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blorbosexterminator · 2 years

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Can you recommend books written by contemporary authors that you consider good literature?

Sure! As contemporary is such a wide-term, I'll try to stick to books published within the past two decades (with inevitably a few books from the 80s and 90s making their way in) or whose author are still writing/still alive.

Zabor or the Psalms by Kamel Daoud (2017). It's a flawed book, as many on this list are. It's originaly in French, being its first flaw. And it slightly loses orientation towards the end, in my opinion. But it's still very much worth the read. The story concerns "Zabor", who believes (or is!) that he holds peoples' lives in his hand, or more accurately in his writings. So the entire book is very much concered with the art of writing, with literature, its power, limitations, etc. Being set in Morocco, it's also concerned with colonialism, religion, faith and God and all that ordeal, and it's tied pretty well with its main themes. Things become more complex when Zabor's father, who abandoned him as a boy, gets fataly sick and his other family members recluse to Zabor as a last chance to prolong his life. It can be a tedious read in a way, the prose is obsessive, repetitive, elaborative, urgent, and frantic. Which as ostensious as it can get, fits REALLY well with the book (and are all words that describe the main character). Perfect form and content complementing each other to serve the same end. I haven't yet read anything else of Daoud, so I'm not sure whether it's his personal style or designed like this for this one particular novel, but what matters is that it works really well. The novel is overall really enjoyable.

Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann (2017). A pretty ambitious novel that covers the Thirty Years' War through the use of the Jester Tyll Ulenspiegel. That sounds slightly wrong. Tyll isn't a mere propp here to allow the largely non-linear narrative to jump from one place to the other. He's an incredible depiction of a resilient, mocking, cruel, ambitious trickster. The novel crosses roads with superstition, folklore, magical realism, the pursuit of science, art, and power, all while covering a pretty turbulent period that's difficult to grasp. It's somewhat funny, dark, and also emotional without ever getting sentimental.

The Plains by Gerald Murnane (1982). This is a book difficult to speak or write about. It's just an experience I highly recommend you go through. It's a book concerened with obscurity, and more originally than anything I've ever read, disfamiliaries anything possible; I can't promise you that you would have any idea what the narrator is talking about at any given point, but that doesn't matter. The premise is deceptively simple: a filmmaker takes a journey into a fictive inner Australia to research his original screenscript titled The Interior and to receive patronage for his film that is sure to depict "The Plains" in a way nothing has ever had before. There's very little plot, dialogue, or even named characters (not even the narrator is named) but that doesn't make it at all a boring or tedious read. And it creatively concerns itself with a myriad of themes regarding culture, borders, the obsession with distinctinvness, the endless search for meaning, uttering the unutterable, all within a mirage. The prose is beautifully, neatly, elegantly and complexly clear, without ever forsaking the Obscure it's dealing with. (In the back of my head there's a connection with Conrad's Heart of Darkness that's yet too elusive to capture.)

The Last Wolf & Herman by László Krasznahoraki. ( 2009): I'd recommend a lot by Krasznahoraki but this is a good place to start. There are two short novellas in the 2016 translated edition, this one and Herman, thematically somewhat connected but are pretty much stand-alones. The Last Wolf is a 70 pages one sentence of an ex-philosophy professor telling a bored Hungarian bartender in some deadbeat German bar the story of how he got a really generous invitation to Extremadura from a foundation that wants him to write about the region in its new transformative age, which leads him to a rabbit hole with the last wolf of the region that's proclaimed to have been killed in 1983 but which has a much more complex story the narrator gets increasingly obsessed and affected by. The thing about it is this inexplicable melancholy that takes over the narrator is very easily transmitted to the reader as well. The style is just Krasznahoraki really, you either like it or you don't, but it's definitely not this indecipherable, difficult or tedious style I've sometimes seen it proclaimed as, it's actually really gripping and does a really good job of crystalizing the inarticulable without persistenting on articulating it and thus mutilating it. Also again, is emotionally honest without ever nearing sentimentality.

The Dove's Necklace by Raja Alem (2010). This is a pretty peculiar novel that might not always be easy to stay on the same line with yet definitely worth it. It starts with a woman found dead and naked in a Meccan gritty alley, and you're being told the story by the alley itself. Then it just gets more and more complicated in every possible way, with dozens or so characters, different povs, etc. It's really grand in scope and lives up to that ambition in every way and in my opinion does every theme it takes (which are are a lot of them) justice. The prose is some of the best I've read in recent years. I would recommend though, if you are fluent in another language than English to look up that translation. The English translation is fine if it goes down to it, but it hardly does the original (especially the tone) justice; it takes a lot of liberty in "casualness" where the original is very refined, careful, and sparse.

The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante (2011- 2014). This one is self-evident lol, but if you haven't read it, I highly recommend you do. The Neopolitan Novel's place in literature and specifically Italian literature, I'm still unsure of. Elena Ferrante is maybe a a better narrator/storyteller than she is a writer (which is not to say she isn't a good writer, she's an incredible one) and it's evident in how gripping this entire story is. And with the wide-range of history and themes it covers, with dozens or so fully formed characters (not even mention the spectacular creation of the two main ones), you're abound to come across something that will particularly pique your interest.

The Door by Magda Szabó. Actually, Szabo's narrator in this novel reminds me a lot of The Neopolitan Novel's Elena. As different as it (really, not many mode points of comparison beyond the similarities between Elena and the Lady Writer), it also concerns an indecipherable relationship between two women; a young, important writer and her eccentric housekeeper. As much mutual love as grows between them, this is no wholesome novel and the book is all the better for it. The narrator is not at all likable; she's naive, selfish, irritating, self-righteous, self-victimizing, and as often aware of it all as not. The housekeeper is no angel either. Essentially, really, what is most interesting about this novel is how it deals with doing the unforgivable and the impossiblity of its resolve, yet with the inevitability of just having to live with it. Though the prose isn't really my cup of tea, and I'm sure I wouldn't actually read much by the narrator-writer [Ironic as I think the character is at least somewhat autobiographical], it's really well-written, and as far as I can tell, really good translation.

The Notebook Trilogy [The Notebook/The Proof/The Third Lie] by Ágota Kristóf. (1986-1991). I think, if you're going to read only one book on this list, this should be the one. Narrated by a nameless pair of twins (in the first one), the book starts with them being moved to their grandmother house in the (Hungarian-not a single country in the book is named, no revolution or war either. But it's clear) countryside somewhen during the last years of WWII, and carries along onto the first period of communist Hungary. The first novel uses the first person plural, the twin boys are inseparable and indistinguishable. They think, behave, and act as one. Though they are anything but naive, the style of writing is as concise as a fable's. Those kids, for all means and purposes, are what I would imagine biblical angels (TM) would be like as human children; terrifyingly ethical with complete detachment, and willngess, alongside the intelligence and capabilities, to do just about anything. And it only gets more interesting and much more complex from here. You can stop at the first and it'll be a perfect novel on its own accord. If you do continue though, be prepared to the have the story altered, affirmed, rejected and interogated in every possible way. Or you can continue, and take a page out of the book by dissecting yourself into two versions, one who did continue and one who didn't. I do believe reading this is an experience worth having in whatever case . Do read a little about the content before you read it if you do, though; the book is set during the war and doesn't shy away from anything, alongside a pretty fair amount of sexual perversion.

#that's all that comes to mind for now #I hope you end up enjoying any of them!#I've not actually read that much recently published novels and a lot of the ones I've read are too mediocre to recommend lol #read A Little Life as a teen and decided contemporary literature isn't worth it actually #my origin story atakwkwk #Book recs

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bullmoozehachi · 3 months

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Since it's the year of the Dragon, I thought about writing here about my favourite ones while also sharing them with you all, so let's go!

1. Shenlong from Dragon Ball:

Shenlong is my favourite Dragon, first of all it looks so cool, not only for the colour combination (Green and Red always look great together), but it is imposing, it's badass! in Chinese tradition, the Dragon isn't seen as a bad guy, he brings water and he helps those in need, and in Dragon Ball he is vital to the series, granting wishes (make sure to keep Oolong away while summoning him) and always bringing back those who died in battle or by evil hands, and I love Dragon Ball, even Gt which is so bad I love!

2. Dragon Shiryu from Knights of the Zodiac

Who else if not THE Dragon himself?! Knights of the Zodiac is, I think, my favourite anime of all time, It has a great story, amazing arcs, (Hades arc is my fav one) and of course it has iconic characters, (I will post here someday about this anime and all the many great characters on it), but yeah, when I was five I wanted to be Shiryu one day, lmao, anyways, rewatching Knights of the Zodiac is a rule for me, I have to do that at least once every year. The five main characters are all very different from one another, with Shiryu being calmer but also wrathful when required, a very iconic scene that marked my whole life is when he blinds himself to fight one of the silver Knights, who could turn his enemies into stone if they looked at his Medusa shield, Shiryu was always and by far the wisest of the five main protagonists and though he had the Dragon's shield, the so called strongest shield in the universe, he would always fight armorless, one of the memes in the series is shirtless Shiryu haha. Anyways, Dragon!

3. Gyarados from Pokémon

In theory Gyarados isn't a real Dragon, but come on, how come it isn't?

I always loved the ''Working class hero" vibe Gyarados has, they are small little funny looking fish that can do nothing but splash (and struggle after some several splashing) but then it evolves and becomes a God-like divination with stats superior to many legendary and pretty much everyone else in the game, it's even stronger than the original water starters, being so accessible since all you need is an old rod to fish a magikarp and then grind it to lvl 20. Also, it flies! Or does it?

4. Blue eyes white Dragon from Yu-Gi-Oh

Watching Yu-Gi-Oh in the 2000's was a magical thing, this era had amazing Anime, cartoons, games, films, and Yu-Gi-Oh is one of the best for sure, being literally everywhere we the fans could enjoy it in many different forms, from the card game, called Duel monsters, the amazing ps1 and ps2 games, to of course the anime, I re-watched the original series in 2020 and I liked it a lot! In Yu-Gi-Oh there are some incredible design creatures, but by a large margin Kaiba's silver beasts of light were my fav ones!

5. Paarthunax from Skyrim

When this game came out it got me strung on, t'was like the world outside my bedroom didn't exist anymore, but it's such a great game so it's comprehensible, I think it gets a bit of over hate by the gaming community and sure, it has its flaws but still it's a great pack of stories, adventures, memories even... Sitting by the fire in Riverwood, listening to 'The banned mare', walking through the streets of Solitude, traveling to all the many beautiful and unique cities that I still remember the names: Dawnstar, Riften, Winterhold, Whitehorse... Climbing the mountains to talk to the Graybeards and being ambushed by a troll lmao... Skyrim is that type of game you don't even need to be in a mission to have fun, it's so immersive that even reading a book you found or listening to the divine soul healing OST is enough to make you feel like you are indeed someone more... Paarthunax is a very wise and ancient Dragon, he's almost like a god in the world of Skyrim and listening to him is like listening to a cool great grandfather that gives you sermons and teaches you about the world of those who are now but memories.

6. Haku from Spirited away

Ghibli (jibūri) films are always so beautiful, they find a sort of uniqueness in the sense of building an atmosphere that always goes beyond the screen and stays with you for the rest of your life, I haven't watched all of them, but from the ones I did Chihiro's journey (I think you guys call it Spirited away) is the one like the most. There, there is a Dragon, just like the film, hugged to the memories.

7. Crossbreed Priscila from Dark souls

I don't like From Software games as much as a lot of people do, maybe my time with them wasn't as good because I haven't played Demon souls yet, or maybe because the times I completed them I always had very unsophisticated xbox controllers who would add to difficulty by turning off in the middle of bossfights! but then again, there's people completing them in fancier ways around lmao, well, I'll revisit them someday soon, but until then, the beauty of the superior to the pure, Priscila.

8. Smaug from The Hobbit

Did I like the film? Nah, not really, it's odd how even though Peter is such a great artist the films didn't manage to be as good as the original LOTR trilogy he made in the early 2000s (being perfect once is already hard, twice would be semi-impossible), But the book is very good, it is and by no sane denying one of the pinnacles in the history of literature, the best book ever written? I don't know, regardless, Smaug is a powerful being, full of gold, who likes to sleep for several hours, that's literally how I want to be in the future. *Please borderline, don't make me delete myself, the other half wants to become Smaug.*

9. Dragoon from Beyblade

Hard to find gifs of this one considering how popular the show was back in the pinnacle of internet and gifs, anyways, Dragoon didn't appear much in the series, at least not in his Dragon form, most of the time we would get spinning things and spike haired characters, haha. I liked this show a lot way back in the day, I'd trade so many things to go back to this even better place, beyond the void, the umbra of nothingness and all this fuzzy jealously of the world around me, anyways, Speaking of Beyblade, my favorite one was Drigger, of course haha. By the way, did you know that the word Dragoon doesn't have anything to do with dragons? They were some cavalry guys who would still be foot soldiers but who used horses to move from large distances, i was searching about that because of the dragoons in StarCraft, (yeah i play SC...) Regardless, in Beyblade, each of the four main characters, the mighty Bladebreakers! represents a different region of the sky in Chinese astrology, i don't remember the names in Chinese now but in Japanese they are: Suzako, the red Phoenix from the south and who represents summer, / Genbu, the green Turtle from the north, which represents winter / Seiryu, the blue dragon from the east, related with spring, / Byakko, the white tiger from the west, the being of the Autumn. These four appear in other anime like Yu-yu Hakusho, but in Beyblade they literally are, Dranzer, Draciel, Dragoon and Drigger.

10. Dragons in flags

I like history and geography quite a lot, and also being someone who likes Dragons I totally love when countries add Dragons to their national flags, this one, the flag of Bhutan is pretty much my favourite flag in the world, also lovely country with amazing geography (I love mountains!).

So yeah, for the lunar year of the Dragon, may this post give a bit of unity to this shattered world we live, with flowers, beams of light and plenty of water and crops to those in need.

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cotton-tails · 3 years

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So I saw this last night, and the little angsty plot bunny in my head woke up and I just had to write something. Fully intended to be a drabble of sorts, but of course it turned into a four page tear-fest, so grab the tissues and strap in.

Oh, and I haven't edited this, it's just 3am word-vomit, so enjoy the mess!

“So, this hasn’t exactly gone to plan.”

Della snorts cheerlessly at Donald’s deadpan comment, struggling into a sitting position and wincing at a twinge in her elbow. The chains dig into her arms with every movement, a very clear upgrade from the ropes they’d all been able to break out of within several minutes not too long ago. These idiots don’t know who they’re messing with.

Or they do; probably a little too well, hence the plan that fell apart very quickly. And the chains. And the scary looking red lightning below them.

“Shut up!” Heron snaps behind them, cuffing Donald a little too roughly around the head.

He doesn’t react more than a sharp hiss and a dark glare behind him, and Della can’t help the sharp pang of guilt under the surge of anger. She bites back a comment, keeping her eyes fixed on the ground until the villain is out of earshot.

“I’m sorry,” she breathes, keeping her voice low.

“What? Why?” Donald sounds confused but she can’t bring herself to look at him.

“You should be with Daisy right now,” she says, “I’m the one who guilted you into staying, into coming on this stupid trip. And now we’re facing the very real possibility of dying.”

Donald is quiet.

Forcing herself to look up, she frowns at the look on his face. He still doesn’t say anything, but the expression says it all; ‘Della-you-absolute-idiot-what-are-you-blathering-on-about?’

“I came on this stupid trip cause our kids were in trouble,” he hisses eventually, “my family were in trouble! You think I wouldn’t ditch my vacation in a heartbeat for any of you?”

“I-” Della starts, but her voice catches, rendering her utterly speechless. He’s not lying, she knows exactly what he would do for the family, for her. Yet, somehow that knowledge isn’t exactly helping.

She misses her chance to reply, all conversation cut off with the explosive arrival of Scrooge and Bradford through the roof.

Della clenches her fist and almost bites through the inside of her cheek as he slams to the ground. She manages to chime out a ‘Hey Uncle Scrooge,’ with Donald when his pained gaze finds them. Beakley mutters a sarcastic ‘Fantastic,’ from her other side. She can only watch as a now armoured Bradford, armed with the sword, picks him up by the back of his coat and drags him up the stairs. He’s blathering on about something, but she’s stopped listening; too busy focusing on her battered and beaten uncle and how this could have gone so completely and utterly wrong.

It’s the usual spiel anyway, threats to destroy his family, his adventures, everything he had worked for, blah blah blah.

Then the contract is revealed, and her stomach drops to somewhere around her knees. If they don’t find a way out soon, Scrooge will have to either sign his life away or they all die, and frankly, neither option sound particularly appealing.

It’s only when Bradford sacrifices his own agents that the desperateness of the situation really sinks in. It’s one thing to talk about murder, it’s entirely another to actually do it. And if Bradford is willing to throw away his own agents, Della can’t imagine what he would be willing to do to her family if Scrooge doesn’t sign.

He tries to buy some time. Della can almost hear the cogs turning in his head as he tries to figure out how to get out of this one. She huffs out a half-hearted laugh at the sharp quip about the fine-print. He’d figure something out, he always does. Not to mention the kids are bound to have found a way out by now, they’d pick up the rest of their allies and be on their way to disrupt the whole evil plan.

It’s just a matter of-

“Ugh! Enough stalling!”

Never mind.

“You need some incentive.”

Della does not like where this is going.

“Perhaps the life of your most trusted ally?”

The three of them snap their heads forward as Bradford stalks towards them, sword dragging on the concrete threateningly. As the screeching rings in Della’s ears, the only thought racing through her mind is ‘not Donnie, not Donnie, please, don’t take my brother.’

Her heart almost stops when he scoops Donald up by his collar, his cry echoing in her ears.

“Donald!” Three voices scream.

She can barely breathe, crippling panic bubbling up inside. All she wants to do is close her eyes and scream, break these chains and drag him back to safety, but she can’t move, she can’t take her eyes off her twin as he’s dangled over the edge.

“What will it be Scrooge? Adventure? Or your Family?”

‘Just do what he wants!’ She’s not ashamed of the thought. They’ll figure out a way to reverse the contract, there’s always a way, always a loophole. Just do it so she can see her brother safely on solid ground.

“Alright, I’ll do it.”

She can’t say she’s surprised at how quickly he gives in.

“No! Don’t!” Donald screams, “find a way out! You can beat him!”

