#LIKE HE HAS ACTUAL LINES NOT JUST ONE LINERS AND DRAMATIC MONOLOGUES

[oatmilkovich]

I'd really love if you made a post about Noel's acting this episode! If you still want to

hey!! <3

this episode reminded us (not that we needed the reminder, looks at the writers) what the show is missing out on when they reduce the characters and their storyline’s down to comedy with very little substance. 

this is the first time in a long while that it feels like mickey’s trauma surrounding terry has been giving the time, space and the dialogue it deserves. I’ve been waiting many, many years for this sort of resolution for mickey...

my thoughts on noel’s performance under the cut (it’s a little lengthy!)...

as always, disclaimer: this is all my opinion, but i did go to drama school and have a degree. there’s a pandemic and nothing else to do, i just like talking about it. 

firstly, something I’ve always admired about noel’s work is his ability to tell us a thousand things without saying a single word. we’ve seen it from the very first season – there’s very few other actors on the show that consistently carry that much power with their silence and noel really did the most this week. let’s look at this moment:

mickey doesn’t say anything until prompted by ian and yet because of the intensity in noel’s look and the sheer amount of tension he’s carrying, we’re completely aware of mickey’s feelings in the moment without having to hear any dialogue. his physicality tells us more than any dialogue would. his shoulders are tense, his face is fight – it’s a deep, visceral reaction to seeing his father. noel has clearly thought about mickey’s pov here – not only about terry, but about this moment in general, about the first time he sees him after coming home from the hospital, about watching the man who tortured him for years finally be met with even an ounce of the same pain he was subjected to. immediately, we’re thrown into the heavy weight of the moment and when mickey does speak, it only echoes what we already know from his physicality. the dialogue complements noel’s performance, rather than solely carrying it. he’s managed to tap into the perfect balance of allowing the lines to come from truth — they don’t feel planned out or rehearsed but delivering them in a way we can tell that mickey has thought about it – mickey’s history with terry is lengthy and incredibly complex and that’s completely embodied in how noel delivers each line. It’s important to me that we can feel the history there, but that history is left at the door when it comes to his work in the scene. he’s not displaying the history, he’s existing in it. 

my personal ‘acting theory’ (to avoid sounding like a wanker) is that you don’t act as your character, but that you exist as yourself under those circumstances. mickey’s circumstances in the scene are noel’s circumstances and he reacts — as he would — in the moment. prep work for this is key. noel has said in previous interviews that when approaching mickey in the earlier seasons, he focused on having a secret and lengths he would go to protect it. knowing this, we have a small idea on how he approaches mickey now. he clearly has taken something in his own life and used it to personalise this situation with mickey, he’s thought about how he himself would react in those circumstances, because he is himself in mickey’s circumstances — this is why it feels so personal, this is why his performance is still so consistently nuanced all these years later. this is why he can tell us so much in a simple shift of the eyes. 

take emma’s performance during this episode – in the moments she’s talking about sandy and how upset she is (eg: inside the ambulance with ian and mick) she’s very much really going for the oh my heart is so broken blah blah, but it doesn’t land because you don’t believe her heart is broken. the lines are empty. you compare that to the subtleties noel shows us throughout the episode and it’s almost unfair that they have her scenes next to his. this isn’t to roast her, but just to highlight the differences in nuance and depth. allowing dialogue to carry a performance vs actually living in the performance. 

discomfort played a huge part in noel’s performance in 11x06 too and discomfort in scenes can bring wonders. mickey is uncomfortable — he’s faced with some horribly difficult decisions. we see a stark difference from his easy going ‘just pull the plug on him’ energy vs when he’s actually given the chance to. the stakes in the scene and situation are extremely high – mickey is quite literally battling with an opportunity he’s been waiting his entire life for. the weight of those stakes are heavy on his shoulders and the highlight of the episode for me was the physical journey on noel’s face as he holds the gun to terry's chest. noel gives us mickey’s internal battle – there’s the pent up rage he clearly had been carrying with him on the ride over, then the irritation, the fear, the sadness, the frustration. you can almost see everything mickey has ever had to go through because of terry in the way he looks at him. 

this shot above in particular has really, really stuck with me. the way he doesn’t respond to ian, keeping his eyes firmly planted on terry – he’s lost in his thoughts, in his history and you can feel everything behind noel’s eyes. 

it’s such a fantastically layered performance that he makes it impossible to look away. he allows the moment to play out and live and doesn’t speed run to achieve anything in his performance. he doesn’t push. noel doesn’t walk into the scene and go ‘oh i’m gonna make mickey feel this on this line and this on this line’ – he gives the emotions their time and place to land, we see and feel mickey’s journey without a single word. it all comes from his natural reactions to the circumstances. he doesn’t try and show us what mickey is going through when faced with the option to kill terry — he lives it, he sits in it and he exists in it. 

we also had a great example of noel’s range this ep. he delivered his funny, usual one liners like he has done throughout this season but really hammered home his talent when given dramatic scenes. it was a refreshing balance. 

overall, noel’s performance in this episode is a great example of how a well acted scene doesn’t have to contain screaming or crying or overt, obvious dramatics in order to be categorised as ‘good’. similarly to what I said in my post about ian’s vows, some of the smallest and subtle moments can carry as much as a 5 minute monologue or an intense shouting match. 

this is long and probably a little boring, but I could honestly talk about his work for ages. thanks for the question (and the other anons too!) and please feel free to send me anymore – especially as we now have a 3 week break before the next episode <3

#i lied and got anxious so here it is an hour later #willa's acting thoughts #enjoy though! i hope i didn't ramble too much #but really i just enjoyed this episode so much #pls ask me anything else if you want to have a discussion! #noel fisher #shameless #tw guns #actingasks

[ckret2]

how tf do u write sir pen and alastor

Step one: rewatch this and this a million times specifically to focus on how they talk—the way they emphasize words, the cadence and flow of their sentences, pace, sound effects, mood, pitch, tone, etc.

Step two: reread their lines here or here (each one handles the transcript a little bit different—the first one is more comprehensive, the second one more objective, and they disagree on a few words) so that you can more fully absorb things like their vocabulary, length and complexity of sentences, etc.

