#Absolute League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

[tomoleary]

Kevin O'Neill “Bloomsbury Quintet” - Mina Harker, Captain Nemo, Allan Quatermain, Dr. Jekyll & The Invisible Man - 2003’s Absolute League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 1.

Source (Colin Smith’s Twitter)

[auxiliarydetective]

Varsha: The Potion and The Poison

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Standing next to Ishmael was a young woman with dark skin, large brown eyes, and long black hair. Her face was mesmerizing to look at, appearing almost otherworldly. There was something about her eyes and her smile that made you trust her, want to protect her at all costs, but it also gave you a feeling of safety, of hospitality. But it didn’t end at her face, of course. It was in her clothes, too, a white top showing off her midriff, covered by winding, indigo-colored fabric, a saree, of silk, with a fine pattern of silver that gleamed in the light of the lamps. A thin chain went along where her hair was parted, leading down onto her forehead to a golden ornament, a similar design shared by both her earrings and the stud gracing her left nostril. But the gold and silver didn’t clash, no, it was far from that. They harmonized in a way that should not be possible. Or, to put it into one sentence: She looked regal. As soon as she laid her eyes on the guests entering the bridge, she placed both her palms together under her chin and gave a deep bow.

Skinner whistled in astonishment. “Wow, I think I’ve just found the most beautiful thing on this ship!” he called out and had already started heading for the woman when Nemo grabbed him and held him back.

“Nobody is to touch her,” the Captain immediately declared.

“Sorry,” Skinner quipped back, “didn’t know she was your daughter.”

“That honour isn’t mine to claim.”

“Clearly, Skinner, she’s out of your league,” Gray declared and pulled him back towards the group.

“This, gentlemen,” Nemo said as he gestured towards the woman to come closer, “is Miss Varsha Devi, the jewel of this ship. She may not speak our language, but she understands every word.”

“I always thought women on a ship meant bad luck,” Quartermain regarded with a smirk.

“Not this one. In fact, since Varsha has been on board, the seas have been nothing but kind to me. - Perhaps due to her navigation.”

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Quietly, you are saving me Please, don't fade away Into the darkness of night I don't need no light to see you shine

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That was when he heard music down the hallway, though only very faintly. Any regular human probably wouldn’t have heard it but, seeing as some portion of Hyde’s superior senses carried over to him, he did. It was an exotic instrument, possibly stringed, with a very distinct timbre. Curious, Jekyll followed the sound to a door that stood just slightly ajar. Nonetheless, the opening was just barely enough to look inside.

The room was lit by a circle of candles, or rather small oil lamps, their flames flickering with the sound of the instrument. In its middle sat Varsha, playing an instrument that vaguely resembled a guitar, though with a smaller, oval- or teardrop-shaped body and a long, thick neck with many more strings than a guitar could feasibly have. It was ornamentally decorated, with designs similar to ones found in Varsha’s jewelry. Distinctly, a snake wound itself around the body of the instrument, a sleek creature crafted by a master, no doubt. Still, the instrument was no match for the beauty of the artist. In the light of the candles, Varsha’s skin took on a copper glow and her hair gleamed golden. The flames flickered in her eyes and her jewelry glimmered. With the way her sleek fingers gently plucked the instrument, a man could get jealous. But not Jekyll. Certainly not Jekyll. After all, them being in any sort of relationship was an impossibility. As he tried to convince himself of that, he barely even noticed himself taking out his pocket watch and starting to fidget with it. First of all, Varsha was divine, and she was fundamentally good-hearted, something Jekyll wished he could claim of himself but clearly couldn’t. He couldn’t possibly burden her with the looming threat that was Hyde, not someone as kind and as fragile as her. Not anyone, but definitely not her. Secondly, Nemo’s protection of her. Though he was not her father, he did shelter her like his own daughter. Skinner had told Jekyll that Nemo had forbidden anyone in the League from as much as touching Varsha, making it very obvious how sacred her purity had to be to him. Even the most elevated and proper courting of her could upset the captain and that was the last thing Jekyll wanted. Not to mention that Varsha probably wouldn’t be interested. After all, who would want a pathetic man like him? The only thing he had to offer was his doctorate. Not even his moderate wealth that he had managed to carry over from London would be a viable factor, considering that she lived in the utmost luxury aboard the Nautilus - if she even cared about riches at all. Thirdly, and most importantly of all, Jekyll knew of the fact that it was customary in India for marriages to be arranged. Surely, someone as beautiful as her already had a husband, or at the very least a fiancé. Nemo may have mentioned that she had no family to speak of, but then he probably had made the arrangement himself, in his efforts to care for her. With Nemo off the table for obvious reasons, the next possible option was Ishmael, but as he was a Westerner, he was an unlikely choice. But there were hundreds of Indian men on board this vessel and one of them was sure to be engaged to her, officially or not. But no matter how much he tried to reason, his heart still beat faster than it should, his hands shivered about the pocket watch and his breath hitched. It was like he was hypnotized. The dangerous snake to her snake charmer. For a while, it was just him and her and the music between them. That was until a voice echoed through Jekyll’s mind.

“Yes, Henry. Look, but don’t touch.” Hyde gave a chuckle. “That’s your way.”

Suddenly, Jekyll became very aware of his surroundings. Of the shadow he might be throwing into the room, of the clicking sound his pocket watch might make, of his breathing that Varsha might hear. Quickly, he put the pocket watch away and hurried around a corner, away from this peaceful image.

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Tagging: @daughter-of-melpomene and @waddlesworth aka the LXG mutual and one of the few people with good content on the movie on this platform. I thought I'd honour you this way, hope you don't mind :)

[importantbusinessdinosaur]

What do you think of 2000AD comics?

2000AD is great, Judge Dredd is one of those comics you can just get really into at any point in your life, if you ever want a glimpse into UK comics scene it's always worth looking at, especially the Judge Death stories with Brain Bolland art.

Mag-freaking-nificent.

Okay, formalities out of the way? We've said Judge Dredd is cool?

Right.

Sit the fuck down and let me tell you about my favourite 200AD comic.

Let me tell you about:

NEMESIS THE WARLOCK

NEMESIS THE WARLOCK!

FIGHTING THE EVIL OF THE CHIEF TERMINATOR

TORQUEMADA

Look let me get into this. Most people know Kevin O'Neill because of his work on League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with Alan Moore. I know him most for Nemesis.

Nothing comes close to the absolute insanity and creativity of Nemesis the Warlock. It is some of the greatest design work ever done and speaks volumes of the environment it was created in.

Every panel, every scene has new and inventive characters, environment, objects. It doesn't stop surprising you with how it portrays everything. They mess with scale a lot, having huge sculptures of people as buildings or just making people tiny on Moebius inspired planes

Have a look at this shot of Nemesis at his writing desk

There is so much going on there it's fantastic. Anyway. Plot? Plot. Nemesis is the leader of the revolutionary army fighting Torquemada, who wants to exterminate all alien life so that only "pure" humans exist. Sounds pretty straightforward right?

Except Nemesis is a Warlock, he only does things in the most over the top evil way to combat him. And not in a "sacrifice your troops" evil way, but in a "haunt this guy and make him think I'm the devil so he does my bidding" way

(I want a church organ with a "brimstone" intonation)

Nemesis also comes through a matriarchal society, and when they attack his family he does indeed go ballistic. I feel it's important you know what the females of his species look like.

Awesome.

Any way thank you for giving me an excuse to talk about Nemesis, I highly recommend it it's an absolute blast.

[tiffanys-aus-and-headcanons]

Appendix D: Some Pig/One More Final

The first three posts in this series are here.

