#and the way i assimilated a lot of what i know came from pure experimentation and fucking around

[oscopelabs]

3D, Part 2: How 3D Peaked At Its Valley by Vadim Rizov

I didn’t expect to spend Thanksgiving Weekend 2018 watching ten 3D movies: marathon viewing is not my favorite experience in general, and I haven’t spent years longing to see, say, Friday the 13th Part III, in 35mm. But a friend was visiting, from Toronto, to take advantage of this opportunity, an impressive level of dedication that seemed like something to emulate, and it’s not like I had anything better to do, so I tagged along. Said friend, Blake Williams, is an experimental filmmaker and 3D expert, a subject to which he’s devoted years of graduate research and the bulk of his movies (see Prototype if it comes to a city near you!); if I was going to choose the arbitrary age of 32 to finally take 3D seriously, I couldn’t have a better Virgil to explain what I was seeing on a technical level. My thanks to him (for getting me out there) and to the Quad Cinema for being my holiday weekend host; it was probably the best possible use of my time.

The 10-movie slate was an abridged encore presentation of this 19-film program, which I now feel like a dink for missing. What’s interesting in both is the curatorial emphasis on films from 3D’s second, theoretically most disreputable wave—‘80s movies with little to zero critical respect or profile. Noel Murray considered a good chunk of these on this site a few years ago, watching the films flat at home, noting that when viewed this way, “the plane-breaking seems all the more superfluous. (It’s also easy to spot when these moments are about to happen, because the overall image gets murkier and blurrier.)” This presumes that if you can perceive the moments where a 3D film expands its depth of field for a comin’-at-ya moment and mentally reconstruct what that would look like, that’s basically the same experience as actually seeing these effects.

Blake’s argument, which I wrestled with all weekend, is that these movies do indeed often look terrible in 2D, but 3D literally makes them better. As it turns out, this is true surprisingly often. Granted, all concerned have to know what they’re doing, otherwise the results will still be indifferent: it turns out that Friday the 13th Part III sucks no matter how you watch it, and 3D’s not a complete cure-all. This was also demonstrated by my first movie, 1995’s barely released Run For Cover, the kind of grade-Z library filler you’d expect to see sometime around 2 am on a syndicated channel. This is, ostensibly, a thriller, in which a TV news cameraman foils a terrorist plot against NYC. It features a lot of talking, scenes of Bondian villains eating Chinese takeout while plotting and/or torturing our ostensible hero, some running (non-Tom Cruise speed levels), and one The Room-caliber sex scene. Anyone who’s spent too much time mindlessly staring at the least promising option on TV has seen many movies like these. The 3D helps a little: an underdressed TV station set takes on heightened diorama qualities, making it interesting to contemplate as an inadvertent installation—the archetypal TV command room, with the bare minimum necessary signifiers in place and zero detail otherwise—rather than simply a bare-bones set. But often the camera is placed nowhere in particular, and the resulting images are negligible; in the absence of dramatic conviction or technical skill, what’s left is never close enough to camp to come back out the other side as inadvertently worthwhile. I’m glad I saw it for the sheer novelty of cameos from Ed Koch, Al Sharpton and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa—all doing their usual talking points, but in 3D! But it’s the kind of film that’s more fun to tell people about than actually watch.

But infamous punchlines Jaws 3-D and Amityville 3-D have their virtues when viewed in 3D. The former, especially, seems to be the default punching bag whenever someone wants to make the case that 3D has, and always will be, nothing but a limited gimmick upselling worthless movies. It was poorly reviewed when it came out, but the public dug it enough to make it, domestically, the 15th highest-grossing film of 1983 (between Never Say Never Again and Scarface) and justify Jaws: The Revenge. Of course I was skeptical; why wouldn’t I be? But I was sucked in by the opening credits, in which the familiar handheld-underwater-cam-as-shark POV gave way to a severed arm floating before a green “ocean.” Maybe flat it looks simply ludicrous, but the image has a compellingly Lynchian quality, as if the limb were detached from one of Twin Peaks: The Return’s more disgusting corpses, its artifice heightened and literally foregrounded, the equally artificial background setting it into greater relief.

