#inherent to literally all of his fucking work but i digress

[killbaned]

THEY'RE NOT A FUCKING CHRISTIAN BAND JESUS CHRIST.

#imagine dragons are the new nickelback in that people think they're the worst thing to happen to music #and are singlehandedly killing the industry despite the fact that at the worst some of their shit is fucking mid lmao #imagine dragons would still be well liked if they hadn't become overly exposed and also like #if their frontman hadn't started doing weird white dude half-rap in the songs which is just. bad. #sorry but i refuse to take music opinions of the website that hated hozier seriously #yes. i'm still mad about that. his debut album dropped and other white people were trying to say he was #fucking racist for being irish and having a blues feel to his music #and then like five years later he became y'alls uwu softboy bogman irish fairy while ignoring the political themes #inherent to literally all of his fucking work but i digress

[devilsskettle]

can you explain that mike flanagan post? /gen (its ok if you dont want to tho)

i can’t speak for the op of the post but i’m happy to share my opinion about it! (here’s the post for anyone else’s reference) (also spoilers below)

i’ll preface this by saying that mike flanagan has had a lot of success and garnered a large following from his horror(-related) projects and i’m not actually sure what the general public consensus is on his work, but my opinion is pretty negative and i’ve seen that opinion shared by a lot of other horror fans, primarily in the frustration towards the way he adapts a lot of preexisting stories. he’s adapted several horror classics (the haunting of hill house/bly manor being adaptations of the haunting of hill house and turn of the screw respectively) and several stephen king books. nothing wrong with that inherently, but the haunting of series is so removed from the source material it doesn’t make sense to even really call them adaptations. it feels disrespectful to the original stories by taking it apart and putting it back together as a vessel for whatever unrelated story he wants to tell, sometimes a story that functions entirely opposite of its source material. for example, the haunting of hill house intends to disrupt its audience. it’s not supposed to be comforting, it’s supposed to unsettle and the whole story is hurtling towards a senselessly tragic ending. the main character, nell, is deeply lonely and unlikable, and she’s blocked from making a genuine human connection with anyone else every time she tries. it’s unclear if there’s anything actually supernatural going on or if she has a collision with this “absolute reality” that she feels entirely unwanted and that she’s wasted her life, and she’s just unable to cope. it’s NOT a family drama, none of the characters are related. for some reason, flanagan decided to make them all siblings haunted by the death of their mother and the LITERAL supernatural ghosts of hill house when they were children (while the main characters stay at hill house as adults and the story takes place almost entirely inside the house instead of primarily seeing the house in flashback). the nell of this version becomes a traumatized widow and spirals, reaches out to her many siblings to no avail for only one day, goes to hill house, and is killed by a literal ghost in a way that makes it look like a suicide, but is later revealed to her family that it’s not actually and she gets to come back and see them one last time to give them closure about what happened to their family, giving them a chance at a happy life together and the people they love. this is a horror story that balks at horror and strives to reverse it. how do you adapt a story that ends in an actual suicide and roll it back that much because it’s too challenging for you to deal with. pussy shit. shirley jackson’s story provides no comfort, no closure, no certainty about what actually was happening in that house. it’s fucking weirddddd to remove a text so absurdly from its source in almost every aspect except name and location (big scary house). i have more chips on my shoulder about this particular adaptation but i digress. bly manor is essentially the same way with its source material of turn of the screw and again it’s fucking weird, there’s no real reason to call it bly manor at all. he’s also adapting edgar allan poe soon and a lot of people are pessimistic about how that will turn out

also re: a “full twisted horror” version from mike flanagan: when does he EVER do anything in a “full twisted horror” way. he writes and directs horror projects constantly but seems to fucking hate the genre. when his adaptations are so de-fanged from the original sources and his original work is so lackluster and cheesy in terms of its horror elements, why doesn’t he just write dramas and/or action movies for christ sake. it’s so conceited too to be like oh i can make a REAL horror adaptation of wuthering heights like. i have absolutely no faith in that whatsoever lol also just because the 2011 film adaptation isn’t “horror” it’s still bleak and tragic and also doesn’t shy away from the nuance of heathcliff as a character and the brutality of the way other people treated him, even if we only see the first half of the novel. like that’s also valuable and to brag about making it a “real” horror film is dismissive of that and just generally tacky imo. also have you seen this guy’s idea of “scary” special effects? soooo lame and tacky. sorry but it’s just not it for me. he really only has two tricks up his sleeve, which are “ghost/supernatural creature with glowing eyes” and “literal cartoon character villain” it’s so uninspired

soooo with that in mind, the idea of him adapting wuthering heights is abhorrent to me. he has shown several times that he doesn’t understand gothic horror, that he can’t embrace the unsettling and insists on comforting his audience instead (also a problem in gerald’s game, doctor sleep, bly manor, etc), that he shies away from the kind of complicated and violent and intense familial and romantic love that is so important to wuthering heights. i feel that he would make any allusion to the supernatural far too literal and the ending cheesy as hell and that would be unforgivable. i absolutely don’t trust him to write complicated “unlikable” women like cathy (he simply strips away anything interesting about his female characters and has no insight into women as people and our life experiences, i actually think he does make the effort which i actually do appreciate from a male filmmaker but more often than not he ends up writing fake deep plot lines for women that lack emotional reality because they’re not based on one specific lived experience, just a general archetypal idea of an experience, which i think he does in other aspects of certain characters as well, i.e. his queer characters or characters who struggle with addiction, all of whom he writes a very similar way) or characters with any nuance in general. tl;dr: i think it would suck ass. he’s not emily brontë and he will never come close and i genuinely hope he dies before he tries to adapt wuthering heights not to be dramatic

in conclusion:

#if mike flanagan even breathes near wuthering heights i am mentioning him by name in my suicide note #anyway thanks for asking i love complaining about this <3

[david-box]

I think the main thing that fucks me about wwdits is that if they kept *one* of their big plot points they had for each character and *actually* worked that it'd be perfectly fine.

Nandor and Guillermo's relationship being defined by both of them wanting what the other has that they cannot obtain, forever, permanently, in diametric opposites with the sexual tension inherent to a LITERAL master/servant relationship that gets turned on its head is a GOOD fucking idea, and I don't even like the couple or ship it. Nadja's harebrained idea and asshole behavior devolving into her project being ruined in front of her could have been a GOOD arc and arguably still can be if they deal with it in this season, and I still don't remember why they turned her into someone that's really into starting a nightclub for ??? reasons after fully establishing that she's the most competent member of the house except I guess to give her something to fail at. The child Colin Robinson thing was wildly interesting for both lore (if there is even is lore, but I digress) and character reasons (they reacted so strangely to it!) and I didn't even like his face. The fact that Guillermo stayed behind for the kid, or to pilfer coin, and Nandor becoming openly shittier as a person, or getting really into trying to be different, or trying to be his own self, or Lazlo deciding to be better, or the DESCENDANT OF VAN HELSING TRYING TO BECOME A VAMPIRE, every energy vampire plot imo, the baron, were all good subplots by themselves, but half of them don't work together and they honestly didn't manage to wrong out a lot of humor out of it.

As it stands right now Lazlo is the only one who's been consistent without needing to be flanderized or have major character elements forgotten about to where it's practically a soft retcon and I don't even know how long that's going to last. And he's changed! He's actively a nicer person! I'm not looking forward to any arc he could have! I *don't want him to change now*! Fuck!

#wwdits #me #text #also the random ass lore they put in as for plotlines is so bad now #like theres “its canon because its funny” and then theres “we need an exscuse” #they didnt even need to really retcon anything #they could have hinted at rhe post death episode that they were just bullshitting themselves bc come on #theres no way not discussing dead ppl again is a ruie #thats bullshit #come on #i dont like the way theyve gone with the whole vampires-nor-knowing #-how-normal-people-live-anymkre-thing #theres old fashioned and then this. #like man #just. #blah #id quit watching but my mom likes the shoe #lol #rant

[bylertruther]

One would think Mike would be ecstatic on his first day in cali. He finally gets to see his gf and spend time with her. But no, Will was quiet and kinda moody and this has ruined the whole day. Ahahaha. When he said that during their argument, it made me laugh. how do you think Mike will react when he finds out El didn’t ask Will to do the painting?

he really said woooooow.... so you're really not gonna be obsessed with me? not only do you bring another girl's painting (which was our thing btw) to OUR reunion and have the NERVE to be hot now, but you also want to not laugh at my jokes or take my olive branch? how abt i step into traffic rn. wht if i slipped n sprained my ankle, will. then would u pay attention to me. i know that my girlfriend has been lying to me this entire time straight to my face, just got harassed by everyone in the roller rink and had that moment immortalized on tape, and ran off to cry somewhere alone, but you not paying attention to me is worse than all of that actually and tbh it's kind of unforgivable. LIKE MICHAEL PLEASE..... I KNOW U CALLED HIM ALL THE TIME AND NEVER GOT ANYTHING IN RETURN BUT STILL...... NOW IS NOT THE TIME AND I DON'T THINK WILL NOT TALKING TO U SHOULD BE UR PRIORITY IF U SUPPOSEDLY LOVE UR GIRLFRIEND MORE AND "CARE ABT [HER] SO MUCH"?! 🧐 but i digress.

honestly, i think it's going to snap his world in two. the painting on its own was not inherently romantic, but will's lies are what make it so. had he just given mike the painting and lifted his spirits, it would've been super touching but easily played off as "you're my best friend, of course i feel that way about you!" just like all of their other heart to hearts, like the crazy together one for example. but the fact that he used eleven's name is what makes it suspicious and it'll break his heart, because will lied to him. the first thing we're shown is that will can't and doesn't ever lie to mike even when it's to his advantage and even if the other party members are telling him to.

according to the script, mike knew that eleven didn't need him anymore because he saw it in her eyes. he feels this way and then will goes and fucks it all up by unknowingly giving him all these false ideas that don't apply to el at all. he isn't going to understand why will lied, especially about something that important, and then he's going to feel even worse because he was right!! and yet he listened to will anyway over both his own understanding and eleven's actions and words just because he trusts him that much.