Undertale was a slightly postmodern children's fantasy movie produced by Jim Henson's Creature Shop in the '80s. Noah Hathaway played the protagonist, Frisk, who went on a long quest to escape from a magical prison inside Mt. Ebott; Frisk's father had thrown them into the mountain, known to be full of monsters, in an attempt to kill them. However, it's suggested that as a human, Frisk is inherently more of a protagonist than a monster can be, and has a vague sort of magical power over them. Toriel's death, which Frisk accidentally causes early in the movie, is commonly listed as a Peak Sad Childhood Moment.

George Orwell wrote The Writing In The Web, a political fable about a cult started by a well-meaning spider. E. B. White wrote Snowball's Farm, a whimsical children's tale about a farm whose animals decide to take over.

Infamously, Emmanuel Goldstein's monologue fills dozens of pages, takes at least three hours to read aloud, and brings the plot of Ayn Rand's 1984 to a screeching halt.

Short story collections and anthologies often keep the same title, author, and spirit, it's just the stories that are swapped out. For example, classic episodes of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone include A Wonderful Life, The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, Miracle On 34th Street, and The Sixth Sense. 1983's The Twilight Zone Movie includes segments based on classic episodes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (directed by John Landis and given anti-war themes), Cocoon, The Poltergeist, and In Search of the Twelve Monkeys (the original starred a young William Shatner). Candle Cove is an episode of Black Mirror.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was a 1999 Ben Stiller comedy about a team of low-rent superheroes who theme themselves after public domain characters because they cannot afford licensing fees. The film was well-reviewed, but a box office bomb. It was actually the first film to use Smash Mouth's One Week - the One Week music video is actually cross promotion with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - and it would remain the film most associated with the song until Dreamworks' Happily N'Ever After hit theaters two years later.

The Amazing Digital Circus was a virtual pet game and toy line that struck when the iron was hot on that niche, before being bought out by Hasbro and rebooted a few times in different forms and mediums. Lauren Faust created a long-running television cartoon of it that was a huge smash hit with fandom culture despite the show's clearly very young target audience. The property's canon is all very light kiddie fare; the scariest thing about The Amazing Digital Circus is that for a brief and touchy stretch of time in the early 2000s, it was owned by the Peoples Temple, which was seriously considering turning it into a recruiting platform.

Your cringe unpublished works that you gave up on were almost certainly swapped around with other people's cringe unpublished works that they gave up on. There's lots of upwards and downwards mobility to the scramble, but not usually that much. Exceptions are very rare - like a beggar suddenly being made king, or a god being reincarnated into an ant - but they do occasionally happen. For example, what you know as the land of Oz exists only in the head of a young Milwaukee stoner, who suddenly came up with the idea for an epic graphic novel one day in the 2010s while sitting on the bus, and spent a couple of years absolutely convinced she would eventually make it. (She cannot draw.) Conversely, L. Frank Baum's children's fantasy series, Enormia, which has been adapted and reimagined many times, most notably as audiences' introduction to color film, exists in your world only as a different Milwaukee stoner's overly elaborate backstory for his jerkoff sessions. This kind of thing is much more the exception than the rule, and even such exceptions are almost always much smaller in scope - an obscure stillborn project getting swapped around with an obscure out-of-print novel, or an obscure direct-to-video z-movie.

The True Detectives forum and its many schismatic spinoffs, all of which are devoted to discussing mystery fiction, host literally thousands of Wind fanfics. Many of the writers - perhaps most of them - have never actually read Wind, just other fanfiction of it; next to none of the fics are worth reading. Most Wind fics reuse the original protagonist, Rorschach, but treat him as a generically relatable blank slate. The most common fic format by far is the "altdunnit", a form of what-if scenario in which the mystery that sets off Wind's plot is different in some way.

Rorschach is held by a substantial portion of the fandom to be an egg (a trans woman who has not realized it yet). Wildbow has never endorsed this interpretation, and it doesn't seem to be much on his radar. In recent years, the trans Rorschach portion of the fandom has grown; they don't tend to look especially kindly on Warn, much of which Wildbow wrote as a response to fans (like those on the True Detectives forum) he felt had been too inclined to take Rorschach's side in Wind. Flame wars over Warn's content were constant throughout its serial publication, and made it easily the rockiest experience of Wildbow's writing career.

Some noteworthy and relevant podcasts include Jonathan Sims' The Dresden Files, the Ranged Touch Network's Scott Pilgrim Made The World, Doof Media's Winding Down (later Warning Down), and the McElroy family's The Adventure Zone (an actual play podcast which has currently had three major campaigns, two anthology series, and various one-shots). Film Reroll is still an actual play podcast that runs the basic setups of movies (and occasionally other media) as short tabletop campaigns; occasionally, their version of a movie will be much closer to ours than it is to the version of the movie in their own universe.

Xenobuddy was an early childhood public access show, originally created for the BBC in the late 1990s but later aired internationally. The title character is a small alien puppet who lives on a futuristic spaceship staffed by children (who speak a vague conlang akin to a dollar store Esperanto). At the end of every episode, it gets lost and is found, usually by (harmlessly) bursting out of one of the children. It was very popular with its target audience and much loathed by parents. Edgy ironic fanart depicting the titular Xenobuddy as some kind of dangerous parasite abounds.

Static is a supernatural slasher franchise created by Wes Craven, with the first film, also simply titled Static, released in 1984. The movies concern a group of gibbering neotenous ogre-fae who wake up in the modern day after a long sleep, incorporate televisions into their bodies, and start eating people by sucking them into hellish pocket dimensions. The Screen-Guts collectively are probably in the top five antagonists most people think of when they think of slasher horror.

Toby Fox's ROSEQUARTZ is especially known for its meta take on video game morality systems. The game has a mission-based structure; throughout it, the player is encouraged to take on a pacifist playstyle, championed by the player character's late mother, the title character. However, the Crystal Gems give the player enough autonomy that you are entirely able to take a much more violent tack; doing so has a rippling effect on the game's writing in countless immersively-integrated ways. If the player goes out of their way to be as murderous as possible - the so-called "genocide route" - the differences from the main route grow much more extreme, and rather than gaining allies, you start to lose them, as the Crystal Gems realize what you're doing and one by one turn against you. If you manage to shatter Garnet - it's the hardest and most iconic fight in the game, Megalovania is playing, her Future Vision gets used for all it's worth - then you use your knife to slash at the cosmos, erasing Earth, Homeworld, and everything else. This, Toby Fox is saying, is apparently all you want out of a video game - another toy to break.

Warner Bros still did Space Jam with Michael Jordan and the Looney Tunes, it's just that the Looney Tunes in question were Mickey Mouse and friends. They also still did a second one with LeBron James, which was, by God, somehow worse. They put Ms. Frizzle in it.

Walt Disney made his squeaky clean reputation on the back of adaptations of things like Rudyard Kipling's adventure novel The Call of Cthulhu, P. L. Travers' Thomas the Tank Engine, and Erich Kästner's feel-good coming-of-age kidnapping tale about the power of perseverance, Lolita, originally done with Hayley Mills and later remade with Lindsay Lohan.

Nabokov's extremely controversial literary classic that has defined the idea of the unreliable narrator is Father's Trap, from the perspective of a man who plots to obtain custody of both of his daughters for nefarious purposes. Most publishers ignored Nabokov's instructions not to depict the twins, Lisa and Lottie, on the cover. Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne have directed mediocre film adaptations, and songwriting team Lerner and Loewe did a musical that was a legendary flop.

The Japanese fashion movement is Gothic Pollyanna, after an otherwise-forgotten series of penny dreadfuls about a cute, cheery, rules-minded young girl who is, despite appearances, an insane criminal. Minor character Bonesaw in Alan Moore's Worm Turns also clearly hearkens back to the Pollyanna stock character.