The film’s prominent SeaWorld product placement is, theoretically, ill-advised, especially in the post-Blackfish era; in practice, it’s extremely productive. The opening stretches have a lot of water-skiing; in deep 3D, the water-skiers serve as lines tracing depth towards and away from the camera over a body of water whose horizon line stretches back infinitely, producing a greater awareness of space. It reminded me of the early days of the short-lived super-widescreen format Cinerama, as described by John Belton in his academic history book Widescreen Cinema (recommended). The very first film in the format, This is Cinerama, was a travelogue whose stops included Cypress Gardens, Florida’s first commercial tourist theme park (the site is now a Legoland), which has very similar images of waterskiiers. Cinerama was, per the publicist copy Belton quotes from the period, about an experience, not a story: “Plot is replaced by audience envelopment […] the medium forces you to concentrate on something bigger than people, for it has a range of vision and sound that no other medium offers.” Cinerama promised to immerse viewers, as literalized in this delightful publicity image; Belton argues that “unlike 3-D and CinemaScope, which stressed the dramatic content of their story material and the radical new means of technology employed in production, Cinerama used a saturation advertising campaign in the newspapers and on radio to promote the ‘excitement aspects’ of the new medium.” There’s a connection here with the earliest days of silent cinema, short snippets (“actualities”) of reality, before it was decided that medium’s primary purpose was to tell a story. It didn’t have to be like that; in those opening stretches, Jaws 3-D’s lackadaisical narrative, which might play inertly on TV, recalls the 1890s, when shots of bodies of water were popular subjects. This is something I learned from a recent presentation by silent film scholar Bryony Dixon, and her reasoning makes sense. The way water moves is inherently hypnotic, and for early audiences assimilating their very first moving images, water imagery was a favorite subject. It’s only with a few years under its belt that film started making its drift towards narrative as default; inadvertently or not, Jaws 3-D is very pure in its initial presentation of water as a spectacular, non-narrative event.

If this seems like a lot of cultural and historical weight to bring to bear upon Jaws 3-D, note that it wasn’t even my favorite of the more-scorned offerings I saw that weekend, merely one that makes it easiest for me to articulate what I found compelling about the 3D immersion experience. I haven’t described the plot of Jaws 3-D at all, which is indeed perfunctory (though it was nice to learn where Deep Blue Sea cribbed a bunch of its production design from). I won’t try to rehabilitate Amityville 3-D at similar length: set aside the moronic ending and Tony Roberts’ leading turn as one of cinema’s most annoyingly waspish, unearnedly whiny divorcees, and what’s left is a surprisingly melancholy movie about the frustrations, and constant necessary repairs, of home ownership. There’s very little music and a surprising amount of silence. The most effective moment is simply Roberts going upstairs to the bathroom, where steam is hissing out for no apparent reason and he has to fix the plumbing. The camera’s planted in the hallway, not moving for any kind of emphasis as the back wall moves closer to Roberts; it doesn’t kill him and nothing comes of it, it’s just another problem to deal with (the walls, as it were, are settling), made more effective by awareness of how a space whose rules and boundaries seemed fixed is being altered, pushing air at you.

Watching a bunch of these in sequence, some clear lessons emerge: if you want to generate compelling depth by default, find an alleyway and block off the other half of the frame with a wall to present two different depths, or force protagonists to crawl through ducts or tubes. This is a good chunk of Silent Madness, a reasonably effective slasher film that, within the confines of its cheap sets and functional plotting, keeps the eye moving. It’s an unlikely candidate for a deep-dive New York Times Magazine article from the time period, which is well worth reading in full. It’s mostly about B-movies and the actresses trying to make their way up through them, though it does have this money quote from director Simon Nuchtern about why, for Bs, it’s not worth paying more for a good lead actress: “If I had 10,000 extra dollars, I’d put it into lights. Not one person is going to say, ‘Go see that movie because Lynn Redgrave is in it.’ But if we don’t have enough lights and that 3-D doesn’t pop right out at you, people are going to say, ‘Don’t see that movie because the 3-D stinks.’” Meanwhile, nobody appears to have been thinking that hard while making Friday the 13th: Part III, which contains precisely one striking image: a pan, street morning, as future teen lambs-to-the-slaughter exit their van and walk over to a friend’s house. A lens flare hits frame left, making what’s behind it briefly impossible to see: this portion of the frame is now sealed off under impermeable 2D, in contrast to the rest of the frame’s now far-more-tangible depth. The remainder of the movie makes it easy to imagine watching it on TV and clocking every obvious, poorly framed and blocked 3D effect, from spears being thrown at the camera to the inevitable yo-yo descending at the lens. (This is my least favorite 3D effect because it’s just too obvious and counterproductively makes me think of the Smothers Brothers.)

