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[blackcur-rants]

Yet More Arcane Meta aka YET MORE META ABOUT ARCANE

So one of the (many) things that makes “Arcane” such an extraordinary show is the degree to which it is very much a show about science.

And not just in the sense that there are characters who wear long white coats and pour multi-coloured/colourful chemicals into test tubes so that they can reverse the Polarity of the Artronic Flow in order to do time travel experiments upon crabs and crustaceans, but rather the way in which the show is about the process of trial and error and experimentation and staying up late at night to make breakthroughs with discoveries, also known as the Scineitfic Method.

Piltover itself is essentially one big science experiment in motion, since, as Heimerdinger says in ‘Some Mysteries are better left unsolved’, the city was built to escape the warmongering of mages and build a society built upon the idea of progress rather than the inborn talents of magecraft and magicalness/magical power. Sadly, of course, that is very much not what happened and Piltover instead became a merchant capitalist oligarchy ruled over by a council of powerful merchant princes like a mixture of Nantucket, New Orleans, Venice, and Disney World that also treated its neighbouring sister city of Zaun like an absolute trash bin. And this, in turn, drives the inhabitants of Zaun to conduct their own experiments in building new societies, whether it is Vander attempting to build a community out of the disparate elements of the Undercity or Silco with his Shimmer experiments in creating soldiers and warriors to fight back against Piltover/Topside or Ekko building a strong and thriving new community in the midst of all the suffering and chaos or Viktor eventually trying to build his own commune with much more disastruous and tragic results, of course. All of these people are essentially doing a miniature version of what Heimerdinger was doing when he founded Piltover all those years ago. That is, trying to create a new and peaceful society that will be free from the suffering of the outside world. And in the end, it is Ekko who succeeds in building a new and good society because of the long process of trial and error and experimentation that began with everyone’s favourite little Yordle and continued with a certain bartender of the Last Drop public house bar all those years ago (no wonder Heimerdinger bonds so well with Ekko and follows him all the way into another time). It is, again, much the same as to how scientific progress and social progress are both done in our own world are built on the metaphorical shoulders of those who came before, with Ekko being almost the Newton to Heimerdinger as Abd al-Rahman Mansur al-Khazini or the Charles Darwin to Heimerdinger as Amr al-Jahiz. It is all a never-ending cycle of innovation and improvement that has no real beginning and no real ending whatsoever.

Which is why I find certain interpretations of Season Two’s ending a little suspect, in all honesty. Too many people in the fandom seem to think we are supposed to see the conflict between Piltover and Zaun as permanently and peacefully resolved when it really is not. The Council scene clearly shows us that most of the new members of the said Council hold Sevika in sneering contempt (although I think she can handle it and will manage to be really successful, strong, and capable as a leader of these two cities, if you know what I mean) and only Shoola is really willing to stand up for her at the present moment. As Caitlyn tells us in the show’s final monologue, “We, whose decisions led us here, will carry them forever. Our only consolation that, with every loss, we found some good, some light, worth gaining, worth fighting for. And though we are doomed to revisit the error of our ways, spark ever more conflicts, our story isn’t over”.

@disregardcanon @dachi-chan25 @angrylesbianbutch @flaretheidiot

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A big point of "Wicked" is that nobody is immune from propaganda and that anyone can fall into passivity in the face of oppression and fascism (especially when it's not super-obvious and in your face and you're mostly unaffected by it) and that even Elphaba herself had to unlearn a whole lot and we actually see her slip back into that mindset just a little during "Wonderful". It literally takes her seeing a literal reminder of how baaad things have gotten with Doctor Dillamond to snap her out of it. Like, this is not a story about Perfect Little Anarchist who always knew the State of Oz was messed up and never bought into it for one minute. It's the story of a person who was desperate for external validation that they almost fell headfirst into becoming a Fascist consigliere and only pulled back at almost the very last minute.

(It's also very much a story about how awful it is when Progressive spaces succumb to toxic infighting between Leftists and Liberals and meaningful change gets swept aside in favour of stupid, petty, and shitty little purity contests that help no one but the tyrants in power and set back meaningful change by decades or maybe even centuries and how we need to unite together as a progressive front to oppose fascism and protect people from its cruelty and oppression rather than said fighting over who is the best and most progressive person...)

It's a good musical, guys. It's a very good musical.

@cynicalclassicist @carcosa-commune @dachi-chan25 @disregardcanon

@glindaselphie

"Glinda is a cowardly little assimilationist who just worships the Wizard and wants him to like her!"

So was Elphaba for most of Act One all the way up to "Defying Gravity".

So was Fiyero for the majority of the story! But they forget that part lol.

“B-but he secretly loved Elphaba and was just pretending!!” Yeah so did and was Glinda for most of it. And Elphie knew that and loved her too but apparently they forget that part as well.

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Sidebar: Does the Prioress also have a strong belief in QAnon BS in this modern AU, by the way? I think that's kind of important to establish, in all honesty.

Also, does the Wife of Bath happen to be queer in this modern AU, by the way?

And is the Pardoner a gay dude who sells essential oils and/or NFTs, by any chance? I think that is also important to establish.

Modern-day Asianist Canterbury Tales AU set in a Beijing hostel bar. 

The Clerk is an underfunded fellowship-holder. The Wife of Bath accompanies her husband overseas for his job but subsequently separates from him. The Prioress is an NGO director with a suspiciously exquisite wardrobe. The Summoner teaches English, knows only five words of Chinese, and refuses to speak anything else when he’s drunk. The Pardoner runs a test prep venture and promises to get your kid into a fancy foreign university for a price. The Knight is an American foreign service guy, probably involved with some black ops shit no one wants to know about. His son attends a prestigious international boarding school and harbors political ambitions.

[blackcur-rants]

So Tony Goldmark on Twitter (I refuse to call it X) talked about how the scene with the Thunderbolts climbing up the elevator shaft to escape from Val’s base early in the film is probably a deliberate homage to the scene where Pacha and Kuzco have to escape from the canyon after the bridge breaks away in “The Emperor’s New Groove”. And he is very correct.