The DEA was a prime-time soap opera about the ongoing "war on drugs"; it ran for eleven seasons from 1982 to 1993. Its plot focused on federal agents working at the Drug Enforcement Administration office in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and especially partners Hank Schrader and Steve Gomez and their families. It is mostly remembered today for its downer ending (in which the treachery of late-show villain Walter White, or "Heisenberg", gets the leads killed, and he escapes from justice), and for its far-more-acclaimed spinoff series Better Call Saul, which also ran for eleven seasons from 1993 to 2004, functioning as a prequel, midquel, and sequel to The DEA.

Between The DEA and Better Call Saul, Kelsey Grammer played crooked lawyer Saul Goodman for twenty consecutive years of primetime TV, first as featured comic relief and later as a leading man. (He also guest-starred on the mostly-forgotten Mall Cop, establishing that it, too, was set in the world of The DEA and Better Call Saul.) Better Call Saul won more than a dozen Primetime Emmys. Peri Gilpin received several of these for her performance as Kim Wexler.

St. Elsewhere was a film written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan in the late 1990s; it was highly acclaimed and successful, and established Shyamalan in the public eye as a skilled auteur with an affinity for twist endings. The film's final scene reveals that its main setting, St. Eligius Hospital, exists entirely within the imagination of an autistic boy, Tommy Westphall, as he gazes into a snowglobe. The so-called "Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis", which posits that this same twist applies to most of fiction due to a network of crossovers, was invented by a Saturday Night Live sketch shortly postdating the film's release, in which an amnesiac Charles McGill (from Better Call Saul) wakes up in St. Eligius, attended to by a cast of characters who are more concerned with their own nonexistence.

After rising to prominence as a writer, storyboarder, and composer for Pendleton Ward's Science Time (where she established the Summer/Jessica relationship that would come to define later seasons), Rebecca Sugar got to make her own cartoon, Henry Ichor. Set in a recently post-apocalyptic but strangely cheerful world, Henry Ichor concerns a young teenage boy who is conscripted as a mech pilot due to his rare and innate ability to link to the powerful Evangelion mecha. (His preferred Evangelion is eventually revealed to be a form of his late mother, the reason he can do this in the first place.) Henry turns out to be a vital asset in protecting humanity from the monstrous "Angels" that frequently threaten it, and is surprisingly emotionally mature for his age. However, the adults around him (especially his father, Gennady) frequently push him too far, especially considering his generally noncombative and pacifistic nature. There is much interpersonal drama and much singing about it, with a very vocally trained cast. After several seasons of slow buildup, the show was forced to suddenly rush to its ending in only a few (infamous) episodes after an arc where Henry had a romance with an Angel in male human form. Henry Ichor The Movie and an ensuing miniseries, End Of Henry Ichor, helped bring the show to a more thematically satisfying conclusion.

Although he has played a creative or consultant role in many animated projects, Alex Hirsch is best known for the one he was actually the showrunner for, Disney Channel's smash hit Sunnydale. Focusing on a small California town constantly plagued by supernatural threats, Sunnydale generally followed a simple monster-of-the-week format, but kept audiences on the hook with teases at a deeper underlying mystery. The show almost didn't get a season two, as Hirsch found working with Disney very tiring, but he was eventually persuaded; season two ran through the rest of Hirsch's ideas at a faster pace, and concluded the show with the leads graduating from Sunnydale High.

For a brief historical moment, Daron Nefcy's show, Ender vs. the Space Bug Army, looked like it would become the successor to Sunnydale, keeping Disney Television Animation prestigious after Sunnydale ended. However, though Ender drew in a big crowd, and lasted almost twice as long as Sunnydale, it was not ultimately as well-received. EvtSBA is a children's space opera, wearing its Starship Troopers (Joss Whedon) inspiration on its sleeve, but also clearly copying some (superficial) notes from Philip Pullman. Set in a future where mankind has come into violent conflict with bug-like aliens, the show follows unbearably smug boy supergenius Ender as he is sent to military school to prepare for interstellar warfare. The show has an extremely cutesy and hyperactive tone; typical filler episodes include the one (generally taken as meta about fandom drama) in which Ender's siblings' futuristic internet arguments prove instrumental to the survival of the human race. Later seasons get a bit more serious, but focus heavily on shipping. The show is infamous for its ending, in which Ender, for his final exam, destroys the Formics' home planet and releases a psychic signal that eradicates the Formic race. Although the show explicitly notes that this includes many individual Formics who we have previously known as sympathetic characters, it is nonetheless played as a happy ending in which a hostile colonial power is defeated. Ender has ended the war; he has beaten the Space Bug Army.

"Meugh-Neigh. 'Meugh' like the cat, 'neigh' like the horse." "Does it mean something?" "No answer; none at all."

Orson Scott Card is an extremely prolific author of speculative fiction. Although it isn't as close to his heart as the Steel Gear series, in which he got to flex his military sci-fi muscles and allegorically retell stories from his faith, he is undoubtedly best known for Ishtar's Curse. Initially a short story and later expanded into a full novel, the plot concerns young Princess Ishtar, or Star, heir to the heathen fairy kingdom of Meugh-Neigh. (In later novels, she changes her name to Bethlehem Diaz, or Beth.) Spoiled and destructive but magically talented, Star is sent to twentieth century Earth so she can develop the wits and the strength of character to be a viable wartime leader for her people - or at least so she can be kept out of the way. After several years of personal growth and magical misadventures with companions she met on Earth, a more grounded Star devises a spell to erase the magic that makes up the bodies of most of her throne's enemies. This plan works, and merges Meugh-Neigh into the Earth as a small and ordinary European country. However, though her subjects are eager to celebrate her for this, Star is devastated when she realizes that she has killed trillions of innocent spirits, and, seeking to atone, she takes on the title of Speaker for the Dead (also the title of the book's first sequel). Although it's frequently ranked highly in lists of fantasy novels of the twentieth century, Ishtar's Curse has received some harsh criticism, with the standard line being that Star is an idealized fantasy of a repentant Hitler figure, and that the text presents excessive justifications for her actions. The story has also been called a reactionary response to Wilde's The Little Mermaid. After more than twenty years, a film adaptation of Ishtar's Curse was released in 2009, starring Dakota Fanning, to mixed reviews. The box office took a further hit due to a boycott campaign, after Card's views on homosexuality (and, relatedly, his membership in the LDS Church) became widely known. In the end, it lost the studio a lot of money.

Hideaki Anno is best known for the classic smash hit anime he made for Studio Gainax, Einstein Goliath Nestorian, a psychologically intense deconstruction of martial arts shonen like Yoshiyuki Tomino's Dragon Ball. Einstein Goliath Nestorian concerns a mystery man known only as Saitama, who finds that he has become dissatisfied with life and alienated from the world after only three years of training have enabled him to easily surpass any physical challenge. The original series is known for its sudden, surreal, and clearly budget-driven ending, although this was quickly alleviated with a similarly surreal but more definitive finale movie. Although many Western anime fans often think of Einstein Goliath Nestorian as pretentious and ultra niche, it was actually a huge mainstream hit in Japan, with a colossal franchise of adaptations, merch, and spinoffs (notably including a series of Retrain films, which began as extremely close shot-for-shot remakes of the original series but wound up spiraling into a very different updated timeline).

Previously most noteworthy for his 2003 visual novel Oreimo, Gen Urobuchi was tapped by Shaft for their extremely successful and acclaimed anime Ohayou Hana!, hailed as a deceptively dark deconstruction of the teen idol genre. The plot concerns a girl, Saionji Mayuri, who leads a double life, being of little note at school, out of costume, but spending much of her time as #1 idol Hana. Her mental stability begins to deteriorate as she realizes that the adults in her life - especially her father, himself a former idol - have groomed her to serve as a drugged and hypnotized propaganda mouthpiece for a shadowy conspiracy. She winds up in the worst of both worlds as her ensuing breakdown, and her handlers' response to it, destroys both of her lives and brings ruin to those she cares about. In addition to the popularity of the actual anime, many of its songs became decontextualized J-Pop hits. The idol anime genre would then receive a glut of edgy lesser imitators, like Love Live: School Idol Project, Cheetah Girls, and magical girl fusion Symphogear. Although the original Ohayou Hana! was a self-contained twelve-episode story, it received a sequel movie shortly thereafter, Ohayou Hana! Rebel!, which ended on a cliffhanger that has still not been resolved over a decade later. The upcoming Ohayou Hana! MK Ultra! is expected to get things back on track. An abridged series originating on 4chan, focusing on cropped screencaps from Ohayou Hana!, called the title character "Miss Ohio", producing the memetic tagline "being Ohio is suffering".