Friday the 13th was the biggest slog of the 3D weekend, and the one most clearly emulating 1981’s Comin’ at Ya! I am not going to argue for that movie, either, which is generally credited with kicking off the second 3D craze; it’s a sludgy spaghetti western that delivers exactly as its title promises, using a limited number of effects repeatedly before showing them all again in a cut-together montage at the end, lest you missed one in its first iteration. It’s exhausting and oddly joyless, but was successful enough to generate a follow-up from the same creative team. Star Tony Anthony and director Ferdinando Baldi (both veterans of second-tier spaghetti westerns) re-teamed for 1983’s Treasure of the Four Crowns, the movie which (two screenings in) rewired my brain a little and convinced me I should hang around all weekend. This is not a well-respected film, then or now: judging by IMDb user comments, most people who remember seeing it recall it playing endlessly on HBO in the ‘80s, where it did not impress them unless they were very young (and even then, perhaps not). Janet Maslin admitted to walking out on it in her review; then again, she did the same with Dawn of the Dead, and everyone loves that.

An unabashed Indiana Jones copy, Treasure begins strong with a lengthy opening sequence of tomb raider J.T. Striker (Anthony) dropping into a cave, where he’s promptly confronted not only with a bunch of traps but, for a long stretch, a small menagerie’s worth of owls, dogs, and other wildlife. There are a lot of animals, and why not? They’re fun to look at, and having them trotted out, one after another, is another link back to silent cinema; besides water, babies and animals were also popular subjects. The whole sequence ends with Striker running away from the castle above the cave, artifact retrieved, in slow-motion as Ennio Morricone’s score blares. There is, inevitably and nonsensically, a fireball that consumes the set; it unfolds luxuriously in detailed depth, the camera placed on a grassy knoll that gives us a nice angle to contemplate it looking upwards, a nearly abstract testament to the pleasures of gasoline-fueled imagery. Shortly thereafter, Striker is in some European city to sell his wares, and in every shot the camera is placed for maximum depth: in front of a small city park’s mini-waterfall, views of streets boxed in by sidewalks that narrow towards each other, each position calibrated to create a spectacular travelogue out of what’s a fairly mundane location. There’s an expository sequence where Striker and friends drop into a diner to ask about the whereabouts of another member of the crew they need to round up. Here, with the camera on one side of a bar encircling a center counter, there are something like six layers of cleanly articulated space, starting with a plant’s leaves right in front of the lens on the side, proceeding to the counter, center area, back counter, back tables and walls of the establishment. Again, the location is mundane; seeing it filleted in space so neatly is what makes it special.

The climax finally convinced me I was watching forgotten greatness. This is an elaborate heist sequence in which, of course, the floor cannot be touched, necessitating that the team perform all kinds of rappelling foolishness. At this point I thought, “the only way I could respect this movie more is if it spent 10 minutes watching them get from one side of the room to another in real time.” First, the team has to gear up, which basically means untangling a bunch of ropes—clearly not the most exciting activity. The camera is looking up, placed below a team member as they uncoil and then drop a rope towards the lens. This is a better-framed variant of the comin’-at-ya principle, but what made it exciting to me was the leisurely way it was done: no more whizzing spears, but a moment of procedural mundanity as exciting as any ostensible danger. Basic narrative film grammar is being upended here: if a rope being dropped is just as exciting as a big, fake rip-off boulder chasing our hero down the cave, then all the rules about what constitutes narrative are off—narrative and non-narrative elements have the exact same weight, and even the most mundane, A-to-B connective shot is a spectacular event.

