#''because i already own the others and/or they don't contain the two characters i'm fixated on''

[idridian]

i've semi-accidentally acquired a press book for the 1962 film "term of trial" (starring laurence olivier) which is a movie about *checks smudged handwriting* ...a schoolteacher whose underage student falls in love with him and then accuses him of molesting her after he turns down her advances. which is theoretically exactly my kind of problematique shit

but also i didn't even want this press book, only the bunny lake one that was on offer alongside it. like, what am i supposed to do with it?? can't very well add it to the giant photo album full of pictures of ann and steven lake, now can i

[kaiserin-erzsebet]

So, here are my long thoughts on The Last Voyage of the Demeter because I'm jetlagged and trying to keep myself awake.

I'm going to organize it from my biggest issues to my smallest nitpicks. Because I am aware that some of the things that bother me are nitpicks. Also this movie is old enough that I don't think spoilers are out of line.

Anyway, here are my thoughts:

I don't think I can fairly judge the movie as an adaptation of Dracula. This would be a short review if that was my standard, because it is a bad adaptation. There's a laundry list of reasons why, and I'll get back to one of them because I think it is indicative of how this movie fumbled the story. It takes a very loose approach to the book, and that wouldn't be entirely fair to fixate on. But I will point out where I think the book executed a theme or tone element more effectively.

I fully went into the movie ready to judge it on its own merits as a self-contained horror story. That's why I was surprised that I disliked it so much, because it doesn't hold up as a piece of horror media. I think the core issue is that the screenplay fundamentally was thinking of itself as a movie about people fighting a monster.

In that respect, it does away with something that makes the Captain's log such an effective part of the original book: The mystery.

The original section is an exercise in dramatic irony. You, as the reader, have already seen the thing making the crew vanish, because you read Jonathan's diary and know what is in the boxes (even if you were reading it for the first time and didn't have the cultural osmosis of knowing who Dracula). You know why they are in danger. The captain doesn't. He spends most of the log trying to figure out what is going on and if it is misfortune or something really on board with them. He only sees Dracula at the very end of the log, when there is little he can do except tie himself to the wheel.

The book answers the question of "why don't they make port or throw the boxes overboard?" with saying that the captain doesn't know for sure if it is actually something malicious related to the cargo. The Romanian first mate has to slowly come to the realization that he does know, because he's resisting believing in superstition. Only when the knife passes through Dracula without harming him does he panic because it's undeniable that he's facing a folklore monster.

That build up is entirely absent from The Last Voyage of the Demeter. Anna just tells them within the first half hour of the movie (she's also a very inconsistent character, but I'll get back to that), and within days the crew has literally seen Dracula multiple times. People aren't mysteriously vanishing; they've been killed pretty clearly and there are survivors with bite marks. The deck is littered with body parts at points. It makes the voiceovers about "some doom" being on the ship seem comical, because the captain has seen with his own eyes what is going on.

The only reason given for why they can't make port to deal with the issue is that they're too far away, I guess? Which is also not the case for a ship sailing that route. This isn't an open sea voyage.

While the pacing of a movie and the pacing of a show are different, The Terror did this so much better. You don't get to see the Tuunbaq clearly until quite late in the series. People just vanish or get mauled by...something. That sense of mystery is just gone in The Last Voyage. And it is disappointing because that was a huge opportunity to nail the tone.

If I had to come up with the key elements of what the Demeter section is, it would be: A Horror Story about a ship with a tragic ending.

They didn't nail the horror, but what about the other two?

There's also a puzzling lack of understanding of the dynamics on a ship throughout the movie. One glaring example is that the First Mate and Clemens make the decision to sink the ship without even asking the captain first. I know this is the merchant navy and not the navy, but that is still a galling lack of discipline. The captain is in charge and his duty is to the whole ship and the crew.

The original captain's log makes use of this. Dracula more or less kills his way up the chain of command because he's a sadist. He's forcing the commanding officers to feel more desperation as they fail in their duty to protect their crew.

The Last Voyage makes the captain a very minor character, which at least to me reveals a misunderstanding of how hierarchy works in a ship. While I don't think including new characters is necessarily bad, Clemens and Anna make most of the important decisions, and neither of them particularly have standing with the crew. It undercuts the idea of responsibility and letting people come to harm under your care (which carries through later to Lucy and Mina).

