#there are hundreds of different stories about transformers you can create based on this idea | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bookstoreadbtr · 6 months

Text

The pandemic is a word I sure you do not want to hear for another hundred years. Although a very tragic time in history, it still birthed forth some amazing and wonderful ideas. Annette Czech was inspired during the lock down to publish a book from an idea that came from her children. I had the chance to speak with her about her book publishing journey.

When did you first notice your joy for writing? Born and raised in Parma Heights., OH, I wrote and produced plays with my neighborhood elementary school friends using garages as stages and charging only $.05 for attendance (popcorn was free). Although the play and story writing continued, productions were halted as the actors were lax in putting away everything they had lugged out of houses. My love of making up stories continued in life, ultimately shared with my 2 sons as they created the Miso Mice in the 1990’s and imbued them with superpowers, and as Pokémon was very popular at that time, individual trading cards.

What inspired you to write your first book? One of 5 sisters, in March 2020 (think pandemic), we began zooming together every week, ended up calling the sessions IdleChatter5 (cheaper than therapy!), and even creating a website summarizing all of our chatter! Many of the topics discussed were about what we termed “The Self Project” — creating our own future selves. We literally spend (as we continue to zoom even now) up to 3 hours almost every week chattering. Conversations range from the exchange of what each sister is doing this week, health information and recipes, to discussing time travel, the multiverse, and questions such as “why are we here” and “what are we doing here” (here meaning Earth)? These sessions changed my way of thinking about everything — realizing that I can (as the Miso Mice say) “choose’ndo” (associated with Universe rule #1: everything gets to choose). This attitude and awareness, that everything is my choice, totally transformed my life both physically, mentally and emotionally. I lost 40 lbs.; lowered my blood pressure; am now consciously aware of what I eat; and swim and walk daily. I am happy! I wanted to share this information with others — that you can create your own future self (if you want) — as it has brought me great joy — but many of the concepts discussed were very academic (and to my mind boring) in nature. Voila — enter the fantasy world in the 🐭 Adventures of the Miso Mice, a different take on the life changing, reinvention, health, lifestyle type of books, presenting these themes in a fun, fantastical manner with language and pictures that can be understood at many levels by all ages through the shenanigans of these 5 whimsical fantastical mice (and yes their characters are indeed based on me (guess who I am!!) and my 4 sisters). I can’t chronicle quickly enough the adventures of these fantastical Miso Mice and book #6 is almost completed!!

What is the synopsis of your first book? 🐭 Adventures of the Miso Mice Book 1: How it All Started and Adventures 1–5 SYNOPSIS

Rumor has it that it all started up in the Universe, but that’s not a rumor at all — it’s actually true! Thinking about it, anyone can see how it became a rumor as lots is going on up there and it’s very possible that no one actually noticed the beginning, much less documented it. Choices are constantly being made by every THING. That’s Universe Rule #1: every THING always gets to choose; that is, sometimes it’s Universe Rule #1 as the Universe’s fine print says: The Universe reserves the right to change it’s mind anytime for any reason without notice as the Universe gets to choose too.

(As sometimes in their excitement to share their story, the Miso Mice jump from one idea to the next rather quickly without any explanation, these little sidebars are included to help make sense, although it’s really your own choice, in regard to what sense you make of their story.

Not sure if you can read the fine print, so here is the Universe fine print in larger print: “The Universe reserves the right to change its mind anytime for any reason without prior notice as the Universe gets to choose too. Also, some say there’s a typo in the paragraph above — THING capitalized. It’s not a typo. In summary, the Universe’s definition of THING is everything and that includes…. hmmm…..let’s just say lots!)

The choices being made are creating all kinds of wonderful and amazing things. Some of those things that are being created are sparks of light energy that the Universe has nicknamed “sprites” and they are moving around the Universe all the time, as one of of the Universe’s favorite pastimes is creating sprites, and experiencing the sprites’ creations. (You are one of those sprites!)

Five of those sprites saw a treasure chest that was floating in the middle of nowhere and being as curious as they were, of course, had to investigate. So they came up to the treasure chest and it magically opened and all kinds of things floated out including a magical button that answered any question the sprites asked!

The first question they asked was: “Who are we?” as doesn’t everyone want to first know who they are? And the answer they got: Fill yourself with bright light. Become consciously aware of the timeless energy that is you — choose and create!

(The Miso Mice named the button PressThisButton and ask it everything. That’s why all answers are italicized in green. Also, PressThisButton is not just for the Miso Mice, it’s actually available to all things. Things can use PressThisButton in all kinds of ways, and in all kinds of situations, but they only figure it out when they are ready…. Are you ready?)

The sprites did exactly that — they became aware that they were timeless energy and those 5 sprites chose to create themselves as the Miso Mice complete with superpowers, as doesn’t everyone want a super power? Please meet Polly Hedron who delights in being physical; Curiosity Launch whose thinking is “non-linear”; Suzy Butterfly, a master researcher, sage and teacher; Shelly Beachcomber who loves searching for treasure on the beach; and Katalina Awsum who is pure Zen. These 5 curious fantastical Miso Mice love to do all the things, especially idle chattering, but adventuring is their most favorite.

The Miso Mice then went back to PressThisButton and asked, “What do we do next?” as once you know who you are, don’t you want to know what to do? Coincidence — something happened — maybe small, maybe big, or even a dream, but it made you take notice. It was significant to you and held a feeling of timelessness. Stop and catch that feeling outside of time. And the Miso Mice experienced a feeling from a way long time ago. The feeling was associated with a song that they had always sang together before any adventures; a song that ensured they had the best, most super fun and safe adventures. They knew and felt that the song was very important to them and together they danced, and effortlessly the words of the song just flowed:

Open heart, open mind, for highest good, for always and in all ways.

Right after the song, they immediately went back to PressThisButton to ask: “Where do we go?” Remember the feeling of coincidence and timelessness you just had. Catch that feeling outside of time again, choose and create! That was it — so obvious! They chose and created themselves, they could choose and create anything else they wanted, where they wanted to go, how they wanted to get there, and what they wanted to do! And they chose a most excellent Miso Mice specially created sailing ship complete with tiki huts, swimming pool and sun chairs as their vehicle, and chose Earth as their destination.

And as you might suspect, their next question for PressThisButton was “What’s our adventure?” To find The Answer Book — to realize what is within your chosen created self which creates your chosen future reality! WOW! This was going to be a really fun adventure and the Miso Mice realized that PressThisButton would be a very valuable tool as they searched for The Answer Book, so they put the button back into the treasure chest along with all of the other things that had floated out, placed the treasure chest into their sailing ship and set sail to Earth.

As the Miso Mice were navigating to Earth, in another part of the Universe, a group of old sprites asked their PressThisButton for something new as many of their choices had previously involved saving a world or galaxy from unsavory characters, and in answer they combined themselves and chose to create as Kaame (rhymes with Sammy) and that unbeknownst to Kaame, she would meet the Miso Mice, become great friends and also learn how to create her own future self!

Together, they go on adventures riding sea horses and meet a star fish who needs to help his fellow star fish on the beach get into the sky. Through PressThisButton everyone agrees that the Zodiac Girls, who are already in the sky can help the star fish (and the Miso Mice have to drop off the sea glass that they found on the beach anyhow, as the Zodiac Girls use it to make jewelry) so they plot a course to the Aries Star Port. At the Star Port they meet Sandman who would like to cross the Rainbow Bridge (can the Miso Mice take him there?) and learn about “choose’ndo” the 100%, AAA+++ credible means of getting anything done: 1) you choose, 2) you just do it. (Some like to abbreviate the process as ‘choose’ndo’.) The Zodiac Girls invite the Miso Mice to attend their Quantum Entanglement Party and they delay their search for The Answer Book to do so.

However, the Miso Mice did not know that Curiosity’s old nemesis Lobsta Clamdestino, the nefarious underwater sand dollar counterfeiter and casino owner has heard that the Miso Mice have a treasure on board their ship and he wants it!

🐭 Adventures of the Miso Mice continue in Book 2 of the series: 💫The Quantum Entanglement Party …. Oh no — the treasure chest and magical button are gone! Did the nefarious Lobsta Clamdestino steal them? Without them, will the Miso Mice finish their quest to find The Answer Book? Go on more crazy and magical adventures as the Miso Mice attend a very entangled party, receive the rare gift of Tem-E-Laks, and then go Timewalking!

What was the most challenging thing you experienced during publishing your first book? All of the 🐭 Adventures of the Miso Mice books are self-published using organizations and software available for free on the Internet. I think that self-publishing is easy — if you go step by step through the on-line instructions. That written it is immensely time consuming taking approximately 2–4 hours to have the book “go-live” on the various platforms that I have chosen — both paperback and digital. And that’s if you have all of the information you need to complete the process. I would suggest reviewing your chosen publishing process in advance and gathering the information that is necessary before beginning the actual process.

Both 🐭Adventures of the Miso Mice and 💫The Quantum Entanglement Party are now available in digital and/or paperback versions from bookstores including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Hudson Booksellers, Books-A-Million, LA’s The Last Bookstore, and many more independent bookstores through Bookshop.org.

To read full interview go to: https://www.magcloud.com/browse/issue/2674874

#bookworm #book nerd #reading #book worm #books #book life #book #readers #books to read #reading community #readers community #reader community

0 notes

jcmarchi · 7 months

Text

Gil Geron, CEO & Co-founder of Orca Security – Interview Series

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/gil-geron-ceo-co-founder-of-orca-security-interview-series/

Gil Geron, CEO & Co-founder of Orca Security – Interview Series

Gil Geron is CEO & Co-founder of Orca Security. Gil has more than 20 years of experience leading and delivering cybersecurity products. Previous to his role as CEO, Gil was chief product officer from the inception of Orca. He’s passionate about customer satisfaction and has worked closely with customers to ensure they are able to thrive securely in the cloud. Gil is committed to providing seamless cybersecurity solutions without compromising on efficiency. Prior to co-founding Orca Security, Gil directed a large team of cyber professionals at Check Point Software Technologies

Orca Security is the pioneer of agentless cloud security that is trusted by hundreds of enterprises globally. Orca makes cloud security possible for enterprises moving to and scaling in the cloud with its patented SideScanning™ technology and Unified Data Model. The Orca Cloud Security Platform delivers the world’s most comprehensive coverage and visibility of all risks across the cloud. With continuous first-to-market innovations and expertise, the Orca Platform ensures security teams quickly identify and remediate risks to keep their businesses secure.

Before founding Orca Security, you worked for a security company called Check Point Software Technologies for over 10 years. What were your key takeaways from this experience?

I rotated positions at Check Point which gave me the opportunity to dive into many different areas of cybersecurity. This helped me develop a true appreciation of the various security concerns, challenges, and needs that our customers today face. In my last role, I focused on zero-day detection and threat prevention, which exposed me to the difficulties of selecting the right security tools for comprehensive coverage. That experience sparked the idea that eventually became the foundation for Orca. I’m a firm believer that security shouldn’t be complicated and that complete coverage can be achieved without an overreliance on numerous tools.

Orca Security has eight Co-Founders. Could you share the genesis story of how you chose to collaborate with such a large team to launch Orca Security?

We are co-founded by eight senior executives and architects previously from Check Point with a shared revolutionary vision for cloud security; one that dramatically simplifies security without compromise. The decision to work together was a deliberate one driven by the belief that we could accomplish more together than we ever could on our own.

We recognized the potential to create something truly innovative and disruptive in the cloud security space. Traditional security systems weren’t built to handle modern computing demands or manage the transition to cloud infrastructure. We took a bold step and developed the industry’s first agentless cloud security solution, which instantly provides 100% coverage and visibility across your entire cloud infrastructure without having to install anything in your environment. The ability to achieve complete coverage without installing agents was a major need across industries and has been transformational for our customers.

Orca Security’s patented SideScanning technology is at the heart of the Orca Platform, can you discuss what this is specifically?

Our first-to-market SideScanning™ technology is the standard for how cloud security should be approached. It accesses the cloud workloads’ runtime block storage and cloud provider APIs to read cloud workloads and configurations without requiring a single agent. This allows Orca to perform fast, wide and deep scans to surface cloud risks without the gaps in coverage, alert fatigue, performance degradation, and operational costs of agent-based solutions. We detect risks at every layer of the tech stack, including vulnerabilities, malware, misconfigurations, at-risk sensitive data, IAM risk, and lateral movement risk, and more.

Can you describe your vision of how cloud computing is an opportunity to re-architect security?

With the rise of cloud computing, businesses are now afforded greater control over their infrastructure, real-time risk mitigation, and the ability to automate threat detection and response. AI has emerged as a key enabler in cloud security, from risk detection to reducing MTTR and lowering the skill threshold for security professionals. Our platform today leverages the power of AI to enhance detection of risks, simplify investigations, and speed up remediation – saving cloud security, DevOps, and development teams time and effort, while significantly improving security outcomes.

What are some of the challenges behind protecting data on the cloud?

Data proliferation in the cloud, and its increasing complexity are probably the biggest data security challenges. It’s very easy to spin up, copy or replicate data in the cloud, and with the rapid adoption of cloud-native application development, use of multiple cloud platforms, and an explosion of microservices it’s difficult to keep track of all your data.

Shadow data, the data that security teams are not aware of, is the biggest threat to sensitive data breaches. From a security standpoint, data that is unknown cannot be protected. It’s important to acknowledge that, no matter how meticulous the IT policies are, every company will have shadow data. Therefore it’s essential that organizations deploy solutions that can discover and classify all their cloud data and show how this data could be vulnerable to an attack so that security teams can prioritize removing these threats.

Orca Security is built on 4 pillars, what are these pillars and why are they so important?

As we build out our platform, Orca continues to stay true to the four key principles that have driven our mission from the start, and without which we firmly believe robust cloud security is not achievable. We call them the Four Cs of Orca:

Coverage: You cannot protect what you cannot see—With our agentless technology, Orca provides users with a single platform that is effortless to deploy and offers 100% coverage of all cloud assets out of the box, automatically including any new assets as they are added.

Comprehensive: Organizations need a comprehensive approach to cloud security. You shouldn’t have to buy one tool to detect vulnerabilities, another tool to detect misconfigurations and another tool to uncover authentication or IAM risk—the list goes on. This is ineffective, wastes time and leads to alert fatigue and team burnout.

Context: There is nothing you can realistically do to protect your environment or respond to risks if you don’t have context. Without context you will just get an endless list of issues and alerts that are very difficult to prioritize. With context, security teams can see their cloud environment like an attacker does, and understand which issues actually put the business at risk versus others that are less consequential.

Consumable: A security solution can provide lots of data, but if it’s not easily consumable, it’s of no use. A cloud security platform should allow teams to search, query, and customize data easily so that it helps them make data-driven decisions, deploy efforts efficiently, and stay one step ahead in zero-day scenarios.

To this end, we recently released our AI-powered cloud asset search that enables users to ask natural language questions such as ‘Do I have any log4j vulnerabilities that are public facing?’ or “Do I have any unencrypted databases with sensitive data exposed to the Internet?”. This allows not only security practitioners, but also developers, DevOps, cloud architects, risk governance, and compliance teams to easily and intuitively understand exactly what’s in their cloud environments without requiring any user training or reading through lengthy documentation.

How are innovations in AI addressing larger cloud security concerns for organizations?

The industry is facing a serious cybersecurity skills shortage, Cloud security teams receive hundreds of alerts each day that require investigation, remediation and response. As cloud environments increase in complexity, more advanced technical skills are needed, further adding to the already existing cloud security skills gap. Here’s where AI can be a game changer. AI’s potential to increase efficiency and lower the skill threshold for cloud security professionals is going to be essential to ensure organizations stay one step ahead of attackers, while fully leveraging technological advances.

Can you explain how Orca leverages AI and what benefits it brings?

Orca is at the forefront of leveraging AI, GenAI, and LLMs to augment cloud security teams. By lowering required skill thresholds, simplifying tasks, and using AI to calculate optimal cloud configurations, Orca dramatically alleviates daily workloads and burnout, and significantly improves cloud security posture. Orca’s AI-driven capabilities enable security teams to keep up with fast-paced cloud-native development and help remove one of the most important obstacles to organizations’ digital transformation and cloud adoption: cloud security.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Orca Security.

0 notes

maxwell-grant · 3 years

Note

You have done an (excelent) post on how to reinvent Batman as a Pulp Hero. Do you think you could do one to Superman as well? Or do you think it is impossible to do this with the progenitor of the Super Hero genre without transforming him in a totaly diferent character?

Well, you saying it as impossible only makes it seem ever more tempting of a challenge, but yes, it is a bit harder. I'm gonna link my Batman post here as a reference point.

Partially because Batman's a franchise I've thought extensively about for a long time in regards to what I like about it or how I'd like to approach if given the opportunity, which is not something I can really say for Superman until more recently the Big Blue to start orbiting my brain. I don't have years worth of redesigns or fan concepts saved on my galleries and files to comb through to pick and choose here, and my experience with Superman as a character is considerably different, in some aspects more deeply personal, and not really something I'd like to go into in this blog, at least not now.

Part of the reason why it's harder is also because Batman and Superman have very different relationships with their pulp inspirations. Batman was, ostensibly, a pulp character adapted to comics, a dime-a-dozen Shadow knock-off who picked up and played up diverging traits from other characters and gradually ran with them to gradually forge a unique identity. Superman right from the start was rooted in a much stronger conceptual underpinning: the Sci-Fi Superman and Alien Menace who, instead of being a tragic monster or a tyrannical villain, becomes a costumed adventurer and social crusader. Even the name Super-Man was taken from an early story of Siegel and Shuster about a telepathic villain who ends the story lamenting that he should have used his powers for the good of mankind instead of selfishness. I hesitate to call what Siegel and Shuster were doing “subversive” because that term's picked up a real negative connotation, and it's not like Siegel and Shuster were out to upend their influences (they were pulp aficionados themselves), but rather putting a more positive, new spin on them.

Which is why it also becomes a bit harder to do what I did with Batman and align Superman with some of his pulp-esque inspirations, like John Carter, Flash Gordon or Hugo Danner, without just making it "Superman but he's John Carter", "Superman but it's Flash Gordon", and "Iron Munro / Superman but everything sucks" respectively. It's harder to create a character that wouldn't feel reduntant and derivative at best, and actively contradictory to Superman at worst.

I guess if I had to come up with a "Pulp Hero Superman" take I liked, well first of all I'd have to take steps to distance it from the likes of Tom Strong or Al Ewing's Doc Thunder, those two are as good as it gets in regards to Pulp Supermen. I stipulated for Batman a "No Guns, No Murder, No Service" policy partially to distance my takes on Batman from all the "Pulp Batmen" that just add guns and murder and take Batman back to the barest of basics. Likewise, I'm adding a "No Depowered Science Hero" rule here, which means it's a take that's likely going to veer off a lot more into fantasy and probably enough tampering with Clark's character that it does risk becoming a different character.

Frankly I don't think I'm gonna succeed at doing these without just making it a new character entirely, because with Batman you can get away with just upending the character's aesthetic and setting and even origin and still keep it recognizably Bruce Wayne (in fact Batman does that all the time), which isn't really the case with Superman, who needs those to remain recognizably Superman as he goes through internal changes and character shifts. I guess what I'm gonna do here is more taking the building blocks of Superman/Clark Kent and see a couple new ways I can rearrange them to create a Pulp Superman

Perhaps something we can do is to scale back or recontextualize the "superhero" parts without diminishing Superman's role as a superpowered fantasy character.

One way we can start is by picking on that connection between Superman and the sci-fi supermen/alien monsters of pulps I mentioned earlier and play it up further, to create a Superman who's deeply, deeply alien in a way that no mild-mannered disguise or colorful outfit can really disguise, something so dramatically powerful and alien, that instead you could get tales about the kinds of ensuing changes and ripple effects this has on the world upon the The Super-Man's arrival. And for that I'm gonna have to quote @davidmann95's concept for Joshua Viers' absolutely stunning Superman redesign on the left side of the image above

The red, the goldish-orange and white, the alienness, the angelic, sculpted feeling, the halo, that innocently curious expression: it’s genuinely beautiful. Superman as a redeeming science-angel from beyond our understanding, as much past the uncanny valley of limited human comprehension as a Lovecraftian monster but tuned to the opposite key - you could spend an endless procession of human lifetimes trying and failing to understand this being, but all you’ll ever know for sure is that it is beyond you, and it knows you, and it loves you.

Superdoomsday from Earth 45, healed and transformed into the savior it was originally envisioned as? Some descendant of his, or a future of the man himself? An alien who picked up on a broadcast of Superman from Earth, and so inspired reshaped itself in his image to spread his ‘gospel’ to the stars?

Alternatively, to come back to Earth a little, many, many pulp characters and series were built off the antics and personalities of real people, celebrities getting their own magazines or serials or fictionalized takes on them, so perhaps one way to make a "pulp" take on Superman would be to emphasize a bit more of Superman's real-world roots, trends that inspired his creation directly or indirectly at the time. The Jewish strongman Sigmund Breibart and Shuster's interest in fitness culture, Harold Lloyd's comic persona, the rising "strongman" film genre in the early 20th century, actors Clark Gable and Kent Taylor that supposedly named his secret identity, Clark Kent being a socially-awkward journalist based of Siegel's own school experiences.

Maybe one start to an authentic Pulp Superman, who would still be Superman, would be to just ask the question "What if Superman was a real person and/or a celebrity, and they started making pulp magazines and serials dedicated to him? What would those look like?". You wouldn't even have to restrict it to just a story set in the 1930s, in fact you could even play around with the rise of new mediums over the decades.

This third one is a little closer to some plans I have for my own take on a Superman character, not necessarily what I would do with Superman proper but one of my ideas for a Superman analogue. Superman's a character I'll always associate strongly with childhood and childhood fantasy, and to tap into that I would emphasize the other end of the fiction that influenced Siegel and Shuster: comic strips, in their case specifically Little Nemo and Popeye.

