nemetonisevilpassiton

[nemetonisevilpassiton]

Another thing I wanted to ask was what do you thing of the use of claustrophobia in teen wolf? Of course the only openly claustrophobic character is Isaac but it seems as though themes as "being trapped" are used often: Stiles or Peter being locked inside themselves (by the Nogitsune or the coma), Malia being trapped in coyote shape, the schoolnight, the kidnapping, the siege, etc... Maybe Stiles' symbolic revolving around keys and doors is also hugely symptomatic of that fear (he's the one that ends up being the most trapped whether it's in a room or outside reality, in a nightmare, situation, etc). He's also the one handling mountain ash the most (ultimate trapping device). Then there's the lingering question of repressing the beast (trapped inside like for Scott) or releasing it (s1 Peter) which is illustrated with the bank vault debacle. And of course with the question of small opressive spaces broadens to the idea of open and huge oppressives spaces: Erica talks about vertigo (which appears more than once), you talked about the bodies of water, there's the woods that seems almost always mainly unknown and to be discovered, there's the white space in which Stiles is during the Void, etc...

(and there's Stiles shitty understanding of spaces and how he keeps bumping in thing but that's something else)

I thought it was an interesting subject and I wondered what you had to say about it since you seem to have a huge grasp of cinematic symbolism, of the horror genre and a precise analysis of teen wolf

i am avoiding writing my fic again, just finishing this cup of tea [black tea with peach and passionfruit, yum] before vanishing back into the void

and you're right - it's not interesting it's fascinating

and absolutely something that should be explored, because the fears of claustrophobia and vertigo are linked to the concept of void, as is water [dark water in teen wolf is ... water is bad, lets leave it at that because it's a huge thing.

Void is absence but also the presence of emptiness - it is by its nature paradoxical, space is a thing but it is defined by the fact that there is nothing there- arent definitions fun

so Erica's vertigo could be an exhalation of Void which we know was messing with the town since the 40's at least, but probably early, was the creature that possessed Rhys an avatar of void or do we call it that when it's probably the creature from Outlast instead. The possession of Rhys does not match the hallmarks in canon of a nogitsune possession [interstingly the thing in the movie DOES - leading me to suggest in the meta discord about how it might be allison's nogitsune and explaining why it was fascinated with scott and wanted revenge on him when the stiles possession used him like a lunchbox and dropped him like trash]

right let's use an easy example - sandra bullock in gravity, imagine the vertigo of that - there is NOTHING in every direction, if the world goes spinning are you spinning or is it a trick of the mind....

but claustrophobia is the absence of space - it is the mind taking away the space around itself in the same way that vertigo is the increase of space

i hope I'm making sense but basically vertigo and claustrophobia become inverted mirrors of each other because of Void

are these phobia manipulated by a creature that feeds on fear?

Stiles' fear of drowning is .... for a long time the meta pack were saying we think Stiles' mom tried to kill him [from 306 onwards in fact] and she might follow the line of La Llorona because of Stiles' association with both water and drowning

as a rule in teen wolf still water = death, unless stiles is there, I'm summarising a lot of work there, running water = corruption unless stiles is there

stiles is the qualifier - Scott is an outlier [most patterns exclude him] but Stiles changes the game without even intending to - characters find themselves revealing great secrets to him, Argent voices his doubts, the chemist revealed his great plan [and do you think Stiles popped his head unknowingly or did mctall shoot him?], Stiles can break mountain ash with a wave of his hand, Stiles makes and breaks doorways, he is a creature of transitional spaces [a huge deal in the is stiles something argument], and his phobia is the opposite of void's two machinations - like the literal opposite, you are both adrift and surrounded - the water is both crushing and holding you up away from the bottom, it is neither vertigo [you[re supported] or claustrophobia [you're not enclosed]

so here's the question - did void possess stiles because he was powerful or because he had no power over him

every power that stiles showcased as void he used when he was not possessed and he is linked to the nemeton - and when void first took stiles he tried to kill him

fun aint it?

[nemetonisevilpassiton]

Hello! From what I gathered you are DarkAthena's meta account (i hope I'm not mistaken) and I just discovered your meta and I must say I really like it! At multiple occasions you mention symbolism and colour theory in teen wolf. I wondered if you would be willing to do a more complete summary of your understanding of it. I have a few idea of my own but I especially liked when you talked about mirror and Scott Mccall's messed up reflection of the self and I 100% agree with Stiles and transitional spaces (keys, door, etc).

Well all that to say I'd be really interested in your interpretation of Teenwolf's symbolism:)

this is a bit of a - symbolism is a huge chasm of a topic, and there are symbols we understand and ones that are clearly there but make no sense - like Chris Argent keeps showing up in scenes with frogs, ceramic frogs, frogs in a shadow box [in his office] and it's like, okay your association is frogs - but what does it mean, is it the way he flip flops on his opinions, is it a reference to the frog and the scorpion and how he is always going to be the victim ....

the thing with symbolism is you have three issues

people agree what the symbolism is and disagree what it means

people disagree what the symbolism is but agree with the final conclusion

people disagree there IS symbolism

now the color theory/symbolism primer is the result of LOTS of work that happened in the background, with people going look! and then it falling apart and worked over and ground into the dirt and still it's not definitive because it's an impossibility. Even if Davis et al sat down and laid it all out - people would still disagree with it

the primer

now most cinematic [and to an extent literary] symbolism is based on Freud, specifically Freud's dream dictionary [yes, really] and the problem is that most western writers know that symbolism, so they continue what they see etc - this is true of colour theory and was the WORST because teen wolf's colour references are reversed because the symbolic associations of godai [the five elements, each representing a season] are reversed

so if we take the basic Earth - it represents repression, claustrophia [I read the other ask, give me a moment] the keeping of secrets, the concept of compression. Like in ATLA the city that denies the war is Ba Sing Se - a city of earth benders with a huge earth wall. See how it works and that's normal. You bury things you don't want people to find so earth = hiding things, lying to keep a secret.

now in teen wolf Earth represents the opposite, the release, the revelation of secrets, rebirth, Derek's evolution is in the earth series [4] and look how much of that series takes place underground, in the vault, in la iglesia, the underpass at the school

mirrors = mirrors mean differnet things to different characters, traditionally a mirror is used to reassure that the self is correct or to tell an undeniable truth [Snow White, Nehelenia's mirrors] which applies to Stiles

they can mean a transition between places, or how those places are seen [Alice through the looking glass, or Candyman] that applies to Lydia

or they can show just how fractured a character is - the broken mirrors [a lot of slasher movies] = Scott

but add on to that the phantasmagoria sequences which were called mirror verse because often details were reversed = it's a very complicated theory that involves a lot of pointing that and that charlie day jpeg with strings and stress

