#fuck the disney character motive of dead relatives

[guardianbee]

I'm finally sitting my ass down and watching Marvel's Spider-Man (and by watching I mean skimming for any scenes with Harry, Anya, Miles, and MJ in them) and I commend the MSM staff for trying new things out with the lore but I'm sorry the majority of the creative decisions in the third season alone just absolutely suck.

Examples:

Curt Connors is a lapdog to Norman Osborn. That goes against the very foundation of his character, especially as one of the more sympathetic and moral villains in SM's rogue gallery (I personally blame ASM1 for this). They reveal it was all for a promised cure to Connors' Lizard transformation, but the episodes leading up to that just make him out to be cartoonishly evil without any sort of moral backbone. It's fine to interpret characters in a different way for a different media/story, but aside from the Lizard persona, there's really nothing about THIS Curt Connors that makes him a well-written or even half-baked reimagining of his character. Plus his design is ugly and is such a downgrade from his USM design lmao.

Jefferson Davis is a lapdog to Norman Osborn AND had one of the worst villainous motivations ever concocted: "Oh no! my son and my neighborhood was put in danger by this superhero! so I'm going to go to this madman that caused FAR more irreparable damage to NYC and could further endanger my son and genetically alter my DNA, kidnap innocent people, and help kill my son's friends so that I may kill this one superhero." STUPID. Did they really think they were doing something here? Where is Rio to slap some sense into this man? Oh, they never introduced her? She's presumably dead?? Miles is a main character in this show and Jefferson was only in one episode before becoming Swarm? Wow, what a fantastic build-up for a character dynamic no one gives a shit about in this show!! Plus his design is ugly (the Swarm design is fine though).

I will say though I think it's borderline funny (and can now even be considered a #canon Miles Morales SM event) that when Miles reveals himself to any of his villainous relatives/friends, the first thing they do is gasp and go "Miles?!?"

This is an S1 thing but they made it my problem again in S3 so: making Jackal Gwen's uncle. I'm sorry, but that's fucking weird given his comic history with her (TLDR he's a scientist who was fucking obsessed with her and wanted to kill Spider-Man because he blamed him for her death). Why did every main character in this show NEED to have a villainous relative (luckily Anya's was a fake because that shit made no sense in canon)? None of that drama with Gwen and the Jackal and Miles and his father was compelling!! Villainous family drama is Harry Osborn's thing you just can't take it away from him!! Or at least introduce villain relatives that make SENSE - could have had Aaron Davis be Swarm instead and build his relationship with Miles from previous seasons, could have made Mark Raxton Gwen's stepbrother instead of Liz's and watched him become Molten Man. See how easy it is to create new interpretations without going against the very core of their characters?

Also did they just straight up never introduce George Stacy in this show? Again Gwen is a main fucking character how do you not introduce and have AT LEAST a few scenes between her and one of her most important and foundational relationship dynamics? Trash, man!

I didn't care for Otto in this show but his replacement, Grady, is such a downgrade. Were they contractually obligated to give Scott Menville another character to voice in S3? Because that's the only reason I can think of for this dude to be here and be one of the most annoying characters on this annoying show.

If this show just had shading it would look five times better but Disney is so cheap when it comes to its animated Marvel properties now. USM had over 100 episodes and they were ALL shaded and looked like a goddamn masterpiece compared to any episode from MSM. MSM S3 only had 12 episodes so you would THINK they could have preserved some of their budget for shading but nope! there is precisely one scene that is shaded in this entire season and it's a scene that involves Grady lmao.

Peter reveals to everyone (including VILLAINS) and their mother that he's Spider-Man. The school board meeting reveal was particularly egregious because Connors just egged him on and he just did it to save Max's job??? When a core part of Peter's dilemma throughout any piece of media is revealing himself to the ones he cares about, how they will react, and what the consequences of such an act will be for them and his superhero life? And he does that all to save a guy's job - not his life, but his JOB??? Get outta here lmao.

MJ being introduced in S3 is fine and Peter instantly falling for her is fine given that he has been instantly enamored with her in almost every other iteration of their relationship but I will say it IS a bit weird given this Peter Parker has not shown any previous interest in girls whatsoever (including Gwen!). MJ's also in just a handful of scenes with Peter and I would have really liked for her to be a stronger supporting character for the third season with a believable romance (because Peter all but confesses he wants to be with her for the rest of their lives in the series finale which is very cute but also feels random when she's been a total of four episodes and has a screentime of MAYBE fifteen minutes in the entire show).

Harry is in like two episodes in S3 and I feel like that was very much a #choice from the writers. If Norman isn't involved, why would Harry be? And that's just a disservice to Harry's character - he's more than his relationship with his father and I thought the MSM writers understood that - the USM writers did!

Tony Stark bankrolling Peter and his friends to create a tech startup is so antithetical to SM as a whole but it is so fucking funny and I know it's because of MCU Spider-Man and I hate it here. MCU Spider-Man has caused irreparable damage to my psyche and the SM mythos at large and I'm so glad that shit has been retconned into oblivion (thank you OMD you were good for precisely one thing).