In my case I would bring additional influences from some of the comic strips I personally grew up reading like Monica's Gang and Calvin and Hobbes, and I already talked a bit about Captain Fray in terms of how he’s a Superman character despite being a villain. I guess you could call this one "What if Superman was a public domain comic strip character, stripped of the importance of being the founding figure of a super popular genre or extended universe, and also was kind of ugly?".

He's not "Sloth from the Goonies" ugly, I swear I didn't actually have Sloth in mind when typing out this idea, I've never watched that film nor did I know until now that he actually spends the film in a Superman shirt. That's not really what I'm going for. Visually I was thinking of modeling my take on Superman heavily after Hugo from Street Fighter and his inspiration Andre the Giant, to really emphasize the “circus strongman / freak wrestler” aspect of Superman’s inspiration, particularly in regards to how Hugo’s SFIII version strikes a really great balance in making Hugo ugly and both comedic and fearsome in battle, as well as lovable and even a little dopey (without being outright stupid, like his IV self) in his victory animations and endings.

He's still Superman, he still goes on fantastical adventures to help people, he's still a deeply loving and compassionate soul whose face beams with joy and affection and who's got wonderful eyes and a great smile. It's just that this smile has a couple of mismatched stick-out teeth or some missing ones, and he's got a crooked smile some people take as smug or malicious, he’s got a strongman’s gut instead of a bodybuilder’s abs, his nose is a little busted (maybe he’s had too many crash landings), and his hair is a little wild or greasy, and he doesn't exactly have very good people skills because of how others usually react to him and, y'know, he doesn't get the kind of publicity Superman would get despite doing ostensibly the same things. He’s not deformed, he’s incredibly intelligent and capable, but in comparison to how superheroes are usually allowed to look, he might as well be Bizarro in the public eye.

It becomes a running gag that people tend to assume some nearby fireman or cop was the one who rescued the hundred orphans out of a burning building single-handedly, meanwhile he's getting accosted off-panel by police officers who think he set the building on fire, or think they can bully this weird man dressed funny. He goes to rescue old people in peril and occasionally they yell at him that they don't have any money. He doesn't get asked to lead superhero meetings or teams even though many in the community advocate for just how much he does for the world, he gets censored out of tv broadcasts or group shots (even his face is sometimes pixelated when they do show him), people invite him on talk shows and don't really let him talk or assume they got the wrong guy. He goes to rescue a woman dangling off a building, and then he gets attacked by like three different superhero teams who assume he must have kidnapped the poor damsel. He was the first superhero, he is the strongest of them all still, but he never really gets credit for it, it nor does he even want to. None of this at all stops him or deters him, except for some occasionally funny reactions.

This never really changes for him, he doesn't really earn people's approval nor does he have to, instead the stories, outside of the gags and adventures you’d expect from a comic strip, veer more towards others learning to be less judgmental and him learning ways to better approach people. He isn't any lesser than Superman just because he doesn't look like most people would want him to look and he doesn't have to look like Superman. Really I think we could use more superheroes that don’t look all so uniformly pretty.

Again, probably not a take that would work for Clark proper, but it’s one way I would take a shot at doing Superman with my own

I have other stuff in the works for this character but I'd like to keep them to better work on them for now, but yeah, these are three of my shots at developing a Pulp Superman.

Alternatively here's a fourth idea that's more pulp than all of these: Join up Nicholas Cage with Panos Cosmatos again, or whatever weird indie director he decides to pair up with next, and let them do whatever the hell they want with Superman. Give us Mandy Superman. Superman vs The Color Out of Space. Superman vs Five Nights at Freddy's. Superman’s quest to find THE LAST PIG OF KRYPTON. Anything goes.

#replies tag #dc comics #superman #clark kent #superheroes #comic books #nicholas cage

115 notes · View notes

tyrantisterror · 3 years

Text

THE A.T.O.M. CREATE A KAIJU CONTEST 3-D!!!

YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE SAFE! YOU THOUGHT THAT THE TIME OF MONSTERS WAS AT AN END! BUT YOU WERE WRONG, FOR NOW YOU MUST WITNESS…

THE A.T.O.M. CREATE A KAIJU CONTEST 3-D!!!

That’s right, it’s back! Celebrating the publication of The Atomic Time of Monsters Volume 2: Tyrantis Roams the Earth! (which in turn completes The Ballad of Tyrantis arc for this series), I’m holding another monster design jam. The third of such jams, in fact!

Like the first A.T.O.M. Create a Kaiju Contest, the aim of this contest is to create kaiju that would fit within the setting of my big kaiju story series, The Atomic Time of Monsters. Think of it as me letting you into my sandbox to play with my toys for a bit, or like you’re being put in the director’s chair of a new ATOM-verse kaiju movie. That means your entry does have to fit into ATOM’s world, which in turn means that yes, there are limitations to your creativity here. But limitations can be good sometimes - they can make us explore options we wouldn’t consider when given completely free rein to do what we want!

(also you don’t have to make a three dimensional image or anything, the title’s just a pun on how the third movie in a monster movie franchise will often be a 3-D film)

Read below the cut to learn the rules and whatnot:

THE RULES:

1. You are limited to one entry per person. Work hard and make your entry count!

2. Your kaiju must have some sort of description of its physical appearance and its personality - you can submit a drawing or a written description (or both!) for the physical appearance depending on what you’re most comfortable with. Using the same template/format as my official ATOM Kaiju Files (https://horrorflora.com/monster-menageries/atom-kaiju-files/) isn’t required, but it was cool when people did it in the last contest, so feel free to do so this time too!

3. The kaiju you create must specifically be created for this contest - no repurposing characters you made for other, wildly different stories. This is not “trick TT into drawing/canonizing my main OC” time.

4. The kaiju must fit the setting and aesthetics of ATOM. I’ll explain this in more detail down below.

5. The kaiju should add something meaningful to the world of ATOM. The more unique and interesting your kaiju is, the more likely you will win the contest.

6. Don’t make your kaiju too dependent on pre-existing ATOM characters - no “Tyrantis’s long lost evil brother who’s the strongest kaiju in the world.” These should be to Tyrantis’s story what War of the Gargantuas is to Godzilla’s movies – heroes (well, monsters) of another story in the same world.

THE REWARDS:

I will make pencil sketches of the top 5 entries in the contest.

I will then make fully rendered illustrations (lineart, colors, & shading) of the top three entries.

The winning entry will be made into a model ala the ones I’ve been making for ATOM’s core 50 monsters, which can then be shipped to the person who created it (should they be able to cover the shipping costs). That’s right, your kaiju could be brought to life in THREE GLORIOUS TECHNICOLOR DIMENSIONS! (Hey, we worked the gag title in to the prizes!)

THE DEADLINE: All entries must be submitted by July 3rd, 2021. You can submit it here on tumblr, via the horror flora e-mail, or any other channel you know how to reach me through. I’m in a lot of places.

THE GUIDELINES (TO HELP YOUR ENTRY FIT THE RULES AND WIN):

The smartest thing you could do if you want to win this contest is familiarize yourself with the world of ATOM by, y’know, reading all the material I’ve published on the subject. In addition to the many kaiju files that are free to read on horrorflora.com, there are now TWO, count ‘em, TWO novels in this series for you to peruse, both of which establish many of the rules of the setting as well as its general themes and tone! You can get them in either paperback or e-book formatting (I’d recommend the former over the latter since I lack the technology to make a really nice ebook, but if money is an object, the kindle version is only $1). Here’s the links again if you missed them:

Vol. 1: Tyrantis Walks Among Us!

Vol. 2: Tyrantis Roams the Earth!

However, since I know reading a bunch of stuff is, y’know, not something everyone is inclined to do, I’ll jot some good bullet points for you in an attempt to outline how ATOM works in a brief, easily digested way:

ATOM is an homage to the monster fiction of the 1950’s and 60’s (i.e. the Atomic Age), and is set in those two decades, albeit an alternate universe version of them where, y’know, monsters and space aliens exist. If you aren’t familiar with the monster fiction I’m referring to, there will be some reference material provided at the end of this post along with some recommendations for further research.

Kaiju/giant monsters in ATOM work under very specific rules. There’s a full description of those rules at this link, but here’s the jist:

ATOM Kaiju are created created by the radiation of a mineral called Yamaneon, which naturally converts harmful radiation into its own unique energy. In natural circumstances, it takes hundreds of years of exposure to Yamaneon radiation for a creature to become fully transform into a kaiju (luckily, Yamaneon radiation slows the aging process while speeding up the healing process). However, an explosive burst of energy - such as the geothermal and kinetic energy released by an earthquake, or the blast of a nuclear weapon - can speed up the process, turning a normal animal into a kaiju within a matter of seconds.

All ATOM kaiju can heal grievous wounds within minutes or even seconds, are supernaturally strong and durable, and can convert harmful radiation to harmless energy that they then feed off of. Kaiju do not have an equivalent of old age, and can theoretically live forever (though their violent lifestyle means that few do).

ATOM Kaiju generally don’t need to eat unless they are severely injured, getting most of the energy they need from solar or geothermal radiation - but many still have instincts that drive them to seek out food from time to time.

Most ATOM kaiju stand roughly 100 feet tall (depending on their body shape), i.e. smaller than the original 1954 Godzilla. There are exceptions to this rule - younger kaiju can be smaller, while exceedingly old kaiju can be significantly larger, but these are rare.

In general, ATOM kaiju are significantly more intelligent and emotionally complex than people expect animals to be, though most are incapable of speech or complex tool use. There’s a reason ATOM Kaiju Files have a “personality” section.

Most ATOM Kaiju are tooth and claw fighters - ranged weapons are a rarity in this setting.

While the terrestrial monsters in ATOM look strange, they are intended to fit within the taxonomy of animals in reality - reptiles, mammals, fish, arthropods, molluscs, etc.

ATOM’s mesozoic era was dominated by a fictional clade of crocodile-relatives called retrosaurs, which are based on the outdated paleoart that one would find in the 1950’s/60’s fiction - i.e. when dinosaurs were viewed as trail dragging lizards instead of strange birds. You can learn more about retrosaurs here (https://horrorflora.com/2016/11/15/atom-kaiju-file-bonus-a-guide-to-retrosaurs/).

Kaiju appear on every continent in ATOM, but certain areas tend to be dominated by different types.

North America is mainly besieged by retrosaur kaiju and giant arthropods.

East Asia is technically also mainly plagued by retrosaurs and big arthropods, though they tend to look more fantastical and mythic - and, often, oddly well suited to being portrayed by a person wearing a monster suit.

Russia is beset by prehistoric monsters that seem to come from the Cenozoic, particularly the Ice Age.

Western Europe is plagued by creatures that vaguely resemble creatures from myth, if they were also prehistoric. Dragon-y lizards, fiery birds, etc.

Towards the mid-way point of ATOM’s timeline, earth is invaded by a coalition of aliens from different solar systems called the Beyonder Alliance, and as a result a bunch of alien monsters can be found on earth.

Mars and Venus both host (or hosted in Mars’s case) animal life. The surviving Martians colonized Venus, and sent some of their kaiju guardians to earth to help us fend off the Beyonders (who are responsible for the destruction of Mars’s ecosystem). Martian and Venusian kaiju have specific anatomical quirks, which you can see by looking at these kaiju files:

Venusians:

https://horrorflora.com/2017/01/03/atom-kaiju-file-29-karamtor/

Martians:

https://horrorflora.com/2017/01/17/atom-kaiju-file-39-kemlasulla/

https://horrorflora.com/2017/01/17/atom-kaiju-file-40-podritak/

https://horrorflora.com/2017/01/17/atom-kaiju-file-41-sombarvot/

https://horrorflora.com/2017/01/17/atom-kaiju-file-38-ullawdra/

Giant robots exist in ATOM, but are big, bulky, and incredibly expensive. Fancy beam weapons also exist, but are similarly clunky - there are no sleek, elegant machines in ATOM.

Since the fiction ATOM takes inspiration from was made at a time when interplanetary travel was only just beginning to be possible, its scope is significantly smaller than modern sci-fi. Alternate universes/dimensions were pretty uncommon because the idea of alien planets still held a lot of wonder to it. So, as a general rule, don’t try to go farther than the one galaxy.

ATOM is a setting for stories that are focused on humanity learning to coexist with monsters, rather than humanity destroying them. A certain level of sympathy is put into almost every creature of its canon, even the ones that are meant to be villains.

REFERENCE MATERIAL

Here is a playlist of 1950′s monster movie trailers.

Here is some reference material from various monster comics of the 50′s and 60′s.

Good movies to track down to understand ATOM’s inspiration and tone include Ghidorah the 3 Headed Monster, Son of Godzilla, Destroy All Monsters, Them!, The Black Scorpion, 20 Million Miles to Earth, Gamera, The Giant Claw, and The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra.

And here’s the intro cutscenes for all the different giant monsters in the PS2 videogame War of the Monsters.

#The Atomic Time of Monsters #The ATOM Create a Kaiju Contest 3D

55 notes · View notes

hauntedbythefanficsofmypast · 4 years

Text

Universe Jump

Marinette, Adrien, and Chloe travel to the DC universe and create lives for themselves as a family. A little side info Marinette is a certified genius with an IQ of 187, Adrien has eidetic memory, and Chloe has Hyperthymesia.

Eidetic memory is when you can remember an image with high precision after seeing it once.

Hyperthymesia is where you remember a vast majority of your life with no problems.

A little background first. At 16 and 15, Adrien and Marinette have their final battle with Hawkmoth and Mayura, after they are defeated Chat and Ladybug hurry away from the scene both about to de-transform. When they find a hiding place Chat Noir breaks down finally de-transforming into Adrien. Marinette drops her transformation pulling Adrien into a tight hug. Neither letting go for over half an hour. They slowly make their way back to Marinette's house, Adrien crying on Mari's shoulder the whole way both unaware of the glares being sent at Adrien.

Since it was confirmed that it was Gabriel Agreste, many were speculating that Adrien was in on it. Some just wanted to take their anger out on Gabriel for torturing them by going after his son. Neither noticed the hatefully eyes following them as they entered the bakery. Tom and Sabine automatically hugged Adrien who was crying so hard he couldn't see or speak. After their hugs Marinette led him upstairs and they simply sat on the couch cuddling, not wanting to leave each other's side.

It wasn't until an hour later that the police arrived to question and inform Adrien on what they found in his house. Adrien tells them he had no idea that his father always talked about the heros with high regards whenever he saw them. When the police tell him about Emilie in the underground Garden, Adrien breaks down sobbing into Marinette's shoulder mumbling about how she'd been underneath him dead the entire time.

The police come to the conclusion that Adrien was not a part of it at all. And is grieving the loss of both his parents now, they agree to come back in the morning to talk with Tom and Sabine about where Adrien will be staying. However the morning never comes for Tom and Sabine, a group of people break into the bakery and set it on fire determined to get back at Gabriel by taking his son's life.

Marinette and Adrien only escape with the Miraculous box, Tom and Sabine had already been caught and it was too late for them. That night all four were pronounced dead. Adrien takes Marinette to Le Grand Paris, knowing Chloe would hide them for as long as they needed. They hide at Chloe's for a week while she pulls strings getting Gabriel's, The Dupain-Cheng's and Fu's bank accounts completely emptied and into her own without anyone knowing. During this time the three talk with the Kwamis on what they should do. It's Orikko that suggests the Kwami's move the money into their own dimension and take the three to a different universe. At first they are reluctant but Xuppu points out that they have no real reason to stay and their Kwamis agree. Pollen points out that Chloe's parents still aren't around. While Tikki and Plagg point out that their chosen are considered dead.

It gets Marinette thinking and she quickly goes over the ups and downs.

"Alright so here's what to know about us leaving this universe. It's a completely new start, no one knows who we are and according to Tikki the last time the Miraculous Box was there was when Hippolyta was Ladybug. So only the Amazonians will know of them. We'll be safer than we are here, not having to worry about people coming after us thanks to Gabriel. We'll have plenty of money and I know enough to be able to fake us having a 'parent' and buy a place for us as well as use it to our advantage. However based on where we end up it may be harder for me to get us IDs, and definitely hard to get us faked birth certificates. Not to mention, I'd have to teach myself an insane amount of hacking to successfully make it look like we've had previous education in that universe."

Together they decide that leaving is the best option even if they are slightly afraid. Plagg and Trixx snag all the money from Chloe's account and transfer it to their home dimension. Then together all the Kwami surround their three holders and transport them to an abandoned warehouse in Gotham with all their bags including the extravagant dollhouse Chloe had made for them. Once there the Kwami quickly swarm the house laying down in their respective beds as Adrien gives each one their favorites to eat before sleeping. Marinette explores the warehouse plotting out everything that must be done in construction while also making sure that no one else was there.

Once it's clear she returns to Chole and Adrien and they begin planning their first moves. Tomorrow Adrien and Chloe will go to a cafe that has free wifi with Tikki and Pollen. And using Marinette's USB they'll insert the 'parent' into the world from there they will create a bank account online, have Pollen transfer some money in, and then buy the warehouse. Meanwhile Marinette will be walking the town during the day with Plagg. As he points out places that give off the most sketchy energy, although they all can feel the destruction energy surrounding the city. He'll be able to find where the worse off people are staying. When meeting back up at the warehouse Marinette will confirm that their transaction went through. Then go from place to place with Plagg radiating as much dangerous energy around her as he can until she finds a bar where the bartender has what she needs.

Marinette meets with the bartender and a contractor the next day when the bar is closed. She tells the contractor she wants everything under the table and is willing to pay in cash half up front and half when the work is done.

"I want it done within a timely manner, bring in those you can trust not to squeal and are good workers, ten of them. I don't want any cut corners. If it'll cost more to do something safer, I'll pay it. And if none of you squeal within five months of it being done I'll give each other you an extra seven thousand and five hundred. These are the plans I have drawn up and this is the location. You'll start in two days. Do we have a deal?"

The Contractor nods promising Marinette the best he has to offer and everything under the table with workers that are capable and wont speak of it. She simply smiles politely nodding and picks up the briefcase sliding it across the table to him. She then tosses a thousand to the bartender telling him to remember her because she'd definitely come back for more and will pay him.

Once back at the warehouse Marinette drops the tough girl persona exhausted from the day. She collapses on one of the three beds Tikki created for them and grins softly. Telling them that construction starts in two days.

When two days pass Marinette is a little surprised at how respectful the workers are and when she questions the contractor, lets call him Doug. Doug tells her that these aren't actually his workers, their friends of his that were contractors as well before they lost their jobs. Told her that he knew they needed the money, and that they wouldn't say anything once they realized they were working for a young girl and not a mob boss.

When Marinette here's that she is much nicer to the men and begins to bond with them Adrien and Chloe join in. Chloe sells a story of their parents being killed in Paris when they were still young and how they were basically sold to slavery. Claiming that they recently escaped after their 'owner' was killed. When asked on how they got the money Chloe immediately turns on Marinette.

"That easy! Mari here is really smart I mean seriously if we hadn't been-well you know- she'd already be in college! She was able to transfer his money into another account and then use one of his fake IDs to get us away!"

Construction lasts for four months and in that time the workers and the teens become closer. The workers even begin helping them with getting furniture, a few of them offering their trucks free of charge and willing to go pick up anything they can't have delivered. Doug even brings in a friend to install a top of the line security system for them. Once construction is over they have a solid bond between them and Marinette promises to call them anytime they need construction done.

At this point the warehouse has been turned into a home for them. With all the necessities and furniture. And in the basement of the warehouse Marinette has a parkour funland put in. They have also had time to research their new city and its heroes. Marinette deems it best that they do not transform or go parkoring in Gotham.

"Something about Batman tells me that if he sees us he won't stop until he knows everything about us. If you feel the need to run transformed or not, go to the basement."

Soon almost every night is spent in the basement for at least an hour and a half. The same time patrol lasted in Paris.

Marinette begins making all of their clothes, bored and missing designing. Soon they have donated all their old clothes and only wear Marinette's designs. It's Chloe that gets the clientele rolling in when a few women ask where she got her shirt. She gives them Marinette's information and soon Marinette is making clothes for others back in her element. She is slowly making a name for herself in Gotham taking up the name MDC.

Marinette also returns to the Bartender asking for help once again. Let's call the Bartender Chasen. She has him get in contact with someone that could fake documents for schooling. She explains to him that while she already has her profession, Adrien loves science and Chloe lives for business. Chasen calls her the next day informing her that he'd found the perfect person.

Chasen-For the right price all of you will be considered legal immigrants in America. He will get you all the paperwork you need within a week's time.

Marinette- And you trust him?

Chasen- Yes, with my life.

Marinette- Very well, what is his price?

Chasen- He wants to know why two 17 year olds and a 16 year old are in need of this paperwork.

Marinette- What is his name?

Chasen- John Constantine.

Marinette-Very well give him my address.

Marinette gives him two thousand dollars before leaving the bar.

A few hours later the trio is relaxing together in the living room. Adrien is excitedly talking about what they could do once they get the paperwork. When a portal opens up in their kitchen, and a blonde man steps out introducing himself.

John- Hello there, I'm John Constantine. Now please tell me why multiple gods have returned to this universe with three teenagers?

The trio is shocked into silence that this man knows they're from another universe. John sighs muttering out a few curses before turning around and opening their fridge pulling out a drink. He sits down at their breakfast table taking a long sip before leveling eye contact with Marinette.

John- Alright pigtails sit down and talk, you're the one Chasen told me to talk to.

Marinette huffs at the name glaring at him before sitting down and telling him their story. Plagg sits on her shoulder facing away from Constantine. Pretending to eat cheese while he is ready to jump to Marinette's defense if needed.

By the end of the night the trio has a foul mouth yet compassionate new friend. John agrees to get them all the documentation that makes it seem like they've lived in the universe since birth.

John- The only people that will be able to tell something is unusual is superheros. My friend is going to tie you all together as siblings with the same father, me. Though you'll all be emancipated and the only time I'll come into play is if one of you gets hurt. Chloe and Adrien will pass as fraternal twins with the same mother, Marinette due to your differing appearance will have a different mother. The only thing that will give you away to heros is my name, they know I do not have kids. Unusually I have enough time to find others to pose as you parents but you're stuck with me.

