#and the people on the sidelines commenting on how it was a comedy/tragedy

[sexyglances]

How Water Is Used In Relation to Hyejin and Dusik and How it Narratively Unifies Them in Their Emotions

Hometown Cha Cha Cha uses Gongjin as a seaside town part of its narrative, so much so that the story feels like it would be incomplete without it, however, in addition, the drama also employs the use of water in other ways, especially during emotionally resonant scenes. Not only do both Hyejin and Dusik each go to the water when they want to go to find solace by themselves, but also, water holds significance when they are together, as its presence seems to be the equalizer in their relationship, washing away any artifices they may have put up and revealing them at their most basic emotional cores.

Hyejin and Dusik are their most carefree with each other when they are in the water together. Both in the beach rain scene and then later when they are washing the blankets together. It's those times when they, for at least a few brief moments, forget the pretenses they built their tenuous denial of attraction to each other on, and just allow themselves to be together. When they are splashing around in the water together, they are simply two people happy to exist in the presence of each other. They bask in the joy of being unencumbered by any of the supposed societal obligations, life philosophies, or whatever other baggage they usually carry with them as shields against showing their true selves. Of course, eventually, real life and their personal hang-ups come barging back in, but when the story has water involved, their dual attraction manifests at its most basic level.

Not there aren't other times they are attracted to the other person, like when Dusik was filling in at the supermarket and stared after Hyejin, or when Hyejin was looking at Dusik as he lay "asleep" while sick, but those incidents were more one-sided and didn't convey mutual attraction in those specific moments. Conversely, water seems to be often present when their attraction is mutual and sparks fly between them. It even happens during their drunken night. I doubt the kiss would have happened had Dusik not used the water from the condensation from the ice bucket as a way to cool his hands, and had he not used those water-cooled hands of his to cup Hyejin's face. That moment (with water in between them) indelibly brought them closer. Even how they met at the beginning of the drama had to do with her losing her shoe to the sea as she was alone, and then they were brought back together in a moment of unadulterated joy after he found the shoe while fishing and gave it back to her. Again, the story uses water as a catalyst for something more.

However, water is also used in isolating ways as well. It's when they are in or near the water by themselves that their individual melancholy hits the most. Both Hyejin and Dusik were each alone at the beach, both with pensive looks on their faces right before they first met as 30-something adults. They were at the beach to be alone in their own wistful thoughts, staring at the sea, lost in their own introspection before the sea brought them together via Hyejin's lost shoe. And a similar feeling was conveyed when they were at the waterfront at the same time (yet still separately) as teenagers as well. Even as children, Hyejin could feel the bittersweetness of an imminent goodbye to her mother at the seashore.

Also, remember the rain Dusik told Hyejin to find joy in because of its unexpected presence? How interesting that it is the next time it is raining, while Dusik is on a neighborhood patrol and he finds Hyejin and Seonghyun sharing an umbrella, that Dusik feels the most disconnected from Hyejin. Because this time with water present, he is separated from her. While she stays dry, he is the only one being drenched by the rain shower, alone, by himself. Even when Hyejin and Seonghyun invited him under the umbrella with them, he refused, keeping himself an outsider once again. He purposefully disconnected himself from them, and the water he said to embrace is the same water that he used to (at least subconsciously) wallow in his loneliness and distance from Hyejin in. And it's also the same rain that he insisted on not taking cover from that gave him the fever Hyejin worried about. His physical isolation in the rain literally made him physically sick, which dovetails in nicely with the emotional isolation they both have felt in their indivudual ruminations by the sea.

The closer the water is coming to them, the more acutely they feel their emotions, as the water itself moves from something they use as a tool for internal contemplation to a tool of external manifestations of feelings that can no longer be ignored.

#hometown cha cha cha #kdrama #meta #my meta #homcha meta #i didn't put it in the post but also interesting to note that dusik and seonghyun's most significant scene that includes water #is the one on the beach where dusik is trying to teach seonghyun to surf #and how it started with dusik not letting seonghyun get into the water at first #and then once they did it was kind of a disaster (and a bit contentious on dusik's part) #and the people on the sidelines commenting on how it was a comedy/tragedy #guess water is decidedly NOT a unifying force for those two love rivals

[snowtimeisbesttime]

Thoughts and questions (remix) on Friendsim Volume 14.

-Overall? Blessed volume. I love these two trolls and would die for them.

Karako:

-We finally know who is this: Karako Pierot, best clown! // And now that we know him, his singular old Troll Call bulletpoint has been replaced by assorted honks.

-Alternia’s plants, like most living (and unliving) things there, Also Want To Kill You.

