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iambountyfan · 1 year ago

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ionnalee took time to answer our questions via instagram stories tonight.

view the full Q&A in our photo album on Facebook or click ‘keep reading’ below for the transcript: facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.742996074497830&type=3

Q: overall thoughts/feelings from the US tour? A: so happy about it. each show was something special. it felt huge to get back up there after pandemic/pregnancy/giving birth and feel like myself again, but stronger.

Q: any song in your catalogue you have yet to play live that you would like to? A: there’s no song i don’t want to play actually. there are just a lot of songs in my body of work. one i am longing to take on with full band is MACHINEE. also craving to sing ‘n.’

Q: what drew you to the electronic soundscape of iamamiwhoami compared to previous folk-pop material? A: there was more to my musicality to explore.

Q: how is the weather in Sweden now? and what’s your favourite place there? A: it’s very hot for june here. 25*c and not a rainy day in weeks. very worrying for farmers and ground water.

Q: favourite synthesizer? A: Moog grandmother, minimoog and Roland JP08.

Q: when is the continuation of the tour planned? A: an exclusive set of shows in my hometown in august in sweden (first time ever to play there). more EU shows to come and then something in the winter too. keen to explore 2024.

Q: as i age, i feel like i lose touch with my imagination. how do you keep yours intact? A: i think the world around us as we grow up is built on seriousness and responsibilities and it’s important to never stop playing despite that. imagination is based on feeling things. experiencing new things. when you go numb you go dumb. i grew up being on my own a lot. the good thing about it was that i built a really vivid imagination.

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Q: ; john is one of your songs that gets me the most, any meanings or stories behind it? A: it is about “selling out” adapting to the consumers will. giving others what they want. hence the title.

Q: no questions, but we love you, so glad we saw you live in Denver ❤️ A: thank you. i loved playing my first show in your city. hope to be back soon and to get to see the rockies too.

Q: Brazil: can we dream about a future gig here? A: yes.

Q: do you have any hobbies we don’t know about? A: a few probably… one is archeology. i am a nerd on plants and roses in particular. free diving.

Q: how do you mix your vocals to be so rich and energetic? they always have so much character. A: i try to do as much as possible with the vocal take itself. the mix is there to enhance it. i use very little effects now and instead play with the physical sound itself or dubs. i do like reverb and being dynamic with any effects. character is in the feeling.

Q: how was the experience of touring with baby bauer? lots of love to you and your family xx A: it was really amazing. tiring at times with little sleep, but overall amazing. he was a trouper and got so much love and support from my crew as well. he had a blast learning to walk in the US. 🤍

Q: sorry, i just want to take this opportunity to thank you for existing as an amazing artist 🖤 A: thank you 🤍

Q: would you consider a KRONOLOGI volume 2 with unheard tracks, demos and new versions? A: yes if that came as a next natural step i would.

Q: any tour/concert with TR/ST? A: that sounds like a fun ride 🤍

Q: what makes you lose your sleep? A: negative stress/lack of recovery time.

Q: why did you decide to go for an audiovisual format with your work? A: it’s a 360 representation of my artistic expression and it was a natural development to get here. often i've been asked how i can afford to make 'all these visuals' when in fact they are as much part of my work as the music if you will. often made with little to nothing but vision, desire and skill. it's just that visuals is seen as PR in music. to me it's a world of its own. they belong together.

Q: what inspires the darkness/haunting feelings in your music? it resonates with me. A: it’s in my DNA.

Q: how has the advance of tech affected the audiovisual process for you? A: i have many of the tools we need to make and release things by our own hand now. wasn’t possible 15 years ago. still we need creativity, ours and others time and lots of bravery not to mention connecting with people who like your work to make something lasting.

Q: any advice for after a breakup? really want to see your view about love and such 🤍 A: when you’re wounded you need to heal. be with people who love you and go outside. listen to music that makes you feel like you. it hurts but least we feel it right.

Q: was the burning of SUTS a metaphor for burning your industry careers to become independent? A: no he was a representative of the audience. it had to happen.

Q: when did you start making music? A: a long time ago.

Q: what do you have planned for the shows in Sweden? will there be a full band, etc? A: yes full band. three amazing nights on my home turf with special guests Zola Jesus and Jenny Wilson is what to expect.

🔗 ionnalee.com/events

Q: i 🤍 your pre-iamamiwhoami work. what song from then are you most proud of? would you ever perform it? A: proud of most of my songs. they’re a snapshot of me at the time. Lake Chermain and This War come to mind. it feels a bit too distant and disconnected to reconnect with however.

Q: will you paint more and sell them? i would love to buy one. A: thanks i will and hopefully i can soon when i have a proper home and work place again. chaotic rn leaving stockholm for vadstena.

Q: hardest part and best part of motherhood? i'm expecting in Dec 💗 A: congratulations 🤍 the hardest part is the physical and mental toll on you and how individual and to me intimately personal the experience is. the best is the biological connection to another being that’s part you like a branch from a tree that grows into its own being. so cool. so much love. thankful to get to experience it.

Q: is Stockholm a place firmly in the past now? A: no i spent 22 years there and have my closest friends and family there plus my studio still. will be there.

Q: my definitive fav body of work of yours is EABF, any fun memories or anecdotes? A: i struggled so much with my health making this album. had just toured for a long time with Röyksopp. felt really insecure about my currency as an artist. had been asked "why aren't you more famous?" so many times through the years cause my value is different in the commercial world of music. choosing to be independent is often seen as "you just didn't make it big enough". this album was a big fuck off to all that. the tour that followed really cemented my love for my audience who believe in me.

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Q: is iamamiwhoami; flying or falling about overcoming a mental health challenge? A: it’s about fighting your own shadows. contradicting behaviours and self destruction.

Q: are there any songs that you had a hard time singing in the studio or live? which one and why? A: SAMARITAN is pretty full on. don’t think there’s a single breath pause in that chorus. plus dancing. hard work for live. also i take a lot of pride in my vocals and have a sensitive pitch ear so i tend to get extremely tired going nuts there. in the studio you can take breaks so no complaining.

Q: any words of encouragement for your queer fans this pride month? 😔🏳️‍🌈 x A: be brave and free ❤️

Q: what instrument would you like to learn that you haven’t yet? A: the harp.

Q: funny memory from the recent NA tour? A: me in Twin Peaks w/ giant b⚫️⚫️bs.

Q: around bounty and kin do you have some more BTS photos we haven’t seen before? A: there’s some but we decided within the group to keep that period to ourselves. it was such an overwhelming time you have no idea. this is why BLUE was a big splash of freedom that i needed to create after many years of being completely closed, isolated and silent.

Q: what helped you keep faith in your alchemizing power from the beginning till now? A: to be perfectly honest growing up i didn’t have anyone who understood my musical or otherwise talent so i went solely on the gut feel that i had something different that made me feel good inside in contrast to a pretty dark time.

Q: is capturing your emotions important to you while singing? how do you best execute it? A: it’s everything. make sure you’re in it and that you have the best possible foundation to be lost in the moment. play songs you enjoy, have good monitors and great production. a fantastic audience does the trick.

Q: what do you think about AI in music. like voice replacement, for example. A: it is what it is but it ain’t feeling things.

#ionnalee #iamamiwhoami #twimc #twimclabel #To whom it may concern.#q&a #jonna lee

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amuelia · 3 years ago

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How do you think Roose will meet his demise? Or will he survive? What's your best Roose end game predictions?

Thank you for the question! This will be a long post under the readmore, going into my thoughts on the show ending and exploring what the books may have set up in regards to themes and characterization, as well as a bit of general analysis of Roose' story arc in a Dance with Dragons (and some speculation about Ramsay as well).

If you click on the readmore i will have divided the post into sections with bolded Headers, if you want to only read my specific endgame ideas you can skip ahead to the "His Endgame?" section.

In The Show

The show had him get killed by Ramsay in s6, which informs a lot of the fandom speculation about this storyline.

I am not a fan of the show's scenario as it was both similar to tywin and tyrion as well as a mirror of robb's death; it would also be offscreen in the books since neither of the characters are PoVs and Ramsay would need to do the act in secret. This would ultimately undercut Roose' role and impact, being a death scene that is not very unique and also isn't shown to the reader directly. Since no PoV is even in Winterfell currently, we would just hear of it from afar and not witness the consequences.

The show also has a different dynamic in the Bolton storyline, emphasizing Ramsay as the "main character" of this arc, and elevating him to the main villain for s5-6 to fill Joffrey's shoes as an evil character played by a very charismatic actor. Ramsay's show writing is informed by the needs of a TV setting that wants shocking moments and capitalizes on "fan favourite" actors; his rising importance in the show thus is not necessarily an indicator of his book importance. The show was also missing many central characters like the northern lords and the Frey men in Winterfell.

The show had a tendency to kill off characters early when they wanted to cull storylines or had no plans to adapt more of the character's story (like Stannis, Barristan, possibly the Tyrells...); In Mance Rayder we have the most obvious example, where they killed him off for real in a scene that in the book was a misdirection. We also have characters like Jorah where it appears the showrunners had their own choice of how they want his storyline to end, even if Grrm has his own ending in mind.

"For a long time we wanted Ser Jorah to be there at The Wall in the end," writer Dave Hill says. "The three coming out of the tunnel would be Jon and Jorah and Tormund. But [...] Jorah should have the noble death he craves defending the woman he loves." - Dave Hill for Entertainment Weekly

So a death in the show does not need to be an indicator that the books will feature an equivalent scene, even if it gives a hint as to what may happen. By s5 the show has become its own beast, and the butterfly effects from radical changes they made as well as the different characterizations results in the show having to cater to its own needs in many cases when it gets to resolving a plotline.

"We reconceived the role to make it worthy of the actor's talents." - Benioff and Weiss for the s5 DVD commentary, on Indira Varma's casting as Ellaria

In The Books

(Since this post was getting out of hand in length a lot of these arguments are a little shortened/not as in-depth as i'd like! Feel free to inquire more via ask if something is unclear or you disagree)

In the books i find it hard to make a concrete guess as to how it will end. Occam's razor would be to assume the show sort of got it right and that it will vaguely end the same, which could very well happen and i will not discount the possibility; Ramsay is cruel, desires the Dreadfort rule, and is a suspected kinslayer and has no qualms to commit immoral violence.

"Ramsay killed [his brother]. A sickness of the bowels, Maester Uthor says, but I say poison." - Reek III, aDwD

Reek saw the way Ramsay's mouth twisted, the spittle glistening between his lips. He feared he might leap the table with his dagger in his hand [to attack his father]. - Reek III, aDwD

Arguments against this or for a different endgame come down to interpretations of the themes in the story arc and opinions on dramatic structure/grrm's writing, and are thus very subjective.

The way the story currently is going, Ramsay killing Roose treats Roose almost as a plot device; his death brings no change or development to Ramsay's character as we already know his motivations and cruelty align with such an act, and we can assume that he would feel no remorse about it either. The results of such a scene would be firmly on a story level, as it brings political changes and moves the plot along into a specific direction. Roose himself cannot have any relevant character development about it as he does not have a PoV and we would not be able to witness his reaction from the outside.

“The only thing worth writing about is the human heart in conflict with itself.” - William Faulkner, often quoted by Grrm

Further, killing his father is very difficult to pull off in secret (Roose is frequently described as very cautious, and employs many guardsmen). And even if Ramsay pulls it off (people often interpret Ramsay as Roose' blind spot, assuming he might be caught by surprise, not expecting Ramsay would bite the hand that feeds him), Roose is the one that holds his entire alliance together; The Freys would be alienated by Ramsay who would antagonize Walda and her son as his rivals, The Ryswell bloc appears to dislike Ramsay (especially Barbrey), and the other northmen are implied to not even like Roose himself. Killing Roose would quickly combust the entire northern faction, and hinder Ramsay's further plans (another reason why I am not convinced of a book version of the "Battle of Bastards"). Though this might of course, if we look at it from the other side, be grrm's plan to quickly dissolve this plot and move the northern story forwards.

"Ramsay will kill [Walda's children], of course. [...] [She] will grieve to see them die, though." - Reek III, aDwD

"How many of our grudging friends do you imagine we'd retain if the truth were known? Only Lady Barbrey, whom you would turn into a pair of boots … inferior boots." - Reek III, aDwD

"Fear is what keeps a man alive in this world of treachery and deceit. Even here in Barrowton the crows are circling, waiting to feast upon our flesh. The Cerwyns and the Tallharts are not to be relied on, my fat friend Lord Wyman plots betrayal, and Whoresbane … the Umbers may seem simple, but they are not without a certain low cunning. Ramsay should fear them all, as I do." - Reek III, aDwD

Roose' death at Ramsay's hand also removes him thematically from the Red Wedding, as we can assume such a death might have happened regardless of his participation in the event (seeing as Ramsay is getting provoked by Roose constantly in normal dialogue, and has a general violent disposition). Roose already took Ramsay in before aGoT started, and married Walda very early in the war, which is already most of the buildup that the show's scenario had. It also has little to do with the The North Remembers plot except set dressing, since the northmen are presumably neither collaborating with/egging on Ramsay nor would they appreciate the development.

Themes: Ned Stark and the rule over the North

Roose is treated as a foil to Eddard; They are often contrasted in morals and ruling styles, while also having many superficial similarities that further connect them (they are seen as cold by people, grey eyed, patriarchs of rivalling northern houses, etc...).

Pale as morning mist, his eyes concealed more than they told. Jaime misliked those eyes. They reminded him of the day at King's Landing when Ned Stark had found him seated on the Iron Throne. - Jaime IV, aSoS

They both have a "bastard son" that they handle very differently; Roose treating Ramsay in the way that is seen as common in their society. Ramsay and Jon as a comparison are meant to show that Catelyn had a reason to see a bastard as a threat (since Domeric was antagonized by his bastard brother), but also shows that her suggested plan for Jon would not have stopped any danger either (as Ramsay being raised away from the castle didn't help).

And if his seed quickened, she expected he would see to the child's needs. He did more than that. The Starks were not like other men. Ned brought his bastard home with him, and called him "son" for all the north to see. - Catelyn II, aGoT

"Each year I sent the woman some piglets and chickens and a bag of stars, on the understanding that she was never to tell the boy who had fathered him. A peaceful land, a quiet people, that has always been my rule." - Reek III, aDwD

It appears to me that Roose' story functions in some ways as an inversion to Ned. He makes an attempt to grab a power he was not destined to (becoming warden of the north), where Ned did not want the responsiblity thrust upon him ("It was all meant for Brandon. [...] I never asked for this cup to pass to me." - Cat II, aGoT). Where Ned rules successfully and his northmen honor his legacy ("What do you think passes through their heads when they hear the new bride weeping? Valiant Ned's precious little girl." - The Turncloak, aDwD), the Boltons are largely hated and there are several plots conspiring against them ("Let me bathe in Bolton blood before I die." - The King's Prize, aDwD).

It seems possible to me that in terms of their family and legacy, Roose might also live through an inverted version of Ned's story; where Ned died first, leaving his family behind, Roose already lived to see the death of his wives and trueborn heir, and might thus also live to see Ramsay's death. Ned leaves behind well raised children and a North who still respects his name, and even though he dies it will presumably all be "in good hands" in the end (in broad strokes, obviously this is all much more morally complex). Roose however built up a bad and toxic legacy, and also built his way of life around evading consequences; it makes sense to me that he would be forced by the story to finally endure all the consequences of his actions and witness the fall of his house firsthand. After all we already have Tywin who fulfils the purpose of dying before his children while his legacy falls to ruins, and a Feast for Crows explores this aspect thoroughly.

Roose' arc in A Dance With Dragons

The story repeatedly builds up the situation unravelling around Roose, and him slowly losing a grip on it and becoming more stressed and anxious.

Reek wondered if Roose Bolton ever cried. If so, do the tears feel cold upon his cheeks? - Reek II, aDwD

Roose Bolton said nothing at all. But Theon Greyjoy saw a look in his pale eyes that he had never seen before—an uneasiness, even a hint of fear. [...] That night the new stable collapsed beneath the weight of the snow that had buried it. - a Ghost in Winterfell, aDwD

Lady Walda gave a shriek and clutched at her lord husband's arm. "Stop," Roose Bolton shouted. "Stop this madness." His own men rushed forward as the Manderlys vaulted over the benches to get at the Freys. - Theon I, aDwD

It also directly presents him as a parallel to Theon's rule in aCoK, who similarly experienced a very unpopular rule and his subjects slowly turning against him. Presumably, the point of this comparison will not just be "Ramsay comes in at the end and unexpectedly whacks them on the head". Both Theon and Roose invited Ramsay into their lives, giving him more power than he deserves, and causing Ramsay to make choices that increasingly alienate others from them (the death of the miller's boys for example has repercussions for both Theon and Roose). Grrm is likely steering this towards a difference in how they will deal with this situation.

It all seemed so familiar, like a mummer show that he had seen before. Only the mummers had changed. Roose Bolton was playing the part that Theon had played the last time round, and the dead men were playing the parts of Aggar, Gynir Rednose, and Gelmarr the Grim. Reek was there too, he remembered, but he was a different Reek, a Reek with bloody hands and lies dripping from his lips, sweet as honey. - a Ghost in Winterfell, aDwD

"Stark's little wolflings are dead," said Ramsay, sloshing some more ale into his cup, "and they'll stay dead. Let them show their ugly faces, and my girls will rip those wolves of theirs to pieces. The sooner they turn up, the sooner I kill them again." - The elder Bolton sighed. "Again? Surely you misspeak. You never slew Lord Eddard's sons, those two sweet boys we loved so well. That was Theon Turncloak's work, remember? How many of our grudging friends do you imagine we'd retain if the truth were known?" - Reek III, aDwD

Roose' arc is deeply connected to the relations he shares to the other northern lords, which has been heavily impacted by the Red Wedding. It stands to reason that they are going to be an important part of his downfall, and we see many hints of them plotting to betray him.

The north remembers, Lord Davos. The north remembers, and the mummer's farce is almost done. My son is home." - Davos IV, aDwD

Themes: Stannis and kinslaying

The books set up Roose and Stannis as foils as well; Both lack charisma and have trouble winnning the people's support, Stannis and Roose both parallel and contrast Ned, Stannis appears as a "lesser Robert" where Roose is a "lesser Ned", Stannis represents the fire where Roose represents the ice, both struggle over dominion in a land that doesnt particularly want either of them, etc... What i find interesting is how they are contrasted over kinslaying:

"Only Renly could vex me so with a piece of fruit. He brought his doom on himself with his treason, but I did love him, Davos. I know that now. I swear, I will go to my grave thinking of my brother's peach." - Davos II, aCoK

"I should've had the mother whipped and thrown her child down a well … but the babe did have my eyes." [...] "Now [Domeric's] bones lie beneath the Dreadfort with the bones of his brothers, who died still in the cradle, and I am left with Ramsay. Tell me, my lord … if the kinslayer is accursed, what is a father to do when one son slays another?" - Reek III, aCoK

Stannis is set up as someone who is very thorough and strict in following his own code and his "duty", even if he does not like what it forces him to do.

Stannis ground his teeth again. "I never asked for this crown. Gold is cold and heavy on the head, but so long as I am the king, I have a duty . . . If I must sacrifice one child to the flames to save a million from the dark . . . Sacrifice . . . is never easy, Davos. Or it is no true sacrifice. Tell him, my lady." - Davos IV, aSoS

The armorer considered that a moment. "Robert was the true steel. Stannis is pure iron, black and hard and strong, yes, but brittle, the way iron gets. He'll break before he bends." - Jon I, aCoK

Roose however is frequently characterized as someone who tries to get as much as he can while avoiding negative consequences, and who does not have a consistent moral code and instead bends rules to his benefit to be the most comfortable to him.