mike tried calling will all the time despite will never calling him back. he tried to crack lighthearted jokes with will at rink-o-mania. he felt like he'd lost will because he was the one doing all the work and that's why he told him "maybe you should've reached out more, but why am i the bad guy?" (paraphrased). and still!! he doesn't let will take the blame when they make up!!! because he loves will that much!! he's the one that patches things up between them and he's the one that's been honest with will even when it was hard!! so for will to not feel like he can give him a painting despite mike literally having his room and his basement covered in his drawings as well as a binder is going to feel like such a punch to the gut in a "wow. i trust you with everything and you can't even trust me with something that used to be our thing? i thought we were best friends, a team, and yet you're lying to me?" like. the tragedy is that will thought he was doing something good for mike and eleven, and he doesn't realize that he just fucked it all up straight to hell. bc then mike is going to be like lol wow so no one really DOES need me cool cool cool love that for me love that my girlfriend AND my best friend both lied to me and felt like they couldn't be open and honest love that 🫠👍

like. it's just such a fascinating plot that can unravel any which way. he's going to be confused for sure. hurt. possibly angry, because we know he lashes out when he's overwhelmed. but he's going to be so hurt and confused. will is his best friend. his home. will never lies. so why after everything.... after everything that they've done, after everything that they've said... after how he treated eleven when she was lying.... why is he lying?

tl;dr homeboy is going to be so hurt and confused in a way he probably hasn't ever been before and it will be Glorious

#asks #i also think he'll have an expression on his face where it's like. embarrassment bc ofc she didn't commission it. when has el ever #expressed any interest in dnd? and why else was will so impassioned in the van? he's going to feel so [will voice] Stupid. #BUT I HOPE HE DOESN'T RIP UP THE PAINTING OMG LIKE WILL DID WITH THEIR PHOTO IN CASTLE BYERS...... I'LL KMS NO OFFENSE

[system-of-a-feather]

Really glad XIV has found something he likes so much just for the sake of liking it, it's a wonderful feeling. - Green from @reimeichan

For REAL though.

Like I literally can count the things I experience regular positive affect for on my hand, actually I'll go ahead and do it now 1) The system, specifically Riku who is the yin to my yang 2) Martial arts and violence 3) The guitar / guitar music 4) Communism and 5) chewing things.

1, 2, and 4 inherently tie to trauma, 2,3 and 5 are solely because they are the easiest sensory de-escalators. #3 I think I'd still like even if I didn't need something to quickly calm me / defuse me / give me a non-destructive outlet; but I really really don't think I'd love it even remotely as much if it didn't serve as one of the few relatively reliable things that can take me out of an aggressive fit and/or fight response.

And like honestly? Beyond that, that's it. I have a good relationship with our fiance, but my attachment is fucked and my feelings towards relationships as a result are a lot more transactional than not. I like his presence, and I like him and what he brings into our life, but as it is I don't think I could in true honesty say that I like him for the sake that I like him. Kinda shitty thing to say, but he's aware on how this be for me and its a work in progress.

But to actually have this mysterious thing I love and get positive emotions and care for.... for little more than it being an aesthetic and a mood and honestly just having a great character design / combat design / sound design?? Just for all those arbitrary reasons??? It's pretty nice honestly and like, I am definitely "overplaying" / leaning far far into the joy this gives me, I could easily like disengage from it because I really don't get caught up naturally in positive emotions most of the time; but like no joke its a major sign of healing for me that I **can** experience this affect so I see absolutely no reason that I should mute it at all.

Plus anyways, I live hard by the rule in life that I exist to enjoy and live happy with myself and live my most genuine life as myself that I can and anyone who has an issue with that can get the fuck out and leave since I quite frankly don't have time for people that want to stifle me or make me change for them. I intend to get better and I intend to fix a lot of my toxic and antisocial issues, but that is for myself. If they can't see the vision of where I'm going in life and/or see it and don't like it, that's up to them.

If me never shutting the fuck up about Vergil and Bury the Light is something that would drive someone away, then good riddance, saves me time on a waste of skin, space, and breath.

But I digress, I can experience a consistent unadultered positive feeling towards something that isn't transaction / function driven and so I'm gonna sit here and make Riku scream about Vergil being around every corner cause the algorithms on everything know what I want to see.

It's a good time for me and its a funny time for them. Anyone upset with that can suck it to be quite frank

-XIV

#alter: xiv #vergil posting #vergil #vulgar tw #ask #asks #aspd shit #aspd tendencies

[elliebear666]

My dumb ass rant-response to an article about how there "isn't a self" and that "science agrees." Actually, it doesn't. It's quite split, but here's my rant.

See... I don't agree with this. I'll tell you why, but let me first preface by saying: I'm not a fucking scientist. I don't know shit about fuck, but also when it comes to complex topics like the existence of a "self," neither do most of the people that study it.

To contextualize my thoughts about, and juxtapose the presence of vs. a lack of, a self… first I will explain how I and many others see the self as a concept: The self is not a static identity. When it comes to existence, static isn't something that often, well, is. Reality is constantly shifting and changing and evolving. The universe expands, stars die and turn in on themselves, planets don't maintain a perfect distance from their star, etc.

However… that doesn't mean the universe doesn't exist. It does. If you can define a concept, and it persists? Then that's something you can say exists.

The self is the same way. Example: If you have a water bottle and you fill it up with water? You still have a water bottle. The volume of water may fluctuate, and its shape may be in a constant state of change, but that water is still inside of a water bottle.

The self is the same in some ways. We are a vessel, a body, which houses an ever changing person. The self is both the body and whatever is beneath the skin, in my opinion. You can't separate the body from the self, and if you CAN, in the literal sense, and you transfer that self to another vessel, that WOULD change things to a degree. The water analogy works only when the self cannot leave the body it is housed within. But when it can, the analogy falls apart. So… onward into obnoxious philosophizing!

So, if we can transfer the self to another vessel, what makes it still the self? I suppose, if we renovate a house, and next to nothing remains of the original material… is it still the same house? That's a bit beyond my ken, but I'll try to put my thoughts to words.

Yes and no.

When it comes to HUMANS, and the existence of a self, one could argue that our "soul" is our self. I don't particularly believe in souls. But I digress…

I guess what I'm trying to say is that… the self is both an amalgamated byproduct of being exposed to existence, and an inherent part of existing as a human. It isn't static, sure, it remains in flux even when it does not appear to be on the outside. But our universe does not stop being the universe that it is simply because it is ever expanding or because whatever is contained within that universe is constantly changing.

I actually think that a universe is the best analogy for a self. Everything is in motion, it's always changing. Maybe its contents are somewhat unrecognizable to an eternal entity that just hangs out in nonexistence and observes. However, despite that, the universe is still the universe that it is, even when all light and life is extinguished.

I read a quote that said that "sentience is simply the universe becoming self-aware and experiencing itself." I feel like that's maybe a bit of an oversimplification - we were children of the universe. A father is not his child, even if who he is can be seen in the child he helped create.

The idea of a lack of self would indicate that a person is not an individual. And to be honest, I detest antirealism. I detest anti-individualism, especially because I have spent my life taking a journey into myself and the world around me to discover my most authentic self. Were a self not present, I wouldn't care to find what is most me, and I wouldn't be able perceive the journey as my own.

The fact that each individual's perception is their own is fact enough to posit that there is a self. Each self is capable of perception. Therefore, the self exists. That seems redundant, but many other scientific minds agree that the very nature of an INDIVIDUAL'S capacity for perceiving is proof enough that they have a self.

That's my dumb rant for the day. Here's an article from a free-think website about the existence of a self:

https://aeon.co/essays/the-self-does-exist-and-is-amenable-to-scientific-investigation

[intergalactic-chameleon]

thinking abt gender again bc when am i not

at school -amongst certain peers- i am now understood as being transgender. theyre just kinda like “yea you’re not cis/a woman” and it feels pretty fucking nice. like im finally being given the option to be more authentically me just by virtue of other ppl clueing into how i express myself. and im very into it… like yea, i am transgender. pretty literally. cool

but it’s also a bit strange bc im not super vocal abt specifically identifying as trans or genderqueer. and like, i allow myself to be gendered as a woman if that’s what someone chooses to do. bc i dont rly care nor does it fully feel like im being misgendered. i can be a woman if i need to or want to be. im also cool with my boyfriend calling me his girlfriend. so it kinda feels like i live a double life in some ways.

most ppl immediately identify me as a woman and dont question that decision after doing so, and i work with that. it doesnt make me feel particularly uncomfortable to be addressed as miss or ma’am etc, and i still relate a lot to women/womanhood. and not that being feminine is inherent to being a woman, but i still sometimes miss having long hair and no hair on my face, and also feeling the urge to adorn myself in flowy clothing and pretty jewelry.

and honestly, thats probably because it’s easier for me to feel ‘pretty’ when trying to match that ideal, but also it was a fun creative outlet. putting together a beautiful feminine outfit was really fun! and i have so many items of pretty jewelry and clothing that i still really love and dont want to give away yet. i dont want to pretend like i suddenly am no longer feminine just bc i choose to look more masculine these days.

and look, i can definitely still “femme it up” if i want to, but i think im now going to save that for special occasions. masculine formal wear doesnt rly do anything for me, so i’d much rather wear a pretty necklace and maybe shave my face for a special event instead of trying to find a suit that fits me lol. i digress. i just want to have it all, but it’s difficult to do that. esp since i dont do drag or anything like that lol. (too bad i never got into theater hahaha)

regardless, the most annoying thing abt all of this gender stuff tho is that cis ppl just dont fundamentally understand what im doing lol. my primary care doctor mentioned my mustache at my last physical a few months ago because he was wondering if it bothered me at all… insinuating that if im a Female, i inherently would probably be uncomfortable having facial hair (which NATURALLY grows on me, mind you). ik it can potentially be a sign of a hormonal disorder, and most Women do in fact hate having facial hair, but it’s just like, dude, you dont know me like that. my ratstache and patchy chin hair makes me feel GOOD. no further questions at this time — or ever, please. thanks.