Step three: keep those pages open constantly so that every couple paragraphs you can refer back to those pages to refresh their voices in your head when you get nervous about drifting too far off the accurate voice of a character who's got less than three total minutes of footage, which will be often.

Now you have their voices in your head.

Step four: Go write their voices!! Here are their voices:

Sir Pentious is pretentious. Alastor sounds like a radio host.

I know, I know, that sounds super obvious.

Sir Pentious will occasionally use vocab & sentence structure that makes him sound old-fashioned and dramatic on par with a parody of a Shakespeare villain. He uses phrases like "[they] dare not hinder [me]" or "the likes of I" or pronouncing "striped" as "stripéd." His vocab isn't wildly complicated—you shouldn't be sending readers running to the dictionary—but nevertheless he sounds intelligent.

Pretend that in his heart he's constantly on the verge of giving a villainous monologue about how his evil plan will let him effortlessly conquer the world, and anything else he's doing—whether it's trying to impress a crush or ordering lunch at a fast food restaurant—is either a practice run for that villainous monologue or a distraction from being able to give it. His casual conversations will have that hint of grandiosity. He's going to be mildly irritated at anything that undercuts his grandiosity—it doesn't have enough style, doesn't have enough class. He'll jump on opportunities to gloat, to talk about his goals & plans, to talk down his enemies—to try to make himself sound good, basically.

And—this is super important—remember that he thinks he's evil and is proud of it. He's not one of those villains who believes he has a just or justifiable cause. He's also not one of those villains who is villainous out of spite/anger/vengeance. He says that he is evil and he is gleeful about it. Don't feel the need to give him sympathetic/understandable/justifiable motives for his actions, because he doesn't think he has any and he doesn't care. He's power-hungry and he's bad and he's having fun. He embraces it. Embrace it when you write him.

Alastor is 100% performative at all times. Imagine that at every moment he's speaking he sees himself as a radio talk show host sitting behind his desk with a packed studio audience and the knowledge that thousands more people are listening live. He's animated and exuberant because he's trying his damnedest at all times to be an entertaining host for that imaginary audience. That's his job: put on a good show for the audience.

So every comment is snappy and interesting, he always sounds upbeat and energetic. When he talks about himself and his own emotions, it never sounds confessional, intimate, or sincere; even if he's talking about something that's genuinely been a heavy psychological weight on him, he doesn't present it like that. He presents it like a guest on a talk show telling the host a funny anecdote about his life, or a comedian telling a story to the audience: even if the anecdote is about something miserable, it's presented as an interesting/entertaining story for the consumption of the audience.

(See: the jokey way he says, "Hahaha, why does anyone do anything? Sheer! Absolute! BOREDOM!" The woe-is-me faux drama when he says "My work became mundane, lacking focus, aimless!" Those straight up sound like two depression symptoms. His voice does not sound depressed.)

So he speaks in anecdotes, one-liners, punchy comments. There's going to be very little "uh-huh" or "mm-hmm" or grunts or sighs or other such wordless sounds—everything he says is going to sound crisp and carefully enunciated for the audience at home trying to listen in over the radio.

(And you can play with that as appropriate: I have his performativeness go down when he's having an actual intimate sincere moment, and I have it crank up wildly when he's uncomfortable, secretive, feeling vulnerable, etc., and he wants to hide that.)

Step five: remember their weird speech quirks!

Hiss! Sir Pentious has got his hiss. Now, listen to me very carefully: if choossse to write Sssir Pentiousss'sss ssspeech ssso that every sssingle sssibilant isss emphasssized jussst like ssso, I ssshall sssneak into your houssse in the middle of the night with a Sssharpie and ssscribble an angry faccce on your forehead.

This is the best essay I have ever read on writing accents. And one of the most important points in it is: don't misspell every word to phonetically match how the character sounds, because it's incomprehensible, silly, and gives readers headaches. That applies to Sir Pentious's hiss.

Now, I feel like you can give him SOME hissing. If there's a word or phrase HE's trying to emphasize—if he's talking Extra Fancy, or if he's spitting an insult at someone, or if he's just being more pretentious than usual. Example: if a hero sneaks into a villain's lair and the villain captures them, the villain might sarcastically say "so nice of you to join us!" When I hear Sir Pentious giving that line I hear his voice jump up on the first word, "so nice of you to join us!" So I could write that as "ssso nice of you to join us!" for that extra emphasis. I wouldn't write it as "ssso niccce of you to join usss!"

Also: you can just not write his hiss at all. That's valid, we'll still hear it in our heads. I don't write his hiss when I'm writing inside of his perspective because he doesn't hear himself doing it.

If you DO write his hiss though, remember that it's not just on the S's. Sometimes he over-emphasizes his H's as well or inserts them where they don't belong. ("hhell will be mine, h'and everyone will know the name of Sir—") That's harder to naturally write into dialogue than the S's, but if you're looking out for opportunities you might naturally stumble across one or two. At least remember to carry the hissed H's in your head.

Radio sounds! Alastor's dialogue is loaded down with radio sound effects—studio audience applause (and different kinds of applause for "applauding a stellar performance" versus "welcoming a guest onto the show"), studio audience laughter, little trumpet sounds, snatches of music, xylophone scales, telegram beeps, drum rolls, the screams of the damned—you know, normal things you might hear on the radio. And less clear things too: a thousand different static sounds, muffled voices like you might hear when passing through stations and getting near but not actually on the right station, garbled humming, little second-long clips of songs he heard earlier.

You don't want to CONSTANTLY talk about the sound effects he's making; but like, also, constantly talk about the sound effects he's making. Strike a balance. Good luck.

Get familiar with sound effects—listen to the radio and pay attention to the sound effects used in bumper messages, listen to the sounds in old game shows, listen to radio dramas, find guides by people who work on sound effects for radio and see what they do, browse sound effect sites to see what kind of categories are listed and that people look for. Alastor shouldn't sound like a radio drama, but you can steal sounds from that. If you can hear a sound but aren't sure what to call it, try looking up lists of similar sound effects for sale and just look at what terms they use in the file names to describe the sounds. (Obviously you don't want to buy a $50 folder containing 500 radio sound effects, but oftentimes you can still see the names of the files.)