However, may I also suggest that the scene with the Void’s World that makes up the film’s climactic sequence is kind of a mixture of the Other World from “Coraline” and the climax/ending of “Paranorman”. You’ll know what I mean when you see it.

[blackcur-rants]

Guilt and Regret

“O tell us all about your adventures in India, Colonel Brandon!” Marianne begged as she looked up from her book of Subcontinental fairy tales, “I bet it was all the most wondrous thing!”.

Colonel Giles Christopher Brandon of His Majesty’s Royal Army looked around the room and sighed to himself as he thought about these things. He could feel the shadows of the room oppressively clustered around him, haunting him like ghosts of some long ago tragedy or confrontation that had clustered tragically and mournfully around Delaford in the long, long years since the land that was the property of the House of Brandon for oh so many years, ever since the days when the Conqueror Bastard had gifted these lands to Sir Robert Brandon and his two sons, Robert the Younger and Ralph who was the ancestor of the family’s main line. All around himself, Colonel Giles could feel the ghosts of his ancestors leering down at him from their portraits to judge him for his crimes and his sins and his misdeeds. He saw the images of his late father, Sir Charles Joseph Brandon, and of his mother, the equally late Edith Abigail Price. HE saw images of his deceased brother Elias Joseph Brandon, and of his sister Agnes Sophia Brandon, who was not dead but just in Avignon with her husband Emil Delacroix. He saw images of his grandfather, Colonel Thomas Brandon, who had been slain in a duel by Sir George Bertram of Mansfield some odd fifty years ago. He saw an image of his ancestor Sir John Brandon, a Royalist Cavalier who had fought and slain his own brother Phineas Brandon at Marston Moor at the height of the Civil Wars. He saw an image most ghostly of Sir Benedict Brandon, courtier to both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I and an early supporter of the Protestant movement in England in the olden Tudor days. He saw Thomas Brandon of the olden times, who had plucked the White Rose, unlike his father who had plucked the Red Rose during the old wars of Boar and Rose and had gone on to fight alongside his own son William at the Bosworth Field and won the crown for Harry Tudor at the hawthorn bush. He saw that Sir Roger Brandon, the father of the Lancastrian Richard Brandon, had won his own fame and glory and honours fighting alongside Prince Hal at Agincourt before serving as a bodyguard to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. He saw that Sir Philip Brandon who had served as a squire to Sir Thomas Darcy at that momentous battle wherein Jean of France had been captured at Poitiers. He saw Sir Reynard Brandon and his son Sir Joseph Brandon, the only ones of their family to have survived the Black Death of 1348 or so. HE saw the legendary Sir Fulk Brandon, a famous Templar who had served in the Holy Land with Richard the Lionheart during the Saladinian Crusade. He saw Fulk’s grandfather Sir Peter Brandon, who had fought for the cause of Henry FitzEmpress and FitzEmpress’ mother Matilda the Beauclerk’s daughter though both his father Sir Hugues and his grandfather Sir Eustace had sided with the Count of Blois. And he saw some of the women of his family as well, most notably that famous Edith of Broom Hill whose marriage to Ralph Brandon had given the family these estates through her lineage and connection to Wilfred of Broom Hill, the great landowner given these estates by King Alfred in 884 CE. He saw Grace Morton, wife of Sir Thomas Brandon and thus his own grandmother. He saw that Adelaide Brandon, who had so famously married Sir Thomas Woodhouse during the reign of Queen Anne. And there was his aunt Sarah Brandon, his great-grandfather’s other sister, who had married Sir Walter Halloway around the same time period as her sister’s marriage to Sir Thomas. He saw also Winifred Styles, wife of Sir Tobias in the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages, and thus mother to Josiah Brandon, alongside Josiah’s own wife Martha Wickfield. And there was Marianne Spencer-Brandon, wife of the famed Sir Elias Brandon who had lived in Elizabeth’s time and most beloved of her husband. All of them seemed to be staring down on Giles Brandon, judging him for his past sins and the things which he was about to say, and he prayed only that he would not ever have to tell it.

“If thou dost not mind, Marianne my beloved”, Colonel Brandon spoke at last with a tone of coolest determination in his voice, “I wouldst rather not speak of it!”.

“Oh please and please and please!” Marianne begged on and on and on in that pleading voice of hers to which Elinor had become so accustomed across the course of the many years that they had known each other together. Elinor rolled her eyes and smiled as Marianne made her pleas. The poor girl had, in the last few years or so, become rather fixated on the mythology of the Orient and wanted to know as much as she could about all the lands to the east of the mighty Euphrates, to the point where she had raided all the libraries around her seeking information about these mysterious lands. She had even gone so far as to the wholesale invasion of the library at old Longbourn House the last time they had been there, scattering books around in her quest for more knowledge and wisdom, much to Mister Edward Matthew Bennett’s complete and utter dismay. Eventually, it was even discovered that, although the family of Dashwood-Ferrars and Dashwood-Brandon had managed to evacuate the vicinity of Longbourn before anybody could get into even further trouble with the law of Mister Edward and his wife Margaret Gardiner-Bennett, that had not stopped Marianne from smuggling the very fairy tale book which her eyes were now so vividly consuming with her back to Delaford. Elinor prayed to God on High that they would not detect or berate the Dashwoods about this absence.

Colonel Brandon remained stiff-faced all the while Marianne was doing this. He was good at doing that, retracting his emotions into a shell of seclusion and quiet self-isolation and meditation whenever he was distracted or annoyed by somebody or something, and just wanted to have some time for himself and himself alone. He had a special sympathy for Marianne, though, and enjoyed spending time with her more than with most other people whom he knew from life to the point where they could enjoy extended periods alone in the library together with nobody else in the whole entire world but each other for company.

“Well personally”, Elinor said at last, breaking her silence as a favour to her young sister, “I think that it sounds like a fascinating story! And I would love oh so much to hear it”.