I'll return to other ways the ship setting feels incorrect later, because those are closer to nitpicks.

So, third element: is it a tragedy? Does everyone on board die by the end?

The opening scene may make you think so. But no, actually they don't. Clemens escapes and ends the movie vowing to hunt down Dracula. For one, this is where it is a bad Dracula adaptation because that simply cannot happen and maintain the plot of Dracula. Unless he was rather dense when he read about the Bloofer Lady in the paper and decided that wasn't related. But additionally, the tone of the ending radically changes. It isn't a tragedy where the last act of a brave man is to stay at the wheel, because he isn't the lone survivor left to be battered to death by either the storm or Dracula anymore. In fact most of the crew is still there for the multiple people vs Dracula fight.

This is where the tone really failed for me: the story has a winner, a hero, someone who can make it out alive. And it's the new character. That just did not sit well with me when the original is such a poignant tragedy.

The First Mate, who is the character most primed to come to a realization, hardly has an arc in The Last Voyage.

The insistence that they can fight and maybe even win also makes both Clemens and Anna incredibly inconsistent characters. She especially suffers from this, because she should in theory have the knowledge of how to repel a vampire (the villagers certainly have some idea in the book), but then she says things like "do you think I have the faintest idea how to kill him?" and in the next breath is urging the crew to kill him before he reaches London. She also says Dracula is going to London because "there is no one left in my home country to feed on" but her backstory is that she's on the ship as a deal so Drac can have a snack. So, clearly, he can get people to feed on if he wants.

Clemens is the "too smart and rational" character. But he also never thinks maybe they should expose the boxes to sunlight even after seeing people combust in sunlight after turning. It's all terribly inconsistent.

The decision to not write the story as a tragedy ends up cascading, and that's the root of the issue. They can't win and kill the monster without completely changing the story of the novel, so they are only competent to a point. It makes it a worse horror movie, even disregarding it as an adaptation.

Now for the nitpicks, including quite a few about boats that probably only I noticed:

The aesthetics are all over the place in terms of period. Clemens spends a large part of the movie (which is set in the 1890s) running around in a lace up pirate shirt. No one on this ship owns a period appropriate boat cloak. None of their shirts have remotely the right collars, giving the sense that nautical fashion was sort of vaguely consulted over the long 18th to 19th century-ish.

Please look at this and tell me that it is even remotely late 19th century:

Here's Olek from 1899 for comparison (note the correct high collar and undershirt):

The dialogue suffers from this too. More than one person uses the word "heathen" which just feels wildly out of place in something that is supposed to have rationality and superstition as the key touchpoints (at least if it wants to be like Dracula). It sounds weird coming from a time period 20 years before World War 1. Sailors especially were more likely to be vaguely Christian but mostly superstitious, not zealots using terms like "heathen."

Additional aesthetic nitpick: The ship looks way too old for the period. That is an early to mid 19th century ship sailing in the 1890s without any retrofitting. There's a throwaway line about the captain not wanting a fancy new steamship, but that doesn't account for how antique the captain's quarters are or the lack of metal on the hull. Again, the nautical aesthetics are all skewing too early. If this ship was still a Russian ship like the original, an older sailing vessel might have said something about the lag in Russian shipbuilding, it works less with an English merchant ship.

There's some functional issues about understanding sailing: The ship is way too spacious inside. Really tall men are standing up straight and walking around the hold with no trouble. That may seem like a small point, but imagine what actually exploiting the claustrophobic feeling below decks could have done for the ambiance.

The ship is definitely undercrewed given the number of masts they are showing. That many men would really struggle to reef all of the sails in a timely manner (which would matter in a storm). The writers put a crew of a small fishing vessel on a ship that is much larger and requires more hands. And it is puzzling because more people would mean: more kills and disappearances as well as giving a progression of being unable to raise and lower the sails and also keep someone at the wheel. Which, I will note, the original log does.

My first red flag about this movie was having seemingly no Slavic characters on a ship that was Russian in the original. But now that I've seen it, I'm even more annoyed that the one Russian character exists to: call a woman a slur, call a black man a slur (a rather British one imo), and then immediately be murdered on screen. Can't have nuance in how we portray Slavic people in Western media, huh?