#gender #personal #weeeeee #so weird seeing old pictures of myself. it’s like looking at a completely different person #and all ive done is change clothes #cut my hair #and grown out my stache and patchy goatee

[autisticandroids]

anyway i really dislike the “dean thinks cas doesn’t have feelings because he’s an angel” headcanon because i just don’t think it’s...... believable? 

like, my first thought is it doesn’t make a ton of sense if only because like, cas is such an overemotional character. like his motivations are intensely impulsive, irrational, emotional. but like, you could also argue that dean doesn’t understand that about him, that dean doesn’t see him very clearly, and that’s believable to me.

but there’s a lot of other evidence against this headcanon. like, first of all, dean has seen him human or de-angeled a couple of times, and he clearly doesn’t change that much. second of all, like, yes, in the early seasons dean sees cas as an Angel but by the late seasons he very much sees him as like..... just a guy? like he very much just sees cas as a guy in later seasons. i don’t know if i could pinpoint where this transition happens but it does happen. third of all, we see dean attempting to tug on cas’ heartstrings a good few times? 6x20 “i’m not gonna logic you,” 6x22 “we were family once,” 8x17 “i need you,” and those are the ones that come to me off the top of my head. and in 8x17 it even works! so like when push comes to shove and it’s a life or death situation, dean is aware that cas has heartstrings to be tugged on. like dean knows cas has emotions.

but the biggest reason is like. that line that people use to support it. the one from reading is fundamental.

Oh, I don't know, man. What can I say? You've been chosen. And it sucks. Believe me. There's no use asking "why me?" 'Cause the angels – they don't care. I think maybe they just don't have the equipment to care. Seems like when they try, it just... breaks them apart.

like, that line is..... okay we’re all agreed that dean is like. he is nothing if not a miserable little pile of lies. he is always saying the opposite of what he means and masking one feeling under another. it’s his defense mechanism. things he says, things like this, they’re him trying to convince himself/other people of one thing, while he believes another. 

the first thing he’s doing here is blaming himself. he is taking responsibility for both cas’ previous actions and his current state on his own shoulders. 

now, remember, this is an edlund episode. and given *waves hands* supernatural, i think one of the more coherent methods of analysis one can take wrt. the show is to view individual writers’ bodies of work as coherent canons within themselves, only semi connected with the show as a whole, because individual writers often have strong and conflicting portrayals of the characters. 

anyway ben edlund’s dean very much feels responsible for cas. like, obviously edlund wrote “the end,” and we have collectively made a delicious meal of the fact that the horror of that future for dean is that he’s ruined cas - that endverse cas is very much (if i may weave the text together for a moment) “fallen in every way imaginable,” and that it’s dean’s fault. but the end is not the only place this dynamic shows up. look at the man who would be king - “you're a friggin' child, you know that? just because you can do what you want doesn't mean that you get to do whatever you want!” dean is very much taking it as his responsibility to educate cas here, to teach him right from wrong. ben edlund's dean very much views cas primarily as a child he is responsible for. hell, the whole drama of the man who would be king is basically that cas did something without dean’s permission, which doesn’t make a ton of sense unless you think dean feels responsible for all of cas’ actions. like, this is the flip side of dean’s control complex - if it is dean’s moral duty to control everything going on around him, then everything that happens is his fault. if everything that happens is his fault, then it is his moral duty to control everything around him. they’re the same. 

this line is dean blaming himself for cas’ “brokenness,” since he’s the one who got cas to try to care. and certainly, the text is encouraging him to blame himself:

DEAN It's Sam's thing, isn't it? You taking on his, uh, cage-match scars. I'm guessing that's what broke your bank, right?

CASTIEL Well, it took... everything to get me here.

like, i don’t think cas is trying to fuck with dean’s head here? i don’t think even at the best of times cas is emotionally aware enough to hit on the perfect way to ruin dean’s entire month like this on purpose, and this is not the best of times. and cas i don’t think sees things as dean’s fault, he just sees himself as fallen, he doesn’t think dean pushed him. and a lot of things have happened to cas in the last four years, only some of them to do with dean. to cas, “everything” here means just that - everything. dean is only one piece of a much larger puzzle. hell, cas when cas says “everything” he is probably referencing like, his whole “god’s plan” thing here: quite literally the entire predestined machinations of the world. it’s very little to do with dean.

on the other hand, i’m always just on the edge of reading cas in reading is fundamental, specifically, as bitterly passive aggressive - “always happy to bleed for the winchesters” is such a vicious line it’s hard to believe he’s being sincere. sometimes in stories i can sort of... feel the narrative/author possessing a character and saying what they want to express, rather than what that character would actually say. sometimes i feel like “well, it took... everything to get me here” and “always happy to bleed for the winchesters” were less “authentic cas characterization” and more “ben edlund being a bitter casgirl.” 

but i digress. regardless of whether that exchange was in-character for cas, and whether it was sincere, the effect on dean it has is in-character: dean blames himself. 

and the whole “they don’t have the equipment to care” thing is on the one hand, dean blaming himself - he’s the one who tried to get cas to care in the first place. and on the other, dean trying (and failing) to convince himself that there’s nothing he could have done, that it isn’t his fault - cas’ brokenness is inherent to his angelic nature, that can’t be dean’s fault.

the other thing he’s trying to do here is dehumanize cas. 

he has a couple of reasons for doing this. the first is simply that he's angry. dehumanizing cas is an act of cruelty, and dean is being cruel because he's angry.

it makes sense that dean is angry. like, on one level, cas has done a bunch of fucked shit that dean has every right to be mad about. but that stuff is not imo the primary reason dean is angry. dean is angry because of his self-blame. dean is angry because he blames himself for both cas' actions and his current state, and he's mad at cas for making him hate himself. i know that's like five dimensional blame refraction, but welcome to the twisted mind of dean winchester.

so dean is angry, and he's dehumanizing cas as an act of cruelty because he's angry. but he's also dehumanizing cas because he doesn't want to be angry at cas anymore. he can't forgive cas (because he can't forgive himself and he blames himself for cas' actions), but he loves cas and doesn't want to be angry with him, so he dehumanizes him and strips him of agency in order to absolve him of responsibility.

that's what's happening in this line. and also, all that aside, the line doesn't even say cas doesn't have feelings! it says he does, and they've ruined him!

#spn #love to do a like thousand word exegesis of one line of dialogue

[bigskydreaming]

My favorite thing (cough bullshit cough cough) is when fics allude to all this stuff Jason holds against Dick but never go into any specifics. While at the same time having no trouble being detailed about other stuff in the fam's history or Bruce in UTRH, but the sec its Jason bitching at Dick it gets real vague. Jason's like oh you know what I'm talking about or don't think I've forgotten, you dick....but we're supposed to just imagine for ourselves what that is. Incheresting.

Me at all the fic writers who are like “Oh so you think Dick was never a fuckhead to Jason huh, well in this essay I will....”

Like here’s the thing, as I’m always saying:

Fanfic? Inherently transformative. You can do whatever you want with it.

So that means that yes, absolutely, if you want? For whatever reason? You CAN write Jason and Dick having this extensive history of Dick being a jerk to Jason and Jason resenting him because of it.

But.

But but but but but.

You have to like, actually WRITE that.

And that’s the part that people just.....don’t do. Instead they rely on just handwaving into existence a backstory that only exists on their say-so, and expect readers to just accept Dick’s characterization here as fact, even though its literally not based on canon OR based on anything they’ve actually provided in story......

Because even in a transformative medium, you have to actually TRANSFORM something to get from Point A to Point B!

You want Dick’s character to be this callous jerk full of regrets because he came to his epiphany of How Not To Be A Jerk too late in life and his siblings are all like well we don’t really have time for you now, you missed your shot bro?

Cool cool.

But you have to TRANSFORM Dick’s character from what he’s ACTUALLY like in canon TO that figure there, and there’s no actual transformation in any of these stories. They just start with it taken as a given that this is the way Dick already is, and expect everyone to just catch up and get on board, despite the fact that if we were to anthropomorphize their fic and ask “hey Siri-fic, show us how you got Dick from Point A to Point B,” the fic would say no because there’s no work to show. It doesn’t exist.

Instead, what we actually get is a characterization of Dick that to most of his fans honestly doesn’t make any sense, and we’re like, wait, why is Dick like this here, and in response we get fics being like *points to this part of canon, says everything you need to know is right in there* and we’re like no we’ve been to that part of canon, what you’re describing is literally just NOT THERE. So again, still, once more with feeling: wait, why is Dick like this here?

And not to be contentious on main, oh wait lol I don’t care, but like......tbh this is a very cheap and lazy form of storytelling. And I don’t actually feel bad for saying that, sorry not sorry, because I feel like writers in this fandom have long been perfectly happy to run with this sorta thing and then hide behind “cant criticize my story, Im doing this for free” to keep people from commenting on how this is an ummm not great approach to taking characters from canon and transforming them into something else. 

Even though its like.....I don’t really care about your singular story enough TO criticize it, I’m perfectly content to x out of it and move on to the next one, but when so damn many of these stories are relying on the same shortcut without a single one of them actually doing any of the transformative work to justify their take, and over and over we’re just expected to go along with this, its like.....umm yeah, I do actually feel that at a certain point its abundantly relevant to point out that this IS a ginormous fucking trend and the trend itself is absolutely deserving of criticism.

And quite frankly, when fics or headcanons RELY on the expectation that people just nod and smile and shh don’t question it every time they come across a depiction of Dick Grayson as just this total thorn in his family’s side......like, “no” is actually a perfectly valid response to that expectation, lmao. Nobody is owed fans of this character just sucking it up and being like nah, this is fine, as everyone continues to run with this ball all while justifying it with handwaving and vague pointing at an ever moving target whenever somebody’s just like....”I’m not even trying to criticize your fic, I’m just wondering what your take on Dick is based on, because I think we’re looking at two entirely different characters here.”