“Fine!” Colonel Brandon snarled out softly and at last, after oh so much hesitation, “However, I must wonder why you want to hear it, and would like to warn you that it is by no means whatsoever a pleasant or a cheerful story”.

“I would still like to hear it, however”, Elinor said, for she had something of a fondness for sad and tragic stories.

“Oh alright!” Colonel Brandon growled once again, “Though I do not think I shall enjoy telling it”.

“So as you should know, dear sisters and friends, I was born here in Delaford on the twenty-sixth day of July in the Year of Grace Seventeen-Hundred-and-Sixty, the son of Sir Charles Brandon and Edith Price. I was not the youngest of my family, but neither was I the oldest. I was my parents’ second child, born exactly two years and two months after my eldest brother Elias Matthew Brandon, who was the heir to our estate after my own father’s lifetime. I cannot say I was ever my parents’ favourite, for my father much preferred the sister who was born about three or so years after me and my mother always dwelt her attentions on Elias more so than me, but I was always my grandmother’s favourite”.

“Your grandmother?” Elinor asked once again with curiosity in her voice, “What was her name again, by the way? I think it was something like Jane Grace Martin or something like that”.

“Grace Jane Marston, her name was”, Colonel Brandon spat out as he sighed with amusement, “She was the daughter of Sir Robert Roland Marston of Yorkshire and Olivia Helene Powell of Wales. She was a scholar much like you, Elinor, and I think she would have liked you if we ever got to introduce ourselves to you. By we, I mean myself and my grandmother. She was a good woman and she would have liked you so, so much”.

Elinor chuckled to herself at this acknowledgement and asked Colonel Brandon the question of where his grandmother now was in life and time and space.

“She is dead now”, Colonel Brandon responded with frankness and with honesty, “She died about twenty days after the Americans declared their independence from us here in Britain, having been a widow for about three-and-thirty years and alive for about one-and-sventy of those years. I can show you her grave alongside my grandfather’s and my father’s down in the old Brandon family crypt, if you so wish”.

“I am so sorry for your loss, good Colonel!” Marianne said as she looked up from her book and smiled a smile of consolation in Colonel Brandon’s general direction.

��It is all fine!” Colonel Brandon responded at last after much hesitation, “I have had two-and-twenty years to grieve and I am very much fine now. Not that I was fine in the immediate aftermath, though. I fought badly with my own father not long after Grandmother’s death, and I proceeded to run off to the East India Company at the age of seventeen, feeling jealous of my brother for getting to fight against the Yankee rebels in America as a Colonel at the Battle of Saratoga and some other places at the merest age of three-and-twenty. And that is how I came to serve in the cities of Bengal”.

“Is this where your life gets exciting and adventurous, dear Colonel?” Marianne asked once again with the utmost of enthusiasm in her voice and on her vocal chords.

“Kind of, my dear Marianne, but not really, and not for long” Colonel Brandon sighed with sadness in his voice, “I got into the EIC’s army very quickly, and trained for four years before I was, at last, able to purchase my commission with the help of my Uncle Thomas Price, who served as a Colonel in said army. He was a good man, and true and noble as well, and he served as a good mentor to me during this time period of my lifetime. Now, this was a time when Sir Warren Hastings was still Governor General at Fort William, and he was, at the time, promulgating a war against a confederacy known as the Marathas, who were, at the time, the foremost native power in India owing to the collapse of the Mughals and their empire. It did not work out for us in the end, and we were forced to conclude a treaty acknowledging the Marathas and their independence. Afterwards, I continued serving as a Colonel for a few more years, doing odd jobs protecting cargo ships and merchant vessels from thieves while said ships were docked in the Kolkata Harbour. It was not much, but it kept me busy for a while, three more years at least, while Hastings finished out his term and was replaced by that fool Cornwallis. And as his second-in-command, Cornwallis placed General Frederick Fitzpatrick Meadowes, a rather vicious and unctuous and unpleasant man who held all the natives and his own soldiers in the utmost of contempt. I tried to reason with Frederick Fitzpatrick Meadowes repeatedly, but he refused to listen to me as I attempted to convince him to stop being so vicious and cruel to the civilians”.

“So what happened next?” Elinor asked.

“Well, it happened something like this”, Colonel Brandon responded as he made a continuation, “We were sent by Governor Cornwallis into the jungle to retrieve some legendary statue or other from a temple hidden there for several centuries. It was not really much of a jungle, though. More of a forest but hotter, really. India has been developed as a people for nigh as long as Noah, really. They do not have as much jungle as once they had oh so long ago. This temple had been built in the Gupta Era, but had fallen into neglect in the aftermath of that dynasty’s fall, and even more so after the conversion of Bengal to Islam. We found the temple rather hospitable and comfortable, and there were no traps nor boulders to cause us trouble on our way. And right in the centre of the temple, on the altar place, we found a beautiful statue of the Great God Brahma decorating the altar just as a cross or a crucifix would decorate churches in our own land”.

“Of course I know Brahma!” Marianne piped up with the joy of a child who has just answered their tutor’s most difficult question, “He is the Creator God and he is married to Saraswati. It is he who creates things just as Vishnu protects and preserves them while Shiva destroys them and brings an end to all things!”.

“That is correct, my dear Marianne” Colonel Brandon said as he recalled some of the things he himself had read in the later years following his time in India, “And in this particular statue, I do believe he was sitting both calmly and serenely under the statue of a many-headed snake…a naga, I think it is called…and resting as he floated on something or another”.

“A sea of milk!” Marianne responded once more with the most joyous of glee, “In the old mythological stories, Brahma and his wife Saraswati float together most serenely and peacefully on the snake known as Shesha, the many-headed one who floats on this said milky sea”.

“Vishnu, Marianne”, Elinor responded in an attempt at correction to her sister’s endeavours, “The gods who float together on Shesha through the endless milky sea known as Kshira Sagara around the continent of Krauncha are Vishnu the Preserver God and his wife Lakshmi, not Brahma and his wife Saraswati. Brahma actually lives in the Heavens in the realm called Satyaloka, far above the rest of the universe, while Shiva lives in his mountain home and stronghold citadel of Kailasa with his wife Parvati”.