And—again, from that essay I linked earlier—the characters don't complain about each other's voices in canon. If someone's going to comment on Alastor's radio noises, there has to be a good reason for it, because it's a divergence from the norm. (Like, I have Sir Pentious commenting on and asking questions about Alastor's radio sounds to show he's curious about/interested in Alastor and how his abilities work on a deeper level than just "oh yeah of course the radio demon makes radio sounds" and to show that he's absolutely not too intimidated by him to risk annoying him—and that's intended as a deliberate exception from the norm, to the extent that Alastor comments on it once.)

Musical numbers! Occasionally Alastor will burst into song. Unless you're desperate to try your hand as a lyricist, I recommend against actually writing full songs for him, for this reason: when we see Alastor's full song in the pilot, it sounds like he's singing, because he is and we can hear it. When we see a full song in a book or a fic, it sounds like somebody's reciting poetry, because we don't know the tune and we can't hear the song in our heads. And "giving a poetry recital" is a very different vibe from "singing a song."

What I do to get around this is, when I think Alastor oughta be singing, I just take a song that actually exists and have him sing that one, and then I can fling the link at readers. Go get familiar with pre-1933 popular songs. I recommend vaudeville and musical theater as easy sources to draw from because it more often tends to be snappy, energetic, and oftentimes humorous, which fits Alastor's vibe. I also don't quote the entire song, just a couple of relevant lines—so that within the fic itself it comes across like dialogue rather than like a poetry recital. If you HAVE to include the whole song, mix it in with actions, description, narration, etc, so that it can still be read as dialogue rather than like a solid block of poetry. He's not just standing in one spot unmoving while he sings, is he? No of course not, he's Alastor. Have him dance and do dumb stuff.

Step six: remember their weird accessories, mention them from time to time.

One of the streams that I don't feel like digging up says that Sir Pentious's hat's facial expressions mirror whatever Sir Pent is currently feeling, even if Sir Pent's own expression is less honest to his true feelings. Personally, I go with that—his hat is always showing his genuine emotions—unless it's off his head, in which case it can have its own separate emotions for a moment (such as: reacting to the fact that it's fallen off its owners head). It's completely psychically connected to him and so it's never going to have a separate/independent reaction to what's goin on, just mirror Sir Pent's. There are other ways to headcanon his hat and so other ways to write his hat but that's the way I do it.

Alastor's microphone cane occasionally talk. In the show we see it do that when Alastor specifically prompts it. We don't know if the cane is its own person or if it's more like a magic ventriloquist doll Alastor talks through in order to banter with himself. I treat it as like, 1/2 a person: it's a direct extension of Alastor, and it's got some low-level intelligence, but like intelligence on the level of a chat bot programmed to try to have conversations with people but that doesn't really think for itself. Since it's an extension of Alastor it doesn't really have any thoughts/knowledge that he doesn't, but it's got a slightly snippier/crankier personality, and it might on very rare occasions say things that Alastor like, knows on a subconscious/instinctive level but is consciously denying. Its primary function is to give Alastor the reply he's looking for when he says something he wants a reply to, or to set him up for a snappy one-liner he wants to make but is unable to make unless someone else says JUST the right thing first. Again, there are other ways to headcanon/write his cane, but that's the way I do it.

Also Alastor has living shadows, one of which might be his own shadow, but like, I always forget about them so I don't do anything with them. It's fine it's cool it only shows up during musical numbers anyway.

Step seven: remember their body language.

Sir Pentious's overall body language is, unsurprisingly, pretty serpentine—he's got some wiggles, he's got some dramatic bends that show off his flexibility—and also rather elegant, or at least making a show of looking elegant. At least when he's busy posing in between doing actual work. And he likes playing with his bow tie.

Alastor's gestures are big and theatrical and his arms are always going everywhere.

However, that's not the part of their body language I want to talk about! That's the normal stuff! I'm here for the weird stuff!

Hood! Sir Pentious's hood is basically always flaring out and flattening down and flaring out and flattening down. (And I do headcanon it as a hood—just fraying along the bottom—not as hair. Every time I see fanart that treats it as hair and they braid it or put it up in a bun or whatever I have a moment where I picture his hood shredded up the length into strips and go "OH GOD, OH GOD.") Like, do not constantly describe every single time his hood flares, because it's every five seconds. But don't leave it out by any means. Pick important moments. Make sure it actually adds to the scene.

Eyes! In canon there's a few shots where we can see that Sir Pent's many many eyes move and blink, and they ten to look toward whatever Sir Pent is focused on. It seems likely that they work. If you want to say they work you totally can. I say they work. If you're gonna say they work, keep in mind what kind of field of view that gives him, and keep in mind what you can do with that knowledge. Like, if he's sitting at a dinner table with someone to discuss some kind of skeevy underground business deal and the other person slowly pulls out a gun under the table and points it at him, he's going to see that gun with his knee-height eyes and be able to kick that dude's whole chair over with his tail. 

Smile! Alastor's single most defining character trait is the fact that he's always smiling. The terrified sinners that named him the Radio Demon should've named him Smiley McSmiles. Therefore, there is no need to tell readers that he's smiling. They'll be like, "of course he's smiling. He's Alastor. We're not stupid." However, it's a good idea to mention from time to time that he's smiling, because like, Alastor's single most defining character trait is the fact that he's always smiling. And when it's that constant, it helps to occasionally bring it up to like, maintain that continuity, maintain that sense of the fact that his smile is always there. So you've gotta strike that balance between "don't just keep telling the readers that Alastor is still smiling because you don't need to tell them that" and "mention his smile from time to time." The way I do that is like, mentioning his smile in conjunction with other things, usually as an indication of his mood. Whereas with other characters you'd show changes in their expression by going "he smiled," "he frowned," "he grimaced in disgust," with Alastor you'd say like "his perpetual smile stretched wider into a more genuine one" or "he pressed his lips together as his smile thinned" or "he fought to keep smiling through the disgust"—that way, you're not telling readers that Alastor is smiling, it's something you're mentioning in the process of telling readers something different and more important about his mood.

Step seven: remember this ain't TV. Keep in mind the difference between how they sound when they’re talking out loud on screen and how they’ll sound when they’re just text in a fic.