The pen is already in his hand. “It’s not worth the risk lad.”

They can only watch in horror at the golden glow that circles around him, lifting him up and binding him with unbreakable chains that drag him to the ground.

“I did it!” Bradford crows triumphantly. “The great Scrooge McDuck, now only a poor old man!”

Della’s heart breaks just a little at the look of absolute misery on her old uncle’s face, but she doesn’t have time to mourn properly, because Bradford is talking. Again.

“Normally I wouldn’t indulge in such petty villainy,” he says, his gaze turning back to Donald, still dangling over the edge, with a glint in his eye that makes Della’s blood run cold. “But since this is a special occasion.”

He lets go.

Della’s eyes meet Donald’s for an agonising second, and then he’s gone.

There’s a flash of red, and someone is screaming.

She doesn’t even realise it’s her until a rough hand knocks her back.

“Shut it! Or it’ll be you next!”

Hot tears stream down her beak and she presses her forehead into the cold concrete, not even bothering to choke back a sob. Over the pounding of her own taunting heartbeat in her ears, she hears the sound of the machine powering down (‘Too late’ her traitorous mind provides), of her kids voices yelling something, and Scrooge shouting for them to be careful.

And Bradford, confused and angry as her family finally, finally step in to save the day.

His voice sets off something inside that she hadn’t felt since the day Lunaris betrayed her. A raging anger that burns through her, overwhelming any other emotion and completely taking over her mind.

The chains are no longer an obstacle, and even Beakley can’t stop her from launching herself at the buzzard. They tumble down the stairs, fists flying and feet kicking. Everything blurs after that, which may or may not be a side effect of a rather painful bump on the head as they hit the ground at the bottom of the staircase. She’s kicked off, then it’s just a cloud of lights and bodies and a strong arm holding her back from doing anything overly-reckless and potentially stupid.

The kids, her (their) beautiful, wonderful kids, figure out the loophole and the ever-binding contract disintegrates.

It’s done.

The maniacal villain is defeated once more. The world has returned to rights and the sounds of celebration fill the air.

But Della can only stand and watch, her hands trembling and eyes burning. Beakley stands behind her, hands hovering just behind her shoulders, ready to give comfort if needed.

He’s gone.

Her brother, the other half of her soul; just… gone.

And… oh.

Her knees buckle, a wrecked sob forcing its way from her throat. Beakley catches her with a arm round the shoulders and a hand under her elbow, lowering her gently to the ground as she crumples into a ball. She presses her hands to her eyes in a hopeless attempt to stem the tears as everything comes crashing down.

“It’s okay, let it out dear.”

He shouldn’t have been here. He should’ve been on that amazing adventure with Daisy, sailing together on that old houseboat. After everything life had thrown at him, after all the madness they’d been through, he’d finally caught a break, finally found that amazing person who loved him as fiercely as he loved her.

Then Della had come along, crying about lost time and not being ready. She hadn’t wanted to him to leave, even on a stupid vacation that he would very clearly be coming back from.

Now he wouldn’t even get the chance to go.

And it’s all her fault.

“Mom?”

The obvious confusion and concern in Huey’s voice is enough to send her tumbling over the edge all over again, fresh tears springing up at the thought of having to explain what happened to her- to his kids.

Scrooge hurries them away, and she tries not to listen to the hushed explanation, the startled gasps, and she has to cover her ears for the rest. She can’t stand it.

It’s all her fault.

“DELLA!”

‘What?’

There’s no mistaking that voice.

Her head snaps up so fast she’s half sure she’s given herself whiplash. Even through blurred eyesight, she knows that silhouette, that outfit, that stupid hat. She blinks, sniffing and scrubbing at her face with her sleeve, hardly daring to believe.

It shouldn’t be possible, there’s no way it’s possible. She saw it, she saw him fall, saw the flash of lightning, the empty space where he had been only moments before. She watched her own brother die. So how was he standing ten feet in front of her, laughing as he’s tackled by several small and colourful blurs?

A hand appears in front of her face and she looks up into the stunned face of her uncle. He looks almost as much of a mess as she feels, tearstains tracking down his cheeks and spotting on his coat.

“I think it might be best if we just don’t question it,” he says, helping her to her feet.

His hands are shaking as he holds hers tightly, but she doesn’t comment; it can’t be any worse than her own trembling limbs. They turn back to Donald, who’s ended up sat on the floor under the collective weight of the kids. He’s got a tearful Louie on his shoulder and several kids wrapped around his torso as he struggles to his feet, and Della can see him mouthing a headcount as he takes them all in.

“I swear every time we see you, you have more children.”

She hadn’t even noticed Panchito and José just beside him, grins wide and eyes twinkling with amusement and, in José’s case, something else that she can’t quite place. Donald just laughs at Panchito’s observation, the sound sweet as honey and causing even more tears to well up all round. The pure relief that sweeps through her is almost enough to make her knees give way again, but Scrooge’s hand gripping hers and Beakley’s arm still around her shoulders is just enough to keep her grounded.

Then he catches her eye.

“Hey Dells.”

The kids must see something in her face, cause they have to good sense to dart out of the way just moments before Della hurls herself at her brother. They almost topple backwards, but Donald is able to keep them just about upright while Della just focuses on wrapping her arms around him and burying her face in his shoulder. His arms circle her waist, holding her just as tightly. The tears are streaming freely now, but she’s beyond caring. He can yell at her about ruining his shirt later and she’ll just take it with a grin.

“You idiot!” she yells, her voice muffled by his shoulder, “I thought you were dead!”

“For a minute, so did I,” he says into her hair, “how about we just call it even?”

The soft jibe only makes her laugh, and she holds him just that little bit tighter.

Miracles do happen, and in the end all that matters is love, family and adventure.

But if he thinks she’s going to let him go galivanting off on some adventure without her now, then he’d better think again.

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shining-magically · 4 years

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so I’ve wondered this since the trailer came out years and years ago and Chloe defended the movie - was the red shoes teaser written by the same team that made the movie? were they forced to market it like that, was that based on an earlier draft, etc?? not sure if you know but you seem like the leading expert!

Sorry, this is gonna be an absolute novel because you know I’m an animation fan and the history and production of Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarfs is SO interesting and insane. Like, Tangled levels of insane. Thanks for calling me an expert, no one else was gonna do it so I just kind of took up the helm lol.

Here’s the low-down... The timeline of the movie’s production is an absolute mess and kind of an extremely wild ride. It was in production for ten years, went through a lot of different crew members, and went through at least two other major versions of the story before landing on the final version.

Since there’s not a ton of info on the movie’s production, a lot of this is pieced together from different interviews and context clues, and also a lot of what I’ve read and what I am quoting has been translated from Korean, sometimes pretty roughly. But yeah.

Here’s the story of why the Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarfs teasers and poster were so, so bad and fatshame-y and the actual movie was so, so good and body-positive. (With pictures and production artwork!)

(This is a beast of a post so I’m putting it under a cut.)

All right, so. After its conception originally as a short story by the South Korean studio Locus Creative in 2009-2010-ish, Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarfs was being worked on and was set to come out in Summer 2017, as evidenced by this poster at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, featuring a different logo and very different character designs for most of the dwarfs.

In early-mid 2016, the first teaser (in which we see Snow White undress and then two dwarfs recoil in horror at her fatness when she takes her magic shoes off) was released, after the film had kind of been slowly chugging along for 6 or so years. (I am having such trouble pinpointing when the second teaser was released (in which one of the dwarfs basically attacks Snow while she is sleeping to steal her shoes), but I believe it was around the same time.) The teasers didn’t get that much traction because this was a small film from a small indie studio in South Korea.

None of the final actors had been cast yet. At this point in the production, the story was different, one of the many versions that the movie went through. As in the final movie, the dwarfs were actually cursed knights/princes and Snow White switched back and forth between two body types due to her magic shoes, but in this version, the dwarfs needed to steal the shoes from her in order to break their curse (rather than needing “a kiss from the most beautiful woman in the world” like in the final movie).

The weird thing is, I believe they had JUST changed the movie’s story when the teaser came out. I’m almost positive it was released more as a proof of concept than as an actual trailer for the movie. They had just recently combined two separate characters (seen above), a typical pretty, skinny princess character (Snow White) and a cute chubby girl character (’Bonnie’), into one single character that switches back and forth between the two appearances when she wears the magic shoes (also they had just dropped literally half of the movie taking place in the real world, with a magic mirror portal, it was a whole thing).

They didn’t have the details of this aspect of the new story hammered out yet, and the first pass at presenting Snow’s magically changing body type, was, yeah, not good and super offensive. This was a really inexperienced indie studio making their first film on a low budget, so even the animation and voice acting wasn’t great. I think they just wanted to get SOMETHING out there because it had been 6 years and they wanted to have something to show for it.

But here’s the thing. Despite how the teasers make it seem, this was always supposed to be a movie about body positivity, letting go of appearance-based prejudices, and loving yourself and others for who you are and for who they are, which we see in the final film.

I like to think of our film as a kindhearted one. Our intentions are nice.

- Director Sung-ho Hong

It’s important to keep in mind that this movie was made in South Korea by a 99% Korean crew, and, as I understand it anyway, in Korean culture, ‘fatshaming’ is not really a thing that is seen as overtly offensive. Also, children’s media there seems to have more adult things in it than in the US, which probably accounts for the more risque parts of the teasers. That said, I really believe that at this point in the timeline, the movie was on-track to be bad (or at least not very good) when it was released, and it would have ended up bad IF a few key players hadn’t signed on (which I’ll get to in a moment).

Interestingly, the movie’s producer, Sujin Hwang, said in a 2017 interview:

“[Both teasers] were solely produced to induce curiosity. They’re completely irrelevant to the actual story.”

- Producer Sujin Hwang

I think what she was trying to convey was that neither one is a scene in the actual movie, because while the teasers didn’t reflect the revamped story as it existed in summer 2017 (the time of the interview), they DID reflect the earlier version of the story where the dwarfs wanted her shoes, which is what the story was at the time they were made.

Now that we’re in post-teaser 2016, HERE’S where things start to turn around. After the teasers were released, my guy Disney veteran and native Korean Jin Kim joined the project. He and Red Shoes director Sung-ho Hong had been buddies for about eight years and Sung-ho had been trying to get Jin to come to Seoul and work with him at Locus for a long time, and he finally succeeded.

Jin and his twenty years of Disney experience as an animator and senior designer on films like Tangled, Frozen, Big Hero 6, Zootopia, and Moana, had a HUGE HUGE HUGE influence on the movie. He redesigned almost all the characters, oversaw all the visual development from the moment he signed on, and heavily (HEAVILY) supervised the animation, literally going frame-by-frame through preliminary animations and drawing over them, teaching the inexperienced animators at Locus everything he knew. (Literally almost everyone except him either only had TV experience or had no professional experience because they just gotten out of school.)

From an outsider’s perspective, it really seems as though Jin joining the project (and his gargantuan effort) made the quality SKYROCKET. Not just in character design and animation, but also in things like effects animation, story, etc. After he joined, Locus really started pushing HARD to make a good, high-quality movie, and his influence and experience from being a prominent figure at Disney was absolutely key. The studio also began to really study Disney films and other well-made animated films from other studios to really try and pinpoint what the DNA of a good animated movie really is.

I don’t have any solid evidence, but I’m pretty sure that Tony Bancroft (an animator and the co-director of Mulan) then joined the project because he’s good friends with Jin Kim. He is only credited as the voice director (the movie was recorded in English and the characters were animated to the English dialogue), but I am SURE that he probably also had a pretty big influence on the movie, because like... How could he not? I really really think there was more to his role than his title would have you believe, even though there’s almost no info out there about it.

So now the movie goes through a gigantic metamorphosis. Character designs, visual development, and animation quality are all rapidly improving, the story is tightening, and the themes of the movie (which, again, were always the same and intended to be positive) are being presented in a more sincere way. The movie is becoming the sweet, self-love-encouraging and body-positive movie that was eventually released.

I’m putting a gif from the credits of the final movie here. As we move into 2017, when the giant eruption of backlash occurred, please keep in mind that the story was finalized at this point and that THIS was the movie people were so mad about:

Chloe Grace Moretz accepted the role of Snow White immediately after she read the script and she recorded her lines (I think) in early-ish 2017. Her co-star Sam Claflin also immediately accepted the role of the romantic interest, Merlin, after reading the script and recorded his lines in (I believe) July 2017.

In the summer of 2017, the story and script were more or less the same as in the final movie. Promotional images from that time show that most of dwarfs had been completely redesigned by this point and didn’t have their teaser designs anymore.

They also released a few screenshots that look exactly like the final film. The movie was advertised as coming out in ‘2018′ at this point. Here’s a promo image from 2017 that is MUCH more tactfully worded than the infamous Cannes poster:

So now we’re in summer 2017. The Cannes Film Festival. The movie’s script and story have been basically nailed down, animation is underway, and the Korean film company Finecut is beginning to market and sell the movie to worldwide audiences. They are planning on showing some footage to potential buyers at the festival, and they make a poster to advertise the film there.

Unfortunately, it’s THIS POSTER:

Now here’s where there are some unknowns. By this point, the movie is basically in its final form, which is an adorable, body-positive story about loving people for who they are, loving yourself for who YOU are, and that provides commentary on society’s standards of beauty and how they affect how people are treated/viewed. So why this poster??? All I can really tell is that someone (I think Finecut) really, REALLY messed up and either horribly mistranslated the tagline, or didn’t do enough research to know that this kind of thing is REALLY NOT OKAY in western culture.

The above picture is shared and the internet backlash begins, fueled by tweets from prominent body-positivity activists like Tess Holliday. Even Chloe Grace Moretz speaks out against it, because she of all people KNOWS that that’s not what the movie is about. The internet then finds the old teasers from before the movie was revamped and it makes things worse. Producer Sujin Hwang profusely apologizes and says that that is NOT the message of the movie. Locus pulls the advertising campaign, and takes down the two old teasers.

“Our film, a family comedy, carries a message designed to challenge social prejudices related to standards of physical beauty in society by emphasizing the importance of inner beauty.”

- Producer Sujin Hwang

Voice director Tony Bancroft also tried to explain the situation:

“The truth is the film has a body-positive message as its core theme–it’s the opposite of what reports are saying. The problem is one poorly translated movie poster that has been taken dramatically out of context.”

- Voice Director Tony Bancroft

And then... There was nothing for a while. The movie didn’t come out in 2018 and was delayed. From what I can tell, I DON’T believe this delay was related to the Cannes backlash. I think it was mostly due to Locus’s limited budget and resources, because as we know, animation is difficult, time-consuming, expensive, and easy to do badly but hard to do well. Also, probably with Jin Kim and Tony Bancroft’s influence, they REALLY wanted to make sure to do a good job with the animation because they now had a great story and they really wanted the movie to be a quality, worldwide hit that would kind of put South Korean feature animation on the map. Just take a look at how nice the final animation was:

The movie was released in South Korea on July 25th, 2019. Unfortunately, the damage was done in the English-speaking markets and it was not released to an English-speaking audience until June 22, 2020, when it was released digitally in the UK. At the time of this post, there is no set US release date, but the distribution rights were recently bought by Lionsgate and the MPAA gave the film an official PG rating.

So who’s to blame? There’s no good answer. You could blame Locus for making those old teasers. You could blame Finecut for the competely tonedeaf Cannes poster. You could even blame cancel culture for raging against the movie based on one poster and two old teaser trailers without researching what the movie was actually about.

All I know is, it’s a damn shame.

#mooncactus #red shoes and the seven dwarfs #red shoes and the 7 dwarfs #animation #animation production #animation history #red shoes movie #redshoes #jin kim #tony bancroft

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absolutebl · 3 years

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This Week in BL

March 2021 Part 4

Being a highly subjective assessment of one tiny corner of the interwebs.

This is a LONG ONE, it’s been A WEEK everyone.

Ongoing Series - Thai

Lovely Writer Ep 5 - a little slow this week, but at least Gene finally flirted back, and very cute flirting it was, too. Also we got Aey’s motivation, background, and love interest. Thank goodness for that.

Brothers Ep 8 - still pants, what can I say? Clearly I am a BL masochist. Very embarrassing for everyone concerned.

1000 Stars Ep 9 - the conflict over Tian’s father was REALLY well done. The plot of this drama is excellent, the leads are great together, and yes I totally cried. What, you didn’t?

Ongoing Series - Not Thai

Word of Honor (China) Ep 16-18 - big battle fighty fighty stabby stabby. Ep 17 switches to “this drama isn’t big enough for two chaotic-neutral godlings!” So what do they do? Drink together and bicker... A LOT. Then in Ep 18 we all get the dubious joy of really freaky puppets. (I HATE puppets.) Also how is China letting this be so SO VERY VERY GAY? Also, I wanna walk through the forest wearing a smanshy purple robe and waving a big fuck-off white fan around simply because I’m a pretentious fuss monger. And frankly, I feel like this is an achievable life goal for me.

We Best Love 2 (Taiwan) Ep 4 - not gonna lie, this is looking to be one of my top 3 BLs of 2021. It’s SO GOOD. Big bonus to this ep for treating stalker behavior like the mental illness it is and not as some dumb representation of enduring love.

The Most Peaceful Place is My Place (Vietnam) Ep 1 - finally dropped (find it under NƠI BÌNH YÊN NHẤT LÀ VỀ BÊN EM on O2′s channel). It’s got actors already comfortable with BL and looks pretty good so far. An angry tsundere uke reunited with his ex, a stoic chef, giving us lots of snap, crackle, and pop out the gate.

Dear Uranus (Taiwan GL) Ep 2 - I want to love it, but it is just moving too fast. There’s not enough character dev and then they’re throwing flashbacks in? It feels like a treatment rather than a show, and a rushed treatment at that. Bummer.

HIStory 4: Close To You (Taiwan) Ep 2 (AKA Ep 3-4) - let the cheesy popcorn continue! Idiot remains an idiot; ingenue remains an ice queen; nice gay guy remains nice and gay; obsessive stalker brother is getting ever more whackadoddle. Of course these last two have the best chemistry. (It’s caregiver codependency and the salvation trope. We got us a Leo/Fiat situation going on.) Plus lots of classic BL tropes because OF COURSE there are lots of tropes.