Because like....we are! Lmao. Yeah, different interpretations are a thing, but when the Dick Grayson in question is foundationally based on formative events that literally don’t exist anywhere BUT in the fic writer’s mind because the writer never actually wrote them into the fic and they don’t actually exist anywhere else.....we are effectively at that point talking about two entirely different characters. And its extremely irritating for those of us who want to talk about the one that’s based on actual canon events to be constantly told we’re doing it wrong and just being referred back to the general collective view of how ‘Dick is bad actually, cuz we say so,’ when pressed for specifics. Like, I’ve literally had people post or comment about ficlets I’ve written that show Dick and Jason getting along pre-ADITF, where people are like “aww this is so much better than canon, would’ve been nice if we could’ve had this instead of Dick being such a jerk to Jason.”

I mean....fahlkfhaklfhaklfhklafhklahfalhaf! Y’know?

But I mean. I digress. Probably. I don’t know. What was the question?

[shimmershae]

Some, okay a lot, of pre-mid season (tri? season) finale thoughts.  As if you actually asked for them, lol.

And no, I haven’t actually watched the last episode yet.  I’ve been putting it off all morning.  For reasons.  Reasons that I felt the inexplicable need to put on paper, er, screen.  

If you care at all to read the purging of my fatigued TWD fangirl mind, please look beneath the cut.  Fair warning.  It’s long so pull up a chair maybe, lol.  

I’ll admit it.  The spoilers indicating a significant lack of Carol/Melissa content has dampened much of my enthusiasm and there wasn’t all that much to start with.  

Let me tell you why--

The season, so far, has been woefully unbalanced in favor of the Reaper storyline and the Maggie/Negan conflict (which ties back to the Reaper storyline by the flimsiest of strings) and I’m just not invested.  

Why?  

Well, it’s multifold.  

#1 reason why?  Having a third of the last season ever of TWD devoted to going inside “the lions’ den” of villains I have no emotional connection to or curiosity about is a big fat fail.  

You might say “but there’s the Daryl double agent” aspect and I say “so fucking what” because it was so poorly conceived and has felt like such a WTF set of fraying puppet strings for this plot Angela was apparently jonesing to tell from the GO, damn the torpedoes she had to know where inevitably coming her way.  

Seriously.  I had talked myself into accepting that which I could not change, citing Daryl’s emotional brokenness after Rick.  Convincing myself he’d lost his anchor to goodness and hope and fulfillment in his years of self-imposed exile from Carol and what was left of his family and to a certain extent?  I can still by that explanation.  But really.  It’s the Leah of it all.  

Let me attempt to explain.  

To do that, maybe I should detail how I’ve always perceived Daryl.  

Daryl, IMHO, began this journey with us and the rest of Team Family with a figurative fortress erected around his true, core self.  

He was prickly.  Defensive to any overtures of kindness because he inherently did not trust them.  Loathe to form any real connection to anyone other than Merle, his blood.  

Daryl balked at the possibility of emotional connection and flinched in learned fear from physical touch.  

He did not recognize or accept affection or respect at face value because it was something rarely shown to him before.  

Anybody else remember that childhood abuse book from Consumed?  You know.  One of those first times the showrunners/writers dumped a character nugget in our laps and left it to us to do all the backstory in our own imaginations so they didn’t have to enrich their own characters beyond the scratch and sniff, wham bam this is who they are work?  

Anyway.  We were left to extrapolate from that what most of us h ad already suspected--that Daryl’s formative years were already a living hell before the ZA ever happened.  

So he was standoffish.  He didn’t form emotional connections lightly and physical intimacy was something light years out of his comfort zone.  

Until Carol.  

Daryl’s defenses started to crumble from the very start with Carol because she piqued his interest.  He looked at her, watched her withstand Ed’s abuse, and recognized something of himself.  

Against his will, Daryl started to care and when Carol lost the one good thing that had come out of her miserable life with Ed--Sophia--Daryl’s core identity started to be revealed to us and probably?  To himself after burying it so deep for so long.  

Long story short?  Daryl connected with Carol pretty quickly on a base level through the trauma of Sophia’s loss.  

The real connection, the emotional work it too to peel all those protective layers away took more like--like planting a flower from seed and tending it to help it survive and flourish.  

Simply said?  The work was put in and Daryl bloomed with Carol’s (and Team Family’s) care.  They all put in varying degrees of work but Carol planted the seed of his “belonging.”  

And the thing about Daryl?  Once he bloomed?  He grew strong.  He stretched toward the sun.  

He and Carol essentially bloomed and fought their way toward the sunlight together.  

And little by little, Daryl learned to accept the kindness, trust, and love he always deserved.  

From that newly confident man emerged a Daryl not so fearful of forming connections and none have ever been more powerful than his connection to Carol.  

I’ll spare ya’ll the paragraphs of how Daryl and Carol gravitated toward each other like magnets no matter the means of separation.  

I’ll just spell it out like this:  their bond supersedes all others, even Daryl’s bond with Rick.  And with Daryl only accepting affection from those he trusts implicitly, Carol and Daryl have been the only potential “romantic” pairing that has ever fully made sense for his established character.  

At least the character before Angela launched the grenade of Leah into the mix.  

Leah was a fail from the start.  

And you know what?  I’m thinking that was largely intended (for various reasons) but I still think they could have shown Daryl as receptive to having a “romantic” relationship to those willfully blind to the possibility that he’s actually been in a “romantic” relationship with Carol since Season 2.  Never mind that Carol and Daryl haven’t (yet) crossed certain physical boundaries yet.  Emotionally? They are already there even if neither is able to admit it out loud with the actual words yet.  But I digress.  The people that never wanted to “see” Carol and Daryl as “romantic” because they couldn’t fathom Daryl as seeing Carol in that light had already deemed that Daryl just didn’t feel that way about her, that maybe he didn’t feel that way about anybody (if they couldn’t have their way and have him feel that way about their preferred choice for him, they preferred him alone), and Angela wanted to show them differently.  To show them the light.  

That said, if Angela was so hellbent on doing Leah?  There were a multitude of better ways.  

Here.  I’ll give you one of them.  

Daryl isolates himself from his family after Rick’s “death” same as he did in Angela’s version.  

Carol’s been being pulled more and more to the Kingdom because Henry’s needing a mother figure is like catnip to her hurting natural-born, hurting Mama’s heart.  So Daryl’s anchor to the man he’d matured into, the one with all these earned emotional attachments, is reeled back in, little by little, leaving him unmoored.  

Dog literally runs into him just as before.  It hardly makes sense given how young and floppy and uncoordinated puppies are and thus vulnerable to danger, but this is the least of things we need to worry about suspending disbelief for right?  ;)

Dog and Daryl continue to have these run ins until Daryl decides to retrace the puppy’s clumsy trail and viola!  He finds Leah’s cabin and Leah inside.  She levels the same shotgun at him, they have a standoff, until---

Leah suddenly lowers the gun and incredulously says Daryl’s name.  

That’s right.  One simple change and Daryl and Leah have an undefined past already.  

Daryl doesn’t completely let his guard down because he’s Daryl, but he relaxes enough that we see he doesn’t immediately regard Leah as dangerious to his own well-being.  

From that point on, instead of tying Daryl up and threatening him, we could have been told the story of how they knew each other from before.  

My version goes a little something like this--

Daryl met Leah through Merle.  Merle, in turn, met Leah through the military before he got discharged.  He and Leah had an ongoing “I scratch your itch if you scratch mine” thing and Leah?  Well, she always had a bit of a soft spot/interest in Daryl that Daryl never really returned.  

The thing is, though?  With losing the chosen brother that filled the hole left behind by his lost blood brother Merle and losing Carol to her chasing after a chance of a new family (because she feels Daryl’s out of her reach too, our too blind and stupidly, silently in love idiots)?  Daryl finds himself embracing the shared memories however minimal of that brief past and his grief and loneliness leave him receptive to Leah’s eventual advances in ways he never was before.  

We’re still given hints of their unfolding relationship and we still don’t like it, but it makes more sense for Daryl to cling to the past when he feels he’s lost his future.  

Leah still gives her ultimatum (there’s a reason she gravitated toward Merle in perhaps his most toxic state, she’s more than a little fucked up too) and it’s not as much of a hard sell that Daryl might be pulled in Leah’s direction when he feels Carol is all but lost to him.  

Hell.  They could have even explicitly discussed Carol.  But wait!  Angela would have never allowed that because she doesn’t want to shatter all the crackship dreams in one fell swoop.  

But the story from that point on could have continued just as it has and probably I still wouldn’t have liked it but I could have at least bought it somewhat and understood it.  

Obviously, it didn’t. 

I don’t buy the Leah of it all.  Angela built that “relationship” with monopoly money and it shows.  

Because I don’t buy Leah period.  I don’t buy Daryl giving even giving a shit about trying to or feeling like there’s a snowball’s chance to redeem her so I’m not engaged whatsoever with this Daryl double agent story and him even givign her crumbs about his real family.  

That part rings false.  

So that’s a big problem right there and we haven’t even gotten to the other part I don’t buy.  

You know what else I don’t buy?  

#2?  

Why the hell are the Reapers so bloodthirsty for Maggie’s departure from this mortal coil?  

Without giving better reasoning than they’re just cray-cray, the entire faceplants and considering it’s taken up about 70% of 11A’s focus?  I’m pissed.  

Because, IMHO, they should go big or go home on this to give it any entertainment value because it’s all stale, recycled air if not.  

Maggie’s been established as a much darker character this season.  Which led me to believer the Reapers probably had a legit beef against her, but it seems Angela is reluctant to go all that way down the rabbit hole and doesn’t want to commit to what could be a more entertaining and potentially fascinating story than just Maggie’s in the right, the Reapers are just evil.  