The trio agrees to the conditions and John smiles gently surprising them. He ruffles Marinette's hair telling them he'll be back periodically before he gets the paperwork. He tells Marinette his phone number and before he leaves Marinette grips his hand tightly.

Marinette- That is really all you wanted? Just our story?

John turns to her squeezing her hand gently before nodding.

John- I'm not one of the best people in the universe, that much your little Gods and Goddesses can tell you. But I would never not help a child or children when I can, and while your eyes are older than they should be you're still children. Now enough of the soft bull, I have a reputation to keep! If you need me, call me!

John leaves the same way he came, not seeing Marinette smiling gently at his back. Chloe and Adrien share a grin behind her teasing each other on who the cuter twin is. Marinette rolls her eyes as Plagg and Pollen start arguing for their chosen.

A week later they are now the Constantine siblings.

A few weeks later both Chloe and Adrien have taken their SATs and their ACT, skying some of the highest scores in Gotham. Marinette decided not to take the test knowing that it would be suspicious if they discover she is a genius. People will be asking why it wasn't documented in Paris, instead she uses their week of studying to teach herself hacking, much to John's amusement when he visits.

His amusement fled when he made a snarky comment and Marinette turned to him smirking.

Marinette- At least I didn't sleep with a humanoid shark.

John-....ya f*ckin got me there pigtails!

He then turned and disappeared through a portal unable to look any of his self proclaimed kids in the eyes. Once gone Marinette and Plagg start laughing hysterically together causing Tikki to roll her eyes and start complaining about Plagg trying to steal her Chosen. Plagg sticks his tongue out at her before floating over and resting himself in Adrien's hair.

A few weeks later Marinette is dragging John to a car dealership ignoring his whining. She simply signs and tells him that she needs her parental figures help with buying a car.

John sighs before agreeing to help her get a car, in the end he is glad he is there when the dealer attempts to push Marinette into buying a terrible car.

He immediately gets in between them glaring the man down before telling him that he is shopping for a car for his daughter. The man nodded before stuttering out that he'll get the keys for their safest cars, before rushing back inside.

John huffs not looking Marinette in the eye as she smirks at him.

Marinette- Watch out Dad, keep this up and people might think you care about us!

John-Shut it Pigtails, or I'll leave right now.

Marinette- No you won't.

John doesn't respond because he knows she is right, he got attached to these sassy brats. His only hope is that his enemies don't find out about them. That night he stays for dinner and when the kids fall asleep he places magical sigils on each of their souls. Protecting them from attacks from both Heaven and hell. When confronted by the Kawami he just huffs telling them the brats wormed their way into his heart. Tikki simply smiles patting his cheek before telling him to use the guest room.

The next day John is grumbling sitting at the breakfast bar dressed in only his boxers as Marinette makes breakfast. Adrien sits next to him laughing at the dark look on his face, while Chloe rolls her eyes at both of them sipping her coffee.

He sighs softly thinking about how Bats would kill him for being in his city this long. However when he hears the three burst into laughter together. He can't find it in himself to actually care.

Two months later Chloe and Adrien are attending college classes and Marinette is getting ready to open her own boutique with John's help. They bought a shop in the nice parts of Gotham and with Doug's help they were practically ready to open. They had a large floor room. The right floor of the store was designated for specially designed clothing, a doortalong the wall opened to a fitting room. The left side was for her clothing manufactured in bulk, and the changing areas were located on that side. She also had the walls set for clothing designed by the designers she hired. Above each rack was a whiteboard that each designer was allowed to specially decorate and have their name displayed. Their clothes were being sold under her name in return for only 25 percent while they got the other 75 percent. The back room housed a designing area for Marinette and her designers with extra sewing machines along with racks and shelves for finished clothing. John was helping her set up signs for the day unknown to the both of them they were being spied on.

Bruce Wayne had spotted John Constantine in Gotham over three weeks ago. He didn't confront him because at the time he'd been walking out of Gotham University with two blonds, before getting in a car that a black haired girl with sunglasses was driving. He proceeded to investigate even deeper, finding two new students with the last name Constantine and an upcoming designer sharing the name as well. His first thought was that John had relocated some of his allies into Gotham, which pissed the Bat off greatly.

However it had been Dick that pointed out to him that the kids we're Tim's age and they didn't have any history beyond what John had created for them. Instead of confronting the man and kicking them out he had the entire family taking turns watching the three.

They saw a family that found itself the three obviously weren't actually siblings but that didn't matter to them. They also saw John get closer and closer to the kids slowly starting to spend more time with them. When Marinette began setting up her shop Bruce and Dick watched John smile gently at the girl when she began to ramble on and on. It was that moment that made Dick turn on Bruce telling him that if he even threatened to kick them out Dick would be upset.

Meanwhile Jason was continuously joking and making comments that Bruce was only mad because John managed to adopt a black hair blue eyed child before he could. Bruce got out of his car walking into the unfinished boutique, his eyes zeroing in on the recently named Marinette Constantine. She greeted him politely telling him the store wasn't open yet and only tenseed slightly when John froze at the sight of him. She played it off and quickly turned to John.

Marinette- Hey Dad can you take those extra racks to the back for me, while I give this nice man our opening dates.

John looked like he wanted to argue but instead he nodded picking up a couple racks and taking them to the back. Marinette's eyes were immediately back on him calculating him in seconds. Which surprised him greatly, the only people able to pick him apart like this were his kids.

Marinette-Bruce Wayne and by Dad's reaction you're either a hero or a villain. It's easy to tell you're not a villain though so that only leaves the hero. In Gotham very few heroes are allowed. Based on your age and when heros first appeared I'm assuming you Batman. This means Richard Grayson was the first Robin, going through assumptions once again. This would place your family as the heroes of Gotham. You're Batman, and I know that you know damn well that John isn't our actual father. Probably suspicious of why he has three kids relocated into your city as well. You have a no meta policy in Gotham and I understand why. However John is not a meta, he is a mage and he is our guardian. I fear that the foul mouthed a**hat got attached to us though so he stays. You want answers, that's why you decided to confront us in public, everyone is wondering what Bruce Wayne is doing here, so we wouldn't dare make a move to run. What you didn't account for was going up against someone who could pick you apart in seconds and learn your weaknesses. For instance you've had your back broken, you've healed incredibly however to the right trained eye you can see that you wear back supports. Not only that you still get pains from the injury, pains that you're experiencing right now as shown by the tension in your back. Pain medication not kicked in yet Brucie?

She finished the polite smile never leaving her face even when both heard John laughing hysterically in the back room.

Bruce- You're good.

Marinette-I would hope so in my universe I was one of the best heros and a certified genius.

Bruce- Your universe?

Marinette- Yes my universe. I think we both know talking about this in public is stupid Brucie. Find the warehouse that belongs to Margie Willkins, and you will find us.

Bruce-Margie Willkins, very well. Will she be there as well.

Marinette- Not likely considering she only exists on the internet. You won't find her anywhere else. Now Brucie it is time for you to go.

Bruce- Don't call me that.

He finally growled out, Marinette's smile didn't waver but he could see the glee light up in her eyes at his annoyance. Reminding him of the gleam his kids would get for the same task.

Marinette-Oh but Brucie, I think it's just the perfect nickname! Show me you deserve my respect Brucie, you maybe Batman but you came in here to intimidate one of my family members. I believe you can understand I am very protective of my family. After all I've already had two murdered and I won't lose anymore. Now turn and leave my store with a smile on your face Bruce, or I'll start crying.

John- She will the girl had me running around to get her favorite snacks until Chloe pointed out she was faking.

Marinette pouted looking at John behind her stating that Chloe had to ruin her fun. She turned to Bruce staring him down once more. Bruce nodded confirming that he'd be there.

That night the three were relaxing when Batman jumped down into their living room in front of them. Neither teen flinched Chloe scoffed going back to her nails while Adrien threw popcorn at him complaining that he was blocking the tv. Much to his kids amusement over the coms. Marinette simply sighed before flipping herself over the back of the couch. Gesturing him to follow her, she stopped however and looked him dead in the eye.

Marinette- Oh, and you're seven backups are doing a terrible job of hiding. Might as well tell them to just join us.

This left the entire family stunned as Marinette simply turned back walking into the kitchen and sitting down. Soon she was joined by eight members of the Batfamily. She took in their appearance quickly determining who was who with ease. She smirked when she felt Plagg settle into her jacket pocket. Him being there instead of Tikki meant Marinette wasn't representing Ladybug. She could be as sassy or rude as she wanted.

Marinette- So I get to talk to Batman now and not Brucie. Interesting, nice to see you finally drop your mask around me. Now I can see the real person, oops I wasn't supposed to say that was I?

Batman's glare hardened especially as Red Hood and Nightwing began to silently laugh.

Batman-Get to the point of why we're here.

Marinette-So serious maybe you should try getting a spa treatment, it does wonders. But I digress. Do you want the short version or the long version?

Batman simply stared at her causing Marinette to roll her eyes, before telling the trio's story. Shortly after explaining everything Chloe and Adrien joined them with all the Kwami flying in around, Plagg leaving Marinette's pocket heading back to Adrien.

Nightwing immediately gushes about the Kwami being cute cause Marinette to giggle softly. Each sibling begins to check the Kwami out as well as talk to the three fromer heroes. While Bruce was studying Marinette watching her switch from a mischievous and sassy persona to her actual personality. He watched the kids all talking and getting to know each other. At some point the Batfamily save Bruce had taken their masks off.

That's when both he and Tim noticed Marinette pull out a laptop and start typing. Tim decided to approach asking her what she was doing, Marinette rolled her eyes telling him that she is deleting all of tonight's security footage. Stating that he needs to leave her alone because she only recently started learning how to hack and getting into a company known for their security. Tim makes a noise before pulling her computer away and hacking into the company within five minutes. Marinette stared at her computer for a minute before grabbing his hands and getting closer to his face causing everyone to stare.

Marinette-Teach me, and I will make you my famous caffeine death coffee everyday for a month.

Tim blushed at her closeness until the words coffee hit his ears. He raised his eyebrow before questioning how good it was. Marinette simply released his hand and stood up walking over to the coffee machine and making the coffee in under five minutes. Everyone noticed Adrien and Chloe eyeing the coffee like it was poison when Marinette placed it in front of him. Tim stared at it for a while Marinette sighed picking it back up taking a big gulp swallowing it for them all before placing it in front of him again. Tim finally picked it up and took a sip only to freeze then down it in down gulp. He placed the cup down before grabbing both of Marinette's hands while looking her in the eye dead serious.

Tim- Marry me.

Everyone stared at him in shock especially when he didn't laugh saying he was joking.

Marinette blushed brightly, sputtering out a few unrecognizable sentences before taking a deep breath looking away from him.

Marinette- Honestly, I'm not a girl that marries before the first date. We barely even know each other.

Tim- Your right, what are you doing tomorrow night at six?

Marinette- Uh well I was going to be at my shop until five thirty, after that nothing really.

Tim- Perfect, I'll pick you up from your boutique at five thirty. We'll go on our first date and as many dates as it'll take me to convince you to marry me.

Marinette just sputters out a confirmation unable to look Tim in the eye.

Tim is the last of the family to leave before going he grabs Marinette's hand again. Letting a gentle smile cover his face.

Tim-I am not asking you out just because of your coffee skills Marinette. I had the task of researching you and your siblings. I found you rather fascinating, and we also have quite a bit in common. Your amazing coffee was just a plus. I will see you tomorrow at five thirty?

Marinette- Five thirty. I'll be waiting.

Tim-I won't be late.

He kisses her hand before releasing it and grappling away. He was not ready to deal with his family's teasing. Marinette refused to meet Adrien or Chloe's gaze as she walked to her room, her face bright red.

@abrx2002

@chocolateherringtacofan

@blackmagicforever

@mythogaychic

#timari #marinette dupen chang #miraculous marinette #maribat #miraculous au #miraculoustalesofladybugandcatnoir #miraculous fandom #miraculous ladybug #miraculous fanfic #adrien agreste #chloe sugar #chloe bourgeois #batman #batfamily #john constantine

838 notes · View notes

zenodreemurr · 3 years

Text

Has Infected been nerfed? An in-depth analysis to answer this question

So, very recently, on the Alphatale Wiki, the article about Infected got an update. I have seen many comments about this update, and about how violent a nerf he got was. I looked at his page pretty soon, and as such, I will do an analysis of this (as said) nerf. First, I must say that I have still yet the Alphatale story, and as such, am only based on the Infected article on the Alphatale Wiki. I’m also only talking about Infected, and not Jacob. His stats have been revealed, which is kind of a great addition to the page people could have wanted for a long time. I will not talk about the LV stats abut about the other ones. He has 12000 HP, 39000 ATK and 5000 DEF, which may sound good overall, which a great offensive power, but to be honest, I think such stats could easily make him killed by Great!Sans (and for those who know me, I’ve always said Great!Sans is clearly not OP at all), not even saying about Dunamiz or Greaty (other characters from Greattale), who could kill him pretty easily. To say, in a singular AU, it would make him very strong, but in a greater Multiverse, there is nothing incredible in such stats. He has lost multiple abilities, including the standard attacks (bones, Gaster Blasters), his spine attack, his monstrous form (which was known to be kind of outdated anyway, thanks to the black being, which is technically supposed to be it) and his unrivaled defense. Now, his standard attacks aren’t a great loss, and if the spine attack could be kind of useful, his actual greatest loss is easily the unrivaled defense. Its description was “This ability allows Infected to become temporarily invulnerable to damage.”. It was really good for him to have to counter his kind of mediocre HP and DEF stats of now. Now, he doesn’t have it anymore, which makes him even easier to kill than before. Wisps modification: Some abilities, on the other hand, have just been modified. The wisps one is one of them. The concept isn’t really different, and the greatest difference (and the one we are interested at) is the difference of power of the explosions of now and before. Before, the explosion was causing “an explosion equivalent to one kiloton of TNT”, but now, for a large one, it is described as “a large one can destroy an entire house”. Needless to say, this has been strongly nerfed, and I shouldn’t even talk about small ones. Axe modifications: The axe has been modified as well. Whether it is a nerf or a buff is debatable. Now, it is not states that Infected can be detached to gain more range, so I guess it cannot anymore. However, here’s a part of the current description “It has a special SOUL Bond to him, allowing for him to use his own soul to chain onto the axe, essentially being a physical soul connection.“. Now, what is better is something I will not try to find out, but that could currently be an actual buff. Unholy scream rework: The unholy scream has been completely redone. Before, its effect was about summoning genocide and neutral runs characters to assist him. Now, it is about preventing people from using their magic during most likely days. Sure, said like this, the new unholy scream sounds great, and I think it is. However, for me, it is a nerf. Why, you may ask? The answer is easy. Out of all the genocide and neutral runs characters, not only he can get the help of an army, which could have defended him (countering his mediocre stats), help to kill his opponent(s), or even prevent the opponent from using magic during the entire fight or even more (I’m convinced at least one could). I’m also sure one could boost Infected, whether it would is stats or abilities. Basically, I think that the current unholy scream is something that could have been done with the old one (in a more hypothetical and complex way), but the older one could have had way more advantages, so for me, it is a very violent nerf. God breaker and cannibalism: They are left pretty much unchanged. Creator’s prowess: This is the new name of “The power of a creator”, and is not that much changed, in fact. However, there are actual really meaningful changes. First of all, his limits seem to be objects of the size of a spear, while before, he could create a character. Needless to say, creating a character -as long as it becomes an ally- is way more useful, though the character could hypothetically turn against him. Another difference is that now, it tires him, which was never specified before, and as such, I consider it wasn’t the case. I do not need to explain why this is a nerf. Feral bones: An actual new ability, and as such, not a nerf. Here is the descripion on his article on the Alphatale Wiki: “Corroded, rotten bones that carry disease on them from their state. Best to avoid.“. Honestly, I like the idea, though we do not know what kind of disease it could be. This can actually be useful, and as such, is clearly not a nerfed part. Nothing else to say on the matter. About the black being and the soul harbinger: What about his transformations? Honestly, I do not know about the soul harbinger. According to the history of the Infected article, it doesn’t really show much difference, if at all, though it doesn’t say much things about it. However, when it comes to the black being, there is where the most violent nerf looks like to be. Now, it is stated he has no magical properties left when he is the black being (so he can’t kill by staring at a living being or bring down AUs by hundreds, and there is nothing stated about this now, and you know that this makes me think that he cannot anymore), though he is still physically powerful (it includes being robust if I’m right, which is good), something he most likely was (but was not for sure, I give you it) before the nerf. However, for me, his lack of magical properties is a nerf so violent to it that even his physical power is far from being equal. Again, I stated I would not talk about Jacob. Another question is “Was it intended?”. I personally think that yes, it was, and if it was, then it technically did the job. However, if we try to get basic information about Infected nowadays, he doesn’t look as such a threat as he was back in 2018. I shall say this is not only due to the nerf, but also to how the Undertale community changed in terms of character creation (I will not go into detail about this). However, get again this example. Back in 2018, Infected was really looking like one of the biggest threats an Undertale Multiverse could have, but now, it is easy to imagine him being killed by some characters from Greattale.

#infected #alphatale #undertale au

4 notes · View notes

precuredaily · 4 years

Text

Precure Day 197

Episode: Yes! Precure 5 48 - “Hope VS Despair: The Final Showdown!” Date watched: 16 June 2020 Original air date: 20 January 2008 Screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/nfV2ySD Transformation Gallery: https://imgur.com/a/6k6SzS0 Project info and master list of posts: http://tinyurl.com/PCDabout

Fly, my monkeys!

When we left off, the girls were fighting Kawarino in the Nightmare Colosseum. He tossed the girls around in a show of strength, and he managed to manipulate Milk into despair so he could place a Nightmare mask on her. Despariah used the Dream Collet to restore her youth, rendering it useless. Nightmare hasn’t completely won yet, but they’re damn close to it. How will our girls get out of this?

The Plot

As Despariah revels in her new eternal youth, Kawarino taunts the Precures that all hope is lost for them, and all that’s left is despair. They’re beaten, battered, and bruised, but nonetheless, Dream finds the energy to stand up and declare that she will never despair, and she lunges at Kawarino. However, he knocks her back into the ground, and then throws around the other cures, until they’re all collapsed on the ground, barely able to move. Notably, a bead bracelet lands beside Rouge.

He mocks the Precures and points out that even if they somehow beat the odds and manage to defeat him, they still have no way to restore the Palmier Kingdom, so they’re fighting for nothing. Throughout all of this, Coco and Nuts can’t do much but watch, and through tears they thank the girls for everything they’ve done to help them so far. Then they turn and face Kawarino themselves, but he blows them away with minimal effort while smirking. He pulls out five pieces of the black paper and throws them at the girls, where they land on the ground and quickly expand to encompass them. He explains that this is the Darkness of Despair, which picks up on people’s hopelessness and traps them forever. It surrounds Rouge, Lemonade, Mint, and Aqua, but it’s slow to cover Dream, the Precure of Hope. She uses the last of her strength to barely stand up, and tells Kawarino that she never wants to feel the way she felt when all her friends were captured and had the masks put on them, and she knows they’ve always pulled through when they banded together. This slightly stirs something in her teammates, but Dream collapses from exhaustion while Kawarino continues to taunt.

This time, however, it’s Rin’s turn to be inspirational. She stares at the bracelet and starts talking weakly to Karen, admitting that she finally found a dream for herself after discovering that she enjoyed making accessories. Karen sits up a little bit and admits to Rin that she also found a calling, after helping Milk made her realize she wants to help the sick and injured of the world by becoming a doctor. The other girls sit up and get in on the chatter, with Urara admitting that her friends helped her realize that she could pursue and enjoy singing as a second goal aside from her acting. Komachi chimes in that her novel, Pirate Hurricane, won an award and she attributes it to the help she got from everyone. To return the favor, she wants to put all her effort into making her next story one that everyone can enjoy, and tells them about her shared promise with Urara to create a story for her to perform in when she’s a better actress.

Now that they’re all talking about their dreams for the future, they’re not despairing anymore, and the Darkness of Despair begins to retreat away from them as they stand up, declaring that they need to see these dreams through to fruition. Together, they can do anything, so they won’t give up on their dreams, and they will rebuild the Palmier Kingdom! Coco and Nuts are overjoyed to see them recover, and after a group pose the girls charge Kawarino. He tries to shoot dark energy at them but they dodge and deflect it, coming together for a five-way kick on the chameleon monster!

He knocks them away, slamming them into the walls of the coliseum, and then tries to drown them in despair with the black paper again, but this time, they just stand up and break out of it. Kawarino starts to crack, worrying that the Precures won’t follow “their” path, as he glances at the masked employees packing the arena. Dream starts to realize what’s going on and he takes this chance to try to reclaim the high ground as he reveals that Nightmare’s rank and file are none other than the inhabitants of the Palmier Kingdom! However, this doesn’t have the desired effect. Instead of being upset at seeing what’s happened to their citizens, Coco and Nuts are instead relieved to learn that they’re alive and safe. They launch into speeches about how hurt and lost they were when they thought everyone and everything they loved were gone, and how the five lights of the Precures restored their hope and optimism and faith in other people. At this point, Milk twitches a little, and Despariah, still watching from her throne, glances at the small fairy.

The Princes of Palmier continue to encourage their citizens to believe in the precure and shake off the depression, since they’ve all experienced the power of their hope firsthand during the girls’ visit to Nightmare, and they go on to say that with all the people, they won’t need the Dream Collet to rebuild after all. One of the audience members sheds a tear and a crack forms along its path, and then Milk begins to cry through her mask before breaking out of it. Kawarino is flabbergasted, and looks up at Despariah for guidance. She merely glares at him disapprovingly.

if looks could kill (and the award for original caption goes to..... not PCD)

Desperate to regain his boss’s rapidly declining approval, Kawarino grumbles about how hard he tried to lead the girls to despair, and then yells that he’s done playing around and he’ll destroy everything they love. He attaches five sheets of black paper to himself directly (as opposed to in mask form) and begins to grow. He grows to fill the Colosseum, much like Girinma all those episodes ago, but the difference is that when Kawarino is done mutating, he still has his consciousness and his appearance is exactly the same, just larger. Undeterred, the girls fight on, managing to land a few blows on his body, and they help each other avoid his various attacks.