It is often theorized that Stannis will end up burning his daughter Shireen; the Ramsay issue might then serve to contrast the two men. If Grrm intends it to be compared by the reader, I can see it going two ways: Either Roose will be forced to finally act in a drastic way after avoiding his responsibility in regards to Ramsay and he will be forced to get rid of his son, making him break the only moral hurdle he has presented adhering to during the story (though analyzing his character, the kinslaying taboo is probably less a sign of moral fortitude and more him using the guise of morals to explain a selfish motivation). Or he might not act against Ramsay and suffer the consequences, presenting an interesting moral situation where some readers might consider his action "better" or more relatable than Stannis', breaking up the otherwise very black and white moral comparison between the two men. It serves as an interesting conflict of the morality of kinslaying compared to what readers might see as a moral obligation of getting rid of a monster such as Ramsay; contrasting Shireen whose death would not be seen as worth it by most. Ramsay as a bastard (who was almost killed at birth if he hadnt been able to prove his paternity) also makes for an interesting verbal parallel with the bastard Edric Storm, and might be used for a look at the utilitarian principle of killing a child (baby ramsay/edric) to save countless people from suffering that underpinned Edric's story.

"As Faulkner says, all of us have the capacity in us for great good and for great evil, for love but also for hate. I wanted to write those kinds of complex character in a fantasy, and not just have all the good people get together to fight the bad guy." - Grrm

"Robert, I ask you, what did we rise against Aerys Targaryen for, if not to put an end to the murder of children?" - Eddard VIII, aGoT

"If Joffrey should die . . . what is the life of one bastard boy against a kingdom?" - "Everything," said Davos, softly. - Davos V, aSoS

However Grrm decides to present these conflicts or which actions the characters will take in the end, it will result in interesting discussion and analysis for the readers.

His Endgame?

Looking at the trends of the past books, it is probably going to be hard to predict any specific outcome; every book introduces new characters and plot elements that were impossible to predict from the last book even if their thematic importance or setup was aptly foreshadowed.

Roose has a lot of plot importance and characterization that has, in my opinion, not yet been properly resolved in a way that would be unique and poignant to the specific purpose his character appears to fulfil. However I also have a bias in that i did not like the show's writing of that scene which makes me averse to see a version of it in the books, and i really like Roose as a character and want to see him have more scenes in the next book(s). This leads me to discount plot speculation that cuts his character arc short offscreen early. Roose is only a side character; however, i have trust in grrm's writing abilities and that he would give him a proper sendoff that feels satisfying to a fan of the character.

"…even the [characters] who are complete bastards, nasty, twisted, deeply flawed human beings with serious psychological problems… When I get inside their skin and look out through their eyes, I have to feel a certain — if not sympathy, certainly empathy for them. I have to try to perceive the world as they do, and that creates a certain amount of affection." — George Martin

Considering my earlier analyis, there is a case to be made for Roose killing Ramsay; however it appears grrm might have a different endgame in mind for Ramsay, foreshadowed in Chett's prologue:

There'd be no lord's life for the leechman's son, no keep to call his own, no wives nor crowns. Only a wildling's sword in his belly, and then an unmarked grave. The snow's taken it all from me . . . the bloody snow . . . - Chett, aSoS

I tend to think something might happen to Roose/the Bolton bloc later in the book that would cause Ramsay to attempt to flee the scene again like he did back in aCoK fleeing Rodrik's justice; perhaps Ramsay is sent out to battle but then flees it like a coward, or he sees his cause as lost. This time, the fleeing and potentially disguised Ramsay would not make it out to safety though, and get killed without being recognized as Ramsay, dying forgotten. This would serve as dramatic irony since Ramsay so strongly desired to be recognized and respected as a Lord of Bolton, without being too on the nose.

As for Roose, i could see him getting captured and somehow brought to justice (either when someone takes Winterfell or in some sort of battle). I see it unlikely that he will be backstabbed like Robb was, because it seems very "eye for an eye" and ultimately doesn't teach much of a lesson except "he had it coming"; But the various people conspiring against him could lead to his capture by betraying him (giving a payoff to the northern conspiracies and the red wedding). I would find a scene of him standing trial interesting since i believe we didn't have one of these for a true non-pov villain yet, and it would be an interesting confrontation that he cannot escape from (he also loves to talk so it would be a good read to see him make a case for himself).

I assume Roose will be out of the picture when the Other plot finally properly kicks into gear (whether dead or "in prison"). With Stannis as a false Azor Ahai and Roose as a false Other (with his pale, cold features), their struggle in the north seems to be a representation of the false "Game of Thrones" that distracts people from the "real threat" of the Others.

As always this is just my opinion, and it could all go very differently in the books! There could always be something that completely uproots my analysis and goes into a direction i did not expect from the material we had; But i have fate that Grrm as a writer will deliver and give me something i can be satisfied with.

#asks #asoiaf #asoiaf meta #roose bolton #valyrianscrolls #a song of ice and fire #not art #anonymous

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astrovian · 4 years ago

Audio

Richard Armitage interviews Harlan Coben for the Win audiobook (released 18/03/21)

Full transcript under cut

RA: Hi, I’m Richard Armitage. I played Adam Price in the Netflix series The Stranger, which was adapted from Harlan Coben’s novel of the same name. With me is the man himself, Harlan Coben, number one New York Times bestseller, the author of over thirty novels, including the one you’ve just listened to. I’m delighted to be talking to Harlan about his book, Win.

Okay Harlan, thanks for taking the time to chat about your audiobook and thanks for sending me a copy of the book. Um, it was so nice I ended up wrapping it up and giving it to my brother for Christmas.

HC: *laugh* You’re supposed to read it first, but okay, thanks Richard.

RA: No, I got the electronic version so uh, so I’ve had a good read. Congratulations, a great story. Brilliant, brilliant central character. I mean the first question I’m gonna ask is – because people listening to this have just been listening to the audiobook – are you, um, a big audiobook listener yourself?

HC: I – I go through stages, um, because my mind wanders, I sometimes have trouble focusing. But when I’m in a car, um, that’s most of the time that I’m- that I really love to use the audiobooks because it does make the ride just fly by. However, I’ve set up my life that I don’t have to commute to work every day, so I don’t have it steadily – it’s usually when I’m doing a nice long ride, I get a really good audiobook and time just flies by.

RA: And have you- have you got any favourite audiobooks that you’ve listened to recently, or any podcasts or what is it that floats your boat?

HC: You know, it’s funny. I still remember when I was a working man, way back when, when audiobooks were really first starting out and we had them on cassette tapes, I listened to the entire Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe, um, it was about thirty hours long, going back and forth to work for almost a month. And I still have memories of that experience, and it’s probably, well god, it’s probably 1990 I did that, 1989, something like that.

RA: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean I’ve got a- I’ve got a few journeys up and back from Manchester this year, we’re about to start working on Stay Close, so I’ll happily – I’m happy to take any recommendations of any good books, so maybe I’ll listen to Bonfire of the Vanitites.

HC: Well I tell ya, a lot of people – first of all, it’s a brilliant book, it’s maybe a bit dated, but I doubt that, um. I think Richard, I get more people telling me to listen to any book that you read.

RA: *laugh*

HC: I said, “Hey, I spend a lot of time with this guy, I’m about to do my second television show that stars Richard Armitage. No one I think has starred in two shows that I’ve done ever, so I get a lot of him anyway.” *laugh*

RA: You don’t need my voice in your head when you’re driving, that’s – that’s torture.

HC: That’s right, I’ll be hearing notes on, on scripts in my head if I hear you going. For those who don’t know who are listening, y’know, Richard starred in The Stranger, um, and now is going to be starring in Stay Close, uh, based off two of my novels which I’m sure you can get on audiobook.

RA: And on that note, what um, you’ve had so many adaptations now that have moved from page to screen – what is it like when you go through that process? When you’re – ‘cause you’re very hands on in the way that you kind of collaborate with not just the actors, but with the producers and y’know, the writers. I mean, you’re – you’re writing it yourself. Um, what is it like through, through that whole process, from starting to developing to seeing it kind of realised on screen?

HC: I think the key for me is not to be slavishly devoted to the novel. I think that’s a mistake that a lot of people who are trying to make an adaptation make. So, I go into it, ‘what is the best TV series we can make?’, if it’s true to the book, great. If it’s not true to the book, also great. Um, so I move my stories to various countries, we’ve changed characters around, we’ve changed motivations. Because they’re two very different mediums – a book is a book, and a TV series is a TV series. They should not be the same. One is a visual medium, one is not. Even, even um, audiobooks are slightly different um, than what you read. And they should be. Um, y’know, there’s a performance involved.

Also, because I’ve spent most of my life alone in a room coming up with writing a book, um, where I am just everything – I’m writer, director, actor, key grip. I don’t even know what a key grip is, but I’m that. Um, it’s really nice to collaborate. So um, you’ve worked with me, I hope you agree – I like to collaborate, I like to hear the opinions of other people and um, I really enjoy that aspect of it. I look at it like I’m – like I get to be captain of a World Cup football team, rather than being a tennis player where I’m standing there on my own, which is what happens with a novel.

RA: Yeah, and actually it’s the same when I get to narrate an audiobook, like you say – you get to be director, you get to be the cinematographer to an extent ‘cause you’re setting the scene, but one thing that I’ve – I really appreciated about working with you was having read your, your books and sometimes you’ll pass by a character that is useful to the, to the narrative that you’re telling, but when that comes to developed for TV or film you’ll take a bit more time to investigate that character, and you’re very open to treading those paths, which makes for a very kind of dense narrative with the screenwriter.

HC: Well that’s what I think we’re trying to do. If you think about The Stranger, um, y’know in the book the Stranger is a sort of nerdy teenage male.

RA: Mm-hmm.

HC: And that just – we even tried out some people, and that just didn’t work. And it was really my idea – and I don’t say it in a bragging way, I say it as a way to show how open we all are – to change the character from being male to being female. And once I saw Hannah John-Kamen do it, then I pictured her in a room with you in that first great scene in the bar, um, or at the club when she tells you the big secret, it just worked. Um, you have to be willing to, to sort of stretch your imagination all over again and re-think your story. Which is also fun.

RA: Yeah, and also I suppose because y’know, as much as we love a faithful adaptation of a novel, um what you don’t wanna do is just deliver the novel in screenplay. You want to, for everyone that has read it it’s a new and exciting surprise, and for everyone that hasn’t it’s, y’know, it’s gonna be the same. So, um, it’s nice to kind of have a, to have your audience ready for people who have read a lot of your work, and there were, y’know, a guaranteed audience of people that had, had looked at The Stranger but what you gave them was something really surprising.

HC: Yeah, it was a lot of fun. A lot of fun. And Stay Close, there’s a change in the ending to that which will hopefully shock everybody but especially the people who have already read the book, who will smugly think they know exactly what’s going on.

RA: *laugh* And me, probably. I haven’t read it yet. Um, so when you’re writing – I’m gonna double up on this question now, so when you’re writing, do you write in silence? Do you have any music playing in the background or are you – do you have like a, a kind of sacred writing space?

HC: Um, my routine is not to have a routine. Uh I, I do whatever works until it stops working and then I change up. It’s like I’m riding a horse really fast, and then the horse dies so I gotta find a new horse. So most writers will tell you ‘yes, I use this space, I do it at this time’. Um in the days before Covid, I would go to different coffee shops all the time, I would try out different… any place. Y’know, my favourite example is the end of – when I was writing The Stranger, um with about three weeks left to finish it, I had to take an Uber for the first time. This was a number of years ago. I had to take an Uber in New York City, and I felt really guilty about spending the money on an Uber and trying to justify it, so I was sitting in the back of the Uber and I was writing down notes, and I start writing really well. So for three weeks, I took Ubers wherever I went just so I could finish the book *laugh*

RA: ‘Cause that was the magic formula.

HC: Yeah, that worked! Then that stops working and then I have to find the new, a new place. So my routine is not to have a routine. If you’re trying to write out there, the key to anything is ‘does it make me write more?’ – if the answer is yes, it’s good. If the answer is no, it’s bad. It really is that simple.

RA: I’m gonna make a note of that for when I start writing myself. Um, do you – do you speak any of your characters out loud, your dialogue or your prose passages, do you say it out loud?

HC: The very last stage um, of editing. Okay first of all, no writer gets it right the first time. I know a million writers, I don’t know any writer who doesn’t re-write and re-write a lot. Well, I know one but he’s the guy none of us wanna hang out with, you know what I mean?

RA: *laugh*

HC: So um, the last stage that I do, and it’s usually after I’ve done all the editing with my editor and everything like that, we’re ready to go. I will sit in a room and I read the entire novel out loud to myself. Um, because what happens is, it’s a little bit like a musical score. Where you can – if you read it out loud, I can detect false notes that I may have missed along the way. Um, I can hear them. So the last step is that. I rarely y’know, I’m not – I’m not crazy, I’m not sitting there maybe talking out loud to myself, I’m maybe testing out lines by doing that, and I do that a lot when I’m helping with the screenplays on our shows. But um, for the most part that’s how I do it.

RA: So, in that case, would you ever narrate one of your own audiobooks?

HC: I did narrate one, uh, many years ago called Promise Me. What had happened is we had - my Myron Bolitar series we did seven with the same reader and he retired. I hadn’t written um, I didn’t write Myron for about five or six years it was. And so they said, ‘hey, why don’t you do it?’ which was a huge mistake in many ways. One, I’m not a professional. But two, the people who were fans of Myron Bolitar liked the first guy, and it felt to them liked they had tuned into their favourite TV show and every actor had changed.

RA: *laugh*

HC: It’s really difficult to re-do or start a series, uh, when people know the- the old reader. So um, I also figure- it was also, Richard you know this of course, so for people who don’t know, it’s a lot of work. I’m a guy from New Jersey. I speak very quickly, which does not go over well in audio. I don’t do voices. I would have to sit with a pillow on my stomach because uh, my stomach would sometimes grumble and that would be picked up- *laugh*

RA: Oh, yeah!

HC: By the microphone. And it took me um, a week to record it because – and I don’t know if this is still the case – but back then, the abridged version wasn’t just a cut up version of the unabridged, I had to do a whole different reading for it. So um, it was – it was a lot of work. Um, and it’s a skill that I’m not sure I’m best to do.

RA: Yeah, it does take a lot of stamina. I mean what’s interesting is, having gotten to know you, and when I, when I now read your work, I can hear your delivery, I can hear your voice. And there’s humour in the dialogue, and there’s humour in the as well, and I – it’s an instant ‘in’ for me, so I – ‘cause, ‘cause often I read and I speak aloud when I’m reading alone in the dark, I say things out loud but I think people approach it differently. But I definitely hear your voice in, in these characters. And I think particularly in Windsor Horne Lockwood.

HC: That’s so interesting because Win, I think of my heroes that I’ve had, Win is probably the least like me. I mean um, when you think about Adam-

RA: *laughing* You have to say that! You have to say that because he’s such a badly behaved person, isn’t he?

HC: *laughing* Yeah! ‘Cause I usually like to think of myself as more of like Adam in The Stranger, who you played, or some of the other characters that – the ‘I’m a father or four’ or those kind of guys. What I love about getting into Win of course is that Win is something of an anti-hero. Um, he sort of says and does things that are not necessarily prudent or appropriate, and he can get away with that. Um, so I really loved – I loved getting in his head, it was really an interesting experience. But on the surface anyway, he’s probably the least like me of any uh, main character that I’ve ever written.

RA: Yeah, I mean I- I relate to that totally. It’s a little bit like- it’s probably a side of you, you daren’t investigate, but- but when you get the chance to do it in a fiction um, you can tap into those things that we’re not allowed to do or say in your, in your regular day. But um, where did that character spring from? What was the seed that germinated into his story do you think?

HC: Rarely is this the case, but um, Win is actually – y’know, he’s the sidekick in my Myron Bolitar series but um, when I first created him I based him off my best friend in college roommate, who has a name equally obnoxious as Windsor Horne Lockwood the Third-

RA: *laugh*

HC: Very good looking, blonde guy who used to say before he would go out to parties when we were in college, he would look in the mirror and say, “It must suck to be ugly”. And so I took him and I tweaked him and made him more dangerous, uh and that’s how I, I kind of came up with Win.

RA: And does this person know that you’ve based this character on him?

HC: Oh yes! In fact, some people know who he is, he uses it. He’s still a-

RA: Oh, really?

HC: Owner of all these fancy golf clubs, he’s president of one of the most famous golf clubs, um, in the world right now. He looks the part. In fact, he one time came to one of my books signings years ago and um, he’s sitting in the back, and I tell people the story of how I created Win, and I say, “I’m not gonna tell you who, but Win is actually in this room right now”. It took the crowd about four seconds to figure out who he was, and he had a longer line to sign books that I did *laugh*

RA: Amazing. I mean I have to say, it’s- you, you start reading the story and thinking, ‘I don’t know if I’m gonna like this guy’ but he really grows on you, warts and all. I wonder how many people are gonna go into Saks on Fifth Avenue and go looking for the vault.

HC: *laugh* Yeah, no, I made that up. But there is place in Saks-

RA: I know, so brilliant!

HC: -but the rest of it is completely made up, this involves an app that you’ll read about when you- hopefully when you, when you read book. But yeah, it was fun to do an anti-hero where he makes decisions and does things that you don’t like, and yet you still wanna hang around with him. I always think the key to a fascinating character is not um, that he’s likeable necessarily, but that you wanna spend time with him. Not that he’s a nice guy, but if you were at a bar and you could sit with somebody and have a conversation with them and learn about their life, would this be a person you’d wanna do that with? And that’s sort of the test whenever I do a character. And Win, I think, passes that with flying colours. There are people who love Win and wanna be just like him and there are people who loathe him! But everybody, or I hope many people, are fascinated by him and his life.

RA: Well, also you’ve given him such an incredible kind of tool kit, like a skill set. I mean, I think everybody would look at that character and wish they could do the things he does, maybe not in the way that he does them, but I mean he’s- he’s exactly the kind of character that you’d hone in on, certainly from an acting point of view. I look at that and if I was, y’know, like fifteen years younger, I’d be leaping on that character to play. Which is, it means – it means he’s sort of relatable or aspirational in a kind of anti-hero way.

HC: I’ve heard this a lot, and I think it’s one of the most flattering things that I hear from my actor friends – I think everybody would want to play Win. I mean, I think the- it’s an interesting challenge, um, for a lot of actors. More so than even Myron Bolitar who is my lead series character. Um, everybody kind of wants to play win and kind of wonders who would play Win. Uh, and I take that as a – as a compliment.

RA: Are we gonna see more of him? Is he ge- are you writing more stories for him?

HC: My guess is the answer’s yes. I plan each book as it comes, so I never know until I’ve started. Is it gonna be a stand alone? Is it going to be a Myron Bolitar? Is it gonna be a young adult? Mickey Bolitar is now going to be a Win, and I don’t know until I – each book, y’know when I finish a book, I’m like a boxer who’s just gone fifteen rounds and can’t even lift my, my arms anymore, I gave it everything I had, I can’t even imagine fighting again or writing another novel. So I don’t know is the answer. Probably? I do wanna see Win again, separately or at least back with Myron, so I do think we will see Win again. But the book I’m writing right now is a sequel to The Boy From the Woods, which is the book that came out in 2020, so that’s what I’m writing now. Will I return to Win? Maybe. Maybe. We’ll see how- we’ll also see how people react. Not that I would work necessarily off of commercial interest, but it people really love this book, y’know, we don’t live in vacuum, that would probably somewhat influence what I do.

RA: Right. I mean, because so many of your- your books are being developed and being snapped up to be turned into film or television – I mean, Myron Bolitar is, is a recurring series waiting to happen, and then you’ve got your spin off of Win – I, I- I wonder if, y’know when your first ever, uh novel, did you write with kind of cinema television in your head? Is that something that as modern storytellers we can even avoid? Um, did you ever dream that these would ever turn into sort of film and TV?

HC: Well, everybody dreams, but there’s sort of two answers to it. The first answer is when I’m writing a book, I never ever, ever, not for one second do I think ‘Ooh, this would make a really good movie’ or ‘Ooh, this would make a really good TV series’ because that’s the kiss of death for a book. It really is. It’s, it’s- it’s just a disastrous thought, and if you’re out there writing really don’t try it, because it’s, it’s a big mistake. At the same time, to be realistic and honest, I grew up watching TV. Who didn’t? That’s my – I mean this is what we grew up with. To pretend you’re only influences – y’know you ask a writer ‘What’s your influences?’ “Oh, Shakespeare and Proust and Yeats” – come on. You watched TV growing up. And so that’s an influence on how you tell a story. To deny that is silly. So writers today do think in terms of cinema more just because they grew up with it. Where writers of a different generation did not, so they wouldn’t have that influence.

