#Brother; friend… I earned many titles for a mere copy!!!!!!!!!!! | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ahsokadrabbles · 4 years

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𝐚 𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐠𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 [obi-wan kenobi x skywalker!reader

obi-wan and his padawan spend a day with the younglings.

word count: 2k

warnings: teeth rotting fluff. enjoy!

the soul purpose of this drabble is that it was soft for obi hours, but i think i’m going to turn this into a series so stay tuned!

You had come to a crossroads in your training as a padawan. You were no longer a youngling, but still a student beneath your master, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You were one of the eldest padawans which you never minded, you liked putting on the role of big sister, but it was hard to still be a padawan when in your head you felt much more grown. If it hadn't been for you older brother Anakin being the star of the show when the two of you arrived at the temple many years ago, maybe you would've been a Jedi Knight by now. You loved your brother dearly, but you had always lived in his shadow. His grand title of "Chosen One" loomed above you like dark cloud while he wore it on his head like a crown. It wasn't until three years ago that he outgrew his Master and earned a padawan of his own. It soon became your time to be Master Kenobi's student. Now, every day you woke up with the sun and trained, just as you had watched your big brother do when you were young. It was rewarding, but it soon became old news. You had begun to feel like a grown woman trying to sleep in her childhood bed. You had the mind of a Knight, but your skills just weren't there yet. If you were your brother, you'd throw a fit about not being good enough, but you were patient and devoted to learning. Your Master admired this trait in you. You and your brother were like night and day to him. Anakin was the sun, firey and opinionated, while you were the moon, quiet and wise beyond your years.

You awoke to your friend and your brother's padawan, Ahsoka Tano, shaking you awake. The younger Togruta hung above you in bed, her striped montrals and padawan beads brushing against your groggy face. "I'm awake, I'm awake" You laughed, sitting up in bed. Ahsoka plopped down at the foot of your bed, watching you with cat-like curiousity. "Are you going to get out of bed?" She asked. You stretched your arms up over your head and glanced at the flickering analog clock that sat on your nightstand. The time was nearly obscured by all the things you had crowded on the table. Copies of Jedi texts, spare saber parts, jewelry, and pictures of you and your friends and family. "I have a few minuets to spare." You shrugged, falling back against your sea of pillows with a quiet thud. "You weren't up all night fantasizing about your Master again were you?" The younger teased, which earned her a swat on the leg from you. "Ahsoka!" You gasped, now blushing furiously. She was the first person to catch onto your little crush on your master, and now she teased you relentlessly for it. "You know I'd never tell, I'm just playing with you." A tender look swam in her blue eyes, she always meant any word she said. Ahsoka was the most loyal friend you could ever ask for. "I was actually up all night studying." You replied, finally forcing yourself out of bed. "I wanted to make sure I had all my information straight for the presentation for the younglings today." You caught a glimpse of yourself in the mirror as you walked past and wrinkled your nose. Your hair stuck up in ever single direction and your eyes remained puffy from sleep. Perhaps you had underestimated the amount of time you'd need to get ready this morning. "I'm sure you'll do just fine, you have me after all." Ahsoka sang, batting her eyes in your direction. "I just really need to prove myself. I'm getting old you know." You said as you retrieved a fresh pair of clothes from the closet. "You're only eighteen, Y/N." The togruta folded her legs beneath herself on the corner of your mattress. "Your starting to sound more and more like Master Kenobi every day. I think you're around him too much." You let out an airy chuckle as you changed out of your pajamas. "Yes, but Anakin was so much farther ahead of me when he was my age. I'm afraid Obi-Wan will start to lose faith in me." "Don't be silly, Y/N." Ahsoka sighed, now stood behind you. In the mirror before you two she could be seen, barely, considering she was a head shorter than you, with her hands placed tenderly on your shoulders. "Can I do your hair?" You watched the clock tick by as your friend separated out your strands of hair and twisted them into an intricate up-do. For someone with no hair, she was quite good at doing it. "Done with three minuets to spare. We better go find our masters."