Occasionally, I am tempted to argue that shows like H4 or Cherry Magic or Ossan’s Love aren’t technically BL because of the office setting and age of the protags - but then they all behave like high school students anyway, so *shrug*

Stand Alones

Cute little Taiwanese micro BL Friend or Lover dropped, about bisexual realization within a friendship group. Normally these are too short for me, but this one did pretty good with its 15 minutes of charm, plus it’s abad boy + shy softy pairing.

Breaking News - Thai BL

Fish Upon the Sky released its actual trailer. The upside-down kiss is gone, which makes everyone sad, and it seems far less rivals to lovers than the first iteration, which makes ME sad. But it still looks good and a more classic BL than GMMTV has given us in a while. New trailer focused more on the makeover trope and they’ve upped Mix’s role (the object of everyone’s affection) now that he’s proved himself. (Or they are using him more to carry the trailer since he has a fan base form 1k*). Starts April 9 on GMMTV in 1K*’s time slot, probably with a 10 ep run.

2gether the movie is apparently coming April 22 to Thai theaters. F4 Thailand must be having issues or GMMTV just wants to milk the BrightWin cash cow. It’s rumored to be a combination of 2gehter + Still 2gether with some extra scenes and ending. Also, one assumes a lot will be cut out, if it’s movie length.

Call It What You Want released its updated trailer. If anything, it looks more scary than before. What are we in for? April 9th.

Nitiman got a release date, May 7 on One31.

I Told Sunset About You 2 got an updated release date of May 27 on LineTV.

Second Chance the series is coming to LineTV on March 29. I don’t know much about this one. Tons of familiar faces (mostly TharnType side dishes) and some nice looking new talent but a dearth of eng subs. I think it may take on Brothers’ time slot. Line did eng subs for Brothers so maybe they will do 2nd Chance too?

Close Friend the series is coming April 22. This is a combination of 6 couples with 6 story arcs as music videos (maybe)? It’s an epic fan service with familiar faces like OhmFluke (UWMA), MaxNat (LBC also in Y-Destiny), YoonLay (YYY also in Y-Destiny), KimCop (GenY), and JaFirst (TT2).

Y-Destiny starts March 30, and has starting dropping couple’s trailers. I’m still suspicious given the director but it seems like there is plot (or plots) and a theme. Looks to be a series of 7 single ep vignettes (amended, see comments, might be 2 eps each for 14 eps total), different couple each time, some with supernatural elements, all with decent chemistry and acting chops.

Sun MaxNat’s tutor/student arc

Mon jaded rich kid meets poor innocent

Tues sports romance enemies to lovers

Weds the messy realistic actual dating one

Thurs hot ghost boyfriend (sad)

Fri YoonLayPerth coping with loss and finding new love (sad). This one will all rest on Lay's acting so we know it’s in safe hands. Our boy is going to KILL it.

Sat time-slip memory loss reunion romance

I’m thinking we can’t expect any of these to end happy or be classic BL. They’re gonna be more slice of life-ish.

Gossip - BL Outside of Thailand

Scholar Ryu’s Wedding Ceremony AKA Nobleman Ryu’s Wedding (Korean historical BL) got a legit teaser (eng sub here). @curriculumvtae reports that it’s releasing April 15th on WeTV (Philippines & Thailand) and Idol Romance (South Korea), while Will of Thai Bl says it’ll be on Viki too. It’s a short run of 8 ep built on a fake relationship trope (arranged marriage variant):

Ryu Ho Seon’s (Kang In Soo from You Wish) arranged marriage turns out to be with his expected bride’s brother, Choi Ki Wan (Lee Se Jin from Mr Heart). Ryu tries to undo the marriage, but his ill mother opposes this saying the scandal would be too much. Meanwhile, Kim Tae Hyeong (Jang Eui Soo from Where Your Eyes Linger), a senior at Ryu’s school, comes to congratulate him and falls in love with Choi. Then one day, the original bride disappears.

Okay it seems a bit twisty turny for ONLY 8 EPS, but oh my goodness how excited are we? Our first intentional historical BL out of Korea!

We already knew Hong Kong was doing a remake of Japan’s Ossan’s Love under the same name (not my favorite Japanese BL but so very popular) but it’s now reported to be coming to Viu in June. Who knows how the CFA will take it. Depends on whether Hong Kong bows before the NO GAY KISSES regs or if they are going to use this as a political nose thumb... things could get cray with this puppy (the original has several kisses and s shower scene). Are we back in Addicted territory only with added comedy and civil unrest?

Speaking of Japan, Absolute BL (AKA Zettai BL ni Naru Sekai vs Zettai BL ni Naritakunai Otoko) dropped sooner than anyone thought, March 27. But being Japanese who knows how/when/if we get subs. Protag finds himself trapped in a world of BL, but being straight he fights against any hot guy that draws near, but the whole world (literally) is conspiring against him. It’s a parody adapted from a yoai.

What with Absolute BL from Japan plus Lovely Writer and Call it What You Want from Thailand, is 2021 the year of BL being ultra self referential? Sure feels like it.

In Case You Missed It

Faded a gay micro film from Taiwan from 2017 deals with parental acceptance and serves up a ton of BL tropes (piggyback, forehead kiss, etc). I’m pretty sure this was a propaganda piece for legalization of gay marriage, and it’s an interesting nugget of BL history as a result. Yes, it ends happy. It’s cute.

Next Week Looks Like This:

Some shows may be listed a day later than actual air date for accessibility reasons.

Upcoming 2021 BL master post here.

Links to watch are provided when possible, ask in a comment if I missed something.

Man there’s a lot going on right now! Spring has sprung... I suppose.

P.S. I cannot believe I missed Absolute BL as a blog name. Numbnuts = me.

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itsmoonpeaches · 3 years

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Raya and the Last Dragon: The Importance of Water in Southeast Asia

Disclaimer: The following is from the perspective of a Filipino SEA. Please feel free to add or edit from other perspectives. There are *spoilers* below.

Though Raya and the Last Dragon has its flaws, what it did well, it did really well. Out of every cultural reference that I spotted in this film, the one that stood out the most was the portrayal of water.

In the end credits song, Lead the Way, originally sung in English by Jhené Aiko, there is one lyric that stands out as a nod to this culture of water:

There's an energy in the water There is magic deep in our heart There's a legacy that we honor When we bring the light to the dark Whatever brings us together Can nevеr tear us apart We becomе stronger than ever

There are beautiful views of bodies of water in the movie, and scenes that deliberately look over them. But, it’s much more than that.

The geography of SEA is already so rooted with water. The lands that make up the region are either located on a peninsula and cut through with rivers, or made up of hundreds of islands in the middle of the ocean.

So, let’s talk about water in SEA and in this movie. Below is an in-depth analysis of the cultural significance of water whether it is rain, rivers, oceans, or mythological aspects alluded to in the film.

Nagas and other myths

Let’s start with mythology because this is the basis of much of Raya and the Last Dragon. I want to first point out that this is not an opinion post, so I will not be touching much on my opinions on how the dragons looked like. (TLDR: Disney could’ve done better.)

So many myths in SEA are connected to water besides the dragons, but let’s focus on those.

I did mention briefly about naga and water dragons in my long analysis post on the final international trailer. However, I will go in a little deeper here.

Naga The dragons in this movie are based on the SEA version of a dragon. More specifically a sea serpent or a water serpent. They don’t breathe fire. In fact, they have nothing to do with fire. Their powers all influence water (and sometimes create earthquakes). Their powers include typical influence over water, creating rain, causing winds, and shape-shifting. They are incredibly powerful and revered. Sometimes they are even seen as deities like the Bakunawa in the Philippines. In RATLD, these nagas have a long horn at the front most prominent in Thai and Laotian versions of nagas. They are scaly and might have a kind of crown on their head, or gold jewelry around them. In most portions of SEA, nagas don’t have legs. It looks like the dragons here were partially inspired by an East Asian dragon or maybe the Vietnamese dragon. Other depictions can have them with multiple heads. Nagas also appear in South Asian culture. Here’s a quote from my initial long analysis post to add to this:

Naga are so important within SEA cultures that we have multiple places (and a river) named after them all over SEA and particularly a few times in the Philippines.

What I can tell you is mostly the Philippine version, but a naga is a serpentine creature that lives deep in the ocean, and are often associated with water. Sometimes they are depicted as having the upper half of a woman.

...

In the southern islands of the Philippines, depictions of naga are seen carved throughout buildings, particularly on roofs. A typical dance movement where you keep your hands curved and your fingers bent toward yourself is called “naga hands” and is supposed to be reminiscent of a naga’s graceful claws.

Bakunawa Just to highlight why nagas are so revered, I’m going further into the myth of Bakunawa. Specifically, the Bakunawa story comes from around the Visayas and Bicol regions of the Philippines which is south of the main island of Luzon. Bakunawa is said to be a giant sea dragon with a mouth as large as a lake. It lives deep in the ocean and has influence over the sea and earthquakes, in the depths of the underworld. There are a few versions of the story including that the Bakunawa is a naga that was enthralled by the beauty of the 7 moons and ate them until there was only 1 left. In some versions the god Bathala stopped Bakunawa from devouring the last moon. In other versions, the people down below made loud noises with pots and pans to scare Bakunawa from eating it. There are also another version in which the Bakunawa was once a beautiful goddess. It is also known as a man-eater in other tales. There are similar versions of a giant serpent or dragon-like bird causing eclipses (whether lunar or solar) in other parts of the Philippines.

Rain

I can’t tell you how important rain is in SEA. It’s not that it never rains, but that it rains a lot. Much of SEA is rainforests, which is an attribute that contributes so the rich biodiversity.

In RATLD, rain is depicted as a positive event...because it is. Raya and her friends are shown happy and laughing when Sisu makes rain. Sure, rain can be bad. Too much of it comes with typhoons and floods, but rain means a lot more than the bad things.

But enough rain means that the rivers aren’t dried out. Take the desert region of Kumandra for example. Raya goes there to the end of a dried up river. At the end when the dragons all come back, rain falls and the river is alive again. The people in that region can prosper again.

Rain symbolizes new life Now, this story I’m about to tell you is completely from oral tradition and was passed down to me by a culture bearer from from the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. This person said that when they were young, they did not have to worry about buying food because it was always available around them. If it rained, that was a good thing because it meant that the next day when the grass was damp, there would be mushrooms sprouting that they could pick. (There is an umbrella dance coming from this region that depicts mushrooms popping up after a storm.) If it was windy from the rain, it meant that there were fruit that would shake out of the trees. Rain also means food will grow. Staples like rice need a lot of water. Rice paddies need to be to be constantly flooded so that they can grow, and water means food whether it is in the form of rain, rivers, or the ocean. It means fresh drinking water and abundance.

Nagas and rain Remember how above I said that nagas can influence rainfall? Well, Sisu does just that in this movie. She says that one of her siblings originally had this power, and Sisu gained it because she came into contact with a piece of the dragon gem. This adds to the positivity of rain because nagas are already so revered because of the magic they can do in the movie (and in mythology), that the people that witness it are in absolute awe.

Rivers

Besides the ocean, rivers are the heart of SEA. From the Mekong River that runs through 5 SEA countries including Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia, to the UNESCO site of the underground river in Palawan, Philippines...rivers are just part of the lay of the land.

They are shown to be all of those things in RATLD. There are streams and tributaries that flow into mountains and underground where the dragon gem was originally hidden in Heart. Additionally, there is the incredibly long river that separates the land in the shape of a dragon that flows through all the regions of Kumandra, reminiscent of the Mekong. Rivers are so important that there is even a region in the Philippines called Pampanga that is named after the Tagalog translation of the word “river” seen in the first part of the region’s name, “pampang.” They are the people of the river.

There are whole fishing villages throughout SEA that are built on a river. In fact, there’s one in RATLD.

Rivers are a source of many things, including food and drinking water. When there is a flood during wet season, the land will be full of silt, making the land prime for planting.

I don’t have to tell you how important a water dragon is at this point, but the fact that the movie chose to have that be the shape of the river is significant because nagas live in rivers too.

Transportation This should be a no-brainer, but in case you forgot, rivers mean boats. Boats mean people will want to get around and trade. And, boat culture is so important in SEA. There are all kinds of boats in the region from the huge deep-water kind, to the fishing boats, to thin canoe-like ones, to coracles. You can see them especially showcased in the river town in Tail in Kumandra.

Oceans

Honestly, there wasn’t much about the sea in RATLD, but it’s important to note because nagas in and of themselves have origins in the ocean as well.

The sea is another very important core of SEA culture. Its waters are more unforgiving than rivers, and more unpredictable. Magical, mythological sea creatures tend to be more violent here, and will only be kind to those who are kind first.

In island nations like the Philippines and Indonesia, the people rely on the ocean for so many things. Especially if they live right on the water, some can be fantastic swimmers and can dive and fish for their own food. The ocean is respected, and it is feared.

Though there is no explicit ocean in RATLD, there are elements from port cities and towns that exist including the deep-water boats. In the movie and in SEA, seafood is important.

There’s a scene where Raya and Sisu meet Boun and he offers them shrimp congee. Shrimp is a popular food in SEA, and can be seen in many dishes besides congee or any rice-based dishes.

In the river town, we also see elements of passing fish baskets through the water after a day of fishing, and eating and buying fresh foods to cook later in a water-side market.

Irrigation

It’s pretty obvious that water is needed for irrigation, but just think about how earlier I pointed out how deeply water is utilized. Much of the food in SEA needs water to survive, a lot more than in landlocked countries.

Rice terraces Remember rice? It needs a heck ton of irrigation in order to survive. This means a lot of rain and a lot of soil cultivating. If you take a look at the rice terraces that surround Fang, and even the picture of more overgrown terraces next to the river in the transportation section of this analysis, you can see that rice paddies are supposed to be flooded. Rice terraces are all over Asia, but there are so many of them in SEA that are ancient and still work including the Tagalalang rice terraces in Bali, Indonesia and the Banaue rice terraces in Banaue, Philippines. Honestly I could talk about the importance of rice and water for ages. Sure, rice is a staple in all of Asia, not just in SEA, but in East Asia as well. However, I would argue that it is even more of a staple in SEA. Sure, there are noodle dishes, and bread, but rice is so ridiculously important that in the Philippines, it’s not considered a real meal if there is no rice. There is even a word for food eaten with rice, “ulam.” In fact, in the entire movie, I don’t think I can recall one eating scene in which the characters are not also eating rice with their food. Unless of course, it’s just a snack like fruit. (Maybe there was a stew only scene?) There is a scene towards the beginning of the movie when Raya asks Namaari, “Stew or rice?” when asking which she would prefer. Namaari never answers the question, but she says that it is her first time eating rice in a while. Though it’s never explicitly said, it could be implied that it is because they did not have as much rainwater for irrigation at the time.

Protection

I’ve talked about rivers and the ocean, but I haven’t talked about water as a barrier. Though water as a barrier isn’t an infallible one, it is still important to note.

Protecting from intruders SEA is separated by water. It is also a region that had wars within their own countries in pre-colonial times, and of course, when they were colonized. (Though shout out to Thailand for being lucky in that regard. It remains the only country in SEA not colonized by Europeans.) There were wars between chiefs in the Philippines, and often they had to traverse the ocean or cross bodies of waters to get to the lands they needed to fight on. It ended up becoming a process with a lot of planning. Though SEAs are people of the water, they obviously can’t breathe under it. Nagas here are also important because in RATLD they are seen as powerful, respected protectors. And of course, they are borne of the water.

If you take a look at the picture above, it shows that part of the movie when the water starts disappearing because Sisu disappears. As the last water dragon, her connection to the water was keeping the land alive. With Sisu gone, so was the water, and therefore the protection for the people. The Druun spirit came in with no more hindrances because there was no water to stop them.

The power of the water and the magical energy of the water dragon really showcased itself here.

Interconnectedness

SEA used to be an interconnected region that traded with each other. Of course, not that SEA countries don’t trade now, but it isn’t at the same level as before. The borders now were created after centuries of colonialization.

Water is what connected all the countries of SEA.

Just take a look at the map of SEA above (in red). There is no other region of the world that’s quite like this, except maybe Oceania and around the Mediterranean. It’s relatively easy for these countries and people to trade and share cultures and traditions with one another. Manila, Philippines and the Tondo region was once one of the most frequented ports in SEA. Trade was done with China, India, Africa, and the Middle East. The same kind of trade occurred in other SEA countries as well.

Because of the history of trade over water that is rich in its pre-colonial past, SEA shares many similar cultural aspects and even similar words in languages. Though of course, though there are similarities, there are a lot of differences as well. SEA is not a monolith.

If you want to think of it this way...that Korea, China, and Japan share so many things with each other including having a history of being able to share Chinese characters (the different names including hanzi, kanji, hanja), but that each country and culture is very different...that is what SEA is too.

This aspect of interconnectedness, yet with differences is emulated in RATLD. In the lore for Kumandra, the movie notes that all the regions were once one, but were separated after something broke them (that something being the malice of the Druun spirit). Yet, if they worked together they could become Kumandra once again.

It is shown in RATLD that the best way to make the spicy stew that is pops up multiple times, is to add all the spices and ingredients from all the regions of the land that was once Kumandra. This showcases that just like SEA, Kumandra was once a land of incredible interconnected communication and trade.

Kumandra wasn’t colonized, but it was separated by 500 years of land. The people didn’t use the water the same way. SEA was colonized (and actually, 500 years to the date on March 15, 1521 to March 15, 2021—the Philippines was “discovered” by the Spaniards so I wonder if that was a conscious choice on Disney’s part), and broken apart. I’m sure that without European colonialization, SEA could’ve been one huge interconnected country. Or bigger countries with different dialects.

Spirituality

Lastly, let’s talk about the spirituality of water. In RATLD, there are no other spirits besides the Druun which is made of discord and malice created from human malcontent. Yet, the Druun cannot go near water. I don’t know the exact reason for why it can’t or if it was inspired by a piece of mythology from an SEA country, but that is significant. (If you do know the reasoning behind this, please feel free to add onto this.)

SEA is full to the brim with myths and legends of nature spirits. From spirits that live in trees, to spirits that live in the water. And yes, they are spirits. They can be spirits of ancestors too. The way Chief Benja pours a bowl of water on Raya’s head as beads of it float into the air...it is a great touch to highlight the energy that water just inherently has in any SEA tradition.

