This allows the surgeon to re-establish tissue in another location that can be rebuilt into something else. Here, the lines marking the division of medicine as art or science are increasingly blurred. Such procedures not only require extensive scientific understanding of anatomy and blood supply, but also are dependent on the surgeon being able to reshape one kind of bone into another. In the example of a tumour being removed from the mouth, a leg bone can be transplanted and carved into a mandible, for which an artistic perspective is paramount.

If doctors are criticized, it is often not for their lack of knowledge, but for a lack of insensitivity and for ignoring or being oblivious to the emotional distress affecting their patients. Mahajan (2006) warns doctors against allowing the science behind medicine to inhibit their humanity and sense of empathy. If medicine is viewed purely as a science, then the importance of successful patient-doctor communication and interaction is ignored. A knowledge of and ability to engage with fine art in particular, being able to deduce possible interpretations of artwork and be aware of the underlying emotional connotations being emphasised in the piece can help within the practice of medicine. This is because it makes a person more receptive to the people and emotions present around them, makes them more likely to notice intricate details regarding a person’s physical, mental and emotional state which can be crucial in correctly diagnosing a patient and providing the most suitable treatment overall for that patient. Also, the ability to analyse artwork can prove to be a great skill for doctors. This is because in the analysis of other subjects such as chemistry, the conclusions drawn are mostly based on fact that has been proven or a theory that is being developed, whereas art analysis draws on instinct, emotional response and the perception of a piece. Being able to look beyond the facts and particular list of symptoms to match a diagnosis with a patient can create a much needed patient-centered approach to medical dilemmas, focusing on the patient as a whole, seeing the bigger picture and then matching the patient with the diagnosis rather than the other way around. [7]

Though medicine relies on it, art can be its own form of psychotherapy involving the encouragement of free self-expression through painting, drawing, or modelling, used as a remedial or diagnostic activity.[8] The goal of this is to improve people’s mental health, specifically by reducing anxiety, helping to manage behaviour and addictions, allowing the client to explore their feelings and resolve emotional turmoil. Art therapists use their understanding of visual art in conjunction with counseling theories and techniques. It is widely practiced in hospitals, psychiatric and rehabilitation facilities, schools and other clinical and community settings and it is a prime example of how art can not only link with medicine but enhance it. [9]

Sources 1. https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=art+define 2. https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=define+medicine 3. https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=science+define 4. History, Present and Future of Medical Art http://www.vesaliusfabrica.com/en/related-reading/karger-gazette/medical-art-through-history.html 5. National Library of Medicine Tabulae Anatomicae: Venice, 1627. 6. https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=define+surgery 7. Lisa Sanders: Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis (2009) 8. https://www.google.co.uk/?gws_rd=ssl#q=define+art+therapy 9. http://www.apexart.org/exhibitions/berlet.htm

#medicine #art #science #creativity #creative #essay #personality #personal #i love writing #aspiringmedic

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endenogatai · 5 years

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EF raises $115M new fund, aiming to create another 300-plus startups in the next three years

Entrepreneur First (EF), the London-headquartered “talent investor” that recruits and backs individuals pre-team and pre-idea to enable them to found startups, has raised a new fund of its own to continue scaling globally.

The $115 million first close was led by a number of leading (mostly unnamed) institutional investors across the U.S., Europe and Asia, including new anchor LP Trusted Insight. A number of well-known European entrepreneurs also invested. They include Taavet Hinrikus (co-founder of TransferWise), Alex Chesterman (co-founder of Zoopla), and EF alumnus Rob Bishop (who co-founded Magic Pony Technology which was bought by Twitter for a reported $150m in 2016).

This new fund — which EF says is one the largest pre-seed funds ever raised – will enable the talent investor to back more than 2,200 individuals who join its various programs over the next three years. EF currently operates in Bangalore, Berlin, Hong Kong, London, Singapore and Paris.

This will translate to the creation of around 300-plus venture-backed companies, three times the number of startups it has helped create in total since EF was founded by McKinsey colleagues Matt Clifford and Alice Bentinck all the way back in 2011.

As part of the same announcement, EF says that General Partner Joe White has relocated to Silicon Valley where he’ll focus on growing EF’s investor network on the West Coast. Perhaps the move shouldn’t come as a total surprise — White is the husband of Wendy Tan White, who was recently recruited by Alphabet’s X (formerly Google X) in Mountain View — but either way it feels like a smart move from EF’s perspective as the talent investor, which is also backed by Reid Hoffman’s Greylock, seeks to create further ties to Silicon Valley.