Scott's symbol is shadow - which was a nightmare to work out btw, look how often he is show in shadow, he saw his beast self in a shadow etc - and when I pointed that out the wankstorm could have been seen from space = but all it means is that he has a dual nature - rather than derek who is one as a wolf and a man = werewolf, scott never reconciles

when you point them out they are super easy to go - oh yeah that makes sense, but other people might go - melissa has all those owls because she likes them,

all the way through 6a the meta pack were screaming about the yellow wallpaper and no one knew why until lydia pulled away the yellow wallpaper to reveal the door and we're like WE TOLD YOU because when you dig in and look critically you start to see patterns and those patterns go back to something famous, like how in canaan it was like event horizon- we knew EH was there, but couldn't prove it

and that's the ultimate truth

its not about what you think - but what you can prove

now if you wanna headcanon stiles as penelope from the odyssey [the fic i'm working on] you don't need proof, but if you wanna mess around with the guts of it [a good critical look is often like a dissection]

symbolism can be a nightmare, it can also be an easy step into deeper literary theory - which is what it is - we call it meta because we don't have to put it in the proper format and link a bibliography with books we pretended to read

symbolism is like - oh this appears a lot - does it mean anything

but sometimes the symbolism makes a clear point that just isn't there

derek is association with stairs - traditiionally stairs represent sex [think of old movies where characters would go upstairs, fade to black and it's obvious they had sex] up means accepting, down means rejecting, and derek doesn't even walk down stairs until season 3, he jumps - which prepresents an unwanted sexual attack

see that's solid

but Derek buried peter in the basement - gothic symbolism representing sex, specifically repressed desire [think fall of the house of usher] at the bottom of the stairs - which in symbolsim add them up and you get = Peter violently sexually abused Derek and Derek is hiding it

but there is no evidence of it whatsoever - so somewhere the symbolism as it is historically doesn't match, and it might just be that by burying peter he releases him [see the jennifer and nurse jennifer theory] from his madness and the set was too small for it to be anywhere but the bottom of the stairs

and yet people can argue that it's solid even though it's not explicitly supported, because Peter certainly encouraged the relationship with paige which ended so very badly....

symbolsim - it's a fancy word for your guess is as good as mine but at least now we've gotten past the point where the very mention of colour theory gives me eye twitches

[nemetonisevilpassiton]

Lots of people think the opposite of patriarchal messaging is "actually, men are bad and women are good"

When in reality, the opposite of patriarchal messaging is "there is no immutable difference between a man and a woman and no trait belongs only to one group or the other. Goodness or badness is entirely individual and not tied to gender in any meaningful way"

[nemetonisevilpassiton]

clever villains using familiar faces to beat his ass Batman Beyond 2.0 #4-5

[nemetonisevilpassiton]

Teen Wolf and Genre Expectation

This is a conversation I think we should have had year ago and I think it might be responsible for one of two massive disconnects people have with the show - the other being the fact that it was on TV fucked it over because everything was hurtling towards a satisfactory conclusion when shit we need to make at least 20 more episodes happened.

But we're not talking about that.

Genre expectation is a perfectly normal thing to do. If you look at Star Wars you expect an action movie - action movies follow certain rules and mores. This means there's very little difference between a Steven Seagal film of the eighties and a Gerard Butler movie of the 2010s.

Genre is a shorthand.

If you pick up a romance novel you better get some damn romance is what I'm saying. You make an intelligent decision about how you want to be entertained.

And this is where the big but Athena starts - Teen Wolf doesn't behave like a teen supernatural drama . Of course it doesn't, it's not one, it's horror tv [which is a whole other bag of dead spiders because tv horror is about as well put together as that bag on the whole].

Teen Supernatural Drama, like Buffy, the vampire diaries, shadow hunters, even Shadow and Bone, are about the teen drama of bed hopping, not talking to each other for ridiculous reasons and "drama". Often the only thing separating them from teen dramas is that some of the boys are creatures of the night.

But Athena I hear - doesn't teen wolf do that = no, it wears the veneer of it like a skin a'la Frank Cotton.

This is where the genre expectation conversation starts.

First, lets talk about "Audition". Those of you who know "audition" will fall into two camps, da fuq and you sure about this?

"Audition" is a Japanese horror movie from the J-horror golden age of the early 2000s. It features a lot of "most disturbing movies ever" and "worst villains" lists it it genuinely deserves to be there, and the cover of the DVD is a still of a woman with a syringe and a leather apron, but it's also a genre expectation mind bender and it's perfect for this example.

The most modern film I've seen do this, and for the record "Psycho" does it, and certainly this film references it, is "X" by Ty West, except unlike "Audition" Ty West starts with the films end showing he knows it's a slasher film and making sure the audience does to. Without that opening it would be a better example, it's certainly an easier watch, and it does it knowingly and with a wink to the camera, but really "Audition" is a better example.

"Audition" flat out lies to the audience and it does it with a glee and abandon that actually makes the inevitable ending worse.

Audition by Miike Takashi, director of 13 Samurai [excellent] Ichi the Killer [also excellent but very gory] is based on a 1997 novel. A widower, giving in to pressure from people around him, agrees to meet a new romantic partner. He's busy with his job and his teenage son so he agrees to stage a phony audition for a movie to meet a girl. After interviewing several he meets Asami, a sweet quiet girl who always wears white.

Despite how he can't reach any of her references, they are missing, Shigehiko goes ahead. After several dates they go to a seaside hotel where he intends to propose. Asami reveals burn marks on her skin and demands that he love her and no one else, Shigehiko agrees but in the morning Asami is gone.

Trying to find her using her resume Shigehiko starts to find things are weird. The owner of the dance studio who trained her has prosthetic feet. The bar where she worked was abandoned following the murder and dismemberment of the owner who was found with extra body parts.

Asami goes to Shigehiko's house where she finds photos of his late wife and his son, she drugs his liquor and he hallucinates her, seeing a man in a sack missing several body parts, when he begs for food Asami vomits into a dog dish and gives him it to eat. He sees her burned by the dance instructor whose head she cuts off with a piano wire.

Collapsing from the drug Asami paralyses him and tortures him with needles because he failed to love only her. She continues repeating "kiri kiri kiri" or deeper deeper deeper. She then cuts off his foot with a wire saw. She attacks the son when he comes home. He manages to kick her down stairs where she breaks her neck and with her dying he calls the police.

Audition remains one of the films that caused a general visceral reaction from me where I tried to climb over the back of the sofa away from it. As I said it's a great film.

But its a film that for the first hour is a boring romantic drama. If you turned it on from the tv with no idea what it was you would be forgiven for thinking it was a boring romantic drama from Japan, right up until it's not.

It pretends to be a romantic drama, hitting all the beats, to make the horror hit like a brick to the face, or a wire saw to the ankle.

If I took the plot and said a widower fakes an audition to meet a girl, they get along, she finds out about the audition they break up, he makes a grand gesture and they get back together - happy ending. It is a perfectly reasonable romantic drama plot.

It USES genre expectation to make Asami's face-heel turn much more effective, sweet, quiet Asami with her hands clasped and eyes downturned doesn't seem capable of considering the violence she commits. So when she's stood there with his foot on her thigh smiling she seems like a very different character - but we've spent the last chunk of the movie knowing she's very capable.

Does this mean Teen Wolf was inspired by "Audition", I can't definitively say oh this scene is direct corrollary and shows it's defined, it's a film they've seen but it's not unique for twisting genre expectation, after all Psycho does too and that is a definite source, but it's a great example to show you how it works.

Teen Wolf does the same thing Audition. and Asami, does, lulls the audience into a false sense of security by pretending to be something it's not. It LOOKS in season one to be a supernatural drama where the drama is really the romances, and that to an extent carries over to season 3, and with Scott being a narration character - even if he does not specifically narrate - it seems to focus on that whilst atrocities happen. Not just the murders the villains commit but what is happening around the town.

Matt didn't need a murder lizard to be a creeper taking photos of Allison when she didn't know. Sexual assault is rampant. Characters genuinely get PTSD from their experiences. Violence and manipulation isn't just the remit of the villains. Even the rats in season 6 want to be anywhere but Beacon Hills. Things that would never happen in a teen supernatural drama to the main characters are often the starting point of the mains. The villains aren't posturing and distant, like the Master in Buffy in his basement doing sudoku or something, I never understood why he was scary, but instead are active, casting lingering looks, using magic to commit sexual assault, manipulating the bodies of characters for reasons.