Zack Snyder first came up with the idea for Madoka around 2000, a long time before he'd actually get to make it; he put the project on hold in 2006 to make his adaptation of Worm Turns. He developed the idea with his wife Deborah and a cowriter, Steve Shibuya. Inspired by the Disney Princess phenomenon, as well as Naoko Takeuchi's Pretty Cure (one of the few anime that had already become a hit in the States), Snyder wanted to tell a coherent story about fights between magical girls who could make anything happen, who could make any fantastical world or visual appear. In Snyder's film, we follow Madoka Kaname, a teenager attending a Catholic school in Los Angeles. Madoka and her friends are approached by a strange young woman who goes only by "Mommy", and her animal companion (a CGI-ed up squirrel-cat thing), QB. They offer to make the teens into "magical girls", granting them one wish each in exchange for a life devoted to spiritual warfare. (Another mysterious new girl, Lilly, urges them not to take the deal in the strongest possible terms.) This turns out to be a scam; QB is pitting the magical girls against one another for his own reasons, and in the end, every magical girl and her wish gets corrupted. Despite much of the film's plot being a horrific bloodbath - the MPAA demanded a lot of cuts to get it down to a PG-13 rating - there is a happy ending; Madoka finally makes her own wish and uses it to topple QB's whole system. Madoka isn't often discussed nowadays but it was a major discourse bomb when it came out in 2010, alternately being called misogynistic Orientalist trash and a subversive feminist masterpiece. Snyder, for his part, often notes that QB is intended as an allegory for exploitative forces within the entertainment industry that treat young women as disposable resources with an expiration date; this is already clear to anyone who's watched the film, which is not exactly subtle in its symbolism. He also explains that the film sexualizes the girls in an effort to shame the audience, to get people to understand that they are objectifying the characters in the same way that QB does. The soundtrack's got a really cool ethereal cover of Nine Inch Nails' King Nothing on it, which is probably the most remembered part of the film today.

Selena Gomez became a star by playing Violet Parr on Disney Channel's superhero sitcom The Incredibles. While the show was initially a very throwaway villain-of-the-week affair whose leads had to keep their powers hidden from the public and their caped escapades secret from the government for self-explanatory comes-with-the-genre reasons, it would eventually unfold that the show was set in something of an X-Men-style dystopia where superheroism had been outlawed and supers oppressed by the government as a potential societal fifth column.

Brad Bird directed one of Pixar's most celebrated films, Wizards of Waverly Place; it was Pixar's first film with a predominantly human cast. Disney was hungry for a fantasy property after losing a bidding war for the Luz Noceda rights. It had strong populist anti-eugenic themes, with an elaborate wizarding hierarchy of antagonists who seek to remove the Russo family's magic as part of an effort to curb wizard overpopulation. The sequel came more than a decade later, and wasn't nearly as good.

In addition to Worm Turns, Alan Moore is notable for the heavily metafictional comic Pagemaster, about a boy, Richard, who finds a magical library that contains all stories that have ever been or could ever be told; he becomes lost and imperiled in assorted pieces of historically noteworthy literature (initially ones in the public domain, though later volumes would start using legally safe serial-numbers-filed-off versions of modern stories). The 2003 film, in which Sean Connery played the librarian in one of his last film roles, is widely regarded as a terrible, deeply-toned-down adaptation that didn't grasp the tone or themes of the original story at all; it only covered the first half of the first volume, in which Richard meets "genre spirits" who wish to sort all stories into rigid categories. In a later volume, Pagemaster Millennium, an aged Richard Tyler, who has since taken on the mantle of librarian himself, meets a teenage girl, heavily implied to be Luz Noceda, who has also become lost in the library. She has become corrupted by an eldritch book, or "Necronomicon", written by "the Wrong Author", heavily implied to be the devil (and/or Hugo Astley, an Aleister Crowley caricature from W. Somerset Maugham's The Winged Bull). Flushed with demonic power and enraged by what she's become, a monstrous Luz tears through the library in a blaze of hellfire, seeking to destroy all of literature and the world. It is only through the intervention of the Fat Controller - heavily implied to be God - that Luz is defeated; he mercifully erases her by hitting her with a train, and laments what she became.

[chaos-has-theories]

Not so good news: the only Dracula adaptation in production is Besson's Dracula A Love Tale.

Dontchu worry Nonny I am in for the LONG HAUL. I want to see what they make in twenty years. I'm relying on the teens and young adults on here who don't have a job yet, after all, who can have white-hair kukri Jonathan and Train Fiend Mina on a low simmer for a while.

Also - I haven't listened to any of it yet, but I'm assuming @/theholmwoodfoundation has some of the "new" interpretations of the characters in their podcast. @/lxgentlefolkcomic making a comic that essentially picks up League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, but the Dracula crew are still besties and wife guy kukri Jonathan is absolutely there (it's great). I expect there's already books being released that pick up on things like that!

It's just going to take a while to get the idea all the way to Hollywood. Maybe less long than I think; maybe longer. Either way, it'll be interesting to see how the motif spreads.

[lucifer-is-a-bag-of-dicks]

I have a really weird hyperfixation on The Mummy, but not the Boris Karloff or the Brendan Fraser versions, those would be completely acceptable movies to enjoy (and I do so enjoy them)

but I cannot stop thinking about The Mummy 2017 starring Tom Cruise and it's a problem

I love bad movies, I love them so much, I own so many b-grade horror flicks, old classic films with terrible acting and awful special effects, I love absolutely shit tier cgi, I love Ed Wood disasters, I love cult classic bad movies, I love really weird niche bad movies

but this one is like, such a special kind of bad movie, I can't really put my finger on exactly why though?? but I am damn well going to try, in this essay I will-

they fucked up from the get go by casting Tom Cruise, like this movie is sometimes deliberately goofy, but a lot of the time it takes itself very seriously, SO seriously, and I cannot physically take Tom Cruise seriously, he turns every single scene he is in into a joke by virtue of his mere presence

but when they have actual jokes, they are so not funny they cycle back around to being really fucking funny

I am watching this movie fucking whiff every god damn beat it tries to hit and it does it so beautifully it's a god damn marvel

Russel Crowe as Jekyll and Hyde??? I actually somehow missed the part where he introduced himself as Jekyll on my first watch, so the Hyde reveal was a true surprise to me and I was very genuinely disappointed on my second watch when I realised it was not supposed to be a surprise, because that was a really fun reveal

and Russel Crowe seemed to be having an absolute fucking whale of a time as Hyde, I loved every moment he was on screen with his stupid cockney accent, I would watch his movie, I know it would be bad, that's why I want it, because there is nothing quite like a bad movie with an actor still giving 110%

and the mummy character herself? she was supposed to be pharaoh and then her dad had a son with someone else and now this baby is jumping all up in her place like, okay baby murder might not be the coolest thing in the world but like, she's got ambition, she's getting shit done, she's hustlin' like go get it girl I'm rooting for you babe

also when she sucked the life out of some dude and turned him into a shrivelled husk my roommate said 'she could do that to me and I'd thank her' so she's got that going for her, like girl's a half rotten corpse wrapped in decaying bandages and she still slays

and then we have the completely ridiculous female rivalry??? like this mummy could kill this woman SO MANY TIMES and just doesn't???? for reasons?????? like she could literally kill her in an instant at any moment but no they gotta girl fight for a bit because Tom Cruise is at stake and why wouldn't two hot women fight over Tom Cruise right?? right????