Though it’s probably a little reaching to point this out, the fact that Sisu was said to be washed to the end of a river is so interesting when Raya is looking for her. This is because in some SEA myths the river takes your spirit to the underworld. Raya finds Sisu at the end of a river and she is made of stone, her spirit stolen until her power is unleashed again with the dragon gem.

Floating flowers Perhaps the most beautiful aspect of the movie and as it relates to water is the fact that the animators made a conscious choice to show so much imagery of characters making flowers float upon water. And of course, to use floating flowers as decoration. Characters like Raya, Boun, and Sisu float flowers that look like orchids or jasmine flowers to remember their lost loved ones. The choice of flowers is significant too. These are flowers that are native to SEA. There are flowers everywhere and that is so pretty and so accurate. To have them used as decoration floating in pools is also so nice too, because it is something that is done in households and not just in a palace. You can float a gardenia flower in a bowl of water to make the scent spread in a room, and it makes the flower last longer.

End

I’m sure there is a lot more I missed or things I got wrong. If you see anything you want to add or fix, please feel free to write it in any future reblogs!

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dana-chan-the-control-brain · 3 years

Note

Hey, did you saw the film theory on Invader Zim on Membrane that Low-key makes sense

NO. IT. DOESN’T!

Okay, maybe this is my personal bias shining through, because I really don’t like Mattpatt sometimes... No. Okay, I have nothing against the guy personally. More frankly, I don’t like his fanbase or the way he structures his videos.

The way Mattpatt words and structures his videos acts like he’s the first person who thought of this idea, it’s the main contributor to why I stopped watching his videos a long time ago.

He speaks in a lot of rhetorics and strawman arguments rather than just saying what he wants to say. Like “If you don’t believe me... look no further then...” and that’s the one thing I ABSOLUTELY HATE on theory videos.

And some of Mattpatts own theories he doesn’t take seriously, but this is what you get when you base your INCOME off of youtube ad revenue and browse the reddit forums for new ideas. A completely monopolized way of theorizing. (and this is why there are several paragraphs in my current chapter of Tech Support of Zim’s Computer complaining about the concept of youtube entertainment in general.)

Sure, I don’t think Mattpatt will run out of theories... but I really hate the structure of his videos follows along strawman arguments, acting like he’s always arguing with an imaginary audience for entertainment value rather than just say what he wants to say.

That, and people will often cling to theories of someone with good editing software and a youtube channel then Their own opinions.

Something that I learned was incredibly dangerous to do. I learned my lesson with “That Guy with the Glasses dot com” and I don’t plan to act like I know something or am better than someone else cause I agree with someone who said something on youtube once.

I do watch Internet reviews and theory videos for entertainment, but that’s all they are to me. I don’t like to watch youtube videos to give me opinions on how I feel about things. And I seriously think a wide margin of his subscribers lack critical thinking skills at times, as well as a majority of the youtube audience, or from what I’ve seen in the comment section.

However, remember... These are just my thoughts on the matter... My thoughts are not law and I never claim them to be.

Like when I first joined the fandom and posed my GIR analysis questions... I even said:

“I don’t know if the fandom has talked about this in depth or not... I just got here... or if someone put it into this many words before but...”

Also... the thing that bothers me about his Invader Zim theory...

A lot of Mattpatt’s sources are just..... Wrong...

(for the next few minutes I will be talking about this video, feel free to watch or don’t)

Okay.. “Membrane is an Irken” this has been a popular fan theory since before I even entered the fandom and there are old fics about this. I have read Irken Membrane stories before.

It’s not personally my cup of tea, but it’s fun to think about.

But the straws Mattpatt grasps in his video.... Really upset me because there is some thought to the theory back in the day.. ... Like back in 2002??? but like.... NOW?!

Okay, I’ll pick apart this a little... bit by bit...

He says that Membrane takes a hard stance against anything paranormal.

Kinda... but no.. Membrane never outright denies the existence of aliens. (except in ETF... which he mainly says out of frustration...) This is what Membrane says about “there are no aliens” in the show:

Membrane just says that there are no “intelligent” aliens...None that are able to travel the massive distance to Earth, anyways... If aliens existed at all, (like the cryptoids Dib talks of) they would have traveled the distance to the planet and communicated with them by now.

However, this is a nitpick of a minor issue. One that a majority of the fandom tends to overlook when viewing Professor Membrane and Dib’s relationship in general.

And I do find it weird that he used this for evidence when he cut out the most important snippet from the full lecture he gives Dib here.... JUST to support his claim... as if he’s intentionally leaving that part out.... hmmmm

However, I can let this slide, because it’s a nitpick and really doesn’t change anything that Membrane is very dissuasive of Dib’s alien-hunting hobbies. (I have a theory as to why and I explain it here in my own way)

The point is, Membrane is dismissive of anything alien... maybe because he’s an Irken...okay, good, yes. fair.

A lot of Mattpatts claims from then on are pretty solid, and I won’t bunk them with “But in my headcanon/Fanfic verse...” Because what he is saying is all true.

Membrane denying the existence of aliens even after being taken to space jail doesn’t have much of an explanation and is played for comedy and there are many ways you can go with this, and I am not going to bring up my fanfics or my own headcanons to argue with him here.

Because there is no explanation, and he is going with the “Membrane is Irken” theory... So that’s very solid when he’s talking about Membrane denying the Hallucinations.

Mattpatt claimed that Membrane wore his face covering at all times and had been dressed this way since he was a child.

I will not deny this. This is true.

However, isn’t bringing up Membrane’s childhood kinda put a hole in your own argument?

MEMBRANE WAS A CHILD.

He had been shown to have childhood memories in the comics and the show.

Irkens don’t really have a “Childhood” per say, at least not in the way that humans do. They are a smeet, then elite, then Invader..

If he’s claiming that Membrane came to earth as an Irken SMEET....How, why, and when?

That kinda raises more questions than it answers.... What are you proving by bringing up Membrane’s baby pictures on Earth exactly? It kind of works against your own argument?

Saying that they’re Irken because they all have the same hair.... that’s just stupid... and he’s citing the Invader Zim wiki on this .... oh boy.

Yeah, Like before I watched the show I thought Dib and Disguised Zim were the same character or brothers...

But I don’t think character design here is a solid enough reason in this case... At least not when it comes to the hairstyles... That’s a stretch.

“Hmmm Membrane’s hair forms an M shape... What could the M stand for? Mirken?! SUSPICIOUS!” (this is just a joke)

Also... the lack of ears thing... He did say it would be hard for Membrane to hear if his headpiece was covering his ears, but not necessarily... The entire thing is a headset and he is the man of science, he can really do whatever the fuck he wants cause Science is like magic in a show like this. So if Membrane wears a headset that doesn’t obstruct his hearing at all, I can buy it... Also.. it’s equally possible his ears got blown off in a chem lab accident or he’s legally deaf and that headset acts as a hearing aide and HELPS him hear...

Actually, I always noticed how in Membrane’s original design from the show, the headset looked a lot like a hearing aid. Specifically one with a head clip, It’s one of the things I first noticed about his design in the show.

And it’s just something I always assumed because he’s a scientist who deals with explosions in his face on a daily basis... (in fact he experiences one in episode 2B) So on first viewing, I thought that his headset served as a hearing aid as well as prescription glasses and a communication device.

I’m just throwing out possibilities because the “lack of ears” is also kinda a stretch.

Mattpatt complaining about “lack of nose” however... Okay, yeah I’ll give him that one. It’s a character design choice that is a little odd for Professor Membrane, but it does fit with the Irken theory, since a majority of human characters, in fact, all have noses. So, Yes the “lack of nose” does fit more into the Irken theory.

However.... Florpus anime Membrane DOES have a nose...

Meant to be drawn in a more semi-realistic artsyle, you can clearly see the bridge of his nose here.

And he looks very similar to anime Dib... Sooooo... Shrug-city...

It’s likely that Membrane not having a nose in the show is simply a stylistic choice than anything else. Basically, the bridge of the nose is there... we just don’t see it.

Especially since Nightmare Membrane has a nose as well..

Membrane is like Home Improvement’s Wilson. We will never see his face, and that’s part of the gag. The man probably sleeps in his labcoat honestly...

I also find the voice pattern thing a bit of a stretch. Membrane and Zim are just eccentric characters who yell to emote or emphasize a point or emote stronger. And Membrane’s inflections are never the same as Zim’s.

Remember, no other Irken TALKS like Zim. Professor Membrane doesn’t really go around screaming: “I AM PROFESSOR MEMBRANE” either.....

If anything... it just kinda proves both characters have auditory processing issues or hearing problems more then anything.

And there is a lot of screaming on this show.... Screaming from Dib, screaming from Membrane, Screaming from GIR, screaming from Zim... Screaming is funny... and characters scream so much that the characters with their mouths wide open is somewhat a staple of the show.

This is more because of Johnen Vasquez’s voice direction...

Especially since no other Irken really talks like Zim..

Zim’s manor of Speach is strictly a Zim thing and not an Irken thing.

Professor Membrane’s manner of speech is simply a Membrane thing and not a human thing.

I will give Mattpatt that. That a lot of tech in the show looks similar to Membrane’s. I feel this is mostly a stylistic choice, but it really does fit in with the Irken theory.

Like that Zim just so happens to use the same operating system as Dib is played off as a joke. But it does add some small credence to the theory here... I need to point out when he does get it right... some pats on the back.

These are very good points and does follow through with what he’s trying to prove by the end of the day.

(even if Membrane was lying about the destruction of all mankind with the beans thing, but that’s a minor nitpick here)

But his entire paragraph comparing Membrane’s tech to Irken tech is a really good one. Props there.

This whole paragraph about there being only Tall or short irkens cause their society is height based and there are no “medium-sized” irkens....cause they were “dealt with”

Okay.

....

Sure Mattpatt. Let’s just entirely ignore the existence of the Frylord and this entire character even though you mentioned it in the synopsis at the start of your video... Showing that Taller irkens are in positions of power against the shorter, also... Zim is a tiny irken... there are many Irkens that stand taller then Zim.

Being tall in Irken society is a rarity, and Almighty Tallest Purple said that he and Red “became” the Tallest. How? We don’t know, but we do know at one point the current Tallest looked like this:

How do Irkens get that Tall? Body modifications? Maybe... it’s never explained, but considering the Frylord is super big and probably eats a lot of snacks might have something to do with it. We don’t know.

It’s safe to say that being Tall in their society is a rarity and Tallests are either born or made special from the cloning chamber from the get go.

Not to mention, Membrane is Taller than the current Tallest are already...

and you said earlier in the video that Membrane would have gone to Earth as a child...

When he was no taller than a wrapped Christmas box of socks...

So why would Membrane take refuge on Earth at this point? Mattpatt says that Membrane was sent on a mission to Earth because the Tallest felt threatened by his rule...

BY MEMBRANE’S RULE?!?

HE’S THE SIZE OF A CHRISTMAS BOX OF SOCKS!

What do they have to be threatened by?

Because... Mattpatt DID bring up Membrane as a child earlier in the video... meaning Membrane came to earth when he was about the same size as Zim.

SO THEY HAD NOTHING TO BE WORRIED ABOUT AND HAD NO EVIDENCE TO BELIEVE MEMBRANE WOULD GROW TO BE TALL ORE EVEN VIEW HIM AS A THREAT

You bunked your own argument. Congradulations.

Membrane conquered the world through his inventions. In a way, sure. Membrane Labs does own a lot of stuff. But he doesn’t own everything. A majority of the Corporations that keep the population stupid usually don’t have anything to do with Membrane Labs and aren’t affiliated at all.

But this does fit into the “Membrane is an Irken” theory so I will give him that one.

However, Membrane being an evil corporate dictator is a hot take I never really appreciate at all and I can never get behind it.

It hits too close to home in the real world, and I always like to view Membrane as a self-made man and a World loving hippie at his core who just wants to make the world a better place, much like his son, but he actively does something about it. (which can also be why he encourages Dib with real science so much cause he knows Dib wants to save the Earth as much as he does)

Just calling Membrane a capitalist billionaire that doesn’t care about the little guy kinda seems disingenuous towards his character for me.

Especially when Membrane in “Ten Minutes to Doom” created a machine (foodio) that completely end world hunger... which was in BETA in the unreleased episode...

but by the time the movie rolls around... Foodio exists... past his BETA, meaning that he’s probably no expensive than a common household microwave and can materialize food from nothing:

Yeah. Membrane completely ended world hunger off-screen. thanks. (something no capitalist would ever do...)

Membrane also does appearances for charity (in the comics), and often takes funding for sponsorships when he is low on funds and he had to find a cure for pig mouth.

Sure “Membrane conquered the world” fits the Irken theory...

But I never appreciate that take on his character and that is admittedly, very personal bais.

I just wanted to say my peace a little bit here about how I 100% don’t vibe with the “Membrane capitalist/billionaire scum” especially since he ended world hunger...and invented a cure for the un-common cold.

Works for the theory, so good on Mattpatt for that one, but I personally don’t vibe with it.

Mattpatt compared Zim and Dib’s head shape as something to argue... Like because Dib has a similar head shape to Zim... that Dib has to be an alien... Okay... But If you look at the Invader Zim artbook (which I own)

The show has a very distinct look on how they draw characters’ heads. It’s a very distinct stylistic choice and there are pages upon pages in the artbook describing the style and how it looks in motion, and many revision notes to the Korean animators.

There are lots of pages on the artbook describing in detail the differences between the main characters’ heads, what to do, and what not to do.

It’s a difficult style to replicate, and Dib having a big head was mostly a joke from the showrunners to the showrunners, cause they kept drawing Dib’s head slightly bigger to make him look more appealing.

A majority of the audience doesn’t really notice because all the children in the show have big heads. All the kids are like 3-4 feet tall and have huge heads.

Also... Dib’s head is far more rounder then Zim’s in the comics and the Movie... comparing their head shape as an arguing point, when Dib’s head shape changed midway season 1 when the designs got slightly more streamlined is just... bad form..

Dib and Zim’s heads never really look the same from the early episodes as they do later on.

Comparing this character design similarity just because of the artstyle is really stupid.

This is the most infuriating thing about the video... because Mattpatt disproves his own argument with his own footage not a few seconds earlier.

He claims that Gaz sarcastically mentioning she has a squeedly spooch is a canon fact...... but ... hmm.. Mattpatt... can I rewind the footage of your video, please?

Where’s her squeedly spooch?

IS IT BEHIND HER CLEARLY HUMAN ORGANS?! I DON’T SEE IT?

And this isn’t just a stylistic choice... here’s a picture of another human’s organs for comparison.

Mattpatt literally disproved his own argument and ignored the fact that we saw an X-ray of Gaz’s organs in the very same episode...

Gaz doesn’t have a squeedly spooch and she literally was being sarcastic.

and the whole thing is disproved very easily.

Everything Mattpatt says in between those two points, about Dib being taken aboard an alien ship as a baby, and that there is no mother, and the Clone theory... That is all good stuff and this is what the theory video should have speculated and focused on, because there is some digging to be had here... I feel he focused a lot on the wrong points in his video...

And this is the most outrageous point he makes in his video. It’s the thing that pissed me off the most... and lead me to write this essay in the first place.

He claimed Eric Trueheart himself confirmed the clone theory and had story plans where Dib would discover his clone origins.

HE DID NOT!

IN FACT, Eric Trueheart himself published Volume One of the Invader Zim script book AND THIS IS WHAT HE SAID:

Eric neither confirmed nor denied the rumor.

But for Mattpatt to blatantly say that Eric said that Clone Dib was a planned thing by the screenwriters?!

He is BLATANTLY putting words into a Screenwriter’s mouth! Something that you should NEVER do.

Because it is 100% a lie.

He had no source for this claim. He probably just read the same rumor on the wiki and has no source.

This is the reason why I don’t trust videos like Mattpatt. The truth is often stretched for entertainment value, or information is just made up to prove “they were right” about whatever the topic of the day was. He doesn’t even bother to cite the source he got “Eric Trueheart’s word of mouth” from... because it was wrong.

Sorry if this whole thing is more hostile than it intended to be... But Mattpatt was looking at the ENTIRELY wrong evidence for this show....

Irken Membrane is a fun theory... but Mattpatt picked the entirely wrong topics and points of discussion, even to the point of hiding the truth and straight-up lying to his audience about his sources.

It’s kinda like saying “Birds eat ghost peppers because they’re part dragon and dragons can handle spicy food”

While, yeah, Birds are descended from dinos, it’s kinda missing the full story there and it’s not the reason why birds can eat spicy food.

Irken Membrane is a fun fan theory... do what you want with it. I am not here to dissuade Irken Membrane headcanons...

I’m just here to encourage critical thinking, and perhaps NOT put words into content creators' mouths when there is no credible source for it just because it benefits your argument.

#Invader Zim #Film Theory #Mattpatt #danachan's rants #lol sorry i went off but he really needed to cite his sources more on this one

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gayfrenchtoast · 3 years

Text

Okay fine we're doing this. I havent read the books and I'm probably not going to I've only seen the movies so I'm sorry if anything I say is contradictory or has already been stated.

So! Descendants 3 was kinda shit and I dont like it but especially because of the ending because everybody was like "oh yeah island is open and we're all happy with no worries or implications about free villains or people being spiteful about being imprisoned for years!" In fact if anything they joked about those things.

The island is basically its own culture, I can't say how long it's been around, long enough for some almost adult kids to be about and to develop a kind of community.

The Isle is a place of poverty, people are dirty and on the street, eveyone steals from each other and most people don't put much effort into appearance upkeep (personal or of the sourounding area) not because of laziness or being "evil" but because they clearly don't have time or luxury to do such things or possibly even the clean water. Does the Isle have clean water?? How to they get electricity??? Someone tell me!

Another thing that I've noticed is easy to see but is not much explicitly said is the unique style of those on the Isle. As previously stated they don't have much but those who have the most "power" and such on the Isle are the best example of this As they have the most colourful outfits. However these outfits are often made out of patches and ripped things put together, even salvaged things like nets and chains as we can see on thing like Uma and Harry's outfits in D3 they make the best of what they've got and they do fantastic because their outfits are intricate and detailed and just tell you everything you need to know about them. Which is why it's a damn s h a m e when the original VK's ajust their style to be more like Auradon's. That's not an improvement! Be proud of where you came from!! It's like they forgot what it was like being on the Isle in D3!