The pair of you met your masters just in time as they appeared in the lift the moment you hit the button to summon it up. "There you are, Y/N." Master Kenobi said, Anakin stood smugly by his side. "You were almost late." Anakin added before Obi-Wan gave him a swift kick in the ankle. Your brother let out a hiss as you and his padawan enter into the now cramped lift. You were stood in front of your master, your back nearly press flush against his chest, and you could feel Ahsoka's knowing stare burning into the left side of your head. "Did you do something different with your hair?" Master Kenobi asked, his Couscanti drawl lingering in your chest and making your face burn red. "Ahsoka did it for me." You replied. The girl could be seen beaming from out of the corner of your eye as the doors of the lift slid open. Your quickly stepped out and filled your lungs with air, you could hardly breathe in there. "Would you relax?" Ahsoka laughed once the two of you got ahead of your masters. "Sorry," You stuttered, rubbing your hands up and down the length of your arms in attempt to rub away the goosebumps the mere sound of his voice had given you. "You are so head over heels." "Wrong way you two," You heard Anakin call out. You turned around on your heel to see that you had missed your turn toward the nursery. While you blushed with embarrassment Ahsoka dragged your frozen form down the right hallway. "He probably thinks I'm such a fool-" "Please for the love of Stars get out of your head." The togruta muttered as she set you down in front of the nursery door. "There you are," Master Kenobi said, poking his head out of the door. You let out a yelp, his appearance had caught you by surprise. "Are you feeling well, Y/N?" His blue eyes shifted towards Ahsoka with his brow furrowed in worry. "I just turned the wrong way coming here." You answered for yourself. "Silly girl," Obi-Wan sighed, ushering you and your friend into the dimly lit classroom. The children were sat in a circle, immersed in the blue glow of the hologram in the center of the room. A map of Coruscant and the planets that surrounded it flickered before their small and intrigued faces. "Master Kenobi!" One of the younglings babbled excitedly. Obi-Wan pressed his finger to his lips with a soft smile. "Listen carefully to Master Yoda, young one." "You're kind of a celebrity, aren't you?" Ahsoka teased, gently nudging Master Kenobi's shoulder. "Oh, he's always a big hit with the younglings." You quietly laughed. "Do you remember the other day at the library?" You asked your master. He smiled fondly at the memory and your heart fluttered at the way his eyes crinkled at the sides when he grinned "We were trying to find texts on the Coruscant system for today's lesson and some younglings also happened to be there learning how to use the data pads. Needless to say it ended in them all hanging onto Master Kenobi's cloak." Ahsoka and Anakin laughed while your master just shook his head and grinned. "Master Kenobi, would you like to introduce the padawans?" Master Yoda said, summoning Obi-Wan in front of the group of students. You admired him bathed in hologram stars and surrounded by planets. Just like you, they orbited around him. Without him there they'd be lost, he was their beacon, their guiding force.

You and Ahsoka's presentation on the Coruscant system was well received by the younglings. At the end of it you were bombarded with all sorts of questions and excited remarks. Now you were sat in a chair, not made for someone your size, watching the children intently color and label a map of the system they had just learned about. Your master soon pulled up a chair beside you, it looked even smaller beneath him. "Is something funny?" He playfully asked, watching as you snickered at the seat dwarfed under him. "Oh, nothing at all!" "Do you want a coloring page?" You teased, gesturing toward the stack in the middle of the table. "Not for me, but it seems Ahsoka and Anakin have already helped themselves." You looked across the room to see your brother and Ahsoka both hunched over a shared coloring page shading in all the various planets. "Does mine look alright, Master Kenobi?" One of the younglings, a small green Twi'Lek girl, asked. "It looks very nice! What do you think, Y/N?" Your master said. "That is lovely, Amida!" You gushed. "Everyone's looks so wonderful. I'm very proud of all of you."

Master Yoda had given you and Ahsoka free reign over his lesson so it was up to the two of you to plan all of the activities. Next was a game of what you had named Planet Tag. Each youngling was assigned a planet and if they were tagged by another student, they'd have to say a fact about that planet. There were two other extra planets left, so Ashoka and Anakin took it up to themselves to also play, but after a while they grew tired. "Want to switch out?" Anakin panted, slyly nudging Obi-Wan's shoulder. "Why don't Ahsoka and Y/N play?" He suggested, stroking his beard. "I'm beat, Master Kenobi." The togruta huffed. "Come on! It will be fun!" You said, tugging him towards the center of the room by his wrist. "I don't know, Padawan-" "Did you not listen to my presentation?" You gasped. "Do you not know your planets, Master Kenobi?" He sighed and stood up from his too small chair. "Well, now I must since you've challenged me." He said before teasingly narrowing his eyes at you. The two of you joined the children in their game and Obi-Wan kept getting tagged. He was tagged so many times that he started to run out of facts to say. "You've already said that one, Master Kenobi!" The younglings giggled. "Well then I guess the game is done." You announced, looking out at the small crowd of worn out children in front of you.