All of these things are common in horror because horror is a genre where bad things happen.

What the dread doctors do is closer in actuality to the victims of Martyrs [New French Extremity - don't unless you have nerves of steel and a stomach to match] than it is to Valentine in Shadow Hunters.

The characters and setting of a teen supernatural drama is used to make a horror show.

And Teen Wolf is an excellent horror show. It should be mentioned that is is a low bar, horror shows are almost always terrible, American Horror Story is more interested in grotesquerie than horror, Interview with the vampire isn't about the horror but instead the drama that happens to horror monsters.

Let's take the character of Asami - would she fit better in Shadowhunters or Teen Wolf exactly as she is? - which would be a very interesting cross over and would certainly result in Scott getting prosthetic feet. The Rutger Hauer villain of the Buffy movie would have made a better teen wolf b-movie but he would stand out like a sore thumb in the show even with the mugging and scenery chewing.

And this is where the genre expectation comes back in. If you sit down to watch shadowhunters you know what you're getting, you want to see HOW they do it, you want to enjoy the silly extremes of it, and if you know are involved in the fandom etc this is how people expect Teen Wolf to behave, certainly we see it in the fic and gifsets, and certainly how it was sold, but if you watched Teen Wolf in a vacuum the chances are the dantesque descent through a Jacob's Ladder style hell into a dark industrial silent hill it makes much more sense [right up until halfway through season 5b]

If you watched it for the first time knowing it was a horror show the silliness of season 1 and 2 becomes the set up for the darker horrors of the later seasons.

But the feelings of betrayal and how the show let them down seems to be more about what people wanted the show to do and not what it does. If Hannibal Lecter moved to season 4 Beacon Hills people would be saying hello and waving, but he'd stand out like a sore thumb in Mystic Falls or Forks.

Hannibal also makes the point for me. Hannibal proudly admits what it is and glories in it, with fancy gore and camera angles. It does what it says on the tin.

Teen Wolf has a sticker someone stuck on the can, badly.

I again find myself wishing it was a book/game/comic because then it wouldnt have had to deal with the issues that tv brought it [actors leaving, suddenly finding you have to find material for more episodes when it was all neatly planned] and 6b wouldn't have happened.

6b feels more like a supernatural teen drama than any other season and it's probably why it jars so very badly.

TLDR : teen wolf is a horror show that wears the skin of a teen supernatural drama in order to blend in. and like Frank Cotton is leaking blood all over its suit and can't fit in, but as a horror the idea of the leering uncle at a kid's party it really is on point.

[nemetonisevilpassiton]

aight I’m doing this for y’all and because Ian Bohen looks like a fucking snack in this movie

[nemetonisevilpassiton]

The Teen Wolf Movie, Scott McCall and regret

I suppose that I should start this meta with a disclaimer of sorts. I belong to a school of thought called the cauldron of story that presents the idea that every narrative you ever encounter in your life goes into a giant cauldron to make a sort of story stew, and with practise you can see the stories that inspired it. This isn't plagiarism because it's not the stories that are the meat and potatoes of the work but the mixture of them.

So for example Star Wars is Dune + Hidden Fortress + The hero with a hundred faces and through understanding those works allows you a peek into George Lucas' mind at the time.

Every creator is a giant melange of the narratives that they consumed, ones they liked and ones they didn't and ones they over heard of public transport.

So me shrieking about Jacob's Ladder does not imply Teen Wolf plagiarised it - it just stole from it, in the same way every creator has sticky fingers.

And to understand the teen wolf movie we need to talk about Silent Hill 2 - which creates a story cluster of it's own, if you crossed Jacob's Ladder with Blue Velvet and some other things, some of which are Japanese and I can't recognise [never having encountered them] you get Silent Hill 2.

Unfortunately Silent Hill 2 creates a sort of loop in that Blue Velvet and Jacob's Ladder also inspired Teen Wolf and so it's this sort of smear where we can say that the three of them are all inspirations but we can't say which is which. For example in 3b Scott and Allison hide in a wardrobe with louvre doors which is just like the scene in Blue Velvet where the main character sees the villain through the door of the wardrobe where he was hidden - but the same scene appears in Silent Hill 2 where James first encounters pyramid head. So which is the inspiration - I don't know. Which came first, the pyramid head or the oxygen mask?

Jacob's Ladder is incredibly intrinsic to Teen Wolf [props to weasley-detectives for the leg work on that one] and it defines bardo, and many of the monsters in Allison's narrative, for example, are lifted from that film entirely. Jacob's Ladder did not inspire Silent Hill [the first game] but it did inspire Silent Hill 2 and again they're all mashed together. In season 3, after the be a better Scott McCall program, Scott starts dressing like James Sunderland [the man character of SH2] who in turn is dressed like Jacob Singer in JL, but Scott's costuming is not the same as that of Jacob.

This blending of sources is normal and annoying, generally it is better to have sources that are distinct so you can dig better and explain one source and not two.

At first I thought the Teen Wolf movie was going to be inspired by Event Horizon because I knew it would be full of mindfuckery, and I was wrong in that it was Silent Hill2. It was a few days of picking at it before I realised that it wasn't inspired by Silent Hill2, it was what would you get if you rewrote Silent Hill 2 in Beacon Hills and then had to completely rewrite your script because you can't get the actors.

Scott's narrative is Silent Hill 2 - it's not "inspired by" it's an au but it also has a chronic misunderstanding of Silent Hill 2.

Remember how Gus Van Sant remade Psycho because he wanted to see how it worked and when he did it - it didn't work. It's like that.

In Silent Hill 2 [which is considered a masterwork and work of art in its own right, and is considered to be the very best video games have managed so far] James Sunderland recieves a letter from his dead wife asking him to meet her in Silent Hill. He finds the town abandoned and full of fog but there he meets an alternate of his wife, Mary, but sexy called Maria, a child called Laura [the sh2/twin peaks knot] a bully called Eddie, a girl called Angela who is seeking her mother, and twisted manifestations of James' own emotional turmoil - pyramid head, the sexiest version of nurses etc.

James was made impotent, both sexually and emotionally by Mary's long illness and death and the town forces him to face it. It is a purgatorial wasteland where water is seen as corrupting. This is the same as in Teen Wolf [and actually allowed us to unlock the symbolism and eventually colour theory]. The town is shrouded in fog to show how limited James' viewpoint is.

Now if we look at Scott's narrative, he returns to Beacon Hills to reunite with his dead girlfriend, finds the town almost completely abandoned, she is different and doesn't know him, and he is forced to face the one enemy that made him feel powerless and he gets the girl and the innocent child after someone else defeated the monster again.

Sound familiar.

We need to look at why Void, which the film specifically calls a nogitsune but then contradicts all the canon lore about kitsune we've ever had - but the same is true of Deputy Ishida. When Void possessed Stiles and Scott thought that the possession was quiescent he went with Stiles to Coach being shot, then the explosion at the Sheriff's station where Scott sucked up the pain of just about everyone he met, and Void revealed itself after stabbing Scott, and consumed all the pain that Scott had taken in, and he mocked Scott whilst doing it.

None of the other villains really cared about Scott, they might have paid lip service to the myth, and monologued about him doing things he hadn't, before someone else took them from the picture with Scott there posturing, but only Void made him feel small. Just like Mary's illness with James Scott was made impotent, both sexually and emotionally. Allison's death rid him of his determination that they were destined to be together - even though she had chosen someone else.