Their teamwork inspires Milk to turn to the bystanders, Nightmare’s employees, and encourage them to have hope. The team performs a rush on Kawarino, each performing their special attacks in turn. Mint Shield protects Mint and Aqua from his tails, Aqua Tornado focuses his attention, Rouge Burning and Lemonade Shining blind him, and then a Crystal Shoot to the face knocks him back. This display of Precure’s power to reject despair is enough to push the employees over the edge, and their masks begin to break one after the other. The fairies of the Palmier Kingdom fill the stands and Milk directs them to send their energy to Precure.

no miracle lights needed

The team bathes in the light of thousands of hopes and dreams as Despariah watches in disgust and Kawarino loses his composure. Milk joins Nozomi as the team begins to perform Precure Five Explosion, now glowing with the light of hope. Kawarino tries to resist, but the power overwhelms him, and as he’s overcome, he looks over to Despariah one last time, hoping for her to acknowledge him and save him. However, she merely smirks, and he dissolves into sheets of black paper.

He died as he lived: a simp

The fairies flood the arena, surrounding the Precures, Coco, Nuts, and Milk, and it’s a joyful reunion, but short lived, as Despariah rises from her seat. She remarks on the fearsome power that the girls possess to destroy Kawarino and shatter all the masks of Nightmare, and then says she’ll show them true despair! (how many more despairs are there?) The coliseum falls into darkness, and hundreds of vaguely humanoid Kowaina, with Despariah’s old mask, begin to emerge from the shadows. Coco and Nuts usher the citizens to safety, and the Kowaina charge forward at Despariah’s command, surrounding the Precure, as she gleefully tells them to taste true despair to their hearts’ content! With that, the screen fades to black.

The Analysis

This whole arc is the absolute peak of what makes Precure so good, but this episode in particular stands out among the three parts of the finale. The girls start out at the lowest possible low. It looks like the bad guys have won. They can’t use the wish of the Dream Collet, Milk has been cast into despair, their greatest enemy has had her strength restored, and Kawarino is proving to be a very tough opponent himself. It really seems like there’s no hope left for the girls, but nonetheless, they press onward. They manage to find light in the darkness, and their perseverance weakens their opponents and awakens their allies. The strength of their hope leads them down a path to achieving their dreams even in the greatest adversity and lets them weaken their opponents. They eliminate Kawarino and the entire Nightmare employee base, leaving only Despariah herself to be reckoned with. It’s such an incredible turnaround from where the last episode ended, the team climbed out of nothingness and they’re nearly at the summit of the mountain.... or so they thought, as the episode ends with Despariah finally taking matters into her own hands. It’s an ending that leaves you worried, but at the same time, the girls have overcome everything else that stood in the way of their dreams, surely they can overcome this too.

I’m really glad that Rin and Karen’s subplot about being unsure about their futures is used as the turning point of the episode. It would be easy to have Nozomi give another inspiring speech about hope, but instead, they use the two girls who have the least concrete ideas of what they’re aiming for in life and build on that. They fulfill a season’s worth of character growth, with Rin explaining she wants to make fashion accessories while Karen wants to be a doctor. Since the major theme of the show is dreams against despair, it’s so emotionally satisfying to have the conclusion of their arcs, where they find their dreams, as the foundation of the team’s revitalization. The two girls have finally found what they want to strive for, and they won’t let Nightmare get in the way of them achieving those goals, so they inspire each other and that inspires Urara and Komachi to talk about how their dreams have evolved since the start of the series, and now they all have a bright future worth fighting for and nothing can take that away from them! They encourage and uplift each other and they have each other’s backs, so despair has no room to take hold anymore. And that moment, when Kawarino realizes he can no longer bring them to despair, is wonderful.

There are two aspects of this episode I absolutely love, and they are closely related to each other: The first is how the girls keep fighting and manage to inspire the Palmier citizens out of the darkness. The other is Kawarino’s rapid downward spiral, culminating in his defeat. They are inversely connected and represent a major theme of this arc, and possibly the entire series, which I’ve only realized this late: control vs partnership. Kawarino just wants control: control over his underlings, and control over the Precures. When the girls’ unshakable support for each other snaps them out of despair, he has no other tools to control them with, and their teamwork trumps his individuality. He tries to use the truth about Nightmare’s rank and file being the residents of the Palmier Kingdom against them, but it backfires and he loses his control over them as well, and the combined teamwork between all the fairies giving their power to the Precure is Kawarino’s ultimate undoing. Conversely, the girls rise higher and higher once they realize Nightmare no longer holds any power over them, and they work in harmony to thwart Kawarino and free their allies. Nothing symbolizes this better than their final rush on the giant Kawarino before they perform Five Explosion. He is clearly powerful, but they manage to get the jump on him by deflecting his attacks and pulling his attention in all different directions before Dream knocks him back and leaves him open for the finisher. Also, I believe this is the first time all five of them have used their Symphony Set attacks together with no stock animation.

The fairies also get some great speeches in. When Kawarino reveals the truth about the Palmier citizens, both he and the audience expect Coco and Nuts will despair from this, but instead they turn it around into gratefulness and explain how great the Precures are, and why everyone can rely on them. It’s this particular speech that breaks Milk’s mask, and then she turns around and gives her own inspiring speech to the crowd about how she could do it and so can they, because the Precure need their support. These efforts further the ideas of hope and trust in your friends being stronger than control or despair.

The rapid escalation of events after the girls free themselves from despair is great, because it reinforces the idea that dreams and friends are the key to overcoming everything. It also contrasts nicely with Kawarino’s fall. It's a battle of control against partnership, and when Kawarino stops being able to control the girls, he loses his edge. He has always sought Despariah’s approval, but as soon as he loses his control, he gets sloppy and inadvertently gives the forces of hope more ammunition when he reveals that the Nightmare masked employees are actually the citizens of Palmier. This is supposed to be his trump card, but Coco and Nuts turn it around and use it as a source of hope against him. As he stops being able to overpower the Precures, he quickly loses favor in Despariah’s eyes, and he realizes how little she really cares for him. Since his entire character up to now has been built around his adoration for her and winning her favor, this revelation that he’s actually as disposable to her as the other Nightmare subordinates is beautiful tragic irony.

Now that Kawarino has assumed his monster form and his giant form, I want to revisit all of Nightmare and compare what he did differently from his predecessors.

Girinma

Arachnea

Gamao

Bunbee

Hadenya

Bloody

Kawarino

I don’t remember if I pointed this out before, this project has been underway for a long time and I can’t remember everything I wrote, but all the animals that Nightmare represents are predators of butterflies, which is some excellent symbolism. But what I’m really here to discuss is their transformation between their normal and black mask forms (where applicable). For Girinma, Arachnea, Gamao, and Hadenya, who all donned black masks, they were mutated into giant and more monstrous versions of their bodies, and lost sapience, seeming to revert to a more feral mindset. Kawarino, however, didn’t apply a black mask, but rather the black paper that was previously shown to become black masks, and is now revealed to be concentrated despair. He applied 5 strips of it to his body, which caused him to grow and swell similarly to the others, but when he was finished, he retained his same body proportions and his intellect, essentially just becoming larger, and presumably stronger. It is very telling that he’s not willing to subject himself to the torture he put his subordinates through, which really describes his whole character. He’s willing to force others around, because he considers them disposable, but he protects his own well-being so he can have a future with Despariah, only to realize too late that she doesn’t value him any more than he valued his subordinates.

Despariah herself is enjoyable to watch in this episode for that same reason. Even though she’s now restored her youth and could presumably stomp the Precures herself, she chooses to just sit back and watch Kawarino do what he does, only offering occasional commentary and dirty looks. She really does just see it as entertainment, presumably because she believes that Kawarino has it in the bag, and if he doesn’t, she can step in without issue. She doesn’t really care about Kawarino except that he makes her job easier, so the colosseum setting is actually very fitting in that regard, because the life or death fight between her warrior and her enemies is just a show for her. By putting her a little closer to the action but still acting as a passive observer, the show actually manages to make her more threatening than she was when she basically cooped up in her office, because now we can actually see her and her reactions, and her indifference to the proceedings is haunting, however, this makes the few reactions she does provide that much more fun. At the end, when she’s the last member of Nightmare still standing, when she decides to get serious and unleashes her army of Kowainas, that’s an incredibly chilling turnaround after the ever more inspiring events of the episode up to that point, in a way only Despariah can deliver.

This episode started with the team at their lowest point, dragged them to the pits of despair, and then pulled right back out as they cheered each other on and inspired an entire kingdom’s worth of people with the strength of their hope. I could write forever about how beautifully inspiring it is for the audience, but it’s not over yet. Their greatest obstacle remains in front of them, and it’s going to take every ounce of courage they have to defeat her. Look forward to it!

Pink Precure Catchphrase Count: 0 kettei!

#Precure #Pretty Cure #Yes! Precure 5 #YPC548 #PCD197

19 notes · View notes

introvertguide · 4 years

Text

Hollywood’s Changing Depiction of Slavery

I am generally not that comfortable with discussing this kind of thing, especially the attachment it has to cinema, because it is a reminder that many of the people that created the art I love might not be the kind of person I would actually want to meet. In fact, the depiction of slavery in film over the last century can give you an idea of how the American population thought of slaves and the business of slavery in general. I am going to try and approach this objectively, not because I don’t want to offend (if you are offended by my personal abhorrence of slavery in any form than you can go someplace else for your movie commentary), but simply because I am a middle-aged white male who has never encountered slavery in person and everything I know is second hand. I have seen guest lectures that involved people who walked with MLK Jr in Alabama, but I know very little about black oppression and outright slavery in America beyond history books. So, to keep this educational and not slip into personal bias, I will describe what I have seen in some example films over the last century. You are more than welcome to view the films for yourself, however:

SOME SPOILERS FOR THE MOVIES ON THIS LIST!!! I STRONGLY RECOMMEND WATCHING ANY OF THESE FILMS FOR YOURSELF!!

The Birth of a Nation (1915)

We are starting off rough with possibly the most controversial film of all time. There were protests against this film from both black and white cinema goers even at the time (according to the AFI blurb) and it is evident that the director, D.W. Griffith, overstepped some boundaries as he made the apology piece Intolerance the very next year to win back general audiences. The film depicts Abraham Lincoln positively, which was unexpected to me, and former slaves as animalistic and uncontrolled. The Klu Klux Klan comes along and “heroically” controls the former slaves and depicts the reformation as a time in which white women were afraid to walk the street for fear of attack by former slaves. The lack of support for this film by any black actors is apparent since almost all of offensive black men portrayed in the movie are white actors in black face. As difficult as it was for Black Americans to find work outside of farming and industrial labor in the early 1900s, you still couldn’t even pay them to be in this film. It is hard to gauge if many Americans agreed with the opinions reflected in this film at the time, but some people apparently thought that it was a mistake to free the slaves since black people needed to be controlled and why not get free labor for farm owners at the same time.

Gone With the Wind (1939)

This is a favorite movie in my family so I cringe slightly watching this film now knowing about about Hattie McDaniel’s Oscar and legacy. The role of Mammy was played by McDaniel and she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress...but she had to get special permission to attend the ceremony since the awards were given out at a segregated hotel. She had to use a back entrance and was seated far in the back in an area that was roped off from the white guests. McDaniel was very good at her role since she had played a maid on over 70 occasions and was hassled by the NAACP to use her award as a platform to promote equal rights. I have little reference to what the world thought of the film, but the 13 Oscar nominations and this being the highest grossing film of all time when adjusting for inflation tells me audiences were OK with if not impressed by the portrayals. It seems that America was accepting of the “friendly and accepting” slave who was like a family friend who wasn’t equal but allowed to stay if they did a good job cleaning up around the house. This was not a very accurate portrayal of most slave-master relationships, which McDaniel admits, but she is quoted as saying “it is better to get $700 a week to play a maid then get $7 a week to be one.”

The Legend of N****r Charlie (1972)

During the 60s and 70s, there was a genre of films known as “blaxploitation” which capitalized on the idea that black characters were portrayed stupid thugs that were easily subdued by intelligent white men. This genre did the opposite and featured black heroes who overcame adversity with their power and intelligence, normally over a white adversary. This particular film portrays a slave taken from Africa who is falsely accused of murder and has to run from a racist white sheriff. He turns into a gunslinger and makes a posse of other black gunslingers and this group defeats the evil sheriff and escapes. This portrayal seems as likely as that of Mammy, but the very poor production value and terrible acting (it is pretty difficult to get through) meant no awards. Noting that the box office sales were high almost exclusively at theatres in predominantly black neighborhoods, America was split on the depiction of slaves. White people seemed to be happy with the housemaid while black people wanted a tough hero that rises up and gets vengeance on their oppressors.

Roots (1977): 8 Part Mini-Series

I was unaware that this miniseries was shown over consecutive nights in January of 1977, but tens of millions of people watched all of it (that is 12 hours over 8 nights) and still talk of the impression it made. This movie showed Lavar Burton (you know, the guy from Reading Rainbow and the actor who played the blind guy on Star Trek) as a slave stolen from Africa who was shackled and beaten into a life of submission. This film portrayed slavery as an atrocity that planted seeds of hate and distrust that carried on through generations over hundreds of years. Judging by the ratings, this woke up a lot of Americans to the horror that was slave life. Portraying slaves as happy house maids or whistling old men with big smiles was no longer acceptable. The final episode of this mini-series remains the 3rd highest rated showing of all time according to the Nielson ratings. The series as a whole was nominated for an astounding 32 Emmy Awards and won 9 of them. The low win count was due to multiple actors from the series competing in every acting category. After Vietnam and going into the Cold War, America wanted gritty realism and this seems like exactly that.

Amistad (1997)

I find this to be idea of slavery that I most relate to as realistic. It stars Djimon Hounsou as a slave that leads a revolt against the slave traders on the ship Amistad in which the entire white crew was slaughtered and the offending slaves were brought to American courts to stand trial for murder. This was based on a true account and directed by Steven Spielberg. One might note that the top billed actors are actually Matthew McConaughey, Morgan Freeman, and Anthony Hopkins, but Hounsou absolutely stole the show. I hate courtroom drama in general, but the testimony of this slave was riveting. According to historian accounts, there was a point during this infamous crossing in which it was decided there was not enough food for all the slaves so a couple of dozen humans were tied to a rock and thrown overboard. It has been over 20 years and that still sticks with me. I wouldn’t expect this to be done to cattle, and the scene of the slaves screaming as they know the rock will pull them down and they have seconds to live still haunts me. It encouraged me to look up accounts of slaves and others who saw first hand how bad things got.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I took a an anthropology class in the early 2000s and I remember learning about evidence that proved the horrific treatment of some slaves. It is true that some slaves were allowed to live in the house and treated like family. It is true that some slave owners paid their slaves a small amount or even freed them in their will. However, there are also many children of mixed heritage that prove the amount of rape that occurred. There are also bones in shallow graves in back of some of these old plantations that show evidence of multiple breaks, amputations, mangled limbs, and broken backs that have no sign of treatment but the wear and tear of continued use. These people were worked and beaten to death. If that is what happened, then I don’t want it glossed over with Hollywood scriptwriting.

But I said I would be objective so I will stop there. I can feel myself getting angry and opinionated as I write. Learning about history and enjoying a story on film for entertainment can be separate things. Deep breaths.

There are many, many other movies that portray slavery including The Color Purple, Song of the South, Django Unchained, 12 Years a Slave, and Glory. I am not as familiar with these films as the ones listed above, in fact I still haven’t seen 12 Years a Slave. What I wanted to demonstrate was that films will often depict social issues in a way that is consumable by the masses, and changes in the way things are depicted can indicate a change in public opinion. From what I see in film, the American population once thought of former slaves as a problem that needed to be solved and bringing back slavery could solve that issue. It transformed to a feeling that maybe slavery wasn’t all bad and some slave owners were pretty good to their slaves. Black Americans responded with a genre that said that maybe slaves were tough and amazing which scared people into trying to control them. After the Vietnam War and Watergate, Americans wanted the gritty truth and films began portraying slavery as horrific and scarring to the point of affecting generations with hate. Todays movies seem to recognize the atrocities and to almost look at these actions the same way we look at genocides: how could we let this happen? The students that I work with are now assigned movies and readings that highlight genocide and enslavement, which means to me that we are not in denial of how bad it was and instead looking into keeping it from ever happening again. Perhaps there will be a different viewpoint in 20 years. Until then, I will keep watching movies to get an idea of what the public thinks.

#films as history #slavery #slavery in film #Amistad #Roots #Gone with the Wind #the birth of a nation #popular culture #introvert #introverts #american history

23 notes · View notes

theflashdriver · 4 years

Text

Rapunzel’s Tower (Silvaze)

The clatter and jangle of heavy bangles boomed above the sound of fast footsteps on cobblestone streets as a young knight rushed towards the tower. Blaze the cat, age seven, was not her usual self today; the young feline had taken on a guise, a façade to fit a role she was currently playing. While she was wearing her usual tattered robe and tights, a cape from a centuries abandoned costume store was flitting and fluttering behind her while the visor of and old plastic helmet obscured her vision of the cracked and burning streets around her. Those old trinkets, coupled with the rusted pipe that was her sword, might have given the illusion that she was a more pitiful and crude knight, but this was not the case.

Blaze was playing the role of a young knight who had set off to save a fair maiden from a distant castle in which she'd been sealed, battling her way over all manner of obstacles and destroying all kinds of beasts in search of her true love. Of course, despite the make-believe nature of this game, those obstacles and monsters were oh so very real. The flaming beasts that prowled this city had got in her way more than once, only to be seen off by either a thwack from her supposed sword or a burst of flame from her free hand. Every time she had to dispose of a monster or hurl herself across a lava filled gorge, she would question whether this game of theirs was the best idea but soon she'd fall back into her knightly persona.

This had all come about as a result of two ancient but very different sources. The first was the books they'd been reading or, well, more specifically; the books that the tower's maiden had rather fallen in love with. Since the destruction of their prior home, they'd taken up residence in a library on the edge of the city and rather fallen in love with the various books housed within it. They'd started by reading informative pieces, introducing themselves to the wonders of the past, before gradually stumbling upon the more fanciful tales of both regular and not so regular lives. Her partner, Silver, had rather fallen in love with tales of pirates and knights and kings and queens, often reading them to her and bordering on enacting them to her. His excitement had come to a head recently though, after they'd discovered a most peculiar shop. It seemed to have gone mostly untouched by time, no one had breached its windows or broken down its door, but both inside were countless treasures. Rings, bangles, tiaras, necklaces and other trinkets had just been left in glass display cases for no clear reason. Why someone would choose to buy those shiny objects rather than food or water, neither of them really knew but they did know that the objects belonged in treasure chests and adorning princesses.

Now, taking from long abandoned shops was nothing new for them (it was the only way to survive in their long-destroyed world) but, usually, they stole for either comfort or survival. All of these objects, despite how pretty they were, looked to be entirely pointless; they could gain no sustenance from them and they offered no comfort or protection. However, the naïve pleading of her partner, and a certain red gem that fit so well on her forehead, had convinced Blaze to fill a bag with those sparkling trinkets. On the way home he had proposed using them in a re-enactment; more specifically, that they re-enacted a scene from one of the shorter stories that he'd read to her. It'd taken some convincing, but she had agreed to play his little game under only one condition: that she got to be the knight while he played the part of the princess.

He'd immediately agreed, simply excited to play and not seeming to particularly care what role he took. While that had embarrassed her at first, she'd stood helpless as he scrambled to find some shining armour and when he had brought her a cape from his bedroom, Blaze had felt an excitement brewing in her stomach. A childish, foolish, excitement but excitement none the less. Her armour was adorned from most of their plundered goods, broaches and pins had been stuck through her robe to create small shining patches. Rings and bangles had covered her hands to take the form of makeshift gauntlets, but many had been shed as she ran. Admittedly, even with all they'd taken and dressed her in, she didn't look much like the knights they'd read about in history books or plays, but she did feel… different.

She dashed and leapt across another jagged chasm, using her sword as leverage to vault over an especially wide gap and land safely on the other side. Her eyes locked on a pair of prowling magma hounds, their maws snapped open as they caught sight of the small girl's form. She threw her left hand in one's direction, unleashing a blast of flame that threw it backwards. The second rushed towards her, arriving just in time for its face to meet with her rusted pipe. Without so much as looking back, she kept running; the castle now in sight.

The tower, in actuality, was a skyscraper that had broken and collapsed long before either of them were born. Though the majority of it now lay shattered over the shops and houses that were behind it, its stump still stood tall and proud over the majority of the surrounding buildings. Though Blaze could see it, she knew that the site was especially difficult to reach; that was why they'd chosen it as the stranded princess' keep, after all.

Focusing again on her role, becoming the knight, Blaze charged around the final corner and locked her eyes upon the tower's decrepit plaza. There was a lot on her way; several lava rivers had carved channels through this part of the city and earthquakes had displaced much of the land, segmenting the streets and pavement alike. She threw a glance to the top of the tower; she swore that she could see the flickering of cyan light but, from this distance and at this angle, she couldn't make out Silver.

She resumed her sprint, tracing along the angular central crack that ran along the street, but soon she had shifted to jumping and bouncing. Every third or fourth step was followed by more cracking, the ground had been made brittle by years of constant heat and pressure. She found herself more and more using her pipe to vault and ground herself, very almost losing it to the flames time and time again only to catch and swing it at the very last second. Fleet of foot and elegant, but perhaps not steadfast like the knight in the tale, Blaze soon found herself in the plaza beneath the broken structure.

It took her a moment to find a spot that would fully support her, it seemed as though her every step disturbed the ground somehow, but, eventually, she settled near the spire's base. In its working life, the building had provided homes to hundreds of people. Now it was but a jagged piece of the skyline, too rickety and impractical for anyone to really live in. Positioned closer and frowning upward, the kitten could see a psychic glow plainly emanating above her. After a bit more squinting, Blaze determined that Silver wasn't in view yet; he was hiding until she called out to him, just as the princess had in the story. The moment she spoke up, he'd make his appearance and recite his lines.