ANYWAY, these are all my thoughts and I'm right when I say USM might have had a quirkier, 4th wall-breaking Peter Parker and made him a lapdog for SHEILD with stupid fucking tech like the spider-cycle but at least their main villains were well-developed, the Osborns were the best part of that show, almost all the main characters had satisfying conclusions, AND Peter didn't reveal his identity willy-nilly and was a contentious plot point throughout.

#usm being a better spider man adaptation is so funny to me #but it's MY shitty spider man show and no one can take it away from me!! #posts on the run #marvel's spider man #text post #at least we all have insomniac spider man which has been one of the best adaptations of sm in YEARS

[watermelonsandal]

oopsies

#tadashi hamada #big hero 6 #big hero 6 memes #hiro hamada #bh6 #disney #disney memes #seriously though that's what he should've done #fuck the disney character motive of dead relatives

[counterspelling]

I've been reading this article called "In Plain Sight: How White Supremacy, Misogyny, and Hate Targeted the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy and Won", and I think you'd like it, too.

Well, that was a very long article that I didn't read all of and that I only half agree with. I do agree that there are a large number of right-wing fans who hate think somehow the sequels are ~too progressive~ but I'm on the complete opposite side and think the sequels are the most misogynistic and racist Star Wars has ever been, including 70s Lucas who thought there was only one black man and three (white) women in the entire galaxy.

I think TFA completely failed to be original but was at least fun in that Rey and Finn were both immediately engaging characters I could become attached to and root for, even if it was a movie I could never truly like for the abominable way it treated Han and Luke and Leia. It's hard to say if I hate TLJ or TROS more, but TLJ was definitely the movie that ruined the entire trajectory of the trilogy. Abrams' problem in TFA was, as usual, that he sets up mysteries and then gets so enamored of his own mysteries that he refuses to answer the fucking questions he set up. Who are Rey's parents? We don't know! And he's not going to tell us! As that thing that came out a while ago said, even HE doesn't know the answers to plotlines he set up! So while I truly believe TFA deliberately set up Rey as Luke's daughter and will never, ever understand how anyone could walk out of that movie thinking differently (the whole movie is just a retread of the OT but Rey is literally just Luke and Anakin. A lone force sensitive kid on a desert planet who gets pulled into a galaxy wide conflict, who calls her relatives' lightsaber to her, who dreams of the island Luke is on when she's never seen the ocean), he refused to actually commit to that plot point. 

That left room for Johnson to come in and say everything we've ever known about Star Wars was wrong and completely pull the rug out from under us because shock is more important than narrative or foreshadowing or an actually satisfying conclusion. He took a trilogy, the first NOT about a white dude, and instead of deepening Rey and Finn's arcs or paying respect to their characters at all, he completely undermined not just the first movie but the entire trilogy to center it around the evil white dude nazi. Rey loses her entire personality and motivation and becomes entirely focused on saving Kyle Ron, a man who she has literally JUST watched murder the only father figure she's ever known and then put her first friend into a coma, this directly after he kidnapped and assaulted her, who she knows is also responsible for the deaths of literal billions and directly torturing rebellion members. Why in the everloving fuck does she want to save him? Why is that her responsibility? It's NOT a woman's job to save a man from himself and it's so fucking disgusting that that's the narrative they gave us in 2017.

If the end of TFA had been Luke meeting Rey and realizing he'd been reunited with the daughter he thought dead, at least she would have a REASON for making it her mission to save this piece of shit. But it doesn't! They threw out everything that made Rey who she was to center the movie around the white dude! Finn's plot was basically just a retread of TFA! They took him from the male lead to a b plot, gave him no scenes with Rey when their relationship (and eventual romance) was such a huge part of TFA. And then TROS comes in and validates the vile nazi romance, again gives Finn no real plot, doesn't significantly give us a relationship between Finn and Rey and Poe, the supposed three main characters, and somehow tries to redeem Kyle Ron in a move that makes no fucking sense? All while completely fucking over Luke and Leia over the course of three movies, never giving them any real motivation or plots, and killing them both in ignomious ways??? So yeah. I think the people who hate these films fall into two categories, but definitely it's not just the rightwingers who think Disney can't tell a story.

#star wars #sw negativity #Anonymous #organasoloskywalker asks

[sailorstarr-chan4]

Long Ramble: Fanfic Ideas (?)