You ended the class by reading a story. All the younglings gathered in front of you on the carpet, all surrounding your Master who was sat in the center of them. It didn't take long until the younglings grew sleepy, some fell asleep with their heads in Obi-Wan's lap, other's leaned up against him while they snored softly. In the very back row even Anakin and Ahsoka could be seen nodding off, leaned up against each other's backs for support. "I think that's enough of that." You said, watching as Obi-Wan smiled fondly down at the youngling asleep in his lap. "Very good job, Y/N." Master Kenobi quietly congratulated as he stroked the head of the sleeping wookie in his lap. "Thank you, Master." You replied. After a long moment of quiet, Obi-Wan spoke again. "I remember when you and your brother were younglings." He said with a fond laugh. "You've grown up a lot since then. I'm very proud of you, Y/N." Yet again your master had you blushing, you were thankful that the lights of the classroom had since dimmed. "Get some rest, young one." "I can't fall asleep in here." You laughed with a shake of your head. Obi-Wan stealthily stood up and tip toed his way over the sleeping children curled up on the floor until he finally made his way to you and sat down on the floor again beside you. "Sleep," He repeated, patting his shoulder. You hesitantly rested your head against him, letting the warm smell of his skin and his robes lull you to sleep.

let me know if you’d like to be added to my obi taglist! also feel free to send in requests my ask box is open and in need of some lovin’. thanks for reading! <3

#obi wan kenobi fanfiction #obi wan kenobi x reader #obi wan kenobi x padawan!reader #obi wan kenobi imagine #obi wan kenobi #star wars #star wars imagines #clone wars

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thesuccubuskitten-blog · 7 years

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The origins of Super Mario Characters

Nintendo figures produce the VR of theirs (arcade) debut with fresh Vive-driven Mario Kart

Bandai Namco revealed a virtual reality edition of Mario Kart, Mario Kart Arcade GP VR, which will make its debut over a VR arcade the business enterprise is opening using Tokyo, Japan next month.

The game seems to draw the VR debut of one of Nintendo's flagship franchises, however, it's important to observe it's certified by Nintendo and also invented by Namco - the same as its non-VR predecessor, Mario Kart Arcade GP.Not many specifics are currently obtainable in English about the game, although it's mentioned around the arcade's site as walking on HTC Vive headsets and specially designed racing seats.

Nintendo has thus far been publicly reticent concerning the promise of VR - previous annum frontman Shigeru Miyamoto told investors that for VR wearing specific, we're continuing our homework, along with considering development and have a thoughts to how the current key products of ours are recommended to become played for a somewhat lengthy time of time.

We're looking into the options of delivering an experience that gives value when played for a short time, he continued. And how to eliminate the issues of long duration use.

When I found that out I did two things. First, I whipped out the copy of mine (yes, I ensure that it stays which real/nerdy that I still have an old NES hooked up in the room) of mine and made certain I can still beat the game at will. (I can. Childhood not wasted.)

Secondly, I initiated down a rabbit hole of looking at Mario sites and Wikis and Articles. In the procedure, I stumbled upon the etymologies of the names of several of the key players in the Mario universe. So, in honor of the video game which changed the world, in this article they're, presented in handy 11 item show form.

Mario.

When Mario debuted in the arcade game "Donkey Kong", he was simply referred to as Jumpman. (Which also happens to be the generic brand regarding that Michael Jordan spread leg Nike logo. Two of the most renowned icons ever before equally have generic versions of themselves called Jumpman. But only at least one has now reached the effort of being so effective that he shaved himself a Hitler mustache before filming a business and no one had the balls to fix him.)

In 1980, as the Nintendo of America staff imported Jumpman to lift him straight into a franchise-leading star (Hayden Christensen style), an individual discovered that he looked just like their Seattle office building's landlord... a fellow called Mario Segale.

Mario Segale did not get a dime for turning out to be the namesake of the most prominent video game character ever, however, he probably isn't excessively concerned; in 1998 he sold the asphalt small business of his for around sixty dolars million. (Or 600,000 increased lives.)

Luigi.