-Why’s an imperial drone after him, though? The MC’s had their share of close encounters with drones (Kuprum and Folykl’s route, also Tegiri’s), but the way they described this one made me think it’s different to the others… It also apparently took Karako away in his bad end.

-this butt that has taken so many lives, finally saves one…

-“Man I’d really like to see some seadwellers soon” not like this :( . Assholes aside, it’s (re)confirmed that seadwellers are Really Fucking Tough, and also may have scales?? // considering the guy who got impaled by a bunch of plants and proceeded to worry about their clothes getting ruined, we've got two (2) methods to kill a seadweller: with a special knife coated in special poison and stabbed into a special place as seen in Polypa's route, or good ol' bisection, as demonstrated by Kanaya.

(-And therefore, Feferi probably died because of Eridan's Hope powers doing an asspull thingy (he believes they're Very Lethal so they are), more than because she got lasered through the chest. Then again didn't eridan also attack sollux with the same hopy lasers????? Was Feferi Unjustly Nerfed On Top Of Being Unjustly Sidelined)

-Does Karako not have a lusus? We know he was in Bronya’s nursery (because he’s too small for a purpleblood, apparently?), but if I remember correctly, after the wigglers got stronger in the nursery they’d be taken back to the Caverns proper and make their cocoons and stuff… Then again, his necklace says to call Bronya if he gets lost… // indeed, best cloun probably doesn't have a “proper” lusus, besides Bronya. That's also probably why he had a drone after him... either that, or he's too smol for a purple and therefore cullbait

-No but seriously, Karako’s special. He’s got really fucking strong chucklevoodoos (?) that we’ve never seen before (not that we have a particularly large sample size, but still), a drone seemed to be specifically after him for some reason, parallels with the Signless, and with Caliborn as well… not to mention his bad (yet also good?) end.

-And speaking of cherubic parallels, we might have seen the actual motherfucking Dark Carnival. The question would be if it was real, an hallucination (of whom?) or something else entirely… Real or not, it’s covered in cherub imagery and also depictions of Gamzee in his god tier outfit… turns out he was right about the mirthful messiahs being him, and also him… And there’s tragedy and comedy as well, just like two other clowns we know.

-Why does the MC also go to the Dark Carnival? Are they an honorary clown? If so, did it happen back in Chahut’s route, or did Karako insta-clown them the moment he became friends with the MC? Are Amisia and/or Bronya also honorary clowns?

-The fourth wall appears to be getting thinner after Boldir’s route… // either that, or MSPAR's sheer meta stuff potential’s awakening.

Marsti:

-I don’t recall any of the other Voidbounds having a lot of meta stuff on their routes, but Marsti sure does! Meanwhile, Karako may be the first Mindbound we’ve seen without a façade (Vikare and Chixie pretending that Yes They’re Perfectly Okay With Their Lot In Life, Azdaja’s whole anime protagonist shtick (or is it?), even Amisia kinda had one), but there’s certainly a lot more to him than what we’ve seen. Mind-bounds also tend to stray from the “one short end, one good end, one bad end” formula- Amisia and Azdaja are the only mind-bounds that stick to it.

-It may be just me, but it feels as if Marsti could “read” or “hear” the MC’s narration? It could also be the whole “fourth wall getting thinner”, or perhaps the MC decided to spend the entire route shoving their foot in their mouth (the “rusty” comment comes to mind)

-Marsti kind of reminds me of Vikare (and also Xefros): both of them have a different calling than the role the empire will assign them, and they (try to) embrace that role because unless we fuck shit up in future Hiveswap acts, it’s all they’re going to get. In Marsti’s case, it wasn’t space travel as her sign led us to believe, but medicine.

-(she also reminds me a little of Moira from Overwatch?? i don’t know how to say it in english, so here it is in spanish: se dan un aire) // it's just the art tho, they're both kinda pointy

-Marsti wants to help people, even if she won’t be allowed to be a doctor. From what we’ve seen we can tell she’s talented and she knows it… but she also knows that’s a pipe dream at best.

-Fittingly enough, hygiene’s had a vital role on the development of modern medicine- and cleaning stuff is what drives her through most of her route.

-Basically, LET MARSTI AND EVERYONE ELSE FOLLOW THEIR DREAMS 2K18 // 2k20 going on 21 NOW BUT STILL

-All of Friendsim so far takes place in the same city. It might be Thrashthrust, but I’m not sure if we’ve gone to Outglut (yet). // Friendsim volume 14.5 is the one where we go to outglut and unleash her in dammek's hive

-Boldir’s route really left a mark on the MC. Let’s hope her bad end wasn’t the alpha timeline… and while we’re here let’s also hope karako’s bad end isn’t alpha either please

-How in the actual fuck does the MC even consider taking Marsti to Zebruh’s hive. Like seriously!!! (also, couldn’t they have sent Galekh a message? Nothing fancy, just “hey galaxy 360 mind if i take my new friend to your hive so she can clean it up? its for friendship reasons, you know how it is. also say hi to tagora for me kthxbye”)

-Her new Troll Call bulletpoints reinforce her Friendsim characterization, as with many others. Marsti seems to be one of the trolls that got more character depth from her route (perceived, as we don't know yet how canon are the Friendsims gonna be when Act 2 comes out), like Diemen or Chixie.