This isn’t how narrative cinema is supposed to work, and certainly not what James Cameron’s conception of good 3D proposed. The movie keeps going, building to a bizarrely grim climax involving a lot of face-melting, scored by Morricone’s oddly beatific score, which seems serenely indifferent to the grotesqueness of the images it’s accompanying. (This is a recurring trait in the composer’s ‘80s work; the score for White Dog often seems to bear no relation to the footage it’s accompanying.) That would make the movie oneiric and weirdly compelling even on a flat TV, but everything preceding convinced me: 3D can be great because it’s 3D, not because it serves a story. I’ve spent the last decade getting more angry about the format than anything, but that was a misunderstanding. Treasure of the Four Crowns is, yes, probably very unexceptional seen flat; seen in all three dimensions, it’s a demonstration of how 3D can turn banal connective tissue and routine coverage into an event. The spectacle of 3D might never have been its potential to make elaborate CG landscapes more immersive, something I still haven’t personally been convinced of; as those 19 non-CG shots in Avatar showed (undermining Cameron’s own argument!), 3D’s renderings of the real, material world and objects have yet to be fully explored. 3D’s ability to link film back to its earliest days is refreshing, in the way that any rediscovery of forgotten parts of film language can be, while also encouraging thought about all the things narrative visual language hasn’t yet explored, as if 3D could take us forwards and backwards simultaneously. In any case, I’m now won over—ten years after Avatar, but better late than never.

#3-d #3-d movie #3-d cinema #treasure of the four crowns #avatar #this fashion insider’s new modern engagement ring is making jaws drop #jaws 3d #friday the 13th part iii #cinemascope #cinerama #cypress gardens #widescreen #amityville 3d #scarface #never say never again #run for cover #oscilloscope laboratories #film writing #film essay #o-scope labs #musings #beastie boys

[jasperrollswrites]

Transformation Classroom, Lesson I

The first entry in a raffle series I began running on FurAffinity and deviantArt, which I may expand to here if I can figure out how to handle it. This was just the intro story, and it’s a little self indulgent since it features myself becoming Koro-sensei, the teacher from Assassination Classroom.

———————

ARE YOU STUCK IN A RUT? FEEL LIKE YOUR LIFE IS HEADING NOWHERE? WANT SOME ADVICE - OR JUST FEEL LIKE TRYING SOMETHING NEW? THE CLASS OF LIFE WITH PROF. K EVERY SUNDAY, 6PM, ROOM 3-TF YOUR NEW LIFE STARTS TODAY!

---

The building seemed eerily quiet at night. Jasper knew there were other lessons going on throughout the college building, but outside 3-TF, all was silent, it seemed. He looked at his phone, checking the time - 5:55pm. The lesson should be starting in a moment, but no-one was around. He looked up and down the empty corridor. Whoever Professor K was, Jasper felt a bit sorry for him, seeing as only one person seemed to be interested in his class.

Jasper was dressed in his usual "going out" clothes - a pair of jeans (no belt - it was broken), converse trainers, and a zipped up blue hoodie. He'd tried combing his lengthy hair a bit, but to no real avail - long hair was hard to look after. He sat back on the bench outside the classroom, pulling the strands of his dark brown hair behind him so that it rested on his back, rather than coming down over his shoulder.

5:57pm. The professor hadn't even shown up to his own class, it seemed. Jasper was regretting having come half an hour early. Maybe he should have expected it to be a bust. After how the last year had turned out, he could only see a bad future ahead. Thinking about it, the leaflet he'd picked up had been pretty vague. It didn't really elucidate on what the class was actually for, just generic life improvement slogans. It was intended for a sucker, and that's just what he'd been.