To get their voice across, you might have to exaggerate some things in written dialogue that you wouldn’t in spoken dialogue. For instance, Sir Pentious doesn’t always have vocab that makes him sound like a pretentious, sophisticated supervillain. Sometimes he says “No other demon can compare to the likes of I!” but then sometimes he says “You wanna go, missy?” When he says that the latter line in the show, he still sounds pretentious, because his VA is still using his pretentious-sounding voice. In writing, there is no voice. Most readers KNOW what his voice sounds like, and if you’re writing close enough to his voice they’ll be able to hear it; but it’s going to be harder for them to hear it if you have him saying words that go against what his voice sounds like and they aren’t actually simultaneously hearing his voice IRL saying those words.

So, while “You wanna go, missy?” works on screen when we can hear the contrast between his voice and the dialogue, if that scene was written instead, it’d be easier to get his voice across with “Do you want to go, missy?” because it still has the unexpected/humorous casualness of “missy” in there but making the rest of the sentence very formal preserves Sir Pent’s pretentious speaking style.

Step eight: keep in mind that the question I'm answering is "how do you write sir pent and alastor," not "how should sir pent and alastor be written," so feel free to toss out anything that doesn't work for you.

#hazbin hotel #sir pentious #alastor #about my writing #anonymous #ask

[pomegranate-salad]

Seeds of thought : Wicdiv #32 & #33

Work work work work work. I’ve never worked so much in my life. The college student easy life is a lie, kids. So I’m doing a 2-in-1 type of thing on the last two issues. I didn’t have much material on issue 32 alone anyway and I think these two issues make more sense as a two-parter finale, so I guess it works well. Thoughts and opinions under the cut, spoilers of course. And fuck Woden.

 THE LAST LAUGH

 “Well this looks ridiculous”

This was my - and I assume an unneglectable number of people’s – first reaction to the last page of issue #33 in which we see the severed heads of Lucifer, Inanna and Tara displayed on an altar. This scene was probably effective on some, but for me it immediately called back to Disney’s Haunted Mansion and Futurama, and I was effectively done for : there was no way I could take this visual seriously.

There’s no two ways around it : this scene is silly. First we have what should be one of the biggest reveal of the entire series casually thrown at us by a character who’s not even looking at the audience, Then the camera cuts to this grotesque display of living heads, and the scene is complete with a classic Luci one-liner that seems aware of how out-of-place this entire sequence is. Really, all that’s missing is the laugh track.

You could say anticlimactic ; but really should it be called that when it’s the creators themselves who intentionally destroy the dramatic potential of their own scene ? If you’re not convinced this was intentional, try a little thought experiment and imagine rewriting this scene to amplify its dramatic intensity. By doing so, my conclusion is that this ending had every chance of being a huge finisher like the ones we saw in Fandemonium and Rising Action, but every writing and artistic decision was deliberately made to be as wrong as possible, to ruin every emotional weight this scene could have had.

 This is not an anomaly : in these last two issues, the creators seem to have engaged in the systematic destruction of every dramatic beat by way of grotesque and ridicule. It’s an undercurrent that ran through the entire second part of Imperial Phase, but only reached its full potential toward the end.

It started on the very first page of issue #32, trivializing Amaterasu’s death when the issue before that still gave it all the gravity fitting to the first death of a Wicdiv arc. Then Dio’s last moments of bravery reveal themselves to be a total waste, on top of ruining One More Time forever. Even Woden’s bad guy monologue is sort of too shitty to really muster the kind of epic hatred you’d want to direct at this character. Then we have Sakhmet’s death, caused not by her lover or her sort-of-nemesis Baal, but by a thirteen year old on her first kill. And that’s not even touching on the awful reminder of her fate we get at the end of issue #33. Then there’s of course the beep machine, and issue #32’s hilarious finish, which I think call for no commentary. Issue #33 is divided in two big reveals, the first one forcing on the us the awful visual of David Blake’s head on Woden’s suit and one of the most fist-curling yet somehow pathetic bad guy monologues in history, and the second one being that ridiculous finish scene. The two are even separated by an intimate scene between Cass and Laura that literally gets cut because there’s a stranger tied up two feet from them.

 So if these issues somewhat feel like they’re played all wrong, we know where it comes from. They feel like a multipart climax that got flipped on its head, so not a punch would land or beat would work. That’s not to say there aren’t some really impressive character moments in there ; but for each of them, there’s an inversely proportionally bad joke or ironic twist sweeping right in to undercut the whole thing.

And that’s something worth examining, not as a mistake but as a creative direction. Humour used to be a respite in Wicdiv, a welcome break from all the bleakness and emotional scorching of the characters. Each of them had their own wit, from Luci’s cool girl referencing to Baphomet’s failed swagger, to even Cass’ dry deliveries. But now, humour is just another weapon to hurt us. It prevents us from caring about our characters, from connecting with their emotions, from taking the story seriously. As I was reading through what I knew were Dio’s last moments, all I could focus on was Woden’s villain’s speech and the fact that he was right, and that Dio’s death was probably going to be a complete waste, because that’s how Wicdiv works now. Just compare the weight of Amaterasu’s and Dio’s respective death scenes : they’re not even separated by a full issue, yet the light that’s shone on them is completely different. No matter how much dignity went into crafting Dio’s last scene, it doesn’t matter when it’s put back to back with the textual affirmation of its uselessness, the fact that we don’t even get to give him a proper goodbye, and even after that, Laura’s awful line about his life support. In 2017, I don’t think I need to explain anyone the power of humour in trivializing the most terrible situations and undercutting people’s empathy for each other. This is what Wicdiv has been doing to us these past two issues, against our will. Stopping us from caring. Keeping us at bay even when we’re trying to connect and get involved in the story and characters.

 What does this change in the use of humour mean ? Personally, I link it to the change of our purported hopes as an audience. At the beginning of the comic and up until Imperial phase, we were still allowed to believe, like Luci, that a solution could be found, that the 2-year sentence wasn’t real, nor was the great Darkness. That it was going to be okay. But right at the moment when the characters allowed themselves to think that there could indeed be a solution, we, as an audience, started to know better : there was no loophole, no escape, no way to prevent the inevitable, whatever that was. We could no longer hope that things were going to be okay. So what do you hope for when things cannot be okay ? You hope that they’ll be worth it. If you have to die, let it be a worthy death. A beautiful one. If you have to go, go in a blaze of glory. If you have to fail, let it be at the hand of a worthy foe. Let it be worth it.