Blaze thought for a moment, trying to remember what the knight had said. She must have taken a while because, before she could hazard a guess, the very book that she was supposed to be enacting tumbled down from the skyscraper on a beam of cyan light. The young feline managed to snatch it from the air, finding it already open at the perfect page.

Upon reading no more than the first few words, the knight automatically recalled her lines. Holding the book behind her back, she pointed her sword to the heavens, "Rapunzel, my dearest Rapunzel, I've come for you!"

Now, finally, the princess showed herself. Silver, currently known as Rapunzel, had borrowed one of Blaze's hair ties and pulled back his usually over the top quills. In an attempt to further transform his appearance, the hedgehog had wrapped himself in a thick beige shawl and various silk scarves to give the outfit more colour. From down there it was difficult to see, but she knew that his fingers were covered in rings too.

"Who is it? Who has come to see me?" He called down, leaning precariously over what remained of a wall.

"It is I, your handsome knight!" She shouted back, unable to keep herself from thinking that the so-called knight in the story thought just a little too highly of himself. After all, his only name in this entire book was the handsome knight, "I've come to save you!"

"But how will you join me up here? My father broke the stairs when he locked me away in this tower, I'm trapped!" He exposited, "I've been alone up here for so many years, I'm oh so lonely!"

"But it is being alone for so many years that will bring me to you!" She replied, pointing her sword even harder, "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!"

There was a beat of silence, a mutual realisation surely dawned upon both of them. In the story, the princess Rapunzel was supposed to let down her hair for the knight to climb up. While it was unclear how the happy pair had got down afterwards and left to live happily ever after, the story could not continue without the scaling of the princess' tower and the actual first meeting of the knight and their love. Silver's quills were long, but they weren't multiple stories long, there was no way-

"Dear knight! Do you trust me?" That wasn't in the book, "My hair may not yet be long enough, but I can bring us together another way!"

Blaze saw cyan light begin to pulse and flicker around her frame and creep into her vision, not imprisoning her or grasping her so much as it was making clear his intent. She bit her lip, both her fists tightened around the respectively grasped book and pipe. She was frightened, terrified of heights, but she knew the answer to what he'd asked. They were alone in this destroyed world, they worked and fought and lived and played together.

"Of course, I trust you, d-dear princess! More than I trust anyone else!" She called out, shutting her eyes tight, "J-Just promise that you'll get me up there safely!"

Aura began to tickle at her sides, "I promise, my knight! I'll get you up here as quickly as I can!"

"M-Maybe not quickly!" She felt his psychic touch hesitate, "But not too slowly either…" She grumbled, probably too quietly for him to hear, "Just safely! J-Just get me up there safely!"

The kitten felt a gentle touch, like some kind of hug, wrap around her shoulders before gradually spreading to encase her entire torso. Mere moments after she'd managed to get comfortable with that, her feet seemed to slip from the ground and a light wind began to whistle through her ears. Her toes curled and her teeth grit, she didn't dare to open her eyes even if she knew what was happening. She trusted him not to drop her, that much was true, but she didn't trust her fear not to stoke her powers and tear her from his grasp; sending her plummeting to the concrete below. Eventually though, she felt the air brush her muzzle directly rather than from above; she'd reached the correct elevation, she was being pulled towards him. The moment of truth arrived not with a sound, but something brushing past her shoulder and a hand taking hold of her book wielding wrist.

Her eyes opened, blue energy still tinted her vision, but Silver was the centre of all she saw. The small hedgehog was close, almost nose to nose with her, as he leaned out over the edge of the tower to manually pull her onto its top. She let her sword drop before she landed, it clattered onto the roof as she grabbed at his shoulder with her newly freed hand. Her fear of heights had gotten better since she'd met him, he'd offered to help her with it much too often, but there was still a way to go until she'd be comfortable jumping from building to building or even standing atop this one. They'd been up here before, she knew the floor was stable, but this rooftop was never meant to be a rooftop; it wasn't designed to endure rain, let alone the landing and spittle of lava monsters, and she swore it'd gained more holes since their last visit.

As if noticing her worry, as she made contact with the ground, Silver brought both his arms to tightly wrap around her. It was a comfort and contact that she immediately returned, dropping the book too as she took hold of him. It only took a minute or so for her to relax, feeling her heart slow to match his, but the moment that her features softened and she caught his eye, a smile broke onto his face.

"My knight, you have saved me from my isolation!" He continued the story, continuing to beam, "How can I repay you?"

"Just stay by my side forever, that will be more than enough," She recited from memory, attempting to regain the knight's cool air, "I've searched for you for so long, I don't want to lose you again."

"Then it will be done, I'll stay by your side forevermore!" He insisted, completing the scene by pulling her into an even tighter hug.

His fluffy quills brushed and ticked at her. Though she turned her head in an attempt to hide it, Blaze couldn't help but grin. It'd been very silly, they probably should've spent this time searching for food or reinforcing their home, but Blaze couldn't deny that she'd thoroughly enjoyed this pseudo performance. There was something almost regular about it all, almost as if it suited them better than doing what they had to. She supposed that made sense, they were kids after all and, according to the books at least, kids were supposed to imagine and play games. There was a whole section in the library meant for children and very little of its literature was particularly practical, even if those stories were far more fun to read.

She would never admit that, of course. She always insisted that silly games like this were the result of his sole machinations. But then, he displayed more than enough joy for the both of them.

"You did great Blaze, you really fit the part!" He was practically bouncing, beaming brighter and brighter with each passing second, "But… can I be the knight next time? That all looked really fun and I'll be able to fly up to you; you won't have to worry about getting scared if I do that, right?"

"We can take turns," She conceded but, as she through a small glance towards the ground, her grip on him redoubled in tightness, "But… I don't want to be up this high without you."

"Alright! We can find somewhere lower," He offered, grinning so widely that she thought his cheeks might break, "We could even just do it in the library if you prefer, there are plenty of fairy tales about princesses in dungeons too!"

--- --- ---

The memories of that time were a lifetime away and yet they were still so fresh in her mind. Blaze the cat, age eighteen, was stood on her bedroom balcony. The structure overlooked the royal gardens. Though the grounds were currently devoid of workers, the rose bushes, sunflowers and plants from far afield had been tended for generations and bloomed today with the same vigour they had a century prior. The sun had set almost an hour ago, the last trickles of pink and orange were slowly fading from the sky, and yet she was still wide awake. In a rather uncouth fashion, she'd brought her dinner to her bedroom with the promise to eat while she worked.

But she had done neither. Instead, she'd spent what little time she'd had pacing back and forth across the royal bedchamber; her mind had latched onto those old memories she'd so recently discovered. Memories of a life in which she played the part of a princess rather than lived as one.

They'd thought jewellery no more than interesting rocks stuck to shiny metals, their concept of value had been so jaded that the plate of cold paella on her desk would be worth all the rings and diamonds in the world. They'd been famished, they were delusional children clinging to each other against the odds. Any rational person wouldn't dare think back to those memories or, if they did, would consider them no better than tragic, the most difficult and dangerous time of their lives. So why did she feel like this, what were these bizarre thoughts that cluttered her mind and pushed out every other thought?

Why was she so nostalgic for that terrible place, what possible reason was there?

She'd left that world wishing it better, she'd given her life without so much as hesitating. She could remember looking down at him as her ethereal form drifted up and split the clouds as she passed from one life into the next. Blaze had essentially reincarnated, not only had she forgotten that life, but its pain and strain had been entirely removed from her mind and body. She'd been reborn, this new dimension had granted her an entire refresh of both mind and body, but yesterday had seen her regain half of that. Her mind was spinning, filled to burst with tumultuous memories that so heavily contradicted the life she'd just lived. The current mismatched form of her memory was already having impacts on her mind and body.

The sunset she'd just spent the past hour watching had occurred outside her bedroom window every night for the past eighteen years. Every night, she'd had the option to watch or even simply glance as the sun descended before slipping beneath the horizon. She never had though, or, at least, she hadn't since she was young. The glory and wonder of that sight had been entirely lost on her, she'd become desensitised to it. It'd been made mundane by its perpetuity, made a commodity by their daily occurrence, but now it wasn't so daily. Now she could remember fourteen years spent in a city where the clouds never parted, and it was as if this was the first sunset she'd ever actually seen.

Until her departure, the skies of that future had been overwhelmed by black sulphurous clouds that light refused to penetrate. She'd gone without seeing a sunrise or sunset for fourteen whole years, she'd seen nothing but the most dower of grey skies. This life hadn't been so different though, the sky had been there, but she'd never seen its value. It was all thanks to him; his returning of her memories had saved her from more than a dull castle view, he had unlocked the version of her that'd been hidden away in the shambling tower that was her newly unharmed body.

Unlike that once forgotten day, the first of many times they'd embodied those childish roles and played that silly game, she'd actually saved him. She'd given herself up for him and the world; she'd revealed the sky by leaving rather than arriving. It was painful to think how pointless it had all been though, that their loss of one another had only pealed back one of many layers of disaster that stood between them and the good future they desired. The peaceful world that he fought for was still sealed behind a two-hundred-year barrier of crisis that would surely take decades of work to unlock.

It was with that thought that a speck of cyan light fluttered up and found its way into Blaze's vision, soon being followed by a handful of larger glowing globules before, finally, a grey-white figure masked by that that same energy floated up to enter her vision. Despite his arrival and their reuniting just yesterday, she hadn't been able to see him all day. Her work as both guardian and princess had taken up far too much of her time and refused to halt regardless of her headspace. Silver the hedgehog, age eighteen, was floating just outside her grasp. His body was bound in bandages she'd set just yesterday,

He hung before her in the air, smiling as he reached out to her, just as he had in days long past when he had played the role of knight and she had been princess. Without so much as blinking, she took his hand and lead him to stand on the balcony beside her. The contact seemed to stun him just a little, it took a moment for him to round from his position to land beside her.

He'd quickly gone from grinning to looking sheepish, "I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, I know you said to get here before sundown but I got a little lost and distracted," Before he could even fully apologise, his eyes were flickering back to the outside world, "This place is just so pretty, even the garden down there, it's…"

"It's beautiful," She finished his sentence before continuing, "The sun sets every evening only to rise the next morning without fail and, in the time between the two, the stars come out to dance so wonderfully."

"It's a very different sight from the one I've been seeing," He admitted, plainly scanning the sky for the twinkling of the first star, "Well… not very different, but different enough to notice."

"Oh?" She hummed, briefly managing to tear her gaze from his softer smile.

"Yeah, I don't recognise any constellations, your moon's just a little different too. In the past of my world a lot of it got destroyed. This one looks perfect," She couldn't see it now, but she had last night so she understood him perfectly. Alike the sunset, the moon had stolen a place in her heart, it was undeniably beautiful.

Still, her eyes returned to his frame and the feeling of his hand in hers sapped all of her thoughts. For as overwhelmed as she felt, struggling to rise after that rush of old memories, he was struggling more, even if it wasn't showing so plainly. He'd arrived in a world that perhaps embodied his perfect future only to receive a clear reminder of how long he'd been working at his task, all that it'd already cost him and the future trials ahead of him. Even if he hadn't considered such things yet, those thoughts would surely materialise and bring him to worry; he could be so insecure when he was on his own, so she didn't plan to leave his side.

Blaze tugged his hand, turning him to look away from the sky and to her. He stumbled a little, almost colliding with her as he was made to align with her and the entryway to the royal bedchambers. The hedgehog was framed by the descending sun, even without looking, she could see the stars flickering into visibility behind him. He'd never quite looked real to her, always just a little otherworldly; a figure of bright colours that stood in stark contrast to the burning city that had surrounded them. Here though, flanked by the cosmos beyond this world, he looked more at home than he ever had before. It was almost as if he belonged in this tower rather than her, she couldn't imagine that she looked so stunning with that vista behind her.

Despite how he'd arrived, despite him hovering up to meet her, Blaze knew the role she wanted to play. Fortunately, it was the one she most often took She knew that she wanted to look after him before even considering letting him look after her.

"You know…" She couldn't help but primitively roll her eyes at what she was about to say, a small grin had surely snuck its way onto her lips, but she spoke in her usual dry tone, "I think I liked things better when you were the princess."

Tensions were still so high, these feelings and memories were just so raw, but she couldn't hold a straight face for long and, naturally, neither could he. Their frames reunited, her hands found his shoulders while he came to hug her and their heads heavily pressed against one another. Laughing, even if neither of them were quite sure why they were, they found themselves slowly shifting deeper into her room.

Once they were beyond the threshold, Blaze managed to shift her head from his and take the hedgehog in again. Silver was still laughing, eyes shut as he so casually leant against her. He was quite the mess, his quills still thoroughly overgrown and his fur made mismatched lengths by the injuries he had sustained across this second life, but the warmth behind his smile still shined through. Though his form was slightly different to the Silver she'd known, that smile told her that the naïve hedgehog she'd once known lived on in this new shell. As his eyes finally reopened, she recognised the flash of excitement in them.

"W-Well then, my knight," He was struggling to keep a straight face as he continued her joke, "I made a promise to you once, I don't intend to let it break again," He was playing his role from way back then, perfectly falling back into it, "Now that I've arrived in your tower, I would ask no more than the same from you."

"If that is truly all you wish, my dear princess, then of course, I agree to your terms," At this distance, though she'd been distracted, the scent of salt, smoke and sweat was deeply rooted in his person. Where her soft fur met with his coarser fluff, she could feel the bizarre friction; she'd given him some care yesterday, but it hadn't been enough. No matter how nice he looked with that skyline behind him, there was no denying the truth, "Come on, I'll draw you a bath. You're filthy."

"I jumped in the sea this morning though," He earnestly responded, looking down at himself, "I thought that would be good enough… it took ages to dry off."

"You're still so naïve," He still had so much to learn about living normally, let alone this world, "Just as it's a knight's job to protect the princess, it's my job to look after you. You're dirty, hurt, overgrown…" She noticed that his gaze had drifted past her, his nose was wrinkling. A glance over her shoulder revealed her cold dish of rice and fish, "And clearly famished. Let's get you more comfortable. I won't let you struggle alone for another moment."

All it took was another tug at his wrist to pull his stupefied frame after her. Though this wasn't the role she'd been reborn into, she knew it was the one she suited far better. That and, as the innocently perplexed look on his face proved, he did make for a rather adorable damsel, even if he didn't much need the guardian's more literal protecting.

#silvaze #Blaze the Cat #Silver the Hedgehog #sonic the hedgehog #sonic #silver and blaze

22 notes · View notes

arcticdementor · 3 years

Link

In the summer of 2014, I gave birth to a baby boy. He was born with a perfect Apgar score, after a very easy delivery. But my labor had not been smooth—in fact, throughout the day and a half of contractions, I believed there was something decidedly wrong. I also felt that way as I held him for the first time, and he writhed violently under my hands. In a video taken about 10 minutes after he was born, he can be seen lifting his head up off my chest. “Ooooh, look at how advanced he is!” someone can be heard trilling in the background, before her voice is overtaken by my own. “Don’t do that, love,” I say. Then, to the camera: “Does he seem like he’s in pain to you?”

It took my husband and me three years to understand that in fact I was right that day in the delivery room. Our son was hurt. And it will take him years to heal—longer than it should have, and that is on top of the injustice of the original wound—though I thank God every day that we figured it out.

The first breakthrough came when my husband David remembered a book about brain science he had read a decade earlier, by a doctor named Norman Doidge. It changed our lives, by allowing us to properly understand our son’s injury (and to understand why we couldn’t manage to get a straight answer about it from any of the “experts” we had seen). It’s been a tough road, but from that moment on, we at least knew what to do—and why.

A year or so later, we met Doidge and his wife, Karen, for dinner, and it is here that the story may become pertinent for you.

After we ordered, I told Norman I had a question I’d been wanting to ask—and that I wanted his honest answer to it, even if it meant that I had done something wrong. I proceeded to relay to him the entire tale, from the very beginning to that very moment, of what felt to me like our Kafkaesque medical mystery journey.

How was it, I then asked, that it took my husband and me—both children of doctors, both people with reporting and researching backgrounds, among the lucky who have health insurance, and with access through family and friends to what is billed as the best medical care in the country—years to figure this out, and that in the end we only did so basically by accident?

Norman looked at us sympathetically. “I don’t know how else to tell you this but bluntly,” he said. “There are still many good individuals involved in medicine, but the American medical system is profoundly broken. When you look at the rate of medical error—it's now the third leading cause of death in the U.S.—the overmedication, creation of addiction, the quick-fix mentality, not funding the poor, quotas to admit from ERs, needless operations, the monetization of illness vs. health, the monetization of side effects, a peer review system run by journals paid for by Big Pharma, the destruction of the health of doctors and nurses themselves by administrators, who demand that they rush through 10-minute patient visits, when so often an hour or more is required, and which means that in order to be ‘successful,’ doctors must overlook complexity rather than search for it ... Alana, the unique thing here isn’t that you fell down so many rabbit holes. What’s unique is that you found your way out at all.”

I had barely started processing this when Norman moved to change the subject: “Now, can I ask you two something? How come so much of the journalism I read seems like garbage?”

Oh, God.

David and I looked at each other, simultaneously realizing that the after-school special we thought we were in was actually a horror movie. If the medical industry was comprehensively broken, as Norman said, and the media was irrevocably broken, as we knew it was ... Was everything in America broken? Was education broken? Housing? Farming? Cities? Was religion broken?

Everything is broken.

…

For seven decades, the country’s intellectual and cultural life was produced and protected by a set of institutions—universities, newspapers, magazines, record companies, professional associations, cultural venues, publishing houses, Hollywood studios, think tanks, etc. Collectively, these institutions reflected a diversity of experiences and then stamped them all as “American”—conjuring coherence out of the chaos of a big and unwieldy country. This wasn’t a set of factories pumping out identical widgets, but rather a broad and messy jazz band of disparate elements that together produced something legible, clear, and at times even beautiful when each did their part.

…

This was the tinder. The tech revolution was the match—one-upping the ’70s economy by demanding more efficiency and more speed and more boundarylessness, and demanding it everywhere. They introduced not only a host of inhuman wage-suppressing tactics, like replacing full-time employees with benefits with gig workers with lower wages and no benefits, but also a whole new aesthetic that has come to dominate every aspect of our lives—a set of principles that collectively might be thought of as flatness.

Flatness is the reason the three jobs with the most projected growth in your country all earn less than $27,000 a year, and it is also the reason that all the secondary institutions that once gave structure and meaning to hundreds of millions of American lives—jobs and unions but also local newspapers, churches, Rotary Clubs, main streets—have been decimated. And flatness is the mechanism by which, over the past decade and with increasing velocity over the last three years, a single ideologically driven cohort captured the entire interlocking infrastructure of American cultural and intellectual life. It is how the Long March went from a punchline to reality, as one institution after another fell and then entire sectors, like journalism, succumbed to control by narrow bands of sneering elitists who arrogated to themselves the license to judge and control the lives of their perceived inferiors.

Flatness broke everything.

…

Today’s revolution has been defined by a set of very specific values: boundarylessness; speed; universal accessibility; an allergy to hierarchy, so much so that the weighting or preferring of some voices or products over others is seen as illegitimate; seeing one’s own words and face reflected back as part of a larger current; a commitment to gratification at the push of a button; equality of access to commodified experiences as the right of every human being on Earth; the idea that all choices can and should be made instantaneously, and that the choices made by the majority in a given moment, on a given platform represent a larger democratic choice, which is therefore both true and good—until the next moment, on the next platform.

…

“You might not even realize you’re not where you started.” The machines trained us to accept, even chase, this high. Once we accepted it, we turned from willful individuals into parts of a mass that could move, or be moved, anywhere. Once people accepted the idea of an app, you could get them to pay for dozens of them—if not more. You could get people to send thousands of dollars to strangers in other countries to stay in homes they’d never seen in cities they’d never visited. You could train them to order in food—most of their food, even all of their food—from restaurants that they’d never been to, based on recommendations from people they’d never met. You could get them to understand their social world not as consisting of people whose families and faces one knew, which was literally the definition of social life for hundreds of thousands of years, but rather as composed of people who belonged to categories—“also followed by,” “friends in common,” “BIPOC”—that didn’t even exist 15 years ago. You could create a culture in which it was normal to have sex with someone whose two-dimensional picture you saw on a phone, once.

You could, seemingly overnight, transform people’s views about anything—even everything.

The Obama administration could swiftly overturn the decision-making space in which Capitol Hill staff and newspaper reporters functioned so that Iran, a country that had killed thousands of Americans and consistently announces itself to be America’s greatest enemy, is now to be seen as inherently as trustworthy and desirable an ally as France or Germany. Flatness, frictionlessness.

The biological difference between the sexes, which had been a foundational assumption of medicine as well as of the feminist movement, was almost instantaneously replaced not only by the idea that there are numerous genders but that reference in medicine, law or popular culture to the existence of a gender binary is actually bigoted and abusive. Flatness.

Facebook’s longtime motto was, famously, “Move fast and break shit,” which is exactly what Silicon Valley enabled others to do.

The internet tycoons used the ideology of flatness to hoover up the value from local businesses, national retailers, the whole newspaper industry, etc.—and no one seemed to care. This heist—by which a small group of people, using the wiring of flatness, could transfer to themselves enormous assets without any political, legal or social pushback—enabled progressive activists and their oligarchic funders to pull off a heist of their own, using the same wiring. They seized on the fact that the entire world was already adapting to a life of practical flatness in order to push their ideology of political flatness—what they call social justice, but which has historically meant the transfer of enormous amounts of power and wealth to a select few.