Maggie is right about Negan, IMHO, but she’s also wrong in not listening to him when what he’s saying reeks of simple common sense.  Ignoring sage advice makes her seem more like an angry toddler stamping her feet in defiance than the leader they are so bound and determined to tell us she is.  

You know what?  The window for me to give more than the half a fuck I’m giving right now as they beat this dead horse to dust closed when Maggie decided letting Negan rot in the ASZ jail cell was enough and spared him when she finally had her best chance to end him once and for all.  

Maybe if they stopped having the same damn conversation and they didn’t take up 20% of the screen time left after the boring Reapers/Leah shit, I would be less resentful but I’m not and again, I’ll tell you why.  

BECAUSE.  We are in the last season of the OG TWD ever and this show has chosen to waste screen time on stories nobody cares about to the exclusion of the ones we’re yearning for more of.  

Like ASZ.  We’ve barely seen more than an hour of the eight hours devoted to Carol, Aaron, Rosita, Lydia, Judith, Kelly, Jerry and Co. in total.  Especially since they’ve been trying to establish the Commonwealth on the side, too.  

I mean, I never really expected to dig the Commonwealth so my expectations for it were lower than low so they’ve been exceeded at a miniscule level.  But I expected and hoped for ASZ and those characters we’ve cared the most about to receive much more emphasis and the fact that they haven’t in this last season so far has been the biggest FAIL.  

And okay.  Selfishly, I want more Carol.  She’s like salt.  She makes almost everything go down better.  

But really. Give me more of all the characters we actually care about, please.  The Reapers and the offshoots from that story wheel aren’t it.  I love Daryl but I hate this retread story for him.  Leah is a weak point that pressed upon?  Makes this weak ass arc collapse.  Maggie and Negan are giving us nothing new.  They are the definition of the word STALEMATE and that’s not what you want or need on the finale season of a show.  

Yes, I have enjoyed the majority of the episodes overall, but that was because the moments I loved I weighted more than the ones I didn’t and know they have the most impact on the show down the road.  

Probably 11A will fare better when all is said and done and the show can be binged but standalone?  It’s been an overall disappointment and that saddens me more than I can say.  

Anyway.  I’m going to stop rambling now and try to psyche myself up for episode 8.  I’ll be back with thoughts on it later, maybe.  

Sorry for the word vomit, but I felt maybe I could in someway give voice to some of the feelings floating around out there and let you know that you are not alone.  

Until later, lovelies.  

#The Walking Dead #Season 11 #TWD spoilers #Shae's thinky thoughts #things that make me smile and cry #for reasons

[sleepless-in-starbucks]

Hi could you talk more about why youd recommend not watching ww84?

Sure!

warnings for under the cut: spoilers for WW84 and a bit of the first wonder woman; i only saw WW84 once a few days ago + it’s been a hot sec since i saw the original so if i get a few details wrong i apologize

tl;dr with no spoilers: WW84 is a poorly executed movie that insults its viewer with its messy and self-proud plot, bad character/relationship portrayals, and offers a personal slap in the face to a majority of its audience in their various discriminations, generalizations, and plot points.

the first point is the racism, made well by the post i reblogged here, (edit: found a second post that goes more in depth here) so i’d just suggest looking at that for that matter

next is just How they portray wonder woman in this one

i really appreciated the way the first movie portrayed diana because they did very well in keeping true to her Amazonian raising and life while still clearly showing she was a woman

when i say this i mean that a lot of media has a tendency to either make women who are very fem and keep to traditional gender roles or women who more or less shun femininity and attempt to largely fulfill only male gender roles

diana in the original is a warrior, strong and fierce, but still a woman, not trying to shun that or anything. she wears styles that suit her while still being woman’s styles (she doesn’t force her way into a suit), she talks of and addresses her womanhood proudly and without issue, etc

i want to note here i have no issue with female characters who act extremely masc and reject femininity- i love them tbh- but it’s important to remember that it’s not inherently against womanhood or anything to be a strong fighter who doesn’t stick to every stereotypical social gender norm

and the first wonder woman movie shows this very well

WW84... oh boy

first of all, wonder woman’s changing outfits every other scene. even between scenes where it makes no sense! i’m not saying she can only wear one set of clothes but Geez this was too much

not to mention an entire scene dedicated to her helping steve pick a fashion look? i understand this was to highlight the ‘80-ness of the movie, and it would’ve been fine if it seemed diana was helping him pick a period appropriate look, but it was clear she was trying to help him pick a ‘fashionable’ look which. wonder woman? from the island without a sense of popular outfits or fashion? what?

and the amount of focus on her wearing high heels.... ugh

i’m not saying you can’t have a badass woman who also likes social gender norm fem things but it felt clear that wasn’t what they were going for

wonder woman in the first movie liked practical fashion and not only were many of her outfits not that, her high heels? one hundred percent not practical

it didn’t fit her character and felt horribly out of place, clearly just the producers / directors / whoever going ‘oh, wonder woman is a woman how can we show this? fashion! high heels!’ and i hated it

(warning: imma be jumping from thought to thought as they bump into each so uh... enjoy the train-of-thought style of flaw informing)

and starting at the beginning like.... wow that scene had no purpose

wonder woman cheats in a competition and is punished for this by losing it in the end. except. this is stupid for two reasons

as the audience is shown she didn’t cheat on purpose. she made a mistake, lost her horse, and made a strategy to get back into the race despite this. honestly? i thought the story was going to be a lesson in ingenuity in the worst looking situations. but it wasn’t, which is bad storytelling, because the lesson is then based on a point that isn’t even that true

it is literally Never important again later. unless you count what was going on with the wishstone as ‘cheating to victory’ which i dont. that’s not even what the villain did. he wanted to take over the world. there’s no victory there you get without cheating. wtf. why did that message even happen

going into the actual story we meet the cheetah pretty quick, when she’s still whatever-her-civilian-name-is

and the cheetah... she’s such a bad villain

she doesn’t have the same backstory as she does in the comics

in this one, she uses the wishstone- which is a whole ‘nother thing in and of itself- to wish to be like diana, because ig being smart as hell but social awkward as hell too is so bad you need to desperately wish to be someone else? i hate that trope, but onwards-

she gets that, but in exchange for not only diana’s likable personality she also gets her wonder woman powers (and she loses her glasses, because pretty and cool means no glasses, right? /s), she loses her kindness bc of the rules of the wishstone- in exchange for your wish, it takes smth u care about a lot from you; for her, it was her kindness

this makes her villain! just because she lost her kindness. yep. honestly not a good look regarding all those people out there who are low/no empathy and can still be wonderful nice people but i digress

at one point she complains about why she needs to keep her power rather than go back to being just Her and i fucking wanted to scream

she has like. half a dozen degrees, clearly a couple of friends even if she’s awkward, and she’s got a life that was perfectly okay before she made the wish. as someone who is also socially awkward as hell, it infuriated me to here her acting like it was the fucking end of the world she couldn’t be more extroverted or whatever. there are ways to work on that!!! the movie trying to convince the audience she had a legit reason to not un-wish her wish (for the good of the entire world) was stupid and insulting

also her transformation between ‘looks human, wearing cheetah-pattern clothing‘ to ‘humanoid with cheetah fur/skin/appearance’ literally just. happened. for no reason. that was stupid

y’know what else is stupid? the wishstone. it was clearly just a plot device, and a poorly executed one at that. it isn’t even consistent in how it works

and they did a whole side thing with like. how it had the language of the gods written on part of it and it appeared in random locations across history around the time of great tragedies and,,, that was it???

they never explored the divine connection??? who planted it or why??? how it location traveled or anything????

like i said. poor plot device

i move on now to steve

oh boy steve

he’s brought back to life by diana’s wish on the wishstone, but... it causes him to come back in someone else’s body, quantum leap style. this is. weird. and is never ever addressed by him or wonder woman except once in a throw away comment. like. diana and steve kiss and are implied to have sex while steve is in someone else’s body and neither of them seem to care. this is not good!!

and then his relationship with diana? HORRIBLE

in the first movie they were barely starting to fall in love, only barely a couple even if that. more importantly they were friends, and that night he died diana didn’t lose a potential lover so much as she lost her first non-Amazonian friend

but WW84 portrays their relationship as if they were not only already a couple, but one close enough that even after forty years since steve’s death diana is still completely and hopelessly in love with him to the point that she’s literally hanging off his arm as soon as he’s back and making love that very night

it plays again once more into the misrepresentation of wonder woman’s character (how stereotypically hollywood female to fall over herself at the sight of her love interest) and it wrecks their relationship, which had been a lovely friends-who-could-be-more

what they should’ve done was focus on that friendship, build it back up after the long gap for wonder woman, and then started to rebuild that possible romance (and tear it down at the perfect moment... right when steve had to go again... ah that would’ve been lovely)

but they wanted to go in full-haul on the romance and it just felt. wrong and weak to me. diana’s refusal to consider giving up her wish (to get her powers back and save the world) is bc she doesn’t want to let steve go again, which makes more sense in the context of a first and true friend rather than a hastily slapped together love interest

steve’s character was generally good tbh but the way he played into the story? bad

moving on... the main villain of the movie? sucks. he’s just. fucking awful

despite a motivation being given that he wants to have money, he launches into wanting to take over the world for no real reason. he takes advantage of people for this and almost destroys the world he wants to rule for it. the main reason he stops this is for his son, who up until now he largely ignored and didn’t seem to care that much for outside of basic obligations. and the movie dares try to make him sympathetic by throwing in the fact he grew up poor and was bullied and not liked which i HATE

lots of people are/have been poor. lots of people are/have been bullied (myself included). that does NOT justify them DESTROYING THE WORLD TRYING TO TAKE IT OVER. can it be used to show the audience why he does what he does? yes. but to use it and clearly try to make it a reason to hand-wave-away what he did? NO. FUCK NO

also fucking. y’know how wonder woman took down this villain? she talked to him and the world. she gave a stirring speech while she laid slumped against a wall, not injured, just too weak to beat a bit of wind. she talked and she looped her lasso around his leg so she could talk to the world to to convince them to give up their wishes

once again... the mischaracterization

in the first movie, wonder woman gives a stirring speech while fighting Areas. it’s done in her battle, beating the god of war up while reminding him of what she stood for, who she was, why she would keep fighting for a broken world

it was BEAUTIFUL. it was MEANINGFUL. it was BADASS but SINCERE

this was weak. and it clearly wanted to be more than it was

the whole movie wants to be more than it is- it wants to have an important meaningful message like the first movie, about wishes for the self and war and the world and whatever. and it wants it so badly it does it horribly

the message is ham-handed yet messy and unclear and not right. it doesn’t make sense, and it feels poorly plotted. the movie thinks it’s more than it is and that makes it very hard to watch

and to finish my rant off... WW84 lied to its audience

did you see any ads for WW84? i did. they were bright, vibrant, funky music, stunning moments, action and intrigue. i was thrilled for a movie like it

the actual movie isn’t that

it’s not nearly as action filled, it’s not as ‘80s-focused as it leads you to believe, some of the most prominently featured moments barely matter

the lightning swing? pointless, as at that point in the movie wonder woman’s learned how to fly and does it for no reason but the trailers

and that cool suit? introduced in a random myth for no reason halfway through the movie, brought in at random with no explanation, only there for show and the trailers