RA: Yeah, I mean I- I think this all the time – it’s impossible to even de-program your brain not to imagine scenarios in terms of cinema. I mean I- I often think about sort of Victorian novelists that didn’t have y’know TV, and their trying to describe something that they’ve never seen or experienced. And we have references for so many things – I mean it’s almost impossible not to, we’re- we are and will always be influenced by one or the other, especially in the written word. But I- I find that it means that you can kind of uh, put aside the investigation and just get on with the storytelling. And maybe go even a little bit further. It’s like instant access. Y’know, I know exactly the world that you’re talking about when you’re y’know at the beginning of Win, but- but y’know at the same time I felt there was something very Agatha Christie like about the um, the backstory of uh, of this book, I really liked the fact that there was a historic event that was really informing what was happening right now.

HC: Well, y’know when I start a book, there’s- I’m always- I have a bunch of ideas and I’m trying to think which ones are going to go in the story, and it ends up being several. So for example, in this book, I wanted – I’ve always wanted to do an art heist. Y’know, like the Gardner Museum Heist, where they still haven’t found the paintings that were stolen, the Vermeers and the Picassos that were stolen in that particular – I can’t remember if it’s Picasso now, I know it was a Vermeer – um, stolen in that- that, heist in Boston years ago, I wanted to write a book about 60’s radicals – the Weather Underground and what would happen to people who were involved in that so many years later. I also wanted to write something about a kind of Patty Hearst-type character who was a famous kidnapping here in the 70s. So those were like three of the things that I wanted to like – to delve into. And I ended up delving into all three *laugh* which sometimes happens.

Oh, and the last one I wanted to do – I always wanted to do um, a hoarder that was actually someone famous. There was actually um, something of a case of this in New York City where somebody died who was living in a top floor of an Upper West Side building, and it ended up being the missing son – not really missing, but had just kind of gone off the rails – of a very famous American war hero. And so, I took all of these aspects, which would seem to make three or four different novels, and I make it into one novel if I can. It’s not that different from – again, I’m referencing um, um – The Stranger y’know, because you’re here and provably a number of the people listening to us have seen The Stranger on Netflix, but it’s the same thing with The Stranger a little bit, where I had a lot of ideas for secrets that could be revealed by the Stranger, and each one could have been a separate novel. And instead, the challenge is put them all in one story and find a way to hook them together.

RA: Yeah. I mean, it’s rich in a way that when I- I’m reading it and the producer head in me is saying ‘gosh, this is gonna be a great TV show’ ‘cause you know, you’ve got the present day, you’ve got the near-past and the um, the heist story, which uh, is kind of crying out for – you just want more of it, which is brilliant in a book. When you’re – you’re leaving the reader wanting to know more and wanting to, to know more about that family and what happens to them. It’s – it’s the perfect recipe, really.

HC: And so much of it does come from your life in ways that you don’t expect – right now, maybe a lot of people are watching this uh, the Aaron Sorkin movie about the Chicago Trials from the 70s, Abbie Hoffman, who is played by uh, I think Sacha Baron Cohen played him in, in the movie. When I was in college at Amherst, Abbie Hoffman was on the run, um, but he still showed up one day at our college and gave a speech, then disappeared again. And boy, that stuck in my head always. Man, I’d love to write a character that’s kind of like Abbie Hoffman. ‘Cause he had that charisma even then, y’know on stage he was funny as heck, I must have been eighteen or nineteen um, when I – when I heard him speak. And so that – I never consciously back then, I didn’t think that, but every once in a while those experiences come to head and you wanna write about it.

RA: Mm-hmm. You’ve been writing for quite a few years now-

HC: *Laugh*

RA: -you’re – I don’t know if you can even remember what it was like when you first stated your very first book. Um, and some people have said that books are like children in a way, you sort of rear them and then the more you do, the more familiar you are with that process. But would you – I mean, it’s difficult for you to answer this, but would you say you have a favourite book that you’ve written?

HC: I don’t have a favourite book that I’ve written. Um, this – this sounds self-serving, but it’s usually the book, the most recent book, that I like the best. Um, it’s a little bit like – and the way I try to explain this is – maybe you wrote a paper, an essay when you were in college which you thought was brilliant. You remember that moment in school and you wrote a paper and you thought it was brilliant and you find it now and you re-read it and you go, ‘wow, this wasn’t good after all’. It’s not that it’s not very good, it’s just that you have sort of moved on and you’re not that sort of person and so you see all the flaws. So in the older books, which I don’t re-read, I see all of the flaws. I always think, y’know even if you think of yourself, what you thought ten or fifteen years ago – you sort of go ‘ugh, what did I know back then, I’m so much smarter now’. So the same thing a little bit with books, where I think I’m learning more and the current book is better. One of the interesting experiences of working on these adaptation is having to go back and read a book – in some cases we’re doing one, the next one I think uh comes out in France for example, is Gone for Good, which I think was released in 2002! Or 2003. So I wrote it twenty years ago. And to have to go back and read it now, I’m always kind of cringing at some of the stuff-

RA: Mm-hmm.

HC: -some of the stuff I’m kind of thrilled with, like ‘wow, that’s an interesting twist. You don’t have that kind of ending anymore’ and some of it I’m like, ‘wow, why’d you go there?’ so it’s an interesting experience.

RA: Yeah, I feel the same. I very – I, uh, very early on in my career I would watch my work back in quite a lot of detail, thinking ‘I’m gonna learn something’ and then as I got older it was – it was almost unbearable to just do that. And I actually haven’t been able to do that, but it’s because when you’re – when you’re first starting out you throw everything you’ve got into that first breakout role that you do, and then your realise that you’re always in danger of repeating yourself and you think – ‘gosh, people are gonna suss me out that I’m only capable of doing one or two things’, but you live in hope that you can, y’know, find that one thing that you can completely reinvent. Y’know I still hope for that.

HC: I still think that everyone who I’ve ever met who is successful at what they do has imposter syndrome. If you don’t um, you’re prob- you have a false bravado and you’re in trouble. I always say, “only bad writers think they’re good”. The rest of us really suffer with that, and really questioning and always think we’re gonna be sussed out. And I can tell you, um, Stephen King sent me a book not that long ago because he’d nicely put my name in it and wanted my reaction. But even Steve, after all his success and whatever else, he still worries about the reaction, that he’s as good as he used to be, that people will still like it, he’s – I know him. He still worries about it. And when you stop, that’s when you’re in trouble I think as an artist, when you’re starting to doubt what it- when you don’t have the doubts, you start having an overconfidence that you sort of got this. It’s a little bit like my golf game, frankly.

RA: *laugh*

HC: There’s moment’s when I’m about to swing, y’know, I’m gonna be okay and then you get out there and you stink all over again. So-

RA: Yep

HC: -you’re constantly trying to get better and so I imagine it must be difficult to look at your old roles and you – you’re kinda cringing, right? You see all the mistakes you’re making. You see through you so to speak, right?

RA: Yep. Absolutely.

HC: And then someone will come up to you, right, and they’ll say, “Oh, my favourite thing you ever did was-“ and then they’ll list something you did twenty years ago, and you want them to pay attention to what you’re doing now *laugh*

RA: Yep. Yep. Seeing through you is, is one of the things that is quite haunting because I do, I see through me. I can’t shake myself off, if you know what I mean.

HC: Well, you are very cool, you don’t watch any of it until it’s all over. Uh, that’s correct right? You never watched any of our rushes or I remember trying to tell you that you’re doing great and all that-

RA: No, I watched, I watched the first shot-

HC: -and you had not seen any of it and I watch you every day when you’re on set working on our shows and I’ll comment if I see something or whatever, to either you directly or the director, uh, and most of the time I’m – I’m complimenting you, but you don’t – you don’t know either, because you’re not watching, you’re not getting lost in that.

RA: Yeah, I don’t like to watch or be somebody that studies myself to much, I don’t think that’s my job. I think my job is to be inside the character looking out, rather than the other way around. I leave that to the experts like you and the director.

HC: Also, I think it’s- I think if you start worrying about what – you’re right – and also you don’t have the distance. This is always an issue when I – I first start watching the cuts of the first episodes, and I read the book while I’m editing it, while I try to take time between my writing it and then seeing it, I have to sort of put myself in the position of being somebody who knows nothing about this, and doesn’t come in knowing the story already that I’ve already read or seen a thousand time. How do I keep it fresh in my head when I’m trying to be objective and watching it so we can make edits. Uh, both on the screen or on the page.

RA: Mm-hmm. What draws you to crime/thriller? What – I mean is that – I, I can’t often imagine you writing a romantic novel, but what is it that draws you to this particular genre?

HC: Well, y’know to me it’s uh, not really a genre. It’s more like – it’s a form. It’s more like saying it’s a haiku or a sonata.

RA: Mm-hmm.

HC: And within that form I can, and hopefully have, done everything. Um, I think The Stranger for example is more a story about family, uh, and the secrets we try to hide, rather than it is about who killed who – y’know, the mystery angle of it.

RA: Yeah.

HC: One of my most, uh well-known books, my first bestseller, was a book called Tell No One which was made into a French film starring François Cluze, and that’s really a love story, it’s about a man who’s madly in love with his wife and eight years earlier, she was murdered. And then eight years passed, he gets an email, he clicks the hyperlink, he sees a webcam and his dead wife walks by, still alive., And the pursuit, the wanting to get back, the hope for full redemption is really what drives the story more than ‘who killed who’.

RA: Mmm-hmm.

HC: So different stories do different things. But the great thing about the form of crime fiction is that it compels me to tell a story. I’m not getting lost in the beauty of my own genius, my own kind of navel-gazing. I have to continue to tell a story and entertain you. So any of the themes that I wanna tell, any of the things I wanna discuss, has to be slave to that story. And I think that’s probably a rich tradition. If you think about Dumas really, wasn’t that all crime fiction? Even Shakespeare is mostly crime fiction.

RA: Yeah.

HC: Most great stories, if I ask you to name a favourite novel that’s over a hundred years old, Dostoevsky, whoever, you will find that there’s almost always a crime in it. There’s almost always a crime story.

RA: I mean it’s one of the things that I get very excited about, um, I mean obviously I haven’t read your entire canon but I – there’s a signature, or a theme that you love to play on which is this idea that – that um, the people you know aren’t telling you everything about themselves, or that there’s something to hide and that in our modern world, with technology, we have this sort of ability to – to sort of lead multiple lives of truths or lies. And it’s something which I think we immediately recognise. ‘Cause I think we – we’re living that, that reality, and it’s a theme that I really enjoy about your writing.

HC: Well, first of all, thanks. Second, um, there’s a lot of things we’ve heard about the human condition. One of my favourites about the human condition that I used to write, is that we all believe that we are uniquely complex and no one knows the inside of us. And yet we think we read everybody else pretty well. We all think we are uniquely complex and the person across from us, we can kind of figure out. They’re not quite like us. Um, and that’s something I love to play with when I write. Because you’ve gotta remember that everybody is uniquely complex and on a humanity level, and on an empathy level, I raise my kids and I’m always teaching them that every person you see, the richest, the poorest, the happiest, the saddest – everybody has hopes and dreams. Just think that, when you see a stranger on the street, when you’re going to interact with somebody, when you’re getting angry at somebody, whatever it is – just remember, they have hope and dreams. Um, small little thought, but it helps me create a character as well.

RA: There’s also a- a kind of very strong level of self-deception involved, which I think can be quite surprising. Because you always read a character and go, ‘I’m not like that’ or ‘I would never do that’ and then if you really think about it, we – there’s a truth we tell ourselves about ourselves which isn’t always honest.

HC: Well, exactly. It’s really come to fruition in the world the last few years, where I kind of joked that I’ve been working too hard on making my villains sympathetic, the villains in today’s world don’t seem to be very – very complex at all.

RA: *laugh*

HC: But for the most part, people don’t think they’re bad guys. Even the bad guys don’t think they’re bad guys.

RA: Yeah.

HC: They have some way of, of justifying. It’s one of the great things about human beings, or one of the most prevailing thing about a human being, is we all have the ability to self-rationalise, to self-justify. Um, and so I’ve always tried with my villains, and I hope that I did it in everything that we’ve done together, to try to make even the villain – you may not like the villain, but you get them. I don’t really write books – I don’t write books where the serial killer is hacking up people for no reason, that doesn’t really interest me. I prefer the crimes where you can say, ‘Yeah, I wouldn’t have done it maybe, but I can see why that happened. I can see if I was put in that position, um, where I may have done something similar’. That to me is a much more interesting villain than somebody who’s just cruel and evil.

RA: Yeah. Um, final question actually, is – I mean, as a listener/reader yourself – are there any other authors whose books you love and just go back – I mean, you’ve mentioned Stephen King, um I’m with you on that one – but are there any other authors who really kind of inspire you and, and y’know, like a little guilty pleasure reading for yourself and not for work?

HC: Yeah, well the problem always is that I start listing authors, and then someone will say, ‘well, what about so-and-so who’s a friend of mine’, and then I say ‘oh shoot, I forgot – I forgot that one’.

RA: *laugh*

HC: Y’know I saw recently that it’s the eleventh anniversary of the death of Robert B. Parker, who wrote the Spencer novels, if by any chance you haven’t found the Spencer novels, and I don’t know how popular they are overseas – they’re fantastic, wonderful detective series. Um, so that’s one guy I would go back in time and try to find for audio. But I actually like Philip Roth a lot on audio, even though he doesn’t do crime fiction. I’m a big Michael Connelly fan and I like Lee Child, um and Laura Lippman. Y’know, I could sit here just naming um, people all day. I’m always curious also – who is reading – who does it because of the reader and who does it because of the writer. I know there’s a number of people who will listen to anything you read, Richard, because it’s you. Um, which is really quite nice, but it’s interesting the combination of the audio reader. I have Steven Weber, he’s been reading most of my novels, though I’ve had a female lead – a woman named January LaVoy who’s fantastic – and I think Weber captures my voice. He sounds a little bit like me, we both have a similar background, similar sense of humour, so part of it with the audio is also the match you end up making.

RA: Yeah. It’s interesting, isn’t it? Because I certainly find I don’t often get to read something which is purely my choice, I have a stack of things that are work-related, or that I’m about to record. So I don’t think I’ve – I’ve chosen a book recently which is just been- I don’t know how I would pick something, it’s usually a recommendation, so I’ll certainly have a look at the Spencer novels, they sound – they sound brilliant.

HC: Yeah, and they’re fun – there was a TV series in America for a while called ‘Spencer for Hire’ – this is s or going back to the, I guess the 70s or 80s I think. Um, those were not great, but the novels themselves were sort of – Raymond Chandler to Robert B. Parker to the guys who are working now. So he’s a huge – he was a tremendous influence on most of your favourite crime writers. I said in his obituary eleven years ago, I said, “90% of writers admit that Robert B. Parker was an influence and 10% lie about it”. So um, if you can find Robert B. Parker Spencer novels that would be a good clue for everybody out there.

RA: Brilliant. Well, that just about wraps it up. And uh, thanks for talking to me. I really enjoyed the book and no doubt it will be another best-seller and fingers crossed it ends up as a TV series.

HC: Well, thanks Richard, and I look forward to seeing you work on uh, Stay Close. I know that uh, Armitage Army out there *laugh* that – your, your loud uh supporters and fans who just adore you are going to go gaga cause you get to play somebody quite different from Adam in The Stranger. Um, it’s-

RA: Yeah. Looking forward to it.

HC: Yeah, it’ll be a lot of fun. Thanks very much.

#this was actually more interesting that I thought it would be #sorry the audio ain't great I had to compress it a lot #it is longgg #richard armitage #harlan coben #win

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armageddon-generation · 4 years ago

Text

Articulating Why His Dark Materials is Badly Written

A long essay-thing with lots of specific examples and explanations of why I feel this way. Hopefully I’ve kept fanboy bitching to a minimum.

This isn’t an attack on fans of the show, nor a personal attack on Jack Thorne. I’m not looking to ruin anyone’s enjoyment of the show, I just needed to properly articulate, with examples, why I struggle with it. I read and love the books and that colours my view, but I believe that HDM isn’t just a clumsy, at-best-functional, sometimes incompetent adaptation, it’s a bad TV show separate from its source material. The show is the blandest, least interesting and least engaging version of itself it could be.

His Dark Materials has gorgeous production design and phenomenal visual effects. It's well-acted. The score is great. But my god is it badly written. Jack Thorne writing the entire first season damned the show. There was no-one to balance out his flaws and biases. Thorne is checking off a list of plot-points, so concerned with manoeuvring the audience through the story he forgets to invest us in it. The scripts are mechanical, empty, flat.

Watching HDM feels like an impassioned fan earnestly lecturing you on why the books are so good- (Look! It's got other worlds and religious allegory and this character Lyra is really, really important I swear. Isn't Mrs Coulter crazy? The Gyptians are my favourites.) rather than someone telling the story naturally.

My problems fall into 5 main categories:

Exposition- An unwillingness to meaningfully expand the source material for a visual medium means Thorne tells and doesn't show crucial plot-points. He then repeats the same thing multiple times because he doesn't trust his audience

Pacing- By stretching out the books and not trusting his audience Thorne dedicates entire scenes to one piece of information and repeats himself constantly (see: the Witches' repetition of the prophecy in S2).

Narrative priorities- Thorne prioritises human drama over fantasy. This makes sense budgetarily, but leads to barely-present Daemons, the Gyptians taking up too much screentime, rushed/badly written Witches (superpowers, exposition) and Bears (armourless bear fight), and a Lyra more focused on familial angst than the joy of discovery

Tension and Mystery- because HDM is in such a hurry to set up its endgame it gives you the answers to S1's biggest mysteries immediately- other worlds, Lyra's parents, what happens to the kids etc. This makes the show less engaging and feel like it's playing catch-up to the audience, not the other way around.

Tonal Inconsistency- HDM tries to be a slow-paced, grounded, adult drama, but its blunt, simplistic dialogue and storytelling methods treat the audience like children that need to be lectured.

MYSTERY, SUSPENSE AND INTRIGUE

The show undercuts all the books’ biggest mysteries. Mrs Coulter is set up as a villain before we meet her, other worlds are revealed in 1x2, Lyra's parents by 1x3, what the Magesterium do to kids is spelled out long before Lyra finds Billy (1x2). I understand not wanting to lose new viewers, but neutering every mystery kills momentum and makes the show much less engaging.

This extends to worldbuilding. The text before 1x1 explains both Daemons and Lyra's destiny before we meet her. Instead of encouraging us to engage with the world and ask questions, we're given all the answers up front and told to sit back and let ourselves be spoon-fed. The viewer is never an active participant, never encouraged to theorise or wonder

Intrigue motivated you to engage with Pullman's philosophical themes and concepts. Without it, HDM feels like a lecture, a theme park ride and not a journey.

The only one of S1's mysteries left undiminished is 'what is Dust?', which won't be properly answered until S3, and that answer is super conceptual and therefore hard to make dramatically satisfying

TONAL INCONSISTENCY

HDM billed itself as a HBO-level drama, and was advertised as a GoT inheritor. It takes itself very seriously- the few attempts at humour are stilted and out of place

The production design is deliberately subdued, most notably choosing a mid-twentieth century aesthetic for Lyra’s world over the late-Victorian of the books or steampunk of the movie. The colour grading would be appropriate for a serious adult drama.

Reviewers have said this stops the show feeling as fantastical as it should. It also makes Lyra’s world less distinct from our own.

Most importantly, minimising the wondrous fantasy of S1 neuters its contrast with the escalating thematic darkness of the finale (from 1x5 onwards), and the impact of Roger’s death. Pullman's books are an adult story told through the eyes of a child. Lyra’s innocence and naivety in the first book is the most important journey of the trilogy. Instead, the show starts serious and thematically heavy (we’re told Lyra has world-saving importance before we even meet her) and stays that way.