But it isn’t. And that’s what humour’s there to prove. When our hopes were that things would be okay, the comic responded with tragedy ; now that we simply want them to be worth it, its weapon of choice is ridicule. As such, it’s definitely not a coincidence that the 455AD special preceded Imperial Phase part II, as it sets the tone for the entire arc, up to its back quote : when it’s clear Lucifer won’t be able to outlive his death sentence, all he want is to be allowed to burn. But he won’t be. He will bleed out and his body will be dragged across and city and cut to pieces by an old lady then fed to the river. Such is the fate that awaits our character. Pathetic and grotesque in equal parts, useless unless it serves someone else’s purpose, following rules you do not understand.

If Imperial Phase is the arc in which the gods are allowed to think themselves kings and queens, then the creators are the King’s fools, the ones allowed to tell them their real value because they do it through jokes and flip-overs.

This arc is a constant battle between the story the characters wish they were in and the one they’re actually in. That’s why it would be wrong, for example, to think of the beep machine as a McGuffin : its thematic utility goes beyond a plot device. When just last arc, it was the subject of a joke to relieve the tension between two characters, now it knocks them back to their actual scope. Something so small and silly is the kind of device they deserve. The big, ugly, scary machine ? It does nothing. Did you think you’d be handed a huge plot revelation as the crowning achievement of this arc ? Of course not. Instead, what we get is a sad, banal story of parental abuse from a man who’s not over leaving his youth behind.

Yes, even the David/Jon Blake storyline, arguably the one preserving most of its dramatic intensity over these two issues, cannot help but feel like a sad joke when you consider that David Blake’s motivations are basically the evil queen from Snow White’s. This is what caused all this. This, an old wrinkled lady, and a thirteen year old on a mission from God. Those are our villains, everybody. As for dying a worthy death, our heroes’ options are a pool of blood or a mounted head on an altar.

 None of this is worth it. At this point, it’s even hard remember why “this” sounded so appealing in the first place. And all this goes to contextualize even more Laura’s breakdown speech halfway through issue #33 : she wanted everything they had, and she’d have given anything for it. For power, for glamour, for this. For this joke of a fate that’s not even that funny. That’s what cost her the death of her family, multiple friends, and the rest of her life.

It’s also fitting that Jon finally voices something that has been on my mind for a long time : just how little do you have to think of yourself to think two years of superpowers would be worthier than a fully-lived life ? Through this character who, just like the other gods, is too good for this deal, but unlike them, seems to realize it, it’s yet again the sheer impossibility to make this deal worth it that’s shown to us. Because what becomes clear after this reveal is that if Ananke allowed you to become a god, it’s so she could see that you’d waste away your potential. House always wins, and when you burn the House down, another opens up next door.

 So this is where we are : our hopes of seeing any of it be worth it have been ridiculed, and all that’s left to uncover is precisely which joke our heroes have been the butt of. Cruel ? Maybe. But if fiction so often serves as a way to quench our thirst for grand emotions and epic stories, it’s precisely because outside of it, it feels much more often like one big joke than a sweeping tragedy. After all, Henri Bergson said it best : comedy is much truer to real life than drama.

  WHAT I THOUGHT OF THE ISSUES

 I KNEW IT IT WAS ME I FIGURED IT OUT I KNEW IT WAS DAVID BLAKE I AM THE GODDESS OF FATE BOW TO ME MERE MORTALS !

Alright, I’ll stop.

But while seeing yourself being right is immensely satisfying, it cannot help but damage your read a little ; like I said many times before, I want writers to be smarter than me, to be able to take me by surprise. So if I’ve managed to guess something, that’s great for my ego, but it also makes me a bit sad : that’s just another plotpoint that won’t reach full impact with me because I had so much time interiorizing its potential.

And that’s sort of my problem with these two issues : they revolve around two kinds of plotpoints, some that didn’t surprise me (Dio and Sakhmet’s death, Woden’s identity, the reason for Laura’s attitude) and other that were impossible to guess (the beep machine, Minerva’s “identity”, the talking heads). Meaning that while reading those, I was pretty much letting the plot carry me without being able to pause and care. As I’ve said above, part of it is intentional, but it also means that there aren’t many punches in these issues that landed for me. I’ll definitely count Laura and Sakhmet’s last conversation as well as Cass and Laura’s fight as a success, but the “big” intimate moment of issue #33, the conversation between Cass and Laura, didn’t do much for me, probably because it seems to me that anyone with a functioning brain and ears knew exactly why Laura wasn’t her best self since she had become Persephone. I understand why Cass didn’t see it – as we’re discussed before, she is a factual thinker, meaning she can’t grasp with Laura’s guilt when it is so obviously unfounded – but I still don’t understand the decision to make this a big character moment when literally every sentence Laura had pronounced since the beginning of Imperial Phase revealed what she was going through. There’s nothing more infuriating that being fed information you already think of as canon. If you ask me, this moment is much more important and interesting for what it isn’t, that’s to say a romantic scene, than for what it is. Seeing Laura being rejected by Cass, and therefore breaking the pattern  of dragging people in her self-destroying orbit, is much more defining than her whole speech on guilt.

The problem is that most of the work these issues do is retrospective : if the Jon/David scene on its own has limited impact, the new depth it gives to all the Woden scenes we’ve already been through is vertiginous. Like I said, I did consider what the meaning of David Blake being Woden would be, but that’s another thing to be confronted with the actual fact. When you consider that David is talking to his decapitated, imprisoned son when he’s pouring out his thoughts make issue #14 go from merely quite repulsive to one of the most skin-crawlingly nauseating pieces of media ever written. I can’t imagine what the creators went through crafting this issue while knowing the entire story.

 As for the rest of the reveals, it’s a little hard to weigh on them without devolving into hardcore theorizing. We’re basically at the last stop before the comic has to lay out its hand ; it already managed to delay it through two entire arcs whose very point was to see how long they could get this blind game going. But for me as a reader, it also means I’m at the point in the story that’s the least interesting to me : the one where I have no choice than to follow the train as it’s well on its tracks, without any possibility to pause or jump ahead. I have to wait for the full story to know whether any of these twists paid out or not ; at this stage, I have both too much and too little to really be able to do something with it emotionally or intellectually.