I’m finally narrowing down my WIPs (yay!) and I’m itching to write for different fandoms, including a few “dead” ones.... Because I’m still relatively new to writing fanfiction, it only makes sense that I’d be late to the game for fandoms that already reached its peak and has now petered out to nothing. >.>”

I’ve now written for: Inuyasha (obviously), Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, Disney, Yu Yu Hakusho, Lord of the Rings, and Ancient Magus Bride. All of these I would love to continue writing for, naturally. ^^

Some more fandoms I want to start writing for: 

- Vampire Knight (seriously, I have a historical AU in the process of outlining, that’s slowly growing into something huge, and I’M SO EXCITED FOR IT SBGFHSRGJER! Although I can almost guarantee it’ll gain no traffic cuz the fandom as a whole essentially died in 2014 when the series ended, VK was my very first anime/manga and I love it to death and am DYING to contribute my own take on it)

- Skip-Beat! (thank the gods the series is ongoing, so therefore the fandom is probably still alive -- probably? Mostly I only have oneshot fluffy -- and smutty? -- ideas, plus one Shakespearean-ish AU idea... This is a recent love of mine, so I’d like to try my hand at writing for it ^^”)

- Yuri on Ice (this one actually scares me slightly more than the others because I have never ever ever written yaoi in my life, and I have no idea how to go about it without making it cringe-worthy -.- That and yaoi fangirls kinda scare me, too... But I ADORE Victuuri, and would love to write something cute and/or sexy of them someday!)

- Sailor Moon (this will probably be my only “salty” fic - similar to my motives when writing my little LOTR fic - because canon can be so frustrating. In this case, I plan on writing a few “missing scenes” in which Usagi is schooled for being jealous over her own daughter, and likewise Chibiusa is schooled for being a tad bit too obsessed with her future dad.... yeaaaahhh the manga is reeeeaalllyy fucked up that way... I still adore the series, of course, but a salty part of me wants to “fix” that particular aspect. >> Well, that, and I wouldn’t mind writing a bit of regular fluff or smut either ^^”)

- Kamisama Kiss (tbh, I have NO IDEA what to write, I just know I want to write SOMETHING because this is such an adorable series and I want to contribute somehow! Probably with smut...)

- Ouran High School Host Club (fluff or smut, or both. Doesn’t matter. I adore this series, and would love to try my hand at writing it. But I want to capture the batshit insane comedy that canon showcases, while also being adorable and heartwarming... that may prove to be a challenge...)

Non-anime/manga: 

- Anne of Green Gables (listen: Anne x Gil are my Original OTP™ and deserve all the delicious smut in the world! Thankfully the fandom certainly seems alive and thriving - on ff.net, anyway - so anything I write could gain at least SOME traffic... but my standards are so high for those two, idk if I could give them justice! v.v)

- Frozen (again. Late to the game. Frozen fics are ultimately what made me fall in love with fanfiction, so of course I wish to contribute.... long after that ship has sailed.... Granted, the fandom is still alive, but I’m still nervous about writing for it anyway...)

- *Insert Classic Title Here* (again, more of a “challenge” than anything else. From Pride and Prejudice to Little Women, there’s a part of me that wants to try writing a bit of fluff and/or smut for some of my favorite characters... given time. ^.^;)

#Starling ramblings #anime and manga #fandoms #fanfiction #ideas #Vampire Knight #Skip Beat! #Yuri on Ice #Sailor Moon #Kamisama Kiss #Ouran High School Host Club #Anne of Green Gables #Frozen #movies #writers #writer issues

[diverdowns]

narciso anasui - 1 am character analysis

so, anasui — one of my favorite jjba characters, he’s probably somewhere around third or fourth on my list. i’ll do a quick rundown of his background and personality before i go in-depth into some of the arcs he’s in as well as some of his quotes, notably from the heavy weather arc and the made in heaven arc.

(as you might expect, major spoilers for all of part 6.)

i’ve tried to go easy on the headcanons and focus more on actual character analysis / meta stuff, so here we go.

anasui probably has some serious abandonment issues — we see in canon that it’s mentioned anasui had some major issues connecting with other people growing up, and so he developed a stilted sense of empathy + an obsession with dismantling / disassembling things. this presumably carried over to people — perhaps an underlying subconscious desire to understand people’s motivations that he couldn’t read on the surface through social cues that had, until that point, gone over his head. (or maybe he just really liked tinkering. who knows.)

judging at least from his obsession being allowed to grow unrestricted and out of hand as he continued to suffer socially as a result of it, we can probably assume that anasui’s parents probably didn’t care about him too much — at worst, they may have been neglectful or abusive. still, everything abt his parents is just speculation. notably mentioned in canon though: as a child, he disassembled his neighbor’s car, and was institutionalized for six months. being placed in a place like that for that long of a time does shit to you, and it’s def nothing pretty. add likely parental neglect to the equation, and you have abandonment issues just waiting to erupt.