I also get the sense that the screenwriter didn't know the difference between Romanian and Romani, because the first mate is vaguely hinted to be Romani (the kid mentions "Wojchek taught me some words in Romani") and has a Western Slavic first name, not a Romanian one. When in the book he is explicitly Romanian.

Rapid fire ways the movie gets the book wrong on a nitpicky level: Dracula doesn't get more human looking as he nears London, a vampire who prides himself on being aristocratic isn't going to drink from pigs or rats, the vampires in the book can go in sunlight but are weaker, religious artifacts are way more powerful deterrents in the book, and Clemens is way too casual about transfusions. It makes Van Helsing doing it seem less like an act of desperation. Anna gets Mina's ability to sense Dracula without putting in the effort to reverse engineer the connection.

Someone please tell me that Nosferatu is better. This was honestly very frustrating.

[celestialpaperhaze]

Dimentio Analysis

My thoughts on this Dimentio post, recently shared with me by @iukasylvie! The post: https://altermentality.wordpress.com/2016/02/10/flair-for-the-dramatic/.

! CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR SUPER PAPER MARIO !

Okay before I address the article, I should establish my own Dimentio headcanons. I see our silly jester as a sociopath, in that he can't feel love in the same way as other people. Like Bleck, he has a void inside of him, but Dimentio fills it by feeding off of others. Basically, he likes playing around and taunting people because of how emotionally reactive they are, it's how he fills himself up. Mimi's his favorite to mess around with because she's VERY reactive. As for why he wants his own world: he wants to put on a show. The whole of existence, dedicated to entertaining him. The only characters I can liken this to are the Celestial Toymaker (DW) and the Collector (TOH).

Now first off, the article references SPM in the context of "commedia dell'arte", which was a form of theater in Italy during the Renaissance. This form of theater had three types of characters: innamorati (the star-crossed lovers), vecchi (the powerful elders of society), and zanni (the clowns). The common plot of these plays? Two young lovers, hindered by the elders, who end up turning to the zanni to reach a happy ending.

Of course, Dimentio is a zanni character type. He may not help the Count reach his happy ending directly, but his actions do lead to the wedding with Tippi so, in a sense, this does fit the archetype. And of course, I don't have to tell you who the innamorati characters are. Anyone who knows a lick about Shakespeare probably already knows the love story of Blumiere and Timpani uses a pretty strong "forbidden love" trope, but it's interesting to see this somewhat supported by other forms of theater arts! To say Nintendo and Intelligent Systems had commedia dell'arte in mind when writing SPM's story would be a stretch, but it's always cool to see some elements match across different eras and types of storytelling.

Moving on, does Dimentio care about the other minions? The article eventually concludes that yes, he must, because how could you live in a castle with four other people and not grow to love them? My headcanon lines up with this pretty well--after all, Dimentio words the Count's lie about creating a new world as a "betrayal", and a betrayal facilitates caring enough to trust someone in the first place (points at Olly's entire arc with Olivia in The New Void). But Dimentio doesn't know *how* to love, and his version of "care" is different. He likes having the others around, but as players in his game, as entertainment. That's how he sees it. He fixates on them specifically for a reason he'd never care to explain.

New Void Spoilers Below.

You could say he fixates on Luigi, too, which might seem strange when they had far less time together. Shipping aside, I think canonically Dimentio fixes on Luigi because he's the key to everything, he's a highly valuable asset and Dimentio knows it. In the New Void, this isn't exactly the case. Dimentio doesn't have anything to gain by making Luigi suffer, it's just pure fun. Sure, he COULD torment some Shaydes or D-Men instead, but they're dead and they're boring. Dimentio's also been in the Underwhere for...awhile, and Luigi is a familiar face. In his own way, Dimentio's been a little lonely. It's just that, his way of acting on this feeling is to turn it into a game of psychological warfare...

New Void Spoilers End.

