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recurringwriter · 3 years

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just curious, and i don't mean this in an inflammatory way, but what are your thoughts on Gilbert? just a boring and bad dad or do you see some nuance in him?

(you seem to be the Faerghus Dad expert so that's why I'm asking LOL)

kjsfghfkh i'm not sure what you mean by 'inflammatory way' but i have always had very strong feelings about him aksjgh 'faerghus dad expert' ahhhhh so this is my legacy.. full disclosure i am not a fan of his. apparently this is a ramble! off we go:

so my first impression of gilbert when i played VW was something like this: "WHO is this ridiculous old ginger man? I love him. look at his little grey streaks. he's so old. yes of course i will steal a book on woodworking from petra's room for you. here is your. your noseless. puppet. that you lost. oldguy. when will you be mine? oh please join my army". because apparently i like oldguy characters more than i realized. and then i learned that he DOESN'T join you in VW! and i was looking forward very much to AM and finally meeting this hilarious geriatric knight.

i was So Disappointed. no disrespect to the Gilbert fans out there, but i just cannot feel any sympathy for him.

First, i realize that he's abandoned Annette. 'Okay, but I'm sure that he's got a reason'. his reason? 'I'm too C*th*l*c to apologize and be happy, I must Suffer Penance blah blah I'm old and boring blah'. uggggghhh. i can't relate. if you did wrong, work to do better. it's simple. I get to the reunion at dawn battle. and there's Gilbert. all right, interesting! i wasn't expecting that! where's Dedue, though? Dedue's not here. He'll be back though i'm sure. Gilbert's just filling in--

After the pre-timeskip silliness, Gilbert was so. boring. i don't even want to call him a dad, because he really takes every opportunity to deny that he is. he was dedicated to One Person like hubert but without the menace that makes him entertaining, or the kindness that makes me fond of Dedue. he's just. old. and does whatever pre-gronder dimitri says. and doesn't even try to help. and he's armoured and slow and bad to Annette...

i'm sure there's potential to write him as tortured and regretful. i'm sure that all the letters he never sent to Annette are very emotional. but i let my hopes for him get too high and so i think it'd be a Lot of Work for me to try and be sympathetic to him. and similarly to Rodrigue, he's aware of his mistakes, but doesn't do squat about them, which is why i hate Rodrigue, but i also love that i can try and puzzle out ways to fix things. Annette literally chases after Gilbert and he runs away. he's so selfish about his shame, and i read an analysis about how his behaviour would come across differently to the audience in Japan, but from my experience and viewpoint, he just comes across as being very content to inflict self-punishment since it's easier than trying to make things better with his family.

again! i thought his potential was good. his design is great and interested me from the get-go. but i find him a bore. and unlike a certain wavy-haired idiot i don't really know how to go about getting him to make things right with Annette in a way that i'd find satisfying. he's so obsessed with how he deserves punishment that i kind of. agreed with him. i just wish that it didn't come at the cost of hurting Annette.

#not tagging him because i wouldn't want his 3 fans to see #i Wanted to like him. very badly. but he's just absolutely not my Type personality-wise.#i'd be really interested to see how his fans would write him and if it would fix some of my bad impressions

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cruelfeline · 3 years

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i don't remember the post, but i once saw a cool drawing of hordak in a dress and then somebody commented on it saying it was transphobic? i personally disagree with that, but you're kind of the hordak expert here so i'd like to know your thoughts on it (if you don't mind). thanks!

Jiminy Christmas; I’m no Hordak expert! I just... really, really want to snuggle that spacebat. But!

I’m willing to provide thoughts, if you want them. Keep in mind that I’m not trans, so I don’t know how useful my thoughts are, but... well, I can provide them, and others can decide if they’re useful or not.

I can understand this claim in two ways:

1. It is transphobic because Hordak is a man, and making him wear a dress is some sort of... I don’t know... like, once upon a time, it was used as a joke, y’know? Men wearing dresses was supposed to be ridiculous and comedic, and it was used as a sort of gag on other shows. It was supposed to be absurd, right? So it’s not so much that Hordak is wearing the dress, it’s that an apparently male character is wearing a dress.