(as a side note, psychologically, this is an obsessive ritual that can be seen in a number of conditions from asperger’s to alzheimer’s, so honestly any kind of mental illness speculation is fair game for anasui, but this isn’t the post for that.)

whatever the case, he seems to assimilate back into society once his awkward phase ended, though his strange upbringing probably left some lifelong habits / scars there, who knows. he doesn’t do anything to warrant serious attention until he’s 21. at this point, he has a (presumably) long-term, monogamous girlfriend — if it’s anything like the way he treated jolyne, we know that anasui is… overbearing, to say the least. in any case, he walks in on his girlfriend cheating on him when he makes a surprise visit to his girlfriend’s house, and murdered both of them, dismembering them so that “they would never come together again.”

it’s never mentioned if anasui was a stand user since birth, so we can assume he either used diver down to do all this disassembling or he was just…really good at taking things (and people) apart, but it’s likely that he’d had diver down from a young age — up until he’s imprisoned, it doesn’t seem like he was doing anything in particular that would’ve caused him to be normally strong enough to kill two grown adults on the spot, without the help of a stand. (then again, anasui’s capable of some pretty fucked up things either way, so this is just my speculation / hc.)

after his imprisonment, he has a full psychiatric analysis and — nobody can find anything technically wrong with him. besides his obsessive ritual and explosive temper, he’s…just a regular guy, albeit somewhat of an asshole. emporio mentions that his original obsession’s cause was never really discovered, as well. the murder of his girlfriend and girlfriend’s lover was highly publicized, his name being spread through news both on tv and in newspapers, so presumably the details of the crime were sufficiently brutal.

anasui shows a stunning lack of regard for most people’s wellbeing — for the most part, he ignores F.F. and offers little help as she fights kenzo and his dragon dream — though jolyne (and by extension, jotaro) is a notable exception. anasui claims to have fallen in love at first sight, attracted to jolyne by her iron will and strong determination to do the right thing and save her father, and expresses a strong desire to marry her. actually, when jolyne’s involved, he has an almost humorous lack of self-preservation — eg. during the green birth arc, when jolyne’s infected with a presumably fatal plant…infection…disease….thing, anasui not only touches the flowers growing across jolyne’s skin (trying to use his stand to destroy them from inside of jolyne’s body, to no avail) but also puts the flowers in his mouth, which while being played for laughs is also ridiculously foolish. (in general, though anasui ricochets heavily from being the comic relief character to being the stoic yet brash character in the main ensemble, mostly after weather’s death) there’s kind of an explanation for his reckless behavior, coming up later.

(keeping all of this in mind, and despite anasui’s willingness to use his stand to protect the main cast to the point of taking fatal blows for them, he is definitely not a good person. i just want to get that out of the way before someone accuses me of being like, an apologist lmao)

ok, so let’s go thru anasui’s main appearances, from his introduction onward.

emporio goes on to mention that “if weather report wasn’t here to keep [anasui] calm, there’s no telling what anasui’d do.” seeing as anasui is imprisoned when he’s 21, as mentioned in his introductory chapter, and he’s 25 when SO takes place, four years have passed since he’s landed in green dolphin street jail. (for reference, his sentence is for 12 years — relatively light for a double homicide, all things considered — so he’s served a third of that.) presumably, he’s known weather report for at least a majority of that time, as they at least have enough of a rapport for weather to keep anasui out of serious trouble. (weather is 39 during the events of SO. weather, for reference, has been in prison for around 20 years, since pucci took his memories from him when he was 16. also, at the beginning of the BR arc, weather has trouble using a sink that anasui with his impressive sink knowledge notes has been around in modern plumbing for at least 20 years. as a quick side note, anasui seems to have a ridiculous knowledge, in general, of a lot of mechanical things in general — during the yo-yo-ma arc, he spouts off the specifications of a random machine gun after just glancing at it.)

at the end of ch 697 we also just see a scene of weather and anasui hanging out in what appears to be some random ass hallway in the male ward of the prison with no guards around, so take that as you will lol. the two have presumably been hanging around each other for a while like this, so that’s interesting, at least.

the BR arc is where i really got into anasui, so let’s go a little in-depth on those chapters. anasui seems to know a whole bunch of random facts about disney world (though he holds a theme park guide in his hands while he spouts a bunch of random disney world facts, he doesn’t seem to look at it / open it until after he finishes talking, which draws out the legendary “where the fuck is mickey” line). he also mentions manhattan and rome, and how he’s been to neither of those places. it’s probably safe to assume that anasui is floridian — but maybe he’s just really passionate about orlando, who knows. he seems pretty passionate about sinks, too. other than that, not much real information is released here besides things like “anasui’s very passionate about mickey” and “weather report is a fan of post-impressionism”

so, on to the Fun Arc. heavy weather. when weather first gets his memories back, the first things he does, in order, are shove a injured person out of a chair, take said chair, and then force water into a doctor’s body to make him into a chair.

anasui, despite being a literal murderer and honestly doing plenty of fucked up things over the course of the series, flips his shit. he’s legitimately horrified, probably less so from what weather’s doing and more so that it’s weather that’s doing it. actually, weather kinda acts like anasui, honestly, so maybe this is also just anasui being a giant hypocrite, but hey. he’s literally described between chapters as having no idea what’s going on and being pretty freaked out — he’s just following weather at this point because he still has no idea where jolyne is.