nevermind the fact that he has been practically nothing but ✨The WooOOOOooorst✨ to her the WHOLE first act of the movie, oh and uh let's not forget the 'duh huh guy bad at sex' jokes that they just could not put down for a good chunk there (but wait! uh he's good at sex actually she's just being mean because he hurt her feewings)

like, this movie hits every fucking branch of the bad trope tree, this movie is playing bad trope bingo, it is collecting bad tropes like pokemon, it has to have them all

also a really bizarre ongoing American Werewolf in London reference?? it was not unwelcome, it was some of the best comedy in the movie (that is an easy bar to jump btw), the actor had some great wry line delivery, I enjoyed it

I think the biggest issue, and the reason I can't stop chewing on this magnum opus of garbage, is that it reminds me of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, in several different ways

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen also happens to be another of my favourite bad movies, but it falls into the particular genre of bad movies, a fucking cool as shit concept, and some really cool as shit visuals, and some very cool as shit characters, but an absolute swing and a miss on the delivery

The Mummy 2017 starring Tom Cruise has That Vibe to me, there is some cool shit here, we know this because the previous version utilised that cool shit very very well, but this one was the only one who made the villain a woman pursuing a man, and not just any man, the ✨worst✨ man, you did not feel very sorry for this guy, honestly watching him go through the constant torment of being stalked by a bodacious supernatural babe who put a sexy little curse kiss on him was fun, he's a sopping wet little meow meow and I wanna see him thrown at a wall, and I get to see that several times, and it is a delight every time

in the previous movie the mummy went after really likeable characters, people who were just generally nice, a roguish scamp with a heart of gold, or just really hot, seriously that cast was beyond smoking what the fu

I did not like Tom Cruise as a character, and to be fair that was the point, he was supposed to have a redemption arc, the story and his sacrifice at the end were supposed to be about him becoming a better person

but he fucking doesn't??? it's like 'oh boo hoo I have made this great sacrifice and now I am a monster and I did it to save my lady love's life even though we had zero chemistry and I was just ✨The Worst✨ to her' and then he fucks off to go and do the exact same shit he was doing at the start of the movie, fucking around in the desert looking for boy adventures

it was a great ending and I loved it because it was so dumb and also he abandoned the woman he brought back to life to go fuck around with his bro who he also brought back to life, I love that for them, go have some boy adventures you madlads you sure didn't earn it but don't let that stop you, just heterosexually ride off into the sunset together it's fine, she is literally better off without you in every way you made the Correct Decision

and then there's these moments, moments that are treated like big moments, and could be really cool moments, but just don't fucking land

there's a part where Tom Cruise starts talking to the mummy in her own language (they got a psychic bond and shit which is it's own cool little thing we'll get back to that) and everyone is watching like 😮 oooh didn't know he could do that wow there really IS magic bond between them oooh, and it's like a Big Deal and Very Cool

but Tom Cruise just sounds like he's speaking gibberish with a mouth full of novocain???? it doesn't sound cool at all??? it sounds really goofy???? I half expected him to start drooling on himself

then there is the ending, leading lady dies, he completes the ritual to invite the god of death into his body (a fucking baller move honestly), he fights it for control as the mummy attempts to sway the beast inside him to her side, but when he sees his beloved laying dead he fights her off, using his newfound powers to defeat her, and then weeps over his lady love begging for her to wake up

and then as he lets the god inside him loose, a terrible monstrous visage takes him over as he bloodcurdlingly screams in her face WAKE UP!!! and the power within him that he doesn't understand and can barely control listens

she wakes, and sees him hiding in the shadows, unable to face her now that he has become something terrifying

at least that's what I think they thought the scene would be like, it was a little more like, some crappy flashback and speed up effects as he becomes the god of death, a really pathetic and uneventful 1 minute of him fighting for control, after which he has a really pathetic and uneventful 1 minute of fighting the mummy, and then as he screams for his lady love to wake up, we get a shot of some absolutely fucking god awful cgi and the most uninspired monster face I've ever seen

I mean, half seen, it was a very dark shot, in fact most of the movie is shot in the dark, a very blatant attempt to obscure the shithouse cgi

except in one scene where it kinda fucking slapped, where the mummy sucks the life out of some guys, and then reanimates their husky corpses as thralls, the way they stand like jerky unstable puppets being dragged to their feet by unseen strings was actually pretty fuckin' dope and the dark scene obscured the details in just the right amount to make their uncannily decrepit silhouettes appear super creepy

this is the only time that trick works, every other time I just want someone to turn on a fucking torch so I can actually see what the hell's going on

okay now let's get back to that psychic bond thing

our main character was chosen not because he was a descendant, or a reincarnation, or just Looked Real Pretty (although I think she did have the hots for him a leeetle bit which is like, girl raise your standards, it's Tom Cruise, he's about as sexually appealing as a wet potato, you can do better), he had absolutely zero in common with the mummy's original choice for this ritual, in fact that guy was not significant to the story at all, I think he was just some dude who was down for some ritual shenanigans 'cause a hot lady asked him (also he was hotter than Tom Cruise so this is a significant downgrade, I feel like if she had the opportunity to shop around a little she might have picked better)

so Tom Cruise wasn't chosen for any reason other than that he's the one who released her, and she sees this as her way of saying thank you, and I love that, it's real sweet, would love if I opened a door for someone and they repaid me by summoning a god of death into my body, that really shows they care you know?

she gives him a little hallucinatory kissy kiss and then manages to follow him everywhere, while also compelling him to follow her without him really knowing it, there is a very cool part where he's trying to drive away from her, but somehow ends up driving in a circle and falling right back into her clutches, that was cool, that had the potential to even be super fucking creepy, she can manipulate him without him even realising, it doesn't matter where he goes or what he does, he will always somehow find his way back to her, that's so good, I love that

and then back to the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comparisons

The Mummy 2017 starring Tom Cruise established a concept of an organisation who hunt down, collect, and research supernatural phenomena, with a leader (Jekyll) who also has ulterior motives and is actually not really the good guy, this movie was also supposed to be part of a monster movie cinematic universe, so this really could have become like, the Universal Monster Movie equivalent of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and I would have watched the hell out of that, and I am crushed that this movie bombed so bad and ruined the whole plan

like could you imagine a whole series as bad as this movie? all culminating together as the most god awful Avengers style team up? fuuuck I want to live in that universe so bad

I think my fascination comes from this ungodly mix of real pure potential, those fleeting super fucking cool moments and concepts that, if given to literally any other actor, could have really been something, and the just pure insane failure to make literally anything in this plot successfully land a hit

somehow this movie felt like the completely dead and soulless corpse of a cheap party clown, while the ghost of something incredible flickered in its eyes

[rose-of-oz]

HOLIDAY SHOUTOUTS

Merry Christmas and happy holidays, everyone!! Whether you celebrate or not, I sincerely hope that your day today is amazing and full of love and light <3. That said, I wanted to give some special shoutouts here to all the fellow creators who have helped to make my year that much better. I love every single one of you, and I want to thank every single person who has interacted with my stuff and sent me asks about my babies, but for now these people deserve some special love for all they’ve done for me. Therefore, I want to shout out:

— @luucypevensie, for always listening to my ramblings, no matter how crazy, and for always being willing to talk about crossovers with me.

— @dancingsunflowers-ocs, for being so endlessly supportive of all my plot bunnies and ideas, and for making the most beautiful moodboard gift for my boy Sebastian.