Comments co-founder and CPO Bentinck: “We pioneered a new model of talent investing, and it’s encouraging to see this become a new frontier for venture capital. We believe the world is missing out on some of its best founders because of ecosystem constraints, a lack of co-founders and difficulties getting early pre-company funding. Entrepreneur First is changing that”.

EF is also sharing some data with TechCrunch, revealing for the first time numbers related to the number of EF graduating startups that have gone on to raise outside capital. For the 2015 “vintage” cohort, there were 16 seed rounds, 8 Series A, and now 2 Series Bs. For 2016, 24 seeds, and 5 A rounds so far. For 2017, 41 seeds, and 2 A rounds. And for 2018, 57 seeds, and 1 Series A already.

A slide thought to be from EF’s recent LP pitch deck

“The graph shows the volume of EF companies funded by VCs each year since 2015 (e.g only those that raise a successful seed, not just those funded by EF),” White tells me. “The average age to series A is 40 months according to Pitchbook or 60 months to series B. Many of our companies are already ahead of that schedule, but many more will reach these milestones in the next 12 months”

Below follows an email Q&A with EF co-founder Matt Clifford to find out more about the new fund and where it positions the so-called talent investor going forward.

TC: You’ve announced the first close of a new fund — $115m. What is the remit for the fund and how does it fit into the broader EF program and funnel? I.e. is it mainly for follow on funding so EF doesn’t get too diluted for the most promising companies it helps create?

MC: The main thing we’re doing with this fund is taking our talent investing model global. We’ve always said the world’s missing out on some of its best founders and now we’ve got the capital to change that. It’s true it’s a lot bigger than our last fund, but that’s mainly driven by scaling internationally, not by a change in investment strategy. This fund will do stipends, pre-seed, seed and Series A investing in all our companies globally. It gives us capacity to fund 2,000 individuals around the world over the next three years.

We’ll absolutely be backing the best Entrepreneur First companies up to their Series A, but we’ve been doing that since 2016, so no change there.

TC: An earlier SEC filing suggested the fund was going to be much bigger. What happened?

MC: As far as I know, you have to file the hard cap with the SEC, but that’s not a target. This is a first close, not a final close, but with $115m we can fully fund all six sites for three years, which is great.

TC: Like previous EF funds, the new fund’s LPs include many known founders and angel investors from the London tech scene and beyond. But this time around I gather you have some quite large institutional LPs, too, including from the U.S. How were those conversations different this time or was it simply the Reid Hoffman effect after Greylock Partners became an investor in EF itself?

MC: Yes, this is definitely a “growing up” fund for us. Our first “fund” in 2013 was under £400K, so a lot’s changed! Almost all this capital comes from institutional LPs and they include some of the best investors in venture capital funds globally. EF is a totally new stage of VC – talent investing – and LPs are quite rightly naturally fairly conservative. So Joe and I and the rest of the team have put in a lot of work to get institutions comfortable with something radically different and we feel it’s really paid off.

Certainly having Reid and others involved has helped a lot, but EF is just generally a very different beast from when we closed the last fund: the portfolio is now valued at well over $1.3bn; we’ve had $300m of exits; the fastest growing alumni companies have been funded by some of the best VCs in Europe and the US, etc. So across the board we had a lot more to show.

TC: EF began life calling itself a “talent-first” investor based on the EF program recruiting potential founders pre-team and pre-idea, which made you an outlier at the time. In that sense, you were — and I hesitate to use the word — ‘disrupting’ startup founding and traditional career paths. But now it’s starting to look like the EF model is a ruse to disrupt early stage venture capital or is that too simple an analysis?

MC: Haha! Alice and I are still much more interested in disrupting careers than disrupting VC. What I would say is that we believe we’re heading for a world where many more of the most talented people will become founders and most of those people won’t be in established tech ecosystems. We think that makes the opportunity hard to capture for traditional VC, because it assumes away the real problems – above all, where to find a world-class co-founder.

But we’re very much ecosystem players. I think we’ve now co-invested with pretty much every seed fund in Europe and SE Asia and I think they’d all tell you we play nice.

TC: It’s been reported that in a bid to expand globally, EF has come up against scaling issues with regards to matching founders and company formation. I’ve heard from my own sources that there were teething problems in Berlin, for example. What’s really going on?