Luigi actually has one of the weakest brand origins of all the images of mario characters in the Mario universe (once again showing precisely why, for life that is real, he'd have a bigger inferiority complicated compared to Frank Stallone, Abel or perhaps that third Manning brother).

"Luigi" is merely the product of a group of Japanese men trying to imagine an Italian brand to accentuate "Mario." Why was that the Italian brand they went with? When they all moved from Japan to Seattle, the pizza place closest to the Nintendo headquarters called Mario & Luigi's. (It has since gone from business.)

Koopa.

Koopa is a transliterated version of the Japanese name for the enemy turtles, "Kuppa." Stick with me here -- kuppa is the Japanese word for a Korean plate referred to as gukbap. Essentially it is a cup of soup with cereal. From what I surely tell it is completely unrelated to turtles, especially malicious ones.

In an interview, Mario's creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, claimed he was deciding between 3 brands which are different because of the race of evil turtles, every one of that have been called after Korean foods. (The alternative 2 were yukhoe and bibimbap.) And that means among two things: (1) Miyamoto likes Korean food and was looking to offer a tribute or perhaps (two) Miyamoto believes Koreans are evil and need to be jumped on.

Wario.

I kind of overlooked the debut of Wario -- he debuted in 1992, right around when I was hitting the generation where I was too cool for cartoon-y Nintendo games. (Me and my middle school buddies have been into Genesis only. I was again on Nintendo within four years.)

Turns out the title of his functions both in english and Japanese; I kinda assumed the English way but did not know about the Japanese aspect. In English, he's an evil, bizarro community mirror image of Mario. The "M" turns to turn into a "W" and Wario is produced. The name also works in Japanese, wherever it's a mix of Mario as well as "warui," that indicates "bad."

That's a pretty high quality scenario, since, as I covered extensively in the summary eleven Worst Japanese-To-English Translations In Nintendo History, only a few language distinction finesses back and forth very efficiently.

Waluigi.

When I first read "Waluigi" I assumed it was hilarious. While Wario became a natural counterbalance to Mario, Waluigi believed so comically shoehorned (just tacking the "wa" prefix before Luigi) -- like a giant inside joke that somehow cleared every single bureaucratic step and after that cracked the mainstream.

Well... based on the Nintendo people, Waluigi isn't only a gloriously lazy decision or maybe an inside joke become massive. They *say* it's based on the Japanese term ijiwaru, meaning "bad guy."

I do not know. I feel like we'd have to meet them much more than halfway to invest in that.

Toad.

Toad is designed to look like a mushroom (or perhaps toadstool) because of his massive mushroom hat. It is a great thing these games debuted before the whole generation realized how to earn penis jokes.

Anyway, in Japan, he's called Kinopio, which is certainly a mixture of the term for mushroom ("kinoko") and also the Japanese version of Pinocchio ("pinokio"). Those combine being something along the lines of "A Real Mushroom Boy."

Goomba.

In Japanese, these men are referred to as kuribo, which regularly means "chestnut people." That makes sense because, ya know, if someone requested you "what do chestnut people are like?" you'd almost certainly arrive at something nearly like the heroes.

Once they had been imported for the American model, the staff tangled with the Italian initiative of theirs and called them Goombas... based off the Italian "goombah," which colloquially signifies anything like "my fellow Italian friend." It also kind of evokes the picture of low level mafia criminals without too many competencies -- such as people's younger brothers and also cousins who they had to work with or perhaps mom would yell at them. Which also applies to the Mario Bros. goombas.

Birdo.

Birdo has practically nothing to do with this initial Japanese title. There, he's named Kyasarin, that translates to "Catherine."

In the teaching manual for Super Mario Bros. two, in which Birdo debuted, his persona description reads: "Birdo believes he's a woman and would like to become called Birdetta."

What I do believe this all means? Nintendo shockingly chosen to produce a character that battles with the gender identity of his and then named him Catherine. In the event it was time to show up to America, they got feet which are cold so they determined at the last minute to phone him Birdo, even though he's a dinosaur. (And do not offer me the "birds are descended from dinosaurs" pop paleontology collection. Not purchasing that connection.) That way, we'd just understand about his gender confusion if we read the mechanical, and the Japanese have been sure Americans had been sometimes way too idle or perhaps illiterate to do it en masse.

Princess Toadstool/Peach.

When everyone got released on the Princess, she was recognized as Princess Toadstool. I guess this made perfect sense -- Mario was set in the Mushroom Kingdom, so why wouldn't its monarch be known as Princess Toadstool. Them inbreeding blue bloods will always be naming the children of theirs after the country.