— @carmens-garden, for being my man Wyatt’s biggest fan, for making such beautiful gifts for her exchanges, and for being part of the inspiration for my new Teen Wolf OCs!

— @auxiliarydetective, for introducing me to both One Piece and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen this year (and inspiring my babies Star, Lark, Enola, and Lila as a result), always being willing to listen to my half-crazy ramblings, and teaching me about both ancient Roman society and how German schools work.

— @oneirataxia-girl, for inspiring me to actually introduce my Narnia babies, being my girl Annie’s biggest fan, and just generally being the absolute best.

— @starcrossedjedis, for being an amazing newfound friend this year, being the other person who inspired me to watch One Piece, and just generally being a super cool mom friend.

— @endless-oc-creations, for being the biggest champion of my babies Luci and Carlos, convincing me to watch The Walking Dead, and for the absolutely amazing edits she made for my slasher OC.

— @come-along-pond, as always, for inspiring me to watch The Boys, teaching me British slang, and calling me Mother many times on Discord.

— @ginevrastilinski-ocs, for making such beautiful gifts for my girl Ivana for the Halloween exchange, always sending me asks when I needed them, and being my sister in cool Winchester sister OCs.

— @asirensrage, for always being an inspiration to me and putting up with my rambles in her inbox, and being one of the coolest creators in the game.

— @arrthurpendragon, for always being the best OC fairy godmother any of us could ask for, for her amazing fics, and for inspiring me to create my new Pride & Prejudice babies.

— @nolanhollogay and @witchofinterest, for being some more newfound friends this year and always supporting my ramblings on the queer OC Discord - you guys are the best!!

— @richitozier, for always being an inspiration to me, and for having genuinely some of the coolest OCs and most amazing edits around.

— @bibaybe, for working tirelessly to run the queerocs blog and always hyping up my babies and sending me asks when I needed them most.

— @eddiemunscns, for inspiring me to create three new Ted Lasso OCs, being super nice whenever I chose to bother her, and just generally being a cool person.

And so many more people that I’m so sorry if I’m forgetting!! Again, I really really hope you all have an amazing day even if you’re not celebrating anything, and remember I love and appreciate every single one of you!! ✨🎄

[forthegothicheroine]

I mean some of the "Lucy wanted to be Vampirized" Takes are probably about slut-shaming, but most of the ones I've personally seen come from people who would themselves want to become vampires, and who (perhaps even in an effort to avoid Demonizing Female Characters) assume that Sweet Good Lucy is a front that the character puts up, which she hates as much as they would if they had to do it.

And the problem is...probably not? At least not without a lot of re-writing. And their attempts to make her Totally Secretly Cool (as they specifically define cool) come across as more disrespectful than just openly being like "Outa my way, Prep, I'm about to get it!"

I think you can absolutely interpret Lucy post-vampirism as being a misogynistic caricature, though I would argue that's not the only interpretation, but you really can't do that pre-vampirism without ignoring what the text is outright telling you. Bram Stoker does not seem to have been a progressive guy, but he wasn't sexist in the specific way that people want him to have been. They really want Dracula to be about punishing people for having or wanting sex, if only so that embracing vampirism becomes cool and rebellious, but that's simply not what's in the book.

Likewise, the last straw for me with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was that Alan Moore quote about how Mina could never have wanted a milksop like Jonathan after having been with Dracula. You can argue that about Carmilla. You can argue that about La Morte Amoureuse. You can argue that about Polidori's The Vampyre. But it's just not there in Dracula!

[invisible-vampire13]

Do you ever get bored and decide to mess around with crossover fanfiction ideas and your brain’s gives you an absolute gen of a fanfic? Well here’s the plot of the fanfic that my brain gave me:

In a nightmarish turn of events, Bella Swan, Maximum Ride, Tintin, Danny Phantom, and Hatsune Miku found themselves targeted by the insidious gaze of the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a mysterious group intent on acquiring the teenagers as their own children through any means necessary. Drawn to the teens' extraordinary abilities and unique qualities, the League saw in them the potential for a new generation of heirs with unparalleled talents. As they were pursued relentlessly by the calculating members of the League, the teenagers were plunged into a dark and treacherous game of survival, where their strengths became both a source of fascination and a target for the sinister intentions of those who sought to possess them. With the League's twisted agenda threatening to consume their lives, Bella, Maximum, Tintin, Danny, and Hatsune Miku must band together to confront the looming threat of being claimed as children by a group whose motives veer towards shadowy manipulation and control.

[crehador]

finally ready to call it: undead girl murder farce is the anime of the season (sorry zom100 you are also very good but something magical is happening here)

there is a lot to praise about this series, but the first thing that comes to mind for me is pacing. it takes its time with each case, not hesitating to spend a few episodes on one despite only having thirteen episodes to work with

while that means it's doubtful we'll have any resolution in the "main" mystery in this first cour, i'm glad the anime isn't rushing to just adapt as much content as possible

theater and theatrics are so integral to this story that pacing, here, feels even more significant than it does in most shows. we'll probably be left hoping for a second season after these thirteen episodes are over, but i'd much rather that than a rushed adaptation

the characters are phenomenal, they're familiar and fresh all at once. you have your mished and mashed league of extraordinary gentlemen public domain literary figures, your wet sopping pathetic beast of a man tsugaru, your kickass battle maid shizuku who clearly would not hesitate to kick tsugaru off a train chiyoh-style if the opportunity arose, your genius detective aya with a banging sense of humor and absolutely no body to speak of, and so on and so forth

european mysteries and heists delivered with a rakugo twist isn't a combination of flavors i could have ever conceived of myself, but now that undead girl murder farce has done it so well, i'll be eating up every crumb

[brooklynislandgirl]

TAG NINE PEOPLE YOU’D LIKE TO KNOW BETTER! I. Favourite Colours: Any shade of green {forest and emerald in particular}, black, silver, garnet. II. Favourite Flavours: Good coffee, deeply brewed tea, dark chocolate, coconut, and a 'scent flavour'... it's gonna either be beef being cooked on a fire, or specific to New Mexico... a crisp/cool afternoon when the sun is bright but not hot and you smell it...smoke, something earthy and green with an almost acidic bite if you breath it in just right. It's chile season, and it's being open roasted in giant metal roasters. And lastly, pinon. III. Favourite Genres: Most fantasy though with a penchant for High Fantasy. True Noir/ Mystery, Horror, History/Alternative History. I do enjoy Romance and Sci-Fi {typically golden and silver age are most often forgotten but truly a guilty pleasure} but tend to prefer them blended with a different genre. Poetry is entirely different and for me it's more like music than narrative fiction, though I do have a soft spot for the Romantics, and the Beat Generation. {You can have my Kerouac and my Ginsberg whence you've pried them from my cold, dead, yaddah yaddah}. And because I am a bastard, I'm going to ruin it all for you: Literally almost any Emily Dickinson poem can be read/sung to the tune of the Yellow Rose of Texas, or the theme to Gilligan's Island. You're welcome. IV. Favourite Music: Classical, Tribal Trap, Country, Grunge, Classic Rock {stfu, G-N-R and them are not YET classic rock}, 80s Rock/Metal. Broadway Musicals, Rap/R&B, really just about anything. Probably my favourite singers are Eddie Vedder {yes, I know}, Geoff Tate who's is utterly incredible even after 40 years. And honestly? Garth Brooks. V. Favourite Movies: SW: The Empire Strikes Back, Tombstone, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Strange Days, Highlander, CA:TWS, Doctor Strange, ST: The Undiscovered Country and just so so so many more. VI. Favourite Series: Constantine, Doom Patrol, Legends of Tomorrow, Supernatural, Babylon 5, Farscape, Loki, ST: DS9/TNG/TOS/SNW {Really all of them except Voyager and Discovery}, Salem, Original Charmed, Witches of East End, Burn Notice, Fargo, Resident Alien, Res Dogs, Longmire, Justified, Dallas {Original and Revival} and Dark Shadows {Original AND Revival}. Family Guy, Bob's Burgers {and Archer}. Robot Chicken. Lastly I'm also going to say the Orville, which yes is a sort of parody of Star Trek, but also an homage, and a surprisingly well written one. VII. Last Song: Paint it Black ~ Ciara cover, Superhero ~ Johnny Hollow VIII. Last Series: Loki Episode 1-Season 2 or American Gigolo Episode 1. IX. Last Movie: The Noel Diary, The Dark Knight trilogy X. Currently Reading: Ten Little Indians anthology by Sherman Alexie, Digitisation and Digital Archiving: A Practical Guide for Librarians {second ed.} by Elizabeth R Leggett, ¡Sin resolver! Misterios de la historia by Dona Herwick Rice. XI. Currently Watching: The Fall of the House of Usher, Loki, Resident Alien XII. Currently Working On: The 500 or so posts I owe across my blogs. I am so sorry for being absolute fail.