MC: It’s definitely the conventional wisdom that VC isn’t scaleable, but I think we’re proving that wrong. If you take our core metric of co-founder matching, our most recent European cohorts had the highest matching rate so far – over 80% of people who joined us found a co-founder (though of course we don’t fund every team that forms). Similarly if you look at our first Paris cohort, it has one of the highest investment rates of any cohort we’ve ever done (and we’ve done 21 cohorts so far). Honestly, we’re really happy with the way the international expansion went, though I’d be the first to say that scaling is hard and we’ll make mistakes!

TC: We’ve seen a few EF clones appear. Sincerest form of flattery or blatant opportunism? And which, if any, part of EF is defensible?

MC: I always remember Paul Graham being asked this about YC clones and saying he felt “like how JK Rowling would feel if someone wrote a book called Henry Potter”. Joking aside though, I think YC has shown that highly defensible network effects in VC are possible. There are literally hundreds of YC clones and yet 95% of the value in accelerators has accrued to YC. I think we’re on track for something similar in the talent investing space.

The key way to think about defensibility is at the level of the customer – i.e. the founder. Which talent investor do you want to join? You want to join the one with the highest quality potential cofounders. Which one has that? Well, unsurprisingly, the one with the track record, the best alum, the best network, etc. Once you’ve established that – and EF is 5 or 6 years ahead of the clones – it’s very difficult to catch up and the advantage compounds quickly.

TC: You shared some stats with regards the success rate of EF startups and the figures look encouraging. But what we don’t yet still have are many exits. This isn’t surprising given that you invest incredibly early so it will take time for startups to move through the cycle, but it also means that LPs backing EF continue to take a leap of faith. Is that a fair statement and what was the major pushback you got from LPs that declined not to join EF on this next phase of your journey?

MC: For sure, that’s fair. The numbers look great on paper, but it’s way too early to see significant cash returns. In fact, right now we don’t want more exits, as we want our best companies to keep growing privately for as long as possible. Last year, the portfolio raised more money than they had in the history of EF before that put together, so we’re feeling very positive.

It’s definitely true that some LPs don’t want to invest until you’ve returned a whole fund, but fortunately lots of them put in a lot of time to understand the model and were willing to partner with us for the long-term. This will be a big year for the portfolio – no big exits, I hope, but lots of momentum on revenue, product and funding for sure.

TC: Lastly, you now have a General Partner and EF’s CFO Joe White (who I understand was instrumental in helping to raise this new fund) posted to Silicon Valley, where he’ll be helping to grow EF’s investor network on the West Coast. How important is U.S. venture capital to EF’s future and when can we expect to see EF launch a program across the pond?

MC: Yes, Joe and I spent a lot of time on planes and in the US last year to pitch LPs! The vast majority of the capital in this fund is US-based and, of course, Reid and Greylock are there too. What Joe, Alice and I all believe is that Silicon Valley remains perhaps the best place in the world to scale a tech company, even if it’s no longer the essential place to start one. This means that being able to build relationships with the best US VCs is a key competitive advantage for an EF company.

We’ve already seen some of this, with Insight leading Tractable’s B round and Founders Fund leading Massless’s (EF LD9) seed. But Joe being there full time is an ideal way for us to accelerate this and I think you’ll see a bunch of EF companies raise US-led B and C rounds this year. The key is the right capital at the right time.

We’re still thinking hard about our next stage of expansion. It’s hard to see a major need for EF in Silicon Valley itself, but there may be a big opportunity in other parts of North America. Watch this space…

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8204425 https://tcrn.ch/2BJPkPF via IFTTT

#IFTTT #RSSMix.com Mix ID 8204425

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fmservers · 5 years

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EF raises $115M new fund, aiming to create another 300-plus startups in the next three years

A slide thought to be from EF’s recent LP pitch deck

Below follows an email Q&A with EF co-founder Matt Clifford to find out more about the new fund and where it positions the so-called talent investor going forward.

We’ll absolutely be backing the best Entrepreneur First companies up to their Series A, but we’ve been doing that since 2016, so no change there.

TC: An earlier SEC filing suggested the fund was going to be much bigger. What happened?

But we’re very much ecosystem players. I think we’ve now co-invested with pretty much every seed fund in Europe and SE Asia and I think they’d all tell you we play nice.

TC: We’ve seen a few EF clones appear. Sincerest form of flattery or blatant opportunism? And which, if any, part of EF is defensible?

