Speaking from the perspective of someone who has not actually read any of the relevant comics (I've heard it suffered from being part of the new 52), I do like playing around with the premise of the whole Dick Grayson Spyral arc in a vaguely post-crisis setting.
It's like. We have Tim Drake. First his little brother dies. (Sure he was a pain in the ass and half the time when they talked, they ended up fighting, but Tim and Damian were still brothers. Damian was still a kid.) Then Dick gets kidnapped and unmasked and dies, and there's a closed casket funeral. Jason's in his villain era because I said so and Bruce is pushing everyone away and being even more of an emotionally constipated ass than usual because he's mourning. And look, he's the last one standing again.
You're Tim Drake. You're Red Robin and Red Robin was never supposed to be permanent but one thing turned into another and things kept happening, and, well, you never got around to coming up with a new mantle. There's no Robin and Batman needs a Robin so maybe you try to become Robin again, but putting on a dead boy's uniform feels different when you were actually close to the kid. You can never really go back and Bruce doesn't like it and he's being more of an ass than usual. Sure, he's grieving, but you're grieving too. and, and...
What I'm getting at is Tim becomes Nightwing. To honor his memory. To carry on the legacy. Possibly Red!Nightwing to distinguish himself from the original.
And then we get Damian coming back from the dead. Bruce is better after that, but still shutting himself off and being more of jerk than usual. He still has a dead son. Dick's still dead, but Nightwing and Robin team up after Damian yells at Tim because he came back to life to find Dick dead and Tim wearing the costume, but once they work that all out, they team up. They get along better. It's a shame death it was it took to get there.
Eventually Dick comes back from the "dead" and we get that mix of betrayal and anger, but also relief. (And also they should be mad at Bruce too for keeping it a secret). Ummmm, Tim has to go find another new mantle. All of Bruce's terrible decisions he made during the arc were retconned to be because he was brainwashed by Brother Blood II aka Brother Bloodier or something when there's a new primary author and actually he's a great dad.
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"Ed Iskandar talked with God. Then it was Lucifer’s turn. Now he was addressing Adam and Eve.
[...]
Right now, Iskandar was rehearsing the plays from Act I, including Madeleine George’s 10-minute piece about the Fall of Man, which she gives the elaborate title, “A Worm Walks Into A Garden or The Fall of Man, an experiment in motive and comedy.” In it, Lucifer tells dumb jokes to Adam and Eve, as a way of seducing them. Adam finds them funny. Eve doesn’t.
“You’re missing a crucial part of your anatomy,” Lucifer says to Eve. “The funnybone.”
Lucifer is being played by Asia Kate Dillon.
[...]
Dillon was writhing and entwining themself around Eve. Suddenly Chase Brock, the show’s choreographer, got down on the floor and started to writhe on the floor along with Lucifer. Brock had researched the earthworm, and showed some pictures of earthworms to Dillon on his laptop to suggest other moves they could make."
"50 different plays by almost as many different playwrights is a massive undertaking in which each vignette varies in tone from the one before it. The actors playing the characters do not change from play to play; this forces the performers to be as comfortable and convincing with farce as they are playing tragedy. It is also fascinating to contemplate the mental and emotional gymnastics that each performer of The Bats (the resident acting company of The Flea) must have undergone to ensure that each character maintains the same internal psychological throughline when they appear in different plays by very different authors.
The first act deals with the Old Testament books and the Nativity. In playwright Dale Orlandersmith’s Song of the Trimorph, the angels in Heaven mindlessly worship God (a deliciously petty, yet shrewdly authoritative Matthew Jeffers), who takes it as His due until Lucifer (Asia Kate Dillon) starts to question whether love without choice means anything.
Dillon’s beautifully delicate, white-haired devil is one of the show’s most complex figures. Watching them evolve from nuanced philosopher to diabolical heavy to world-weary cynic, depending on the vignette, is fascinating. The narrative speeds its way through the Bible. Highlights include Madeleine George’s surprisingly feminist take on the Adam and Eve story; Hwang’s marvelously urgent Cain and Abel tale, which posits the first murder as a story of vengeance against a capricious God; and Mallery Avidon’s whimsically horrifying tale of Noah’s Flood, which also entails the deaths of everyone who didn’t make it aboard the Ark.
[...]
The show’s second section deals with the Life of Jesus, with Colin Waitt’s astonishingly variegated boy-next-door Jesus shifting from an idealistic dreamer as he travels with Mary and Joseph to a forceful, almost angry philosopher when he argues with Lucifer about the nature of love to a bratty dolt when he confronts Gabriel about his inevitable fate. The fact that the playwrights clearly have a different idea of Jesus’s personality sets Wiatt a complex task: He has to make his Christ the same in all situations; whether he’s being comic or tragic, Wiatt is convincing and moving in a performance of stunning versatility.
Indeed, his likable turns in Gabriel Jason Dean’s beautiful Christ Enters Jerusalem makes his ferocious agonies in Qui Nguyen’s Christ Before Herod and his subsequent crucifixion all the more heartrending. The third act deals with Christ’s resurrection and humanity’s fate at the Day of Judgment, and includes a series of plays set in modern times, as well as God’s final words to Lucifer, Jesus, and to us. The show’s final Day of Judgment coda by Jose Rivera is an essay of forgiveness and unexpected love."