Just like Mary/Maria Allison is robbed of any autonomy. Mary is defined entirely by her illness, something she resents. Maria is Mary but sexy and resents James' fixation on Mary. Allison is the twisting of the knife to Scott, she is also the one who died on his watch and the one who he loved - and chose someone else. Brought back via the nemeton she is robbed of memory and vacillates between the image of her mother sending her after the wolves and Scott's image of her. She does not remember that she broke up with him, why she broke up with him, or any of the times he manipulated and used her. She is unaware, under the stadium, that he is still manipulating and using her. He is so set on his own affection for her - which after fifteen years will be a very different creature to what it was when he was sixteen and she was alive, that he steamrolls over her arguments and rather than bring her to her father, who she remembers and trusts, he maintains the isolation until she remembers what he wants her to remember.

Allison might as well be a ghost in the movie for all the autonomy and ability to choose that she retains. She is a weapon to be aimed, first by the nogitsune-creature that is manifested [which looks so much like the green eyed fox in The Lost Tomb (series 1, which is not the first series but is the first one chronologically] that I actually cursed out loud that I can't even watch weird Chinese tomb raiding shows without Davis having seen them too. I am actually tempted to call it the Green Eyed Fox because it even shares powers and the fly caught at the end of 3b was a housefly not a firefly - you can make a solid argument that it was Scott's view of the nogitsune, and had nothing to do with Void or an actual nogitsune and why Deputy Ishida was a 900 year old kitsune who didn't know because it allowed Scott an easy understanding of how it had oni - the weaons it used to kill Allison]

Or to simplify a lot of the details in the movie might have manifested because they were Scott's understanding of those things.

And this is where the overlap with Jacob's Ladder comes in.

In the chiropracter scene Louie explains to Jacob about Meister Eckhart, a christian theologian who explains bardo really well. To summarise after death figures appear and start to burn away the things that hold people to life, if you're nto ready to give these things up the figures seem to be demons and if you are they're benevolent angels.

Scott, and his entire plotline being about wish fulfilment and regret, feeds into this because Scott won't give these things up. He is still working for Deaton, he has done everything he can to not be a wolf except when it benefits him, but given the opportunity to bring Allison back from the dead he leaps at it without questioning anything about the plan - which Deaton does.

He fixates on Allison, not as she is, but as she was and leaps into danger convinced of his own ability to sway her to his side - because he believes he loves her.

But he doesn't love her - she's been dead for fifteen years = he LOVED her.

Silent Hill 2 is purgatorial which is a term you see thrown about a lot in media, oh this did make sense it was purgatorial, or the reason that these scenes don't gel is because it's purgatorial. Often those things aren't, they're just shitty writing. Lost for example, it being purgatory made no sense whatsoever.

Purgatory is an old Christian concept which is also called limbo. According to catholicism Purgatory is where you went when you should have gone to heaven but for some reason couldn't, for example a new born baby who wasn't baptised was tainted by original sin [you're born damned in catholicism] would go to Limbo, good people who weren't christian went to Limbo, the wives of sinners who could belonged to their husbands but didn't deserve hell went to limbo. Some catholic theologians suggested that it was possible to pass through purgatory and ascend to heaven.

It's this version of purgatory that Meister Eckhart put forward and Teen Wolf calls Bardo. It is a series of between states that allows the subject to cast aside those things that held them in place - like regret, to ascend to heaven.

Beacon Hills does seem to descend into a purgatorial wasteland, like Canaan in canon, as the show goes on and Scott re-enters it to the collapse of Oak Creek [which is weird that it went from standing proud to building graveyard in fifteen years when no one demolished it], and the first person he meets is Lydia- who has been shown to be able to travel between the worlds and has one foot in the afterlife by her nature.

Yet he cannot give up the triumphs and losses of high school. His worst enemy is one that didn't care for him when he was a kid. He gets to play lacrosse in the state championship. His teenage girlfriend comes back to life. He wants kids and how convenient the only werewolf with a kid dies saving Scott.

Scott chooses to remain trapped in the past. He cannot accept the figures stripping away those things that hold him back. Even the one thing that can lead him forward -his wolf - is denied. He is still the person he was in high school - he's just older and has a car now.

In many ways that's much more tragic than killing Derek.

The movie had some really great ideas - it's a pity that the movie ended up like that with Derek beating up the green eyed fox in a location they stole from Deadly Premonition and that is one piece of media Davis can keep to himself because life is far too short to play Deadly Premonition.

[nemetonisevilpassiton]

Where the Monsters Live - a teen wolf meta

 I haven't written a teen wolf meta in some time not because I think everything has been said but it's hard to open a conversation when no one is listening. But with the movie coming I think it's finally time for me to explain the Nightbreed thing.

Because I keep mentioning it and then never explain why.

There are inspirations I can prove [Event Horizon], there are those I know are absolutely true but there's not QUITE enough information [Legacy of Kain] and then there's Nightbreed.

Davis knows Clive Barker's work, I can prove that  easily - [a three part mega meta about Hellraiser and Peter] but then there's Nightbreed.

If Hellraiser is about want Nightbreed is about the outsider. It is considered one of the first queer movies [one of the others, Nightmare on Elm Street 2 is heavily referenced in season 2 with Jackson] and where Freddy is an analogue for Jesse's homosexuality [or bisexuality, depending on how you read it] but Nightbreed has no easily determined as gay content but if it got any more queer I'd be surprised.

Jodorowski [the guy who wanted to make the animated Dune movie] called it the "the first truly gay fantasy horror epic," and hyped the slash potential between patient and doctor but other critics said that was a vast understatement. Tyler Coates argues that it represents queerness and otherness ""Because normalcy is subjective and based solely on how the majority defines it, it's important to establish mini-societies and cultures with people like you"

Nightbreed is the narrative is one of a young man [Aaron Boone] who is manipulated by a male authority figure [Decker] into believing himself a monster and seeking a sanctuary becomes a literal monster. Or Clive Barker, a gay man writing in the UK in the 1980s [the same period Sandman was written to give you some context] who took the idea of "if you will make me the monster I will show you how monstrous I can be" with the idea of the monster as victim. Boone, who only wants to belong, becomes their saviour because he wants to save a single person, a human who takes his side.

Unfortunately before I can take this further with the narrative I have to explain the second narrative = the one of the movie. Barker wrote Cabal and all was good, then because of the popularity of Hellraiser he was approached by Morgan Creek who thought that Cabal [a novella] would be easier to adapt than Weaveworld. Burned by previous adaptations of his work [Rawhead Rex - as bad as you think it might be it's actually worse] Barker agreed as long as he could direct [as he did with Hellraiser] but he was tortured by studio execs who recut the movie behind his back. When the movie came out everyone knew that it was a pasted together mess where they took the core narrative of monsters as victims [whilst still being monsters] with over an hour cut from the finished cut.  But the movie still formed a huge cult following.

Years later a VHS copy of the original work print which is the longest cut which restored the original ending and was so popular at horror conventions that Scream Factory convinced Fox to restore the original work and released it as the "Cabal Cut" [So that's three different versions with different narratives so far, the Theatrical Cut, the Directors cut, and the Cabal Cut] and that convinced Clive Barker to get back involved and he released a fourth cut.

So which one of these has Davis seen? All of the above.

As a teenager I found so much comfort in the Theatrical Cut and my mother, knowing how much it meant to me, once taped an entirely new cut off the BBC, which is probably the only one I can say that Davis HASN'T seen and it might be the shortest cut.