Overall, the strongest part of the article is the description of Dimentio's ideal world. Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of darkmarxsoul's Chaos Trilogy, but this depiction of Dimentio's universe might be the best I've ever seen. “Dimentio’s goal is to maximize the amount of drama in the universe…a world with the dials of mortal anguish and despair and even joy set to maximum volume, and the banishment of the mundane. A world where he pulls all the strings to ensure this happens. The Ultimate Show.” Chilling! It's like Bill Cipher's whole Weirdmageddon deal, except rather than maximizing weirdness, DImentio would be maximizing drama, flair, and theatrics. All the world's a stage, and whatnot.

I LOVE this idea for a world of his so much that it's a wonder I haven't started writing fics centered around it already! All these new people living what they think are just ordinary lives, not knowing that it's all being orchestrated by a being that craves mere entertainment. Life as a musical, maybe a comedy tomorrow, or maybe a tragedy next week--all because Dimentio wants it to be. I mean, that's absolutely horrifying when you think about it! Enough for a brief existential crisis maybe! But it's also very cool >:)

In summary: what do we think about Dimentio? I think he's a sociopath who doesn't understand love but desperately wants to be entertained. The article's description of Dimentio's ideal world is scarily accurate and also has a LOT of fanfic potential. Dimentio himself is fun and silly, but also dangerous and probably not someone you'd want to interact with in real life.

As this is my opinion/interpretation, I'm too biased to say whether or not this aligns well with canon. But what do you think? Do you think this all fits Dimentio perfectly, or do you have other thoughts?

[monkey-d-ezekiel]

One Piece Chapter 1097 - Ginny; Thoughts, Discussions and Speculations

Cover Page:

I gotta start off by saying, Kuma is HIM. I don't usually use the word gigachad but like. Kuma is genuinely the definition of a chad. EVEN HIS CHIN IS THE GIGACHAD CHIN. The way he carries everyone on his back without second thought has genuinely been so awe inspiring throughout this entire backstory.

The Themes and Narratives Surrounding Kuma:

Also, not to mention, his character seems heavily inspired by Jesus. He has heavy Christian themes surrounding him, he lives in a church, and he uses his fruit to take upon himself the pain of other people. I wonder if his story is gonna be a parallel of Jesus' life... (Perhaps Kuma carries the pain of all the Straw Hats like a cross??? WHAT IF HE REVIVES AFTER DEATH??? If that's the direction Oda is going with his character then I can't contain my excitement.)

The panel of Kuma taking on THE SAME AMOUNT OF PAIN THAT ZORO TOOK, LITERALLY EVERY WEEK makes the entire incident at Thriller Bark so much more impactful than it already was.

I'm especially curious about the "Hands of Liberation" remark... do y'all think that perhaps there are Devil Fruits which serve as accompaniments to the Nika fruit? Because some of the fruits are clearly more relevant to the entire Joyboy narrative than others... (Imagine if there were several God fruits, which bring different Gods into the same universe... Like Jesus, Zeus, Krishna, Allah and so on. That would be super cool for me idk 😭).

I think that Kuma's character could go in two or three directions. He could reach egghead and stop Saturn with the stored up pain, killing himself in the process. He could awaken his fruit and restore the deleted Bonney memories, while becoming a God himself. He could also just show up to disperse the Straw Hats again, like he did at Sabaody. OR HE COULD pilot the giant robot which reacted to Joyboy's heartbeat and wreck all the Marines at Egghead.

The Revolutionary Army, Monkey D. Dragon and Ginny:

We got a lot about Dragon in this chapter too. We now know that he was a young marine at one point, before he got disillusioned and left. So Garp did actually get his son to join the Navy? This actually strengthens my belief that Akainu and Dragon were buddies back in the day. Like really good ones. Akainu, to this day, is still extremely fixated on Dragon. His sole obsession at Marineford was to kill the person he repeatedly referred to as "Dragon's son".

Another interesting thing is that 22 years ago, Dragon did not have his face markings. He did have them 14 years ago, though. Could the markings have something to do with the birth of Luffy? I genuinely can't fathom how he got those marks. Something leads me to believe that it has something to do with Shandora and Skypiea, but I have literally nothing to back that up 😭😭😭.

22 years ago:

14 years ago:

Also, I just LOVE the budding romance between Kuma and Ginny. It's a very cute relationship, which is also tragic in some ways. It's sad to see that Kuma is hesitating to be with a girl he loves because he remembers the persecution that his Buccaneer father had to face and doesn't want to let that repeat. I hope they're able to get together before the inevitable tragedy strikes though 😭😭😭.