Contrasting the serious tone, grounded design and poe-faced characters, the dialogue is written to cater to children. It’s horrendously blunt and pulls you out of scenes. Subtext is obliterated at every opportunity. Even in the most recent episode, 2x7, Pan asks Lyra ‘do you think you’re changing because of Will?’

I cannot understate how on the nose this line is, and how much it undercuts the themes of the final book. Instead of even a meaningful shot of Lyra looking at Will, the show treats the audience like complete idiots.

So, HDM looks and advertises itself like an adult drama and is desperate to be taken seriously by wearing its big themes on its sleeve from the start instead of letting them evolve naturally out of subtext like the books, and dedicating lots of scenes to Mrs Coulter's self-abuse

At the same time its dialogue and character writing is comparable to the Star Wars prequels, more childish than media aimed at a similar audience - Harry Potter, Doctor Who, Avatar the Last Airbender etc

DAEMONS

The show gives itself a safety net by explaining Daemons in an opening text-crawl, and so spends less time showing the mechanics of the Daemon-human bond. On the HDM subreddit, I’ve seen multiple people get to 1x5 or 6, and then come to reddit asking basic questions like ‘why do only some people have Daemons?’ or ‘Why are Daemons so important?’.

It’s not that the show didn’t answer these questions; it was in the opening text-crawl. It’s just the show thinks telling you is enough and never shows evidence to back that up. Watching a TV show you remember what you’re shown much easier than what you’re told

The emotional core of Northern Lights is the relationship between Lyra and Pan. The emotional core of HDM S1 is the relationship between Lyra and Mrs Coulter. This wouldn't be bad- it's a fascinating dynamic Ruth plays wonderfully- if it didn't override the Daemons

Daemons are only onscreen when they serve a narrative purpose. Thorne justifies this because the books only describe Daemons when they tell us about their human. On the page your brain fills the Daemons in. This doesn't work on-screen; you cannot suspend your disbelief when their absence is staring you in the face

Thorne clarified the number of Daemons as not just budgetary, but a conscious creative choice to avoid onscreen clutter. This improved in S2 after vocal criticism.

Mrs Coulter/the Golden Monkey and Lee/Hester have well-drawn relationships in S1, but Pan and Lyra hug more in the 2-hour Golden Compass movie than they do in the 8-hour S1 of HDM. There's barely any physical contact with Daemons at all.

They even cut Pan and Lyra's hug after escaping the Cut in Bolvangar. In the book they can't let go of each other. The show skips it completely because Thorne wants to focus on Mrs Coulter and Lyra.

They cut Pan and Lyra testing how far apart they can be. They cut Lyra freeing the Cut Daemons in Bolvangar with the help of Kaisa. We spent extra time with both Roger and Billy Costa, but didn't develop their bonds with their Daemons- the perfect way to make the Cut more impactful

I don't need every single book scene in the show, but notice that all these cut scenes reinforced how important Daemons are. For how plodding the show is. you'd think they could spare time for these moments instead of inventing new conversations that tell us the information they show

Daemons are treated as separate beings and thus come across more like talking pets than part of a character

The show sets the rules of Daemons up poorly. In 1x2, Lyra is terrified by the Monkey being so far from Coulter, but the viewer has nothing to compare it to. We’re retroactively told in that this is unnatural when the show has yet to establish what ‘natural’ is.

The guillotine blueprint in 1x2 (‘Is that a human and his Daemon, Pan? It looks like it.’ / ‘A blade. To cut what?’) is idiotic. It deflates S1’s main mystery and makes the characters look stupid for not figuring out what they aren’t allowed to until they did in the source material, it also interferes with how the audience sees Daemons. In the book, Cutting isn’t revealed until two-thirds of the way in (1x5). By then we’ve spent a lot of time with Daemons, they’ve become a background part of the world, their ‘rules’ have been established, and we’re endeared to them.

By showing the Guillotine and putting Daemons under threat in the second episode, the show never lets us grow attached. This, combined with their selective presence in scenes, draws attention to Daemons as a plot gimmick and not a natural extension of characters. Like Lyra, the show tells us why Daemons are important before we understand them.

Billy Costa's fate falls flat. It's missing the dried fish/ fake Daemon Tony Markos clings to in the book. Thorne said this 'didn't work' on the day, but it worked in the film. Everyone yelling about Billy not having a Daemon is laughable when most of the background extras in the same scene don't have Daemons themselves

WITCHES

The Witches are the most common complaint about the show. Thorne changed Serafina Pekkala in clever, logical ways (her short hair, wrist-knives and cloud pine in the skin)

The problem is how Serafina is written. The Witches are purely exposition machines. We get no impression of their culture, their deep connection to nature, their understanding of the world. We are told it. It is never shown, never incorporated into the dramatic action of the show.

Thorne emphasises Serafina's warrior side, most obviously changing Kaisa from a goose into a gyrfalcon (apparently a goose didn't work on-screen)

Serafina single-handedly slaughtering the Tartars is bad in a few ways. It paints her as bloodthirsty and ruthless. Overpowering the Witches weakens the logic of the world (If they can do that, why do they let the Magesterium bomb them unchallenged in 2x2?). It strips the Witches of their subtlety and ambiguity for the sake of cinematic action.

A side-effect of Serafina not being with her clan at Bolvangar is limiting our exposure to the Witches. Serafina is the only one invested in the main plot, we only hear about them from what she tells us. This poor set-up weakens the Witch subplot in S2

Lyra doesn’t speak to Serafina until 2x6. She laid eyes on her once in S1.

The dialogue in the S2’s Witch subplot is comparable to the Courasant section of The Phantom Menace.

Two named characters, neither with any depth (Serafina and Coram's dead son developed him far more than her). The costumes look ostentatious and hokey- the opposite of what the Witches should be. They do nothing but repeat the same exposition at each other, even in 2x7.

We feel nothing when the Witches are bombed because the show never invests us in what is being destroyed- with the amount of time wasted on long establishing shots, there’s not one when Lee Scoresby is talking to the Council.

BEARS

Like the Witches; Thorne misunderstands and rushes the fantasy elements of the story. The 2007 movie executed both Iofur's character and the Bear Fight much better than the show- bloodless jaw-swipe and all

Iofur's court was not the parody of human court in the books. He didn't have his fake-Daemon (hi, Billy)

An armourless bear fight is like not including Pan in the cutting scene. After equating Iorek's armour to a Daemon (Lee does this- we don’t even learn how important it is from Iorek himself, and the comparison meant less because of how badly the show set up Daemons) the show then cuts the plotpoint that makes the armour plot-relevant. This diminishes all of Bear society. Like Daemons, we're told Iorek's armour is important but it's never shown to be more than a cool accessory

GYPTIANS

Gyptians suffer from Hermoine syndrome. Harry Potter screenwriter Steve Kloves' favourite character was Hermione, and so Film!Hermoine lost most of Book!Hermoine's flaws and gained several of Book!Ron's best moments. The Gyptians are Jack Thorne's favourite group in HDM and so they got the extra screentime and development that the more complicated groups/concepts like Witches, Bears, and Daemons (which, unlike the Gyptians, carry over to other seasons amd are more important to the overall story) needed

At the same time, he changes them from a private people into an Isle of Misfit Toys. TV!Ma Costa promises they'll ‘make a Gyptian woman out of Lyra yet’, but in the book Ma specifically calls Lyra out for pretending to be Gyptian, and reminds her she never can be.

This small moment indicates how, while trying to make the show more grounded and 'adult', Thorne simultaneously made it more saccharine and sentimental. He neuters the tragedy of the Cut kids when Ma Costa says they’ll become Gyptians. Pullman's books feel like an adult story told through the eyes of a child. The TV show feels like a child's story masquerading as a serious drama.

LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA

Let me preface this by saying I genuinely really enjoy the performances in the show. It was shot in the foot by The Golden Compass' perfect casting.

The most contentious/'miscast' actor among readers is LMM. Thorne ditched the books' wise Texan for a budget Han Solo. LMM isn't a great dramatic actor (even in Hamilton he was the weak link performance-wise) but he makes up for it in marketability- lots of people tried the show because of him

Readers dislike that LMM's Lee is a thief and a scoundrel, when book-Lee is so moral he and Hester argue about stealing. Personally, I like the change in concept. Book!Lee's parental love for Lyra just appears. It's sweet, but not tied to a character arc. Done right, Lyra out-hustling Lee at his own game and giving him a noble cause to fight for (thus inspiring the moral compass of the books) is a more compelling arc.

DAFNE KEENE AND LYRA

I thought Dafne would be perfect casting. Her feral energy in Logan seemed a match made in heaven. Then Jack Thorne gave her little to do with it.

Compare how The Golden Compass introduced Lyra, playing Kids and Gobblers with a group of Gyptian kids, including Billy Costa. Lyra and Roger are chased to Jordan by the Gyptians and she makes up a lie about a curse to scare the Gyptians away.

In one scene the movie set up: 1) the Gobblers (the first we hear of them in the show is in retrospect, Roger worrying AFTER Billy is taken) 2) Lyra’s pre-existing relationship with the Gyptians (not in the show), 3) Friendship with Billy Costa (not in the book or show) 4) Lyra’s ability to befriend and lead groups of people, especially kids, and 5) Lyra’s ability to lie impressively

By comparison, it takes until midway through 1x2 for TV!Lyra to tell her first lie, and even then it’s a paper-thin attempt.

The show made Roger Lyra’s only friend. This artificially heightens the impact of Roger's death, but strips Lyra of her leadership qualities and ability to befriend anyone.

Harry Potter fans talk about how Book!Harry is funnier and smarter than Film!Harry. They cut his best lines ('There's no need to call me sir, Professor') and made him blander and more passive. The same happened to Lyra.

Most importantly, Lyra is not allowed to lie for fun. She can't do anything 'naughty' without being scolded. This colours the few times Lyra does lie (e.g. to Mrs Coulter in 1x2) negatively and thus makes Lyra out to be more of a brat than a hero.

This is a problem with telling Northern Lights from an outside, 'adult' perspective- to most adults Lyra is a brat. Because we’re introduced to her from inside her head, we think she's great. It's only when we meet her through Will's eyes in The Subtle Knife and she's filthy, rude and half-starved that we realise Lyra bluffs her way through life and is actually pretty non-functional

Thorne prioritises grounded human drama over fantasy, and so his Lyra has her love of bears and witches swapped for familial angst. (and, in S2. angst over Roger). By exposing Mrs Coulter as her mother early, Thorne distracts TV!Lyra from Book!Lyra’s love of the North. The contrast between wonder and reality made NL's ending a definitive threshold between innocence and knowledge. Thorne showed his hand too early.

Similarly, TV!Lyra doesn’t have anywhere near as strong an admiration for Lord Asriel. She calls him out in 1x8 (‘call yourself a Father’), which Book!Lyra never would because she’s proud to be his child. From her perspective, at this point Asriel is the good parent.

TV!Lyra’s critique of Asriel feels like Thorne using her as a mouthpiece to voice his own, adult perspective on the situation. Because Lyra is already disappointed in Asriel, his betrayal in the finale isn’t as effective. Pullman saves the ‘you’re a terrible Father’ call-out for the 3rd book for a reason; Lyra’s naive hero-worship of Asriel in Northern Lights makes the fall from Innocence into Knowledge that Roger’s death represents more effective.

So, on TV Lyra is tamer, angstier, more introverted, less intelligent, less fun and more serious. We're just constantly told she's important, even before we meet her.

MRS COULTER (AND LORD ASRIEL)

Mrs Coulter is the main character of the show. Not Lyra. Mrs Coulter was cast first, and Lyra was cast based on a chemistry test with Ruth Wilson. Coulter’s character is given lots of extra development, where the show actively strips Lyra of her layers.

To be clear, I have no problem with developing Mrs Coulter. She is a great character Ruth Wilson plays phenomenally. I do have a problem with the show fixating on her at the expense of other characters.

Lyra's feral-ness is given to her parents. Wilson and McAvoy are more passionate than in the books. This is fun to watch, but strips them of subtlety- you never get Book!Coulter's hypnotic allure from Wilson, she's openly nasty, even to random strangers (in 2x3 her dismissal of the woman at the hotel desk felt like a Disney villain).

Compare how The Golden Compass (2007) introduced Mrs Coulter through Lyra’s eyes, with light, twinkling music and a sparkling dress. By contrast, before the show introduces Coulter it tells us she’s associated with the evil Magisterium plotting Asriel’s death- “Not a word to any of our mutual friends. Including her.” Then she’s introduced striding down a corridor to imposing ‘Bad Guy’ strings.

Making Mrs Coulter’s villainy so obvious so early makes Lyra look dumber for falling for it. It also wastes an interesting phase of her character arc. Coulter is rushed into being a ’conflicted evil mother’ in 2 episodes, and stays in that phase for the rest of the show so far. Character progression is minimised because she circles the same place.

It makes her one-note. It's a good note (so much of the positive online chatter is saphiccs worshiping Ruth Wilson) but the show also worships her to the point of hindrance- e.g. take a shot every time Coulter walks slow-motion down a corridor in 2x2

The problem isn’t the performances, but how prematurely they give the game away. Just like the mysteries around Bolvangar and Lyra’s parentage. Neither Coulter or Asriel have much chance to use their 'public' faces.

This is part of a bigger pacing problem- instead of rolling plot points out gradually, Thorne will stick the solution in front of you early and then stall for time until it becomes relevant. Instead of building tension this builds frustration and makes the show feel like it's catching up to the audience. This also makes the characters less engaging. You've already shown Mrs Coulter is evil/Boreal is in our world/Asriel wants Roger. Why are you taking so long getting to the point?

PACING AND EDITING

This show takes forever to make its point badly.

Scenes in HDM tend to operate on one level- either 'Character Building,' 'Exposition,' or 'Plot Progression'.

E.g. Mary's introduction in 2x2. Book!Mary only listens to Lyra because she’s sleep and caffeine-deprived and desperate because her funding is being cut. But the show stripped that subtext out and created an extra scene of a colleague talking to Mary about funding. They removed emotional subtext to focus on exposition, and so the scene felt empty and flat.

In later episodes characters Mary’s sister and colleagues do treat her like a sleep-deprived wreck. But, just like Lyra’s lying, the show doesn’t establish these characteristics in her debut episode. It waits until later to retroactively tell us they were there. Mary’s colleague saying ‘What we’re dealing with here is the fact that you haven’t slept in weeks’ is as flimsy as Pan joking not lying to Mary will be hard for Lyra.

Rarely does a scene work on multiple levels, and if it does it's clunky- see the exposition dump about Daemon Separation in the middle of 2x2's Witch Trial.

He also splits plot progression into tiny doses, which destroys pacing. It's more satisfying to focus on one subplot advancing multiple stages than all of them shuffling forward half a step each episode.

Subplots would be more effective if all the scenes played in sequence. As it is, plotlines can’t build momentum and literal minutes are wasted using the same establishing shots every time we switch location.

The best-structured episodes of S1 are 1x4, 1x6, and 1x8. This is because they have the fewest subplots (incidentally these episodes have least Boreal in them) and so the main plot isn’t diluted by constantly cutting away to Mrs Coulter sniffing Lyra’s coat or Will watching a man in a car through his window, before cutting back again.

The best-written episode so far is 2x5. The Scholar. Tellingly, it’s the only episode Thorne doesn’t have even a co-writing credit on. 2x5 is well-paced, its dialogue is more naturalistic, it’s more focused, it even has time for moments of whimsy (Monkey with a seatbelt, Mrs Coulter with jeans, Lyra and Will whispering) that don’t detract from the story.

Structurally, 2x5 works because A) it benches Lee’s plotline. B) The Witches and Magisterium are relegated to a scene each. And C) the Coulter/Boreal and Lyra/Will subplots move towards the same goal. Not only that, but when we check in on Mary’s subplot it’s through Mrs Coulter’s eyes and directly dovetails into the main action of the episode.

2x5 has a lovely sense of narrative cohesion because it has the confidence to sit with one set of characters for longer than two scenes at a time.

HDM also does this thing where it will have a scene with plot A where characters do or talk about something, cut away to plot B for a scene, then cut back to plot A where the characters talk about what happened in their last scene and painstakingly explain how they feel about it and why

Example: Pan talking to Will in 2x7 while Lyra pretends to be asleep. This scene is from the 3rd book, and is left to breathe for many chapters before Lyra brings it up. In the show after the Will/Pan scene they cut away to another scene, then cut back and Lyra instantly talks about it.

There’s the same problem in 2x5: After escaping Mrs Coulter, Lyra spells out how she feels about acting like her

The show never leaves room for implication, never lets us draw our own conclusions before explaining what it meant and how the characters feel about it immediately afterwards. The audience are made passive in their engagement with the characters as well as the world

LORD BOREAL, JOHN PARRY AND DIMINISHING RETURNS

At first, Boreal’s subplot in S1 felt bold and inspired. The twist of his identity in The Subtle Knife would've been hard to pull off onscreen anyway. As a kid I struggled to get past Will's opening chapter of TSK and I have friends who were the same. Introducing Will in S1 and developing him alongside Lyra was a great idea.

I loved developing Elaine Parry and Boreal into present, active characters. But the subplot was introduced too early and moved too slowly, bogging down the season.

In 1x2 Boreal crosses. In 1x3 we learn who he's looking for. In 1x5 we meet Will. In 1x7 the burglary. 1 episode worth of plot is chopped up and fed to us piecemeal across many. Boreal literally stalls for two episodes before the burglary- there are random 30 second shots of him sitting in a car watching John Parry on YouTube (videos we’d already seen) completely isolated from any other scenes in the episode

By the time we get to S2 we've had 2 seasons of extended material building up Boreal, so when he just dies like in the books it's anticlimactic. The show frontloads his subplot with meaning without expanding on its payoff, so the whole thing fizzles out.

Giving Boreal, the secondary villain in literally every episode, the same death as a background character in about 5 scenes in the novels feels cheap. It doesn’t help that, after 2x5 built the tension between Coulter and Boreal so well, as soon as Thorne is passed the baton in 2x6 he does little to maintain that momentum. Again, because the subplot is crosscut with everything else the characters hang in limbo until Coulter decides to kill him.

I’ve been watching non-book readers react to the show, and several were underwhelmed by Boreal’s quick, unceremonious end.

Similarly, the show builds up John Parry from 1x3 instead of just the second book. Book!John’s death is an anticlimax but feels narratively justified. In the show, we’ve spent so much extra time talking about him and then being with him (without developing his character beyond what’s in the novels- Pullman even outlined John’s backstory in The Subtle Knife’s appendix. How hard would it be to add a flashback or two?) that when John does nothing in the show and then dies (he doesn’t even heal Will’s fingers like in the book- only tell him to find Asriel, which the angels Baruch and Balthamos do anyway) it doesn’t feel like a clever, tragic subversion of our expectations, it feels like a waste that actively cheapens the audience’s investment.

TL;DR giving supporting characters way more screentime than they need only, to give their deaths the same weight the books did after far less build up makes huge chunks of the show feel less important than they were presented to be.

FRUSTRATINGLY LIMITED EXPANSION AND NOVELLISTIC STORYTELLING

Thorne is unwilling to meaningfully develop or expand characters and subplots to fit a visual medium. He introduces a plot-point, invents unnecessary padding around it, circles it for an hour, then moves on.

Pullman’s books are driven by internal monologue and big, complex theological concepts like Daemons and Dust. Instead of finding engaging, dynamic ways to dramatise these concepts through the actions of characters or additions to the plot, Thorne turns Pullman’s internal monologue into dialogue and has the characters explain them to the audience

The novels’ perspective on its characters is narrow, first because Northern Lights is told only from Lyra’s POV, and second because Pullman’s writing is plot-driven, not character-driven. Characters are vessels for the plot and themes he wants to explore.

This is a fine way of writing novels. When adapting the books into a longform drama, Thorne decentralised Lyra’s perspective from the start, and HDM S1 uses the same multi-perspective structure that The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass do, following not only Lyra but the Gyptians, Mrs Coulter, Boreal, Will and Elaine etc

However, these other perspectives are limited. We never get any impression of backstory or motivation beyond the present moment. Many times I’ve seen non-book readers confused or frustrated by vague or non-existent character motivations.