 So as a final verdict because I have to go back to cramming for administrative litigation, I’d say these are two issues I’ll have to revisit once the comic is over, because I suspect they’ll be a lot better with the full story in hand. Most of its impact is on the issues before them and in the groundwork they lay out for the final year. So as a stop point, they may not hold much interest, but I can definitely see them be one of the comic’s most astute cogs once it’s done and over. As a two-parter finale, I like it more than the Imperial Phase (part I) finale : it’s more coherent in its construction and doesn’t try to bite off more than it can chew. It’s mostly plotpoints and twists, meaning it’s my least favourite kind of read, but once I’m able to put that aside to see it instead as a character work thread in a bigger design, it’ll probably hold my interest much more. But as of right now, I can at least commend it for how much it makes me want to reread everything from the beginning. Which I definitely do not have the time for right now. Damn you. Damn you all.

#wicdiv #seeds of thought #suprise fellow fans i bet you thought you'd seen the last of me

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Jonah Hill joins the Five-Timers Club on a uniformly funny Saturday Night Live

Tina Fey, Jonah Hill, Candice Bergen, Drew BarrymoreScreenshot: Saturday Night Live

“I guess the worst part of the play was their confidence in it.”

“I’m not an actor, I’m a [movie, Netflix, directing] star!

It’s be nice to think that Jonah Hill has fully stepped out of his pigeonhole at this point. A couple of Oscar nominations, co-lead in an hit Netflix series, writer-director of a promising new coming-of-age movie, Hill has emerged from the Apatow star factory still straddling the line between serious artist and broad comedy movie star. (Sort of like James Franco, except that people actually seem to like Hill’s directorial debut and no one—as of this writing—has accused Hill of being a sex creep.)

That dichotomy showed up in Hill’s monologue, as SNL legend Tina Fey ushered new Five-Timers Club member Hill into the selective lounge set, where fellow FTC members Candice Bergen and Drew Barrymore celebrated his entry by showing an old sketch where Hill’s character admits to doing some serious damage to a toilet. Protesting that he does more than toilet humor now (“But that’s where you shined!,” enthuses Bergen), the disappointed Hill can only endure an all-ladies Five-Timers welcome, since, according to Fey, Bergen, and Barrymore, all the male members have turned out to be, well, sex creeps. (Steve Martin will just play his banjo “without consent.”)

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Saturday Night LiveSeason 44

Fitted with the coveted FTC smoking jacket, Hill is disappointed to find that the new female leadership has refashioned it into something like a kicky boldero number. It’s a neat little way to incorporate Hill’s evolving comic persona while still trading on the downtrodden victim vibe he carries with him, especially once Kenan pops in to remind everyone that his record-breaking seniority carries its own privileges. “This is my show. I let you in here sometimes,” he responds to Hill questioning his presence in the Five-Timers lounge.

Over at Vulture, AV Clubber Jesse Hassenger recently did a ranking of the relatively rare phenomenon of SNL hosts’ recurring characters, and placed Hill’s Borscht Belt six-year-old Adam Grossman near the top. I get it. For one, the field isn’t exactly littered with gold (glad I’m not the only one sick of the Omletteville guy), with most of the bits weathering even faster than those done by the actual cast. But Grossman keeps working as well as he does because of a character throughline, as the garrulous little guy keeps tossing out his inexplicable Catskills schtick to his unlikely Benihana co-diners alongside a series of guardians indicating the unstable family life that’s somehow spawned such a weird creature. Here it’s forbearing nanny Leslie Jones, sighing deeply as she weathers Adam’s insult comic “I’m just kidding” one-liners as Grossman attempts to puncture any tension his borderline racist material generates by proclaiming his age (complete with specific and funny awkward hand gestures). It’s never been my favorite sketch, but Hill (who created the bit alongside Bill Hader and Seth Meyers, based on a bafflingly tracksuited child diner Hader once sat with) is into it, and he suggests the merest hints of the defensive mechanisms that are powering Adam’s transformation into a hacky joke machine, which always lends just enough shadings to the idea. Leslie kept breaking, but, then again, so did I.

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Weekend Update update

There was a certain elegance to the way SNL kept weaving themes through its political material tonight, with jokes about Trump’s “caravan of scary brown people” terror tactics, and the importance of voting on Tuesday reinforcing each other throughout. Jost and Che were on, each landing their material confidently. On the caravan (of desperate asylum seekers that are a thousand miles away), Jost noted how Trump’s sweatily named “Operation Faithful Patriot” (where American troops are needlessly stringing barbed wire for a piece of election eve fear-mongering theater) sounds like a company that makes “reverse mortgages and catheters.” (Fox News commercial viewers get that.) Che followed up on the race-baiting scare tactics by urging that the old white people being hyped about the looming but nonexistent threat should be more worried about the less-easily-scapegoated specter of their grandkids stealing their pain pills.

On the election front, Che continued his role as Update’s resident “slow your roll” skeptic, confessing that, while he does intend to vote (on Tuesday, November 6, kids), he’s not going to buy into any “final notice for democracy” panic. Joking that, if final notices were actually final, his college debts would actually be paid, Che, as ever, positions himself for the long view, an edgy place to be in a time of national crisis (see, there’s that panic), but one consistent with his stance as a (black) guy who’s been living in a dangerous situation his entire life. For Jost (white guy), the jokes were less pointed, but not bad, as he noted that things are pretty dire when ice cream is taking a side, and that it has to be a complicated feeling when Oprah knocks on your door, only to present you with a pamphlet about Georgia governor candidate Stacey Abrams instead of a new car.