Nobody appears to be sure precisely why they went the guidance, nevertheless. In Japan, she was regarded as Princess Peach from day one. The term did not debut here until 1993, when Yoshi's Safari became available for Super Nintendo. (By the manner by which -- have you ever had Yoshi's Safari? In an unconventional twist it is a first-person shooter, the only girl in the whole Mario times past. It is like the equivalent of a country music superstar making a weird rock album.)

Bowser.

In Japan, there is no Bowser. He is simply called the King Koopa (or similar variations, like Great Demon King Koopa). And so where did Bowser come from?

During the import process, there was a problem that the American masses would not recognize how the little turtles and big bad fellow could certainly be named Koopa. So a marketing staff put together a large number of choices for a title, they liked Bowser the very best, as well as slapped it on him.

In Japan, he is still hardly ever referred to as Bowser. Over here, the title of his is now extremely ubiquitous that he is actually supplanted Sha Na Na's Bowzer as America's a good number of well known Bowser.

Donkey Kong.

This's a far more literal interpretation than you think. "Kong" is based off King Kong. "Donkey" is a family-friendly way of calling him an ass. That's right: The title of his is a valuable variation of "Ass Ape."

Mario Bros. offers 2 plumbers, Mario in addition to the Luigi, having to explore the sewers of New York subsequent to peculiar animals have already been appearing awful there. The goal on the game is defeating every one of the opponents in every phase. The aspects of Mario Bros. include lunging and only jogging. Unlike coming Mario video games, players cannot go on opponents and also squash them, except if they had been already left turned on the back of theirs. Every stage is a series of operating systems with water lines in every nook on the display, on top of an object termed as a "POW" block in the center. Wraparound is used by phases, meaning that opponents along with players that go off to a single side area will reappear about the opposite side.

The participant gains points by beating many adversaries consecutively which enables it to get involved within a bonus round to acquire more areas. Foes are defeated by kicking them over as soon as they have been flipped on their backside. This is carried out by hitting the wedge the opponent is on directly under them. If the participant enables a lot of time to successfully pass after achieving this, the adversary will flip itself too over, modifying as part of color and also increasing velocity. Every phase has a particular number of enemies, with the last adversary immediately changing color as well as boosting to optimum speed. Hitting a flipped opponent provided by underneath causes it to right itself and begin moving ever again, though it doesn't modify color. or swiftness

You will find four enemies: the Shellcreeper, which merely walks around; the Sidestepper, that calls for 2 hits to flip over; the Fighter Fly, that moves by getting which enables it to just be flipped when it is touching a platform; and the Slipice, which transforms platforms to slippery ice. When bumped of below, the Slipice expires straight away rather than flipping over; the foes do not count toward the whole number that have to be defeated to finalize a stage. Many iced platforms return to usual at the start of each and every new phase.

The "POW" obstruct turns each foes coming in contact with a platform or maybe the floor each time a professional hits it coming from below. It can be used three times just before it disappears. Through the Super Mario Bros. 3 in-game Player-Versus-Player model of the minigame, every one of the three uses may cause the enemy to drop a flash memory card and all the enemies to get flipped over. An additional element in this small remake is that the water lines are straight, often spitting out ample fireballs in the 2 plumbers. When any kind of opponent sort except a Slipice is defeated, a coin is found and also can easily be acquired for extra points; however, the stage concludes as soon as the very last adversary is defeated.

As the game advances, components are added to take the difficulty. Fireballs possibly bounce round the display screen or perhaps traveling directly from just one side on the other, and also icicles type below the operating systems and also spring completely loose. Extra rounds provide the players a chance to mark up spare factors as well as lives by collecting coins without needing to deal with enemies; the "POW" block regenerates itself on every one of the screens.

#mario

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mxgicaal-moved-blog · 7 years

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((So here’s a story I wrote about the universe created by me and my friends, that this OC was originally from! I’m mainly posting this to share with my old friends but you can go ahead and read it too!))