"Overall, the point of view of The Mysteries leans toward deism, the Enlightenment philosophy that presents God as a kind of clockmaker who created the universe, then left it alone to run according to its own laws. We see God squabbling with, then abandoning, Lucifer, setting in motion the events of the Bible, but even in Eden he is surprisingly enigmatic.
[...]
And, as one of the thieves killed with Jesus prophesies, it may all be for naught; he conjures up a future in which "the religion founded -- haha --upon your existence will be held up to justify the slaughter of millions over hundreds and thousands of years, for the brutal sins of domination and exploitation, the lynchings, the massacres and genocide, the relentless militarism. Everything you stood for will be erased."
[...]
In any case, the company is an almost constant joy. Among the more striking performances, [...] Asia Kate Dillon is a compelling presence as Lucifer."
"Four dozen playwrights take four dozen spiritual positions, which allows bubbles of radical reimagining to emerge only to sink again beneath the waves. For instance, our very first playwright, Dael Orlandersmith, paints Lucifer (Asia Kate Dillon) as a sweetheart Cordelia type refusing to curry favor with an insecure God (Matthew Jeffers). The fallen Light bringer keeps popping up throughout, and yet while Lucifer makes a number of solid points—many vigorously antichurch—they're still costumed as a blood-smeared reptile. Does evil exist? Or does it only exist when it can dress super cool?"
"It begins with a scene in heaven where we meet the lavish Angel Chorus that will be with us for the duration of the play, and witness Lucifer’s expulsion from heaven, something like in Milton’s Paradise Lost.
[...]
We also meet the rebellious Lucifer in that first scene in heaven, played with dazzling cynicism by Asia Kate Dillon, and at the same time the angel Gabriel, played by Alice Allemano, who, obedient to God, in contrast to Lucifer, struggles valiantly trying to make sense out of God’s commands and following through on them. These two, Lucifer and Gabriel, played by tall, striking people, fine actors who resemble one another, hold the vast array together like bookends.
The scenes in the Garden of Eden are delightful, played, appropriately in the nude, by Jaspal Binning as Adam and Alesandra Nahodil as Eve. Throughout the play, Biblical episodes are interpreted by the many playwrights in non-canonical ways and the first of these is brilliant: the knowledge the first couple gain through their disobedient eating of the apple is — how to tell a good joke and how to enjoy one!"
"Act I – The Fall begins with Creation and Lucifer’s fall from grace with God. Lucifer is played by a steady, radiant Asia Kate Dillon who reappears frequently to mix things up with earthlings and the rival angel, Gabriel, played by Alice Allemano makes goodness alluring. God is played by an extremely patient and multi-dimensional Matthew Jeffers whose sense of humor humanizes the Lord."
"As starting points, Dael Orlandersmith’s “Song of the Trimorph (Lucifer’s Lament)” and Liz Duffy Adams’s “Falling for You” are somewhat too abstract, particularly “Falling for You,” which has Lucifer wonder, “How can there be love in the absence of being?”"
"Starting with the Fall, we are introduced to the Angel Gabriel and the fallen angel Lucifer, played by two equally lissome and brilliant young actors, Alice Allemano and Asia Kate Dillon. They compete for God’s affections by using a chorus of singing punk angels."
"Asia Dillon as Lucifer brought the precise mixture of demonic delight and fragility necessary for such an adaptation: watching their performance was like looking at a raw cut in the bowels of the earth, brimming with fire and unimaginable sadness."
(no relevant quotes, but throwing in a brief pdf of a grantee project report that focuses on Engagement)
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Vent ig
Fandoms will always be more willing to humanize and excuse the male antagonists but will take any chance to further demonize female antagonists (or just female characters in general lets be honest) and turn them into cartoonishly evil ppl.
I hate making everything about RQ but Elara is what sparked this from me, or at least something I remembered pushed me to want to vent about this. It kills me that ppl in this fandom will sit and make excuses day in and day out about how Maven actually isn't to blame for any of it and how it actually isn't that bad that Maven killed thousands of ppl and physically and mentally abused Mare and Iris (and hell maybe even Evangeline who knows at this point) but will then turn around and exaggerate what Elara did to the absolute extreme. I am NOT saying that Elara didn't do anything wrong or should be excused cause I don't think that! What I am saying is, I loathe when ppl will talk about her and erase parts of her character in order to turn her into a cartoonishly evil stepmother. You don't have to like her, you don't have to think she had anything but bad intent, but don't talk about her if ur just gonna ignore or change part of her character because for some reason u can't fathom her not being 100% rubbing her hands together maniacally laughing evil. (Especially considering Elara barely has any character so like how r u just missing shit that easily?) And it doesn't just stop with her. It happens with characters in every media! Alicent Hightower gets half her character IGNORED because god forbid she not be 100% evil and u feel anything but hatred for her! Sansa gets demonized for shit she did at like 11 like come on. I mean hell, even characters from children's media get demonized for existing (like I'll never forget hearing that ppl HATED Mable Pines for being what? an annoying 12 year old?)
Ppl also love to claim they stan or love female characters but in reality they only love that character in relation to their male love interest. If she ever goes against her male love interest then it turns into "she's such a bitch" or "she's so selfish" like I mean thats literally what happened to Mikasa the moment she "turned" on Eren.
Idk im so tired of ppl stanning and loving evil male characters and finding every which way to justify their actions but then going out of their way to make female characters WORSE than they actually are.
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