Marianne stared at her sister with a combination of annoyance and amazement, clearly impressed at just how well her sister Elinor had succeeded in correcting her on mythological trivia. Colonel Brandon, meanwhile, simply made a mental note to himself about all of this and reminded himself to research more about this later.

“So as I was saying,” he continued after getting permission from the girls, “We returned to the village nearest the temple on our way back to Kolkata. Unfortunately, the villagers clearly recognised the statue poking out of General Meadowes’ bag, and they began threatening us with pitchforks, or at least some of them did. Others just got on their knees and begged us to return their most sacred and beautiful statue to the temple from which it had originated. In the midst of this confrontation, Meadowes refused to budge, and it came to a point wherein one of the villagers threw a pitchfork at me that landed in my right shoulder. Almost without thinking, I drew my pistol and shot the man who had wounded me straight through the heart…and thus the massacre began”.

“What do you mean?” Elinor asked, a worried and horrified look showing up oh so clearly on both her face and on the face of Marianne as well.

“Meadowes barked an order while I was nursing my right shoulder, and the regiment began to slaughter the entirety of that village. Not a single person was spared, neither man nor woman nor even child. Even the babies and the infants were put to the sword by Meadowes and his men, who were used to doing this from their time in Ireland. And soon, it was not long before the village was entirely depopulated. O, they tried to fight back, but knives and farmers’ sticks were no match for swords and muskets, and that village is still a blighted ruin to this very day, as far as I can know or tell”.

Colonel Brandon looked around himself, taking in the shocked looks of horror and of anguish and of despair on Marianne’s face and the look of stunned disbelief on Elinor’s face.

“Did you try to save anyone?” Marianne asked, her voice close to despair and weeping for the lost souls of all those years ago.

“There was one family I tried to save”, Colonel Brandon responded with sadness in his own voice, “A widow and her four children, three sons and a daughter, if I remember correctly. I tried to place myself in the doorway to block them from the soldiers when I saw them all trembling and crying at the advance of our forces, but Meadowes shot me in the right leg and thrust me aside before he burst into the small household and killed the children and…had his way with…the mother before killing her as well”.

Colonel Brandon could see Elinor weeping softly but strongly at these words as well as Marianne shaking with rage at what she heard. And he could not blame either of them. The sheer horror of what Meadowes and his forces had done to that village, and the complete capitulation of the British government to refusing to make even the slightest acknowledgment of their atrocities, filled him with rage as well, and he too wanted to make a journey to the King’s palace or to Parliament and yell at them all for their complicity in this act.

“So what happened next?” Marianne asked, though she clearly did not want to know the answer all that much.

“I recuperated in the Fort William hospital for some good long while or another, two weeks or so at least”, Colonel Brandon responded as he continued with this story, “And then I returned to London for some rest and relaxation. And it was there that I was forced to watch with horror and disgust as the King himself knighted Frederick Fitzpatrick Meadowes with the Order of the Garter for his services to the Empire. The man is still the utmost of monsters and I hate him, but good luck getting anyone in this island country of ours to acknowledge the horrors of what he did to that village and so many others in Bengal. And as for the statue, it did not even get the honour of being displayed in a museum for the public to see. Instead, Sir Frederick Fitzpatrick MEadowes sold the beautiful thing to a friend of his, namely Sir Thomas Bertram of Mansfield Park up in Northamptonshire. And there it remains amongst his collection unto this very day”.

“Then we should go get it!” Marianne said at last, “Someone has to find it and return it to its proper place in Bengal! That is the way it is supposed to be!”.

“I fear it is not that simple, Marianne”, Colonel Brandon sighed with sadness and with regret, “It is guarded so tightly with locks and doors and by Sir Thomas and his servants that nobody can get in there. And even if you somehow got it out of Mansfield Park, you would have to make some long voyage or another by foot or by another method to the coast to board a ship to bring it home to India. And there are always people whose job it is to check for smugglers. There is no way in the world that you will ever make it back to the temple to put the artefact back. And even if you do somehow succeed in getting it back to the Temple, my dear friends, the village that once cared for and tended to it is now gone forever, and there is none to prevent the beautiful statue from falling to time and decay in that place. Mayhaps it is best that the statue remain in Mansfield Park”.

Colonel Brandon descended into the panting of despair and grief, his mind filled with regret and sorrow at the events which he had just described. Truly, there was no undoing the past. The village could not be brought back from the dead, nor would Sir Frederick Meadowes ever have his knighthood taken away because of his crimes and atrocities. The Bertrams and the Meadowes would grow fat and old and wealthy off their crimes and atrocities, and the only hope that there would ever be for justice would be when they were dead and the Almighty Everlasting cast them down forever into one of the Dantean Circles or another. It made Colonel Brandon growl with rage to remember how much he had been unable to do anything for those people, and the memory of it all would haunt until his very last days of life upon this Earth.

“So what happened next?” Elinor asked once more, curiosity dripping from every single pore of her vocal cords as she asked this question.

“Well I returned home” Colonel Brandon responded at last after so much hesitation, “And then my cousin Eliza…that was when I learned that she had died and left me with her young daughter, and also my brother was dead and I was left to care for both her and for his household here in Delaford. So I decided to throw myself into caring for Eliza because it was all I felt I could do to make up for what I had done in India”.

“It is a little silly to blame thyself for that”, Elinor responded to all of these pieces of information, “You weren’t the one giving the orders or perpetrating the atrocities”.

“Yes, I do suppose that is true” Colonel Brandon sighed with acknowledgement as he accepted Elinor’s points into his mind and into his heart also, “However, I still do feel responsible for it. For if I had not fired that first shot into the man’s shoulder, the massacre might not have sprung into action”.

“Well, he was attacking you, if I doeth remember correctly”, Marianne responded to the points that Colonel Brandon had just made, “So it is not like you were completely unjustified”.