So yeah

the story is about Boone, a young man who has been and out of psychiatric care all of his life, in the book he has heard of Midian there and incorporated it into his own personal mythology, in the film he dreams of it. Boone's troubles include impotence [actually important] but over the past few months he has been doing better, he's weaned himself off his meds, he's in a healthy relationship with Lori [I'm unsure if the character in Teen Wolf is named for her or Lori Stroud] when his doctor, Decker [played by David Cronenberg! that David Cronenberg] who convinces Boone that he has been killing people in his sleep and he has to turn him in after killing 17 people including woman and kids. He gives Boone what he says are valium and Boone, tripping balls, walks in front of a truck.

In the hospital he meets a man called Narcisse who mentions Midian, to get more information Boone manipulates Narcisse into giving him directions and Narcisse determined that Boone take him with him peels off his face [in the movie it's everything on his head but his face], whilst the hospital is working to fix this Decker shows up with the police and Boone flees. With the directions he goes to Midian, in the book this is a cemetary next to an abandoned gold town, but in the film it's just a random cemetary in the wilds. There he falls asleep and wakes up to two of the "breed" Kinski and Peloquin who want to eat him, telling Boone he's an "innocent" [and killed nobody] Peloquin [who gets the best lines] bites Boone and chases him to the gates of the cemetary where Boone is confronted by the police. Decker convinces the police Boone has a gun and they shoot him dead.

In the movie we see Boone's body reawakening but in the book it's left "he's dead"

The story is then taken up by Lori who disbelieving of Boone's status as a "babykiller" wants to go to the place where he died and drives out there, meeting a woman called Cheryl [who has the second best lines in the movie] and goes to the cemetary where she finds a weird creature and a woman begging her to bring her out of the sunlight. lori does this and the creature turns into a child who cannot understand that the light hurts her because she's too little, and forms a bond between the two, her mother Rachel, tries to help Lori but is shut down by Doug Bradley. Going back into the sunlight Decker goes after Lori because he thinks Boone survived the shooting and now knows his secret - that HE is the serial killer. Boone comes to save her but he isn't alive, he's "beyond death". Narcisse interferes and Decker escapes.

Decker goes to the local motel kills everyone and then to the police station telling the police chief, Eigermann, that Boone is alive and he did it. Boone has been thrown out of Midian for threatening its security and Lori takes him to the motel where "everyone's dead, Dave", overwhelmed by the blood Boone eats some of the bits. Eigermann shows up and arrests him getting a doctor to prove he is "walking around in my fucking cell dead" and that Decker was right and he has helpers under the cemetary. A few deputies go to the cemetary and find Ohnaka, a peaceful breed who looks human, they drag him into the light and start one of the most uncomfortable scenes in horror as he starts to turn to dust and turns to each of them in turn but in their horror they push him away until he dies. If you can watch that scene without thinking oh it's a gay lynching I'll be very surprised.

Eigermann realising the sun is his best weapon puts together a mob of rednecks with all the weaponry they can find and attacks the cemetary and the necropolis beneath it. Understanding the vast majority of the "monsters" are perfectly harmless and incapable of defending themselves plans are put in place for them to flee but ....

okay here's where most of the changes happen, there's what happens in the book, what happens in the theatrical cut and what happens in the cabal/directors cut

in the book after springing Boone from jail he realises he is empowered [physically and sexually] by his change and returns to Midian to put up enough of a defence to get everyone out, he fights with Decker and kills him, trying to remove Midian's founder, Baphomet, he is rebranded Cabal who will gather up the nightbreed and find them a new home, Lori realising that he is immortal stabs herself so he has to turn her to save her life and they go off into the sunset. This is basically how the director's cut/cabal cut ends except sometimes Narcisse is killed by Decker, sometimes not. In the book Ashberry and Eigermann put together a monster hunting squad leaving the story open.

in the theatrical cut Boone releases the feral uncontrollable nightbreed, the berserkers to help them fight and is seen as victorious, the tag-along priest, Ashberry, finds Baphomet whose blood turns him into a sort of nightbreed and he resurrects Decker to help him hunt them down.

so- yeah, not much difference.

Now some of you will have already realised that the story of a young man manipulated by the one male role model he has and bitten, transformed into a beast and forced to become saviour with the help of his plucky love interest is what teen wolf seems to be without any digging. But that core doesn't QUITE work even with a cursory reading, because Scott doesn't want to save the monsters, he never sees the werewolves as anything BUT monsters and Boone's easy everyman status doesn't work with Scott at all, although Scott is easily as manipulative. And I wonder if the change between them, Scott's inability to be the saviour Boone becomes, Scott's unwillingness to do what Boone is happy to do [kill to protect], Scott's inability to give up Allison where Boone constantly tries to drive Lori away to keep her safe puts up this dissonance.

Yet the parallels are very really obvious which is why Nightbreed [never a good movie, an important movie, but it features ACTING!, matte paintings instead of landscapes, wooden and wobbling set stages, the best director in it is one of the hammiest actors] keeps coming up. You can't NOT mention it because the parallels are so clear but they're also so wonky.

When I rewatched Hellraiser I was surprised that the Frank/Julia thread in Teen Wolf was so apparent, and so thorough between Peter and Lydia, how the corruption of the mental health facilities was so blatant in both. It was in your face, with Nightbreed it's like Teen Wolf was made from the memory of the film he watched years before but it's all so deliberate. Making Scott a saviour would have been easier than what we got, a character who has all of Boone's worst traits and none of his good. Scott's costuming echoes James Sunderland from Silent Hill but Derek is dressed, especially in season 1, just like Boone. Derek's early incompetence is not something Boone ever struggles with and Boone was bitten where Derek was born. Deaton = Decker is easy but Deaton's motives are never revealed, Decker wants a scapegoat to keep killing and will do anything he can to do that, but Deaton never stops manipulating Scott, both in ways that are positive and negative.

Gerard and Eigermann are probably besties.

The concept of Monster = Victim is unique to barker, no one did it before or after to the same extent, there are plenty of "man is the real monster" but that's not quite what happens, the nightbreed ARE monsters, they include cannibals and people who can turn into animals and smoke, Dracula would fit right in and they'd feed him happily, but they are also children, the disabled, the ones who could never pass as human. And Barker, in Nightbreed's most famous quote puts it succinctly and sums up Teen Wolf very well which is why I'm SO adamant that they're related.

Rachel: "To be smoke, to be a wolf, to live for ever: it's not so terrible. You call us monsters but when you dream, you dream of flying and changing and living forever, you envy us, and what you envy..."

Lori: "we destroy."

What is Teen Wolf if not that envy, and a character who is both a wolf and a destroyer, one who envies but cannot accept anything else, who did not seek to join the monsters, and hates that he has become that. And in the hands of a better writer we wouldn't have the same Nightbreed dilemma, where it almost manages to say what it wants to say and what it does it does by accident and can't be considered "good" as much as resonant.Outcasts found in Nightbreed, in Midian, a place to belong, a place where their sins, both real and imagined, would be forgiven, where they would not be judged.The same is true of the mythical "Hale pack", judging by fandom and just numbers, more people are fascinated by the Hale Pack under Derek Hale, whose journey is less like Boone's than even Scott's even if they are dressed the same, [usually this fits SO well, Scott's comparison to James Sunderland is blatant, Stiles' story matches that of Angela in Silent Hill 2 who he dresses like at the same time as Scott first appears in the green jacket, his abuse by his mother is the same as  hers, although the Sheriff is a much better parent than Angel's father whom it is heavily implied sexually abused his daughter]

I could write books about the two of them, and why Nightbreed was so influential both on this and media in the wider sense, even when all we had was the theatrical cut people were writing books and albums and making works about Midian, even before fandom found its home on the internet people cosplayed named members of the 'breed, the Peloquin, Rachel, Lylesburg etc. But I've already written 2,5k words and I've barely scratched the surface.