Moving on, here's something that was touched on in D2 but not enough. Equality. On the Isle there is basically equal opportunity as in saying everything is shit and nome cares what gender and presumably what sexuality you are as long as you can work. Sexism is shown to be almost casual in aurodon from the looks of it, Chad makes sexist comments and litterally none else says anything or seems to see anything wrong with it except Jay who caves to pressure from peers and expectations. He does redeem himself because he's from the isle and he knows you shouldn't give a shit about anyone's gender or anything. If they can do something and ask to be included you give them that opportunity. The sexism is also implied in the way that the rule book has men written specifically in the first place and that it has taken until then for anyone but boys to be allowed on any kind of sports team. We never see it! It seems to be the hetronormative veiw where the boys do sport and girls do cheerleeding and other genders? What other genders? Never heard of that? BAD AURADON!! I bet there's so many trans folk on the island just living their lives, thinking Aurodon is the better place and not knowing that it's a cis het filled nightmare.

Okay no I'm headcannoning now, if their are now a bunch of Isle kids at auradon prep they find it fucking aweful the way all these preppy royals are treating them and make the first LGBT club in Auradon. There is lots of pushback and they get bullied a fuck ton for making themselves the most prominent queer folk in the school until a fight breaks out and the club demand that they should be treated better, taking all the evidence to fairy godmother who is very hesitant because COME ON she's never been that great she is biased to Auradon kids and if putting away those in the Isle is brought up she is all on it, she is jelly spined about doing anything against the royal kids. So the kids are like "Fine, if you won't help us we'll take this to the King himself!" Well mainly the queer mom's of the group (you know the ones I'm talking about) who lead the others and protect the anxious queers as they storm to Ben at his fucking locker and demand an audience because they are being harassed and bullied and none is doing anything. Ben had no idea there was even a LGBT club (too busy ig) and is gassed there is one for a moment before he's like "wait people are harassing you?" So Bisexual King Ben gets his lovely Bi wife and they start coming to club meetings and investing in the pins and stuff the club makes. Most club members are pleased but the queer mom's are apprehensive that this will help until some assholes come to the club to do their usual bullying only to find King and Queen Beast themselves siting there with rainbow bracelets and bi pins and all trying to have a nice old time eating their fucking cupcakes what the fuck are yall doing? The bullying dies down quick once they realise it ain't gonna fly, the other OG VK's that hear about this become members and very protective over their queer children. Did I mention Dizzy and Ceila are a part of the club? They're girlfriend's. Celia is one of the queer moms. Harry becomes one of the biggest protectors over the group as the pan dad. He's been going around snogging everyone and anyone wholl snog him everyone already knew he was queer they just didn't have the balls to try and bully him over it as much as they bullied the lil club members. But now Harry can often be seen in jackets and shit with pan and general queer patches and pins and running around with his gay children yelling "MOVE WE'RE GAY!!" He totally calls them his queer crew. Anyway as a result lots of queer royals start coming out of the woodwork, obvs Lonnie is one of them, and the club eventually serves to bring members of Auradon and the Isle close together.

Where was I? Yada yada auradon expects girls to be pretty princesses and boys to be brave knights or dashing princes. It's shit and should stop being portrayed as good. Moving on!

Food! One of the things we'll established in all movies is that the food of the Isle is shit compared to food of Auradon. The Isle has no fresh fruit which likely means its almost impossible for things to grow there which is fair because again there doesn't seem to be much fresh water and there are always clouds overhead so no sun. Maybe there is some people trying really hard to grow stuff but the general attitude of the Isle seems to be "there is no time for that" and fruits are forgotten so much that the VK's litterally don't knownwhat they are when they come across them. That and anything containing sugar. Actually it's mention by Dizzy and Celia that they enjoy the fact that the cake dosent have dirt or flies so basically food there is terrible. We don't see much food on the Isle but what we do see seems to be beans, eggs, chips and shellfish. Basically protine and carbs that can be easily stored and produced. To be fair beans are kidna good for you but they're likely a sign that if they get any imports from the mainland it is canned stuff. Prison food. There's probably some chef villain that is trying their best to make good food out of the shit but honestly the Isle dwellers should be angry that they've been deprived of good food for so long not happy they're finally been given decency.

Moving on, music! Auradon dosent have nearly as many musical numbers it seems, the Isle songs have a distinct style, to them, the villains that basically "founded" the place were masters of the dramatic songs (with backup or solo) so banging music is basically ingrained in the music's culture, even for battle as we see with the fight between Mal and Uma in D3. Meanwhile Auradon seems to have mainly romance and "I want" songs. Even Audrey's villain song is basically an I want song.

Okay let's talk about the Villains. We've established that the VK's are not inherently bad. However not all of them can be totally good and there are legit OG Villains just kinda chillin on the Isle. They've obviously lost quite a bit of their power, motivation and sanity (isolation will do that to ya as they lost everything and the VKs know no different) but deadass? They were bad guys. You can try to rehabilitate them sure but you've basically just let them free roam, they could make a runner and you wouldn't get the chance. They were also shitty patents which is brushed over/joked about in the interaction between Carlos and...man I feel bad I forgot her name deadass their relationship seemed to come out of nowhere in the second film she didn't seem interested in them at all and friendzoned them multiple times I'm pretty sure Disney did that becaue queer kids were relating to Carlos and headcanoning them as queer (which they deffinatly are) but deadass their mom is an attempted animal murderer and has hurt her child as we can see from how they're afraid of her and her rhetoric and yet it's "haha I'm afraid to meet your ma!" "Me too cus im a dog! Lol!" Fuuuuck offfffff

I think I'm running out of thoughts so here's a last one for now; with the magical barrier down a bunch of magical Villains kids should be coming out for the woodwork. We know Mal has magic basically stored in her so it's is possible, she technically doesn't need the spellbook to do magic it is just inherent to her. So with the diverse range of people from the isle there are deffinatly magic folk in there. Actually if we're following Disney movie law I saw something mentioning Jay being half Genie and yeah! He should be half Genie! Jafar got turned into a Genie he's probably only human because of the barrier! Oh also Ben should be able to go beast on command as long as he had a better beast form than he did in the movies. And give him back the beard and fangs like fuck you he looked so much better

Okay I'm done for now

#decendants #decendants 3 #mal #carlos de vil #jay #harry hook #uma

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ms-demeanor · 4 years

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Hi, can I get some clarification? At one point does lusting for a person/feeling lust for someone become objectification?

Objectification is treating a person like an object, like a *thing* instead of a person.

(for the purposes of this post I am primarily going to be talking about sexual objectification though parents treating their children like objects is DEFINITELY a thing)

I would argue that objectification happens when you disregard a person’s autonomy (not that you overrule or deny he fact that they HAVE autonomy, but like it doesn’t even occur to you that your choices should be considered because they’re not real enough to you in that moment for it to matter).

Having a crush on your friend or thinking that the cashier at a store is sexy isn’t objectifying them. Resenting your friend for not returning your crush or taking a photo of a sexy cashier to share on social media is objectifying them. Arguably just thinking about someone while masturbating is, to an extent, objectifying them. But imagining the sexy cashier taking you out on a nice picnic date and showering you with presents and buying you a pony is objectifying them too.

I’ve got a hot take here: Objectification isn’t inherently bad.

There’s a person at my gym who has some fucking THIGHS. Every time they’re at the gym they’re on the stair machine for a minimum of thirty minutes. I’m pretty sure they can’t wear jeans because I can’t *imagine* the kinds of jeans that would fit over this person’s quads. Every time I’m at my gym and this person is working out their thighs it’s a little bonus perk for my gym visit. In fact it’s kind of an incentive: if I go to the gym maybe I’m gonna get to see THIGHS and that’ll be cool.

This person is an object to me. At a conscious level I know that they are a real person with their own thoughts and desires and agenda and whatever but that’s not what they are to me. What they are to me is Damn! Thighs!

And that’s not a problem.

However if I *follow* them around the gym to look at their thighs, or if I stare obviously and move so that I’m working out behind them, or if I follow them out so I know what their car looks like so I can make sure to go into the gym if I see them in the lot THAT is a problem. And if they introduce themselves to me and I don’t remember their name or their interests and all I ever want to talk about is how hot their thighs are then THAT is a BIG problem. And if they were my coworker and I ignored their achievements and didn’t listen to their requests because their needs were less important to me than hot thighs and anyway if you spend so much time looking good you’re probably an idiot who doesn’t really work but just gets a paycheck because the boss likes looking at you and your work doesn’t matter THEN that is a VERY VERY BIG problem.

You are allowed to lust after and objectify people so long as it doesn’t impact the actual real world and that actual real person.

Chris Evans is an object to me. He’s pretty. I like looking at him. He doesn’t have any idea that I exist so me seeing him as just a pretty dude and ignoring everything else about him doesn’t matter. And I cannot tell you how much I DO NOT want to personally humanize Chris Evans as a celebrity and form a parasocial relationship with him where I know about his dog and his siblings and look at pictures of his family at the holidays. I’m much more comfortable experiencing Chris Evans as an object than as a person, thanks, and I’m pretty sure that for most celebrities that’s how they want most of the world to interact with them. But if I were to meet him and objectify him by presenting him with sexual fanart of him or if I were to have an interview with him about his political website and only asked him questions about his workout routine THEN it would be a problem for me to objectify him and I would be doing so in a way that was directly harmful to him.

Also. In terms of nonsexual objectification:

I keep hearing random liberals say that Biden needs to nominate a woman of color as his running mate.

I hear it over and over but I’m not hearing names, just “Joe Biden needs to nominate a Latina” “Joe Biden won’t win if he doesn’t run with a Woman of Color on the ticket.”

Over and over. But no names. No policy. Almost as if people are seeing this possible running mate like some kind of talisman or token or object or fetish (in the original “magical object’ sense, not the sexual sense) instead of a theoretical politician with experience and ideas of her own.

Hm. Gross.

And yes it is COMPLETELY possible to objectify men and we as a society do it A LOT and I kind of have the objectification of men as commodities in the popular music industry as a special interest that I’ve done a lot of reading and research and writing about.

Objectification is a thing that people do. It is arguably a *necessary* thing that we do in our society, where we’re aware of so many hundreds or thousands of people that we can’t actually individually treat them like humans (and we can’t even meaningfully conceive of MILLIONS or BILLIONS of people).

So let’s look at George of the Jungle (because that’s what we’ve been talking about today)

The ladies looking wistfully at George as he plays with the horses: these characters are objectifying the character of George but it is likely harmless because he doesn’t even seem to notice that they’re ogling him.

Ursula’s roommate/friend staring at George naked: this character is objectifying George and it *could* be harmful to his character because it will change their interactions and the way she views him and the dynamic between him.

The advertising for the film focusing on a shirtless character slammed into a tree: Not objectifying George.

Tumblr focusing on gifs of George/Brendan Fraser without his shirt: Objectifying the character/actor, harmless (though if you approached the actor on the street and said “Oh my god, I am so hot for your ass in that one scene where you’re wearing the bowl” that would be harmful)

People focusing on Brendan Fraser’s weight gain and lamenting that he’s no longer sexy: Objectifying the actor, potentially harmful to the actor (because people frequently tag the actors in criticism like this) and definitely bodyshaming in a way that can be harmful to the people who encounter the criticisms.

Fans expecting actors to maintain a particular level of fitness outside of a film: objectifying the actor, harmful.

Studios expecting actors to perform complicated stunts without adequate preparation or safety precautions: Objectifying the actor, harmful.

Studios and audiences expecting actors to be dangerously dehydrated so that they appear extremely muscular or extremely fit when filming; Objectifying the actor, harmful.

A film executive expecting an actor to perform sexual acts for them or to tolerate sexual touching because they’ve cast the actor for a part: Objectifying the actor, harmful.

So it’s interesting that while the actor Brendan Fraser was likely objectified in the process of making this film (especially considering that, yeah, there was probably some unhealthy dieting and some dehydration to look as lean and muscular as he did in some scenes) the film as a whole does not objectify the character of George.

Anyway.

Shit’s complicated and there’s not a clear dividing line but it’s okay to think of people as objects sometimes because that’s honestly a thing that we have to do to get through the day without keeling over from overextended empathy but it’s not cool to *treat* people like objects and media that treats people like objects frequently models behavior that people normalize even if they don’t intentionally emulate it so it’s worthwhile to have discussions about the objectification of characters in media.

There we go.

Easy, right?

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schleierkauz · 3 years

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Q&A with Cornelia Funke - 05.07.2021

You guys probably know the drill by now. I’ve sorted it into topics to make it easier to read, have fun!

Mirrorworld

Q: What happened during Will’s and Nerron’s travels between the 3rd and 4th book?

A: Cornelia could spend hours thinking about that, figuring out the things they tell her and the things they don’t. She’ll keep the question in mind because she would also like to know the answer.

Bookstore Guy: “Maybe whatever they did is too... private to tell you?” (... 👀) Cornelia: “Very possible.” (....... 👀) “Dustfinger is like that, too, he barely ever wants to talk to me.”

Q: Do the residents of Ink-/Mirrorworld have a name for their world, like how we call our planet “Earth”?

A: Cornelia thinks that’s an excellent question and since their world is very similar to ours, the name would probably be similar as well. Gaia, maybe?

Inkworld

Q: Will we learn more about the Black Prince’s younger sisters in the new book?

A: Cornelia says “Ooohhhh!” and writes it down. She just started working on TCoR chapters again, so she’s been collecting ideas and thanks us for all the suggestions.

Q: Are there any magical items in the Inkworld that no one has found yet?

A: The Inkworld and the Mirrorworld are the same, so yes, there are. Inkheart (the book) itself is magical and so is the fire. Fenoglio has only seen a very small part of the Inkworld and he thinks that’s all there is but in TCoR we will discover new places that will make the connection very clear.

Q: What would Rosanna’s path have been like, had she lived? Perhaps she would have taken after her father?

A: Cornelia loves the idea and agrees that Rosanna probably would have shared many traits with Dustfinger. But, hers was a life unlived... Perhaps she will still take after Dustfinger in her next life?

Q: Could the Black Prince and Robin Hood be the same person?

A: No, definitely not. Robin Hood has a very anglo-saxon, white background; the Prince is black and from Africa. He is very different from Robin Hood as a person. He didn't used to be royalty or anything like that, he grew up in poverty... But they do share similar goals!

Q: Has Brianna shared what happened to her after the events of Inkdeath?

A: Not really, not yet. Cornelia is starting to discover some things but it takes a lot of time. Brianna is a character who likes to hide.

- Cornelia is realising that there is a lot of interest from readers regarding the story about Dustfinger’s and the Black Prince’s childhood/youth and she made a note to work on that asap

Other Books

Q: How long did it take to finish the new Dragon Rider book, Curse of Aurelia?

A: Cornelia started in winter 2018 while she was evacuated due to the fires. She’s been working on it on and off ever since and estimates it’s been 14 months of pure research and writing.

Because she wrote it in English but the publishing date for Germany was rescheduled to be earlier than originally planned, there’s been a lot of very complicated translation work. Right now she’s waiting for feedback from the Chumash tribe because she used elements and characters from some of their stories and they’re making sure she didn’t mess anything up.

Q: Why are Frieda and Fred a couple now, it’s heartbreaking!

A (and I’m just gonna quote Cornelia directly here): “No no no. Listen. There’s no need for broken hearts. It’s been 12 years and Sprotte and Fred split up pretty peacefully at some point in the past. Part of the reason for that was that Sprotte went to New Zealand and Fred wanted to stay in Germany.

Things like that happen all the time, despite all the love in the world. Take it from someone who’s 62 years old by now and who has lived many different forms of love. Also, Sprotte is not upset at all and she’s fallen in love with someone else- you’ll see. You already know the person. It’s a beautiful and passionate lovestory.

Fred and Frieda meanwhile are happy that Sprotte is there because she knows Fred so well that she can give them good advice. And I think it’s a beautiful thing when people who were once in love with each other can still be friends afterwards, even though the romance may not work out anymore. No need for broken hearts, really.”

Q: Does Cornelia come up with titles for her books at the beginning of the writing process or does it take more time? A: Depends on the book and the language she’s writing in

- Cornelia’s new book about letters and herbs is almost finished. She’s still unsure about the title - she’d like to include the word “kingdom” but that same word in german (”Königreich”) carries a lot of male energy which doesn’t fit the story

Q: What’s the biggest difference between Pan’s Labyrinth the film and Cornelia’s book?

A: Cornelia hopes there is no “biggest difference” because she tried to keep things canon compliant. But he did add short stories to give some characters a background story. Otherwise, she didn’t feel it was her place to mess with a perfect story.

Misc.

- The stream started with a ten minute tour of the bookstore and the bridge it stands on while Cornelia just silently sat there

...and I thought that was pretty funny. My favorite quote: “This house was build in 1567, so... it’s pretty new.”

- They are going to give away signed bookmarks and stuff again once Cornelia is settled in Italy

Q: Does Cornelia bind her own notebooks?

A: No, but she would like to. The botebook she uses for TCoR was made by a bookbinder in Scotland, usually she just uses moleskin hardcovers.

Q: Is Cornelia always satisfied with translations of her work?

A: Absolutely not, but she thinks a perfect translation is impossible. You always have to make compromises.

- Cornelia was recently invited to a village that belongs to the Chumash tribe and got to feed their sacred fire, a deeply touching experience she struggles to put into words

Q: What’s Cornelia’s favorite language to write in?

A: She can’t answer that because it depends on the book. For example, she couldn’t write about the Inkworld or the Mirrorworld in English, it wouldn’t fit. Writing Dragon Rider in English was fun, though, because the English language often feels “lighter” than German.

- Cornelia has no idea which language she dreams in

- Any time Cornelia reads that men and women can’t be friends she wants to slap the person who wrote it because it’s such annoying nonsense

- Minors will be able to stay at the farm in Italy as long as they’re self-reliant because Cornelia doesn’t have time to be anyone’s mom. There’s also always the Spiegelhof in Germany, which would be an easier option.