I do still think that there's a possibility that Ginny is Bonney, instead of Bonney being the child of Ginny and Kuma. Kuma marrying Ginny at this stage, while being a pastor, just doesn't feel right to me personally.

OKAY THANKS IF YOU ACTUALLY BOTHERED TO READ THROUGH THIS ENTIRE THING. Tell me some cool theories of your own regarding Kuma and Ginny (or even Dragon). I love theorizing even though I know my theories are too subpar for Oda to incorporate 😭😭😭. Here's a random Ginny panel cuz she looks cute here.

[fayofthefandoms]

Hi, Fay! I just wanted to tell you that I finished reading South Park Confidential a few weeks ago and I loved it! The original fic is really well written but you managed to not only keep up the quality of the writing, but to transition from the original author's style to yours. And it's soooo smooth!

I really enjoyed the direction you took the story to and the way you kept fleshing out the characters over the course of so many chapters. I particularly enjoyed the way you portrayed Tweek and Craig, they felt very real and their relationship develops in such a natural way and it's so friggin' cute!

And also a big "holy shit, that was amazing" to the political/social commentary you weaved into the narrative. The whole Clyde arc is just... I don't know, I just love it. It's powerful! I often see stories (and not just fanfiction, I'm talking about published work) that try to explain or reflect on certain political/social themes using plot and characters, but the two feel compartmentalized, like water and oil. I think you did a pretty good job at creating a story that uses both elements in each other's favour.

Oh, and I laughed a lot too! Those Stan-Kyle dialogues had me giggling sometimes at two o'clock in the morning.

Sorry for the long ask and I hope to see more of your writing!

(ask is is in reference to this fic)

Ahh thank you so much for your message! I am so happy to hear that you enjoyed it :D

The original South Park Confidential was actually what got me into the fandom in the first place! I had watched a few seasons of SP on Netflix and thought "Huh, I wonder if there's any fanfiction of this stuff? Just kidding! ...Unless? 😏" And so I logged onto ao3 dot com, searched "south park" and clicked one of the first options that came up. I was so fixated on trying to figure out how the author might have planned on ending it, that I ended up laying out all my thoughts, and then went "Huh, this is actually solid enough for a fic of my own." The transition between Deephurting's fic to mine was quite chaotic from my perspective, involving a lot of fiddling with plots and plans, and tearing apart the original fic for every clue I could find. So I am glad to hear that it felt smooth from a reader's perspective! (-u-;)

I didn't have a whole lot to go off of with Tweek and Craig's relationship, as they hadn't had as much focus as Stan and Kyle in the original work. I knew I wanted to do a recovery arc for Tweek, and so much of Craig's character was developed with that idea in mind (that's where details like his previous job as a security guard in a psych ward sprang from). But of course I wanted to be really careful not to fall into the unfortunate trope of "and then they banged and his mental illness was cured forever 😌." I think what helped achieve that sense of realism was the fact that I didn't limit each characters' main conflict to be purely contained within their romantic relationship, which a lot of romance stories often do. Because real life is messy and complicated! I think the best kinds of relationships are those which help us make sense of the chaos.

Writing overt political comment in fiction can certainly be a tough balancing act! It's so easy to wind up coming across as preachy or patronising. To be honest, I think my biggest advantage when writing SPC was that I was largely only posing questions to the audience... because I didn't actually have the answers. That fic is a very interesting record of an author's philosophically consequentialist crisis, lmao. In many ways, Clyde's character epitomises this, but he also works in tandem with the deliberately two-dimensional Cartman as a reflection of the ACAB movement. I could go further into these creative decisions, but this answer is already getting quite long, and I'm aware you didn't actually ask how or why I wrote it how I did, haha ;)

The Stan + Kyle banter was a very fun part of the fic to write! A lot of it flowed very naturally because when you have two characters with differing goals who are still on the same side, their conflict winds up manifesting in little quips and jabs, instead of full blown arguments (most of the time...)

Thank you again for the ask, and do not apologise for the length, as I always love to hear people's thoughts! I have a habit of writing loooong responses anyway, aha. And I have many more fics on the way, so look forward to those I guess :)