To be fair, he had been in that state for a while. Uni had been a dead end, and now he was stuck back at home, with no job, no prospects, and no idea what he was going to do for the rest of his life. He could easily go back to an office job like he'd done before, but the idea of spending another 3 years in an absolutely soul crushing place just made him even more depressed. Perhaps that's why he had been suckered in by the leaflet.

6:00pm. He'd give it until 5 past, and then he'd leave. If the teacher couldn't even be bothered to turn up to his own class...Jasper was broken out of his thoughts, by the sound of the door creaking, and he looked up from his phone to see that the door to 3-TF had opened up, now slightly ajar, seemingly by itself. The lights in the classroom were on.

He stuffed his phone into his pocket, and stood up. Had the teacher been waiting in the classroom? Had the door been open this whole time? Now he felt stupid. There were probably already people in there, having their lesson...well, no, that didn't seem right. Surely he'd have heard them? He stepped over to the door, pushing it open to reveal...

A normal classroom. A fancy new smart whiteboard, but otherwise just a regular old classroom with desks and chairs, and a computer for the teacher to use. A large mirror, some 10 feet tall and about 4 feet wide was at the back of the room, set into the wall, like it was a dance studio mirror. Jasper wondered what it could possibly be for. On the wall next to the door, there was a large dark blue pinboard. Someone had printed out a piece of paper with the words "Our Successful Students" on it, and stuck it to the pinboard, but there was nothing else on the board besides. There was also no-one else in the classroom - just Jasper, alone.

Jasper frowned. Well, back to plan A, then - give it 5 minutes, then leave. He found a desk close to the front, sat down in the chair and leaned back, putting his feet up on the desk. He looked at the pinboard across the room, laughing a little at the sign. Guess this class wasn't very good, if the board was so empty.

What had been the point of coming, he thought to himself. What was he looking for, going to this class? Well...some sort of positive direction. Some way to figure things out so he'd stop worrying constantly about the future. Things had seemed so simple a year ago, and now they'd gone completely off the rails. He was drifting pointlessly through life at the moment. If he was giving this class, his lesson would be very simple - don't do what I did, kids. I'm an idiot.

As he jokingly entertained the idea of himself doing teaching, something about the room shifted. The dust blew around slightly. The blinds covering the windows fluttered, as if they were being blown by an unfelt wind. The computer quietly flicked on. Jasper didn't know it, but his lesson was just beginning.

He lowered his right arm, letting it hang down by the side of his chair, and that was where it started. His fingers opened up, the index and middle fingers sticking to each other, while his ring and little fingers also stuck together, as if he was doing a casual Vulcan salute. It could've just been something he felt like doing, but then it became clear that some other force was at work here, as the fingers literally stuck to each other. The skin of the separated digits began to knit together silently, covering over the fingernails, and underneath the skin, the bones inside the fingers melted away without any feeling. The 4 fingers had become two boneless digits...that seemed a lot more flexible than before.

The fingers extended slightly, curling a little, as the hand began to bloat strangely. A similar process was happening to Jasper's thumb, the bone melting away, but this digit was becoming shorter, shrinking down to a little stub. The hand was becoming distinctly inhuman, as the palm of his hand lost its definition, bloating out into a pair of small orbs, supporting his more...noodly fingers. The colour of the skin on his hand was beginning to lighten too, looking a little strange in the light, no longer pink. It looked more like it was a shiny yellow.

The process was now continuing up his arm, the pink colour draining from the skin, lightening, taking on a more shiny yellow quality, like that of rubber. As it did, his arm was extending downwards, sliding out of the long sleeve of his hoodie, the bones melting away in his arm as well. However, instead of becoming a useless limb, it was gaining in flexibility - alongside the appendages that used to be his hand, it was becoming clear that his arm was becoming a tentacle.

His hoodie was not exempt from these changes. The sleeve was beginning to ride up his...tentacle, coming up to about where his elbow used to be. It no longer clung to his arm, the sleeve beginning to hang down lower, leaving a significant gap between arm and sleeve. The colour was darkening, the dark blue deepening, heading towards pure black, save for three stripes of dark blue that remained untouched.