#hiveswap #friendsim #karako pierot #marsti houtek #long post #thoughts and questions #t&q remix

[starwarsnonsense]

Darren Aronofsky’s ‘mother!’ as a feminist fable

* Spoilers for Darren Aronofsky’s mother! follow *

I must begin by apologising for what can only be a digression on a Star Wars blog, since mother! (beyond the inclusion of Domhnall Gleeson in a tiny role) has absolutely nothing to do with everyone’s favourite space opera series. However, I can’t feel too bad about it since I really, really need to talk about mother!. Excuse my indulgence, and I hope that those of you who do read these find my thoughts interesting.

I watched mother! for the first time at the weekend and it truly blew me away. I left the theatre with a deranged grin in my face, amazed and overjoyed that Aronofsky had convinced Paramount to fund, promote and distribute something this batshit crazy (amusingly, they actually felt the need to explain themselves in a statement). However insane you expect mother! to be, nothing can surpass the actual experience of watching it in a theatre and hearing the disquieted murmurs of an unprepared and steadily more agitated crowd. 

mother! is any and all of the following, depending on how you choose to approach it - a black comedy, a parable, a pretentious pile of nonsense, an allegory, a muddle of metaphors, a home invasion film, an affront to all reasonable standards of good sense and decency, etc., etc. But what I’m going to focus on here is how mother! is also a rather shattering feminist fable. Just allow me a few paragraphs of scene-setting to get there.

To get right into the thick of it, it has been well established by many others (not least Aronofsky himself) that mother! is a biblical allegory - Jennifer Lawrence’s Mother (upper case mine, out of principle) is Mother Nature, Javier Bardem’s Him (note that all-important, end credits-sanctioned upper case!) is the Judaeo-Christian God, Ed Harris’s ‘man’ is Adam, Michelle Pfeiffer’s ‘woman’ is Eve, and so on and so on. mother! is, in essence, a microcosm of the entire Christian Bible - it is even neatly divided into discrete halves that correspond to the greatest hits of the Old and New Testaments. The characters here are not individuals so much as representations of concepts - they are forces of nature and qualities of man. The film bends time to breaking point, compressing thousands of years of progress, conflict and bloodshed into two hours and reducing the entire Earth to an increasingly dilapidated house.

By borrowing its structure from the Bible, mother! is, by default, a portrait of humanity and its capacity for harm - and it is upsetting people precisely because Aronofsky’s view of man is extremely bleak. Humanity is framed as an ever-swelling deluge of insatiable, greedy and thoughtless brutes, with only the barest glimmers of kindness and compassion visible amidst the chaos. At the film’s end, the only acceptable solution for Mother Nature - her heart black and withered, her love all-but extinguished by her suffering - is to burn them all to ashes. 

mother! is a condemnation of humankind, but it is also a condemnation of the baser qualities of God Himself: His demand for worship, His indifference towards the natural world, and His insistence on the continuation of man even in the face of its violence and destructiveness. Him is portrayed as more akin to the curious, selfish, playful gods of the Ancient Greek pantheon than the bearded, stoic sky-father that the Christian God is now usually framed as - he has a short memory for the horrors wrought by mankind, and demonstrates inexplicable and senseless investment in perpetuating them, even as Mother Earth rages against their existence. The film takes the idea of the six days of creation and, rather brilliantly, makes it look as if God created man out of idle curiosity once he’d become discontented with the tranquil perfection of his creation.

One of the richest and most fascinating interpretations of mother!, as far as I’m concerned, is the one that approaches it as an allegory for the diminishment and sidelining of the divine feminine. This is conveyed through something as basic and obvious as capitalisation - while the exclamation mark in the film’s title has got all of the attention, the lower case ‘m’ means more than you’d first think. It is a very well-established convention that God is always referred to with upper case pronouns (His, Him, He) - this is done to distinguish Him from the petty, fading gods from other religions, and from all those lower creatures with no claim to divinity (or, as it turns out, upper case pronouns). By introducing mother! with lower case in the title of the film, the disadvantage of Mother Earth is being established from the outset. 