Via Steve O'Hear https://techcrunch.com

#TechCrunch

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toomanysinks · 5 years

Text

EF raises $115M new fund, aiming to create another 300-plus startups in the next three years

A slide thought to be from EF’s recent LP pitch deck

Below follows an email Q&A with EF co-founder Matt Clifford to find out more about the new fund and where it positions the so-called talent investor going forward.

We’ll absolutely be backing the best Entrepreneur First companies up to their Series A, but we’ve been doing that since 2016, so no change there.

TC: An earlier SEC filing suggested the fund was going to be much bigger. What happened?

But we’re very much ecosystem players. I think we’ve now co-invested with pretty much every seed fund in Europe and SE Asia and I think they’d all tell you we play nice.

TC: We’ve seen a few EF clones appear. Sincerest form of flattery or blatant opportunism? And which, if any, part of EF is defensible?

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/19/a-lof-of-efffing-money/

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thommyalladin-blog · 6 years

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Q & A: The Home Entryway Garage Makeover

Considering the garage has become the main entry and exit point to the home for an increasing number of people, it's no wonder improved garage spaces have become more coveted.

For this reason, we thought the term “home entryway garage makeovers” seemed rather appropriate.

Stephen, from Oakville, Ontario (located 30 minutes outside of Toronto) and his wife are among the homeowners who saw the benefits of upgrading such a frequently used area of their house.

The couple also wanted to have a more high-class look to complement the stylish aesthetics of their luxury cars.

A look at one client's home entryway garage makeover

The home entryway garage makeover by Garage Living for Stephen included the following upgrades:

Floortex

polyaspartic floor coating

PVC slatwall panels with hook and bike rack accessories

GL Premium cabinetry with a stainless steel countertop

wall-mounted tire racks and LED garage lighting fixtures

an aluminum wall-mounted hose reel and polyurethane garden hose

Stephen was thrilled with his garage makeover and kindly sat down with us to share his experience working with Garage Living.

Before we get to the interview, take a look at this short time-lapse video that shows the efficient transformation of Stephen's 3-car garage in just a couple of days over the span of a week:

youtube

What did your garage look like before the makeover project started? Was it an older garage or just unfinished?

Our house was rebuilt five years old. It's a big garage that was drywalled and had a raw concrete floor that had some settling cracks.

What was the impetus to get the garage done? Were you just tired of it and had been thinking about getting it done for a long time?

The cracks in the floor were bothering me and I wanted to get that cleaned up. I have a Mercedes and a Maserati, so every time I drove in there it just didn't seem like an appropriate home for them.

How long did it take for you to decide you needed to do something about it and start looking around for a company?

We had a list of priorities. We didn't build the house, we bought it after the gentleman that built it got relocated back to the U.S. There was a lot of work to do on the inside to bring it up to what we wanted. We wanted to get the interior finished first.

Once all that got done, it was time to get the garage taken care of. The garage was on the list, but further down the list. I wanted it to look finished and look like it was a part of the house.

We always drive into the garage and then enter the house about 90% of the time. Every time I drove in, it didn't feel like a completed part of the project.

How much research did you do beforehand to figure out what to do with the garage and who to talk to?

When I first talked to my wife, I had an idea of what I wanted it to look like. I take the cars to Denny's Car Wash down the road. One of the car magazines (Autostrada Forum Magazine) there had a Garage Living ad on the back of it, so I noticed that. That was kind of the impetus to get me to start researching it.

Then I phoned a few other companies, including just concrete restoration companies. I had to decide if I was just going to do the floor or do the whole thing and we decided we were going to do the whole thing.

Based on the various companies that I interviewed and got quotes from, Garage Living by far stood out as the most competent. Just the overall value proposition was strong.

So you initially wanted to do the floor, but it sort of grew into this bigger project?

No, I just wasn't sure which direction I was going to go and if it was worth spending the money on or not. It's kind of like finishing your basement or putting in a pool – do we do it because it'll increase the value of the home? Does it not?

We decided that if we ever did sell the house, it would add significant value to the house for anybody with a nice car who also appreciates something like driving into a nice garage. The garage would seem like an integral part of the home.

So you're looking at it as an investment, too…you're looking long-term as well.

Yes, we're looking at it primarily for us to enjoy the garage and then second, I just figured it would make the house a good overall package.

After that, did you go to the website and do your research?

Yes, I looked at a few different websites, including theirs, and called and got Daniel Albo (one of the Garage Living owners).