Maybe what Davis wanted to write, because it's meatier between the teeth as a writer, was what if Boone didn't want to save the 'breed. What if he worked with Decker to bring about their destruction - and he botched the landing - hard.

[nemetonisevilpassiton]

Christmas at Chatsworth

[nemetonisevilpassiton]

#good omens

[nemetonisevilpassiton]

Silly puppy for Tuesday Dec 28, 2021

[nemetonisevilpassiton]

Scott McCall and getting what you need - a teen wolf meta

I've spoken at length about Scott and the hero's journey and how it doesn't apply, and also how hero does not mean main character, and how Scott fits the traditional role of the antagonist - not villain, not big bad, but a character who is most interested in things remaining static.

I want to expand on Scott and the traditional framework of a protagonist using the want/need lens.

The idea being simply, a character goes from asking for what they want to getting what they need.

Disney is actually great at this which makes them brilliant as examples. They actually have an "I want" song, with the words "i want" featured prominently. In Beauty and the Beast Belle goes from singing "I want more than this provincial life" to getting what she needed in a community that accepted her for who she was. In the Little Mermaid Ariel sings "I want to be part of that world" but what she needed was to be accepted as a person and not just the youngest voice in Triton's choir.

As they go through the story it changes from "I want" to "I needed this and often didn't know"

So with this framework let's look at Scott.

Scott WANTS to be popular, he wants the view of teenage high school-dom he's seen in movies and on TV, he wants what he perceives Jackson to have - but Jackson is 95% mess 5% facade. Although he doesn't appear to Jackson works his ass off to get what he has because he's convinced that unless he's king of the castle no one will like him for who he is.

Scott's perception is flawed but that doesn't invalidate his want. The want is perfectly normal and in another narrative would be a great need to be realized - Scott Howard realizing popularity kinda sucks and he should be himself is the want/need of the original movie.

In the movie Heathers Veronica goes from wanting popularity and to be liked by the right people to being a strong person who doesn't care what people think. Yellow Heather [whose surname I can never remember] goes from wanting people to see her as perfect to getting help for her eating disorder.

Wanting popularity is not a bad thing, even for Scott - at first, Teen Wolf shows popularity as toxic and had Scott learned that this would be a very different meta.

Scott never achieves "what he needs" because he just changes one want for another, he wants to be popular, he wants to be cured, he wants to be left alone, he wants to save everyone, he wants to be seen as a hero - but what does Scott NEED?

The narrative needs things from Scott but that's not the same as what Scott NEEDS, not wants, what would in the achieving create the endgame Scott, the one who is at the end of the story. And Antis, if you have an answer for this, I'd love to know it.

Lydia goes from I want to be queen bee to accepting who she is and eschewing the facade she wore of the mega bitch and allowing herself to rely on other people.

Stiles goes from wanting Lydia to needing to protect the people he loves and doing his best to do it [even when it's not much]

Liam goes from wanting to control his anger to understanding it's a part of him and doesn't need control as much as managed.

Characters evolve when the narrative gives them what they need - even when they don't know that they need it, and sometimes it can be a variation of what they want.

Characters who remain in the "I want" remain static, and that can work really well for episodic characters for whom change would upset the narrative, Batman for example can't get what he needs because then he'd stop fighting crime and there would be no more Batman.

There are readings on the story that would answer it, if Scott is a villain in the tone of "In the Right One in" where he appears to not be one, and doesn't consider himself one - but is one doing things like recruiting child soldiers, sending others to die in his place, not listening to anyone and causing unnecessary harm to his allies = which are all things he does in canon - then what Scott needs is to be stopped, to be released from the burden which he's botching. It is unlikely such a character can be redeemed

but if scott is the hero he thinks himself = Scott needs support that he doesn't have because he's rubbish with people, he's charming and charismatic but doesn't listen

then there is the third option - what does the narrative need? What would end the story satisfactorily, it wouldn't be to stop Monroe, because that wouldn't change anything, the war won't end. Maybe what Scott truly needs is someone he can follow, a general who won't let him down, who won't betray him and will give good orders. Someone who knows how to use him effectively.

I've said all along Scott would make an amazing Right Hand [just as Peter is a left hand] maybe that's what he needs, someone to be the right hand of [and ideally it would be a new character, an older werewolf who knows what he's doing {the hales clearly don't}]

[nemetonisevilpassiton]

The Psycho Problem - a teen wolf meta

I recently wrote a meta about the face-heel turn and used Event Horizon as an example to explain it, and guessed it was the source of the idea in Teen Wolf - I was wrong, it was Psycho.

Let me start at the beginning.

Psycho might be Hitchcock’s masterpiece, it is certainly the most famous and as famous as it is very few people seem to have seen it and certainly don’t quite understand the layout of the movie, because it’s very sneaky. It was written as a novel by Robert Bloch in 1959 and quickly turned into a film.

It starts with a woman, Marion, working in a bank where a client drops off a $40,000 cash downpayment, Marion, knowing her boyfriend Sam has debts, makes the decision to steal the money and leaves Arizona intending to drive to Fairvale California to bring Sam the money. After trading in her car for one with California plates she is caught in a terrible rainstorm and books a night in a local motel. There she meets Norman and hears him talking to his mother and when pressed Norman admits she’s mentally ill and he is her carer, moved by the story and wracked by guilt Marion decides to bring the money back. She hides the money in the room and has a shower where a shadowy figure stabs her. Seeing blood Norman runs to her room and finds her dead. Terrified he cleans up her possessions in the trunk of her car - including the money - and moves on.

A week later Marion’s sister, Lila, goes to Fairvale to confront Sam about Marion’s whereabouts but Sam doesn’t know where she is. They are confronted by a private detective, Arbogast, who has been hired to look for the missing money, he looks into motels to find that Marion stayed with the Bates’, Norman can’t quite answer him but tells him that Marion met his mother and when Arbogast asks to meet her but Norman puts him off. He telephones Lila to give him an update and sneaks upstairs to meet Mrs Bates where a shadowy figure stabs him to death.

Sam and Lila visit the motel and see a female figure who does not answer the door to them, so they go to the sheriff who tells them that Mrs Bates died in a murder suicide ten years previous and that Arbogast lied to Sam and Lila to pursue the money, convinced something bad has happened they drive to the motel where Norman carries his mother to the fruit cellar to hide her.

Sam talks to Norman at the front desk where Lila sneaks around looking for a way in, sneaking into the cellar, worried Norman knocks Sam out and goes to the fruit cellar to check on his mom, where Lila has found a skeleton in a rocking chair wearing a dress and wig and when she turns around Norman is wearing his mother’s old dress and wig and holding a chef’s knife intending to kill her. Sam has come around in time and is able to stop him.

At the police station it is revealed that Norman killed his mother and her lover out of jealoousy and unable to bear the guilt created the persona of her in his own mind who could do the things he wanted to without reproach of his normal mind, and this persona was jealous so whenever Norman felt attraction for a woman “mother” had to kill her and Norman had killed two girls before Marion. The film ends with Norman permanently “mother” and blaming Norman for the killings as Marion’s car [with the money] is pulled from the swamp.