(ina = icy, lea's oc, i don't remember much about her but i do recall that she was the ice mage and we shipped her with fukai) {UNKNOWN.} With Bloodcrusher defeated (no, merely sealed away) so long ago, and the stones back in their place on the Demon Lord's crown, the mages seem like some sort of fairytale. Not many remember them, and the idea that those jewels on the museum-exhibit crown grant powers is absurd. But this woman knows better. This woman breaks the glass with a kick and grabs the crown, sprinting down halls and avoiding security traps skillfully - running, running, running far away until she's in some dark alley. "I will awaken you." She sends the crown flying across the alleyway hard enough to hit the ground and unbind the jewels on it. The jewels vanish into thin air and the woman smirks.

{ROY.} The first thing he hears is the sound of busy streets. Then comes his vision; a strange and narrow pathway between buildings that certainly isn't made of dirt. It's solid material, a light gray color, he notes as he gives the ground a few firm stomps. Then comes the sensation of a clenched fist - opening his hand, he sees a little blue stone with... some sort of engraving on it. It all comes back. The mages - names come tumbling out of his mouth. Myalis. Hikari. Neo. Celeste. Ryllae. Ina. Balance, Light, Darkness, Time, Fire, Ice... and so many more. The vision of a crown, its jewels scattered everywhere. The horrible, horrible enemy they'd faced once and never saw again. He's been called upon again, reborn after - how long? the world seems so different now - because some force above wants him to do... something. What he needs to do, he doesn't know. But his first thought is Ryllae. Ryllae's always had the answers, right? If he can find her... Glancing back down at the stone, he closes his fist and runs out onto the street.

{LEONARDO.} Anxiously, the boy wrings his hands. He's been asked questions before - "shouldn't you be in school?"; "how old are you?"; "where are your parents?" - but he doesn't know if he's going to be able to answer the ones that are about to be fired at him. A soft groan escapes the lips of he who is lying on the bed. A perfect mirror image, with sickly pale skin and dark hair - one could mistake these two for twins. (They were twins, once upon a time.) Eyes flutter open and Leo tenses, staring even harder at the lookalike. The other boy tries to sit up - he falls back down, weakened by fatigue. Finally, crimson eyes lock with Leo's and the boy speaks almost defensively. "Who are you?" Deep breaths, Leo has to tell himself, deep breaths so you can explain something so outlandish. He closes his eyes for a second before replying. "More importantly than me, I'd ask, who are YOU?" That mirror image opens his mouth but he's silenced by Leo's own voice. "Except I already know who you are." From the bedside table, Leo fetches a gem black like a void and presents it to the boy. "Ring any bells, Neo?" Neo frowns, suddenly even more defensive. "Give me that." As if revived, he snaps into a sitting position and snatches the gem, studying it before turning to Leonardo. "...I'll ask again. Who are you?" A demon. Your brother in a past life. "Someone who knows that there's a reason you were summoned back to this world." "Is that so." Blunt as always, Neo gives him a skeptical look. "It is." Leo is equally blunt, but his old habit of copying is brother is quickly discarded in favor of a more serious tone. "Listen, if I'm correct, the only thing you can remember is that you're a mage and you have the duties that accompany that title. I don't know how you've come back, but you have, and it's for good reason." The red-eyed boy nods quietly. Expectantly. Leo scratches his head. "...Uh, I dunno the reason, but it's a good reason." "Okay." Neo rolls his eyes in that familiar way Leo's always missed. "Anyways, the important thing is that you're here and I think there are some people you can't afford to wait meeting." He places a hand on the other boy's. "I trust you, Neo, so will you trust me?" Silence. "...Good. My name's Leonardo."

{CELESTE.} "Myalis!" the girl calls, running across the crosswalk. This place is strange, but she's gotten used to it after a few hours of wandering, and now her number one priority is to find her brother. Or at the very least one of the other mages... And maybe get a longer skirt. This one's kinda short. When she reaches the sidewalk, Celeste is met with a familiar sight - unfortunately not Myalis, but... "Ina...?" she asks cautiously, tilting her head at the girl with ice-blue hair. "Cele?!" "It IS you!" They share a hug - long and tight, the first hug they've shared in centuries, probably. When Ina finally pulls away, her happiness turns to concern. "I had a feeling I was supposed to find you..." "And I had a feeling I was supposed to find Myalis. If you could help me with that..." "Celeste." "Mm?" Her answer is absentminded; Myalis is on her mind right now. "We're here for a very particular reason, I think." Glancing around nervously, Ina lowers her voice. "I feel like something's off. I haven't felt this way since..." Though Ina has trailed off, Celeste is well aware of what the other girl is referring to. Frowning, she replies. "If you're right, and the others are here too, it's important that we join the others. We need to make a plan of counterattack."