“That is partially true”, Colonel Brandon responded unto Marianne’s claims, “However, I do not think Meadowes would have found an excuse to start the massacre if I had not fired that shot or kept the bullet firmly inside the barrel of the gun”.

“Balderdash!” Elinor exclaimed with a theatrical flourish combined with a magician’s flair, “Meadowes was most likely looking for an excuse to do violence to those poor people of India and just did not wish to do so in a way that exposed the fullness of his sadism for all the public to see. So he waited for the villagers to do something that would seem to justify his actions, and then he let loose with his cruelty”.

Colonel Giles Christopher Brandon sighed to himself once again in acknowledgement of Elinor’s points, though he could not quite accept these specific ones into his heart or into his soul either. He still regretted the fact that he had let that bullet fly out of his gun on that fateful day in July and he wished he could turn and twist the hands of the Great Clock of the Universe backwards and backwards until he could find a way to stop Meadowes from committing those atrocities and bring all those lost and sorrowful slain souls back unto the world of the living. Or maybe even just kill Meadowes or lock him away in some place from which he could never escape to perform more atrocities. The thought of that man living free and growing rich and prosperous upon his estates somewhere in Yorkshire or in Derbyshire made Giles Christopher Brandon sick unto the roots of his very stomach, and he could not bear to think of him for much longer than was needed.

“So I think this has been a good conversation”, Elinor said at last after much passage of time after Colonel Brandon had finished with this conversation, “However, while I cannot speak for you or for the Colonel either, I feel rather trapped and confined in the stuffy air of this drawing room, and I would like to take a walk around the garden for a while before we have our dinner together. What do you say, my dear Colonel Brandon?”.

Colonel Brandon sat down for a while longer and sighed to himself as he thought about Elinor’s suggestion. He himself did noit feel closed in by the atmosphere of his drawing room, for he had lived here frequently for most of his life and it had so often been his place of comfort in times of anxiety and woe. And he had always felt rather uncomfortable in direct sunlight, like he was burning on a pyre or a chicken roasting in an oven. Nevertheless, when he saw Marianne practically pleading with her eyes for the chance to go on a walk, Colonel Brandon could not help but sigh as he thought about the beauty of the woman he loved, and so he got himself up from his chair and went to walk with the sisters in the Delaford Garden.

And so it was that Colonel Brandon and the two elder Dashwood Sisters got up from their seats and made their way out of Delaford’s rather stale and musty old drawing room into the garden wherein they would take their walk.

They did so around the time that the old clock in the hallway struck twelve o’clock in the afternoon. And the clock continued to strike even after it had left.

And on and on did it continue to strike, heedless of the absence of its patrons.

[blackcur-rants]

So, about “When Marnie was there”…

You cannot convince there still isn’t a queer element to Anna and Marnie’s connection just because they are granddaughter and grandmother. To me, it seems like this movie is still a story of queer connection between a bisexual girl who grew up in an era where she could never be openly sapphic and instead had to be content with marrying a man who loved her anyway and did not judge or despise her for her queerness and her soft butch lesbian granddaughter who lives in a time period where she can be more open about who she is and will probably get to live the sapphic/queer life she herself never got to have.

@dachi-chan25 @disregardcanon @cynicalclassicist @carcosa-commune

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In all seriousness, I could talk a lot about the parallels between them as characters and in particular how they kind of correspond to Odysseus and Penelope in certain ways (why do you think I chose the name Penelope for female!Pip in "The Pip and the Penny"?).

Like, Pip and Odysseus are fairly obvious. Hero who sets out from their homeland and encounters trials and tribulations before returning home wiser and more world-weary but also having found true happiness at last. Although there is that one fascinating contrast of "Odysseus brings harm to a brutish monster and that ends up being the cause of pretty much all of his problems on the way home" vs "Pip brings health and comfort to the seemingly brutish Magwitch and that ends up coming back to help him and allow him to begin finding himself over the course of many years". And then of course, there is Estella's whole status of concealing her true feelings for Pip and having to deal with pressure to turn away from him by both Miss HAvisham and later by Bentley Drummle until they are reunited and realise how much they truly love each other.

And meanwhile, Davey kind of has parallels with Penelope, as I have discussed before. Both Davey and Penelope are marked from early on by the absence of a strong male figure in their lives (Odysseus' absence on the Trojan War and his later voyages/Davey's father having died six months before he was born) that allows toxic infiltrators (the Suitors/the Murdstones) to come into their lives and wreck things up. Oh and there's also an important friendship with a nursemaid (Eurycleia/PEggotty) and the whole chapter called "The Tempest" can easily be seen as a tragic ending version of "The Odyssey" wherein Odysseus dies at the hands of Poseidon and PEnelope must continue to go on without him (hell, Dickens literally compares him to a famous married couple when Davey sees himself as Sheherazade and Steerforth as Shahryar while they are at Salem House together).

Also, here's some fanart I commissioned @kaereth to draw of Copperpip reimagined as trans sapphics in a non-patriarchal alternate history world called Albion for all my followers' viewing pleasure.

[Image description: A commissioned piece of fanart showing Pip from "Great Expectations" and Davey from "David Copperfield" here reimagined as sapphic transgender women in an alternative version of England. Diana Harriet Josephine Copperfield is on the left and is a tan-skinned woman dressed in brown and white and gold who is watching as Penelope Isabella Pirrip, here depicted as a red-haired Japanese woman dressed in brown and green, is reading one of her books and is cheerfully discussing said book with Penny. They are sitting together underneath a statue of Sir Galahad as well, sword planted firmly in the ground and a cloak draped over one arm and a cross emblazoned on his tunic]

@eleftherian @dachi-chan25 @cynicalclassicist @carcosa-commune @secretmellowblog @disregardcanon @kittyissorad

Also, if there was a larger Dickens fandom on Tumblr, imagine how popular shipping Pip and Davey together would be.