For example, S1 spends a lot of time focused on Ma Costa’s grief over Billy’s disappearance, but we never see why she’s sad, because we never saw her interact with Billy.

Compare this to another show about a frantic mother and older brother looking for a missing boy. Stranger Things uses only two flashbacks to show us Will Byers’ relationships with his family: 1) When Joyce Byers looks in his Fort she remembers visiting Will there. 2) The Clash playing on the radio reminds Jonathan Byers of introducing Will to the song.

In His Dark Materials we never see the Costas as a happy family- 1x1’s Gyptian ceremony focuses on Tony and Daemon-exposition. Billy never speaks to his mum or brother in the show

Instead we have Ma Costa’s empty grief. The audience has to do the work (the bad kind) imagining what she’s lost. Instead of seeing Billy, it’s just repeated again and again that they will get the children back.

If we’re being derivative, HDM had the chance to segway into a Billy flashback when John Faa brings one of his belongings back from a Gobbler safehouse in 1x2. This is a perfect The Clash/Fort Byers-type trigger. It doesn’t have to be long- the Clash flashback lasted 1:27, the Fort Byers one 55 seconds. Just do something.

1x3 beats into us that Mrs Coulter is nuts without explaining why. Lots of build-up for a single plot-point. Then we're told Mrs Coulter's origin, not shown. This is a TV show. Swap Boreal's scenes for flashbacks of Coulter and Asriel's affair. Then, when Ma Costa tells Lyra the truth, show the fight between Edward Coulter and Asriel.

To be clear, Thorne's additions aren’t fundamentally bad. For example, Will boxing sets up his struggle with violence. But it's wasted. The burglary/murder in 1x7 fell flat because of bad editing, but the show never uses its visual medium to show Will's 'violent side'- no change in camera angle, focus, or sound design, nothing. It’s just a thing that’s there, unsupported by the visual language of the show

The Magisterium scenes in 2x2 were interesting. We just didn't need 5 of them; their point could be made far more succinctly.

In 2x6 there is a minute-long scene of Mary reading the I Ching. Later, there is another scene of Angelica watching Mary sitting somewhere different, doing the SAME THING, and she sees an Angel. Why split these up? It’s not like either the I Ching or the Angels are being introduced here. Give the scene multiple layers.

Thorne either takes good character moments from the books (Lyra/Will in 2x1) or uses heavy-handed exposition that reiterates the same point multiple times. This hobbles the Witches (their dialogue in 2x1, 2 and 3 literally rephrases the same sentiment about protecting Lyra without doing anything). Even character development- see Lee monologuing his and Mrs Coulter's childhood trauma in specific detail in 2x3

This is another example of Thorne adding something, but instead of integrating it into the dramatic action and showing us, it’s just talked about. What’s the point of adding big plot points if you don’t dramatise them in your dramatic, visual medium? In 2x8, Lee offhandedly mentions playing Alamo Gulch as a kid.

I’m literally screaming, Jack, why the flying fuck wasn’t there a flashback of young Lee and Hester playing Alamo Gulch and being stopped by his abusive dad? It’s not like you care about pacing with the amount of dead air in these episodes, even when S2’s run 10 minutes shorter than S1’s. Lee was even asleep at the beginning of 2x3, Jack! He could’ve woken from a nightmare about his childhood! It’s a little lazy, but better than nothing.

There’s a similar missed opportunity making Dr Lanselius a Witchling. If this idea had been introduced with the character in 1x4, it would’ve opened up so many storytelling possibilities. Linking to Fader Coram’s own dead witchling son. It could’ve given us that much-needed perspective on Witch culture. Imagine Lanselius’ bittersweet meeting with his ageless mother, who gave him up when he reached manhood. Then, when the Magisterium bombs the Witches in 2x2, Lanselius’ mother dies so it means something.

Instead it’s only used to facilitate an awkward exposition dump in the middle of a trial.

The point of this fanfic-y ramble is to illustrate my frustration with the additions; If Thorne had committed and meaningfully expanded and interwoven them with the source material, they could’ve strengthened its weakest aspect (the characters). But instead he stays committed to novelistic storytelling techniques of monologue and two people standing in a room talking at each other

(Seriously, count the number of scenes that are just two people standing in a room or corridor talking to each other. No interesting staging, the characters aren’t doing anything else while talking. They. Just. Stand.)

SEASON 2 IMPROVEMENTS

S2 improved some things- Lyra's characterisation was more book-accurate, her dynamic with Will was wonderful. Citigazze looked incredible. LMM won lots of book fans over as Lee. Mary was brilliantly cast. Now there are less Daemons, they're better characterised- Pan gets way more to do now and Hester had some lovely moments.

I genuinely believe 2x1, 2x3, 2x4 and 2x5 are the best HDM has been.

But new problems arose. The Subtle Knife lost the central, easy to understand drive of Northern Lights (finding the missing kids) for lots of smaller quests. As a result, everyone spends the first two episodes of S2 waiting for the plot to arrive. The big inciting incident of Lyra’s plotline is the theft of the alethiometer, which doesn’t happen until 2x3. Similarly, Lee doesn’t search for John until 2x3. Mrs Coulter doesn’t go looking for Lyra until 2x3.

On top of missing a unifying dramatic drive, the characters now being split across 3 worlds, instead of the 1+a bit of ours in S1, means the pacing/crosscutting problems (long establishing shots, repetition of information, undercutting momentum) are even worse. The narrative feels scattered and incohesive.

These flaws are inherent to the source material and are not the show’s fault, but neither does it do much to counterbalance or address them, and the flaws of the show combine with the difficulties of TSK as source material and make each other worse.

A lot of this has been entitled fanboy bitching, but you can't deny the show is in a bad place ratings-wise. It’s gone from the most watched new British show in 5 years to the S2 premiere having a smaller audience than the lowest-rated episode of Doctor Who Series 12. For comparison, DW's current cast and showrunner are the most unpopular since the 80s, some are actively boycotting it, it took a year-long break between series 11 and 12, had its second-worst average ratings since 2005, and costs a fifth of what HDM does to make. And it's still being watched by more people.

Critical consensus fluctuates wildly. Most laymen call the show slow and boring. The show is simultaneously too niche and self-absorbed to attract a wide audience and gets just enough wrong to aggravate lots of fans.

I’m honestly unsure if S3 will get the same budget. I want it to, if only because of my investment in the books. Considering S2 started filming immediately after S1 aired, I think they've had a lot more time to process and apply critique for S3. On the plus side, there's so much plot in The Amber Spyglass it would be hard to have the same pacing problems. But also so many new concepts that I dread the exposition dumps.

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maxbegone · 4 years ago

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AND WE ARE BACK!

Part two of the Schitt’s Creek Community Fic Rec is here! This time, we focused on celebrating our favorite AU’s! Once again, this is dedicated with love to the the authors of this community! Every participant chose one AU (which was a little hard to do for some) to share and why they enjoyed it.

Thank you to everyone who submitted!

@bestwisheswarmestregards // @brighter-than-sunshine // @danieljradcliffe // @devilstelephone�� // @fishyspots // @imargaery // @justwaiting23 // @patrickbrewsky // @rockinhamburger // @roguebabyinyourstore // @rosebuddsmotel // @stuck-on-your-heart // @the-13th-wheel // @thedidipickles // @thisbuildinghasfeelings // @yourbuttervoicedbeau

And a very special thank you to anyone who has ever written anything in this community!

Everything is posted below the cut, and you can check out part one here!

**As always, if I missed an author’s tumblr handle, please let me know!

@bestwisheswarmestregards

Odd Man Rush by @samwhambam

It’s David and Patrick and Hockey! Three of my favorite things! Also the ending is one of my favorite endings. It’s so sweet! It’s part of the series score and all of the stories are so cute but this one is my favorite!

@brighter-than-sunshine

Thanks For Choosing Bagged! by dinnfameron

I love this one because the dialogue is so adorable, and true to David and Patrick! I can totally see the characters getting involved in something like this, like a different version of a rom-com.

@danieljradcliffe

Going Down by concannonfodder

This is one of the best stories of NYC!David and recently out Patrick while they're both trying to find themselves. It's beautifully written and my favourite part is that each chapter switches between David and Patrick's POV. It does a great job of highlighting the aspects of their personalities that we know and love but shows them to us in a new light.

@devilstelephone

sustineo by @rockinhamburger

The contemporary art discussions between Patrick and David are interesting and important to the story. Patrick still cares for and emotionally connects with David In a world that is so different than Schitt’s Creek. I liked that Sebastian Raine was the evil force without being included as a character.

@fishyspots

Welcome to Cabaret by @vivianblakesunrisebay

It's lovely from start to finish! In this 'verse, Christmas World didn't pull out, so David didn't get the lease for the general store. Instead, he gets roped into helping Moira with Cabaret, and meets Patrick (kind of) through that. I love the way this author writes. The dialogue is in-character, and the plot is wonderful and pulls out moments from canon and reimagines them in some truly inspired ways. I'm such a fan of all of this author's works; this was the first one I read, and it remains my favorite.

@imargaery

David.; or, a Tale of Misapplied Sense by Siria

A Jane Austen D&P AU and it is BRILLIANT. If you're an Austen fan, you will be able to immediately pick up on how well this author adapted Austen's style, wit, character descriptions, and ability to whack you over the head with romance when you're not even ready for it yet. Siria is a very experienced fanfic writer, but writes for many fandoms, so I think that's maybe why it doesn't have that many hits? I'm so glad I clicked on it. I want to wrap myself up in this story. I want to make a podfic out of it. I want to put it on a t-shirt and wear it every day. Also, it's in a regency AU where homophobia isn't a thing, so you don't even have to worry about that. I want to tell you more, but that would spoil it. Just read the damn thing and thank me later.

@justwaiting23

You Were the Ocean, I Was Just a Stone by @al-ex-an-d-er-hamiltons

The image of a curly haired fisherman Patrick is enough but this whole fic is such a sweet concept. Their interactions in this are so reminiscent of the show but also so different because they already know each other vaguely, and I come back to this fic over and over just because it's the perfect mix of angsty miscommunication and fluff.

@maxbegone

Known and Be Known by ahurston

As someone who tends to lean toward canon/canon-divergent stories, this was a refreshing take on an AU. Beautifully written and wonderfully raw, ahurston conveyed the vulnerabilities between both David and Patrick so wonderfully. “The mortifying ordeal of being known,” personified in fanfiction format. With humor and some wonderfully hot scenes peppered throughout, this fic was just brilliant from start to finish. I love when authors explore Patrick's insecurities and vulnerabilities - they aren't written about as often as David's are. I implore you to read this, if you're able.

@patrickbrewsky

Bound by Symmetry by barelypink

They say write what you know. I instead read what I know. David is the accidentally fantastic teacher we all wished we'd had in high school, and some of us wish/hope we are or might be one day. This fic is a great exploration of combining everything David knows he is (creative, bright, v.knowledgeable about art) and all the things he thinks he's not (empathetic, a role model, great with kids, selfless, kind, & big hearted) The selling point quote: "And it feels good, David realizes, to have a job that means something, a purpose beyond himself. A place where he feels like he belongs, just like his students." (David Rose proves he is both a good and nice person).

@rockinhamburger

Blackbird, Fly by distractivate

This is a post-apocalyptic story about love, connection, and hope, with a central theme of growth from destruction. I could not put this one down; I read it feverishly in one sitting, desperate to soak up every word. I love this fic because it is what I like to think of as an exemplar for transformative works (one of ao3’s top values). I love the way the fic stretches toward the light in the dark. It makes me think: about the quintessential elements of these characters, what remains the same despite changed circumstance, and what inevitably shifts when these characters we know and love are faced with a situation far outside their experience or comfort. This story likely hits differently in 2020, when post-apocalyptic narratives feel much less distant than they might have just a year ago. And yet, all the more reason to read an incredible work about hope and resilience and transformation.

@roguebabyinyourstore

Fifteen Hundred Miles by MoreHuman

Where do I even begin with this fic? I was at first skeptical about what reason David Rose would have to willingly subject himself to a trek through the wilderness out of his own volition. Well I’m so glad I ignored that admittedly stupid part of me because this is one of the mostly beautifully crafted stories I have ever read. Patrick and David are individually on their own journeys of self-discovery, but the way they help each other find what they sought... It’s breathtaking. Their feelings for each other bloom so organically over their time together that despite the circumstances laid out before them, the miles that they stumble and walk and run bring them miles closer to each other. Closer to the love that they both didn’t know they needed. The characters come alive and are identical to their canon selves. The dialogue and banter are spot on David and Patrick. The writing itself is superb. The tropes are incredible, the pining and *oh no there’s only one tent.* The slow burn is tantalizing but in a way that feels true to a genuine love story. The way the setting somehow breathes in tune with the characters, the way they leave messages behind in the trail register—conveying more than they can utter aloud— and the way their families communicate with them throughout their time on the trail through letters. All of the elements of this story ground it in universal truth, in feelings that are not only relatable, believable but demand to be felt. I can wax poetic until I am blue in the face, but really... Read this story. And then reread it a million times.

@rosebuddsmotel

I Carry These Heart-Shapes Only to You by @ladyflowdi and @ships-to-sail

There are over 180,000 words in this WWII AU, but not one of those words is wasted. It is gorgeous in its prose, and incredibly romantic without romanticizing the very real pain and tragedies of the era in which it exists. It's not an easy read by any means, but it's the kind of cathartic emotional journey that is more than worth it in the end.

@stuck-on-your-heart

kiss from a rose by mihaly ( @davidroseshusband )

What can I say about this very special fic that would do it justice? In this story, Alexis stars in a Bachelorette-style dating show and it’s every bit as brilliant as it sounds. On top of the incredible characterization, there are little surprises at every turn, there’s pining, and of course, there’s love. Secret love, even. This fic is truly addicting – I promise you won’t be able to stop once you start reading, and it will leave you feeling so satisfied (and if you’re like me, a little misty)!!!

@the-13th-wheel

Hold Me Like You’ll Never Let Me Go by @mooodlighting

It is a wonderful short AU where Patrick and David where they meet at an airport after they get snowed in. It is cute, there is longing and pining that just make it a wonderful read!

@thedidipickles

Beneath the Winter Snow by Distractivate

The writing is so utterly gorgeous all the way throughout that I frequently needed to take breaks to breathe. The author *perfectly* builds an Olympic world that I can totally see my favorite characters inhabiting, and the resolution is gorgeous. All of Distractivate's AUs are amazing, but this one still stands out.

@thisbuildinghasfeelings

How Do We Get Back by @unfolded73

This one deals with a literal alternate universe, which is the first thing I loved about it because I had never read a fic quite like it before. It's a beautifully written 60,000+ word masterpiece that definitely makes me feel ALL the feelings. In addition, it is absolutely riveting. I could not stop reading until I got to the end.

@yourbuttervoicedbeau

Make It To Me by figmentof ( @rosesdavid )

Epistolatory fic is SO hard to pull off and the author does such an incredible job with the way the characters shine through even though we only see them interact via text message. This fic is my comfort food and I reread it regularly <3

Anonymous Recs:

Just Breathe by olivebranchesandredwine

I love this one because it's got Patrick as a yoga teacher (hot!) and shows David being proactive about anxiety and it's just such a lovely story.

Shall I Stay? by alladaydream ( @maybewecandreamalittle )

This is so worth the 100k wordcount. 18-year-old David and Patrick sweetly leaning into first love, a lot of angst and pining in the middle that allow them both to heal and grow, and a heartfelt reconciliation. Plus, two bonus cherries on top with artist!David and a beautiful epilogue in which they (spoiler) live happily ever after. The tone and pacing of this fic is so good, and I always go back to it when I want to read something comforting.

Your Heart is Keeping Time with Me by @yourbuttervoicedbeau

I haven't seen 50 First Dates, but this fic is better than the movie could ever be. The author's writing is so beautiful and her David who has amnesia and her Patrick who wants to help him are just PERFECT. I want more and more and more of this.

Once again, thank you to everyone who participated and thank you to every single person who has written something in this community! It would be wonderful to do a part three, but for now, enjoy some alternate universe fics!

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heretherebedork · 3 years ago

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THE ENDING FOR OSSANS LOVE. WE DID IT THEY DID A NON-COMEDY KISS. INITIATED BY TIN TOO. WE WON FELLAS.

but seriously, this episode was wild from start to finish. i watched it live on tv so i was just an anxious mess during the ad breaks wondering whether the last 30, 20, 10 minutes could really tie up the story. and it did! i’m still amazed at how much happens in one episode. we really went from siu muk screaming about how tin should’ve thought through the marriage to them kissing on the couch? and i’d like to think the easter egg is a lawyer asking them these questions before letting them sign their marriage papers but i’m getting ahead of myself

so KK telling tin to go find muk was quite surprising to me. i thought even if deep down KK knew tin wasn’t genuine with his romantic love for KK or couldn’t reciprocate it the way KK wants, he’d rather play pretend than let Tin go, so truly, props to him for being the bigger man and being mature (if thats the term) and encouraging Tin to go find ah muk. i think it’s also partly because he does love Tin enough to want him to have a happy future and not be so selfish as to keep him when both parties aren’t gonna be 100% happy with it.

and then when muk tried to tell tin they wouldn’t have a good future together but obviously just saying without any fight in him? honestly i kinda laughed, it felt like he included it just as an inside joke like, hey remember how i said this and we broke up but here you are ditching your marriage? we ended up right where we left off! (i can’t articulate this properly but i hope you understand HAHA). and Tin going like, i’m a big boy, let me choose :( and it’s true! he has indeed grown (sure he still can’t pack but i’m sure he’s more in touch with his feelings towards siu muk)

honestly? i’m very satisfied with the ending, and LOVED it when carmen took out her own recording device. i was wondering why ping gor just stopped using it after the scam. so glad they brought it back, esp through carmen and it helps solidify their relationship. this couple is truly iconic, i love their dynamic.

i still have so many thoughts but here are some nice stuff from their zoom after party: (1) literally everyone (even the producer) wants to do a movie adaptation or a second season (movie felt more ideal amongst them, but any continuum is nice). (2) for the last scene/ kissing scene, edan and anson actually did three takes with varying degrees of intensity. the one that aired was the middle one, and when asking whether they’d release the most intense one (apparently more mouth/lip movement), both edan and anson lo said they shouldn’t release it because they want it to happen in the movie/ sequel. (3) the cast thinks KK and Darren has potential. (4) the cast also thought louis and francesca should’ve kissed. (5) the hk adaptation is airing in japan HAHA (in fall) as well as a few other east asian countries. that’s all i recall for now.

thank you, francis, from the bottom of my heart, for answering my asks and allowing me to have someone to vent to, laugh at, and get emotionally wrecked together. i know you watch a bunch of other BL series but this has become my favourite show (i don’t watch a lot but when i watch shows i completely spiral) so i’m so happy to get to talk about it with someone. something so dangerous about asian dramas is finding people who want to talk about it (in english as well!) i’ll probably be in your askbox for a few more days sorting out my feelings but i loved going on your blog and seeing new posts about ossan’s love!

We got a comedy kiss turned real kiss! Which was wonderful. It was so, so good to see. I was SO WORRIED when Tin panicked at the kiss again but YESSS WE GOT THE KISS. I might watch those last few scenes with them again, tbh. They're just so GOOD and SWEET and HEARTFELT. What darling boys.

That episode was definitely a wild ride. They held out for the last minute to solve things. Siu Muk yelling about Tin not making up his mind just made me wanna scream, though. I mean, come on dude! You did break up with him for 'his own good'. What did you want him to do? You knew he still had feelings for you when you broke up with him! Stop it! I really wish Siu Muk had been the one to go after Tin, truly, and not have the failed scene at the bridge... but it was good to see Tin chase him down though.

Oh, that scene hurt so much. Siu Muk was so unsure and so scared and Tin, for the first time, genuinely made up his mind. He said 'This is me and I know myself, stop telling me who I am' and he meant it. Is he a fully competent and independent adult? No, but who is? He's capable of running a business and choosing who he loves and if he can't pack a bag... well, everyone has a weakness.