(im going to note for my own self-satisfaction that despite weather’s whole “you’re only useful to me now cause you can kill me, anasui” line and all that, when pucci grabs anasui during weather’s fight against him, weather visibly reacts and gets worried regardless, so hey, my rarepair)

okay, after weather’s death, anasui makes a mini speech. (arguably, weather’s death is the turning point for anasui to take more of a serious and less of a comedic role.) here’s what he says:

“listen, jolyne. people have called me a ‘murderer.’ the papers have called me that, and i can’t say that i disagree with them. when people asked me if i would sacrifice myself for the sake of my family, i answered ‘no.’ i’d probably answer that way, now. my heart was never moved by them.”

(more evidence to suggest that anasui’s relationship with his family wasn’t necessarily the best.)

“but i know that i’d be willing to risk my life for something that was able to revive me. i used to be dead.”

interjection here: whether he’s talking about his betrayal (when his girlfriend cheated) or maybe just a general feeling of aimlessness towards life in general, this is pretty dark for anasui, actually. it’s one of the only times he even talks abt his crimes, and this is an interesting concept that araki explores a few times with multiple characters. (eg. anasui risks his life to revive himself with “love,” or what he thinks is love, in any case, to follow jolyne. abbacchio does something similar to follow buccellati, in p5. weather “revives himself” for revenge, and johnny in p7 for the hope of walking again.)

prior to giving himself a mission (jolyne), anasui thinks of himself as functionally dead. this also explains, for example, his nonchalance towards risking his own life and wellbeing for the others.

“weather was that way, too. weather came back to life when he left that prison. i can tell. so don’t think too deeply about what happened to him. these past few days, weather was happy. weather was already saved.”

— okay, in my mind, most of this is just shit anasui says to make jolyne and hermes feel better about weather’s sudden death. to an extent, it’s true: weather prior to getting his memories back was enraptured with the world outside the prison, helping innocent people, messing with sinks, reading fairy tales, but that’s not really the truth. after getting his memories back, weather admits to wanting to die, admitting that he took a cruel sense of pleasure in watching heavy weather run its course and telling anasui that in a twisted way, he’s glad anasui’s there so that he’d kill him. weather’s not happy.

(but who knows? in the end, the character that actually knew weather for the longest was anasui — maybe he’s right and that there was something that revived in weather that we didn’t get to see as the readers.)

but what’s interesting is that he doesn’t mention weather’s sudden transformation after getting his memories back, he lets jolyne and hermes carry on the weather they knew in their thoughts, instead of telling them the truth of weather’s personality. on my second read-through, i noticed that (besides pucci, i guess, and versace by proxy) anasui is the only one who sees weather’s true personality.

and maybe, dying for the sake of his goal (ie. weather’s attempted revenge) was close enough to redemption, in anasui’s eyes. if we pick apart weather’s final goals, he’s living only so that he can 1. take revenge on pucci and 2. die. honestly, in a sad, fucked up anasui-logic kind of way, weather dying in his attempt to kill pucci at least fulfills half of those goals, so it’s not a stretch that anasui could shrug and say “close enough i guess.” but imo, he still says what he does mostly to ease jolyne and hermes’ consciences. it’s one of his kinder moments.

in the actual final fight against pucci, anasui’s probably just behind jotaro in terms of fully grasping and understanding pucci’s abilities — and their implications in battle. his final plan is the only one they really have: because diver down is able to phase through and protect all of the others, he will take the first hit from pucci, and at that exact moment jotaro will stop time and presumably ora pucci into oblivion.

it doesn’t work, but the plan had merit and was surprisingly well thought-out, showing quite a few of his personality traits — while he’s angry and headstrong most of the time, he’s relatively good at thinking on his feet and is always quick to come up with plans, especially in battle. now let’s look at his last lines.

“don’t stop [pucci’s blow] before he hits me. do it after…”

while all the other characters pause and stare at him in shock after he says this, he’s relatively calm about it. he knows it’s the only chance they have, regardless of the danger it poses to himself. dying, to anasui, is not the worst that can happen — it’s having to live again with no purpose (which he’s established, atm, as jolyne).

“ever since i got out of prison, i’ve managed to stay alive… if i can just stay alive, keep this trend… then maybe i’ll ask jolyne to marry me. …or, you know, something like that.”

a lot of people do make light of this (and it’s somewhat comedic, for sure) but it’s interesting again to see how much this drives him. before i really get into it, let’s take a look at jolyne’s (infamous) response.