I mean. Pip would be SO MUCH BETTER to him than Steerforth was 👀

[blackcur-rants]

So I have recently taken time out of my busy schedule of life to watch the two post-Michael Bay live action “Transformers” movies, namely “Bumblebee” from 2018 and “Rise of the Beasts” from 2023 (I wanted to watch “Transformers One” on streaming, but I cannot find a way to watch it that does not give money to Biff Jayzus and his giant evil post office). I watched “Bumblebee” on Paramount Plus and “Rise of the Beasts” on Netflix. I enjoyed them both immensely, though I think I got just a little more invested in “Rise of the Beasts” (though that might have just been the fact that I watched RotB on a TV with better sound than the TV on which I watched “Bumblebee”).

And what I Want to talk about in this essay is about one line in “Rise of the Beasts” that really speaks to me both in terms of the film itself and how it relates to both of these films and how they easily outclass the Michael Bay movies of 2007-2017.

Okay, so here’s a quick recap for “Rise of the Beasts”: Our main character is Noah Diaz, a young man in 1990s New York who used to be a Marine for the United States Army before he retired to look after his chronically ill little brother Kris. Basically, he buys a car that turns out to be an Autobot named Mirage and gets drawn into a case where an archaeologist discovers a statue that contains one half of the Trans Warp Key, a Cybertronian Device that can open up gateways and portals across the galaxy and which is currently being sought by a bunch of bad Transformers who want to use it to free their Master Unicron from the galaxy in which he’s been imprisoned so that he can go back to eating planets again, as he is wont to do.

So basically our heroes have one piece of the Trans Warp Key from a statue of Nubian origin (as I have discussed before) and they need to go find the other piece so they can keep it safe from Unicron. And fortunately, Elena (the archaeologist who discovers the statue in the movie) happens to recognise the symbols on the back of the old statue as being from a Peruvian culture in origin. And so they all go to Peru to find the Trans Warp Key’s other half. And because they’re being guided by a Maximal Transformer named Airazor, they are quick to find the Maximal leader Optimus Primal (short version: The Maximals are a group of transformers who can turn into animals rather than into vehicles and who have been hiding out on Earth since their planet was destroyed and devoured by Unicron).

So they start walking along and having a conversation with Optimus Primal and how the Maximals have been hanging out with the indigenous folks of the region for the last few thousand years, and Noah decides to ask Optimus Primal if they played any part in the creation of artefacts such as the Nazca Lines, to which Optimus Primal responds:

“We cannot take credit for human ingenuity”.

Not gonna lie, when I first heard that line in the movie, my jaw dropped just a little. It’s such a masterful little subversion of the standard shallow-ass “Aliens came down to the primitive brown peoples and taught them how to build stuff and wear clothes”, instead depicting a strong state of cooperation and acceptance between Amaru’s people and the Maximals. And of course, this state of peaceful coexistence and mutual cooperation is a strong contrast to how much Unicron in this movie (and in the Transformers Mythology more generally) can be seen as a metaphor for colonialism, particularly in how his whole thing is taking the resources of other worlds for himself and how he uses people from the worlds he has consumed and devoured as his foot soldiers. And of course, this Godlike Personification of Colonialism is opposed by a team led by two Black brothers whom the film explicitly mentions as having experienced intense marginalisation at the hands of White American society. And thus we have a truly excellent thematic and ideological conflict between the Autobots and their allies on one side and the Decepticons and their allies on the other side, with the Autobots symbolising cooperation and mutual connection while the Decepticons represent colonialism and conquest.

And of course, this also ties into the other factor of these two movies simply having much better written and acted and more likeable protagonists than any of the Bay movies. To put it very simply and bluntly, it is much, much easier to care about “How will Charlie Watson be able to deal with and move on from her father’s death and her resultant grief while also helping Bumblebee get the message to Optimus?” and “Can Noah Diaz and Kris Diaz find a way to care for each other and help each other even as the world seems set against them?” than it is to care about “How ever will Sam ‘Shia LaDipshit’ Witwicki ever get to make out with a girl who’s honestly way cooler and more interesting than he is (Thank you, Lindsay Ellis)?’. It is also very important to note how both Charlie and Noah are shown to have mechanical talent as engineers even before they meet the Autobots, while Sam just stumbles into owning things (Again, thank you Dan Olson for this observation). This makes them feel like active participants in the stories of the Autobots and the Decepticons rather than just being dragged into it and then just kind of winning by default.

It's almost like having themes and messages and political ideas (however basic or simple) in your story actually makes things richer and more interesting and meaningful while trying to ‘avoid’ politics and political messages makes a resulting experience that is far more bland and forgettable and also far less interesting as a whole.

Think about that, will you, as you write your own stories.

@sepublic @acephysicskarkat @cynicalclassicist @dachi-chan25

[blackcur-rants]

You know, I actually one of my college essays on “Sweeney Todd” in comparison with “Taxi Driver” and I talked about how both stories are about patriarchal power fantasies and especially how “Sweeney Todd” deals very heavily with objectification.

Basically, “Sweeney Todd” is in many ways a proto-“Wicked” in that it is a Jewish composer named Stephen taking a work that reimagined a previously one-dimensional pop cultural villain into a fully realised three dimensional character with sympathetic reasons for doing what they are doing and adapting it into an operatic-style musical. However, a key difference between Elphaba and Sweeney is their motivations for going against the Wizard/Judge Turpin. In “Wicked”, Elphaba’s motivations are almost entirely idealistic. She has no personal beef with the Wizard when she decides to go against him during “Defying Gravity” (she doesn’t even know he’s her dad for the entirety of the show), she just wants to save the Animals from his oppression and tyranny.

Sweeney Todd, meanwhile, is very much the opposite. He’s not opposed to Judge Turpin because of what Turpin represents as a corrupt symbol of the Victorian British class system and all of its inequities and injustices, or because of how Turpin is an implied serial abuser of women or because of all the people Turpin has murdered through execution. He’s angry because Turpin tore him away from what he sees as his rightful life as a middle-class husband and father and took his wife and his daughter from him (there’s a reason why Sweeney constantly refers to them as “My Lucy” and “my girl” and with lines like “You’re gone and yet you’re mine!”, as if they are beloved pets rather than people). He shows a profoundly callous disregard for everyone else in the world around him, to the point where in “Epiphany”, he says “In the meantime, I will practise on less honourable throats!” as if all of his future victims are just a dress rehearsal for finally killing Turpin. And he never stops to consider that his behaviour and worldview are part and parcel with the same system that allowed Judge Turpin and Beadle Bamford to get away with their crimes for so, so long.