I don’t really buy this because (a) none of it is played for ridicule: Hordak just wears a dress because that’s what he wears, and it’s not a joke. It’s just... a complete non-issue. Neutral in humor. And (b) Hordak is an alien clone who probably does not have the same understanding or interest in gender that humans have. Because he is not a human. And can easily be interpreted as gender non-conforming. So he’s not “a silly human man wearing a dress because ha ha men look silly in dresses.” He’s an alien that kind of looks like a human male but doesn’t subscribe to any human gender “rules,” making the whole argument a moot point.

2. It is transphobic because Hordak is a villain (evil colonizer, blah blah blah), and thus it is bad to portray a gender nonconforming individual as a villain because it puts such individuals in a bad light. This is the same sort of complaint I see about Double Trouble: they’re a gross lizard person, so they’re bad rep.

This is obviously nonsense to me because I don’t think of Hordak as a simple “villainous colonizer”; rather, I think of him as an emotionally complex character with an excellent arc and plenty to love about him. I wouldn’t find it insulting, for example, to be compared to him.

So! I don’t think it’s transphobic for Hordak to wear a dress. And I think most other fans don’t, either. But if there’s a trans person out there who does, for whatever reason, well: they have more experience in the field than I do. So I’d probably take into account their assessment as well.

Also, if anything in this post is unsavory in any way, it is not on purpose; there may be nuances and matters I don’t know to take into account because, again: I’m not trans. So please forgive me if I misstep!

#Anonymous

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kindestegg · 5 years

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Oh this is something ive been thinking about recently so ill just make a post about it bc it might be interesting (?) To some. Like if you care about media analysis n symbolism n all.

So like in deltarune, something hit me about the four main characters, kris, ralsei, susie, lancer.

They all begin their journey with their faces covered.

Kris and susie have their hair covering their eyes, ralsei wears his hat which obscures his features and lancers hoodie (?) Casts a shadow over his eyes.

And most interestingly, susie and ralseis sprites begin to show their faces around the end of chapter 1, and if the sprites toby posted at the alternate version of lost girl are anything to go by, they will continue fully showing their faces. The same however cannot be said about kris and lancer.

Lancer because, well, at no moment we see a face reveal from him, unless you count that One Joke Sprite, which hardly seems like an actual reveal. But kris is particularly interesting here, because they DO have a brief show of their face at the end of chapter 1... and yet the one screenshot we have of them in presumably chapter 2 still has their face covered, and nothing seems changed.

I am unsure of what exactly this all could mean, or if it even IS intentional symbolism at all or not. But if i had to make a guess, id say it is a showcase of evolution in a characters arc. In chapter 1, susie learns to change how she interacts with the world around her and ralsei as well gains a more nuanced view towards fighting or lack thereof.

Its hard to say if lancer goes through any change. Part of me wants to say the journey DID change him, but i also feel that overall there was not much to change in the first place. He really is a silly little prince.

And kris? Again, a very complicated case. You might think "oh kris is being controlled by us and our actions dont matter and all blah blah so of course nothing changed right" and youd be right... to an extent. Just like kris only has a brief showcase of their face, this would reflect how, although their actions were limited and controlled, stumping character progress, they did undergo change, but a forced change. The characters around town say kris is acting different when you talk to them. And that would be our doing. So it would make sense that, if we are the soul and not kris themselves, that the only time they would show their face to signify change in character would be when they forcibly remove us.

#Commander's orders

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loreweaver-universe · 6 years

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Y’know, today I feel like talking about Disgaea, specifically my problems with Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance.

Spoilers for Disgaea 1, 2, 5, and Makai Kingdom, I guess.

So, first off, let’s talk about...

The Narrative.

Disgaea 5 tells the tale of edgelord Squall Leonhart wannabe Killia, a former asshole who got redeemed by falling in love with the daughter of the only demon to ever give him a proper ass-thrashing, who spent his time teaching Killia how to find inner peace blah blah blah it’s actually pretty bland. Killia speaks in a constant monotone, half-heartedly tries to get his rapidly accumulating party of Overlord-level demon pals to leave him the hell alone, and is generally just really goddamn boring. It’s not to say this kind of character can’t be interesting--in fact, I name-dropped Squall earlier, and until Final Fantasy VIII went completely off the rails in the second disc he was a legitimately nuanced character and I was interested in seeing where he went. Here’s the problem with all that, though:

The Disgaea series is a parody.