~*~ Tagged by: @nightmarefuele my sweet and disturbing C. Tagging: @fasciinating, @respondedinkind, @chiefofstafftanner, @smolcuriouskitten, @rhodestoruin, @lalamoon, @mouthoftheocean, @ifyoucatchacriminal, @morgansmornings and anyone who would like to do this!

[awestruck-atrophy]

yes explain immediately right now

okay, this is going to be a long one!

what is atrophy’s EDEN?

EDEN is less of a storyline than it is a universe for several gothic/Victorian characters to run around in. It’s a little like an AU, except it doesn’t strictly need to be defined as that bc all the characters involved are either original, used w/ permission, or in the public domain. it’s named as such because of a greenhouse of the roof of their little building, and because of the song From Eden by Hozier. there’s lots of Hozier influence in this.

it involves James (or ‘Jay’) Moriarty and their right hand man Sebastian Moran (both of whom you might know from the ACD Sherlock Holmes stories) assembling a team of criminals, dubbed “the EDEN project”, reverse league of extraordinary gentlemen style.

these criminals include:

ex-murderer and asylum escapee Edward Hyde, who was put into Bethlam after his trial for Henry Jekyll’s murder, where he failed to prove that he was, in fact, Dr. Jekyll himself.

perpetually suicidal and coincidentally unkillable Dorian Gray, who joins up because he has nothing better to do and promptly falls head over heels for the project’s coroner.

gentlemen thief and debonair master of disguise Arsène Lupin, who was only supposed to be in England long enough to rob the British Museum and stuck around because Moriarty had a better offer.

century-old force of nature and famed monster Adam Lucifer Frankenstein, who over the hundred-odd years he’s existed has rekindled a quiet (if distant) fascination with humanity.

depressed coroner Elijah Lijk, the world’s awkwardest man and master of uncomfortable staring, who is just here to get his paycheck pretty please.

& last but not least, freshly reanimated father of mad science and gothic lit’s own sopping wet cat Victor Frankenstein, who Adam brought back at Moriarty’s request (but mostly just to prove that he could.)

eden doesn’t have a specific time period— it’s actually built to house purposeful anachronisms (so while Arsène and Moran may have modern-day tactical equipment, Dorian still absolutely dresses like its both the 1880s and the 1920s simultaneously)

oh, also, versions of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, Gabriel John Utterson, Henry Clerval, Ganimard, Lestrade, Henry Wotton, Basil Hallward, Mycroft Holmes, Sybil Vane, the whole Frankenstein family, and several others have existed or do exist in this universe.

playlists related to EDEN:

atrophy’s EDEN <- character songs playlist

Bethlam (EDEN) <- classical ambient playlist

the greenhouse (EDEN) <- music with words

[pixelgrotto]

Sweet Nightingale

One of the neat side effects about my job writing guides for Rock Paper Shotgun is getting exposed to stuff that I don't typically touch. For example, the survival/crafting genre, which blew up in the 2010s when I was living in Asia and too busy trying to survive in real life. I was aware of games like The Long Dark, of course, and I thought Valheim looked okay when it came out. But as someone who's never been thrilled with the idea of chopping down digital trees for wood (except for maintaining my farm in Harvest Moon 64), survival games have mostly fallen off my radar.

Obviously, that's no longer the case thanks to work. Survival games are perhaps one of the few video game genres out there that remain opaque as hell, therefore making them perfect fodder for guide writing. And this year has already seen several big survival games released, with Palworld taking up far more of my mental space than I ever would've imagined for much of January and February. (My lukewarm take is that Palworld is okay. Not really my thing, but I get why people like it as both a meme game and a "I can't believe Nintendo isn't suing, because that Electrabuzz ripoff is equipped with a GUN, somebody stop him!")

But this post is not about Palworld. It is, rather, about Nightingale, an enchanting survival title made by Inflexion Games that unfortunately launched into Early Access only a few weeks after Palworld probably stole some of its potential player base. I had the chance to consume a fair bit of Nightingale prior to its release, and I also wrote a few guides on it for work. I'm not sure if it's actually going to take off - its current player numbers aren't as high as expected, and the game bristles with a special degree of enrapturing jank that's definitely not going to appeal to everyone. Case in point: half of my colleagues hated the pre-Early Access UI, which made several unusual decisions, including flipping the usual hotbar configuration present in these sorts of games. This has since been rectified, and now the UI is more streamlined and accessible, though also a bit more boring, in my eyes.

I think Nightingale sticks with me precisely because it boasts an aesthetic and setting that are very much not boring. We're talking about a gaslight fantasy atmosphere that feels a tad Neil Gaiman, if he were channeling the same stuff that inspired Alan Moore to write The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Apparently, Nightingale's concept was based on the novel Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I have not read but now want to, and the game starts by placing you as an inhabitant of a late 1800s reality inextricably linked with Fae beings. A big calamity happens, and folks exploring the Faewilds are tossed into disparate realms and separated from their magical hub city, dubbed Nightingale. You have to help your character survive in these bizarre biomes, which are filled with Wonderland-style beasts and floating sculptures in the sky. Hopefully by constructing your own estate in these magical outposts and allying with other Realmswalkers, all of you will one day reach the city of Nightingale once more.

I am an absolute pervert for this sort of alternate history Victorian stuff, and if I'm going to be very frank, my initial reaction when playing Nightingale was wondering if its enchanting setting was "wasted" on a survival/crafting game. It's the sort of thing I'd expect to see in a tabletop RPG (which I would gladly play), not a game where you need to construct a sewing table and then kill 5 hippos so you can skin their hides and put those hides on the aforementioned sewing table and wait a minute so you can craft a little cape for yourself.

I'm not the only one to have this thought, and there's a whole calvacade of commentators who posted similar things on every Rock Paper Shotgun article devoted to the game. In a nutshell, it seems to come down to the fact that many outspoken individuals don't like the survival gameplay loop of running around chopping down trees so you can craft a better axe to chop down more trees, but thus far they've safely been able to ignore most crafting games because they typically take place in forests or post-apocalyptic environments that are usually pretty samey. Nightingale is not samey, which makes people want to play it and then lament that it's not in their ideal genre of choice.

Once again, I really need to expoud upon how much charm this game has. Your guide through the tutorial is a smooth talking fey with a poncy vocabulary named Puck. Umbrellas serve as in-game gliders to make you descend from great heights like Mary Poppins. And even though the basic survival loop is there - yes, you've still got to farm those damn hippos - there is a nifty tarot card system in place that procedurally generates the worlds your intrepid Realmswalker is forced to confront. It's a mishmash of ideas that really feels like it's ripped from the pages of some Game Master's steampunk world (there I go again, going off on how much I'd like to play a Nightingale TTRPG), and even though it's largely busywork, eventually you can get a rifle that shoots ice ammo and a legendary set of "armor" that's really just a Victorian tweed suit. By damnation, it's appealing.