So what has that to do with Teen Wolf - like most things it comes down to Motel California [306]

In the opening teaser we see Alexander Argent buy a newspaper with a date of 1977 on it, but the location is Fairvale, a fictional town from Psycho. [kudos to @auntpol​ who spotted that]

 We noticed parallels with Isaac and continued on blithely sure we had mined that particular hill until I wrote the meta on the face heel turn when I was explaining to someone else about how Psycho had done the same technique - introducing Marion as the main character and then switching it with the shower scene - this led to oh that episode has a shower scene followed by a god-dammit.

Norman, in the persona of “mother” who has no moral restraints lurks outside the shower to stab the girl.

Scott, roofied off his face on wolfsbane and possessed by whatever is in the motel and removed of moral restraints, lurks outside Allison’s shower but is questioned.

It’s a really obvious parallel and we missed it. We were so busy looking at phantasmagoria and the suicide scenes that we totally missed it. It was signposted and we still drove straight on by. We looked at Hotel California. We looked at goat demons [the gran capri means great goat]. We looked at Nightmare on Elm Street 2 which starts and ends on a school bus [and has a lot of teen wolf parallels with Jackson in particular]

Scott McCall is given a direct parallel to Norman Bates. 

Scott, removed of moral constraints, is directly compared to a serial killer.

Not can be said to be paralleled with, not it is possible to interpret the information this way - nope, they did everything short of having the woman behind the counter be a skeleton in a dress and a wig.

The “removed from moral constraints” is important - because Scott was off his face in this episode, and loss of agency is a huge deal in Teen Wolf [possession, sexual assault, body modification and manipulation],  but it’s also a sliding scale. Tracy killed her father under the spell of the dread doctors but she continued using her abilities for violence by choice. Donovan was out for violence before he was modified because he lacked those moral constraints. Scott’s moral code is one end of the spectrum - he has put in place restrictions and restraints that he might not otherwise follow and certainly doesn’t before season 3 and his “be a better Scott McCall program”, until mid 3a he was prepared for people to die and even to kill [Peter in s1], he didn’t treat Jackson as a victim but didn’t want Scott to kill him because he had a plan with Deaton to use Jackson to remove Derek and Gerard from his own life.

In 3a Scott puts in place a “moral code” that is not in his nature and that he takes very little manipulation to slip from, and it is a “moral code” that he cannot uphold but refuses to change until it becomes as dangerous as having none. In 6b he is willing to sacrifice two kids for his own life and that is a very amoral thing to do, it might be absolute naivete that he thinks that they will not kill them [which is stupid] but with a moral code that contains no killing you can’t allow other people to kill for you.

Ned Stark at the start of Game of Thrones commits an execution himself because he thinks that the weight of the decision he made should be on his hands. 

I do still think the bait and switch over who is the “hero” is from Event Horizon, I do think that’s deliberate I just think we were absolutely given this parallel so we wouldn’t miss it, so we’d recognise Scott is again and again compared to villains. 

I often complain Teen Wolf is too subtle with it’s signposting - but then they put a great big neon sign over their main and we’re too busy looking at the pattern on someone’s shirt to notice it.

[nemetonisevilpassiton]

Event Horizon, Teen Wolf and the Face Heel Turn - a teen wolf meta

Event Horizon, Teen Wolf and the Face Heel Turn - a teen wolf meta

I have spent a long time comparing Teen Wolf to Event Horizon because Event Horizon shadows Beacon Hills so very surely but I never explained why it’s a great comparison and why it’s an important example of what happens with Scott.

Event Horizon does in 90 minutes what it takes Teen Wolf six seasons to do.

It is easier to explain what happens to Dr Weir than it is to explain what happens to Scott because Dr Weir has an absolute moment where he performs the “Face Heel Turn” so you can go HERE! It happens HERE! Where with Scott it’s a much slower descent.

So let’s start with definitions - the “face heel turn” is a wrestling term, or one that is used for modern sports entertainment. Performers take a role, a babyface, or face, or a heel, a “hero” or a “villain” although those terms are not quite right. A babyface is a performer the audience roots for and the heel is the one the audience roots against.

The performers will change roles depending on the storyline that they are in, they will betray an alliance for personal gain or whatever, and a hero becoming a villain is a “face heel turn” and a villain who becomes a hero in the storyline is a “heel face turn”.

This is not the same as a redemption arc, because the character in the storyline has no intention of being redeemed, they’ve switched sides for whatever reason the story needs. It’s a term more associated with low brow entertainment, street performances, wrestling and the like but it’s a really useful term in this instance.

What teen wolf does is what Event Horizon does where the heel face turn is entirely based on audience supposition. There is no supporting evidence in either that the “hero” is the main character but audience expectation leads to a false assumption. The writer tricks you into that assumption but as I said it’s easier to explain this with Event Horizon than with Teen Wolf.

Event Horizon is an odd movie, it might be genius, it might be a terrible failure, it might be both at the same time, but this it does very well. Paul W S Anderson is a director who is better at inserting things that look cool than crafting a cohesive storyline, he has beats that he wants to include and often forgets to join them together so I’m guessing the original script included this twist and I’m pretty sure that it was stolen from this because it worked well. 

I want to make this clear this is a really clever subversion and it needs all the kudos, the fact that it comes from Event Horizon is the surprise. I love Event Horizon but I can see its faults. It has a lot of them.

Event Horizon starts - after the text crawl - by introducing us to Dr Weir, played by Sam Neill, being told that the ship has reappeared. We follow him and learn his core detail, that his guilt over his wife’s suicide exists although we don’t know the details yet. Through him we meet the crew of the Lewis and Clark who exclude him and are led by Miller. Weir is the one who explains the “science”, he is the one who built the ship, he is the one who is best placed to save her. The first fake out dream sequence is Weir’s. He is our port of entry into this universe. We are introduced to him through a window.

The same is true of Scott McCall, we zoom in through the window to find him with his back towards us - like Dr Weir - fixed on the first core tenet of his personality - his desire to be first line. Through him we are introduced to the second world and the characters. He is our port of entry to this universe.

Traditionally characters introduced through windows are shown to have a limited viewpoint. They are traditionally easily led. Unlike Dr Weir Scott is shown in shadow, Dr Weir is looking in a mirror - in Teen Wolf that would represent viewing the self to reassure them of their self, where shadow represents duality. Dr Weir is shaving, Scott is lacing his crosse. Both of these simple domestic activities actually create a false sense of security for the universe.

Dr Weir is, unlike Scott, a professional, he is the one who tells Miller that he is overreacting at the reveal of the ship, he does not want to accept the weirdness even as he is visited by the “ghost” of his dead wife, still as she was in the moment of her death except without eyes. Claire might be the most disturbing thing on the ship and the ship is rather famously disturbing.

Scott is also determined to refuse to see the supernatural because he has his own plans, Weir wants to return the ship to continue his science stuff, Scott wants to be first line. When things start to go wrong the refusal to change that plan endangers people.

As to why Event Horizon does this shift better than Teen Wolf is because it makes it absolute. He breaks. Trying to fix the ship he is visited by Claire in the circuit corridors and escaping her finds the first victim of the ship and claws out his own eyes.

Let me repeat that - he gouges out his own eyes.

Eyes in Event Horizon mean acceptance of the “other realm” the so called Hell but that the final villain of Teen Wolf requires this act when the comparison to Weir is so explicit is interesting.

Weir then starts to kill the crew of the Lewis and Clark and Miller is forced to try and save as many of his crew as he can. He steps up as the hero but we see Weir waver before the moment of madness, the famous “I am home” gif I love to use and have inserted.

Weir wants to fix the ship. He wants to maintain stasis. He wants to get his way and refuses to listen to the reasons why this is a bad idea. 