Now, full disclaimer--I’ve only played Disgaea 1, 2, 5, and Makai Kingdom. I have Disgaea 3 and 4, but I haven’t been able to secure a PS3 to play them on yet, so I’m leaving those out of the discussion (though from what I’m aware those are parodies as well.) However, of the four games I have played, Disgaea 5 stands out as being the only one of them to really take itself seriously.

Well, 2 did as well to a certain extent, but other than the looming issue of “we’re trying to off your evil dad, Rozalin,” Disgaea 2 takes itself about as seriously as Disgaea 1 did, and Disgaea 1 is a farce.

A beautiful, glorious, hilarious, one hundred percent intentional farce.

Laharl is a ridiculous creature. He’s petty, narcissistic, and childish, and while there are serious story beats (Etna being blackmailed, that asshole Angel stealing Flonne’s protective pendant, etc) Laharl never stops mocking his foes, his friends, and the genre itself. Disgaea 1, in short, is taking the piss, parodying the most ridiculous parts of anime and JRPGs (and, hell, American raygun gothic) with delightful glee...which is why, when things turn deadly fucking serious in the final chapter, it’s so goddamn heart-wrenching and effective. That slow burn of Laharl growing to care about Flonne enough that he tears the Heavenly Host several new assholes to try to save her from their judgment (and, even in the best ending, has to talk himself down from murdering the head angel in cold blood because she wouldn’t have wanted him to take revenge for her sake) is one of the most effective tonal twists in the history of media, in my opinion: all of a sudden, it’s not funny anymore.

While Disgaea 1 lampooned the genre as a whole, Disgaea 2 takes a different tack, and lampoons common anime/JRPG character archetypes. The hot-blooded, idiotically honorable melee fighter; the spoiled rich brat of a princess; the annoyingly perverted goblin of a third wheel (and, ugh, I wish that archetype would die already), the plucky little kids who are the least innocent characters in the whole crew other than the aforementioned perv goblin, on and on and on. The goal may be serious, but the characters are almost as silly as they were in Disgaea 1, and I actually think 2 manages an even better balance of humor and compelling storytelling than 1, because not only is the romance between Adell and Rozalin natural, enjoyable, and endearing, the dramatic beats come along without undermining the sheer silliness of our protagonists until it can have the most impact. There’s a moment in one of the later chapters where Laharl from the first game appears without warning, pissed off, heavily geared, and more than a thousand levels your superior.

(Yes, I said a THOUSAND levels. For those of you in the audience who aren’t familiar with the series, the level cap is 9999, and you can reset a character to level 1, storing attained levels for bonus stats. I’ll be talking about the grind later, don’t you worry.)

The encounter with Laharl accomplishes several things over the course of the two fights with him: it delivers a joyful reunion with the protagonist of the first game, which turns to terror when you see his stats, which turns to horror as you send your team into the meat grinder to die helplessly...and then it shows us that something is frighteningly wrong with Rozalin as she is seemingly possessed and tears this impossible foe apart effortlessly. From there the story really kicks into high gear, and like Disgaea 1, transitions into a deadly serious final assault on Zenon’s stronghold, but unlike Disgaea 1 it’s not a shocking swerve in tone--the story’s been building to this over time, gradually reconstructing the genre it gleefully tore to pieces over the previous game and a half.

Makai Kingdom is a very different affair, and can actually be most closely contrasted with Disgaea 5. In the Disgaeaverse, an “Overlord” is a very powerful demon who rules a pocket dimension called a “Netherworld.” Laharl’s an Overlord, for example. Makai Kingdom deals with a set of protagonists on a whole other level of power; these are the Overlords that other Overlords view as gods, and they essentially sit around on their asses playing card games and throwing popcorn at their TV.

I think you can see where I’m going with this.

Makai Kingdom is a return to Disgaea 1′s attitude--relentless silliness, mockery of itself, with a sharp turn at the end. Whether it accomplishes this goal as well as Disgaea 1 isn’t all that relevant, but it is something we can compare to Disgaea 5.