Oh man, a movie adaptation would be great. A second season would probably make me twitchy because EVERY. SINGLE. SECOND. SEASON. EVER. is like 'miscommunication and possible cheating!' and I don't want that for our boys. I want them to just be happy together. I'd only like a second season if they let Siu Muk and Tin be the secondary happy couple and make someone else be in that weird love triangle position. I'd actually love that! They'd make an amazing 'happy in the background' couple.

I want that kiss. DAMNIT. I want that KISS. I wanna see all the versions of the kiss and also more kisses, pleases. Just... Tin and Siu Muk kissing in general would be great and ideal and my favorite thing ever. I just want their future to be happy and content and full of love.

Oh, I am always glad to get show-specific asks, or any ask at all, and happy to chat and natter and share! Please, always feel free to hit me up. It's hard to find a BL I'm not watching (if you do, feel free to tell me about it because it's probably an accident!) I have too much free time, no life and a love of BL that is all encompassing. I've been so glad to know that other people share this show and the same deep thoughts about it and enjoyed all the same bits!

You are always welcome to hit me up and to chat. I've got plenty of headcanons I'm still considering for these characters so I look forward to seeing and hearing your post-show thoughts as well.

#ossan's love anon #ossan's love meta #ossan's love hk meta #my ossan's love anon #i love my ossan's love anon #ossan's love hk #ossan's love hong kong #ossan's love #anon ask #anon answer #bl meta #seriously it was a very cute ending

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travel-hopefully · 4 years ago

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A collective post of everything I watched on Netflix in 2020

I finally found the watch history function on Netflix which I wanted in order to reminisce over the TV/film I watched over the last year, including the good and the bad. I’ve included a little round-up of my thoughts for each, as lockdown has got me with plenty of time on my hands. If anyone has watched any of the below feel free to give me a message- happy to discuss anything!

Travelers (season 3) - this was an unforgettable show with some great characters and definitely put me through hell (in a good way), I am a David x Marcy shipper for sure!

IT Crowd (season 4 & 5) - my favourite comedy show ever, and I mean the UK version

Explained (random episodes) - interesting bite-sized episodes on a variety of topics

Sherlock (season 3 & 4) - it kinda went downhill from season 4...and doesn’t help that there is no season 5 in sight

Unforgettable - must be pretty forgettable cause I couldn’t remember watching, a typical revenge plot romp I think

The Mind, Explained - same as for Explained above, except more pyshcological

You (season 2) - binge-worthy! I love to hate Joe Goldberg.

Don’t F**k with Cats - wow, this was disturbing but so gripping.

Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle - geniunely a good remake and rather amusing

Sex, Explained - as for Explained but a little more intriguing ;)

The Stranger (season 1) - full of suspense and a good binge watch but ultimately full of plot holes with an unsatisfying conclusion

Gavin & Stacey (season 3) - a classic which I only started watching in 2019

Sex Education (all of it) - comedy gold!

Unbelievable (limited series) - very harrowing, an emotional rollercoaster based on a real-life rape case

Atypical (all of it) - light-hearted and fun to binge

The Sinner (season 1) - it was okay... wasn’t spectacular compared to other similar dramas I’ve seen

Love Is Blind (season 1) - cringey but satisfying

In the Shadow of the Moon - I hardly remember this one :)

Dunkirk - a stand-out historical movie

The Stepfather - typical killer stepfather plot but rather enjoyable

The Super - an interesting premise, but not that super

Saw VI - all gore not much plot

Doctor Who (random episodes) - no words needed :D

Louis Theroux and Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends (random episodes) - I love his style of interviewing - what a man!

The Revenant - a lot of... well, not much

Nightcrawler - it was decent, but something was missing which I couldn’t put my finger on

How To Get Away With Murder (seasons 1-5) - probably my biggest new watch of the year, a rollercoaster of suspense, drama and murder, another season to go...

Ocean’s Eleven - fun but cheesey

Blumhouse’s Truth or Dare - creepy faces and an interesting ending

Eli - it started one way then went another, I wasn’t convinced

Star Trek (2009) - I couldn’t really get into this one...

In the Tall Grass - a lot of running around in grass

Bloodride (season 1) - i loved this, a quirky idea, i binged it

Apostle - intense, a satisfying religious cult horror

The Platform - great idea, not sure on the ending

What Keeps You Alive - what happened in this one again?

History 101 - didn’t watch many episodes :P

The Prodigy - a decent child possession horror

Into the Night (season 1) - really enjoyed this, a highlight of the year for me, hoping for a season 2

It - pretty chilling and creepy, but a tad cheesey

Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom - the first one has a brilliant dinosaur fight scene, the second one has too many plot holes and inconsistencies to take seriously

Knowing - a Nicholas Cage sci-fi/apocalpytic classic, pretty decent

Stranger Things (random episodes) - i tried to get my bf into the show but sadly he still isn’t much of a TV fan

Miranda (random episodes) - such fun!

Black Mirror (seasons 1 & 2) - another one i introduced the bf to, i got a bit further with him on this one, the very first episode being the highlight

The Last House on the Left - a decent remake, but nothing outstanding

Dark (season 3) - this, my friends, is one of the greatest shows of all time. want a timey-wimey story where everything is connected and has an amazingly satisfying conclusion? this is the show for you!

The Silence - a bad ‘A Quiet Place’

Geostorm - i’m a fan of disaster movies but this one wasn’t in the same league as some of the greats

Panic Room - a mum and kid hides in the panic room when a group of thugs break into the house, it was enjoyable but not all that memorable

Prisoners - a very long film with some enjoyable parts but overall unsatisfying

Girl on the Third Floor - it was okay, i can’t remember much of it

The Woods (season 1) - another Harlan Coben adaptation- not as good as ‘Safe’ or ‘The Stranger’ but still a gripping thriller

Time Trap - a fun time-travel film with some interesting turns of events

72 Dangerous/Cutest Animals (random episodes) - just ‘cause i love animals

Slasher (all of it) - some very gory deaths, especially in season 3. quite disturbing but keeps the suspense up throughout.

2012 - a guilty pleasure of mine, realistic or not

Kingsman: The Secret Service - a fun spy film, will be looking to watch the second one soon

Blackfish - this was harrowing, it really made me think, but overall i’m on the side of tilikum

Unsolved Mysteries (season 1 & 2) - watching some of these my jaw dropped, love theorising on this kind of stuff

Down to Earth with Zac Efron (season 1) - Zac is great in this, he seems so chill and literally ‘down to earth’

The Call - I love this film, seen it 3 times now

Contagion - very relatable right now, interesting to see the parallels with todays situation

Next in Fashion (season 1) - i didn’t get too far with this, i found it a little superficial

Searching - another of those internet web-cam based films. decent but not memorable.

Non-stop - another Nicholas Cage classic, this time a suspense thriller

Freaks - as the title suggests this one was rather weird, i didn’t quite gel with it

The Perfection - wow, that was an experience. definitely memorable, even if some characters make questionable decisions...

Extraction - not usually a fan of action-type thrillers, but i actually enjoyed this one, plus it has Chris Hemsworth in it!

Line of Duty (season 2) - full of suspense, a great build-up in the first 5 episodes, but the way they tied it up really grated on me

Insidious - watched this one with my sister. a genuinely good horror film on rewatch with an amazing cliff-hanger

A Quiet Place - another one watched with my sister. labelled a horror but its more sci-fi, either way its a classic. bring on the second film!

The Dark Tower - disappointing mostly.

Gladiator - i’d never seen this before and now i understand the hype- what an epic movie!

Criminal UK (season 2) - didn’t disappoint following the exceptional first season

Venom - a fun comedic marvel film, definitely need to watch more from Marvel in the next year- i need an order to watch them in as don’t know where to start

Our Planet (season 1) - chill David Attenborough to put on in the background

The Equalizer - a great action revenge thriller plot with a badass Denzel

Merlin (random episodes) - who doesn’t love a trip down memory lane with some nostalgic bbc merlin?

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) - pretty scary remake

The Witcher (season 1) - rewatched in order to familiarise myself again before season 2 - i didn’t realise how funny the show was until this time round, gotta love Jaskier!

American Murder: The Family Next Door - this was haunting

The Haunting of Bly Manor - phenomenal, emotional, creepy, heartbreaking - i much preferred it to Hill House

Abducted in Plain Sight - seriously, how naive are the parents in this? i could have a rant for hours about this!

The End of the F***ing World (seasons 1 & 2) - very bingeable, Alyssa makes me laugh too much, i love how relatable the show is

Fractured - didn’t expect much from this consipiracy-type film but it kept me guessing right till the end

The Ripper (limited series) - very intriguing, but the mysogyny in this was shocking

Inconceivable - a typical mother looking for her baby revenge plot but still entertaining

The Midnight Sky - i’d heard rave reviews for this but was disappointed by a lacklustre plot which was sacrificed for award-winning cinematography

Killer Women with Piers Morgan (season 2) - a pyschological interview series which looks into the mind of murderers, rather interesting

May the Devil Take You - scarier and jumpier than i thought it would be!

So 2020 obviously gave me a lot of time to watch a s**t load of stuff and looking back at it i feel like i got a decent amount of my watch-list ticked off! And obviously this is not including shows watched on other media so there’s that too (a special shout-out to the William Hartnell era of Doctor Who which I watched this year on BritBox). In all, 2020 has definitely introduced me to a few new fandoms and progressed my love for others.

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camillemontespan · 4 years ago

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writing camille montespan and the problem with the TRR MC

Basically, an opinion piece about the TRR MC and a short essay on Camille Montespan. Feel free to add your own opinions and maybe write your own about your MC/OC!

@moonlightgem7 @jovialyouthmusic @ibldw-main @katedrakeohd @pug-bitch @saivilo @argylemnwrites @rainbowsinthestorm @marshmallowsandfire @marshmallowsaremyfavorite @gardeningourmet @princessleac1 @axwalker @mskaneko @emichelle ***************

Can we all agree that the TRR MC is slightly flawed? And perhaps a little annoying? And a hot mess with no idea of how to fit into the nobility? Who basically improvises everything she does while stringing the King of Cordonia along (if he isn’t your LI) and solves every problem with a trip to the boutique or attending a ball?

TRR MC is not the best MC in the Choices universe and that is a hill I am willing to die on.

That’s where fanfic comes in. During my year and a half in this fandom, I’ve discovered mutuals who write stories about the TRR MC that puts the actual Choices writers to shame. MCs are fleshed out with proper back stories. The ridiculous canon story that a waitress from New York finds herself in a suitor competition in a European country - a country she’s never heard of because clearly she’s not informed on geography- is still incorporated into fics but it’s given more of a realistic twist. We are aware of how stupid the actual storyline is and so we try our best to make the best of it. Sometimes, we write AUs to fix the shit that the TRR writers have made a reality. AUs are the best.

As my writing has developed, I’ve found that I’ve created my own universe for Camille, my TRR MC. In my very first fic, This Heavy Crown, I focused more on the suitor competition and stuck to canon moments because I didn’t know you could write AUs. It was very angsty. But I found it so fun to write Camille and the fanfic writing obsession began.

Fun fact about Camille: she is actually descended from nobility. Madame de Montespan was a real life noble of Louis XIV’s court - she was his mistress. I thought it would be fun to name Camille after Madame de Montespan because how ironic would it be to have the American commoner turn out to be more regal than fucking Madeline?!

Anyway back to my writing.

Now, I tend to write AUs that have more realistic plots. My favourite series that I’ve written has been The History of Us and I will tell you why.

MY FAVOURITE CAMILLE SERIES

The History of Us (the first chapter is missing, sadly) is where Camille becomes more than just the Duchess of Valtoria. As I wrote her, she became more of a person - which sounds ridiculous but I think my fellow writers will understand due to their own writing of their MCs!

The History of Us is still set in Cordonia and Camille and Drake are Duchess and Duke. But that is where canon stops. My own head canons grew and became, to me, actual canon for Camille and Drake.

In the fic, Camille takes their daughter, Lily, and leaves the family home, clearly upset with Drake. Before she goes, she gives Drake a box and tells him to go through its contents before making any contact with her. The mystery in the opening chapter is WHY is Camille leaving? All of my readers were asking ‘what did Drake do?!’ and you eventually find out as the series develops.

In a nutshell, Drake struggles to adapt to his new role as Duke (something I found the Choices writers never attempted aside from his awkward ‘things are great!’ joke). He is a fish out of water and longs for life to be normal. While Camille has flourished in her role, Drake hasn’t and the pressure gets to him. With constant media attention, Drake feels claustrophobic and so turns to alcohol to numb himself. As a result, he isolates himself from his family and Camille is left trying to hold the ship together.

It was a challenging fic to write but I had so much fun writing more of Camille. She isn’t perfect and that is what I wanted to show. She fucks up. For the first chapters, she is very much of the idea that they present their best faces to the world and keep up their duty to Valtoria. Her Duchess hat is firmly on her head. A few of my readers were screaming in the comments that she needed to get her family out of Cordonia. I agreed with them but I knew that to make Camille realise her mistakes, she had to be stubborn and actually.. Wrong. But, as things with Drake get worse, Camille forces herself to confront what is truly important and she starts to fight for her marriage and her husband’s health.

CAMILLE IN A NUTSHELL

‘Wife and mother first, Duchess second.’ That is Camille’s motto and is something that is echoed in all of my fics. She is a fierce woman who fights Drake’s corner and the loves of her life are her family. The more confident she becomes as Duchess, the more willing she is to stick up for herself and her family. When they make decisions based on their children -eg. Sending them to a ‘normal’ school so they can mix with commoners - the nobility are outraged. But does Camille care? No. She is a lion mama who wants the best for her kids. She doesn’t want Lily and Luna to turn into stuck up rich girls. She wants them to stay grounded.

Unlike in canon when Drake and MC go to Texas and are stuck there against their will (or was it us, the players, who were stuck there against our will?), I write that Drake and Camille visit Texas every summer. It’s a slice of normality for them and they love it there. It’s where Camille can just be Camille. When Camille isn’t a Duchess, she can be more relaxed. She goofs around and plays with her daughters. She wears more casual clothes and drinks whiskey. She is the Camille that Drake fell in love with, not that he doesn’t love her when she’s a Duchess! It’s just that the Duchess Camille is a more refined version and how polished and elegant she can be scares him sometimes, while also making him feel in awe of her. This is a woman who entered Cordonian nobility without any experience and actually listened to advice and worked hard to adapt (something TRR MC does not). Basically, Camille has two sides to her, the Duchess and the commoner, and she strikes a neat balance between the two.

I base the foundation of her character on her face claim, Meghan Markle. I find it funny when mutuals have told me in the past that when they see Meghan on TV or in magazines, they’re like ‘oh it’s Camille!’

Why have Meghan as an FC? Well, I feel she resembles my TRR MC closely, plus Meghan was literally an American commoner who found herself marrying into royalty.

What I love about Meghan is how keen she is to make a difference. She threw herself into royal duties when she married Prince Harry and, like Diana before her, she made a huge impression on the people she met. I’m sad that she and Harry left their roles as Meghan had so much potential.

So, Camille basically does the stuff that I think Meghan would do if she was still a working royal.

Camille is a feminist who works to promote women’s equality in the workplace. She wants Cordonia to modernise (something lacking under Constantine’s rule) and now that Liam is King, that dream will become a reality. She imagines a future for her daughters where they can have any job they want and be whoever they want to be; the sky is the limit. Everything she does is for her daughters.

Despite wanting Cordonia to modernise, Camille is also respectful of their history. In my head canon, Drake and Camille discover that Valtoria used to hold Open Houses. An open house is when the people of Valtoria can visit the Duke and Duchess and talk to them about issues within the duchy. Open houses hadn’t been a thing for 200 years but when Camille and Drake discovered this old piece of history, they reintroduced the concept. Basically, Camille wants to use her platform for good - something which the TRR MC is lacking. All TRR MC does is go to balls and act like an idiot! Where is the responsibility? Where is the interest in learning more about the duchy? Why is she never at her duchy?!

If you want to read more of Camille, I point you to the interview I wrote of her. I love writing interviews as they are like a character study and it’s so fun to delve into the personality. Writing this interview was a joy. The words flowed and I was so pleased with how it turned out. It’s the definitive piece about Camille and who she is.

#camille

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being-worthy · 4 years ago

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Saturday Home Cinema: Mulan (2020) - A very honest review!

I just had to write this review because Mulan is one of my heroes and I’m a huge fan of the original Disney Mulan (1998). I saw the movie for the first time as a kid when I had trouble feeling integrated and was daily bullied at school. I re-watched it again and again and again until I was able to learn by heart the script and all the songs in German (and later on, even in English). I just saw so much of myself in Mulan (maybe except for the fact that I’m not as beautiful or witty as she is). I too always felt out of place and I couldn’t be my true self and I was never very ladylike either. I also looked up at her and saw her as a role model. Sometimes I thought that if I stared long enough at my reflection in the mirror, it’d show me my true self - and I’m still waiting to this day… Disney’s 1998 version of Mulan was and still is my favourite Disney movie.

> SPOILER ALERT AHEAD!! <

The best thing about this movie is the soundtrack, especially at the end. Christina Aguilera was the right choice to sing Reflection and Loyal Brave True. The goosebumps her voice gives, I can’t even describe how extraordinary her voice is. In the end credits, you can listen to the English version of Reflection as well as the Chinese version (sadly sung by Liu Yifei ¬¬). It’s worth to watch the end credits and listen to the songs.

*My suggestion: Stop whatever you’re doing. Put on some headphones (even better if they’re noise-cancelling), close your eyes, play the song Reflection song (and Loyal Brave True if you feel like it) by Christina Aguilera, no distractions no interruptions, forget about everything and everyone, let the song flow through your ears, mind, heart, body, and soul, and you will feel like you’re Mulan, especially when the drumming gets louder, it’s epically epic! (Sorry for the redundancy but it IS a remarkable song!)

I welcome the idea of wanting to take a classic and do something new, something fresh with it but humanity could’ve gone without this movie and they shouldn’t ask for $35 to watch it on Disney+ and sometimes a classical doesn’t need to be redone. Additionally, I can’t entirely understand what’s going on these past years not only with Disney but Hollywood and all other big movie production companies. It’s either remake of this classic or a 2nd/3rd sequel of a movie that doesn’t actually require a sequel but it’s still done anyway. Why even bother wasting big amounts of money to create a disaster? You’re better of donating that money to charity (or to me lol). The main thing that Disney has been doing lately are remakes of many of our childhood movies Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, Dumbo, The Jungle Book, The Lion King, among others, and now Mulan. Some have a few good parts in them but they still can’t and never will compare to the original. Why is there no originality and innovation anymore? Have they run out of ideas? Furthermore, let’s be honest people will always compare the remake (either consciously or unconsciously) with the original because there are less than a dozen movies where the remake either was (almost) as good as the original much less better than the original. The movie Mulan (2020) had a massive budget and is the most expensive film made by a female director (Niki Caro), yet how they made it, the battle sequences and CGI effects, etc. they’re all crappy.

Budgets of all Mulan interpretations:

Mulan (1998) - $90 million > Directed by Tony Bancroft and Barry Cook. Made $304.3 million in the box office

Hua Mulan (2009) - $12 million > Directed by Jingle Ma. Sadly, made only $1.8 million in the box office. It deserved more love!

Mulan (2020) - $200 million(!!) > All that budget was a waste!

I’ve seen all three versions. The 1998 version is for everybody and it’s funny and you feel with the characters and the film. Let’s be honest, the granny is one of the best characters, most of us have or had a granny like that in our lives. The 2nd one is a 2-hour long movie, a more mature adaption which illustrates the ugly harsh truth about war and the loss and death it brings with it and that there’s nothing funny or cool about it. This one is not suitable for children. You feel with the characters and their sacrifices and they also develop along the movie. I can only recommend to watch this version if you haven’t. And the latest one is a disgrace.