To venture briefly into theology, the feminine divine is now usually considered inferior to the masculine one - it has been this way for many centuries, with the ancient goddesses of wisdom, fertility, love and creation being sidelined in favour of warlike, dominating male deities. As Bettany Hughes observes in The Guardian:

At the birth of society and civilisation I find a religious landscape littered with feisty female deities who make wisdom their business. There's Nisaba the Babylonian goddess who looks after the stores of both grain and knowledge in Mesopotamia; the Hindu goddess Saraswati; the Zoroastrian Anahita; the ancient Greek Athena; and the Shinto Omoikane (a fine goddess of holistic thought and multitasking).

But come the end of the bronze age and many of these deities have been demoted. Here we witness a precursor of the Judaeo-Christian scenario. Up until 1400BC, citadel settlements are stable. Goddesses – notably in charge of fertility and learning – have a crucial role to play. But as civilisation gets greedy and society more militaristic, these wise women are edged to the sidelines in favour of a thundering, male warrior god.

It is my feeling that we see this dynamic - with the divine female creative force being forced to the margins by an overbearing figure of male authority - played out in the marital relationship between Him and Mother in the film. Mother is the central creative actor - she is the one who makes the house at the centre of the film (which is analogous to the Earth) beautiful and vibrant following its destruction in a fire. Without her, it is impossible for Him to create. But her efforts are constantly overlooked, scorned and belittled - the guests in her house destroy her belongings, invade her sanctuaries, and show outright disdain for her wishes. Her attempts to resist them are perceived as comical, with her will only being enacted on those rare occasions that Him deigns to support her. Mother is clearly expected to be a passive source of inspiration for Him, an ornament whose attempts to assert herself or share her opinion are swiftly shut down. Just as history has erased goddesses and female deities as patriarchal structures have become more and more entrenched, the characters surrounding Mother in the film seek to trample her down and ignore her role in creation.

A big point is made in the film of the generational divide between Him and Mother - Him is middle-aged, his face lined and weathered, whereas Mother is a beautiful young woman with immaculate skin and an abundance of golden hair. This distinction drives home the imbalance between them - it is a divide designed to unsettle and disquiet from the moment you first see them together, the kind of union that makes your skin crawl from an instinctual sense that something is profoundly wrong with it. 

As the film unwinds, this suspicion becomes fully realised - the film is cyclical in that it begins and ends with a mother setting herself and the house aflame, her heart transforming into a shimmering crystal that Him places on a stand in his study as a new mother forms from the ashes of the marital bed. In this way, He is revealed as the collector of countless women’s hearts - He is essentially a Bluebeard figure (with the study functioning as his forbidden bloody chamber), and the central tragedy of mother! is that the heroine is offered no escape from him. In keeping with Aronofsky’s dim view of existence, the relationship between Mother and Him is destined to repeat itself in an unending cycle of destruction and rebirth. We are all doomed to repeat the same mistakes, being nothing more than the playthings of a capricious God.

There is no sense of lessons learned or mistakes avoided here, and one of the greatest injustices on display is the sheer contempt with which Mother is treated. Aronofsky has been open about the fact that mother! is an environmentalist film, and the vitriol that Lawrence’s character is dealt with is, of course, a statement on how we treat the Earth. But it is also effective precisely because it frames this contempt towards Mother Earth as a very specific kind of contempt - misogyny. The misogyny is most overt in how the avatars of humanity treat Mother, with their subtle disapproval, judgement and objectification building and building until they overflow into a riot of violence and verbal abuse at the film’s climax. The allegory is three-fold - we are witnessing contempt for women generally, contempt for women as a force for creation (in everything from the mundane sense to the divine one), and contempt for nature as a maternal force.

Some commentators have misconstrued the film’s depiction of misogyny as evidence that the film itself is sexist, but I could not disagree more strongly - Aronofsky’s film is a pin-sharp deconstruction of how society treats women, and it is uncomfortable because it is meant to be. Misogyny is real and it is ugly, and by depicting its evolution across a spectrum ranging from a disapproving look to seething violence we are being forced to confront it. The film is entirely told from Mother’s perspective, which makes the brutality and cruelty of her treatment inescapable - she is the only character we can truly feel empathy for, with her suffering registering on an acutely visceral level because it is portrayed so intimately.

While the film offers its characters no escape from a cycle, I like to think that Aronofsky designed mother! to be as shocking as it is in order to confront us with some of the hardest truths - the truth of how we treat the Earth and the truth of how we treat women. Too much cinema is the audiovisual equivalent of junk food, encouraging passive and unthinking consumption. The very fact that mother! has inspired such emotional responses - from passionate hatred to profound admiration - is testament to the fact that it did exactly what it set out to do by jolting people from their complacency.

#mother! #darren aronofsky #not star wars #not sw #film #cinema #film analysis #essay