Because this cohort insists on sameness and purity, they have turned the once-independent parts of the American cultural complex into a mutually validating pipeline for conformists with approved viewpoints—who then credential, promote and marry each other. A young Ivy League student gets A’s by parroting intersectional gospel, which in turn means that he is recommended by his professors for an entry-level job at a Washington think tank or publication that is also devoted to these ideas. His ability to widely promote those viewpoints on social media is likely to attract the approval of his next possible boss or the reader of his graduate school application or future mates. His success in clearing those bars will in turn open future opportunities for love and employment. Doing the opposite has an inverse effect, which is nearly impossible to avoid given how tightly this system is now woven. A person who is determined to forgo such worldly enticements—because they are especially smart, or rich, or stubborn—will see only examples of even more talented and accomplished people who have seen their careers crushed and reputations destroyed for daring to stick a toe over the ever multiplying maze of red lines.

So, instead of reflecting the diversity of a large country, these institutions have now been repurposed as instruments to instill and enforce the narrow and rigid agenda of one cohort of people, forbidding exploration or deviation—a regime that has ironically left homeless many, if not most, of the country’s best thinkers and creators. Anyone actually concerned with solving deep-rooted social and economic problems, or God forbid with creating something unique or beautiful—a process that is inevitably messy and often involves exploring heresies and making mistakes—will hit a wall. If they are young and remotely ambitious they will simply snuff out that part of themselves early on, strangling the voice that they know will get them in trouble before they’ve ever had the chance to really hear it sing.

…

I’m not looking to rewind the clock back to a time before we all had email and cellphones. What I want is to be inspired by the last generation that made a new life-world—the postwar American abstract expressionist painters, jazz musicians, and writers and poets who created an alternate American modernism that directly challenged the ascendant Communist modernism: a blend of forms and techniques with an emphasis not on the facelessness of mass production, but on individual creativity and excellence.

Like them, our aim should be to take the central, unavoidable and potentially beneficent parts of the Flatness Aesthetic (including speed, accessibility; portability) while discarding the poisonous parts (frictionlessness; surveilled conformism; the allergy to excellence). We should seek out friction and thorniness, hunt for complexity and delight in unpredictability. Our lives should be marked not by “comps” and metrics and filters and proofs of concept and virality but by tight circles and improvisation and adventure and lots and lots of creative waste.

And not just to save ourselves, but to save each other. The vast majority of Americans are not ideologues. They are people who wish to live in a free country and get along with their neighbors while engaging in profitable work, getting married, raising families, being entertained, and fulfilling their American right to adventure and self-invention. They are also the consumer base for movies, TV, books, and other cultural products. Every time Americans are given the option to ratify progressive dictates through their consumer choices, they vote in the opposite direction. When HBO removed Gone with the Wind from its on-demand library last year, it became the #1 bestselling movie on Amazon. Meanwhile, endless numbers of Hollywood right-think movies and supposed literary masterworks about oppression are dismal failures for studios and publishing houses that would rather sink into debt than face a social-justice firing squad on Twitter.

#tablet magazine #alana newhouse #read the whole thing

2 notes · View notes

aion-rsa · 4 years

Text

Rome: The Long Road of the Original HBO Epic

https://ift.tt/36frbPD

It was the biggest show ever produced when it premiered on HBO. Filming in exotic international locations and on sets that went on for blocks, it was an epic spectacle that many whispered couldn’t be done on television. Not with its hundreds of extras in lavish costumes, and not with its cast of more than a dozen major characters. Yet HBO gambled big with a budget that exceeded $100 million on its first season.

These details might be mistaken by many as the genesis of Game of Thrones. But before HBO’s song of ice and fire, this was also the origin of the first actual modern TV epic. It was the story of Rome.

In its debut, Rome was even more gargantuan in scale and opulent in design than Thrones’ first few years. Filmed at the legendary facilities of Cinecittà Studios in the actual Rome, HBO and showrunner Bruno Heller oversaw a vast recreation of antiquity during the life and times of Julius Caesar. From the austere grandeur of the pre-imperial Roman Forum to the eventual seediness of the gangs on the Aventine Hill, the final days of the Roman republic were reimagined in sweaty, shocking, and spectacularly expensive detail.

“We used the most modern scholarship, which suggests that all the sculptures were painted,” Heller says over Zoom as we reminisce about Rome and its Cinecittà extravagance 15 years after the series’ 2005 premiere. Every morning Heller would be up at 4am, arriving early on set and getting lost in the art direction’s colors. “Walking out there at dawn into the Forum and seeing this world created, it was just magical. It gives me goosebumps now thinking about it, seeing a hundred [Gaul] tribesmen on horseback with great furry helmets charging down a hillside yelling, that sort of thing. No one makes things like that anymore. Even something like Game of Thrones would use CGI for the kind of things that we were doing for real.”

Actor Kevin McKidd, who played one half of Rome’s soul, the honorable to a fault Lucius Vorenus, expresses similar awe when he thinks back at what they accomplished.

“I mean listen, none of these budgets were small, but I think Game of Thrones ended up being smaller than ours,” McKidd correctly points out. Whereas Rome was budgeted at $100 million when it premiered, Game of Thrones debuted with a more reasonable starting price tag of $60 million. Says McKidd, “Ours, it was the first time anybody had tried this, so we just had to spend the money. And I think they figured out, it seems, ways to do it smarter or for less… because our show came out of the gate just huge and bawdy and big, and unapologetic.”

Heller is even more succinct in describing Rome’s making.

“Most films, and even TV, is planning for battle,” Heller says. “Planning for a big TV series like [Rome] is like planning for war, for a campaign. It’s invading Russia.” He pauses, “You have to think about the retreat, as well.”

This was Rome’s war: brief, bloody, and beautiful.

‘Very Unlikely to Be Made’

When HBO first hired Heller to take a crack at a Rome treatment, he didn’t think for a minute it would get made. In the early 2000s, HBO was a different place than it is now. The Sopranos and Sex and the City of course turned the premium cable network into the leader of the prestige cable revolution—or harbinger of peak TV as it would later be called—and the network had its eye on bigger and more dazzling projects. In 2001 HBO even released the most expensive miniseries ever up to that point with Band of Brothers. But that World War II-set series also had the names Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks attached as producers. The network still relied on bankability.

So when Heller took a meeting about Rome, he was acutely aware he’d be unable to lend that same prestige to a sword and sandals epic. He’d written some scripts before at HBO and admired the vision of then-HBO chairman Chris Albrecht and Carolyn Strauss, then-president of HBO’s entertainment division. But he was being called in to discuss a show based on a preexisting miniseries pitch by John Milius and William J. MacDonald—a pitch the network was already wary toward.

“It’s one of those projects that’s really going for broke and very unlikely to be made, [given] the budget that was required,” Heller recalls of HBO’s attitude toward Milius and his vision. “They were paying me to write a script to take it at least to a respectable point at which time they can say, ‘Okay, thank you.’”

Citing himself as “cheap” at the time, Heller recognized it was easier to pay a young writer for a treatment than a whole production crew for a pilot. So he used the opportunity as an excuse to immerse himself in Roman history and lore. This began via conversations with his co-creators Milius and MacDonald. Their central conceit already had in place the three characters of young Octavian, the boy who would be Augustus, first Emperor of Rome, as well as Roman centurions Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus.

In history, as with the series, Pullo and Vorenus were the only Roman soldiers who Julius Caesar mentioned by name in his journals. But other than being Roman centurions in the 13th Legion, not much else is known of the men. And Heller took his first major liberty when he lit on the idea of changing Pullo from a centurion to a coarse, insubordinate soldier beneath Vorenus’ command.

It was a savvy move that mapped the heart of the Rome series. Whereas most other fictions about this oft-dramatized era in history focused on the lives of the legendary patricians—be it Caesar and Octavian, or Marc Antony and Cleopatra—Rome would maintain all those characters and the lower tiers in daily Roman life. Through the introduction of Pullo and Vorenus, and their contentious friendship, the fall of the Roman republic suddenly becomes an upstairs/downstairs dramedy.

Says Heller, “The model that first sparked me on ‘oh, this is how to play it’ was [Tom Stoppard’s] Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, because the larger story is so well known, like Hamlet, that it’s hard to tell that story. The downstairs story has to be more compelling than the upstairs story, because the upstairs story, a little like Batman, is a given. It’s a myth. Everyone knows what happens.”

It also allowed Heller to dive into modern research.

“There was a lot of very recent scholarship at that time that transformed people’s sense of what Roman [history] was,” Heller explains. “There was much more about the everyday life of Roman people, about how people would have lived in apartment blocks in the insular working class life, and looking at it from that modern perspective.”

Reflecting on the dirtiness and filth that would be in the Roman Forum, the showrunner adds, “It’s lucky that practically every previous representation of Rome on any scale kind of went for the grand imperial late Edward Gibbon velvet drapes and marble columns. Even Gladiator went for that. Whereas, in fact, it looked much more like Calcutta or Bombay, and smelled like that.”

This also provided the writer the chance to explore Roman culture and custom with a greater push for authenticity than many Hollywood films of yore. For example, Heller attempted to learn how to read Latin at least as well as the uneducated Pullo—though he says he only got about as far as being able to recognize “oh that’s a pub” if he were walking the streets. More successfully he came to understand his vision of the Pagan working class mentality when he wrote a scene of Pullo praying to Portunus, the Roman god of locks and keys.

It all informed an extravagant treatment for a series he’d end up writing half the episodes of (and he tells us all 22 installments of the show passed through his typewriter before shooting). Yet, at least per the co-creator, what got Rome greenlit was as much his innovations as the developments of an entirely different epic series at HBO.

“[Chris Albrecht] was looking for something that had to be big and that they had to put money behind,” Heller says. “I think it was going to be Mel Gibson doing Alexander.” Indeed, at the same time HBO was developing Rome, the network was also working with the then-beloved Oscar winning director behind Braveheart for a 10-part series on Macedonian conquest.

“Then it turned out that Mel Gibson was going to do Alexander but he wouldn’t be Alexander,” Heller says. “[But] they didn’t want to be in business with Mel Gibson as a director-producer without Mel Gibson as [the star].”

As Gibson’s project imploded, Rome’s prospects would rise, sans any stars. Clearly things in the entertainment industry were about to change.

A Bottle of Tequila in the Roman Forum

When speaking with McKidd over Zoom, the actor’s affection for Rome is profound. Not 20 feet from his screen rests Lucius Vorenus’ sword, which he safely keeps in his own home. Similarly, within the actor’s mind resides nothing but warm memories. He reminisces about seeing his children spend summers growing up around the actual ruins of the Roman Forum and Colosseum during production; and he savors still the long nights at Cinecittà with British theater legends like Kenneth Cranham, a fellow Scotsman who played Pompey Magnus.

“It was an incredibly social time,” says McKidd. “It was almost like summer camp for British actors. We all got to live there; we went out for long dinners every night and we’d speak to Kenneth and all the older actors, who told us such amazing stories about all their time in the theater.”

But one relationship, perhaps the most significant of the entire series, was that shared by McKidd and his co-star Ray Stevenson, aka Titus Pullo. While there were of course other vital parts to the series, from worldly Ciarián Hinds as Caesar to Tobias Menzies’ despairingly well-intentioned Brutus—and one must never overlook Polly Walker’s Machiavellian Atia of the Julii (Heller’s favorite character)—the heart and soul of the series belongs to Pullo and Vorenus, the odd couple of 48 BCE.

Off-screen McKidd and Stevenson had known each other for years through mutual friends, but it wasn’t until they were in the final round of chemistry auditions in a Covent Garden hotel that they began a significant lifelong friendship. But then, it was a late epiphany to cast the red-haired and fiery McKidd as the straight-laced Vorenus.

For the actor, the process began early when he bumped into Heller, as well as executive producer Anne Thomopoulos and director Michael Apted, while in Romania. At the time, McKidd was there filming the TV movie Gunpowder, Treason & Plot (2004), as it was cheaper to shoot a period piece about 16th century Scottish court intrigue in eastern Europe than actual Scotland. The Rome team was entertaining a similar idea.

“I’m strutting around in my thigh-high leather boots and period costume, and we’re riding horses and swinging swords, and all that stuff and having a great old time,” says McKidd. “And I hear these American voices in the corridor, so I come out, and here is this guy called Bruno Heller.” They immediately got to chatting about the Danny Boyle movie McKidd did, Trainspotting (1996), and about this new TV series focused on ancient Rome. McKidd quickly prepared with his current director a film reel of himself riding horses.

Yet when HBO finally sent him a script, the producers didn’t want him for the Vorenus role; they saw him as Pullo.

HBO’s Rome Ending Was Originally Very Different

By David Crow

Movies

Why Gladiator Continues to Echo Through Eternity

By David Crow

On the casting process, McKidd remembers, “I said to them, ‘I’d love to come in and read, but I would really much rather read for the part of Lucius Vorenus.’ And they were like, ‘No, we really see you as maybe Pullo, can you read for Pullo?’ So I said, ‘Okay.’ So I came in and I read for Pullo. And they’re like, ‘Okay.’ Then a week goes by, and they call and they say, ‘We really love you, but maybe can you come in and read for Marc Antony?’”

So it continued until McKidd begged to get a screen test for Vorenus. It even took so long he initially considered turning the series down in favor of indie projects he was already committing to. That was at least a thought he had on the set of Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven (2005) until word got around at the pub to co-star Liam Neeson.

“I came down to the bar and Liam was pointing his finger at me and he was like, ‘You, I need to have a word with you outside,’” McKidd says. “And I was like, ‘Ah shit.’” Out in a snow-covered Spanish countryside, Neeson commanded, “Go to a phone booth, find a phone right now. Call your agent and hope and pray they haven’t offered that part to somebody else.”

They had not, and soon enough McKidd was flying alongside Stevenson to the actual city of Rome.

“I remember me and Ray going to Rome in the spring… with Michael Apted, walking around this back lot at Cinecittà, and it was all just scaffolding at that time, there was no frontage. I remember Michael turned to me and Ray and said, basically, we can’t fuck this up, because it was so huge. It was so beyond anything that any of us had ever seen.”

With red paint chipping across weathered doors, and mules grazing in the squares, a Roman Forum unlike any other came alive in the same space where Martin Scorsese just filmed Gangs of New York. The sense of size and scale was overwhelming, as was the pressure on Stevenson and McKidd to anchor it. Fifteen years later, McKidd is candid about how that tension shaped each man and, in the actor’s mind, the series.

During the last day of production on the first season, after shooting had wrapped and festivities began, McKidd and Stevenson found themselves sharing a quiet set of stairs leading up to their Roman senate. Between them was a bottle of tequila. Off in the distance, the faint sound of wrap party debauchery was rising to a muffled roar, yet the central stars of Rome were keeping their own company and having a long overdue conversation.

“I don’t think Ray would be mad at me for telling this story because we’re still close friends and I love him dearly,” McKidd says with a measured tone. “Initially, he and I clashed. We just had very different styles. Ray’s this big larger than life personality, and as Bruno would say, I’m much more this ‘Presbyterian,’ or you could say a little more controlling… and we ended up at loggerheads a lot, and fighting, and being difficult in the first season.”

Yet as McKidd is quick to point out, this translated to perfect chemistry on the screen, as Pullo and Vorenus were often “at loggerheads” during the first season, which culminated with Vorenus’ life imploding on the same day as Caesar’s assassination. Meanwhile Pullo found some semblance of peace. But here in the twilight of a recreated Roman Forum, the season was getting a much needed post-script.

“The wrap party is going on somewhere, and we can hear the music,” McKidd says, “and he and I just sat out there sharing the bottle of tequila. And we had it out, you know? Because we both had been holding stuff in for the season about things that annoyed each other… We got all of it off our chest and we ended up just having a huge hug, and we threw this bottle, this [now] empty bottle of tequila, into the middle of the Forum. We made a pact with each other that from that point on we were going to be the closest of friends, and we still are.”

In many ways, it mirrored the coming dynamic between Pullo and Vorenus in season 2, which McKidd likewise recognizes.

“Our bond was unbreakable in the second season,” he says. “You see that chemistry shift and move, and morph throughout the two seasons, and it pretty much tracks Ray and my relationship.” And it would prove indispensable that second year, especially as both characters, like their actors, were forced to close ranks and face that the end was nigh.

The Cost of Doing Business Like the Romans Do

Founded in 1937 by Benito Mussolini, the international renown of Rome’s Cinecittà Studios has long superseded its less than auspicious beginnings. Celebrated as the home to a highly skilled community of filmmaking artisans, Cinecittà’s name is inseparable with legendary filmmakers like Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini, and Sergio Leone. And it’s been the site of landmark Hollywood productions, such as Roman Holiday (1953), Ben-Hur (1959), and even the notorious Cleopatra (1963). Yet as Heller points out, no American production has been back to Cinecittà since Rome.

Says the creator, “It’s Italy, I love it, and it’s part of the culture, but you were there to be picked over and for them to, in completely formal and legitimately legal ways, take as much money out of the production as possible.” He pauses to smile and choose his next words carefully about the difference between shooting a movie and TV series in that environment.

“With a series, you’re making long-term relationships,” he continues. “It’s like a marriage. A movie is a one-night stand. You can be a bastard to everyone on a movie and you’re never going to see them again. So the result is more important than the relationships. In a TV series, the relationships are more important, in the end. It’s pointless having a successful first season of a show and then you can’t do the second season because no one will work together.”

This is not to say the only reason Rome was prematurely cancelled had to do with frustrations over the cost of doing business in Rome—McKidd also cites, for example, Rome eating up too much of HBO’s production budget from other projects in 2006. Nonetheless, reports of high-finance rigamarole even reached the cast.

Says McKidd, “I heard enough to know [about] the scaffolding. I don’t know how many tons of scaffolding was used to build that set, but I remember one of the earlier conversations was, ‘We need to buy this much scaffolding.’ And the people at Cinecittà were like, ‘You can’t buy that much scaffolding, but you can rent it from my brother.’”

Both Heller and McKidd insist there was no criminality or dishonesty about this, and it was simply the way things are done. But for the creator, word was executives high above his pay grade were disturbed by the Byzantine labyrinth of Italian politics. So much so it became contagious throughout Hollywood.

“At one stage, the Italian government issued arrest warrants or provisional arrest warrants for all the fiduciary producers of the show,” Heller recalls. “And that’s a sort of a standard Italian business practice, but when buttoned-down straight-laced lawyers from New York are flying out to Rome and discovering that this is [how business is done], people were spooked.”

It was also just a contributing factor to Rome’s untimely cancellation, which occurred during the pre-production process of season 2—and before the series’ popularity would explode with the international DVD sales and second season launch.

Heller was so far into writing the second season that they were in prep, gearing up to film the second season premiere, when he got the call it was over. The havoc this wreaked on Rome’s remaining 10 episodes, with one of them ready to shoot, was immediate.

When the first season concluded, Gaius Julius Caesar was dead, Vorenus had lost the love of his life, and Rome was headed toward civil war. The second season was always meant to be the fallout of that war, with a study in the brief and doomed alliance of Marc Antony (James Purefoy) and young Octavian (Max Pirkis), as well as the woman between them, Octavian’s mother and Antony’s lover, Atia. All of that, plus the death of Brutus and the other conspirators, would still occur in season 2… but so would Antony’s flight to Egypt and the eventual civil war between a now adult Octavian (Simon Woods) and Antony and Cleopatra (Lyndsey Marshal).

“I had to reconceive the second season basically from scratch,” Heller says with lingering exasperation. “Because when you take out that much history, the jump between the death of Caesar and Marc Antony taking over, and his death in Egypt, it was a huge amount of quite obscure but great, scandalous, fascinating, eventful history.” Most of it had to be jettisoned, too, between Brutus’ death and Antony declaring in his will that Caesar and Cleopatra’s son is Caesar’s true heir.

Some critics and fans were disappointed with the visibly breakneck pace of the second season. Others found it an exciting retelling of that period. One of Rome’s stars seems to be in the middle.

“I think the second season was successful in some ways, but it also feels, in my mind, a little rushed,” McKidd confesses. “And I think Bruno would say that too. Just because so much story was crushed and sort of concentrated down into season 2. I love [it], but I definitely felt like it was a lot condensed in.”

And yet, McKidd and Heller both seem to lean more toward a satisfaction with it. In fact, the producer even suggests the ending with the ascension of Octavian to imperial status (he takes the title “First Citizen”) was the perfect grace note. While it’s well known among fans the series had a five-season bible with Cleopatra and Antony’s deaths originally marking the end of season 4, and season 5 following Vorenus and Pullo going to Palestine in time for the birth of Christ, that was never Heller’s favorite part.

“That was one of the elements that Milius was fascinated by that I had no interest in whatsoever, frankly, trying to tie it in to the birth of Christ. Because, at the time, it meant nothing. It would have to be a completely different story. Put it another way, no Romans were worried or thinking about the coming of the Messiah.”

It was a Christmas story Heller didn’t want to tell. Even so, he had some interesting ideas already in place, including a vision of the ancient Holy Lands being closer to Monty Python’s Life of Brian than Ben-Hur.

“Palestine was in ferment at the time, and messiahs were popping up all over the place,” Heller says. “Judaism, at that point, was in a moment very much like Islam at the moment, full of passion and ferment and faith, and dreams of martyrdom.”

Like much else with Rome, it feels like a fascinating opportunity left unfulfilled, but one that the creator is glad to leave unexplored.

All Roads Lead to Rome’s Legacy

Rome shined briefly but brightly on premium cable. Premiering in the fall of 2005, it was gone by spring ’07. But even shortly after its cancellation, there were some small whispers of regret because of the show’s DVD sales; whispers that continue to be heard by stars of the series. McKidd says if you asked HBO in 2020, some would likely wince again at cancelling it, as he heard they did by the time season 2 aired. But “they couldn’t go back on that, or felt they couldn’t.”

But if it burned off like a Roman candle—with fire and thunder in its wake—the show still provided a roadmap for how to produce a massive spectacle as a television series.

“I think a lot of the producers that aren’t the ones that you hear about mostly, like Frank Doelger… were all pivotal on Rome and went directly into Game of Thrones,” McKidd says. “Frank Doelger was one of the main producers, and he very much was the guy who whipped our show into shape and we learned a lot of lessons. So yeah, I think very directly, those people went into Game of Thrones and had learned a lot about how to do this kind of level [of production.]”