Scott is exactly the same.

At some point Scott has a “face heel turn” it’s entirely possible it happened before he was bitten but the comparison is apt because Scott is so like Weir and when the situation gets overwhelming he digs his heels in. Although he is the character who introduces us to the secondary universe - the one where werewolves are a thing - he is the one who wants things to go back to what he thought that they were - a thing they never were. There were always things wrong with the Event Horizon’s science and there were always werewolves in Beacon Hills.

They are both blind by their own choice - gouging out their eyes was the literal manifestation of that.

They are not cured of their blindness by virtue or acknowledgement - they don’t immediately accept the truth of their situation - they are cured by outside interference. In Weir’s case it’s whatever is wrong with the ship and the repeated line “where we’re going we won’t need eyes” although the manifestation that Miller fights at the end has eyes. Scott is cured by Malia whose history is …. Vague …. And ill defined. She could very well be the thing that Jennifer summoned, but that’s a different meta and it’s by @auntpol.

Anyway

Weir is corrupted by the “whatever” is in the ship, the Hell, it’s not defined. The visitations, the creeping horror all combine to break him, and Scott’s growing corruption by whatever is in the water in Beacon Hills and his fear of what he is capable of rendering him unable to act allowing the corruption the same free reign as whatever happens on the ship. Teen Wolf takes six seasons to do what Event Horizon did - it lied and then revealed that it had lied. That Weir was not the one to save them; that given the opportunity Weir would send them all to Hell because Weir could not move past what had happened. His repeated thoughts of Allison are exactly like the Claire haunting - a manifestation of what he lost and cannot live without.

Scott created his own “hell” by a lack of empathy and by his repression - by refusing to listen he did not hear the surviving victim of the Beast and HER fear allowed Gerard to mould her into a fanatic. The war with Monroe is a hell that Scott spread and that the creature in 6b drove people into a panic of fear, a place where they could not remain inactive but Scott remains inactive. His fear paralyses him and so he condemns people. Weir does it actively, becoming a face for whatever is happening in the ship in the finale. Scott becomes so fixed on the defeat of the “anuk-ite” [it’s not an anuk-ite, I don’t know what it is] as a way to fix the problem he passively created he condemns them as much as Miller blowing up the corridor of the Event Horizon. It’s a bandaid and the war that follows is the trauma the survivors are left with, and the knowledge that Miller is wherever the ship went [the best guess is the Warhammer 20k universe as it was so inspired by EH]

Weir is our guide and is revealed to be a trap, because the situation he created overwhelmed him and made him his agent.

Scott does the same - and in recruiting Alec he is the agent of the thing that consumed him.

It’s the same - Event Horizon just does it much more explicitly.

[nemetonisevilpassiton]

I've started researching about the mythology of the Oni recently and based in what I've found Teen Wolf downplayed them hard. Like, they were dangerous, but they weren't as n as dangerous as the Oni from mythology. Or as scary.

I answered this with a joke, some insightful research and Tumblr ate it

Okay the joke was that the teen wolf in question was an akaname knowing people who googled it would laugh

But oni 

Oni is a catch all term like monster or criminal, it covers a lot of things, the “oni” in teen wolf are specifically kagemusha or shadow warriors but it’s a double meaning which leads to a fascinating and we’ll supported theory

As with all reading ymmv and just because it’s not contradicted doesn’t mean it’s right, teen wolf defines nothing so theories like this can exist contradicting each other with the same evidence

Kagemusha means shadow warrior but is used to mean body double, specifically a man hired by the daimyo in cases where he feared assassination

It spirals back to teen wolf through a director called Akira Kurosawa and if you know anything about movies as an artform (as opposed to just enjoying them) you’ve run across him in some form or another. His Seven Samurai became the Magnificent Seven, Rashomon became the shorthand for a specific technique (which teen wolf uses in Visionary) Hidden Fortress heavily inspired Star Wars, the Matrix called a character Mifune after Kurosawa’s favourite lead and I can go on

Almost every film director can be traced back to being inspired by Kurosawa.

Following the release of Star Wars Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola used their success to get Kurosawa funding for a movie which was Kagemusha (Coppola had just released his film version of Heart of Darkness - Apocalypse Now) and the film was Kagemusha

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kagemusha

Kagemusha is interesting she says wishing she could use italics

A thief who bears an uncanny resemblance to the daimyo is hired to be his body double but the daimyo is killed leaving the instruction to hide his death for three years, and use the thief to deceive his enemies (who include Nobunaga) although the daimyo’s son tries to reveal the subterfuge the thief maintains the image until he is wounded and is revealed not to have the right scars showing him to be a fraud, the young lord seizes power, overrules the generals and leads them into a battle that they lose.

So it raises a questions which is supported by the text

Was there an imposter serving in the role of alpha?

There is definitely usurpation, just about everyone and everything was taken over by people who were not supposed to have that power, Peter usurped Laura (either through his own madness or outside manipulation) Gerard usurped Victoria, Scott usurped the Hale alpha territory, the dread doctors usurped supernatural abilities, Valack tried to usurp Lydia’s abilities, the leonmensch usurped the hunt’s power and they were all consumed by that usurpation

But hers the question, was Scott a body double for the Hale alpha, in that being a “true alpha” he was designed to draw attention away from the Hale alpha allowing them to build an army whilst every johnny come lately went after Scott, an alpha with questionable abilities, no alpha speed or strength and even the bite is 50/50 (we can not say with certainty Liam turned because of the bite, we can say Scott believed that was the reason but Liam has the same providence as Malia, either of them could be Peter’s child and we know nothing about when werewolves first manifest, we know Malia was 8/9 and we know Liam was tazzing out before he was bitten and this was treated as a medical disorder but…. As I said 50/50)

As I said it’s an interesting theory and it fits shady Deaton, Deaton was loyal to the Hales, Derek was an untrained and unskilled alpha and everyone was gunning for him, if he needed time setting a diversion would help, a lot, and Scott was loyal to Deaton and it would explain why Deaton told Derek to trust Scott and why Deaton went to so much effort making Scott ascend (faking the kidnapping to get Scott to break mountain ash before the alpha pack showdown)

Basically it set Scott up as an unknowing Sailor Venus to Derek’s Sailor Moon (for the record both the Kagemusha and Sailor Venus were capable)

It’s a sound theory, nothing in the text contradicts it, unlike the thief and Sailor Venus it’s likely Scott doesn’t know and that’s why we don’t see if Derek has ascended to go with his evolution in the power walk at the end, but it being sound doesn’t mean it’s the only reading

Sometimes these things are - like Scott isn’t a good person but thinks himself one, Stiles is definitely something, Stiles’ somethingness comes from his dad

Sometimes these things can be definitely shot down with canon evidence - Talia was a nice person, Derek knew what he was doing

Most of the time I try to give you all the evidence so you can make your own mind up

Yeah, the oni are interesting

[nemetonisevilpassiton]

Do you think Stiles had forgiven Allison and become her friend by the time of 3B?

Stiles didnt resent Allison, he resented the time she spent with Scott

Stiles has this thing where while being sociable he gives his all to the people he lives and expects them to leave him behind, with Allison Scott left him behind, and that wasn't her fault, she didn't tell Scott to ditch him, but he still ditched him because scott's an all or nothing kinda person 

Stiles liked Allison, he ran around passing messages for them, he didn't show her any acrimony, even he knew she wasn't to blame even if he wanted to blame her because she was the reason Scott left him behind

I am trying to be careful in my wording because i don't think there was any intent from any of the three of them, just kids having kid feelings in adult situations