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Pete Davidson has become such a strange star on SNL, his very public statements about his battles with mental health and substance abuse and the recent ongoing saga of his tabloid-fodder relationship with now-ex Ariana Grande have made Davidson more of a personality star than anyone I can think of in SNL history. Pete’s never been the most polished sketch guy (although he’s improved), and his Update pieces as himself have always been his best showcase, especially since he’s sharpened up his material beyond the adorable stoner little brother schtick he started out with. Here, with newly-dyed hair and the elephant of his recent, much-publicized breakup hanging over his head, Davidson delivered a solid series of political takedowns in advance of the Tuesday midterm elections. Sure, they were all cheeky appearance smack (NY Republican Peter King looks like “a cigar came to life,” Florida candidate Rick Scott looks like “if someone tried to whittle Bruce Willis out of a penis”), but, for a young comic staking out political material for the first time in his life, it’s funny stuff. And since SNL has made hay all season long about Davidson’s rising media profile, his genuinely sweet and decent-sounding appraisal of ex Grande was both de rigeur and unexpectedly touching.

Melissa Villaseñor made the leap to the main cast this year, but hasn’t had much opportunity to show off her mimicry skills or her comic chops much on the young season. So, taking a page out of Heidi Gardner’s playbook, she debuted a specifically targeted character piece on Update, with her “Every Teen Girl Murder Suspect on Law & Order.” Honestly, it’s such a specific Gardner niche at this point that I was surprised to see Villaseñor in the chair, but Melissa did fine, as her Brittany—ostensibly there to talk about young adult literature—squirmed and equivocated about what happened to her friend Logan at that “big alcohol party.” Not to harp on the comparison, but Brittany wasn’t as immediately memorable as any of Gardner’s similar turns, even if Villaseñor delivered on the premise with a uniformly strong performance.

Just when I think I’m tired of Kenan Thompson’s Big Papi, he pulls me back in. It helps that there’s a reason for his appearance tonight, as, you know, the Red Sox won the World Series again. (That’s, like, what, four in 15 years, right? Huh. Cool.) Petty sports partisanship aside, Kenan’s performance as retired and beloved Boston slugger David Ortiz has never been the problem. Kenan’s Ortiz, with his nonsensical endorsements, gap-toothed ebullience, and food obsession, is an all-time belly laugh, his infectious enthusiasm for baseball, food, his spokesman deal for the concept of spokes, and simply being Big Papi is impossible to hate. (Presumably even for Yankees fans, whose team got clobbered in the ALDS 3-1, including a humiliating 61-1 loss on their home diamond.) But the jokes don’t change much (as in, at all). Thankfully, it’s been a while, the Sox won the series, and it was nice to see the big lug again. Mofongo all around.

Best/worst sketch of the night

Look, some of you are going to clamor for a “worst” tag on Kate McKinnon’s teacher sketch. You’ll point to both its unexplained weirdness and its languorous pace, and how it never quite announces its authority as something that should appear as early in the show as it did. Well, shush. This was great stuff, not as much for the sketch itself (it really could have used more writing punch to match McKinnon’s performance), as for how it represents the sort of oddball conceptual idea Saturday Night Live desperately needs to encourage. The premise of someone acting weird while other people comment on it is hardly new SNL territory, but, as McKinnon’s overly dramatic drivers ed teacher sprawls on the classroom floor and rambles on about her predicament and its meaning, it was like a cool drink to realize that the sketch wasn’t going to go out of its way to hammer the premise home with explanations for the slowest possible viewer. It was just weird for weird’s sake, and McKinnon, accusing her charges at laughing at her “like this was some episode of Friend,” worked within the framework of the sketch to craft an enigmatically loopy character whose comic integrity isn’t over-explained. There is room on SNL for a lot more shades of humor than its current template generally allows.

This week’s branded content sketch, on the other hand, was pretty unnecessary, even if some of the performances livened it up a little, as another NBC property got some free advertising. Not watching interminably long-running televised talent shows as a rule, I’m not particularly invested in how the celebrity judges were impersonated here (although Kyle Mooney’s perpetually amazed Howie Mandel got a laugh). But at least the joke that there are only a very few possible narratives to every contestant’s journey on such shows took the piss a bit, and Cecily Strong, Kenan and Leslie, and Jonah Hill all sang their hearts out as the contestants who are probably terrible—but then are shockingly not terrible!

Also not terrible but not that surprising was the newscast sketch, where Cecily Strong’s weatherperson is nonplussed by boyfriend Hill’s decidedly unwelcome on-air proposal. Hill manages to create a nicely realized character is his unimpressive suitor, unwisely wearing a green shirt in front of Strong’s green screen and even more unwisely busting out a proposal rap. And the bit even has a decent turn, when Strong reveals that her refusal was only because she’d planned an elaborate on-air proposal of her own. I kept waiting for the reveal that Strong’s too-perfect twist was only in the downtrodden Hill’s head, but the sketch decided to let the improbable duo have their happy ending, so that’s nice.

“What do you call that act?” “The Californians!”—Recurring sketch report

Adam Grossman, Big Papi.

“It was my understanding there would be no math”—Political comedy report

With SNL’s resident guest Trump Alec Baldwin otherwise occupied (and pointedly joked about), the show opened with the always more-profitable tack of doing Trump without Trump. With Kate McKinnon adding Fox News talking head and smirking white supremacist Laura Ingraham’s glint-eyed provocation to her long list of current right-wing a-holes (“No, you’re an a-hole,” McKinnon’s Ingraham responds to her viewer mail), the sketch ran through the usual roster of weekly outrages. Finding ways to satirize the news at this point is a thankless task since reality is so far beyond satire that our pals at The Onion can essentially just transcribe stuff. Here, the jokes leant on hyperbole to make comedy out of Fox and friends’ (and Fox And Friends’) daily klaxon blare of racist bullshit designed to make white parents vote against their self-interest. Like Trump’s ginned-up, racist, Hail Mary, pre-midterms caravan, which Cecily Strong’s appropriately wild-eyed Jeanine Pirro’s claims contains such terrifying, non-white figures as “Guatemalans, Mexicans, the Menendez brothers, the 1990 Detroit Pistons, Thanos, and several Babadooks.” Similarly, Kenan Thompson’s cowboy-hat-wearing disgraced former Sheriff David Clarke showed footage of the caravan in the form of a swarm of migrating crabs. “And those are humans?,” gently presses McKinnon’s Ingraham, to which Clarke replies, “Basically, yeah.”