WW84 is not the movie is lead people to believe it was, and the movie it is is poorly executed and insulting to a variety of peopler/minorities

if you’re gonna watch it, pirate it. i can give you a link. just don’t give dc your money or your legit views for it

#that got long #but what can i say? im passionate about my bad movies #and ww84? #that was a bad movie #if anyone wants clarification on smth let me know #wonder woman 1984 #ww84 #ww84 spoilers #the cryptid speaks #lost in the fray

[asotin]

I've been rereading naruto and was struck with how much I love Iruka. Can you spare a soul a small rant regarding that beautiful being? (Or about Sai, that awkward boi is precious is all his dick-loving glory)

If there is one thing I can always be counted on to do, it's yell about my favorite man in the world, Umino Iruka

Yes I will also be yelling about Sai bc I love him too

Sai:

First and foremost: he has a good arc. Discovering that he still has emotions despite Shin’s death? Finally finishing the book he started as a tiny child for Shin because he remembers what that connection is like?

His struggles with socializing (his joking about Naruto’s dick is fun to me bc despite doing it wrong, he accidentally gets the spirit of it) and his dependence on books (there's one literate boy in Konoha and it's him) are such good details

That crop top? Best choice

Making him resemble Sasuke was risky and considering my thoughts on Sasuke, maybe didn't work how Kishi intended but I don't hate it

I wish we'd seen him spend more time with Yamato. They're the only characters from Root who we meet. Yamato would be a good person to spend time with as Sai adjusts, especially since they don't have the student-teacher relationship that Naruto and Sakura have with Yamato

Speaking of- Sai has the coolest style. I do not care about rasengan. I do not care about chidori. I do not care about reincarnation or only caring about people’s safety when they're directly in front of you

But I do care about those little ink animals he can make!!! I care about him holding that massive brush when he's doing the sealing during the war

And I care about him being a member of Root and likely highly skilled but getting nerfed bc god forbid anyone look capable when Naruto and Sasuke are around

I care about him learning how to read Sakura well enough that he could read her smile as false

Sai is wonderful and I love him

Iruka:

Iruka is the reason we have the story. There is no Naruto without him. He's also the reason we have the kind of story we have bc not only did Iruka save Naruto’s life, he’s the person Naruto learned to love from

This kid has never felt wanted, and the first love he feels and recognizes as love* is Iruka being ready to die for him. Naruto’s desperation for attention suddenly gets fulfilled in the worst moment of his life. He’s a little kid and a teacher he trusted drops bombshell after bombshell on him. Everybody lied to him and hates him because he's a monster. He killed Iruka’s parents

But three times, Iruka risks dying for him. The barrage of kunai and shuriken. The fūma shuriken in the back. The fūma shuriken when Iruka is sitting on the ground, exhausted

Iruka loves loudly. He's frequently yelling or crying bc he's overcome with emotion; he adores the students in his care so much that he can't keep quiet- except when he gives Naruto his hitai-ate (which Naruto wears until it's totally worn out, which is the best detail in the whole fucking narrative). That's the only time when Iruka is quiet and happy

Naruto definitely soaked that loudness up. All of his big declarations about people’s worth in part one have the shape of Iruka in them. When he pleads with Zabuza not to belittle Haku, that's Iruka. When he tells Neji that he's going to fix the Hyūga, that's Iruka

Imo things go wrong with Sasuke partly because Naruto is the aggressive one. Iruka’s kind of forcefulness is always in defense of someone. With Sasuke, Naruto is pursuing. That isn't “I see your worth, and I value it.” That's “I want you so you have to stay”. That's a selfish love, a child who's indulged instead of parented

But that's a digression!

Iruka is unique in two meaningful ways:

1) he apologizes. How many times do adults apologize directly to children in this story? How many times do they question what they've done and say they made a mistake to the child they wronged? Iruka is the only parental figure who sees Naruto as having inherent worth. Not as a jinchūriki. Not as Minato and Kushina’s son. Not as a hero. When he's little Uzumaki Naruto, failure, Iruka apologizes for not seeing how much Naruto was hurting. Iruka was 22 and still waking up from nightmares after ten years (that's a sign of chronic trauma! who else is still that deep in ptsd?) but he’s the only one who took any responsibility for Naruto’s pain

2) he’s a nobody. Everyone around Naruto is special. All his teachers are geniuses or notoriously powerful. Iruka is just a guy. His name means nothing. But out of all the adults who have specific reasons to look after Naruto, Iruka is the only one who does. Iruka doesn't lie to Naruto. Aside from the Kurama thing (I can't fault him for not breaking the rules to tell a child he's got a monster inside him) he tries to obfuscate once, when he's trying to stop Naruto from dying needlessly in the war. Iruka isn't strong enough to stop Naruto, but he does try, and when he realizes he can't, he does one further special thing: he tells Naruto to survive

Who tells Naruto that? Who, other than Iruka, takes the time to tell Naruto, in a heated moment, that Naruto’s life matters because he's Naruto? Which adult in Naruto's life consistently sees him and treats him as a child?

* Iruka taking the time to parent him by making Naruto clean up after himself and staying there to supervise, along with taking Naruto to Ichiraku to buy him food, are also love, but they wouldn't ping to Naruto as such

#asks #anonymous #naruto #sorry this took me so long 😅 #long post

[good-forthe-weekend]

Okay, so like, this blog has low key become an ACOTAR theory/headcanon blog. But here we go again. Because I’ve been thinking about the remaining books/novella, and what might be obvious about what the next book may be. So stick with me on this one, but here’s how I hope it plays out. (Gonna be really long, because 3 books worth of theories, so gonna make it a read more post)

Let’s start with what I’d like the books to be (not in a demanding bitchy way, just what I generally hope for)

Books 5 and 6 (in no particular order): Azriel, Elain/Lucien

Novella: Feyre’s pregnancy from her/Rhys’ perspective

While books 5 and 6 could be in any order, depending on the overarching plot with Koschei and everything, I really think the next book is going to be about Az. I know that the 2 main contenders for obvious choices are Az and Elain, but I don’t think their stories are meant to be told together. Their arcs are completely different. Az needs to be someone’s first choice and get over 500 years of darkness and self hatred, whereas Elain needs to find her own agency. Here’s how I’d do those things.

Az’s story, to me, is rooted in self worth. I don’t think he has much. I think that the events of his life have done everything to convince him that no matter how much good he does, no matter how many people love him, he will never be good enough. Similar to Nesta, tbh. Just rooted in different places. His family loathed him, Mor’s been stringing him along for 500 years, and most people value him for what his shadow singer abilities can do for them. I think his story should revolve around him finding self worth, and being his own first choice, but also realizing how inherently valuable he is to everyone around him. (If we get a brothers bonding moment in Az’s book, I will cry my eyes out in the best way) Now *personally*, as a lover of Gwyn, I would love to see her tie into Az’s story. (NOTE: No hate for any shippers, Gwynriel, Elriel, Elucien, idc. They’re all valid, this is a respect only zone. This is simply my personal opinion on what *I* would like to see) Gwyn has also been shown to need some help in the self worth category. She literally says how she believes she’s a bad person for not being able to save her twin. So I’d love if her and Az have parallel stories in Az’s book. Romance or not. Actually, I’d love to see them grow side by side without having to be all horny all the time. I’d love if Gwyn prioritizes her mental health and growth above having a relationship, and tells Az that she cares for/loves him, but needs time to herself before getting into a relationship. Mates wise, I do see the merit in the Gwynriel mates theories. (I’ll get into why I don’t like Elain as Az’s mate later. But also, I have no problem with Elriel, I just don’t like the idea of them being meant to be mated. Although I have this evil!Elain idea brewing in my head that would fit with Elriel being supposed to be mates that the cauldron effed up) but I also am on the fence about it, because even with my own headcanon about ACOTAR mates, I’m still getting a little tired of every single romance having to be mated.

For Elain, I have 2 theories that I favor. Either she gets kidnapped by Koschei, and her story is a loose retelling of Swan Lake, or she ends up going to the Spring Court, and we get Beauty and The Beast part 2, but different this time. Either way, I want her story to give her some damn agency and flesh out her character as more than the Cosette character whose whole personality is “Well, I went through a trauma and stayed kind”. Because there’s a way to do that meaningfully, but since it’s been coupled with her being a character that simply does not do anything for herself, it falls flat for me.