- Cornelia wants to invite environmental activist to her farm as well as artists

- Cornelia thinks parents should have more time to get to know their children before deciding on a name for them

- Cornelia firmly believes in reincarnation but isn’t sure why

...Aaand that’s it for now! Right now it’s uncertain when the next stream will happen, maybe in August, maybe September or maybe even October. We’ll see. I hope you enjoyed! :)

#inkheart #reckless #inkworld #cornelia funke #yall.... if the princes sisters end up in the new book bc i asked that question... i will literally never shut up about it #like apologies in advance but holy shit. finally. FINALLY.#i also asked the rosanna question and cornelias answer straight up made me cry #they didn't answer that many questions this time #because of the bridge tour and many conversations inbetween #but i love these streams #they're so cozy #i hope you guys are all doing okay #i'm working on some stuff but i can't focus on anything lately #things just feel weird #i think it's the weather #oh well! good night for now! <3 #info

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fandumbstuff · 3 years

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The Star Wars Saga, ranked best to worst.

1. The Empire Strikes Back Directed by Irvin Kershner

Upon close consideration, I’ve come to the shocking conclusion that Empire is the best Star Wars film. There’s a wealth of world-building and character development here that in many ways makes Star Wars the living breathing universe it is now. A richly complex melodrama lies at the heart of Empire, giving a whole new meaning to the term “space opera”. The performances here are some of the strongest in the entire franchise. Mark Hamill not only fleshes out Luke’s character, but in his training with Yoda and his duel with Vader he establishes the profound nature of the force, and how every future character interacts with it. As Han and Leia, Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher create authenticity to their characters’ relationship. Often misinterpreted as playfully hostile or sassy, there’s a real and endearing sense of affection between them, particularly in the infamous “I love you”/”I know” line- shedding their previously petty flirtation and affirming their true feelings. The emotional crux of Empire lies not in the most memorable twist, but in the moments immediately following it - In Luke and Leia reaching out to each other, reconnecting a relationship that was lost, rekindling hope in the force after we thought it was lost.

2. A New Hope Directed by George Lucas

I’ll be the first in line to make fun of dorky George Lucas and his woeful attempts at writing dialogue or romance. However, it’s pretty damn impossible to ignore what he achieved with Star Wars in 1977. The sheer audacity of his vision and his determination in executing it despite the naysaying from producers and supposed friends. Lucas had the bold idea of using cinema for it’s absolute worth- more than just a storytelling medium but a theatrical one. A cacaphony of sight and sound that could draw mass audiences and create a lasting impression. It’s a formula that every Hollywood and Bollywood blockbuster strives and more often than not fails to follow. It’s hard to dissociate A New Hope from the cultural phenomenon it helped create, but when you do, it stands as an impressive film on it’s own. Groundbreaking in terms of it’s visual effects and nostalgic in the simplicity of it’s sci-fi serial story, Star Wars ticked all the right boxes for so many people. If I was to boil Star Wars down to an essence, i think it lies in 2 scenes: Luke looking out at the binary sunset on Tattooine, and Han Solo yahooing after the Falcon saves Luke in the Death Star trenches. Those two scenes, Wistfulness and Exuberance, are the two sides of one concept- Adventure. Star Wars ignited those emotions in every child’s imagination, and it’s a flame that’s likely to never go out.

3. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Directed by Gareth Evans

Hard to believe this is a Disney movie. While the house of mouse may have a reputation for emotional gut punches in kids movies, it’s never felt quite so... permanent. Rogue One is an unrelenting emotional journey barelling towards surefire tragedy. We spend moments with characters that seem to be carrying the weight of the world on their shoulders. The sense of desperation that permeates the movie almost overpowers any sense of heroism. It’s so unlike anything we’ve seen in a Star Wars movie. Their courage comes from a place that is wholly genuine and believable. We see the rebellion for the despondent group that they are. Sorely outnumbered by the Empire, their actions in this movie show a reckless, darker side to them and makes the morality of Star Wars so much more complex. The first time we meet Cassian Andor- the stand out performace of the film by Diego Luna- we see him kill another rebel to protect their secrets. It’s a movie that reframes the original Star Wars trilogy, making it a richer, complex universe and more intriguing as a result. Also, the last five minutes might be the best five minutes in any Star Wars movie.

4. Return of the Jedi Directed by Richard Marquand

The one sore spot in the original trilogy for me are the Ewoks. I realise it's ridiculous for me to complain about kid-friendly creatures in a kid's movie, but Star Wars has done this a lot more tolerably in the form of Porgs and Baby Yoda. Just something about these furry, Tibetan speaking monsters who somehow have the wherewithal to defeat an elite and well equipped empire rubs me the long way. Anyway, other than that, the movie's pretty fantastic. The culmination of Luke's journey comes to a head in an extremely emotional and effective climax. John Williams score crescendos to operatic heights and Mark Hamill's stellar performance sells Luke’s torment. It’s also worth noting that in those final moments of moral dilemma, Darth Vader is silent- it’s David Prowse’s performance entirely that sells this. His incredible presence throughout the trilogy builds to this moment and you can feel the weight of it in those closeups on Vader. Every other cast member rounds the story out perfectly- from Lando and Han’s playful rapport to Leia’s more militaristic side in planning the rebellions final moves. I still bemoan the fact that they changed the final song- an opinion that I’m apparently a minority on- but it’s a pretty incredible ending altogether and wonderfully cathartic to watch over and over again.

5. The Last Jedi Directed by Rian Johnson

With Last Jedi, Rian Johnson analyzed the universe Star Wars inhabits, and what drives it’s characters. The characters that we love are pushed to their limits, struggle against insurmountable odds and their own innate flaws. And we see all of them fail in turn. It is remarkably bleak, but not without purpose. It is out of this failure that the Resistance needs to recoup and come back stronger. The performances here, are arguably the best you’ll find in the entire franchise. Daisy Ridley has to break down Rey’s naivete and find a deeper sense of self actualization. Adam Driver hands in some of his best work, by swerving the audience into believing Kylo Ren and then creating a desperate plea in THAT throne room scene, and eventually turning him into a snivelling villain, all in the same movie. Mark Hamill’s performance here is heartbreaking- revealing the bleakest version of Luke, and struggling to find his redemption. Last Jedi is a bold deconstuction of these characters, of what they stand for, and what makes Star Wars beautiful.

6. The Force Awakens Directed by J. J. Abrams

In many ways, a safe movie to announce the return of Star Wars. But it’s hard to fault this. Disney’s decision making was shrewd here, bringing on J. J. Abrams to pay homage to George Lucas’ original vision, returning the franchise to it’s roots of practical effects and shooting on film. There was something truly special about experiencing this film in theatres, so much so that I did it eleven times. It captured a sense of wonder for fans new and old- hearing the scream of Tie Fighters, John Williams herald the return of the Millenium Falcon, and the look of awe on Rey’s face as she clutches her destiny in her hand. I’ll be honest, the film loses some of this magic without the shared experience of an audience, and it’s flaws are more noticeable. But being swept up in the excitement of adventure felt so darn good in 2015, and that’s so key to this franchise.

7. Revenge of the Sith Directed by George Lucas

This movie has risen so much in my opinion, entirely due to the animated Clone Wars series. Revenge of the Sith depicts the overwhelming tragedy that frames the original Star Wars. Watching Clone Wars explains explicitly what makes this film so tragic. But it’s more than that- it’s a catastrophic failure on behalf of the Jedi Order. Ignorance and pride allow evil to fester and grow. George Lucas took the simplicity of the moral struggle he established in 1977 and tried to give it depth and complexity with the prequels, and it pays off in Revenge of the Sith. It leads into the original trilogy quite brilliantly, with a promise of hope and resilience.

8. The Phantom Menace Directed by George Lucas

It has not aged well. While the advent of CGI I’m sure felt exciting at the time, and you almost can’t fault George Lucas for his insistence on staying at the forefront of VFX innovation as he has always done, it’s his reliance on so much of it that fails horribly. Like a kid in a candy store, Lucas stuffs the pockets of this film with so many bizarre effects for absolutely no reason. That sea monster scene is one of the worst displays I’ve ever seen and it’s absurd that it sits in a Star Wars film. Add to that the boring political plotline and ridiculous midichlorian dilemma and there’s very little redemptive about this film. However, it does have podracing, and Duel of the Fates, and it’s remarkable how much that salves the wound.

9. The Rise of Skywalker Directed by J. J. Abrams

Alright, well obviously this film has been problematic. However, I’m not about to bemoan the idea that Disney has ruined Star Wars and I have nothing left to live for. So let’s all just calm down. Ultimately J. J. Abrams was faced with the impossible task of wrapping up the Skywalker saga, with very few Skywalkers to work with. I firmly believe this would have been a very different film if Carrie Fisher was around to complete her performance. But left with nothing but the new cast, Abrams is caught between summing up the past while also looking to the future. It forces an awkward plotline with Palpatine- despite Ian McDiarmid's solid performance, the writing here seems wildly derivative of the franchise. There are some truly beautiful scenes, most notably the chemistry that Adam Driver gets to share with Harrison Ford, and Joonas Suotamo’s critically emotional outburst as Chewbacca. Some of the production design and score is so entirely different from the rest of the franchise it's inherently intriguing. But there’s very little here to save some of the poorer choices the film makes: the open plot hole with Finn, the derailing of Rey’s character development, and most crucially, the deeply perturbing culmination of Rey and Kylo’s relationship. The audience literally went “ew”.

10. Solo: A Star Wars Story Directed by Ron Howard

The biggest problem with Solo is that it operates under the presumption that people will be enamoured and invested in it. Not just in one movie, but in an entire series of movies. Solo clearly operates as a setup for further sequels. As a result, many plot lines remain unresolved, and Qi’ra winds up being a completely under-baked character. Her motivations make no sense, and a twist ending that I assume was supposed to be exciting is instead downright confusing. There’s a lot of unnecessary exposition into Han’s past too. As an origin story, I don’t need to know every aspect of Han’s past- especially not cute winks at inane things like “Why’s he called Solo?”. All this being said, The movie features some solid performances- Donald Glover is expectedly phenomenal as Lando, and Alden Ehrenreich excels as Solo, adding some welcome flavour to the character- particularly his friendship with Chewbacca, and a brilliantly executed final scene between him and Woody Harrelson’s Beckett.

11. Attack of the Clones Directed by George Lucas

How in the world this film made it all the way to production and into filming, with no one pulling Lucas aside and saying “Hey George, those kids have no chemistry” is beyond me. And I’m not going to blame Hayden Christensen or Natalie Portman on this one, because the whole damn love story makes no sense. Maybe falling for a dude who admits he murdered women and children isn’t such a great idea? Then there’s the increasingly convoluted political climate set up in Phantom Menace, and the machinations of the dark side that would take the entire Clone Wars series to fully explain. All this being said, Temuera Morrison, Samuel L. Jackson, Ewan MacGregor AND Christopher Lee are all in this movie. And they’re pretty damn fantastic.

12. The Clone Wars Directed by Dave Filoni

It’s inexplicable that Dave Filoni would go on to have a hand in some of the best Star Wars content ever made in Clone Wars, Rebels and the Mandalorian. And yet he got his start in the franchise by putting up this piece of junk. And junk is being a little generous. The humour is so juvenile it’s insulting to even the youngest of audiences it’s intended for. The plotline feels way to thin to warrant a feature film, and if this was in fact intended as a pilot for the TV series, they sure picked to most uninteresting story to pique our interest. Skip the movie, watch the show.

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365days365movies · 3 years

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March 7, 2021: Onward (Review)

Guess what my favorite Pixar film is now!

Yeah, it’s still Finding Nemo hands down. Not even a little bit of a question. But there is still a question. Where does this movie rank for me? And by the way, Finding Nemo is my FAVORITE Pixar film, but I don’t consider it be objectively the best.

I mean...come on. It’s Ratatouille. The hell else was I gonna say?

Ahhhhhh, SHIT, you make a good point there. Well...at least there’s only the two choices for objectively best

OH HOW GODDAMN DARE YOU

...Any more you wanna throw at me, you goddamn monsters? Huh? HUH?

...Crying, probably. Goddamn, OK, there are a LOT of good Pixar films, and this one doesn’t have a GODDAMN CHANCE against these movies. So...which ones does Onward beat, for me, anyway?

I mean, yeah, duh. I’d put all of the Cars films below Onward. Brave and The Good Dinosaur, too. All of the Toy Story films are above it, and...I think my initial assessment was correct.

And again, I like A Bug’s Life a lot! But I think that Onward’s about on this level for me in terms of favorites. Why is that? Well...let’s go through it, huh? You an check out Part One and Part Two of the Recap if you’d like, but the Review and my final opinions are down below!

Review

Cast and Acting: 9/10

OK, above everything else, I will say that Tom Holland and Chris Pratt are great in here, and they...mostly disappear into their characters. Maybe it’s because these are currently both MASSIVE names, but I never lost sight of the fat that these guys were playing Ian and Barley respectively. It’s a little odd, especially for a Pixar movie. Not as much for a Disney movie...which is an interesting point to revisit later. But they are good. And they’re also vastly surpassed, for me, by Julia Louis Dreyfus, WHO FUCKING OWNS HER ROLE! Yeah, sorry, Dreyfus is the MVP of this movie for me, and I genuinely love her and Laurel. Octavia Spencer was, of course, also good...but was also weirdly stilted in her line deliveries most of the time. I love Octavia Spencer, but she’s not a voice actress, what can I say? Still, Corey’s another of my favorite characters, so she’s not bad at it. Tracey Ullman and Mel Rodriguez are also good in here, for the record.

Plot and Writing: 9/10

You know...it’s funny. This movie doesn’t really feel like a Pixar movie, as much as it feels like a Disney movie. Not a bad thing, I promise, but it just doesn’t...feel Pixar to me. I can’t quite pinpoint the reasons for that...yet. But in terms of the plot, it’s mostly standard Disney/Pixar adventure fare, with some decent writing and good universe building behind it. However...I’ve been thinking about the ending, and it’s actually the most Pixar thing about the movie, mostly because it was, well...extremely unexpectedly good.

Yeah, I mean that. Ian’s sacrifice is NOT how I expected that to go down, and probably would’ve been different in a straight-up Disney movie. Credit to Dan Scanlon, Jason Headley, and Keith Bunin for crafting a unique and emotionally deep ending. If Pixar’s good at one thing, it’s emotionally complex endings. Coco eventually ends with Coco dying, Boo’s sort of just gone in Monster’s Inc (I know Sulley sees her again, BUT WE DON’T), Toy Story eventually ends in Woody leaving the gang with Bo Peep, and Finding Nemo...I mean, Nemo surpasses his disability, and Marlin learns to let go of his son, so...OK, maybe that’s the exception. STILL MY FAVORITE DO NOT @ ME

Directing and Cinematography: 8/10

Well...on one hand, it’s a Pixar movie. Obviously it’s got good directing (by Don Scanlon), but...I think this movie broke Pixar films for me. YEAH. I’ll explain, and understand: I’m not saying that the cinematography by Sharon Calahan and Adam Habib is bad, but it’s very Pixar formulaic. Here’s what I mean: I’m gonna put a bunch of GIFs of Pixar films up here. Look for the commonality.

THEY’RE PERFECTLY BALANCED. Which, at first glance, obviously isn’t a bad thing. But I just posted GIFs of films from SEVEN different directors! And they ALWAYS balance their characters perfectly on screen! I’d provide more proof of this, but LOOK!!!! It’s a very formulaic form of cinematography, and while it’s obviously not bad, it’s also...obvious. You want more proof? Let’s look at more unique Pixar films and directors. Brad Bird first.

Bird’s scenes feel more dynamic, more interesting, and he has a MUCH higher focus on the foreground vs. the background than these other guys. And yeah, he also centers some of his characters, because that’s find of how film works, but his films are a lot more visually complex, and they’re considered the best of the Pixar movies. OK, what about a more recent film?

A HELL of a lot of shots in Soul are unbalanced. Which is interesting, because this is Pete Docter, one of Pixar’s most prolific directors. He’s also the director of some of their most unique films, like Monster’s Inc., Up, and Inside Out. And his flair is in a lot of unique camera movements, but also interesting angles and shot composition. And maybe I’m going CRAZY with over-analysis here, because I am NOT a film student, AT FUCKING ALL...but this film made me notice this because it just feels so visually...formulaic. Not bad, just plain. And not just in terms of cinematography.

Production and Art Design: 8/10

These are Disney characters. THESE ARE DISNEY CHARACTERS. Which, I must once again stress, IS NOT A BAD THING. But it’s also not really Pixar. I mean, look at that collection of GIFs up there again. One of the things that Pixar is lauded for is its unique character designs and concepts. And, uh...this isn’t that. It’s still good...but it’s not Pixar’s usual fare. Again, not a bad thing, as they’re more than allowed to innovate, but...is a lack of innovation really innovating? Breaking formula, yeah, but pointedly not anything new. Which, sure, fine, but...it ruins something for me, I’m gonna be honest.

Now, again, IT IS NOT BAD. It’s still actually VERY good, from the lighting to the rendering, and to the unique world that’s been constructed. Well...mostly unique. It’s kind of just our world with magic. There’s definitely some uniqueness, but not enough for me in a lot of cases. I dunno, it’s weirdly low-fantasy for something that is POINTEDLY high-fantasy in origin. Which is pretty interesting, now that I’ve typed that out loud. I like the look of this movie, again...but I’d love something a little less Disney, and a little more Pixar.

Music and Editing: 9/10

Music’s good! And so is the editing, for that matter. Composed by Mychael and Jeff Danna, and edited by Catherine Apple, this aspect of the production carried over pretty well, I think. Soundtrack is definitely fitting for a fantasy film, that’s for sure. And, yeah, no problems with the editing (which, to be fair, is not the easiest category to judge for e, ESPECIALLY here). The point of is because, well...not putting it on my playlist. It’s good, but not the best music I’ve heard, this month, or from a Pixar movie. Real talk, whenever I mention Finding Nemo (I KNOW I KNOW I’LL SHUT UP ABOUT IT BUT HOLD ON), the soundtrack plays through my head with reckless abandon. Can’t really say the same for Onward.

I’m more than cool with a 86% for this one.

Look, it’s a genuine rarity for Pixar to make a bad film. Although...it’s funny, this is barely a Pixar movie for me. It mostly just doesn’t feel like a Pixar movie, potentially because it has the overarching structure of your more typical Disney fare. Which, no, certainly isn’t a bad thing, but it’s not...quite the same.

This is still a great movie, and good for families. And I should say, I’m watching this film from the standpoint of an only child, and it was still a heartwarming look at a relationship between two very different siblings. I liked it, is what I’m saying. But this is it: we’re done with animated fare now. Although, blue animated magic characters from Disney does remind me of someone...