I’m a bit confused as to what the message of the movie is. On one hand, it tells you shouldn’t hide your inner beauty, you shouldn’t hide who you are, you shouldn’t hide your abilities, you shouldn’t try to hide who you truly are in order to conform to what the world/society wants you to be or who you should be, let your true self shine and be yourself and don’t allow anyone to tell you that you’re inferior just because they think/say you are. This is something powerful and admirable but, on the other hand, at the same time, it tells you that you can only do that if you are the chosen one. Let me explain... In the beginning, we see Mulan as a little girl chasing a chicken up to the roofs of the houses at the village where she lives. Basically, she’s born as a one-woman army (almost deus ex machina) and doesn’t require any further training which is total and utter rubbish. She has all the skills because of her powerful chi (vital life force energy) but has to underplay them because it’s not very ladylike to behave like she wants to and she still underplays them when she trains with the soldiers so as to keep a low profile. Her being so powerful from the beginning makes me feel alienated from her and I can’t empathise with her. It’s also not very realistic, nobody is born with their abilities fully developed. For example, even Bruce Lee had to train hard to get where he got and he wasn’t the only one.

The original version shows us a regular girl, at times clumsy (which is a cliché but we still liked it) and when she’s confronted with new situations, she analyses them and finds a quick canny solution to them. She also has to train her body and mind to get to the peak of her potential and accomplish what nobody else could in her time, and here the character is done from the start of the movie and the only thing she has to do is choose not to hide her chi anymore. This tells us that you don’t have to work hard to achieve your dreams whereas in reality you actually do have to work your butt off!

I’m not a fan of the leading actress they chose for Mulan, aka Liu Yifei, not only because she’s a police brutality supporter according to her controversial tweets a while back - this already makes her unworthy to portray Mulan who is the complete opposite - but also because she didn’t do a good job at depicting this great role. Mulan is a role model for every girl and woman and it’s a massive contradiction if a woman who agrees to the atrocious police methods impersonates her role. What message do we send out to every girl out in the world? In her acting she’s this blank and hollow person through the movie and transmits no emotion whatsoever - not even when she cries. This also makes it difficult for me to identify myself with her. She’s this wooden plank, she is and stays a blank canvas through the whole movie with no growth in her character and it’s frustrating having to see this because the character of Mulan isn’t at all like this. Mulan experiences many emotions from the moment where she makes the decision to enlist so her father doesn’t have to or when she experiences the loss of her comrades or has to kill someone for the first time, etc. she suffers along her journey and all this changes her but you see nothing of it in Liu Yifei’s Mulan.

In the Disney version, there are some crucial moments that are missing in the new one. For instance, the most crucial one is the moment where Mulan decides to go to war. If you remember the animation one, she’s sitting in the rain by the dragon statue and at that moment makes a decision that could kill her or worse bring dishonour to herself and her entire family (including ancestors) which was far worse than death during that time! She gets up, marches to the altar of her ancestors, takes her father’s sword and cuts her hair (I know men had long hair back then too but still), puts on the armour and goes to war. All this while being accompanied by an epic song written by Jerry Goldsmith called Haircut. This is one of the most intense and dramatic moments in the movie and in all Disney movies! You can understand and feel the importance of this decision for the character and you feel the weight of it! In the 2020 one, she takes the sword and the next shot presents her already with the armour on - there’s zero dramatic impact here. That was a great missed opportunity!! By omitting important scenes and their dramatic impacts like this one that are essential to the story and to the characters, to their development and their journey throughout the story and you really need to rely on the original from 1998 to have this context.

The battle scenes are like many modern movies: lots of action, lots of moving (too fast-moving), a few amazing fighting moves and fights but not showed entirely. I at least expected some similar quality, like we’ve seen in films such as Hero (2002), House of Flying Daggers (2004), and Tiger & Dragon (2020) to name a few. Sadly, these movies had better fight scenes quality than Mulan which were filmed in high frame rate but over-edited with action that is negatively frenetic and have artificial CGI effects (even the CGI effects in Independence Day were better - I’m watching the movie while writing this). We’re in the 21st century with great advances in technology and movies are given big budgets (particularly Hollywood films), yet despite all this, most movies end up with CGI effects from another era. How come this happens over and over? In this one, we see people running too fast, horses running too fast, and they’re all like a big mass of headless chickens and you don’t know exactly what is happening where. All this fast running, the constant cut and paste of scenes looks all too modern and doesn’t fit the current time period of the movie and it surely doesn’t transmit the way of fighting of that period.

Moreover, we get lots of flashback-lesson learning scenes throughout the movie. This is another fashion in movies lately, playing the film in the present time while at the same time jumping back and forth between flashbacks. It spends a good portion of the movie with these flashbacks. This is not a big issue and admirable per se but when these scenes are insignificant because they’re glossed over and transmitted without zilch emotion, then why even bother to include them in the first instance?

As a last comment, I like the fact that they hired Chinese actors and actresses for the movie (although I don’t know why it had to be in English, I’d have preferred it to be in Chinese, it’s not like we’re allergic to subtitles - unless they’re not done properly), some of them of renewed name, like Gong Li, Rosalind Chao (I loved her in The Joy Luck Club), Jet Li, Donnie Yen (legendary Ip Man), Jason Scott Lee (saw him in Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story), Tzi Ma but they won’t be able to save the movie even with a great cast like this one.

#disney mulan #disney mulan 2020 #mulan live action #saturday home cinema #boycott mulan #don't watch it #don't watch mulan #don't watch mulan 2020 #disney should be ashamed #honest review #a very honest review #film night #movie night

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lucyreviewcy · 4 years ago

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The Three Three Musketeers (or Where The F*ck Did All The Stupid Hats Go)

I read The Three Musketeers and then I watched the 1973, 1993 and 2011 adaptations. Which one wins tho?

Adaptation is a fascinating concept, especially of texts which are frequently adapted or parodied. After I rewatched the 2005 Pride and Prejudice I was reminded how weirdly divisive the two dominant adaptations of that book are. A lot of people consider the 2005 to be an inferior betrayal of the 1990s BBC version. I actually prefer the 2005 because I think Matthew McFadyen’s Mr Darcy is a wonderfully complex character. McFadyen imbues Darcy with social awkwardness and anxiety, which Lizzie misinterprets as his pride. To overcome the “Lizzie doesn’t fancy him ‘til she sees his house” debate, director Joe Wright includes a moment where Lizzie glimpses Darcy alone with his sister. He’s comfortable, his body language is completely different, and he’s smiling broadly. That moment really sold me on the entire film because it made Darcy a full character and was a really simple addition that rounded out the story. I still like the 90s version but for me, it’s the 2005 that takes first place. (Although an honourable mention for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies because it is an excellent romp.)

Look: adaptation is always a complicated topic. You can’t untangle one adaptation from another, because it’s pretty rare that somebody adapting a classic text like Pride and Prejudice or The Three Musketeers is not already familiar with existing adaptations. The most recent adaptation of any classic text is not simply an adaptation of that text, but the next step in a flow chart that includes all the previous adaptations and the cultural context of the newly created product. These three adaptations of Dumas’ 1844 novel are all texturally and stylistically very different, and two of them diverge significantly from the original text. What I found truly fascinating was what all of them had in common, and what each new era (these were made at around 20 year intervals) decides to add or remove. What do all these movies agree are the essential parts of the story, and what are some adaptations more squeamish about including from Dumas’ original narrative?

Before we dive in, no I have not seen every single adaptation of the story, that would be a dissertation level of research and I do actually have things to do right now (although, I will admit...not many.) I’m looking at these three Hollywood adaptations because they all had star studded casts (for the era they were made in), they’re all English language, and (crucially) they were all easily available on the internet for me to stream.

What are the essential ingredients of a Three Musketeers adaptation?

Firstly, there should be at least three musketeers. Secondly, D’Artagnan (Michael York 1973, Chris O’Donnell 1993, Logan Lerman 2011) should be a young upstart who is introduced part way through a sword fight. He should also have silly hair. He is also consistently introduced to the musketeers in all three films by challenging them each individually to duels at noon, one o’clock and two o’clock.

The films all maintained some elements of the original “Queen’s Diamonds” storyline, and featured the Queen, Milady and Constance. The characterisation of these three varied a lot.

Our villains in each case are invariably the Cardinal, his pal Rochefort (who always has an eyepatch, although this trope is not in the book and is actually attributable to the way Christopher Lee is styled in the 1973 film), and Milady de Winter. Satisfyingly, at least two of the villains usually wear red because they’re bad. Red is for bad.

All three are very swashbuckling in tone, have elements of physical comedy, and two of them include one of the three valet characters Dumas wrote into the original story, Planchet (1973 Roy Kinnear, 2011 James “ugh why” Corden). They also all bear the generic markings of the movies made during the same era, our 70s D’Artagnan feels like a prototype Luke Skywalker. The 90s version features a random martial arts performer. The 2011 version has CGI and James Corden in equal measure (read: far too much of both.)

What are the big differences?

I’m going to divide this category into three main segments: character, story and style. My own three musketeers, the three musketeers of movie making.

Character

D’Artagnan

D’artagnan in the book comes across as a pretty comical figure. He’s nineteen and there’s something satisfying about how similar Dumas’ caricature of a nineteen year old is to a modern character of the same age. He’s overconfident, has a simplistic but concrete set of morals, and falls in love with every woman he sees. If D’Artagnan were a 2021 character, he’d really hate The Last Jedi, is what I’m saying. He’d definitely have a tumblr blog, probably a lot like this one, but perhaps a scooch more earnest. He really loved The Lighthouse but he can’t explain why. Isn’t it nice to know that awkward nineteen year olds have been pretty much the same for the last three hundred years at least?

In all three films he’s kind of irritating, but at least in the 1973 this feels deliberate. This version has a certain “Carry On Musketeering” quality to it and D’Artagnan is your pantomime principal, he’s extremely naïve and he takes himself very seriously. This is the closest D’Artagnan to the book, and the 1973 is, in general, the film which adheres most faithfully to that source material.

The 1993, which is (spoiler alert) my least favourite adaptation, has Chris O’Donnell as the least likeable D’Artagnan I’ve come across. I’ve only seen O’Donnell in one other thing, the Al Pacino movie Scent of a Woman. He’s bearable in that because he’s opposite Al Pacino, and so his wide-eyed innocence makes sense as a contrast to Pacino’s aged hoo-ah cynicism. Rather than being introduced in a practice sword fight with his father, as in the other two films, D’Artagnan is fighting the brother of an ex-lover. This captures the problem with the film in general: this adaptation wants D’Artagnan to be cool. He is not. The comedy of the 1973, and indeed the book, comes from D’Artagnan being deeply uncool, and from his blind idolisation of the deeply flawed Musketeers who actually are cool, but not necessarily heroic, or even good people. Their moral greyness contrasts with D’Artagnan’s defined sense of right and wrong, but he still considers them to be role models and heroes.

2011′s version also suffers from “Cool D’Artagnan” syndrome, with the added annoyance of that most Marvel of tropes: the quip. One of the real issues with this film is that the dialogue has a lot of forced quippery that doesn’t quite land, and the editing slows the pace of the entire film. D’Artagnan’s first interaction with Constance is a bad attempt at wit which Constance points out isn’t very funny. The problem is that Constance has no personality so there’s no real indication that she’s in any position to judge his level of wit. She’s just vague, blonde and there: three characteristics which describe an entire pantheon of badly written female characters throughout the ages. Cool D’Artagnan also means that Constance should be additionally cool, because in the book, Constance is older than, smarter than and over-all more in charge than D’Artagnan.

Female Characters

Let’s go into this with an open mind that understands all these films were made in the sociological context of their decade. The 1973 version would absolutely not be made in the same way now. Constance is a clumsy cartoon character who is forever falling over and accidentally sticking her breasts out. This is not the character from the books, but does at least leave an impression on the viewer one way or another.

In contrast, the 1993 has a Constance so forgettable I literally cannot picture her. I think she holds D’Artagnan’s hand at the end. That’s all I can say on the subject.

The 2011 has Gabriella Wilde in the role, and absolutely wastes her. Anyone who’s seen her in Poldark knows that she can do sharp-tongued beautiful wit-princess with ease. It’s the writing of this film that lets her down, in general, that’s the problem with it. The storyline and design are great, but the actual dialogue lacks the pace and bite that a quip-ridden star vehicle needs. This Constance is given simultaneously more and less to do than the Constance of the original book, who demonstrates at every turn the superiority of her intellect over D’Artagnan, but doesn’t get to pretend to be a Musketeer and whip her hat off to show her flowing golden hair like she does in the 2011.

The best character, for my money, in The Three Musketeers is Milady de Winter. Even Dumas got so obsessed with her that there are full chapters of the book written from pretty much her perspective. In the book, she’s described as a terrifying genius with powers of persuasion so potent that any jailor she speaks to must be instantly replaced. My favourite Milady is absolutely Faye Dunaway from 1973. She’s ferocious and beautiful and ruthless, but potentially looks even better because the portrayals in the other films are so very bad.

The 1993 version has your typical blonde 90s baddie woman (Rebecca De Mornay), she wouldn’t look out of place as a scary girlfriend in an episode of Friends or Frasier. 2011 boasts Milla Jovovich who presents us a much more physical version of the character, even doing an awkwardly shoe-horned anachronistic hall of lasers a la Entrapment except instead of lasers its really thin pieces of glass? The “yeah but it looks cool” attitude to anachronism in this film is what makes it fun, and Jovovich’s Milady isn’t awful, she’s just let down by a plot point that she shares with 1993 Milady. Both these adaptations get really hooked on the fact that Athos used to be married to Milady at one time (conveniently leaving out the less justifiable character point that Athos TRIED TO HANG HER when he found out she had been branded as a thief - doesn’t wash so well with the modern audiences, I think.) Rather than hating/fearing Milady, the two modern adaptations suggest that Athos is still in love with her and pines for her. This detracts from Athos’ character just as much as it detracts from Milady’s. Interestingly, and I don’t know where this came from (if it was in the book I definitely missed it), both films feature a confrontation between the two where Athos points a gun at Milady but she pre-empts him by throwing herself off a cliff (or in the 2011, an air-ship.) I think both these versions were concerned that Milady was an anti-feminist character because she’s so wantonly evil, but I disagree. Equality means it is absolutely possible for Milady to be thoroughly evil and hated by the musketeers just as much as they hate Rochefort and the Cardinal. If you want to sort out the gender issues with this story, round Constance out and give her proper dialogue, don’t make Milady go weak at the knees because of whiny Athos (both Athos characters are exceedingly whiny, 1973 Athos is just...mashed).

The Musketeers

These guys are pretty important to get right in a film called The Three Musketeers. They have to be flawed, funny but kind of cool. Richard Chamberlain is an absolute dish in the 1973 version, capturing all those qualities in one. Is it clear which version is my favourite yet?

Athos is played variously by a totally hammered Oliver Reed (1973), a ginger-bearded Kiefer Sutherland (1993) and a badly bewigged Matthew McFadyen (2011). They all have in common the role of being the most level-headed character, but the focus on the relationship between Athos and Milady in the 93 and 11 editions undermines this a lot. Athos should be cool and aloof, instead of mooning over Milady the entire time. The 2011 gives Athos some painfully “edgy” lines like “I believe in this (points at wine) this (flicks coin) and this (stabs coin with knife.)...” which McFadyen ( once oh so perfect as Mr Darcy) doesn’t quite pull off.

Porthos seems to be the musketeer who is the most different between interpretations. A foppish dandy in the 1973, a pirate (!?!) in the 1993, and then just...large in 2011. I think the mistake made in the 2011 is that large alone does not a personality make. There are hints at Porthos’ characterisation from the book: his dependence on rich women for money and his love of fine clothing, but these are only included as part of his introduction and never crop up again through the rest of the film. Pirate Porthos in 1993 is... you know what, fine, you guys were clearly throwing everything at the wall and seeing what stuck.

Aramis is our dishy Richard Chamberlain in 1973, followed by womanising Charlie Sheen in 1993 and then strikingly suave Luke Evans in 2011. I actually didn’t mind Luke Evans’ interpretation, his dialogue is forgettable but his sleek charm stuck in my head. For some reason, this version has Aramis working as a parking attendant for horses, it worked for me as a fun A Knight’s Tale-esque bit of anachronistic character development. Charlie Sheen has never managed to appear likable or attractive to me and so his role in the 1993 falls flat. In fact, in that edition there’s not much distinction between the musketeers as characters and they’re all just very 90s and American. As anyone who’s read this blog before will expect, I think Keanu Reeves as Aramis would have really upped this film’s game. In fact, Keanu Reeves as Aramis, Brad Pitt as Athos and Will Smith as Porthos could have been the ultimate 90s adaptation, throw in DiCaprio as D’Artagnan and Roger Allam as the Cardinal and I’m fully sold.

The King and Queen

All three films try and do the “Queen’s Diamonds” storyline, but only the 1973 actually includes the Queen’s affair with Buckingham. The queen, played by Geraldine Chaplin, is a tragic romantic figure (she doesn’t have a tonne to do besides being wistful and sighing over Lord Buckingham). The king is played as a frivolous idiot by Jean-Pierre Cassel (voice dubbed by Richard Briers). He doesn’t really think of the queen as a person, more as a possession that he doesn’t want Buckingham to have.

In the 1993 version, Buckingham doesn’t really feature, and it’s the queen’s refusal to get off with the Cardinal that prompts his fury at her. The book does touch on the Cardinal’s desire for the queen, but it’s placed front and centre in 1993. This is definitely the boobsiest version, with quite a lot of corsetry on show and a cardinal who hits on literally all the women. The king is shown as a stroppy teenage boy under the thumb of the cardinal, who just wants to ask the queen to the dance but doesn’t have the nerve. The king is, essentially, a Fall Out Boy lyric.

The 2011 also seems to be really squeamish about the idea of the queen having an extramarital affair. It paints Buckingham (played with excellent wig and aplomb by Orlando Bloom) as a stylish villain, who’s advances the queen has rejected. Like the 1993 version, the King is a feckless youth rendered speechless by the presence of his wife. Both these versions want the King and Queen to be happy together, while the 1973 doesn’t give a fuck.

The Cardinal and his Cronies

The cardinal is kind of universally an evil creepy guy. One of the characters from the 1973 version who actually left the least impression on me, played by Charlton Heston. I think he’s overshadowed in my recollection by cartoonishly evil Christopher Lee as Rochefort. Lee’s Rochefort is dark, mysterious and wonderfully bad, and so influential that all other incarnations’ design is based on him. The 1993 version had truly over the top Michael Wincott as a character I could honestly refer to as Darth Rochefort from the way he’s framed, while 2011 boasts a chronically underused Mads Mikkelsen in the role.

Cardinal-wise, 1993 was my favourite with Tim Curry in all his ecclesiastical splendour. It was disappointing that everything about this film, including the Cardinal’s sexual harassment of every single female character, really didn’t work for me. Tim Curry is a natural choice for this role and gives it his campy all.

2011 has not one but two trendy bond villain actors, with Mikkelsen working alongside Christoph Waltz who was...just kind of fine. I was really excited when he appeared but he didn’t really push the character far enough and left me cold.

Story

The story is where the different adaptations diverge most completely. 1973 follows the plot of the novel, D’Artagnan comes to Paris, befriends the Musketeers and becomes embroiled in a plot by the Cardinal to expose the Queen’s affair with Buckingham through the theft of two diamond studs. D’Artagnan, aided partially by the musketeers, must travel to London to retrieve the set of twelve studs gifted by the King to the Queen, and by the Queen to Buckingham. He does so, the plot is foiled, he’s made into a musketeer! Hurrah, tankards all round.

The 1993 version drops D’Artagnan into the story just as the Cardinal has disbanded the Musketeers. I found the plot of this one really hard to follow and I think at some point D’Artagnan ended up in the Bastille? There was this whole plot point about how Rochefort had killed D’Artagnan’s father. In the original, and in the 1973 version, D’Artagnan’s entire beef with Rochefort is rooted in a joke Rochefort makes about D’Artagnan’s horse. I guess for the producers of this one, a horse insult is not enough motivation for a lifelong grudge. That is really the problem with the entire film, it forgets that the story as told by Dumas is set in a world where men duel over such petty things as “criticising one’s horse”, “blocking one’s journey down a staircase” and “accusing one of having dropped a lady’s handkerchief.” The colour palette and styling are very 90s “fun fun fun”, but the portrayal of the cardinal and the endless angst about D’Artagnan’s father really dampen the mood.