Also, side note about Elriel being mates who the cauldron messed up. I don’t care for that. First of all, I don’t think that the cauldron picked Nesta and Elain’s mates when they were Made. Which I mention in my personal theory on ACOTAR Mates, which I linked above. I think that the Cauldron picks mates when you’re born, which would mean that Elain and Lucien were always meant to be mates. Besides which, while I’m not a rabid supporter of either ship at this point, I see what people are saying about it not being a good thing that Az’s shadows disappear when Elain is around. His shadows are a part of him, they’re his friends. So I think it’s better for them to respond well to someone’s presence than disappear entirely. Also, with the light singer theories (which I see on both Gwynriel and Elriel sides), in ACOSF, it’s said that light singers weren’t good. They were beings that looked kind but ultimately were evil, just like shadow singers look all bad, but ultimately Az is an extremely kind, empathetic person with a savior complex. So, unless you want to make your fave be secretly evil (which, again fits in with this evil!Elain theory I’ve been stewing on lately) it’s probably not a good idea to say they’re ‘the light singer to Az’s shadowsinger’. ALSO ALSO. Azriel deserves to be someone’s first choice. Not their 3rd, behind the guy that the universe destined them for AND the human that they still aren’t entirely over. Azriel isn’t a ‘well, since there’s no one else to choose, I GUESS’. Azriel is someone who deserves, and should be loved as a first choice. And no matter if that person is Gwyn or not, we should see someone fall for him as a first and only choice.

Anyway, if she got kidnapped by Koschei, I’d like for everyone to freak out and be trying to save her (Lucien included, because protective fae mate), but Elain ends up saving her damn self. Without anyone knowing until she just sort of shows up somewhere in Prythian. Whereupon everyone is like “You escaped Koschei?????”, and Elain just responds “What, like it’s hard?”. I don’t have too many specifics in mind for this theory, but yeah, I’d love if that were to happen. I can even see a path for Elain and Lucien to fall for each other in that scenario, I just can’t find a way to verbalize it.

Alternatively, and hear me out on this one, I would love for her to go to the Spring Court. SJM keeps putting connections between Elain and Spring, and has even had several characters say she’d love the Spring Court. She doesn’t belong in the Night Court. And I would love, and again hear me out here, for her to help Tamlin. I know, I’m not his biggest fan either. But I don’t want him dying alone and angry either. He was an ass, and reacted poorly to many things, but I want him to grow from that. And learn how to be a better person. And not be so overprotective. How does Elain fit into this? Well, I’m not sure how to get her there, but I would love for her to end up in Spring Court, where she befriends him. Friends. Nothing more. Not a drop more. In fact, I want Tamlin to make an advance on her, thinking that he’s falling for her, only for Elain to be like “Dude, you only think you like me because I’m the one who’s been helping you, but we’re friends. We wouldn’t work as more.” Or even vice-versa. Either way, I would LOVE to have a story about a character coming into their own without a big romance, and frankly after the way Elain has treated Lucien and Az, she can stay alone (as much as I think her and Lucien would be cute together). But I also think that Elain befriending Tamlin, and eventually becoming a member of his court, could lead to some nice healing places for Feyre, and would afford her the opportunity to actually confront Tamlin about everything they went through. (It would also be cool if Tamlin made her High Lady of Spring, without them being together. Idk, I think it would be cool for him to abandon tradition so much when he held it up to a toxic level before)

‘But how does Lucien come into this?’ I hear literally no one asking because this post is so fucking long already. Well, beloved reader of this bullshit, I simply want him to officially be able to move on. I want him and Elain to have arcs that happen at the same time, and are tied loosely together, but are ultimately separate. I want Elain to find agency and finally make up her mind, and I want Lucien to call her out on stringing him along. And I ultimately want him to find peace. (And for him to find out he’s Helion’s son in the messiest way possible, but I digress) I really just want Lucien to ride off into the metaphorical sunset and be happy and content and finally value himself. If Elain is in the Spring Court, maybe call out Tamlin for the way that he abused Lucien too. As long as he ends up happy, I’m cool with it.

Also, I want a comeuppance for Mor/Eris. They’ve been hinting at something for several books now, and I damn well want to see what’s behind those hints. (I also low key want the Eris/Mor comeuppance to cause a confrontation between Az/Mor/Cass about their weird dynamic and how toxic it was, and how it kinda made Mor treat Nesta like shit. I just really want Cass to officially choose Nesta in front of the IC, esp Mor. I think it’s important for their relationship. I could go on and on about that tho.)

Personally, I kind of want Mor and Eris to have been Mates. Not only because I already ship Mor/Emerie and want to see a mated pair that don’t end up together, but I think there’s a ton of opportunity for angst there. Maybe they fell for each other, never actually let the mating bond fully set (because, up until this point we’ve never seen a mating bond click into place without sex, which we know they never had), and Mor realized that no matter how much she cared for Eris, she was in fact gay, and so she slept with Cass, and you know the rest of her story there. Eris didn’t care, and told his father that he would marry her anyway because they were in love (I don’t think he’d play his full hand and admit to being un-mated mates because it would put Mor in a whole new level of danger). Beron basically told Eris that under no circumstances would he marry Mor, and told him to abandon her completely. With a threat to Mor’s safety thrown in there for good measure (like “Go ahead, marry her. See exactly what will befall her her in the Autumn Court. It will not go well” except more eloquent and shit) When Mor’s family dumped her, I don’t think that he found her first with people with him. I think he would have found her shortly after she got left, and he’d have been alone. So he found a way to tip off Az that she was there, and staged it to look like he found her and semi-publicly abandoned her completely. Idk, I just feel like there’s a lot more to the story than we know, and given how extremely Mor responds to someone who never actually laid hands on her, I think there’s more to why she does that. Maybe it’s because she knows he’s her mate, and is terrified he’s going to get spiteful and let that info slip. I kind of want this to be a situation to be one where she didn’t outright lie about what happened, just the context, because she knew if the context was revealed, then she’d be forced to come out, so she lied by omission.

Personally, I would love for this to be a not insignificant piece of Az’s book, because I think there’s a not insignificant part of his personality that’s been influenced by Mor, so whatever comeuppance that Cass/Az/Mor have (and I’m praying they do), I hope it’s not just glossed over. I also wouldn’t hate if this story was told in the novella, but I also really want to see Feyre and Rhys’ side of their pregnancy story (I think it would be weird to have such a significant plot for them told during someone else’s story, and not give us Feyre and Rhys’ perspective). And that would really only fit in either a novella or bonus short story. Also, I think that Feyre’s pregnancy would make a better novella, and Mor/Eris would fold nicely into the plot of a book.

So yeah, there’s my ridiculously long rundown on what I want to happen/my theories for the rest of the ACOTAR series. Feel free to add/dissect/interact/tell me I’m horridly wrong. I wanna talk about these books at length so bad

#acotar #acowar #acomaf #acofas #acosf #feyre archeron #rhys #cassian #azriel #mor #eris #lucien #vanserra #beron #emerie #gwyn #nesta #elain #tamlin #theory #headcanon

[firelxdykatara]

incidentally, i really wish i gave a shit about hazel or his redemption. genuinely! his fight with salem was pretty cool, the dust vs magic shit was clever and well-done, but like... the show failed to give him believable motivations as a villain, so why am i supposed to care that he suddenly switched sides for no reason at all?

leaving aside how pointless the scene with jinn was ( @itsclydebitches covers it well in her recap but like, how did just seeing a naked blue genie answer any questions he had??? and also why didn’t they just ask a fucking question to make the relic useless to salem, i do not understand-), i have never understood hazel’s point as a villain to begin with--at least not once the gretchen reveal happened. before that, he was actually pretty interesting--a counterpoint to adam’s needless ferocity, seeming like he might be the One with a Conscience among the bad guys, but then he just goes absolutely feral trying to kill oscar because of ozpin and all of that just flies right out of the window.

the show could have established that gretchen was on a mission for ozpin when she died. that way, hazel’s anger would at least make marginally more sense as he connects gretchen’s death specifically to ozpin’s orders. have oz apologize for sending her into a situation she wasn’t ready to handle. or even establish that salem lied to hazel, and made him believe that the war was ozpin’s fault! that he was ultimately to blame for the grimm existing and the war continuing for so long. something. instead, all it says is that gretchen was enrolled at beacon, and that she died during a training mission. a risk students training to be huntsman and huntresses know and understand going in. it is a risk they accept when they decide to train to fight grimm. presumably it’s why the huntsman academies are college rather than high school aged--young enough to be able to intensively train and potentially have a decades-long career, but old enough to be able to decide for themselves if the risks are ones they are willing to undertake.

which is exactly what gretchen did. she accepted the possibility that she might die fighting grimm, because that is literally a huntress’ job. it’s tragic that it happened so young, and on a training mission, but it would’ve been just as tragic if she were a fully licensed huntress dying on her first mission, or her fifth, or her fiftieth. because people dying young is a tragedy. but it’s still a risk that huntsmen and huntresses choose for themselves. it’s the risk gretchen agreed to when she enrolled at beacon.

so what it ends up reading like is ‘my sister made a choice i can’t understand/didn’t approve of, and she died, so since i can’t blame her for it i must transfer my rage to the nearest potential target’. except that he is now working directly for the woman who created the grimm that killed his sister. (something something themes about choice vs fate vs destiny being a cornerstone of the show, and yet blaming ozpin for the choices of other characters -cough- pyrrha -cough- is a thing this fandom [and lately the show] does constantly, but i digress) ok, so v8 established that he went after salem first and tried to pulverize her again and again and eventually realized she couldn’t be killed. fine. so he........starts working for her. helps her murder huntsmen and huntresses who made the same choice his sister did.

to avenge his sister.

yeah ok.

and the thing is, confused/twisted/seemingly nonsensical motivations for villains aren’t inherently a bad thing, or even bad storytelling... but the story has to acknowledge that it’s happening! or at least, it has to if i’m expected to buy it and ultimately care about the character in question. where is the acknowledgement from hazel that his rage at ozpin was ultimately misdirected, and he is finally choosing to respect his sister’s choice by following in her footsteps? where is the realization that she made her choice and the outcome might not have been any different if she’d gone to another school, or if she’d graduated and become a fully fledged huntress and died facing grimm anyway?