Unlike Baldwin’s uninspired Trump, which serves as a crutch for some very one-dimensional writing as a rule, the satire here is more layered. There are the performances, which are uniformly great. (McKinnon and Strong don’t need more praise at this point, but they are both outstanding, nuanced comic actresses). And the sketch casts a wider net, encompassing Ingraham’s fleeing sponsors (and the reason why), leaving her thanking warm ice cream, nurse’s sneakers, and White Castle. (“A castle for whites? Yes please.”) And, divorced for now by Baldwin/Trump’s absence, the cold open works to lay the groundwork for some recurring satirical themes for the rest of the show. There’s GOP voter suppression, here prodded along by Ingraham giving non-white voters the wrong advice. There’s Fox’s feverish efforts to mock the very idea that Donald Trump is a bigot. (“Except for his words and actions throughout his life how is he racist?”) And there’s the transparent propaganda of Trump’s latest “brown people are coming at you from below” propaganda, with McKinnon claiming that Trump’s try-hard gung-ho operation is actually named “Operation Eagle With A Huge Dong” and bragging that there will be “five armed soldiers for every shoeless immigrant child.”

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Hey, there’s a midterm election coming up on Tuesday, so vote in that. Pete Davidson ended his amiably goofy Update stint by urging everyone to vote, as did musical guest Maggie Rogers (via T-shirt), and, in the Vote Blue campaign ad, so did a roster of very fucking nervous Democrats. While polling shows that maybe, perhaps, enough Americans are motivated, pissed, and goddamned terrified enough to actually go out and vote on Tuesday (yes, this coming Tuesday, you) to put some checks in place against Donald Trump and his GOP accomplices in dismantling democratic norms, environmental regulations, and civil rights of any kind, well, we’ve seen sweaty Democratic overconfidence explode in our faces before. That’s the message here, as the person-on-the-street interviews parroting optimistic election messages all veer into a series of forced grins, shaking hands, binge-drinking, eyes-averted mumbling, and, in the case of Heidi Gardner’s tremble-voiced suburban mom, hair-trigger panic. “Get inside until Tuesday!,” she snaps at her frolicking children, while Hill’s anxious doctor tries to take comfort in the fact that Nancy Pelosi predicted a big victory on Colbert, and Leslie Jones grits her teeth in her stated faith that “white women are going to the right thing this time.” Pitch perfect stuff, right down to Aidy Bryant hauling off to slap teenaged son Pete Davidson when he jokes about forgetting when Election Day is. (It’s Tuesday. November 6. Check here for all the necessary info you need to vote. On Tuesday.)

“HuckaPM” continued SNL’s baffling comedy position that literally every woman involved in the Trump administration is secretly ashamed of her role in, well, every shitty thing Trump and the Republican Party does. You know, despite the fact that there is no evidence to that in the public or private actions of any of them, including (or especially) the sketch’s target, White House Press Secretary and sneering daily mouthpiece for whatever bigoted nonsense dribbles out of Trump’s Twitter account in the middle of the night, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Still, this sketch works because of Aidy. Good god, is Aidy Bryant great at physical comedy. Even if one can’t follow the show’s premise that there is some glimmer of humanity in Sanders’ soul somewhere, Aidy sells the hell out of the idea that only a sleeping pill loaded with quaaludes and “what Michael Jackson’s doctor called ‘one-and-dones’” can knock Sanders out after a day of claiming that “CNN spelled backward is ISIS” and that Trump’s caravan boogeymen includes ravenous chupacabras with a trio of outstandingly timed and committed falls. Sometimes performance overcomes everything else.

The off-Broadway show short film trafficked in a sort of joke that never doesn’t work on me, so I’m going to allow myself to be pandered to. The main joke—that an actor-written topical revue is not very well written—is fine. (I loved how at least two of the numbers shamelessly aped Hamilton). But I’m just a sucker for jokes where scathing review blurbs are read out as if they’re raves by an enthusiastic voice-over guy, and these had me laughing. “This is helping no one,” and “Whose parents paid for this?” were good, but the New York Times critic’s economical “Jesus Christ!” got me out loud.

I am hip to the musics of today

Maggie Rogers came out flat in her SNL debut. Like, vocally, very flat for her first song of lilting, pretty pop. It was the sort of wobbly beginning that could knock a fledgeling performer right off her pins, but, to her credit, Rogers came back stronger in the second number. It helped that that song was more uptempo and didn’t highlight a delicate introductory vocal, but, still, props to Rogers for pulling it together. As Adam Grossman might bellow, “Redemption song!”

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Ego Nwodim got a line. Keep plugging, new kid.

Otherwise, in an exceptionally strong night for the female cast, Kate wins it by a whisker, edging out Cecily and Aidy.

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“What the hell is that thing?”—The Ten-To-Oneland Report

While it’s no “Whiskers R We,” “Wigs For Pugs” ably carried on the ten-to-one tradition of doing adorably weird stuff with animals, as Hill and Cecily Strong played a couple of clearly mobbed-up entrepreneurs whose pug toupee business is in no way “a front for something.” Mainly, it’s just pugs in wigs, with a succession of very chill pugs getting carried out in their hairy finery, but sometimes that’s enough. And Hill, Strong, Aidy, Mooney, and Kenan (as a guy making pug beards) are thoroughly committed to their characters in a broad yet deadpan way that adds another level to the premise. Pugs in wigs. What more do you need, people?

Stray observations

Kenan’s Clarke cites his caravan sources as “the crows from Dumbo,” echoing Clarke’s description of his current state as “unpopular with my own people.”

McKinnon’s Ingraham refers to Baldwin as “disgraced former actor Alec Baldwin” and shows a clip from “Canteen Boy” to explain.

Che claims that the country would be doing better if red state parents would stop “sending all their liberal kids to coastal cities to do improv.”

Pete Davidson, addressing his new blue hair, claims he looks like “a guy who makes vape juice in a bathtub,” and “a Dr. Seuss character who went to prison.”

Melissa Villaseñor’s teen suspect finally breaks down, telling Jost that she only stabbed her dead friend as a joke, “but Logan took it the wrong way and started bleeding.”

Big Papi for Apple Watch: “You gotta watch your apples or a monkey’s gonna steal them, man!”

Vote on Tuesday.

The Red Sox won the World Series.

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Source: https://tv.avclub.com/jonah-hill-joins-the-five-timers-club-on-a-uniformly-fu-1830206395