The 2011 version, this is where the shit really hits the fan. We meet our musketeers as they collaborate with Milady to steal the blueprints for a flying ship (it’s like a piratecore zeppelin). Milady betrays them and gives the plans to Buckingham, they all become jaded and unemployed. D’Artagnan arrives on the scene (his American accent explained by the fact that he’s from a different part of France) and befriends the Musketeers. The cardinal tries to frame the queen for infidelity by having Milady steal her diamonds to hide them in Buckingham’s safe at the tower of London. Something something Constance, something something help me D’Artagnan you’re my only hope. MASSIVE AIRSHIP BATTLE. The king and queen have a dance. James Corden cracks wise.

It seems like as time has passed, producers, writers and directors have felt compelled to embellish the story. I think, specifically in the case of the two later versions, this is because they wanted the films to resemble the big successes of the period. Everybody knows no Disney hero can be in possession of both parents, so D’Artagnan is out to avenge his father like Simba or Luke Skywalker. In the 2011 version, the plot is overblown and overcomplicated in what seems like an attempt to replicate the success of both the Sherlock Holmes and Pirates of the Caribbean franchises. Remember the plot of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End? No, me neither.

Style

The style of these films grows increasingly wild along with the plots as time passes. The 1973 features a lot of slapstick comedy, some of which really made me cackle, and some of which was cringeworthily sexist (Constance’s boobs through the window of a litter.) That’s the 70s though! I love The Godfather but Diane Keaton’s character is unbelivably dull and annoying. Star Wars features a pretty good female character but she does end up in that bikini. The 70s seems to be a time of movies that were great except for their occasional headlong dive into misogyny. That doesn’t mean the entire movie is bad, it just means it’s suffering from the consequences of being made in the 70s. There were other consequences of this, I doubt many modern productions could get away with physically injuring so many of it’s cast members. From a glance down the IMDB trivia page, this film yielded a higher casualties to cast ratio than the My Chemical Romance Famous Last Words music video, and that’s a hard figure to top.

The 1993 version is a Disney feature and suffers from having a thin sheen (not Charlie in this instance) of “Disney Original Movie” pasted over every scene. It looks like The Parent Trap might be filming in the adjacent studio a lot of the time. The vibrancy of the colours makes the costumes look unrealistic, while the blandness of the female characters means this movie ends up a bit of a bland bro-fest. Also occasionally the sexual and violent moments really jar with the overall tone making it an uneven watch. One minute it’s Charlie Sheen cracking jokes about trying to get off with someone’s wife, the next minute you see Milady throw herself off a cliff and land on the rocks. Weird choices all round.

The 2011 version, as I’ve already mentioned, was trying to borrow its style from the success of Sherlock Holmes and Pirates of the Caribbean, with a little Ocean’s 11 thrown in. The soundtrack flips between not quite a Hans Zimmer score and not quite that other Hans Zimmer score, and after the success of Stardust it ends with a Take That song (for it to match up to the story it should have been Take That feat. Harry styles imho). Visually, there’s some fantastic travel by mapping going on, there’s far too much CGI (one of my friends pointed out that the canal in Venice seemed to be full of Flubber). Everyone is dressed in black leather, and there are not enough big hats at all. One of the best things about Musketeers films is that they’re an excuse for ridiculous hats, and in a film with a quite frankly insane visual style, I’m surprised the hats didn’t make it through. The cast, unfortunately, really lack chemistry which means the humorous dialogue is either stilted or James Corden, and the editing is just very strange. It’s one of those films that feels about as disjointed as an early morning dream, the one where you dream you’ve woken up, gotten dressed and fed the cat, but you actually are still in bed.

Conclusion

Adaptations focus on different things depending on the context they were created in. The 2005 Pride and Prejudice is deliberately “grittier” than its 1990s predecessor, at a stage when “grit” was everywhere (The Bourne Identity, Spooks, Constantine). The Musketeers adaptations demonstrate exactly the same thing: what people wanted in the 70s was bawdy comedy and slapstick with a likeable idiot hero, the 90s clearly called for... Charlie Sheen and bright colours, and the 2010s just want too much of everything and a soundtrack with lots of banging and crashing. The more modern adaptations simplified the female characters (although the 1973 version definitely is guilty of oversimplifying Constance) while over-complicating the plot. There’s a lot of embellishment going on in the 2011 version that suggests the film wasn’t very sure of itself, it pulls its plot punches while simultaneously blindly flailing its stylistic fists.

The film that works the best for me will always be the 1973 because it’s pretty straight down the line. Musketeers are good, Milady is evil, falling over is funny and the King’s an idiot. The later adaptations seem to be trying to fix problems with the story that the 1973 version just lets fly. The overcorrection of Milady and the under characterisation of Constance is the perfect example of this. If you want your Musketeers adaptation to be more feminist, don’t weaken Milady, strengthen Constance. Sometimes a competent female character is all that we need. A Constance who is like Florence Cassel from Death in Paradise or Ahn Young-yi from Misaeng could really pack a punch.

I adored the energy of the 2011 adaptation, I loved how madcap it was, I loved how it threw historical accuracy to the wind. I thought the king was adorable, and I really enjoyed seeing Orlando Bloom hamming it up as Buckingham. I was genuinely sad that the sequel the ending sets up for never came, because once they got out of the sticky dialogue and into the explosions, the film was great fun. It was a beautiful disaster that never quite came together, but I really enjoyed watching it. I love films that have a sense of wild chaos, some more successful examples are The Devil’s Advocate, Blow Dry and Lego Batman. I think the spirit of going all out on everything can sometimes result in the best cinematic experience, it’s just a shame the script wasn’t really up to muster for 2011 Musketeers.

I’m excited to see what the next big budget Musketeers adaptation brings, even if I’m going to have to wait another ten years to see it. I hope it’s directed by Chad Stahelski, that’d really float my boat (through the sky, like a zeppelin.)

#ThreeMusketeers #Three Musketeers #Adaptation #Movies #Film #The Three Musketeers

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kamisama-senpai · 4 years ago

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Fate The Winx Saga my opinions

Okay so I know 99% of my content is anime stuff but listen, listen I just had to talk about this, like ever since trailer came on yt. So yeah guys today we are gonna talk about Winx club, not this Winx, this...the Netflix adaption, Fate the winx saga. Winx club is literally my childhood, my favourite cartoon. And despite all the criticism that fate got I decided to give it a watch. But don't get me wrong, I agree with criticism, like I was so furious when I first watched the trailer, cuz first the whitewashing, then they kicked Techna out of the show, Flora was replaced by character named Terra, their fashion sucks which is an insult to the original show and don't even get me started on how dark and edgy this is, show is darker than a freaking black hole. There is too many unnecessary drama in my opinion which I will explain further in a minute, but yeah I won't go in details with the criticism cuz there is so many videos that already covered that topic. But from this you get the picture why this adaptation caused such a commotion and upset so many people. I was kinda conflicted about watching the fate but at the end I decided to go and see how is it. I mean it can't be that bad and it wouldn't be fair to judge it just from trailer. I do like the idea of adding new elements in the story and not making it to be the same as the original, I mean this is an adaptation, it doesn't have to be literally a live action copy of the show, where is the fun in that. So I like to think of this show as part of the winx franchise, but also as its own thing, like World of Winx was. I still think they should have left Techna and Flora on the show, but I do understand why they removed Techna as their focus is clearly on elemental magic and technology as magically element wouldn't feel right here. I would put a new character on her place that would have Techna characteristics and give her metal for her magical gift, so she would be called Methalica, I mean it's just my idea, but I think it would work since metal is an element and Techna had a basic self explained name so I think it fits perfectly. Next thing, for Flora, like I said I would include her on the show, but I would be okay with Terra as her cousin to appear on the show, I have nothing against Terra, in fact she is honestly my favourite character on the show, her behaviour is the most in winx style which is kinda sad considering she is the added character, but we will get to that part, first I want to say something positive about this show okay. So what I really like is how in fate there are male fairies and female specialists, I think that's cool, and also it's a great representation in media. Another thing that I'm okay with is like a mentioned before adding new elements to the story, the threat which are the burned ones, that's how they call the monsters in the show, I only watched first episode so I don't know much about them but anyways in this version the barrier around Alfea exists to protect everyone from burned ones. Special effects are very nice and locations look good too. I'm happy they stayed with same names for the kingdoms like Solaria and Eraklion, hope we get to see winx travel to some of the relams, if not this season then please in season 2 cuz that would be great. I like Aisha relationship with Bloom, and Bloom's character, I do think it's a bit too much sometimes, the way she acts but in some moments it's fitting. Like it's completely normal to question everything, to be confused, scared and curious about magic, how it affects and changes her life over the night, and fire can be very dangerous so her behaviour is reasonable. Also I like how she didn't fell for Sky instantly, and it was nice to see conversation between her and Faragonda or however is she called here but you know what I mean, so I'll just call her Faragonda cuz I didn't remember the new name. I like they included that moment since interactions between Faragonda and Bloom were really important for the plot, especially in the first season of original show. I don't mind not having transformation sequence in the show that much, I think it would look kinda weird, they could have just switch to fairy form, but even if they won't have wings at all it's not such a big deal, at least to me. In that scene they also included another great detail, how Bloom made comment about magic dimension not looking magical enough which is the reference to the original show. Those were all the things I liked about the first episode but aghh I just can't ignore the bad stuff, and believe me there is a lot. So after giving it a watch, no I don't hate the show and I will probably finish watching other episodes, not sure will I make video for each tho, most likely not since I got a lot of videos I want to make, collabs as well but maybe I'll do one for after the first season. But anyways, this show has some good moments I'll give them credit for it, however I can't turn a blind eye on bad elements. I said before how fate was too dark, in my opinion there is a lot unnecessary drama, like I hate what they did with Stella, I get that she will probably be nicer later on, but still, why is she so mean here, it just doesn't feel right, and why add that love triangle crap, it's like they didn't know how to put friendship on test without it. The reason everyone liked original Winx is cuz it was standing out from other shows in a good way. Making Stella the mean girl is so not original and drama about Sky is just unnecessary element. More unnecessary drama is definitely with Bloom as well. I mean does every main character needs to have a terrible life, super dark and edgy? In the original show, Bloom had good relationship with her parents, she had a good life but she always knew she didn't belong there, how there was more to it but she just couldn't explain what. I think that part of story should have stayed like in the cartoon. All this drama just feels so unnecessary. What I also didn't like is Sky. His interactions with Bloom were pure cringe, the introduction scene felt scripted and unnatural. I don't know I just didn't like the way they presented his character. Every time he would appear on the screen I would get annoyed instantly. Riven was okay, nothing special but better than Sky. Speaking of specialists, what I also hated is how poorly their acting was in that scene with teacher talking about burned ones. My dude you didn't convince me. Listen, good actor is supposed to pull you into the story, make you believe his words, to be able to feel it but we just didn't get that in the scene, and I hate it cuz that scene could have been done so much better it's supposed to be this important moment cuz they talk about how burned ones are dangerous, it shows how big of a threat they are in the story, but idk the way they acted in that scene just wasn't good enough, it wasn't convincing. First episode had a lot of bad acting moments where I would just feel like they weren't prepared for this. I really hope it gets better with time cuz acting is the key element, if it isn't convincing enough people won't believe it. Interactions are also really important and we barely got to see any between our main girls, yes there were moments between Aisha and Bloom, few moments with Musa and Terra but I just wish they did a proper introduction to all and idk one moment between all 5 of them, cuz that scene at the end felt weird, when they all got worried about Bloom, like Musa you don't know her you didn't say a word to Bloom, why are you here now, you see what I mean, it feels out of place. Like it would be so much better if they first did a proper interaction between winx girls, it doesn't have to be a long scene, this is the first episode after all, but one moment where they meet each other, then the ending scene would make so much more sense, it would give them some reason at least to be worried about her. Next thing Aisha, ahhh I do like her interactions with Bloom, but what really annoyed me is how they introduced her in the show. Like we all know she is a water fairy, you don't need to mention it like every second. Aisha was like hey guys you know I swim twice a day yes twice a day, I swim, do you know where I can find the pool, cuz I swim. Yeah just no, Netflix show don't tell, show us that she is a water fairy, this isn't the way. Same problem with Beatrix, like we get it you are supposed to be a bad girl but again, show don't tell. I swear moment between her and Riven was so cringy. And what makes no sense, how was Beatrix able to enter that room with burned one that got captured, don't they have some security, someone to guard it, they said burned ones were a serious threat so why leave it unguarded for every curios teen to just walk in. It literally makes no sense, but whatever I guess for the sake of the plot, even though that could have been done differently too but I'm not getting deep into it, overall episode was fine, like I said it had some good moments, I'm willing to give it a chance, but I also think it's important to address the criticism for the show, which is everything I just complained about, and if you don't agree with me and think I was too harsh on the criticism that's fine, it's your opinion, I just said mine. I do think that show has potential, it just depends what will they do with it.

#fate the winx saga #winx #winx reboot #my opinion #i just had to

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klutzymaiden123 · 4 years ago

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Some Tips on How I Keep Motivating Myself to Write

This post was inspired by a response I recently got from @pastelnightgale and obviously, I’m not an expert (I’m literally on year 6 of a fanfic rip), but I still wanted to type something up about this.

I find that the hardest part about writing is finding the motivation to actually start it . . . and then keep it. You can have all of these intricate fantasies in your head, with twists and turns and even a playlist you made on spotify, but actually getting up and writing it is ridiculously hard.

Especially if, like me, you suffer from perfectionism.

I kinda wanted to write a post about how I personally motivate myself to write, both fanfiction and my own things. Obviously, what I write is flawed and needs a lot of improvement, but I’ve come really far and I’m proud of the progress I’ve made.

So, here’s some tips I’ve picked up over the years. Feel free to apply this to whatever art you personally create, but this is primarily for writers.

1) Listening to Music

This is my number one. Easily. I’m someone who has a lot of attachment with the music I listen to (as most people do, I’d assume). Though I’m picky with the overall sound, I prefer music or artists who really put a lot of thought into their lyrics specifically. Or even when they use certain effects to carry across emotions or add more emphasis to specific lines. It’s why I’m such a fan of Taylor Swift; her songs are basically poetry packaged as pop music.

It personally helps me to listen to music not just because it’s enjoyable, but it helps create scenarios in my head. We all shoot music videos in our head, why not try doing it with your characters? Plus, if the artist you’re listening to plays with words through metaphors or similies or imagery, it’s a massive bonus. I seriously recommend turning to music, whatever genre you listen to, and letting that sometimes paint the picture for you.

2) watching Movies.

This is a massive one for me. I don’t know how high this would be on anyone else’s lists since films are obviously a completely different medium to books, but I find there’s a lot of things that can be useful about movies. For one thing, movies just have better fight sequences. Kinda obvious statement, but I don’t mean in a ‘well you can see it so therefore film is better’ no, I mean, film literally has better action sequences.

Obviously, as a writer, you’re never going to be able to properly adapt the quick pace of fights in movies. But you can adapt the details in how they move. Fight scenes in movies are better then books because they’re choreographed. Now granted, I’m still beginning my journey in reading, but so far, I haven’t been impressed with what I’ve seen. Either the author writes a scene that describes the action, but with no focus on the strain it has on the character’s bodies, or they gloss over the fight completely. It makes me feel like I’m reading fanfiction, but written from the younger side.

It’s just super dissapointing, so I try to challenge myself by studying how the characters moves, the impact of their movements on each other, and then how tired that can leave them.

But also, movies can have other things that I think writers should learn to adapt. Like a character’s mannerisms. Now, I don’t just mean mannerisms as in what they do in their day to day lives, I mean facial ticks. Like, the minute sequences their features will go through as they’re processing news. Or their stances. Or what they do with their hands. Actors are very detailed about how they’re protraying their characters, and I just find myself aching to carry that over in my own portrayal of my characters.

It’s obviously important to realise that film and novels have both their benefits and disadvantages in what they can and can’t portray. But it’s even more important to realise that different mediums can also teach us things about our sense of portrayals.

3) Reading books

This may be surprising that it’s not number one, but honestly, I didn’t start reading actual books until late last year. I kinda used to read some in high school, but those were few and far between. This year I’ve actively been trying to emerge myself in more professional writing, as I do find it a little strange to want to write so badly without taking any infleunce from any other writers.

Previously, I used to take inspiration from fanfiction and fictionpress, which I guess I still do. There’s definitely benefits in exclusively reading them (for instance, I prefer characterisation, romance and comedy in fanfiction) but I personally find books to be better in overall world building. I mean, obviously.

World building and setting are my weak spots, and I find that reading literal books actually helps me easier improve on these areas. Oh, and length. I’m a pretty detailed writer, but it’s sometimes hard to navigate what should and shouldn’t be getting so much focus. Fanfiction is pretty short (typically only a few pages), but books can be a whole lot longer, and how they use that space and length helps me translate it into my own pages. Granted, I tend to write way too much, but it’s still really helpful in navigating what should and shouldn’t be getting focus.

Oh, and bonus points for booktubers. They review a variety of different books, and for me personally, whenever they critique books, it motivates me to write something brilliant so they could maybe read it and smile. My favourites are WithCindy and Dominic Noble.

4) Tumblr—Specifically writing blogs.

When I tell you that I did nothing in my last years of high school but secretly read fanfiction and writing blogs on tumblr in class, I--

Obviously, I’m biased, cause I’ve been reading tips on here since I was a kid, but I really recommend following some good blogs on here. They give such good advice, specifically on how to research, or portray certain emotions and, most of all, representation. Tumblr was actually where I learnt to write my fight scenes—about how to portray the feeling of a quick sequence of events, while balancing it out with your character’s limited view. They write things I haven’t even seen professionals talk about (and honestly, I think they could benefit from reading a tumblr blog).

My personal favourite blogs are: Nimble’s Notebook, and Clevergirlhelps

5) Re-writes.

Okay, this is a massive one I should’ve mentioned in the beginning. Never compare what you have on your word doc to what others have published. Why? Because I can tell you that they did not start off like that. They went through massive amounts of editing and drafting and re-reads before coming out like this clean cut version. Trust me. No one’s that quick. And even if they are, who cares? It could take you two drafts, it could take you four, it could take you nine--we all work at our own pace.

It’s something I have to keep reminding myself when I’m on my first and second draft. Because they are shit. I always feel untalented when writing my first draft--oh, and that’s not a purposeful dig at myself to get compliments, I genuinely mean that. I will never let someone read one of my early drafts because they are literally so bad, and not only that, but those drafts are for me. They’re not there for anyone else yet. Early drafts are just so you can start to build your empire, they’re your foundation. You can reach for the sky the more you keep building.

Don’t get on your own case if you don’t like your first draft. It’s fine. It gets so much easier the more you rewrite it. Trust me.

6) Write Things for You.

This is one of my favourite tips. Oh, and I don’t mean it in a ‘you’re not writing for an audience, you are the audience’ kinda way. No, I mean literally write things for you. And only for you.

If you have a story in your head that you don’t want to write because you know it’s just a phase, it won’t last long enough for you to make something out of, or you’re not confident in it, or whatever, fuck it—just write it.

Open your word doc and type it out. Then don’t post it. Or share it. Keep it on your computer, stored away in a folder you won’t ever share. You might be asking, why would you waste your time on a project no one will ever see? Simple.

It takes away the pressure.

A major hindrance to a writer actually writing is sometimes . . . not feeling good enough. You’re worried that an audience will laugh or mock what you’ve written, or that it won’t turn out just the way you planned it too, or even that the plot is too corny. Well, what I’ve found is that writing for myself stops me from judging myself so badly. I have so many documents on this computer of corny borderline wattpad stories that will never see the life of day. And it feels great. Cause I’m still actively writing and improving myself while eliminating that huge amount of anxiety that plagues me.

This is such a massive tip, please consider it. Obviously, if the story turns out really well, go ahead and post it if you’re super proud of it. But otherwise, just write something with the intention of not sharing it. Keep it to yourself, so you can look back on it with fond memories.

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