(and let’s not forget, please, that in the midst of all this, he’s been beating the everloving shit out of a young boy, several years younger than gretchen would’ve been when she died at her possible youngest. i’m sorry but i don’t fucking buy hazel’s sudden concern and compassion when he gave no fucks about oscar before, just because he housed the soul of the headmaster who just happened to be running the school his sister chose to attend.)

we don’t get that. we get “no more gretchens, boy” which.... like? what is the alternative? what, exactly, does hazel expect the world to do rather than risking potential ‘gretchens’--that is, people training to fight grimm and ultimately losing that fight, either in training or afterwards? what is the alternative to the huntsmen academies, exactly? just rolling over and letting grimm slaughter people rather than training them to fight to protect themselves and others? it’s not as if people didn’t train to fight grimm before the academies--there were combat schools scattered throughout the kingdoms, and exactly how different would hazel’s current situation be if gretchen had attended a small combat school and then gotten killed by grimm, rather than beacon? and for that matter, would hazel really have been perfectly fine if his sister had, idk, been 23 or 25 instead of 17-21 when she died?

it seems to me that the only way to prevent ‘gretchens’ from happening again is to.... stop training people to fight grimm. and that’s a recipe for disaster, because it’s not as if the grimm are slowing down. it’s not as if salem can be stopped permanently, as far as hazel knows, and she will always be able to just... make more grimm. he’s seen that personally.

so, ultimately, his sacrifice rings very hollow for me. i already didn’t care for his origins because they made no sense, even in their illogic, and i care even less for his more nonsensical decision to defect. and it’s a pity, because i’ve always been a sucker for a good villain redemption story. hazel’s just... wasn’t that, at all, for me. (i did enjoy emerald’s part, but it remains to be seen how that’ll be handled in the rest of the volume. and frankly, i’m a little salty that hazel got this role rather than mercury, for whom i could actually see something like this working.)

#hazel rainart #rwby #rwby meta #rwby v8 #rwby spoilers

[prodicalmenace]

Okay but like you’re in a coma and life and death are fighting for you where ironically Dazai is life and Chuuya is death—

i still dont have a real writeable idea for this so lets just talk it out...

dazai as life and chuuya as death has the same energy as canon where they keep trying to push dazai as inherent good and chuuya as inherent evil. its so funny. im laughing, like right now and all the time, because a.) theyre meant to embody “the grey area” as much as the entirety of the story does all the time and b.) this fandom doesnt seem to understand that an allegiance does not equal a stop on the pendulum of morality so stop acting like everything has to be one or the other and actually READ instead of drooling over pictures

but this scenario of a coma almost fits so right. you, i dunno, get hit by a car or have a bad bungie jumping incident, idk, whatever it is the world views it as a freak accident and here you lay in a hospital bed for months like bad spinach. except its not a freak accident, because there exists this higher power or whatever that has dictated your time. as you lay unconscious the lose ends around you are closing up, the life that goes on improves as you truly leave your mark on the world as a literal casualty of life.

but life gets greedy. 

dazai sees your unconscious body every day and knows it was his job, his rightful honor or whatever, to complete your life cycle and give you up to deaths doorman, chuuya. it was arranged before you were born, and he does it all the time, but how fucking dare your partner develop romantic feelings for your sibling while you sit there lying in your own filth. how dare the world turn on without you, how dare it improve, when your life made it bearable enough for him.

it’s very adjustment bureau, a transaction that was never supposed to be torn between the one who is selfish and the one who knows his place, because chuuya knows this is for the best, that this will be your release and you will finally know the peace you literally kill yourself trying to experience. he better than anyone knows life after death, and he knows that you deserve it, so just let go and he can give that to you.

but you remain too attached to life, to dazai’s pull on your fingertips that suddenly remind you that you’re cold. and for those brief moments you exist, but it stings when he asks you to lightly move your muscles and breathing in burns with the plastic shoved in every end of your body. it shouldn’t hurt so much to live but boy did you already know that, because life just takes and takes and takes and when it claims to give a damn it sure flips the switch on you, huh? what will dazai do anyway, other than thrive a bit in the chaos your life creates before moving on to better things. what part of his selfishness is so attractive to you when it hurts just to be on the same plane as him, and the same plane will never be the same wavelength.

so often people backtrack the shit of life with benevolence and opportunity but we are all well aware its garbage, and i think that fits dazais character so much. life is supposed to be beautiful, simple, dressed in a trench coat and ready for rain but he jumps into the fucking river and doesn’t bother holding his breath. it’s unreliable, it’s real, it feels like a nightmare only you’re aware for it.

meanwhile, as kimmy schmidt puts best, death is the eternal sleep and mama needs a nap. it’s often regarded as the true benevolence and the existence of freedom. there stands chuuya, beautiful sideways mullet chuuya who understands (even if in little practice) empathy and its value in life as much death. chuuya who puts your mind at ease when the world is sheit and threatens to drown you without your own comprehension. chuuya who allows you to let go, to grow, to digress, to do as you need because now you can. i have less descriptions here but basically, chuuya is so good, yah?

this also rings to chuuyas loyalties--where chuuya fights its for order, for structure, for safety of those he loves. his value of people makes being death a perfect role because life is so hell bent on torturing people that don’t deserve it, meanwhile he’s fulfilling a duty that has meaning and is working for a larger purpose than his own satisfaction. likely this means that you actually mean just as little to him as you do dazai, but only one of the two is concerned with your actual wellbeing rather than an emotional outburst. comedy, i know, but deaths misplaced anger comes from lifes inability to follow through. 

also this post is not about dying being good plz dont bull a booth on me i cant take the heat

#osamu dazai #chuuya nakahara #dazai x reader #chuuya x reader #bsd x reader #bungou stray dogs #bsd au #prodicalmenace requests

[binickandros]

1. I feel like maybe there is some deeper explanation behind the poor decisions they made on The Stand (like deliberately cutting down Nick's role in the edit?) which may come out at some point. Idk it just seems like maybe it was a super troubled production. Eg. they have been claiming that they were done with shooting by the time Covid shutdowns happened, but I've been looking into it (bc I have no life rn) and on Benjamin Cavell's twitter he was talking about

2. doing some extra filming in August 2020. And I know pick ups / reshoots are 100% normal, so in itself that isn't evidence that covid affected the show more than they're admitting, but it seems weird to me that they'd insist in interviews and stuff that it wasn't affected at all. I suspect maybe they just... literally didn't end up with all the footage they needed, so they just kind cobbled together what they could at some points

3. and that maybe explains why they just drop the flashbacks in episode 4 etc.? And why some bits are just so random / don't fit, like that boat photo Nick looks at before he dies? That doesn't explain why they seem to have gone out of their way to cut out Nick's scenes and backstory in the edit, but maybe that was for some other reason which also might come out in the future... *resigned and angry shrug*

4. Side note, that Benjamin Cavell guy seems to not only just not understand the book, but also actively dislike it, in all his interviews he is like criticising it, calling bits unnecessary (like the pandemic, Stu and Tom's journey back to Boulder) so the fact that guy was in charge might have something to do with it. Anyway sorry that's the end of my investigation report here

okay gonna put my answer under the cut...

Starting with ask 4: God fucking dammit. This is like JJ Abrams adapting Star Trek or D&D adapting a deeply thematic fantasy epic. Go away!! If you don’t like the source, don’t fucking adapt it!! I said the same thing in another answer a few days ago, and it will always remain true. If there’s some MAJOR aspect of the work that gives you pause (like...Star Trek’s inherent nobility, or GoT’s fantasy/prophecies/inversion of tropes...don’t get me started on what D&D hated about ASOIAF...) then PICK SOMETHING ELSE. Just do that. Like fucking Zack Snyder making Superman “dark and gritty.” Superman is hope! He’s bright and colorful and he doesn’t kill people!!

Why are (white) men so fucking arrogant that they think they can ignore/hate/disregard major themes of a work they’re adapting, but successfully adapt it anyway?? Spoiler alert: they are fucking wrong. And they need to be stopped. Once again I’m asking Zack Snyder to fuck off and leave Arthurian legend alone.

Sorry I digress, but it’s tangentially relevant.

It’s p clear there’s a lot they either shot or planned to shot that’s on a cutting room floor somewhere. Most glaring example being the thing with Nick’s boat postcard, bc it’s CLEAR we, as the audience, are supposed to connect emotionally w not only that moment for Nicky, but w the postcard itself. First shot of Nick’s sad little face as he places the postcard, then the long, lingering shot of it as he gets up and walks away. Unless it’s some truly rando misdirect, it’s something that was clearly important to Nick, and we’re supposed to recognize it. But ofc we don’t bc they left it out, but they...I guess either didn’t think we would care/notice, or that they could pull a major Moffatt-style fast one on us by making us connect emotionally to a meaningless symbol just bc we’re told to.

Side note: look, not to be That Guy, but doesn’t a gif of this moment kinda...look like...Nick is sadly jerking off in a darkened room??

(gif via @rioliv)

Uh anyway I see now it’s less like that on desktop than on mobile. Moving on...

That article I read yesterday talking about cutting M*nson as The Kid (again, thank GOD), Cavell mentioned that their budget was super tight. I mean, one of the things about this adaptation was supposedly the much larger budget than 1994, but...I have talked before about how this one seemed claustrophobic in comparison, and at the time I made the joke that episode 7 used the entire location budget in one episode. So idk maybe they just ran out of money bc of that dumb lightning sequence in ep 8??

Regardless of the story, I think we can all agree something went very wrong somewhere, and it probably starts way back at the beginning. Possibly there were network conflicts too? Who tf knows. I wish Amazon or Netflix or (even better, despite GoT) HBO had done this instead of CBS. But if wishes were horses

#anonymous #asked and answered #the stand #nick andros