Heller likewise marvels at how HBO learned from Rome’s problems with its initially more affordable and tighter fantasy epic.

“The way they divided crews up in Game of Thrones, it was clever because there was always a general staff of central command, but they had more than one general, and they didn’t lose control of the generals,” Heller says.

And just as Rome carved a path for the modern era of epic television shows, Game of Thrones has now created a space for more diverse TV epics like Netflix’s The Witcher and Amazon’s upcoming Lord of the Rings series.

“[We were] ahead of the curve in the sense that it was too early,” Heller says. “But it’s not so much the audience [changed], as it is the appetite and the ability of networks and studios to make things of that size and to promote them and to market them, and to have faith and the courage to back them up.”

This series walked so that Peak TV could run. It’s a formidable legacy, and one that proves all roads in blockbuster television really do lead back to Rome.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

The post Rome: The Long Road of the Original HBO Epic appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/38reEeK

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

3 notes · View notes

douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

Text

OK, I'LL TELL YOU YOU ABOUT IDEAS

Object-oriented programming in the 1980s. If it can work to start a startup. Instead of building stuff to throw away, you tend to want every line of code to go toward that final goal of showing you did a lot of startups grow out of them. Already spreading to pros I know you're skeptical they'll ever get hotels, but there's no way anything so short and written in such an informal style could have anything useful to say about such and such topic, when people with degrees in the subject have already written many thick books about it. Those are both good things to be. I don't mean that as some kind of answer for, but not random: I found my doodles changed after I started studying painting. When someone's working on a problem that seems too big, I always ask: is there some way to give the startups the money, though. What would it even mean to make theorems a commodity? There seem to be an artist, which is even shorter than the Perl form.1 However, a city could select good startups.2

Tcl, and supply the Lisp together with a complete system for supporting server-based applications, where you can throw together an unbelievably inefficient version 1 of a program very quickly. Or at least discard any code you wrote while still employed and start over. But a hacker can learn quickly enough that car means the first element of a list and cdr means the rest. If an increasing number of startups founded by people who know the subject from experience, but for doing things other people want. It could be the reason they don't have any.3 An interactive language, with a small core of well understood and highly orthogonal operators, just like the core language, that would be better for programming. The more of a language as a set of axioms, surely it's gross to have additional axioms that add no expressive power, simply for the sake of efficiency.

One of the MROSD trails runs right along the fault. When you're young you're more mobile—not just because you don't have to be downloaded. The fact is, most startups end up doing something different than they planned. The three old guys didn't get it. PL/1: Fortran doesn't have enough data types. What programmers in a hundred years? Just wait till all the 10-room pensiones in Rome discover this site.4 Common Lisp I have often wanted to iterate through the fields of a struct—to push performance data to the programmer instead of waiting for him to come asking for it. It would be too much of a political liability just to give the startups the money, though. And they are a classic example of this approach. For one thing, real problems are rare and valuable skill, and the de facto censorship imposed by publishers is a useful if imperfect filter.

I'm just not sure how big it's going to seem hard. Often, indeed, it is not dense enough. If the hundred year language were available today, would we want to program in today. Of course, the most recent true counterexample is probably 1960. A friend of mine rarely does anything the first time someone asks him. As a young founder by present standards, so you have to spend years working to learn this stuff. The market doesn't give a shit how hard you worked.

You can write programs to solve, but I never have. One advantage of this approach is that it gives you fewer options for the future. Otherwise Robert would have been too late. Look at how much any popular language has changed during its life.5 Java also play a role—but I think it is the most powerful motivator of all—more powerful even than the nominal goal of most startup founders, and I felt it had to be prepared to explain how it's recession-proof is to do what hackers enjoy doing anyway. The real question is, how far up the ladder of abstraction will parallelism go? Anything that can be implicit, should be. New York Times, which I still occasionally buy on weekends. So I think it might be better to follow the model of Tcl, and supply the Lisp together with a lot of them weren't initially supposed to be startups. It's because staying close to the main branches of the evolutionary tree pass through the languages that have the smallest, cleanest cores. The way to learn about startups is by watching them in action, preferably by working at one. At the very least it will teach you how to write software with users.

Few if any colleges have classes about startups. All they saw were carefully scripted campaign spots. It might help if they were expressed that way. It's enormously spread out, and feels surprisingly empty much of the reason is that faster hardware has allowed programmers to make different tradeoffs between speed and convenience, depending on the application.6 At the top schools, I'd guess as many as a quarter of the CS majors could make it as startup founders if they wanted is an important qualification—so important that it's almost cheating to append it like that—because once you get over a certain threshold of intelligence, which most CS majors at top schools are past, the deciding factor in whether you succeed as a founder is how much you want to say and ad lib the individual sentences. This essay is derived from a talk at the 2005 Startup School. Preposterous as this plan sounds, it's probably the most efficient way a city could select good startups. Most will say that any ideas you think of new ideas is practically virgin territory. Exactly the opposite, in fact. Whatever computers are made of, and conversations with friends are the kitchen they're cooked in.7 That was exactly what the world needed in 1975, but if there was any VC who'd get you guys, it would at least make a great pseudocode.

If this is a special case of my more general prediction that most of them grew organically. Writing software as multiple layers is a powerful technique even within applications. The more of your software will be reusable. Using first and rest instead of car and cdr often are, in successive lines. Of course, I'm making a big assumption in even asking what programming languages will be like in a hundred years? It must be terse, simple, and hackable. It becomes: let's try making a web-based app they'd seen, it seemed like there was nothing to it. Both customers and investors will be feeling pinched.8

The main complaint of the more articulate critics was that Arc seemed so flimsy. That's how programmers read code anyway: when indentation says one thing and delimiters say another, we go by the indentation. You need that resistance, just as low notes travel through walls better than high ones. Maybe this would have been a junior professor at that age, and he wouldn't have had time to work on things that maximize your future options. How much would that take? It's important to realize that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand.9 You'll certainly like meeting them. It's not the sort of town you have before you try this. This essay is derived from a talk at the 2005 Startup School. I'm not a very good sign to me that ideas just pop into my head.

Notes

Dan wrote a prototype in Basic in a series A rounds from top VC funds whether it was 10.

With the good groups, just harder. Which in turn the most successful founders still get rich from a startup could grow big by transforming consulting into a great one.

There are two simplifying assumptions: that the only way to create events and institutions that bring ambitious people together. A has an operator for removing spaces from strings and language B doesn't, that's not as facile a trick as it was putting local grocery stores out of their portfolio companies. If the next one will be familiar to anyone who had worked for a really long time? One new thing the company they're buying.

If I paint someone's house, the growth in wealth in a bar. I didn't need to warn readers about, just as much the better, but they start to be about 50%. Together these were the impressive ones. Other investors might assume that P spam and P nonspam are both.

All he's committed to is following the evidence wherever it leads. The point where things start with consumer electronics.

If they're on boards of directors they're probably a cause them to keep them from the VCs' point of a press hit, but that we wouldn't have understood why: If you have two choices and one or two, and so on. But if so, or in one where life was tougher, the same reason parents don't tell the whole story. Incidentally, the switch in mid-twenties the people they want.

Trevor Blackwell points out, First Round Capital is closer to a clueless audience like that, except in the median VC loses money. Unless of course reflects a willful misunderstanding of what you care about, just those you should seek outside advice, and this trick, and so don't deserve to keep them from leaving to start or join startups. There is not much to seem big that they only even consider great people.

You also have to do it right. In every other respect they're constantly being told that they are bleeding cash really fast. Probably more dangerous to Microsoft than Netscape was.

In theory you could probably improve filter performance by incorporating prior probabilities. If you have the concept of the reason for the coincidence that Greg Mcadoo, our contact at Sequoia, was no great risk in doing a small proportion of the subject of language power in Succinctness is Power. As I was there was near zero crossover. Some urban renewal experts took a shot at destroying Boston's in the evolution of the next year they worked.

1 note · View note

a-very-fond-farewell · 4 years

Text

The forbidden crack! Untamed prompts: 15/? Kimi no Na Wa AU: “Seamless” [ok I changed stuff bc I’m well on my way to thirty and teenage love is fun and fresh until you realize you could technically be a parent yourself and then it’s all downhill from there. so the characters are adults, sorry about that] [title comes from (what I understand to be) a way of saying that goes “a goddess’s robe is seamless” which (supposedly) should mean a great plan coming together –which reminded me of fate and time and the whole underlying plot of the movie– or something perfect/the product of perfect craftsmanship. I was looking for info about weaving procedures and I stumbled across this:

From Wikipedia, under “Loom” “In Tang Dynasty, China, the goddess weaver floated down on a shaft of moonlight with her two attendants. She showed the upright court official Guo Han in his garden that a goddess's robe is seamless, for it is woven without the use of needle and thread, entirely on the loom. The phrase "a goddess's robe is seamless" passed into an idiom to express perfect workmanship. This idiom is also used to mean a perfect, comprehensive plan.”

There’s also reference to the legend of Vega and Altair, which is what the Japanese festival tanabata is based on. And my creative juices gave me a sugar high so...yeah] * No matter how isolated Gusu is known to be, preparations for the upcoming July festival attract people from all over the country. Time has relentlessly transformed what used to be a secluded and safe place for people to meditate in into a tourist location known for its cold springs and breathtaking sceneries. Yet, Lan Zhan wonders what cities and stories could possibly hide behind those mountains he has known for all his life.

Managing the temple of the goddess along with his older brother and uncle should bring him joy, but deep down he knows he’s still living beside them more out of obligation than anything else. Lan Huan himself feels trapped behind the usual mask of politeness and fake smiles, his heart still bleeding for the loss of his two precious friends in the span of five years. Their uncle Lan QiRen well may have taken them in when they were mere children, stepping in to take care of them in place of their mourning father after losing his wife... but Lan Zhan knows his brother doesn’t want to disappoint their elder in any way.

Falling in love not once, but two times in a lifetime should not be frowned upon... but Lan QiRen couldn’t stomach the idea of one of his nephews falling for a man the first time, let alone the second. Just having said goodbye to Nie MingJue when they were mere teenagers after their uncle had prohibited him from meeting with his nephew, Lan Huan thought he could have another chance at happiness with Meng Yao in his twenties... just for the other man to fall ill and move country to look after himself. Ever since, Lan Huan has stopped believing in ever being able to find happiness for himself and decided to accept his fate and manage the temple like their uncle did for most of his life.

The idea of celibacy doesn’t sit well with Lan Zhan, not for himself and certainly not for his heartbroken brother, but life outside Gusu seems so far away and unapproachable. Without them the ancient tradition of working the loom to create seamless robes would perish and most of the profits from the temple would fall dry if not for their hard work. Their mother used to be a seamstress herself, teaching them how to weave without breaking the delicate thread, setting the rhythm of their hearts with her feet moving on the pedals as they watched her work her magic day after day. Their robes are still valued for their absolute perfection, even if nowadays they’re bound to be bought not by emperors or kings, but by celebrities and politicians who just want to boast their ego in front of cameras and flashing lights. The set Lan Zhan himself has been working on will take another three months to finish and on top of that he uses his spare time to make the ribbons they sell at the local gift shop while his brother prepares the traditional talismans by hand, his calligraphy as delicate as the products of their weaving.

As the nights of the local festival approach and they practice the rituals in full traditional gear more to appease the tourists than anything else, Lan Zhan feels getting more and more tired the longer he wears the long wig and the heavy robes himself, wishing his heart could stop being so ungrateful for the life he was entrusted with. But the news of a comet quickly approaching them brings the promise of change as Lan Zhan looks up at the sky and wishes he was born in a different body. Just for once. Just to live at least once in that existence of his.

[more under the cut]

Wei Ying is in university (engineering major), living with his brother Jiang Cheng (marine biology major) in their sister’s tiny ass apartment. They keep her company while she waits for baby Jin Ling to be born, ZiXuan working day and night in the hospital fresh out of med school to get their family a bigger house. Wei Ying and Jiang Cheng moved in from the tiny Yunmeng and secretly hate the big city life, but their studies come first and they didn’t want to leave YanLi alone while pregnant. Their parents are still working in the countryside and couldn’t properly care for her, living so far away in Lanling.

Wei Ying works part time in a bar and the usual routine is so rooted in his system that he doesn’t even care anymore. Study, eat, work, sleep. Rinse and repeat. He would like to think his brother has it easier than him, but he’s even more elusive than him, studying in the library until his night shift in an art gallery as a guard. The poor guy doesn’t even sleep, let alone have a social life. Spring has just begun and YanLi still has a trimester to go, her spirits low even if she loves her child very much already. Keeping her company and helping her leading a normal life is their priority as her brothers, but sometimes Wei Ying wishes things were easier.

He doesn’t really want to become an engineer, or, at least... he used to want that. But he’s more interested in actually making stuff instead of taking a hundred calculus classes per semester. He wishes he could enjoy his studies more and maybe get a girlfriend or boyfriend to pass the time, not that he believes in romance or anything. Commitment sounds scary.

One day he wakes up and... nah, he’s still dreaming. The ceiling is wrong, he doesn’t live in an old traditional cottage with a view on... wtf is that a mountain? Fuck that he doesn’t have time to waste, he has a test today. Studied hard enough last night he fell asleep on the desk... better start getting ready.

So he goes to the bathroom and showers, too tired to even open his eyes. But the shampoo smells all wrong, what even is sandalwood? And he doesn’t like mint toothpaste. And why are his clothes a size bigger? He doesn’t even own a button down, what in the...?

Who the fuck is that in the mirror??!?

On the other hand, Lan Zhan wakes up on a desk, drool on the books, late for a test an angry stranger reminds him he has to take in half an hour at best. He is presented with a soup his body mechanically ingests out of habit as he tries to politely nod to whatever the kind woman in front of him is saying. (“You look sick, are you really okay?” / “A-Jie stop babying him” / “But I’ve never seen him so... quiet?” / “He’s probably pretending so that he can skip his test.”) But if he really has given his word for such a commitment... maybe he should just go.

Still, he doesn’t remember going to any university. That may be a problem.

His body feels different, but he never paid attention to his reflection. They don’t even own mirrors back at home anyway. He doesn’t remember his hair reaching well over his ears and under his jaw. Should he consider asking his brother to cut it for him? It feels greasy, should he fix it or?

As he tucks a strand behind his ear he realizes something is terribly wrong. From the tip of his nose to the width of his shoulders, from the clothes he put on without even thinking. The window of the shop under the apartment he’s just left shows him a stranger that he cannot recognizes for the life of his.

And now some funny stuff:

(If you are not familiar with the movie, go watch it. But if you are you should be fine with the following list so... enjoy)

Jiang Cheng loves dogs, but Wei Ying is allergic and they cannot get a puppy... so he de-stresses at a local dog café whenever he can. Wen Qing works there even if she’s a cat person and comments on how he’s secretly planning to murder her so he can get her job. They’re good friends and dated for a while before Wen Qing understood her lesbianism was stronger and Jiang Cheng’s chaotic bisexuality was leaning more on the boy section of the partner store anyway. They bitch about everything and everyone anyway.

Lan Zhan (in Wei Ying’s body) manages to arrive in university and take the test, getting perfect scores even if Wei Ying’s never got such a high mark. For the rest of the day he roams Lanling in awe, believing it’s just a very nice dream. He also discovers the existence of pet bunnies in a pet store and his life changes.

Wei Ying (in Lan Zhan’s body) is a mess. Lan Huan immediately notices something is wrong, but he hasn’t really smiled in several months and whatever is happening to WangJi is extremely entertaining to him. He sees him skipping the morning prayers right in front of Lan QiRen’s salad (so to speak) and he doesn’t seem to remember the existence of their uncle’s punishing bamboo stick.

He also clearly never used a loom in his life, but luckily Lan QiRen is too busy to notice as he welcomes tourists in the temple and explains them the history behind it. Lan Huan takes “Lan Zhan” out for a stroll and they sit down as Lan QiRen’s mellow voice explains the legend of the weaver goddess and the importance of the artisanal work they still keep practicing to this day. Transfixed, “Lan Zhan” smiles big at his brother and Lan Huan knows for sure this is not his WangJi at all.

Wen Qing finds “Wei Ying” petting bunnies in the shop where her current girlfriend MianMian works and notices how... awfully quiet he is. She thinks he bombed the math test and might be sad, but he doesn’t seem to recognize her when she waves her hand at him. She then reminds him he should be getting ready for work and he blanches at the idea. Eventually asking her “where he’s supposed to depart for” and honest to the gods Wen Qing ends up convincing herself he’s high as fuck.

Imagine “Lan Zhan” being reprimanded by Lan QiRen for -gods forbid- laughing too loud? Asking for a beer at the local tea house? Saying out loud that he craves meat when he’s vegetarian? That’s just a dream for poor Wei Ying, whatever! He’s having a great time and Lan Huan is this close to lose it when they practice the traditional rites together and “Lan Zhan” doesn’t know how to put the long wig on anymore.

Now imagine “Wei Ying” not knowing how to use a shaker at work, or how to make a martini, or the fact that he and a boy named Wen Ning are actually coworkers and not strangers. He goes back home at 3am with the feeling he has forgotten something important, but when he finally (finally) finds his apartment he falls asleep on the doorway. Too drained by the city life to even change out of his uniform.

Next day there’s no switch: Wei Ying wakes up in his body by the doorway, with Jiang Cheng coming back from his night shift and panicking hard; Lan Zhan wakes up in his bed but he’s somewhat grounded at 20 for... drinking beer?

Technical stuff now!

Lan Zhan lives in 2010 and he is 20, Wei Ying lives in 2015 and he is 20.

It’s LXC who suggest his brother to keep a diary for his dreams if they get too crazy (later on it will be revealed something shocking about LXC, but for now the journaling is just a “suggestion”)

WWX and LWJ switch every other night or so, and things change when WWX wakes up in LWJ’s body and finds the diary.

They keep in touch with diaries [bc I don’t think LWJ would have a phone like...ever, but I digress]

WWX notices the two Jades of Gusu are kept outside of their peers’ circles because other people think their family is weird: they still use courtesy names; they don’t eat meat; most of their relatives are believed to have died in celibacy without actually being monks themselves; they don’t drink alcohol and are deemed unsociable... and so on.

But it’s when he overhears people bashing LXC for “his past with several boys” and for “running away from society like his father” that WWX (in LWJ’s body) actually loses it and starts a fistfight right then and there until those losers stop muttering behind their backs.

In the meantime, ZiXuan comes back home to surprise YanLi... and LWJ is there (in WWX’s body) and the younger man almost doesn’t let him enter bc he doesn’t know who this strange man is and what does he want from Jiang Cheng’s sister?

LWJ also follows JC to his night shift one day bc he’s never seen an art gallery (but apparently WWX often trails behind his younger step brother anyway, so JC doesn’t notice anything weird... aside from how quiet the other is)

JC then takes that opportunity to ask his brother (while LWJ inhabits said body) if... if he’s depressed and needs help [“Wen Qing saw you petting bunnies too many times for you to be ‘just fine’. You can talk to me.” / “it’s fine.” / “fuck that you’re not fine. Stop lying to me.” / “it’s just a transitional time for me, it will pass” / “who taught you such big words, what the fuck”] and then JC begrudgingly tells his brother than he loves him and doesn’t want him to be sad.

The next day WWX is back in his body and finds written down: “your brother tells me he loves you and that you should take better care of yourself” and WWX clowns the fuck out of JC the following day and JC is like “noPe. You’re fucking fine. Whatever, your fucking with me. You’re always fucking with me. Stupid of me to fucking care, gods forbid.”

LWJ starts developing feeling when he learns WWX defended Lan Huan + LWJ goes every night he can to the art gallery when he doesn’t have to work at the bar and learns there’s an entire section of the gallery dedicated to Gusu + but he doesn’t want to think about home for now, avoiding the exhibit, and so he learns more about JC and starts to think he would have lots of things to talk about with LXC.

Lan QiRen takes his nephews to their annual purification trip to Burial Mounds, to a cave hidden on the mountain where it is said the goddess met with her lover for the first time in the past. They leave their offerings and change the ropes securing the entrance of the cave with sturdier ones, which they have made themselves prior that year. It is said that whoever enters the cave will be granted a wish, so it’s responsibly of the Lan family to keep everyone else out until the lover of the goddess returns to be granted the wish to reunite with her. It’s a privilege the goddess has left for him to enjoy and no mortal should dare take that from him. Only those who wear the sacred headband of the Lan family can enter without being cast out of the cave and be forced to leave by the spirits.

WWX falls in love with LWJ a bit everyday: the little gifts and notes he finds on his desk for WWX to open and read every morning; the beautiful drawings LWJ makes of the mountains; the care he put in the white robes that should adorn a deity and not common human beings.

crushed with longing for WWX, LWJ wishes to meet with him one day (the real him) and so he runs away from Gusu on train and reaches Lanling and searches for him at the university. But he’s not there. He looks everywhere for him, but doesn’t find him. Until he stumbles into YanLi and it’s almost like there’s a wall between them: shocked, LWJ recognizes YanLi even if he knows she has never actually met him in real life; but the worst thing is that... she’s not pregnant. She’s not even at home as she usually is, but going to university herself and it doesn’t even seem like she’s even in a relationship with ZiXuan yet: the two of them not even sparing a glance to one another in the university corridors.

LWJ finds his words at long last, asking YanLi if her brother Wei Ying is well. She beams at him at first, elated to see her brother actually has friends outside of the family... “but you look around my age, right? What business do you have being friends with a fifteen year old boy anyway?”

Shocked, the last thing LWJ can do before leaving her alone is to give her a ribbon he made himself, the one that represents his heart. “I just know him by chance, he... he helped my brother once. I was wondering how to repay his kindness so I made this for him. Can you give it to him?”

That evening he goes back to Gusu and he prepares for the festival knowing the comet is coming. The last thing he wishes is to forget about Wei Ying, because -having realized there’s a discrepancy in timelines and that he has interacted with someone from the future for months now- he cannot possibly justify having developed feelings for a minor.

There are no more switches and WWX is left wondering what happened.