Disgaea 5 starts off similarly--hideously powerful Overlord-level demons gather together, but the characters are...not exactly dour, but played straight, I guess. There’s no parody, no lampooning; it’s very stock JRPG comedy (and “comedy”), with dramatic tension, a serious approach to its story and antagonists, and predictable story beats obvious to anyone who’s ever seen a mediocre anime or played a mediocre JRPG. Hell, the main villain’s name is Void Dark, and not a single character makes fun of that! There are some interesting designs, and I actually think Majorita is a compelling villain for Usalia, who I likewise enjoy immensely, but the story abandons almost everything that made the previous games’ plots entertaining. Topple an empire, murder some baddies, get your homes back, save your dead love from the creepy brother with the incestuous undertones. That’s it. That’s all. As a story structure, it works just fine, and as evidenced by my love for the rest of the series I absolutely think challenging established conventions is a good thing, but it doesn’t do so successfully enough that it stands out as a worthy entry in the series. Where it does shine is in improvements to gameplay quality-of-life and beautiful animation, which brings me to...

The Gameplay.

Disgaea 5 improves the UI, adds all sorts of neat little quirks to character customization, and improves game control substantially. It adds extra ways to gain stat points (like I said before, character levels cap at 9999 and can be stored for stat bonuses--this game also allows you to train stats for stat points via minigames) and is just generally more in-depth than its predecessors...at the cost of being stupidly easy to grind out.

Yes, I think an easier grind is a bad thing. Let me explain: I have over ten thousand hours in Disgaea 2 alone over the last twelve years. I picked the first two games up when Disgaea 2 was brand new, and have beaten the game dozens of times in the intervening span. Most recently, about five years ago, I created a save file on the PSP port of the game, and I spend idle trips or the time I’m falling asleep grinding it out as kind of an idle game.

Literally everything you do in a Disgaea game gets you experience for something. Weapon mastery, skill exp, character exp, you name it. Hell, you can run randomized dungeons inside your items to level those up, too. It’s incredibly satisfying and makes for a constant sense of progression--even if you don’t level up in a fight you’ve still gotten experience points for the skills and weapons you’ve used, making it stronger, more effective, etc. My personal goal is to, eventually, have one of every character class maxed out on stored levels and every skill and weapon proficiency in the game, which is a deliberately impossible task because it’s just so much fun to chase it forever.

Here’s the other thing: the Disgaea series, due to the ludicrous level cap, is known for its absurdly deep pool of ever-stronger bonus bosses, stretching, yes, all the way up to the level cap. The hunt for those is likewise extremely satisfying, and takes quite a while, especially since the campaign usually caps out at around levels 70-90.

With all this in mind, imagine my dismay when I realized I was blowing through skill and weapon exp and hitting the caps on everything in a tiny percentage of the time I was expecting. To be fair, there is a “Cheat Shop” NPC who can adjust the EXP you gain up and down, which is neat, but I have to crank it down to literally single-digit percentages of normal to get the same amount of chase-time out of it. This is not to say that the game should be inaccessibly grindy; in fact, Disgaea 1 and 2 aren’t. The story campaigns in those games are perfectly completable with the normal skill progression and a small but admittedly grindy amount of extra leveling in unlocked areas. It’s all the extreme bonus content that’s gated behind the postgame grind, and the huge ceiling on skill levels and weapon proficiencies means you’re constantly rising in power and challenging new heights. I think that’s a fantastic reward for being dedicated to the game! And Disgaea 5 in its default state takes that away. I had a character capped out on all proficiencies, subclasses, and aptitudes within my first hundred hours of the game.

It was...disappointing, I guess. All around, mostly; for every step forward it took, it also took a step back. Ultimately, the story takes a backseat to my points about the grind, because the campaign in any Disgaeaverse game is literally about 2% of the game’s content. Disgaea 5 took my grind from me, and that’s why I’m salty enough to have just spent an hour typing up a book report on its failings, I guess.

#disgaea #disgaea 5 #disgaea spoilers #disgaea 2 #makai kingdom #bloggin #inbetween

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bwlgeo · 6 years

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Tales from the HUCU: Harvest Love Review

Disclaimer: This review is done from memory after a single viewing. There are likely factual errors and misinterpretations abound.

My mother is a huge fan of Hallmark movies. When I say she’s a huge fan, I mean that as she sits, doing clerical work for her job and talking to my sister from halfway across the country, she will absentmindedly leave the Hallmark channel on in between sporadic marathons of Law & Order and Matlock and watch the original films Hallmark has managed to secrete. Now I love my mother, so one day I decided to join her on one of these watching sessions.