OK, the next movie is NOT ALADDIN, I swear. I’ve definitely seen that one. But, uh...since I’m moving to live-action anyway...

March 8, 2021: The Thief of Bagdad (1940)

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thepointoftheneedle · 3 years

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Fragment

I’m really enjoying the fragments (and I freaked myself out with that word count thing so I’m taking some time off from writing....note to self -NEVER look at the stats page.). Anyway I keep trying to write this little soulmate thing but, without me intending it, it always becomes an academic paper on the philosophy of colour perception. And I can’t imagine anybody but me is interested in that!

Below the cut anyway....(I guess this should have been for Friday but what the heck...)

His eyes fluttered open as he awakened but, feeling the warmth of the sleeping girl by his side, he closed them tightly. He wanted them to have this experience together. Nothing would ever be the same for them again. It was a special moment for a couple and he wanted it to be perfect. He had installed the app on his phone so he fumbled for it, knocking some loose papers from the nightstand and cursing gently. She mumbled and stirred so he put his hand over her eyes. “What the hell J? What’re you doing?”

“I’m opening up ‘Soul Truth.’ We can look together.”

“Oh J, no, don’t do that,” she moaned softly, beseechingly.

“Ssh, don’t worry. It’ll be great.” He kissed her gently, voice-activated the app and removed his hand from her eyes. She was looking at him, not the screen so he gently turned her head and looked down as she did. The screen was a uniform blue. His stomach lurched. It must be a glitch. “Wait, wait a second,” he muttered, clicking the app closed and reopening it. Solid blue. He looked at her and saw the sadness in her beautiful dark eyes. Sadness but not surprise.

She reached out a hand and stroked his cheek softly, “Hey, I’m sorry J. I didn’t want to disappoint you but I already knew. I just didn’t feel it last night.”

“Jeez Rox, I’m so sorry. I can do better, you just have to tell me what I did wrong. I know I can be what you want. I thought you’d…I thought I felt you...”

“I did, Jughead, of course I did. Listen. It was great. You were great. So tender and kind. It was beautiful and I really had a good time but it wasn’t…I don’t know. It wasn’t whatever soul mates have. You’ve heard Fangs talk about it. It’s next level. Transcendent. What we had was great sex, but it was just great sex. No angelic chorus. You had to feel that?” She was normally tough and streetwise but now her voice was gentle, trying not to hurt him. There was a painful lump in his throat.

“I thought it was transcendent, you were anyway. I think I’m falling in love with you Roxie.” His voice was quavering. He was ashamed of his weakness. “It has to be a mistake. It’s the app. It has to be.” Abruptly he was up and heading down the hallway before she could say another word. “Fangs, “ he yelled. “You in there?” He stood waiting, shivering, in his boxers, while disgruntled groaning emanated from the room, until eventually the door opened a crack and Fangs peered out at him.

“Jones, the building better be on fire. We didn’t get in til four. What time is it?”

“Just after eight. Look, is this broken?”

Fangs looked at the proffered screen blearily then a small smile appeared on his face. “Aww cute bunny.” Jughead snatched the screen back and swiped up. An image appeared in his visible spectrum of a cartoon bunny rabbit holding out a carrot. The legend underneath read “I wuv you.”

“Uggh, why don’t they have something with a bit of gravitas? Shit. Fuck it!” Jug turned around just as Fangs understood the situation.

“Oh my god Jughead! Did you and Rosaline finally do the do? Oh shit…you can’t see that can you? Oh Christ man, I’m so sorry.”

Jug swallowed down his disappointment, just like he had been swallowing down his anger and sorrow and guilt and sadness for most of his life and shrugged at Fangs. “No biggie. Apparently I’m destined to die alone. Whatever.” He stalked off back to his own room only to find Roxie already getting dressed. “Roz, shit, can’t we talk about this? Don’t go. Maybe it’ll happen later, perhaps it’s not always instant?”

Her voice was low and mournful when she spoke. “J I really care about you, you’re my good friend, but we’re both searching for something that we’re never going to be able to give each other. Let’s just take some time apart. Maybe in a few months we’ll be able to go back to being pals again. I’m really sorry that you’re disappointed.” With that she was gone in a whisk of magenta hair and Cabotine perfume.

He sat on his bed and stared into space. He’d been so sure. She was a dear friend, she understood him, laughing at the same things, enjoying the same movies. There was never any stress or conflict with her. It was easy. She indulged his bad moods and cajoled him out of sulks with food and silly jokes. He knew enough to leave her well alone when she was getting into one of her rages. Then gradually, as they worked together on the documentary project, he found himself wanting to touch her hair, wanting to hold her tiny body against his in a protective embrace, wanting to make her feel good with his touches. She’d seemed uncertain but he’d persevered, wooed her really. Then finally, excited and giddy after the showcase where their documentary project had taken first place she’d kissed him and whispered, “Do you want to go back to your place?” He’d been so happy as they’d crunched back to his apartment through the first snow of the winter. He’d wondered if it might happen when they finished the film. While sex tended to be the main way that a soul bond was revealed, a lot of soul mates actually bonded on completion of some other kind of shared project. It hadn’t happened then but he’d been so sure that, if they made love, it would click and the missing shade would be revealed to them. And then it hadn’t happened.

The app was pretty new. Before the advent of the smart phone, folks would have a painting or a poster in their homes. To those who were not matched it would look like an ordinary scene but once a soul bond was formed, the missing colour in the spectrum was revealed, and the soul mates could read the message in the image. It was a little like a magic eye poster. You looked at it for a moment or two and then the missing colour reconciled itself into words or an image. Originally they had some gnomic inspirational quotation. The one in the trailer he grew up in had, his mom said, had the Rolling Stone’s lyric, “You can't always get what you want but if you try sometime you find you get what you need.” Ironically FP and Gladys had been neither what the other wanted nor what they needed. Later it would turn out that FP had lied when he stood in front of that poster and told the innocent, love-struck young girl, wrapped in the sheet from his bed, that he saw it for the first time too. Actually he’d already bonded with someone else, someone who had no intention of getting tied up with a guy in a gang from the wrong side of the tracks. He must have thought it was his lucky day, a second chance for happiness, when the beautiful girl he’d been romancing excitedly admitted that she could see the colour for the first time. He’d nodded enthusiastically, said, “Yeah, me too,” and whisked her away to a world of damp trailers, drunken arguments and angry guys repossessing their truck, or the tv, or the kids’ toys. She’d stayed because she believed he was her soul mate. She thought she had no other options until, in a drunken rage, he’d revealed that it had always been a lie. She snatched up her daughter and left him. And left the boy too, unwilling to take a kid who looked so much like the man she had been fool enough to trust and who had ruined her life with his lies.

The fact that scumbags with no moral scruples lied about this shit had led to the development of checking apps like Soul Truth, “the truth, the soul truth and nothing but the truth” according to the tag line. You both looked at the screen and noted down what you saw, then swiped up and the image was revealed in ordinary unbonded colours. It made it harder for predators and perverts to take advantage of young innocents while their good sense was overwhelmed by romantic dreams. It also revealed that about ten percent of bonds were unreciprocated like Jughead’s parents, one of the couple bonded and the other didn’t. Those couples had to decide if they would make that work, aware that one was more invested than the other, or if it was better to simply part, the bonded still feeling that desperate pull to their mate even decades later. Jug guessed he should be relieved that he hadn’t seen the colour that morning since, clearly, Roz was just not that into him.

He’d been sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at the rug like that for thirty minutes when Fangs tapped softly on the door. “Not now,” he snapped but Fangs ignored him and pushed open the door.

“Ok Jug. I know you’re upset but it just means you haven’t found her yet. She’s still out there and if you go into one of your epic sulks you’ve got less chance of meeting her. What classes have you got today?”

“Nothing I can’t cancel. Everyone’s cramming for Finals. I was supposed to meet the princess to go over the final layout for the literary magazine. She can do it on her own. She’ll like that better anyway.”

Now Kevin joined his boyfriend in the room, both of them making him feel self indulgent and guilty with their solicitousness. “You shouldn’t shut yourself away and mope, Jughead. Go and edit like a champ and then come by the theatre for us and we’ll go for burgers. We’re striking the set but we can take a break. Our treat. What do you say?”

Jughead pondered for a moment. Nothing was going to change if he sat here, the princess would be unbearable if he blew her off, and burgers on someone else’s tab were his favourite kind of burgers, so he grudgingly allowed himself to be persuaded.

An hour later he was in the midst of a heated argument with the princess about his perfectly legitimate decision to kill a terrible poem about the fall which she, inexplicably, had marked for an already overcrowded page four. “You can’t just take things out without consultation Forsythe. We’re an editorial committee, we make decisions together. It’s supposed to be a collaboration.”

“What, you want to keep this pile of third grade horseshit do you? And you’re just calling me that to make me mad. Don’t think I don’t know.”

“I didn’t say that. It’s terrible. It obviously has to go. But you can’t just do it unilaterally. And you can’t call me Princess and not expect me to retaliate. You know my name.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake Princess... sorry, my humblest apologies, for fuck’s sake Betty. What the hell are we arguing about if we both think it’s bad and needs to go? And why is it even in here in the first place?”

“It’s in there because we were waiting on your egregiously late piece of sub Lovecraftian geek porn. I was filling space. Since you finally got your ass in gear we don’t need it anymore. So spike it.” She had this way of making him feel like he lost, even when he won an argument. It was infuriating.

They worked on pagination for another couple of hours with surprisingly little conflict, and then he wrote kickers for a few of the longer submissions, hoping to tempt the reader to give a story a chance. She made sure the submissions were correctly attributed and that the running heads and page numbers and folios were in place. Finally it seemed that they were done. He clicked back to the front page, checked the position of the artwork and the masthead and looked over at her with a questioning expression to see if she was satisfied. She nodded her approval and, at last, under the words “Joint Editors”, he typed "Betty Cooper & Jughead Jones.” As he clicked ‘save’ something shifted in his field of vision. He was alarmed, pushing back from the desk and looking around, meeting her startled eyes. Her green eyes, which weren’t green anymore. He couldn’t describe what colour they were, there were no words.

“What just happened?” she whispered, obviously badly frightened.

“Does…does anything look different to you?” he replied, hesitantly, reaching for his phone.

“Yes, everything. What’s going on?”

“I’m not sure. Look at this.” He pulled up the app. On the screen he could see, without difficulty, a cartoon cat, Pusheen maybe, its paws deep in some dough. The caption read “I knead you.” As he read the words in his head, she said them aloud. “Fuuuuck,” he murmured. “I think we’re soulmates, Princess.”

#fragment #bughead fan fiction #bughead fan fic #colour perception is way interesting #pink is nearly always the last colour word in a language

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jadelotusflower · 3 years

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July 2021 Roundup

Discussed this month: The Once and Future King, The Good People, The Secret of Kells/Wolfwalkers/Song of the Sea (aka "Irish Folklore" Trilogy), The Matrix Trilogy, the John Wick Trilogy, Space Jam: A New Legacy

Reading

The Once and Future King (T.H. White) - I've actually read this before, but it was a long time ago and I remembered very little of it so it seemed time for a revisit. Written between 1936 and 1942, this is a surprisingly meta retelling of Arthur and Camelot, very obviously and heavily influenced by WWII, with much academic pondering on the concept of humanity and war and ongoing conflict against Might=Right - looking to the past to try and understand the present. Some familiarity with the legends is assumed, White occasionally making reference to Malory, and there is a strange anachronistic feel - Merlin lives time backwards and talks of Hitler and other 20th Century references, White frequently refers to Old England and the way things were "back then", but also calls Arthur's country Gramarye, the narrative taking place an a kind of alternate history/mythology where Uther was the Norman conqueror of 1066, and yet reference is also made to the Plantagenet kings.

Comprising five volumes (the first four published separately at the time, and the final posthumously), it struck me on this read how each of the first four are structured around the childhood of a major player -Arthur (The Sword in the Stone), Gawain and his brothers (The Witch in the Wood), Lancelot (The Ill-Made Knight), and Mordred (The Candle in the Wind), and how their upbringing played a part in the inevitable tragedy of Camelot. In the final volume, The Book of Merlyn, it comes full circle as Arthur on the eve of his death is taken to revisit the animals of his childhood for much philosophising (at one point Merlyn argues at length with a badger about Karl Marx and communism.)

The Sword in the Stone is the most engaging, with young Arthur (known as "the Wart") and his tutelage under Merlin, being turned into various animals like an ant, a goose, and a hawk to learn about each of their societies (political allegories), and meeting with Robin Wood (Hood) and Maid Marian to battle Morgan le Fay, and the climactic pulling of the sword from the stone. This was of course the source material for the Disney film, although missing the wizards duel with Madam Mim (appearing in the original publication, but removed for the revised version).

The Ill-Made Knight is the longest volume and was honestly a slog to get through, because honestly Lancelot is pretty dull/terrible, and the Lancelot/Guenever love affair less than compelling. Ultimately it's Lancelot's hubris that dooms them - he is warned that Mordred intends to catch him out in Guenever's room, but he goes anyway, and doesn't leave when he tells her to, because he is stupid.

It’s no surprise that the female characters are given the short shrift, but there’s an uncomfortable vein of misogyny running through the book. To wit:

Elaine had done the ungraceful thing as usual. Guenever, in similar circumstances, would have been sure to grow pale and interesting - but Elaine had only grown plump.

And then later:

Guenever had overdressed for the occasion. She had put on makeup which she did not need, and put it on badly. She was forty-two.

Morgause (the eponymous witch in the wood/queen of air and darkness) is a negligent mother whose sole motivation is revenge, Elaine rapes Lancelot by deception, Guenever is hypocritical and shrill (but achieves a sliver of nuance in Candle), Nimueh is a nonentity, and Morgan le Fey is a monstrous fairy. If only White had turned his academic pondering inward and in order to examine the role of women in his worldview other than as damsels or instigators.

But Arthur also gets the short shrift - after all the focus in his childhood, he becomes almost a peripheral figure in the rest of the story until the very end, and we're not actually given much to show why he is the once and future king, other than that he tries to institute a slightly less brutal system.

Ultimately, White is more interested in philosophy than character, and so Camelot's inevitable tragedy feels more clinical than visceral.

The Good People (Hannah Kent) - If the Irish Folklore Trilogy (discussed below) is the beauty and wonder of Irish myths and legends interacting with the human world, this book is the cold danger of superstition and the devastating affect of folklore used as an explanation for life's ills. Set in 1820's rural Ireland, Nora is widowed and left with the care of her young disabled grandson Michael, believed to be a changeling. The local wise woman Nance, who feels the touch of "the good people" sets about to drive out the fairy from the child, believing that the "real" Michael will return, much to the growing dread of Mary, the teenage girl Nora has hired to care for him.

Here fairies are seen as a malevolent force, "sweeping" away women and children, causing bad harvests, and bringing death to the village - to be respected and feared. And then there's Nance, bartering traditional cures for ailments and troubles - some work, some do not, and some pose great danger. On the other hand, this is a remote village where a doctor must be fetched from Killarney, and only one priest who is less than charitable. Neither provide any help or support to Nora.

SPOILERS It's an upsetting read dealing with dark subject matter - grief trauma, child abuse and accidental infanticide, a kind of slow burn horror. If it takes a village to to raise a child, it also takes one to kill a child, as mounting fear and superstition moves through the population like a contagion, heightening Nora's desperation for the "return" of her grandson, and Nance's to prove her knowledge. It's an impeccably researched novel (based in part on a true event) but very unsettling - poor Michael is never really given humanity, and I feel this book would be hugely triggering in its depiction of disability and neurodivergence.

Watching

The Secret of Kells/Song of the Sea/Wolfwalkers (dir. Tom Moore) - I've been meaning to watch these films for absolutely ages, and I finally got to them this month. I’m pleased to say that the many people who recommended them to me were absolutely correct, because they appear to have been made to specifically cater to my interests. Some mild spoilers ahead.

I watched these in internal chronological order as suggested by @ravenya003, starting with The Secret of Kells, set in 9th Century Ireland where the young monk Brendan helps illuminate the to-be famous manuscript and befriends a forest sprite Aisling, under the threat of a Viking raid. Next was Wolfwalkers, jumping forward to 1650 Kilkenny where the English girl Robyn, daughter of a hunter, is drawn into the world of the forest and Mebh, who turns into a wolf when she sleeps. And finally we go all the way to 1980's in Song of the Sea for the story of Ben, who must help his younger sister Saoirse (a selkie) find her voice and bring back the faeries who have been turned to stone by the owl witch Macha.

Although the stories are completely separate, they've been described as Moore's "Irish Folklore" trilogy, and it’s easy to read a through line from Kells to Wolfwalkers in particular - both deal with fae of the forest, and Aisling appears as a white wolf at the end of the film (having lost her ability to appear in human form). I like to think that Aisling is in some way the progenitor of the wolfwalkers - after all, Kells and Kilkenny are less than 200 kms apart.

Song of the Sea is distant from the other two in both time and subject matter, dealing with selkies, creatures of the water. In many ways, Kells and Wolfwalkers feels like a duology, with Song more its own thing. On the other hand, an argument could be made for common fae spirit/s in different forms across all three films - Aisling is a white sprite, Robyn takes the form of a white/grey wolf, and Saoirse a white seal.

The strength of these films other than the folklore is the visual style - I really love 2D animation, and while I appreciate the beauty of cg animation, I often find in the latter’s focus on hyper-realism the artistry can be left by the wayside. These films not just aesthetically beautiful, but the art is used to tell the story - from the sharp angles that represent the darker or harmful elements (Crom, Vikings, the Town), to the circles and rings that represent safety and harmony (the Abbey, the forest, Mebh and her mother/the wolves healing circle, the holy well). The exception is probably the home of Macha, the owl witch, where circles are also prominent and represent magic, and this is often the case in folklore (fairy rings, fairy forts, etc).

Kells is the most stylised, resembling tapestries or pages and triptychs from medieval manuscripts, playing with perspective. I actually saw pages from the real Book of Kells years ago in Dublin, and remember them being very beautiful. We only get glimpses of the Book and the stunning Chi Rho page at the very end of the film, but the style of art is present throughout the film and particularly in the forest where Brendan finds inspiration for his illumination, and on the flipside his encounter in the dark with Crom Cruach, represented as a chalk-drawn primordial serpent.