@disregardcanon @cynicalclassicist @carcosa-commune @dachi-chan25

finally got to see sweeney todd live (seen the movie and a few boots) and i have some Thoughts about utilizing sexism in your setting without the writing itself being sexist. because sweeney todd is SO good at it.

if you haven't seen sweeney todd, uh, both spoilers and trigger warnings for sexual assault, murder, cannibalism etc?

in sweeney todd we have three critical female characters

the entirety of sweeney todd happens because a man with wealth and power decides that he wants to rape benjamin barker's wife. he makes up a sham crime to get benjamin out of the picture and ships the man off to australia. this leaves young lucy as a single mother in victorian london.

he horrificly and publicly rapes her in a setting where other people jeer and laugh during the act. eventually she tries to poison herself, and the combination of poverty and cruelty is left to fend for herself on the streets, slowly losing her grip on reality due to the past trauma, ongoing trauma, and presumably brain damage from the poisoning.

when her husband, now calling himself sweeney todd, returns to their street, she is quite literally still there. he's cruel to her even before he "learns" from mrs. lovett that lucy died. the absolute revulsion he experienced towards her due to her being a homeless woman blinded him to even the possibility that this person who is in the right location could be his wife, even before she's "confirmed" as dead. she's just his beautiful, lost ideal. (but she isn't. she's there she's suffering she's insightful and caring and she's THERE-)

sweeney and lucy's daughter, joanna, has been stolen and locked away by the very judge that sent him to australia and raped her mother. she's spent all sixteen of her years confined to a single room, and the moment she catches the attentions of our young hero, the man she calls FATHER decides that he must marry her.

forcefully.

when she presents resistance and tries to run off with her young man, her captor forces her into an asylum where she will wait until she decides to become his wife the way that he is "owed".

sweeney never once acts to save her, despite both mrs. lovett and our hero's prompting. she, again, is the lost ideal. she would remind him too much of his lost love! oh no, however could he stand it! she is just something to mourn, even though she is here. breathing. singing frantically longing for freedom making connections with others and clever choices-

and then we have mrs. lovett, his wonderful, conniving soulmate. she's hilarious! she's far more clever than anyone gives her credit for, because she's just a silly woman after all! she snorts! she tells bad jokes! she's kind to children!

the dynamic between her and tobias only works so well because she's a woman. even if mr. todd was kind to him in a very similar manner, little boys don't show their affection for grown men with I Must Protect This Person. that is a way that little boys are taught to show their affection for the older women in their lives. because their grans and mums and aunts and older sisters, why, they're just so delicate! so kind! grandpas and dads and uncles and older brothers might need help and deference, but their favorite women need protection.

they can't be aware of the terrible things that are happening, or god forbid, a PARTICIPANT! that's just my auntie nelly! she's not capable of such a thing. she says things like "poor thing" and tells silly, bad jokes, and flutters around after the man she has an unrequited crush on.

surely she can't be in on this dastardly plot! she can't be its true author! the one that takes an angry, short-sighted man and gives him a purpose. that would be absurd!

sweeney never suspects her until seconds before he kills her. toby never suspects her at all. she's just a silly little cook with a crush that needs protection after all.

[blackcur-rants]

You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about Disney’s movie “Wish” a lot since I saw it in December of 2023.

Now, I know one of the (major? -ish?) issues some people have with this movie is Amaya becoming queen after Magnifico is overthrown, which does kind of fall into the whole “Good Monarch, Bad Monarch” trope rather than criticising monarchy as a whole (although no one has that problem with Zuko becoming Fire Lord at the end of "Avatar: The Last Airbender" or Simba becoming King of Pride Rock at the end of "The Lion King" or Glimmer and the Princesses being monarchs in "She-Ra and the Princesses of Power"). And this does kind of tie into my thesis of “Wish should have been a miniseries so that we could actually. Develop all of these ideas and themes in more detail than we got to do so in the movie itself”, especially since that would have allowed us to spend more time with Amaya and grow to appreciate her the same way we did with supporting characters in more recent animated shows (“The Owl House”, the aforementioned “She-Ra and the Princess of Power” and “Avatar: The Last Airbender”, “Amphibia”, “Centaurworld”, “Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts”, “Arcane”, “Hilda”, etc).

However, there is one detail I’m surprised not to have seen covered in other works or essays about this movie.

At the end of the film, the roles of ruler and wish-granter, which were one position under Magnifico, are now separate positions with Asha as wish-granter and Amaya as ruler.

Now why does this matter? Well, let me tell you.

Well you see, my dearest readers, Rosas under Magnifico is very heavily coded as a theocracy. It’s not super-blatant and in your face about this theme, but the structure of this society is very much “There is a singular Prophet/Priest/God-King who rules over this society with unquestioned might and if you obey him, he will grant your deepest wishes of your heart and if you don’t, you will suffer in misery and loneliness and isolation forever and ever”. In fact, even the fact that the movie is set on an island near the coast of Spain (a country notorious for its history of theocratic repression and religious strife) adds a strong if unexpected layer to this dimension/theme of the story. Hell, Asha’s own name is a modified form of the common Arabic name Aishah, which connects her on an implicit level to Islam and Moorish culture, with her obvious mixed race heritage meaning that she probably would have been targeted for persecution and/or execution under Spain’s infamous “Limpieza de Sangre” rules (although I do think “Wish” takes place a good while before those laws went into effect, so maybe this metaphor is not 100% perfect).