Now the sad part:

Under the weather for what happened, WWX follows JC around a lot and he even adopts a couple of bunnies to cope. YanLi is closer and closer to the due date and gets restless, forcing her brothers to clean up the entire apartment with her until everything sparkles for the baby’s arrival. They dig out an old box with all of YanLi’s stuff from university and LWJ’s ribbon appears out of nowhere. WWX immediately recognizes it for what it is.

[“I’m sorry A-Ying, I was supposed to give you this back then, but I forgot.” / “What are you taking about... why do you have a Gusu’s ribbon with you?” / “Ah, was your acquaintance from up there? He said you helped his brother once, or something like that... and he wanted to thank you. I’m really sorry.” / “How long ago was that A-Jie?” / “Five years or so? I think?”]

To this JC startles, saying that’s awfully weird, considering what happened to Gusu exactly five years prior. To which WWX is like ?pardon? and then JC takes them to the art gallery to the traditional art section, where the exhibit on Gusu is: there, WWX finally remembers how a relatively small rock has detached itself from the comet and destroyed Gusu in 2010 on the final day of the July festival.

On a display there, the siblings find one of the few things spared by the fire: an unfinished set of robes weaved with the precious heavenly silk, which was said to be made from the stars themselves.

Wei Ying cries all of his tears, neither JC or YanLi can console him and the only thing they come up with is that -maybe- their brother felt bad for forgetting to cherish a friendship... but they don’t remember if he had reacted so badly five years ago when the news of the fire at Gusu broke.

In the middle of the night, with the ribbon secured around his wrist, Wei Ying runs away and takes a train to Gusu. There are no more direct lines and he has to hike all the way up there... just to see a lake where the town was supposed to be. The crater so big it swallowed the ground where half of the city used to be.

Desperate, he wanders the mountains without knowing where to go, until his feet take him to the secluded path Uncle QiRen took him once. He follows it, noticing the same ribbons knotted around the trees he saw the first time he walked there. He follows the path and reaches the cave.

Inside, nothing happens. The talismans are still there, but -as he imagined (*eyeroll emoji*)- there’s no actual magic preventing him from entering. So he jumps over the white ropes made of ribbons and silk and gets inside the cave of Burial Mounds. He takes shelter there from the storm outside and thinks of Lan Zhan, of how much he misses him. And then he cries thinking about him and his brother and their uncle and the entire Gusu: because none of them deserved to die. And he wishes he can rewind time and save them all.

He faints in the cave and his wish is granted.

Now for the good part!

He wakes up in LWJ’s body (in 2010), the day after the boy’s impromptu trip to Lanling, the last day of the July festival. He gets to work as soon as he goes downstairs, determination painting his (well, LWJ’s) features to the point Lan Huan notices... and he has to say something.

While they ate breakfast, out of Lan QiRen’s sight, Lan Huan sits his “brother” down and tells him something unexpected: that he used to switch bodies with not one but with two people at the same time, NMJ and JGY.

That he managed to finally meet NMJ in their teens when the older boy came to Gusu for a school trip... but he didn’t want to leave bc he had finally found LXC and didn’t want to part ways. Lan QiRen put end to the older boy’s silly antics and the two friends agreed to meet in secret, before Lan Huan put a end to the relationship for fear of displeasing his uncle. The three friends kept switching bodies until one day they stopped.

Then Meng Yao came to find him and told him he had discovered the truth of what happened: that NMJ had a car accident and lost most of his memories of their years as friends and that now was living somewhere else with the woman he fell in love with. Meng Yao himself tried to live in Gusu for a few years afterwards, regardless of his poor health, eventually deciding to not make Lan Huan worry and disappeared without a word to take care of himself (or to die far away enough so that Lan Huan didn’t have to see him at his worst).

Lan Huan said that it took him years to remember their names and that he was able to finally utter them in front of his brother only the previous year, at the last July festival. He also reveals WWX that trying to remember something so simple caused him great pain, to the point he believed he could let himself die that way, starving himself from human connection.

Impressed and sorrowful, WWX cries for him and wishes things were different for Lan Huan, who’s only 23 and yet had suffered more than anyone else. But Lan Huan is content with what he has, even if he feels guilty for being the reason Meng Yao neglected his health. Yet he’s happy for NMJ and doesn’t regret befriending them at all.

With his help, WWX alerts people in Gusu: LXC finally standing up for himself against their uncle in order to gain his respect and convince him of the emergency at hand.

On the other hand, LWJ wakes up in the cave in WWX’s body (in 2015) and doesn’t know why he’s there. Yet he knows the way out and travels back following the ribbons... but when he reaches Gusu he sees there’s only a crater filled with water and doesn’t know what to do. He knows of the time discrepancy between the two realities, but he doesn’t know what to think.

WWX realizes LWJ must be in his body somewhere on the Burial Mounds, from the top of which Gusu can be seen, but he doesn’t know if he would find his own body in the cave, since the year now is 2010 and WWX reached the cave by himself only in 2015. Yet something tells him to go and so he leaves for the mountain.

On top of the Burial Mounds, he doesn’t find anyone.

But Lan Zhan is there, on the other side of the veil between present and future.

And as the light of the sun fades away and dusk approaches, Wei Ying enters his body and Lan Zhan gets back inside his own. They meet for the first time and Wei Ying doesn’t know what to say, having never seen Lan Zhan’s body from outside and feeling suddenly very self conscious and uninteresting.

To which Lan Zhan responds with “are you legal?” / “what the fuck Lan Zhan.” / “I gave you my ribbon. did you receive it?” / “yes, my... my sister gave it to me like, yesterday.” / “yesterday as in... what year?” / “2015”

And then Lan Zhan kisses the hell out of him because nothing screams romanticism to him like a relationship between two contenting adults and Wei Ying gets blissed out of his pants for that single kiss on the spot. In between kisses Wei Ying tries to convince Lan Zhan to stop, that there’s something they should remember... or at least something they should not forget.

But Lan Zhan does not relent, hugging and holding Wei Ying, finally... finally keeping him close and never letting him go.

Until Wei Ying disappears and the only thing left of him is the white ribbon Lan Zhan has given him.

They forgot to write their names, so that they would not forget them like LXC has done for years.

And finally.....!

years have passed, it’s the beginning of 2020 [sans quarantine, thank you] and Wei Ying has graduated and is looking for a job. He doesn’t remember Lan Zhan.

Jiang Cheng has found a job close to the sea at the local aquarium and the only thing he talks about on the phone is “how useless his new intern is. a nobody late bloomer who discovered the mountain wasn’t for him and decided to study in the opposite direction, go figure. Gusu must have bored him alright. but the other day he reminded me mountains are actually ancient reefs and now I think I’m in love.” So all is well.

(Gusu did not fall and everyone was evacuated in time. Lan Zhan had descended the mountain and made sure his brother got his backup in convincing their uncle of the emergency. He doesn’t remember either, but he always keeps his ribbon on his wrist, feeling like he’s waiting for someone to get it back.)

On a snowy night they cross paths on a pedestrian bridge, but don’t recognize each other... until Wei Ying’s scent of lotus reaches Lan Zhan. But the other has already disappeared behind a corner of the ever busy Lanling and they miss each other once again.

The following day, when Wei Ying has just dropped Jin Ling at his kindergarten and is about to cross a road, he sees a familiar face on the other side of the street. Both of them are talking to the phone: Wei Ying to Jiang Cheng, who’s calling him from a toilet, panicking about his first date with the intern; and Lan Zhan with his brother Lan XiChen, who’s waiting for his date to come back from the bathroom in the restaurant they chose to meet at.

As they walk towards each other they sense something, but don’t stop. Until they have now reached their respective sides of the road and realize what just happened. They turn around, but there are too many cars in between them.

They look for a way to meet and run towards a pedestrian bridge right above the road. They make the steps two at a time until they’re out of breath on top and stare at each other after so long. Wei Ying has lived for five years feeling like half of him was missing, but Lan Zhan had spent twice as long waiting for something to change in his life.

(“I’m still legal, you know?” / “That’s the first thing you decide to tell me after ten years? Really?” / “you thought it was romantic last time” / “what’s that supposed to mean?” / “that you should kiss me right the fuck now, you big oaf.”)

They meet in the middle of the bridge and kiss.

Then, Lan Zhan tilts his head and ask “what was you name again?”, clearly amused, and waits until Wei Ying’s laughter resonates all around.

The fucking end.

Now I need a break.

#mdzs #the untamed #mo dao zu shi #wangxian #cql #the forbidden crack! untamed prompts #mdzs/au: manga/anime inspired #mdzs/au: kimi no na wa

6 notes · View notes

morethanonepage · 4 years

Text

i’m angery

i know i’m mostly a star wars killjoy on tumblr dot com lately but allow me to SCREAM about my latest nemesis, a book called “American Dirt”:

Lydia Quixano Pérez lives in the Mexican city of Acapulco. She runs a bookstore. She has a son, Luca, the love of her life, and a wonderful husband who is a journalist. And while there are cracks beginning to show in Acapulco because of the drug cartels, her life is, by and large, fairly comfortable.

Even though she knows they’ll never sell, Lydia stocks some of her all-time favorite books in her store. And then one day a man enters the shop to browse and comes up to the register with a few books he would like to buy―two of them her favorites. Javier is erudite. He is charming. And, unbeknownst to Lydia, he is the jefe of the newest drug cartel that has gruesomely taken over the city. When Lydia’s husband’s tell-all profile of Javier is published, none of their lives will ever be the same.

Forced to flee, Lydia and eight-year-old Luca soon find themselves miles and worlds away from their comfortable middle-class existence. Instantly transformed into migrants, Lydia and Luca ride la bestia―trains that make their way north toward the United States, which is the only place Javier’s reach doesn’t extend. As they join the countless people trying to reach el norte, Lydia soon sees that everyone is running from something. But what exactly are they running to?

Written by one Jeanine Cummins, who has Puerto Rican ancestry but grew up in the MD suburbs (as I did, tbf) and in 2015 considered herself white (”I am white...in every practical way, my family is mostly white.” [cw for sexual assault and murder at the link]), everything I read about this book has begun to drive me to madness.

Recommended by the Mary Sue book club (the source of the above summary), it has since been retracted bc a) its sucks and b) THEY DIDN’T READ IT BEFORE PUTTING IT ON THE BOOK CLUB LIST (”I try to read most, if not all, of the books I recommend for the Book Club because I truly do love reading, and I want to make sure that if I suggest someone grab something, it’s something I can say I liked. When I was looking up two books to fill out the list, one of them was American Dirt. I saw that it had received a lot of positive press from Stephen King, Rumaan Alam, Don Winslow, Sandra Cisneros, and other literary news outlets including Oprah’s Book Club. It seemed like the type of literary fiction that’s always good for a book club read. I was mistaken.“)

Myriam Gurba, at Tropics of Meta, describes being asked to review it for a feminist magazine, and then being told her review was too negative to publish. It included gems such as:

Cummins bombards with clichés from the get-go. Chapter One starts with assassins opening fire on a quinceañera, a fifteenth birthday party, a scene one can easily imagine President Donald Trump breathlessly conjuring at a Midwestern rally, and while Cummins’ executioners are certainly animated, their humanity remains shallow. By categorizing these characters as “the modern bogeymen of urban Mexico,” she flattens them. By invoking monsters with English names and European lineages, Cummins reveals the color of her intended audience: white. Mexicans don’t fear the bogeyman. We fear his very distant cousin, el cucuy.

[...]

With their family annihilated by narcotraffickers, mother and son embark on a refugees’ journey. They head north, or, as Cummins’ often writes, to “el norte,” and italicized Spanish words like carajo, mijo, and amigo litter the prose, yielding the same effect as store-bought taco seasoning.

[...] Lydia’s husband, a journalist, describes her as one of the “smartest” women he’s ever known. Nonetheless, she behaves in gallingly naïve and stupid ways. Despite being an intellectually engaged woman, and the wife of a reporter whose beat is narcotrafficking, Lydia experiences shock after shock when confronted with the realities of México, realities that would not shock a Mexican.

It shocks Lydia to learn that the mysterious and wealthy patron who frequents her bookstore flanked by “[thuggish]” bodyguards is the capo of the local drug cartel! It shocks Lydia to learn that some central Americans migrate to the United States by foot! It shocks Lydia to learn that men rape female migrants en route to the United States! It shocks Lydia to learn that Mexico City has an ice-skating rink! (This “surprise” gave me a good chuckle: I learned to ice skate in México.) That Lydia is so shocked by her own country’s day-to-day realities, realities that I’m intimate with as a Chicana living en el norte, gives the impression that Lydia might not be…a credible Mexican. In fact, she perceives her own country through the eyes of a pearl-clutching American tourist.

Parul Sehgal, at the NYT, digs into the fact that while the motives of this book may be unimpeachable (tho: are they??), the writing itself is...perhaps less so:

I found myself flinching as I read, not from the perils the characters face, but from the mauling the English language receives. Lydia’s expression “is one Luca has never seen before, and he fears it might be permanent. It’s as if seven fishermen have cast their hooks into her from different directions and they’re all pulling at once. One from the eyebrow, one from the lip, another at the nose, one from the cheek.” Yes, of course. That expression.

Sehgal also highlights my favorite line I’ve heard about in this book: “when Lydia finds she is unable to pray, ‘she believes it’s a divine kindness. Like a government furlough, God has deferred her nonessential agencies.’” The Raised in the DMV Suburbs just JUMPED OUT, didn’t it, Jeanine? But like legit, why on earth would a Mexican bookstore lady’s frame of reference ever be A GOVERNMENT FURLOUGH and NONESSENTIAL AGENCIES. followers, i just about died.

David J. Schmidt, at The Blue Nib, calls out other inaccuracies and stereotypes:

It is worth dwelling on the character of Javier for a moment. A “drinking game” could be created based on all the Latin American stereotypes he personifies. Javier is dapper, yet dangerous. He is charming, yet mysterious. He wears a white guayabera, a shirt the author describes as “more suitable for Sunday Mass than a regular workday.” (Untrue—this is a casual garment, more suitable for a love affair in a Fabio-bedecked romance novel.)

This quintessential “Latin lover” shows up at Lydia’s bookstore and speaks to her in a tone significantly different from the other characters of American Dirt. I must emphasise, Javier’s dialogue does not reflect the normal speech patterns of Mexico, but perfectly reflects U.S. stereotypes. The only way to properly read Javier’s lines is through the most gross of caricatures.

One should imagine the husky voice of Antonio Banderas, speaking at his most sensual and Spanishy. Any character he has played in English will do, although it is clear that Javier was ideally written for the voice of Puss in Boots. When Lydia asks if Javier reads English, the dapper narco responds:

“I try, yes […] My English isn’t fluent, but it’s close. And this story is so delicate.”

[...]

The cultural inaccuracies of American Dirt run deep, right down to the language. Throughout her book, Cummins shows confusion regarding the grammatical genders in Spanish. Most notably, she baptises the drug kingpin Javier with the nickname La Lechuza. It is difficult to imagine a macho, womanizing capo using a feminine-gendered noun as his moniker. Would a hardened mafia boss call himself “The Princess of Compton” or “The Belle of Belfast”?

Cummins got a seven figure advance for this. A SEVEN FIGURE ADVANCE. She “wished someone slightly browner than me would write it,” but she did it, and her team is throwing around the fact that her husband’s previously undocumented status as some sort of justification without mentioning that he’s white & Irish.

Also, there’s this news:

Imperative Entertainment, the production banner behind the Clint Eastwood hit The Mule, has acquired the rights to American Dirt, the Mexican migrant drama novel by Jeanine Cummins.

Charles Leavitt, the scribe who penned the Leonardo DiCaprio drama Blood Diamond, has been tapped to write the adaptation, which will be produced by Imperative’s Dan Friedkin and Bradley Thomas.

Charles Leavitt is a white guy who, most recently, wrote the Warcraft movie. So, that’s going to end well.

I’ll leave you with this other gem from Gurba (from her essay about it, “Pendeja, You Ain’t Steinbeck “):

Susan Sontag wrote that “[a] sensibility (as distinct from an idea) is one of the hardest things to talk about” and with this challenge in mind, I assert that American Dirt fails to convey any Mexican sensibility. It aspires to be Día de los Muertos but it, instead, embodies Halloween. The proof rests in the novel’s painful humorlessness. Mexicans have over a hundred nicknames for death, most of them are playful because death is our favorite playmate, and Octavio Paz explained our unique relationship with la muerte when he wrote, “The Mexican…is familiar with death. [He] jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it. It is one of his favorite toys and his most steadfast love.” Cummins’ failure to approach death with appropriate curiosity, and humility, is what makes American Dirt a perfect read for your local self-righteous gringa book club.

so idk, The Mary Sue, maybe it should stay on your Book Club list after all. (Oh wait: as of this writing, it still is.)

#american dirt #sorry for the long post but as i said #i'm angery #long post #(also TBF: i think Schmidt dings the book for having a character named luca)#(my cousin named her son that)#(and it's not like mexicans can NEVER have foreign names [i mean -- SCHMIDT -- etc]#but it's a thing that maybe requires some explanation even if it is 'well she liked the italian version better'#(oh also you can be white and latinx)#(i think more accurately jeanine is white passing but)#(that's her deal to id with)#anyway this will be made into a movie staring whatshername from Knives Out and MAYBE diego luna as the dead hubby #but realistically oscar isaac bc they love killing him off

13 notes · View notes

tyrantisterror · 5 years

Text

REVENGE OF THE A.T.O.M. CREATE A KAIJU CONTEST!

Eons ago, when the earth was young, I held the first A.T.O.M. Create a Kaiju Contest, and creators like YOU populated my activity page with a legion of giant monsters! Now, years later, in celebration of publishing the first volume of The Atomic Time of Monsters, the contest calls to us once again, and it’s only grown bigger and spikier with age. If you wish to once more ravage the world with atomic titans of your own design, then please, read on after the cut to discover the rules of this thrilling kaiju role call!

Ok, for clarity’s sake I’ll drop the goofy melodramatic tone.

THE RULES:

1. This time around, you are limited to one entry per person. Last time we produced 60+ kaiju, which was awesome, but this time around I want to narrow the scope a little bit - especially if I end up doing something crazy and end up drawing them all like last time, since my carpal tunnel syndrome afflicted hand just can’t do what it did those years ago. Work hard and make your entry count!

2. Your kaiju must have some sort of description of its physical appearance and its personality - you can submit a drawing or a written description (or both!) for the physical appearance depending on what you’re most comfortable with. Using the ATOM kaiju file template isn’t required, but it was cool when people did it in the last contest, so feel free to do so this time too!

3. The kaiju you create must specifically be created for this contest - no repurposing characters you made for other, wildly different stories.

4. The kaiju must fit the setting and aesthetics of ATOM. I’ll explain this in more detail down below.

5. The kaiju should add something meaningful to the world of ATOM. What would be the point of having another fire-breathing t.rex monster? The more unique and interesting your kaiju is, the more likely you will win the contest.

6. The kaiju must be independent of the main plot of ATOM - not “Tyrantis’s long lost evil brother who’s the strongest kaiju in the world.” These should be to Tyrantis’s story what War of the Gargantuas is to Godzilla’s movies – heroes (well, monsters) of another story in the same world.

THE REWARDS:

I will make pencil sketches of the top 5 entries in the contest.

I will then make fully rendered illustrations (lineart, colors, & shading) of the top three entries.

THE DEADLINE: All entries must be submitted by August 9th, 2019. You can submit it here on tumblr, via the horror flora e-mail, or any other channel you know how to reach me through. I’m in a lot of places.

THE GUIDELINES (TO HELP YOUR ENTRY FIT THE RULES AND WIN)

The smartest thing you could do if you want to win this contest is familiarize yourself with the world of ATOM by, y’know, reading all the material I’ve published on the subject. In addition to the many kaiju files that are free to read on horrorflora.com, the first actual, factual novel in the series was published very recently (and, y’know, is the reason I’m holding this contest), which you can get from amazon in both paperback and/or kindle editions (I’d recommend the former over the latter since I lack the technology to make a really nice ebook, but if money is an object, the kindle version is only $1).

Kaiju/giant monsters in ATOM work under very specific rules. There’s a full description of those rules at this link, but here’s the jist:

Most ATOM Kaiju are tooth and claw fighters - ranged weapons are a rarity in this setting.

While the terrestrial monsters in ATOM look strange, they are intended to fit within the taxonomy of animals in reality - reptiles, mammals, fish, arthropods, molluscs, etc.

Kaiju appear on every continent in ATOM, but certain areas tend to be dominated by different types.

North America is mainly besieged by retrosaur kaiju and giant arthropods.

Russia is beset by prehistoric monsters that seem to come from the Cenozoic, particularly the Ice Age.

Western Europe is plagued by creatures that vaguely resemble creatures from myth, if they were also prehistoric. Dragon-y lizards, fiery birds, etc.

Venusians:

https://horrorflora.com/2017/01/03/atom-kaiju-file-29-karamtor/

Martians:

https://horrorflora.com/2017/01/17/atom-kaiju-file-39-kemlasulla/

https://horrorflora.com/2017/01/17/atom-kaiju-file-40-podritak/

https://horrorflora.com/2017/01/17/atom-kaiju-file-41-sombarvot/

https://horrorflora.com/2017/01/17/atom-kaiju-file-38-ullawdra/

Giant robots exist in ATOM, but are big, bulky, and incredibly expensive. Fancy beam weapons also exist, but are similarly clunky - there are no sleek, elegant machines in ATOM.

ATOM is a setting for stories that are focused on humanity learning to co-exist with monsters, rather than humanity destroying them. A certain level of sympathy is put into almost every creature of its canon, even the ones that are meant to be villains.

REFERENCE MATERIAL

Here is a playlist of 1950′s monster movie trailers.

Here is some reference material from various monster comics of the 50′s and 60′s.

Video of retrosaurs in action.

Finally, here’s the page for the original ATOM Create a Kaiju Contest, which has even more reference material for you to peruse.

#Revenge of the ATOM Kaiju Contest #The Atomic Time of Monsters #kaiju

93 notes · View notes