So, the two of us sat together and slogged through the Fall Harvest Hallmark original movie marathon. The first indication that this would be no petty feat was that this marathon ran from seven in the morning to eleven at night (at which point it was promptly euthanized by a two hour block of Golden Girls). What this means is that Hallmark channel had, to that point, created enough two hour long movies themed specifically around the Fall Harvest to fill a sixteen hour block. That is eight films, all with different characters, actors, settings, and “plots,” that all focus very pointedly and unflinchingly on the Fall Harvest. Luckily, I was spared from the labyrinthine sprawl of the entire marathon, and sat down to begin watching around three in the afternoon. I was thrown in about twenty minutes into an absolute glorious gem of a film titled Harvest Love.

So first let’s talk about the cast. I had my predictions about Hallmark movie casts, and they were absolutely one hundred percent correct. All of the protagonists are women, all of these women are in their late thirties to early forties, and all of them are tall, attractive white women. There is always, and there always will be, a “best friend character.” The best friend is perpetually and unflinchingly: younger, homelier, shorter, with darker hair, and maybe, maybe, if the stars align and the ancients decree it, they can be a minority (oh we’ll get to that, don’t worry). There is a beautiful juxtaposition in costume design between the leads and their parasitic lesser halves wherein the leads are dressed in the manner of an early two-thousands Macy’s magazine model, all suit jackets and jeans, and the subspecies’ clothing resembles that of a nineteen sixties chemistry professor, a sea of faded cardigans. This, as I have indicated by my vernacular, is to demonstrate the clear antiquated “alpha > beta” setup of these relationships. These best friend characters’ lives do not matter. They receive no characterization, no development, and no focus. The only purpose of the best friend character in these films is to give a target to our protagonist’s lazy and lengthy exposition. In fact, the best friend characters are rarely able to get a word in edgewise. The best friend characters are inevitably either single, or in a completely blatant, uncharacterized marriage with a blatant, uncharacterized man. This brings us to the second part of the cast: the men.

Hoo boy, the men in these movies. If someone had pitched Hallmark channel original films to me as spinoffs of the Westworld franchise in which women can pay absurd sums of money to spend painfully scripted romantic halcyon days with woefully boring attractive synthetic men, it would be very difficult to then prove to me that this summary was not true. These leading men are synonymous, symmetrical, and all unfathomably, infallibly, detestably boring. I actually began to feel simultaneously sorry for and angry with the casting director, whose job must be either immensely boring, or take place in a cloning laboratory. There is one slight (read: not enough) saving grace to the male leads when compared to the female leads, and that is that they are allowed to be ever-so-slightly ethnic in appearance. This is not to say that there are any African American or Asian leading men, GOD no, that would be RIDICULOUS, right? No, but every so often you’ll have a leading man with a smoldering tan (I tend to defer to the adjective “smoldering” when describing these men because if these movies cannot be bothered to diversify their cast then I cannot be bothered to diversify my vocabulary). Sure, these men are as attractive as Greek statues, but they contain equal parts personality. Oh, and there sure are a whole fucking lot of single father doctor/farmer/lawyer/all around demigods with no personality in the bizarre Hallmark Universe Cinematic Universe (the HUCU for short).

I’ve talked a bit about the diversity in these films, so let’s focus on that for a while, shall we? Fuck. Me. Throughout the four films I watched, the eight hours of time I spent in a hideous Sisyphean trap, unable to pull myself away from the screen, I saw: one southeast Asian character, and three African American characters. That’s it. There are two leads per movie, one best friend per movie, one “boyfriend” in three of the movies (we’ll talk about these poor bastards in another review), four children characters across the films (we will also talk about these poor bastards later), and, on average, four extra side characters per movie. That is thirty-five total characters across my night, and four of those characters are people of color. Of those people of color, only one manages to make billing on the film for playing the oh-so-dynamic and nuanced role of “Asian best friend” in Love Struck Cafe. OH BUT FUCKING WAIT. She’s not the REAL best friend character, she is the red herring work best friend. Once the lead gets out into the country she meets her REAL and WHITE best friend. OF COURSE, HOW SILLY OF ME. But this review is not about Love Struck Cafe, it is about Harvest Love, so let’s try to stay on topic.