This style is also present in Wolfwalkers, particularly stark in the way the birds-eye grid of the town often looms over Robyn in the background and in her work at the castle. The depiction of the forest has more of a storybook quality however, as does Song, where almost every frame resembles a painting, particularly the sequences of Saoirse's selkie trip through the sea and Ben's fall through the holy well.

Rav points out in her review that there is the ebbing away of myth and magic in each successive film, contrasted with the rise of Christianity/modernity. But there's circles and rings again, because while the ultimate power of the faerie world is fading away, the interaction between our human protagonists and faerie actually increases with each film. In Kells, we have only Aisling and Crom, in Wolkwalkers, we have Mebh and her mother whose ranks grow to include Robyn and her father, and finally in Song we have Saoirse, Bronagh, Macha, the Na Daoine Sídhe, and the Great Seanachaí.

Watching in the order I did, it does give the impression of the mythological world opening up to the viewer, gaining a deeper understanding and exposure as time progressed. On the other hand, that is also because the human world is gradually encroaching on the world of Faerie, from isolated settlements like the Abbey of Kells, to growing town of Kilkenny and the logging of the surrounding forest, to a modern Ireland of motorways and power lines, and industrialised Dublin where the remaining fairies have moved underground. It makes the climax of Song, with the fairies restored but returning to the land of Tír na nÓg, rather bittersweet.

I also credit the strength of the voice acting - the adult roles are minor but with greats including the dulcet tones of Brendan Gleeson and Sean Bean, and the ethereal Maria Doyle Kennedy (who I wish had gotten to do more). But the child roles are all performed so well, particularly Honor Kneafsey as Robyn, whose growing desperation and distress is just heartbreakingly palpable.

The Matrix Trilogy (dir. The Wachowskis) - I usually don't post rewatches in the Roundup, but I really, really love these movies. I will never forget seeing The Matrix at the cinema as a young teen, knowing nothing other than the tease of the enigmatic trailers, and just being completely blown away by it, and then becoming completely obsessed a few years later in the leadup to Reloaded.

It wasn’t my first fandom, but it was probably the first time I took fandom seriously. I was very invested in Neo/Trinity in particular as well as all the mythological/literary references that fed directly into my interests. I haven’t however gone back and read the fic I wrote, for fear that it is very, very cringe. I know where is is though, so maybe one day before the ff.net is purged.

This is Keanu Reeves at his most handsome, and while he doesn't have the greatest range (as many actors don't, although they don't get as much grief for it), when he's in the zone there's no one else who could do it better. He just has a Presence, you know? A vibe, and it compels me.

This is particularly present in Neo, a character whose conflict is almost entirely internal, burdened by the weight of his responsibility and destiny, both before and after he learns it is a false prophesy. He’s not your typical quippy macho action hero, but much like my other fave Luke Skywalker, is a character who is ultimately driven by love and self-sacrifice. I definitely have a Type of male hero I adore, and Neo fits right in there.

I also really love the sequels, flaws and all, because you know what, the Wachowskis had Ideas and they weren't going to deliver Matrix 2: Electric Boogaloo. Each film goes in an unexpected direction, and not in a subverted expectations ha ha silly rabbits way, but one that does have an internal logic and pulls together a cohesive trilogy as a whole, and how often does that happen these days?

The sequels are so…earnest, with none of the cynical cool detachment perhaps some would have preferred - at its core a trilogy exploring philosophy and the nature of prophesy vs choice, determinism vs free will, and the power of love. Maybe it can be hokey, and some of the dialogue a bit overwritten, but I don't care, there's so much I still enjoy even having seen the trilogy many times over the years.

Not to mention the great female characters - while I'm not sure any of the three strictly passes the Bechdel Test, we have Trinity and Niobe in particular who I love with all my heart. It does kind of annoy me that the Trinity Syndrome is so named, because it only applies in the most reductive reading possible, and Trinity expresses agency (and badassery) every step of the way, saving Neo just as much as he saves her. I mean..."dodge this"/"in five minutes I'll tear that whole goddamn building down"/"believe it"? Niobe piloting the Hammer through the mechanical line in Revolutions? Iconic. There are criticisms that can be made, sure, but the trilogy ultimately loves, respects, and appreciates its female characters (and important to note that the avatars of The System, the Architect and the Agents, are all white men).

Then we have the Oracle, who ultimately holds the most power and is the victor of the human/machine war. There's so much going on with the Oracle I could talk about it all day. It's that fate vs free will question again (“if you already know, how can I make a choice?”), but with the wrinkle of manipulation (“would you still have broken it if I hadn’t said anything?”). Choice is the foundation the Matrix is built on, the unconscious choice for humans to accept the system or reject it - the Architect can't control that, he can only manage it, and the Oracle can't force Neo onto the path she has set out for him, only predict the choices he will make based on her study of the human psyche ("did you always know?"/"No...but I believed"). But she plays with the concept of fate in a complicated web of prophesies for outcome she wants and trusting the nature of Morpheus, Trinity, and Neo to bring it about.

And then there's the visual storytelling - there is so much meaning in almost every frame and line of dialogue. The mirroring and ring cycles not only in the constant presence of reflective surfaces and central metaphor of the Matrix as a simulacrum, but the androgyny of Neo and Trinity, bringing each other back from the dead in successive films (and ultimately both ultimately dying in the third), Neo and Morpheus’ first and last meetings, Smith who is ultimately Neo’s dark mirror, the Oracle/the Architect, just to name a few. I just…really really love these movies? Maybe I’ll do a full post rewatch sometime.

I am however reserving judgement on the Matrix 4 - already there are a few things making me uneasy. Lana is the sole director for this one (Lilly is not involved), and Laurence Fishburne apparently wasn't even asked back, even though Morpheus actually survives the trilogy (as opposed to Neo and Trinity). But I’m interested, and don’t want to go in with any expectations, but rather ready to be surprised again like I was when I watched the first film (and hope I can stay away from spoilers).

John Wick Trilogy (dir. Chad Stahelski) - It was a trilogy kind of month! This genre is generally not my thing, as I don’t have a high tolerance for graphic violence and pure action bores me after a while, but I was in a Keanu kind of mood and I'm always hearing people go on about John Wick so I wanted to know what (if anything) I was missing. While still a bit too violent for my tastes, if nothing else I could appreciate the dance-like fight choreography, even if the worldbuulding is absolutely ridiculous - I mean, literally thousands of assassins across the world chilling in sanctuary hotels, supported by a vast network of weapon suppliers, tailors, surgeons, spy networks, etc? It’s silly, but hey, I was happy to go along with it.

What I do appreciate about Keanu Reeves, and this seems to be a common thread, is that even when in action hero mode (Matrix, Point Break, John Wick, and to a lesser extent Speed), he consistently plays a man who is completely in love with his partner/wife - like, completely, unapologetically devoted to them, and I think that is a big part of the appeal - it's that Keanu energy that is often the antithesis of toxic masculinity, even when in roles that would ordinarily rely on those tropes.

Wick is in many ways the spiritual successor to Neo - insular, taciturn, and even as he's dispatching death with clinical precision. Much like Neo, Wick is a character who is somehow Soft (tm) despite all the violence. I once listened to a podcast where they amusingly discussed the Reeves oeuvre as simulations of Neo still trapped in the Matrix, and it’s very easy to make the case here and imagine John Wick as Neo plugged back in after Revolutions, mourning Trinity and set on mission after mission to keep his mind active (and it would certainly explain why the guy hasn’t dropped dead after being stabbed, beaten up, strangled, hit by a car, shot, and falling off a building). It’s a fun little theory.

Stahelski was Reeves' stunt double and a stunt coordinator on The Matrix and there's plenty of homages in the visual style and reuniting Reeves with costars Laurence Fishburne and Randall Duk Kim (who played the Keymaker).

I did also find it amusing that Wick is also often referred to as babayaga (equated in the film to the bogeyman). Well, Wick is in many ways a witch who lives in the woods, just wanting to be left alone with his dog, and there is a supernatural energy to the character, so...I guess?

Space Jam: A New Legacy (dir. Malcolm D Lee) - I took my niece to see this at the cinema and it was…pretty much what you would expect. I thought it was fine for what it was, even if a bit slow in parts (it takes a looong time for the looneys to show up) and I wonder if they have the same cultural pull they had in the nineties (the age of Tweety Bird supremacy). But the kids seemed into it (my niece liked porky pig) and that's what counts I guess.

This time, the toon battle royale takes place on the WB servers, where evil A.I. Don Cheadle (having the time of his life chewing the cg scenery) wants to capture Lebron James for...reasons, idk. James and Bugs have to find the rest of the looneys scattered across the server-verse, a chance for WB to desperately remind people that they too, have media properties and a multiverse including DC comics world, Harry Potter world, Matrix world, Mad Max world, Casablanca world etc. Some of it feels very dated - there is I kid you not an Austin Powers reference, although it did make me smile that Trinity was on James’ list of most wanted players (skill: agility).

Unfortunately, nothing it really done with this multiverse concept except “hey, remember this movie? Now with looneys” six times, and the crowd for the game populated by WB denizens including the Iron Giant, Pennywise, the monkeys from the Wizard of Oz, Scooby Doo and the gang, etc. But still, it's fun, and hardly the tarnishing of a legacy or whatever nonsense is driving youtube clicks these days.

Writing

The Lady of the Lake - 2335 words.

Against the Dying of the Light - 2927 words, Chapter 13 posted.

Total: 5272 this month, 38,488 this year.

#roundup #reading watching writing #long post

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that-fandom-pan · 3 years

Text

Obey Me OC Profile!

Finally decided to post something myself here! Here’s the profile of my Obey Me OC, Rulgrodath.

Name: Rulgrodath

AKA: Ru

Birthday: Jan 13th

Zodiac: Capricorn

Favourite colour/colour scheme: Black, green, blue and silver

Scent: Ocean – seaweed, sea salt.

Height: 5’3’’

Voice: Strong but pretty quiet most of the time, very sarcastic when she’s angry, ranges between alto and soprano tones because of her music career, if she’s talking and she wants someone to hear, they know about it. Her voice is loudest when she’s angry, but she tends to go very quiet beforehand, and speaks through gritted teeth before she blows up.

Eyes: Yellow with a slit, catlike pupil

Hair: Dark brown, reaches about ¾ down her back, has a slightly lopsided fringe parting

Body:

Demon form: One pair of large black feathered wings with an iridescent sheen of green and blue, two sets of horns, one curling down either side of her head and two sets of horns, one curling down the sides of her head, one sticking up, green and blue scales on her temples, jaw and neck, long black green and blue feathered tail, black feathers around her shoulders and neck, usually wears a set of black gloves with two sets of finger armour on the index and middle finger of her right hand, black leggings and tank top (occasionally a black dress).

Human(ish) form: very skinny, no horns or wings, still has the scales, wears the same finger armour as in her demon form but without the gloves, hoodies or fluffy jumpers and leggings or sweatpants depending on how she feels, and a necklace Levi bought for her at a Comic Con as a sign of friendship.

Obsessions/habits: Can have severe body issues at times as it reminds her of how she died, this is what most of her breakdowns are based on, very protective of people she cares about, can overthink a lot, if nervous she’ll either bite her lip or mess with her hands (e.g. tapping, wringing her hands, cracking her knuckles), if she’s wearing a necklace or jewellery she’ll mess with that or her hair, will absorb herself in music or games when she’s upset, can verbally and emotionally blow up if she’s pushed too far, is also pretty self conscious about her height as compared to most demons she is very small due to her originally being a human.

Sweet spot/Sensitive place: Top of her head and behind her ears - she will start purring like a cat, very ticklish, will punch or try to freeze whoever is tickling her unless they are very close (e.g. Mammon, Astro*, Hiris**).

Talents: Musician, very talented vocalist, good at comforting people when they're having bad days and cheering them up, not afraid to stand up for herself and other, can be quite terrifying at times, notices small details pretty often, can read body language and pick up on details of a person's attitude, personality and actions

Faults/sins: Envy and Pride, as those are what killed her, severe body issues, has a tendency of putting others above her own wellbeing, inner conflict of wanting to be perfect and knowing that is self destructive, a bit of a people pleaser,

Special skills/powers: Water magic, calming voice.

Music taste: Very wide, varies from jazz/swing to modern pop, film and game soundtracks to classical music, rock to musicals. The only kind of music she doesn't particularly like is reggae.

Personality: Kind, a little overprotective, a 'mum' friend to anyone she cares about, not afraid to speak her mind, will stand up for others, tough outside, soft inside.

Nicknames: RuRu (Mammon), Treasure (Mammon), Player 3 (Levi), Water Witch, Ice Queen/Ice Witch/Snow Witch, White Witch

Backstory key points: Grew up in a family of musicians, was heavily praised throughout her life, grew envious of other musicians she thought were better than her, which led to her practicing almost constantly with no breaks. Died of starvation, dehydration and exhaustion. Was reborn in the Devildom as a demon of Envy and Pride. Met Levi at a Comic Con - they literally ran into each other, Levi in Lord of Shadows cosplay, Ru in Female Henry cosplay on her way to perform on stage, they bonded after the performance. Stayed in contact online for a while before meeting up in cosplay a few times, then to hang out as friends. Levi eventually brought her back to HOL to play games, where she was introduced to his brothers.

Animal theme: Feathered dragon/bald eagle

Relations to other characters:

Lucifer: Heavy dislike because of how harsh he can be to his brothers, especially Mammon. Will tolerate him though. Will quote musicals and sometimes Shakespeare to casually insult him. Will only lash out if he says something that might hurt someone, as a reminder that maybe he shouldn’t be so tough on those around him.

Mammon: Love interest (ignore this if you don’t like OCs shipped with canon characters). Bonded after she first came home with Levi, she saw how, despite being talked down to by his brothers, he kept supporting them no matter what insults they threw at him. Very supportive of him and comforts him whenever she can.

Levi: Best friend (one of), was the first of the brothers she met, thinks he's funny and likes it when he starts rambling about things he likes, joins in at times, wants to help him with his insecurities.

Satan: Mutual respect for how much they both annoy Lucifer. Happy to talk about books and musicals with him. Tries to reassure him that he is not Lucifer 2.0

Asmo: Best friend (one of). Gossip, music and shopping buddies. Likes spending spa days together. Very supportive of her whenever she has a body image breakdown. Tries to calm her down when she's angry at Lucifer, but won't physically get in the way.

Beel: Friends, he makes sure she has food if she's going through one of her body image episodes (was told by Mammon and Asmo), tries to comfort him when he's worried about what's happening between his brothers. Will frequently bake things for him and his brothers.

Belphie: Like Satan, mutual respect for how much they annoy Lucifer. Happy to lie about and just chill with him.

MC: Mother figure. Very protective of them and will defend them from anyone who wishes them harm, including the brothers. Makes sure they're alright as much as she can. Has a pact with them so they can call her whenever they need her.

Diavolo: Respects him. Understands he has a lot going on so will give help when asked, but most of the time will leave him be. Very grateful towards him due to him helping her get settled in the Devildom when she arrived after her death.

Barbatos: A little afraid of him because of his time related abilities. Tries to keep on his good side as much as she can.

Simeon: A bit of a fan, since he's the author of TSL, one of her favourite series. Holds him in very high regards, very happy to talk with him. Has offered to collaborate with him if he needs music for future films/episodes.

Luke: Considers herself a bit of a mother figure to him. Looks after him when he's upset, happy to bake with him as much as he wants.

Solomon: A little skeptical of him, considering the 72 pacts he has with demons and his magical ability. One of the few people she struggles to read.

Astro*: Best friend (one of). Will team up with her to stand up to Lucifer. Protective of one another, will gladly cause chaos together.

Hiris**: Best friend (one of). A little jealous at times because she still has some family, but overall similar relationship as between Ru and Astro. Will gladly try to satisfy her curiosity and listens to her stories a lot.

Role: Student, vocalist and musician at multiple clubs

Family: None, doesn’t know what happened to her human parents or siblings after she died, barely remembers them at all.

Extra facts:

Will use her water magic both to help herself and others to calm down after a bad day and also to trap anyone she wants to 'talk' to - will freeze their legs and shoes to the ground so they can't move (usually Lucifer or people who decide to verbally or physically attack one of her friends)

Will buy Mammon or Levi something from Akuzon without them knowing whenever they've had a bad day to cheer them up

Will cause water based inconveniences targeted at Lucifer if she wants a more subtle way of annoying him after he's given someone (usually Mammon) a too severe punishment - e.g. burst pipe in his bathroom, frozen drink when he's starting to overstep his boundaries (even when she's not in the room, has a codeword with Mammon for him to send to her if he ever feels like Lucifer is talking down to him too much), bucket of water is accidentally knocked over and it spills on him, water goes cold when he's having a shower and will not reheat (Lucifer knows its her but has no way to prove it as she's never actually seen doing it unless she wants to be seen, only MC, Hiris and Astro know that Ru has the HOL pipe system memorized so she knows which pipe goes to which room)

Most presents she gives that haven't been bought on Akuzon are either made with her water magic or tickets to concerts she has managed to get through a few connections (the latter is usually for Levi)

Can and will come up with the most creative insults she can

Is an ace at rhythm games

Has sung duets with Asmo/accompanied Asmo on several instruments

Hates horror movies

Always carries two flasks: one of water so she always has access to something to use for her powers, and one of pineapple juice to help soothe her throat.

Has let Asmo style her several times for concerts - including the time with the suit and corset.

Loves swimming

Is bisexual

Ship facts (please disregard this if you don’t like OCs shipped with canon characters):

Often persuades Mammon to do shows/concerts with her as a way to make him feel better and to get back at his brothers

Mammon has persuaded her to do multiple modelling sessions with him.

Also uses the concerts she knows Mammon will be watching as a way to flirt with him - has worn a suit and corset with heeled boots to do this before.

Has kissed Mammon on stage multiple times.

Has Mammon saved as MonMon on her DDD

*Astro belongs to one of my friends (will update if I find them on Tumblr)

**Hiris belongs to @storypanda88

#obey me #oc #obey me shall we date #obeymeoc #rulgrodath #obey me mammon #obey me lucifer #obey me leviathan #obey me satan #obey me asmodeus #obey me beelzebub #obey me belphie #otome

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