Hell, Magnifico actually shares a number of traits with previous theocracy-coded bad guys in other animated media. Like Judge Claude Frollo, he is a profoundly arrogant European aristocrat whose biggest enemy is a woman of colour and who has a song in the movie that mirrors a song that the protagonist sings (“At All Costs” in “Wish” and “Heaven’s Light”/” Hellfire” in “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”). Like Horde Prime in “SPOP”, he has a silver and white colour scheme, has eyes that glow green when using his magic and powers, and also brainwashes the hero’s friend into attacking them at one point in the story. And like Belos in “The Owl House”, he is a guy who came to this island from elsewhere and destroys objects that represent people’s deepest hopes and desires in order to gain power for himself and his biggest opponent is an Afro-Latina girl.

iAlso and furthermore, while I fully acknowledge that “I’m a Star” is the weakest song in the movie and probably eats up a bit more screen time than it needs to do so, there is a strong hint of this anti-theocracy theme present even within that song. Whereas Magnifico espouses a very traditional organised religion view of “The Divine Power and the Divine Message are enshrined in me and in me alone and any attempt to challenge this power is akin to heresy and/or blasphemy”, what Star shows Asha in “I’m a Star” is a much more pantheistic world view wherein the Divine is enshrined in all living things and we are all part of a greater cosmic whole. And that, of course, pays off in the wonderful climax of this movie, wherein all the citizens of Rosas finally unite against Magnifico and use their shared power to seal him away forever inside his own magical staff.

So basically, what I am saying is that when the roles of wish-granter and ruler of Rosas are separated out to Asha and Amaya respectively at the end of this story, it’s a pretty obvious allegory for the separation of church and state. No longer will Rosas be this tyrannical metaphorical theocracy under the rule of an arrogant and power-hungry prophet-king, but it will instead be a proudly multicultural and pluralistic and open society that shares its wish magic with the world instead of hoarding it for itself behind its castle walls like it was under Magnifico.

So…what am I saying with all of this? Well, not all that much, just that this is honestly a truly fascinating theme buried within the storyline of this movie that not many people seem to have noticed. And honestly, I wanted to bring it up mostly because I haven’t seen that many people talking about it even though it's incredibly obvious to me at least. And also because I think it makes the movie really interesting to analyse it through this lens and because even flawed, imperfect movies like this one can actually yield some fascinating and wonderful food for thought if you actually think about them like this.

@cynicalclassicist @whencartoonsruletheworld @writerqueenofjewels

[blackcur-rants]

[Image description one: A drawing of Jane Eyre and Edward Fairfax Rochester in a universe wherein they are reimagined as an Afro-Caribbean trans lesbian named Joan Ayala and a bisexual cisgender JEwish woman named Eleanor Rodinsky-Rosenberg. Joan and Eleanor are dancing together against a white backdrop, with Joan being dressed in a black dress with white gloves and a sapphire-and-pearl necklace while Eleanor is dressed in a blue-and-white dress with white gloves. They are both smiling and happy with each other's presence and their love for each other]

[Image description two: A drawing of Odysseus and Penelope reimagined as queer women. Odysseus is now a Black Butch Lesbian named Oduzessa who has long black hair and wears a red dress, while her wife Penelope is now a Chinese-descended trans woman of biseuxal persuasion who also has long black hair, although hers is straight while Oduzessa's is curly, and is wearing a golden dress. They are both resting together in their famous wedding bed as they both smile and Oduzessa holds Panelokeia's face in her hands while Panelokeia keeps her hands placed firmly upon Oduzessa's chest]

Once again, @kaereth, this is truly excellent and you did an amazing job on all of this. I particularly adore the absolute tenderness and gentleness with which Oduzessa and PAnelokeia are touching others' faces and the sense of a wry smile upon Eleanor's face.

@cynicalclassicist @carcosa-commune @dachi-chan25 @disregardcanon @flaretheidiot @celticbotanart

Commissions done for @blackcur-rants !!

[blackcur-rants]

So as a fan of Tony Goldmark and his threads on social media, I’m still really thinking about how he defines Liberals as basically “Leftists who recognise that we are stuck with Capitalism and want to find ways to make things better from within the System That Exists instead of hoping in vain for a Glorious Revolution that will probably never come”.

And honestly, I think that’s a really good summary of “Wicked”. A key point of contention between Elphaba and Glinda is basically this:

Glinda: Elphie! We are stuck with the Wizard! We aren’t going to get rid of him any time soon, but if you let me, I can find a way to get within his system and mitigate some of the damage he’s doing.

Elphaba: Sorry Glinda, I can’t accept that because it goes against my morality. I still love you, but goodbye for now.

@cynicalclassicist @carcosa-commune @disregardcanon @dachi-chan25

[blackcur-rants]

and in the true spirit of 9-1-1 on abc it is like. comedic levels of melodramatic. he literally looks like a sad dog that’s been abandoned on the side of the road by his owner.

[blackcur-rants]

night at the museum is crazy because it’s like omg this monkey is slapping ben stiller! haha! this statue come to life is a bust so he can’t scratch his nose! and then it’s like. what does it mean to be alive? to have history, to know that history? to make an impact on the future? is there any truer purpose, any greater fulfillment than bringing joy to children? than helping them learn? are museums not the most noble, earnest creations, because they are monuments to our human dedication to knowledge and understanding? what matters is not the amount of time spent on earth, but the brilliance of that brief burst of life and love. we are all reaching out, connected, touching each other’s lives for forever into eternity. do not fear the darkness. rejoice at the inevitability of a shining tomorrow, even though you will not be there to see it. and then it’s like omg the monkey’s slapping ben stiller again! he peed on his shoes!

[blackcur-rants]

official elon musk hate post reblog to hate like to hate reply to hate

[blackcur-rants]

You've been cast into a fictional setting, and you don't get to pick your genre. This wheel picks it for you.

[blackcur-rants]

people with tooth decay aren't bad people. they aren't lazy either. neither are they unclean or irresponsible. tooth decay doesn't make you a bad person. you don't deserve mockery, judgement, or tooth pain for having any. the only thing people with tooth decay deserve is healthcare.