I had a few companies come out to give me ideas and I didn't give them any budget. I just wanted to see, with no budget, what would they come up with and what were their ideas and what would they do?

The overall process with Garage Living was by far much more professional. They were more knowledgeable and what Daniel said made a whole lot more sense. With everybody else, I think they were trying to sell it within a certain budget, even though there was no given budget.

Garage Living came up with an excellent design and the way they were treating the garage floor seemed like a much better process. They wanted to come out beyond the garage doors and down the lip. One of the other companies was only coming to the interior of the garage door, which doesn't look right to me.

This luxurious space nicely complements the client's Maserati and Mercedes.

When you were doing your research and looking at quotes, how did Garage Living's website compare to others you looked at?

The website left you with a very professional impression. There are some nice pictures on there of the products and I just thought it was user-friendly. The website was kind of a “landing spot” and the biggest thing was more the process of the quotation.

That included them being out here, the way they showed the materials, talked about what was going to be done, took the measurements, and got back to us very quickly with regard to initial concepts and designs. It was very professionally managed.

In your online review, you said that the overall design Garage Living came up with was no comparison to the other companies.

I thought that the quality of the materials was far better and the overall design was good. It was more the quality of the materials that were going into it, Garage Living's professionalism, and the context of how Daniel presented the pitch for the project and how he explained the materials. Then we went out to the showroom before making the final decision.

How much of the showroom experience helped you make a decision?

For someone who needs that to make a decision, the showroom is definitely impressive. The decision was made prior to the showroom, basically, just from the content on the website and from the overall impression from interacting with Garage Living, versus the other companies we had quote on the project.

So going into the showroom was more just to look at things like the finishing details and accessories?

We were deciding between the baseline cabinets versus the intermediate or midrange cabinets. We wanted to see them, to decide if it was worth the additional money to go with the midrange, as opposed to the baseline cabinets.

The showroom was nice just to see the tangible quality of the cabinets and the scope of what Garage Living deals with. It just gave you that final touch of confidence in the context of dealing with Daniel and with the company, period.

How did you figure out whether to go with a baseline or a more premium cabinet model?

It was just the quality of them and the look. When we looked at what the difference was between the two as far as the scope of the project was concerned, we decided to go with the midline cabinets (GL Premium).

Was how you were going to use the cabinetry, like as a possible work area, a factor at all?

No, it's more aesthetic. The drawers are still empty in a lot of cases. It doesn't get used that way, it's more just for the overall look whenever we drive in.

So basically looks, minimal storage, and to keep it tidy?

Yes.

Now you have all this garage storage you never had before. How was it managing the garage storage before?

Before, everything was all over the place. There were just metal shelves from Costco being used with everything stacked on them. It was one of those things where when you move in, the garage is the last thing to get organized and cleaned up.

There was a lot of stuff that needed to be purged and gotten rid of. We used the garage to park cars in, but it by no means made you feel good when you drove in.

Your garage makeover also included a couple of tire racks, which I assume is for your winter tires?

That was also one of the reasons I went to the showroom, was just to see what the tire racks like. I called around to get quotes on storing our winter tires. I always just stored them stacked on the garage floor and also on a Canadian Tire wall rack.

We wondered if they were really worth the money to store tires on or should we just store them at the garage where we get them changed over? When I called around, I found that basically, the racks will pay for themselves within a couple of years, in comparison to having the tires stored at the garage itself.

Was price a deciding factor in your decision to choose Garage Living?

Garage Living wasn't the cheapest quote, but I just felt the overall value proposition was better. I felt the project was going to get done properly and in a timely fashion.

It sounds like compared to the other companies, you just had more confidence in Daniel and Garage Living.

Yes. Any questions I asked they were able to answer – and not in a, for lack of a better word, a BS way.

Daniel didn't come across like a sales guy just pushing something. Garage Living came across like they cared about the install, cared about the quality of the materials, and were very knowledgeable and very professional.

Some of the other companies just seemed like they wanted to get in and out with the quickest solution possible and were just trying to push something on you. All one guy did was undermine and knock other companies. To me, he lost before he even started. He just didn't have a professional presentation, either.

Was there anything about the other companies that impressed you or made you consider going with them?

No. I was shopping for the best project overall and something I thought was fairly priced for the quality of the workmanship, materials, etcetera.

Your Google review mentioned that you were impressed with the scheduling and overall professionalism of Garage Living. Did that surprise you?