(jolyne:) “anasui… all right, ask me. […] your plan… it still as hope. it’s not darkness that drives you… even if there’s only one path that we can take, if there’s a hint of hope, then that’s the right path.

holy shit do i love this quote. in the end, anasui’s not… redeemed, not really. he’s still a murderer. he still feels no remorse over killing those people. but he’s not evil, either. his motivation is that he wants to live for real: he is driven by hope. and through all the morally grey protagonists of parts 5 on, this is what they all have in common: a hope or dream that gives someone who’d thought themselves dead something to live for. jolyne doesn’t say this because she’s suddenly in love with anasui, or because she wants to marry them, she says it because she’s realizing this — she’s realizing that anasui’s hope, his resolve, might be enough for this plan to work.

actually, in the end, in an ironic twist of fate, he does die for — and by — jolyne’s hand. (hah.) pucci redirects stone free’s punch into anasui’s torso, piercing through his chest and killing him near instantly. rip. and that, in any case, draws an end to this wall of text.

also i think one random fic i read mentioned a throwaway line that anasui apparently had about him having been married once in prison? i dont recall anything like that, but someone else has confirmed it (i’d love to find the source, if anyone has it!)

i’d love to get into the whole thing about his motivation in the first place: why anasui “falls in love” with jolyne and why that matters, as well as possible subconscious motivations for his obsessions/his stand ability but that’s falling solidly into the territory of hc’s, and not so much analysis/meta. 

i’ll write it up some other time, maybe, if there’s interest.

#narciso anasui #narciso annasui #jjba #stone ocean #jjba meta #stone ocean spoilers

[mst3kproject]

1108: The Loves of Hercules

I kinda miss the shorts and the black and white films in the new series, but I was happy to see a Hercules movie in the lineup! It feels like MST3K getting back to its roots.  This is a particularly awful Hercules movie, too, short on feats of strength and long on romantic melodrama – and never once does Herc bend prison bars or pretend to drink a love potion!  Get with the program, movie.  Along with napping, those are his defining acts!

An encampment of some sort is attacked by the Ecalian army, who proceed to slaughter everybody there including Hercules' wife Megara.  Hercules naturally goes looking to have a few words with the King of Ecalia about this, but when he arrives at the city he learns that the man is already dead.  If he wants vengeance, it will have to be against the king's daughter, Deianira.  Obviously Herc's not gonna take revenge against a girl for something she didn't even do – instead, he immediately falls in love with her, only to learn a few days later that she's already promised to a man named Achillo.

Herc leaves Ecalia in a huff, and after slaying a hydra even cheaper than the dragon in The Magic Sword, he arrives in the land of the Amazons.  Their queen, Hippolyta, drinks a potion that makes her look like Deianira in order to win Hercules' heart.  He is surprisingly okay with this, and fully prepared to stay with her until she gets sick of him and turns him into a tree... but then he learns that the real Deianira is about to be forced to marry her father's killer.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting here going, “Megara?  The redhead who died in the opening scene?  Remember her?  Anybody?”  Apparently not.

When a female character is killed off so that her death can spur a male character to action, this is colloquially known as 'fridging', after the time Alexandra DeWitt was killed and stuffed into a fridge just to piss off her boyfriend, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner.  Among non-hack writers it is generally frowned upon as both sexist (implying that women's lives are important only insofar as they matter to men) and lazy (there are better, less cliché ways to motivate your character).  This movie's treatment of Megara is one of the purest examples I've ever seen.  She is introduced only so that she can be killed, and killed only to make Hercules go to Ecalia, where he promptly forgets all about her when he meets Deianira.  Megara has served her entire purpose in the first couple of minutes, and is never mentioned again.  One wonders why they bothered paying an actress to play the part.  If she's gonna be that irrelevant, why even show her on screen?

This movie claims be be about The Loves of Hercules, but the fact that it forgets about Megara the moment Hercules meets Deianira makes it seem doubtful that he actually loves either of them. If Megara were so dear to him, surely he would grieve for her a while, rather than immediately wanting to run off with her killer's daughter.  And if he didn't love Megara, to whom he had apparently been married for some time, why should we believe he loves Deianira? He barely knows Deianira... it seems like there's a lot more lust going on there than love, especially when he's so willing to accept Deianira's double in Hippolyta.  We get a Hercules who seems to blunder from woman to woman without a lasting attachment to any of them.

This is the biggest problem with The Loves of Hercules, but it's a long way from the only one.  There's also Mickey Hargitay. I've seen Mickey Hargitay in a couple of films before – besides this one, he was the detective in Lady Frankenstein and Anderson in Bloody Pit of Horror (god, I've seen a lot of terrible movies).  I kind of want to say he was better in those, but now that I think about it I'm pretty sure he was dubbed in both so it's actually quite hard to gague his performance. It's better than in the non-MST3K Loves of Hercules I watched, which was a re-dub in which all the characters were stoic and British.  He does a lot of Dull Surprise™ and postures like he's in a silent film.  His 'feats of strength' do not communicate impressive power – he just looks like a guy struggling to balance a prop tree.