Had it been five minutes yet? Jasper dug into his pocket, with his new tentacle-like hand, and pulled out his phone to look at it, and almost immediately dropped it upon noticing how dramatically his hand had morphed. He sat up, afraid at first, not recognising his own arm, even though he could clearly feel it and move it around. There was a few seconds of a panging sensation in his chest, as his heartbeat quickened, and he failed to logically put together what was happening.

Then, slowly, the realization came. He knew this arm. Well, of course, it was his own arm, but he recognised this tentacle-y appendage from somewhere else. Panic was starting to be replaced by acceptance...and excitement. "Oh man, is this..." he murmured, hardly daring to believe this was happening - it was almost literally a dream come true for the young man. He moved his "fingers" around experimentally, enjoying how flexible they were. He'd broken his little finger as a teenager irreparably, and had been unable to move it properly ever since, so the increased ability of his hand and arm were a joy to behold.]

He moved his eyes up, and saw that his clothing was changing too - so far so good. As he looked at the changed sleeve of his hoodie, he could feel something snaking out from beneath - another, smaller tentacle rolled out of the sleeve, and he could feel it too. He could control this tentacle, like an extra arm. He gingerly touched it with his regular hand, and felt it wrap around his human fingers lightly. Jasper smiled.

Like touching the tentacle had spread the change, his fingers on his left hand were following the same process, and now he got to watch it happen, instead of being oblivious like before. A grin spread across his face as he watched his skin turn pale, the fingers knitting together in a manner matching his right hand. He touched his morphing arm with his already changed arm, enjoying the feeling of the skin becoming smoother, shinier...completely alien.

His hoodie split open, the zip coming undone and revealing the light blue shirt underneath, but it wasn't going to be a shirt much longer. The colour darkened, the geometric design fading away, becoming a smarter dark red. The threads of the shirt were becoming thicker, and the bottom of the shirt was attaching itself to his jeans, the new material spreading downwards, as the denim became assimilated.

Jasper stood up now, watching his clothes morph such an unnatural manner, thoroughly enjoying his change. He could feel the body under his clothes undergoing a similar process, the bones and organs melting away, or morphing...tentacles. It was all tentacles under there. He was tickled by the thought, and couldn't resist letting out a laugh - "Nyuruhuhuhu...Ooh!" He stopped himself, surprised at the bizarre giggle he'd let slip. His voice had gone from his usual deep, somewhat apathetic tone, and was now raised in pitch, more lilting and playful. 

His hoodie was now extending down, becoming pure black like the sleeves (another tentacle unfurled out of the left sleeve, matching the right). It was lowering, down past his hips...or where his hips had been, now that it was all tentacles. Past his knees, down until it was a wide cloak around his ankles. The same was happening with his shirt and jeans, the two articles of clothing knitting together. The legs of the jeans came together, the split fading away, becoming one article of clothing, not unlike the cloak his hoodie had become. Thick, yellow tentacles slid out from under the cloak, settling onto the ground, and his converses began to stretch, the feet inside them bloating up extensively, before quickly tearing the shoes to shreds, revealing another pair of thick tentacles, indistinguishable from the rest.

Golden stripes formed over his shoulders, and the collar of his shirt came up, flipping over, the colour fading to a pure white. A strip of fabric threaded itself under the collar, and began tying itself, before settling across where his chest had been - a short, smart tie, with a symbol of a crescent moon on it. Jasper looked down at himself, still grinning. This was the best thing that could have happened to him. He was finding the new direction he was looking for.

He felt his body over, his new clothes, quivering with excitement. "Is this your lesson, Professor K?" He asked to himself in his new voice...then quickly realised his mistake. "Nyuruhuhu, of course...there was no Professor K, because Professor K was always meant to be me the whole time, wasn't he?" He now asked the question to the room, as if someone was listening. "K, for Koro-sensei, right?" He waited for a response - nothing could be heard, but he seemed to be cocking his head, as if he was listening.