Yes, it actually did. Coming from the trades and having done countless renovations and construction-related projects, finding good tradespeople is one of the biggest challenges. It's difficult to find people that show up on time and people who, if they're not going to be there on time, will at least call.

It's more you're wasting your time waiting around for people that don't show up and then you call them and all you hear are excuses. Daniel set the tone for that and every person that we interacted with at Garage Living after Daniel followed through and exceeded expectations.

They were here on the very day they said they'd be here and we had booked months in advance. It took exactly a week, which is what Daniel said it would take. And from start to finish, the workers were really polite, respectful, and very professional. They did everything they said they were going to do and beyond.

There's always a lot of stress involved for anyone who's dealt with the trades. That wasn't an issue with your project?

Nothing. It was zero stress. It was a pleasure dealing with people that take pride in what they do, as opposed to it just being piece work and wanting to get in and out as quickly as possible. They moved plugs around…even if it was six inches, they moved it. Garage Living did a very, very good job overall. If I did move, I would call them immediately to do my next garage.

Did you have to make any compromises with what you initially thought the garage would look like and what you had in mind?

We actually spent more than what we were originally planning on spending and are very happy that we did so. We didn't really have a budget in mind. When you start any project, you kind of have a hunch as to what you think it's going to cost or how much you think you're willing to spend, and with this one it was similar.

GL Premium cabinets with silver doors and gray trim configured with tall storage lockers, overhead cabinets, and a stainless steel countertop.

So it wasn't a big surprise with what the project cost?

No.

What, if anything, could Garage Living have done differently if you had to do this all over again?

I don't think there's one thing that they could have done differently to improve the experience.

As I said, the overall experience exceeded expectations and the design was excellent. Even for the photo shoot, they were very respectful of the property and thankful that we allowed them to do it. We were more than happy to have them spend the day and do the photo shoot and the time-lapse video.

If the makeover process hadn't been such a flawless experience, we would have paid the invoice and that'd be the end of it. But we were happy to have them showcase such a good job and proud that the finished product came out the way it did.

Do you show it off to friends or visitors that come over?

Yes, in fact, I was speaking at a conference the other day and I was showing a few of our customers the pictures of the garage and they were like, “Wow!”.

One of them has a Porsche 911, so we were talking about garages and I said, “Oh, I got a new home for my Maserati”. They asked if I minded telling them how much it was and I told them and they said, “Oh, that's really reasonable for something like that. I thought it would be more”. They were actually surprised, based on the pictures. In fact, I gave her Daniel's contact information.

So overall, you'd say your life's better having the garage completed and you feel better about pulling into the garage now?

Yes, it bugs me right now that the floor is dirty and needs to be cleaned, but you don't want to be getting the hose out and making a skating rink in there, so we kind of brush it off. But as soon as the weather turns good, I'll get the hose out and squeegee it and clean it up.

In the past with your concrete floor, would you just sweep it out in the spring? Do you find this garage floor easier to maintain?

I would shovel the snow out before, whereas now it's much easier to maintain and keep clean. It looks good, it looks finished whenever you drive in. A week or so ago it was one of those mild, slushy days. When I came home, I got the squeegee down that Garage Living left us at the end of the project and squeegeed the floor, which helped to clean it up.

Was there anything else you wanted to add?

I would say if anybody's considering doing anything with their garage, regardless of how big or small, that I would call Garage Living. Have them come out to give you some ideas as to what they can do. I think regardless of whether it's just the floor or a full project like we did, it'll get done right.

Regardless of how much they're wanting to spend, the money they spend with Garage Living is a good investment because it gets done properly. I think of it more now as an extension of the home, as opposed to just a garage that's connected to the house where you park your cars in a space that just didn't seem like a fitting home for the cars.

So your home's main entryway space is just nicer now.

I would say 90% of the time we drive into the garage and come into the home through the garage, so it's an extension of that finished space now.

It feels much better and it's much tidier. Everything's got a place with the way Garage Living designed it and the way things are organized. And it's got that flexibility so if your slatwall storage needs change, you can go back to the showroom and get some ideas as to what other kinds of hooks and accessories you can get.

As we organized things, we found a spot for the hoses on the wall. They're not normally there in the summertime, but in the wintertime, they're just spare hoses that we use for various things on the property. Everything's got its place.

View the Home Entryway Garage gallery to see more photos from Stephen's garage makeover.