Nor does it help that in comparison with Steve Reeves and Alan Steele, he makes for a relatively skinny and baby-faced Hercules.  Hargitay was 1955's Mr. Universe, and he's certainly in admirable shape, but he's just not up to 'demigod' levels.  He looks like the Hercules Ryan Gosling would have grown up into.  Apparently Hargitay got the role because the studio wanted Jayne Mansfield, and she would only agree to be in the movie if Hargitay, her husband, played Hercules.

Then there's the monsters.  Amusingly crummy monsters are stock-in-trade for a Hercules movie, usually realized by people in ridiculous costumes.  The Loves of Hercules is rather ambitious here.  Rather than giving us a distinctly un-threatening lion or a guy in a lizard-man suit who clearly can't see anything, we get a full-scale three-headed dragon standing in for the Lernaean Hydra!  It is significantly uglier and less mobile than its Russian cousin in The Sword and the Dragon, and looks kind of like one of the animatronics from Disney's Jungle Cruise ride.  It's laugh-out-loud obvious how careful the actors are being not to damage it.

These movies are never very faithful to the source material, so it shouldn't bother me that their 'hydra' bears only the faintest resemblance to its mythological inspiration... but it does.  The hydra is my favourite of Hercules' twelve labors – it's some kind of reptilian monster that Hercules tried to defeat by cutting off its head, only to find that multiple (usually three) heads grew back from each stump.  This makes it an excellent metaphor for a problem that needs to be addressed at its source rather than just having its symptoms brushed under the rug, but it also serves to make a point that most of these movies ignore: Hercules isn't stupid.

The hydra was a monster Hercules could not defeat by brute strength alone – he had to use his strength in a smart way.  In the myth, he burned the neck stumps so that they couldn't heal, then dipped his arrows in the hydra's venom to make them extra-deadly to all the monsters he'd have to fight later.  The Disney version actually kept the spirit of this idea even as they changed the ending.  Without a torch on hand, Hercules instead brings down a cliff on top of the hydra, trapping it under tons of rock that he can escape from, but it can't.  This is sort of the inverse of my point from a few reviews back about brains and hands: brains aren't much good without strength to do the work, but strength also isn't much good without a brain to direct it.  By making the hydra a creature Hercules can just stab to death, the episode loses all its meaning.

A lot is also lost from our impression of Hercules' intelligence, which wasn't exactly riding high anyway after he seems unable to remember more than one woman at a time.

Finally, of course, there's The Loves of Hercules' other monster and supreme What The Fuck moment, the Totally Random Sasquatch.  It was only on the second viewing that I realized this was supposed to be the 'monster Alcyone' the peasants mentioned rustling their cattle.  When describing him to Hercules and Deianira before the stampede, they call Alcyone a thief before they call him a monster, and use the word 'monster' in such a way that it seems like a metaphorical description of a human thug, rather than a literal one of Bigfoot.  With the cattle stampede and everything that follows to distract me, I'd forgotten all about Alcyone by the time we actually met him, and the sudden arrival of an ape-man seemed to come completely out of the blue.

In fact, even after realizing the connection, this is a weird, weird moment.  What is Alcyone even supposed to be?  The closest thing I can come up with to Bigfoot in standard Greek mythology is a satyr, but Alcyone is even less satyr-like than Torgo.  The writer Hanno the Navigator referred to a tribe of savage ape-men who supposedly lived around Sierra Leone, which he says the natives called gorillai (yes, this is where we get the word), but that's a long way from Greece and the story is fairly obscure.  As far as I can tell, Alcyone is exactly what Jonah and the bots first took him for: a totally random Sasquatch.  Between him, Cry Wilderness, Om the Caveman, and Gulfax the Poodle-Wookiee, I think we can officially dub Season 11 the Bigfoot Season.

As long as I'm here, 'Alcyone' is a girl's name in Greek.  It refers to a type of bird.

The Loves of Hercules is pretty competently made in most respects.  Even with some of the shortcomings in the casting, acting, and effects, it could have fallen into the 'hokey but charming' category, if only it hadn't forgotten about Megara.  The way she simply ceases to exist, as if women are like shirts and you can just pick a new one when you lose the old (or something similar if the one you originally wanted is no longer available), gives a very poor impression of both Hercules and the writers and makes it difficult to really get into the romances that follow.  In a film about the loves of Hercules, that's a fatal mistake.

#mst3k #reviews #the loves of hercules #all these movies have bigfoot in them #women in fridges #my cheese steak #60s

[vferrwposts]

The F word: A Fandom Filled Reality

I have a big family. I have one brother who is a senior in high school and I have my beautiful mother. And, of course, I have my grandparents, and my cousins, and my cousins’ cousins, and my second aunts and uncles, and last, but not least, the family dog. But, in addition to this, I have family who are wizards, superheroes, and professional monster hunters. I promise I’m not delusional.