Harvest Love is a post-apocalyptic film about a single mother fighting tooth and nail to protect her son from the psychotic brigands in neighboring areas to the small area of farmland where she has managed to scrounge together a group of pear trees (I wrote this sentence as a joke, but now I really want this to be the real summary). No, Harvest Love is about a single mother named Luna inheriting a massive pear farm estate out in the middle of fuck you because fuck you. Anyway, she and her son, still grieving the loss of her husband, move out to this pear farm to get away from her job as the BEST FUCKING SURGEON her hospital has ever seen. We know her husband has died because it is told to us explicitly and repeatedly. Any chance to infer this loss from context or acting is annihilated by the fact that the actress could not be bothered to show a single sign of grief. We also learn pretty early on that this mother is real negligent of her son (Again, we only know this because the characters tell us this). She misses baseball games, and recitals, and blah blah blah. But again, the movie doesn’t show us any of this. Instead, they have our protagonist explain multiple times to her son how sorry she is that she misses all of these events.

These scenes, which I hypothesize are supposed to be emotional, fall flat for two reasons. The first reason is that this child is a blank mask of paper mache, and the second reason is that someone, be it the director, the screenwriter, or the actress playing Luna herself, decided that Luna should never, ever, ever stop smiling. I swear, should the very ground open up beneath her feet, should her love interest be revealed to be a serial murderer (we’ll get to that), should the stars literally crash into the Earth, Luna would be floating in the vacuum of space, alone and breathless, smile carved into her face, baring her obnoxiously perfect teeth to the whole universe. This isn’t to say the actress portraying Luna is bad. No, Jen Lilley puts in an absolutely mediocre performance adequately showing the spectrum of emotions from happy to blissful throughout the film. It can at least be said that she puts forth the effort to act.

The same cannot be said of her alternate half, Ryan Paevey. First, let me say that I literally had to look up the name of his character because the film had given me neither reason nor indication to remember anything about this man other than the fact that he, too, is a genius scientist stuck out in the middle of fuck you for reasons that are fuck you. Of all of the men I encountered that night, good old Ryan is by far the most boring. The male lead of Falling for Vermont is a serial murderer straight out of Dexter, the lead in Love Struck Cafe is at least a Walmart brand American Thomas Kretschmann, and, in turn, the male lead of Harvest Wedding looked so strained and furious that he could snap any second. Poor Ryan doesn’t have the luxury (or more likely the talent) to display such depth. No, our lead love interest’s facial expressions range from smoldering confused face to smoldering face that isn’t supposed to be confused but looks confused anyway. Maybe at a few points he manages to snap his ceramic face into a smile, but otherwise, he simply smolders his way through the movie as he denies and decries our heroic stalker for three fourths of the movie’s run time.

This brings me to my next focus point: OH YEAH, Luna manages to win Will’s heart simply by BEING EVERYWHERE HE IS ALWAYS. Will works on their pear farm. I guess. Honestly I missed that part. But he lives in the shed. I guess. Again, I was fighting to stay conscious during this film. But he goes out and does the actual work while Luna stays in her house and laments how much she hates her job (smile never fading) and apologizes to her son for being a terrible parent (again, always smiling). Luna almost immediately forgets her dead husband and starts trying to jump Will’s bones, namely by following him out into the fields, following him out into town, stealing his ATV and following him into the fields again, breaking into the shed to spy on what he is doing (this last one we can forgive because it’s important to the plot. Sort of). Then, after an HOUR AND A HALF of “I just don’t think I’m ready for a relationship,” and scenes in which the director mistook “blankly staring at each other’s blank faces” for “sexual tension,” Luna finally manages to Stockholm the fuck out of Will into loving her.

Mmkay let’s talk about plot now. All of the events in this film are leading up to the Fall Harvest festival (OF COURSE, OF-FUCKING-COURSE), where there is a contest to see which farm can bring in the most pears, judged by a panel of renowned no seriously I’m not joking this is all true. The protagonist’s farm has been failing for these last few years, and there is supposed to be tension built up around whether or not our protagonist will succeed. There is a problem with this tension. The conflict is introduced in the form of Ronnie. Like all other men in these movies that aren’t protagonists, Ronnie is short, homely, whiney, and pitiable. This movie attempts to make Ronnie appear to be a villainous character. He shows up when Luna is happily describing to her son how sorry she is that she is a terrible fucking parent and he gloats about the festival. Luna states that, in the past, her farm has always won. Ronnie remarks that these last few years have been different. Luna says some other shit that I couldn’t care any less about and Ronnie walks away all dejected.