"Ahh, I see." He said to nothing, closing his eyes in contentment...then suddenly snapping them open as he felt a clump of hair fall from his head. "Oh my - I'm missing the best part!" He spun around, and shuffled forward quickly on his new tentacles towards the mirror, surprised he had forgotten it was there. "Yes, yes, I understand," he said, rolling up to the mirror. "It's so they can enjoy it, like I am. You've really thought this through."

He put his tentacle fingers up to his face, still grinning, as more clumps of hair fell to the floor, and felt his head begin to expand, like his hands had. His face was losing definition, his ears consumed by the expanding head, disappearing entirely. His skin was becoming smoother, the smooth alien skin that matched his tentacles. His nose flattened against his expanding head, becoming featureless and indistinct. His grin was widening, widening, right across his expanding skull. His eyes were becoming smaller, the sclera fading away, things like eyebrows and eyelids, and all the defining features that made up a human face becoming non-existent. His eyes were simply little pinpricks of black now, his hair had all fallen off. His head was simply a round yellow sphere, with a couple of dots for eyes, and curved grin he couldn't stop making - not that he wanted to. He was very, VERY happy with what had happened here. But something was missing.

"Ah, yes, my cap, if you please." He said to the room. He turned around, away from the mirror, and saw the square cap, with the little thread in question set on a table. He picked it up with a tentacled hand, and set it directly atop his head, then turned back to the mirror. There, now he was finished. He admired himself for a moment, and considered what his former self knew about his current self. He could still feel Jasper inside him - it was sort of like they were sharing a headspace. He was meant to have a bevy of wild abilities - mach 20 speed, morphing his body at will, impossible to be killed...although he couldn't really feel that kind of power within him. Maybe he should give it a try.

There was a brief shimmer, as he moved beyond the speed that a human eye could register, from the back of the room, to the front, in less than a millisecond. He definitely still had the capabilities of his fictional counterpart, but...the part of him that was still Jasper had expected that he should be feeling that power coursing through him, yet he just felt...normal. He supposed it was for the best. He shouldn't get overconfident, after all.

"So...back to business, he said to the room, shuffling slowly over to the teacher's desk. "You want me to teach the people who come here then? Of course, of course, I have no qualms with that. Imparting wisdom is the greatest joy in life, is it not? But what are you getting out of this?" He settled his tentacles down in the chair, looking up at the ceiling, waiting for a response. No sound was made, but he seemed to be listening to something or other.

"Playing your cards close to your chest, are we...well, never mind. I'll determine the purpose sooner or later. I'm just happy to teach, after all. I'll do as you say - after all, you've given me this blessing, have you not? And without the disastrous effects of my fictional self too, which is a plus...well, my deepest thanks, regardless."

He leant back in the chair, still grinning constantly. "Now, if you wouldn't mind, could you excuse me and my former self, for a moment? He's positively bursting with excitement, and I really can't keep it in any longer. It's a little embarrassing." He waited for a moment, then, satisfied with whatever he had heard nodded. He closed his eyes, then opened them again, and leapt out of the chair, quivering with excitement again.

"Nyuruhuhuhuhuhuhu!" He giggled uncontrollably. "I'm really...really Koro-sensei! Nyuruhuhuhu! Ohh...a dream come true, a dream come true! And I get to...oh, this is too exciting! I better start getting ready! Someone could come through the door at any moment!" And with that, he immediately began bustling about, setting up his new classroom. New students were thirsting for knowledge all the time. Koro-sensei couldn't wait to give them some of his own, now quite literally, transformative lessons.

#writing #transformation #transformation classroom #assassination classroom #korosensei

[mushroombossa]

i keep thinking abt how much i absorb and learn stuff in the most unconventional ways, like if i legit wanted to give helpful advice to ppl i'd probably have to sugarcoat my actions or completely tell them to do it differently from me otherwise it would just sound bonkers

#like when ppl say you should sketch every single day #and i actually feel like i improve everytime i take breaks between stuff i do? #and the way i assimilated a lot of what i know came from pure experimentation and fucking around #plus some random advice i got here and there #and some observation too #idk it's weird #i'm thinking abt art specifically but i could apply this to soooo much of my life tbh