Typically, people can’t choose their family. We are born into our families and by genetic proclamation we know who we are related to. But, what defines family? Perhaps, a group of individuals who have common ancestors, or a group of individuals who live under one roof. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary offers one of many definitions of family stating, “a group of people united by certain convictions or a common affiliation.” This sounds much like the way I would define the “F word.” Fandom. Throughout my twenty-year life, I have been born and reborn again and again into different families. I’ve become a Potterhead, a greenie, part of District 12, a member of the Dauntless, and a gleek. I consider myself a close relative to the magnificent Harry Potter, a friend to the Flash, and a little sister to the Winchester Brothers from the CW’s television series Supernatural.

If my friends could describe me, they would probably say that I am the one in the group who becomes overly infatuated with fictional characters. Of course, I reject this and say I am not obsessive, but passionate about the different worlds and backgrounds that these characters come from. I have become familiar with so many fandoms that I talk about their characters as if I personally know them. But what exactly is a fandom? Urban dictionary defines it as “the community that surrounds a TV show/movie/book etc.” “Fandom” was actually derived from the word “fanatic” centuries ago, and has since had an impact on the millennials of this century. While many people do have positive, yet emotionally reckoning, affiliations with fandoms, I have personally learned that most people associate being part of a fandom as being an annoying, obsessive “fan girl.” I have often heard the phrase, “Oh, you’re one of those weird Supernatural obsessed girls?” or “Oh jeez, if I insult Harry Potter are you going to sacrifice me to Satan or something?” (Both are questions that I’ve actually been asked before). I’m not sure what exactly sparked this negative connotation to the word “fandom,” but it might have to do with the way stores like Hot Topic advertise merchandise for the “latest trending shows and books.” I know multiple people who have not given popular shows like Supernatural or AMC’s The Walking Dead a chance because of how “mainstream” the shows have become. I’ve never understood why being part of the mainstream has been a turn-off, but that seems like a question for hipsters alike. Regardless, I consider each “fandom” to be more than just a literal “fan base,” but I think of it as a family.

Attachment to these worlds and fictional people goes much beyond entertainment for me. My reality presently consists of being a sophomore in college at DePaul University in Chicago. I am a minority, as well as the daughter of parents who divorced when I was seven, and I struggle with anxiety.  Essentially, the characters I read about in books or fall in love with on TV are never perfect, but they each have characteristics about them that inspire and motivate me to stay strong or keep going. Once I delve deeper into these different worlds and get to know more about the characters, I immediately find a connection to them.

This attachment to fandoms and fictional characters started at a young age. As a kid, I always loved Disney and the year that my parents divorced this love grew significantly. The last thing I remember my family did together was vacation at Disney World. This led my seven-year-old self to latch on to anything Disney from that point on. Why? Because it made me happy, it reminded me that for a second within a very life changing year, there was still euphoria. Even now I love Disney and when people meet me for the first time they say, “Oh, you’re one of those super Disney fanatics huh?” and they assume it has to do with a basic, cheesy love for the films. No. I don’t love Peter Pan because it was a great childhood movie, I love it because when I was seven I spent countless days imagining I could escape to Neverland and for the brief moment that my imagination allowed me to feel like I could, I felt less anxious than usual.

In high school I came to the very real realization that I had social anxiety and sometimes going to school felt like a difficult chore to complete, but I was able to push myself and get over it. What made that easier for me? Two fictional boys from a TV show. The CW series Supernatural currently has one of the largest fandoms. While the series follows two brothers, Dean and Sam Winchester, across the country while they face demons, ghosts, and monsters alike, the show also deals with themes that address mental illness, family issues, and relationships. The Supernatural team has even gone so far to create a charity called “Always Keep Fighting,” which focuses on inspiring and helping people who suffer from a mental illness. Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, the actors who star in the show, are very big on reminding their fans that no matter what they are struggling with in life, they should always keep fighting, just like Sam and Dean Winchester do. With this campaign, they have sold t-shirts with the slogan on it and donate all profits to charities such as, To Write Love on Her Arms, The Wounded Warrior Project, and Student Suicide Prevention. When this campaign first launched, a movement began on twitter where fans from all over the world took it upon themselves to support other fans with mental illness who could not afford the campaign t-shirt by purchasing one for them. This is the family that I am a part of. This proves just how much a fandom can be more than just a fan base. Fandom is being able to go out in public with a Supernatural campaign t-shirt on and have a stranger stop me and tell me that they hope I’m winning my fight. Fandom is also being able to spread love and connect with people from all over the world through websites and social media and learning that I am not alone through my fight.

These fandoms are an escape from my everyday struggles and they offer a support that can be very difficult to find for people like me, who struggle to feel calm with others so easily. If I ever feel a moment of weakness or I am having a really bad mental day, or I’m simply stressed about daily chores, I can easily escape by opening a book or choosing an episode on Netflix. Anxiety, depression, or reality in general can be dealt with in different ways and if being indulged within a make believe world works best, then take my advice and let yourself fall in love with fictional characters. Let them be the ones to remind you that you will be okay. Wear your rock salt with pride, like I do mine, and don’t be afraid to say fuck you to your demons.