HOLY FUCK. Ronnie says to Luna that her farm has started to fail as a burn. Sure, maybe Ronnie doesn’t know what the fuck is up, but we, the audience, know that Luna’s farm is failing because her husband, the man who previously ran the farm, IS FUCKING DEAD. Normally this would be a completely devastating faux pas; it certainly stopped me in my tracks. But that’s right, Luna doesn’t give two shits about her dead husband now that she’s met her sexy scientist neighbor guy, it doesn’t even occur to either character that Ronnie just accidentally used Luna’s husband’s untimely death as a petty insult.

The movie then proceeds to give us more and more reasons to sympathize with Ronnie and DESPISE Luna. There is, of course, her general disregard for her son, her general disregard for her husband’s death, her general disregard for Will’s personal space, her general disregard for the law, her general disregard for her job (it has been two weeks since she abandoned her hospital, ignoring all of their calls), and her general disregard for anything resembling emotion, but there’s also the fact that every tidbit of information we receive about Luna and Ronnie’s past as childhood rivals indicates that Luna was a huge piece of shit to Ronnie. This isn’t the story of the little girl who got bullied getting back at the asshole who pulled her pigtails, this is the story of a malevolent psychopath returning to her hometown to finish the devastation she started on the town punching bag. Let’s talk about how she finishes this poor fucker off.

Like I’ve mentioned, Luna’s farm is failing. They can’t seem to grow pears efficiently. There’s a brief scene in which we are led to believe that Will is hiding something when he sneaks into the shed at night. The shed he owns. He goes into his own shed at night. For some baffling fucking reason, Luna finds this suspicious enough to BREAK INTO HIS SHED. She finds apples and beakers and shit. OH YEAH FUCK ME HOW COULD I FORGET-

-When Will first shows up, Luna tells her son “Oh yeah, why don’t you go with this complete stranger we’ve met once before and go explore these pear fields?” The little victim follows Will, thankfully doesn’t get kidnapped and eaten, and Will gives him an apple. This is confusing to Luna. An apple. Because “We don’t have any apple trees here.” So thus, there is no way he could have procured an apple. All of us simple folk tricked into watching this excuse for a movie are using basic level logic and presuming that he just, I don’t know, bought some fucking apples. BUT OF COURSE, WE ARE THE SIMPLE ONES-

After finding his apple meth lab, Luna confronts Will and he reveals that he has been working on secret hybrid pear-apples while tending the farm. Hybrid. Pear. Apples. So, when the harvest festival comes around, Luna tricks the whole town into helping her pick pears, Will cheats and brings shitton of people from out of town from some stupid fucking subplot about buying a new farm or something I forgot and his stupid fucking sci-fi pearapples, and they all cheer and laugh in Ronnie’s stupid ugly face. Haha, take that, Ronnie! Wait, why are we glad she beat Ronnie? She cheated and was all around a piece of shit to him and her son and her love interest and her husband’s memory. What the fuck is this Twilight Zone-ass world?

Let’s close off this wonderful and joyous review by talking about the single minority in this film. I would use this time to talk about the best friend and her husband characters, but they are so absolutely underdeveloped and underutilized that I can’t even remember what they look like (other than the fact that they are white and probably blonde). There is an elderly black man in the film, he lives somewhere and does something (I tried to remember, I really tried). His entire purpose in this film is to sit down with our protagonist on rocking chairs outside of their pear farm and exposit. No seriously. Luna asks this old man about her new sexy smoldering slightly-but-not-really ethnic neighbor and this old man proceeds to read off the character biography for Will that’s in the script’s liner notes. We, the audience, are granted an entire minute and a half long speech describing this faceless boring stupid sexy man’s backstory thanks to this film’s single person of color. So I’d like to dedicate this review to that poor man: Tom Pickett. In my eyes, Tom is the true hero of this film. Certainly not fucking Luna, not her dumb son whose name I forgot, not Will and his stupid sexy boring scientist face, not even Ronnie, whose misunderstanding of social conventions was endearing in a sociopathic murderer sort of way. No, Tom is the hero. For sitting there and mustering every ounce of his strength and willpower to slog through this film’s garbage fucking exposition even though all of the information he tells us is shit we could have easily surmised from context. Thanks Tom.

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