It's this sense of originality that makes me want to play Nightingale more, and injects within me the strength to overlook the jankiness in the combat and UI that make me ocasionally feel like I'm playing a game from the late 2000s. (The first Witcher, are ya there? I'm reminded of you.) And I daresay it's unfair to say that Nightingale's eclectic setting is "wasted" on a survival/crafting experience, which is a harsh statement that probably does a disservice to both Inflexion Games and to the entire genre. While these sorts of games might not be my automatic cuppa, Nightingale actually makes me want to play more of them, and I plan on purchasing V Rising next month, which I missed out on back when it came out.

All this is a roundabout way of saying that there's power in a good setting and a striking coat of paint. Sometimes that's all we need to overlook gameplay loops that do not initially appeal to us, and I'm sure there's a whole audience out there that cared little for crafting in the wilderness but loved monster collecting. Palworld was the honeypot that probably encouraged them to look deeper into what survival games had to offer. For me, Nightingale performs a similar function.

There's also the fact that I appreciate it when games take risks and dare to step outside of the cornerstones of what's considered safe and sellable in their respective genres. Nightingale probably wouldn't have stood out nearly as much as a CRPG, for instance. There are already gaslight fantasy RPGs out there, and you can still buy Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura on Steam. But there's nothing quite like this in the survival space, and thus we have something brave and bold, unique and odd - a potent combination that compels me to stay a while in its mysterious Fae red room. I certainly hope that Nightingale survives its turbulent Early Access period, because while chopping down trees and building houses might not be what I'm immediately looking for when I sit down to play a game, stick a tophat on me and say I'm doing it in the realm of A Midsummer Night's Dream and my mind has the potential to change. It's all about the flavor, in other words, and Nightingale has that in spades.

[drowsy-siren]

Since you're up for answering any ask at the moment, what's your favorite monster to fantasize about fucking~? Or just a few ones you reeally like if you can't pick just one, mrow~ ^w^

Ooo hard to pick an absolute favorite but devils, demons, and vampires tend to stick at the very top of my list

Eldritch entities, too (check out How to Get a Girlfriend When You're a Terrifying Monster by Marie Cardno, and the Sucker for Love game if you like this stuff)

Uhm werewolves and mermaids sometimes

And then like very specific monsters, like Nimue from Remnant 2, Shelob from Shadow Of War, and Lady Dimitrescu, Mina Harker from the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen movie (but she's covered by vampire above too I guess)

[strangestcase]

Ok so in regards to That Awful Fic, You Know The One, I’ve realized that a babified, dumbed down Hyde that doesn’t get to kill not only contradicts Hyde’s characterization in the original Novella, but also his characterization (AND reason for being) in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen -both the comics and the movie-… which is ironic since That Awful Fic is supposed to be a riff of LXG, and the author is currently writing for an LXG AU supposedly written to fix the issues with the comics in which their god-awful, ableist take on Hyde appears to be the one in the League

and this is because:

Hyde being a dangerous, violent murderer is the reason he is in the League in the first place. In the comics, the League is recruited by the British Empire, so there is a certain level of commentary on a story in which the goverment knowingly hires a mutated, cannibalistic version of Jack the Ripper to use as a living weapon. In the movie, the League is a ploy by Moriarty, and Hyde is recruited so that Dorian can spy on him and present Moriarty both with the serum and information about him, so that Hyde’s state can be reversed engineered and used to create super-soldiers. If Hyde isn’t all that dangerous, why is he there?

Hyde being intelligent is an important plot point in both the comics and the movie. In LXG, Hyde is portrayed as he is in the book: governed by animal instinct, yet with the reasoning skills, intellect, and knowledge of an upper-class scientist, because that’s what he is. Without his intelligence, LXG Hyde would absolutely useless- unable to negotiate the terms of his recruitment with the League, unable to put his instincts behind when he needs to think clearly, unable to improvise plans (much quicker than the average human!) if he has to. Sure, the League wants him for his superhuman strength and enhanced senses, but him being much MUCH smarter than he looks is, literally, a key point in his characterization in the LXG franchise. Taking that away is a step down from Moore and Robinson’s scripts, and makes the claim that That One Fic is depicting Hyde “better” than most movies (and particularly the LXG movie) not hold any water (other than being rather ableist, keeping in mind they only do that because Hyde is a “child” in their eyes… my guys he’s over 50).

In a meta sense, Hyde not being evil or dangerous enough, portrayed as a spineless coward (I’d say he is a coward but not a spineless one lmao, it’s literally in the OG book, he has more of a spine than Jekyll could ever dream of) defeats the purpose of Hyde being a character in LXG in the first place. In the comics, he’s the let’s say token evil teammate… though he does share that title with Griffin and to a lesser extent with Nemo (who, despite being the villain of 20k, was right, you know). But in volume 2 Griffin betrays the team and Hyde becomes the sole villain-in-the-good-guys-side. In the movie it’s a bit more extreme since Griffin, due to a copyright dispute with Universal, had to be replaced by a new character, Skinner, who is nowhere near as messed up as book!Griffin or comics!Griffin, with Dorian Gray as the traitor- making Hyde alone in being a villain in a heroic team again. Even then, the point of LXG, at least in the comics, was to spoof the idea of a crossover superhero team like Avengers or the JLA- Moore makes the thesis that putting characters that have very different backgrounds and moral alignments in a goverment-backed contingency team is a recipe for disaster, and the “the Empire has trouble distinguishing its heroes from its monsters” line drives the point home. The British Empire was awful, Moore says, they’d gladly have goddamn Edward Hyde of all people work for them and get his hands dirty for them. I do agree that the comics. Dropped the ball hard on the satire but (gestures) Hyde was awful in them for a reason. You don’t have to like it but the reason is there.

The magic in Hyde’s interaction with the League (in the movie, which I like so so so SO MUCH better than the comics!!) is that he’s upfront about being a monster, and willing to latch on to the team like a lost puppy the INSTANT he notices they begin to see him as the human being with feelings that he is. The other members still have their demons, and I’d say the only character that is 100% a hero in their source material is Mina- Hyde is at least honest about his issues, because he literally can’t hide them- he was made to embody them. I don’t know- stripping Hyde of all the traits that made him a scary, compelling villain in the first place is already bad writing if we’re talking OG book fanfiction, but to put that watered down Hyde (the extreme ableism in his depiction aside) in an LXG inspired writing project is like writing an Avengers comic in which you make Bruce Banner a calm, collected, healthy person that doesn’t know jack shit about radiation, and claim you did “better” at writing him than the 2012 movie because you didn’t like that Hulk wasn’t grey like in the first comic! Hmph!

Anyway rant over

[batmanego]

rule #1 of ferris posts is that someone voices their insane opinion on it. i’m so sorry ferris

“Alan Moore is a tragic figure” is actually not an insane opinion, sadly. it is widely held. and, i mean, the things he’s done are not quite as egregious or consistent as, say, Garth Ennis, but i still feel it’s the responsibility of anyone who writes a defense of him to at least acknowledge the brutal, senseless misogyny present in neonomicon and the killing joke and the absolutely tasteless racism present in league of extraordinary gentlemen (? i cannot for the life of me remember what Alan Moore property that fucking thing is from but im pretty sure it’s LOEG).

and i mean i get it. he was ousted from the comics industry for pretty bullshit reasons, and i’d be lying if i said that i’m not a fan of a few of his works (for crying out loud, he came up with TAO! one of my favorite characters in all comic book fiction! he wrote gang wars/homecoming! he wrote swamp thing!!!!) but like, come on. on a post where i talk about how fucked up comic book writers are, you can’t try to paint him as a sympathetic figure and expect me NOT to mention the brutal rape and antiblack caricature.