{SAPPHIRE.} The young man across from her at the cafe looks awfully familiar, but she can't put her finger on it. Of course, being such a popular girl, Sapphire's garnered attention from a lot of guys... perhaps he's just an admirer that approached her once. Fingers carding through long pink hair, the girl takes another sip of her hot chocolate. He's stealing glances at her, she notices from the corner of her eye. But Sapphire pays it no mind. Many, many boys have stared at her before. Then he comes over to her table. As he opens his mouth, she braces herself for some sort of inquiry about her phone number, but instead she's met with a genuinely confused-sounding voice. "Excuse me, ma'am, but have we met before?" This throws Sapphire off a little. Is he flirting with her? He doesn't look flirtatious. He doesn't look happy at all. He looks... lost. So she answers honestly. "Not that I remember. But you do look familiar." He quite politely asks if he can take a seat with her - to which she accepts; it's rare to find a cute boy with manners - and starts asking her questions about her family. Not her. Her family. For whatever reason. Does she have any cousins? What are her cousins like? Sapphire is completely stumped now. Is he interested in her or not? What are all these questions for? When she opens her mouth to ask, a feminine voice calls across the cafe from the doorway. "Myalis!" The boy's head snaps to the source of the voice, and Sapphire's eyes follow his. "Hikari?!" He runs off, too excited to bid Sapphire farewell. She raises an eyebrow as they enthusiastically begin to talk and step out of the cafe. What a strange boy.

{ROY.} "Uh, excuse me." Roy turns around to find a purple-haired man, probably in his early twenties, looking down at him a bit awkwardly. Strange; it feels like Roy should be the older one, but... "If I were you, I'd probably head in that direction." He points backwards. "Just consider it a tip from... someone who knows what's up." With that, he walks off, not giving Roy a chance to reply. 'Someone who knows what's up'? Is this a total coincidence or does someone actually know that he's a mage? Maybe even someone who's set up a trap? But Roy's always been a risk taker, so he takes off in the direction that man had pointed in. He's greeted from afar with four familiar faces - faces he'd never forget in his entire life. Or in any of his future lives, for that matter. "Guys!" The group turns to look at him before the girl with short ginger hair calls back. And then he runs as fast as he can across the pavement, straight into the arms of four people he'd been through hell and back with. Celeste, Ina, Hikari, Myalis... "You're just as beautiful as I remembered," he commented to Celeste with a smirk - earning him a scolding from Myalis. They laughed and talked and caught up on what they'd been doing. And then Roy said it. "Seeing you guys again is great and all, but there's still Neo and Ry out there..." As far as he could sense, anyway. It seems that only the seven of them had been called upon. "We can't exactly celebrate until we find them, yeah?" "That's what I was going to say." Hikari crossed her arms - oh, this was a perfect opportunity to get under her skin. "Great minds think alike. Maybe we're soulmates, then?" "Oh, Roy, would you just SHUT UP!"

{LEONARDO.} Apparently there was some sort of radar that existed within mages, because Neo sure was confident about leading the way in their search. Neo had practiced introducing himself to random strangers with the phrase "yeah, I'm the guy from The Matrix" (how'd he even know about that movie...? He was still slumbering when it was released--) and they'd stopped for ice cream at least twice. The urgent tone Leo had wanted to deliver was lost in Neo's interest in the new world. Now they were strolling through a park when the red-eyed boy stopped suddenly. "What is it, Neo?" Leo glanced at his former brother with a mouth full of lychee-flavored ice cream. That ice cream was promptly grabbed from him. "Hey! Neo, th--" "Shush." Neo narrowed his eyes and snuck behind a tree, ice cream cone in hand. "I smell... a unique fear." Completely lost, Leo nodded and let Neo do his thing. Stealthily, the boy pulled his arm back and hurled Leonardo's ice cream cone across the park. He didn't even have time to be angry because a girlish scream shortly followed. "NOT LYCHEE! GET IT AWAY FROM ME! GET IT AWAY!" Neo snickered as a pink-haired boy came running and bumped straight into Leo, nearly knocking him over. "Wh-whoa!" That boy looked up and blushed brightly. "Oh, s-sorry--" "Found you, Roy!" Neo slapped Roy on the back and laughed. After him came more old friends - Hikari, Celeste, Ina, and Myalis. How long had it been? Three hundred years, maybe? And, unlike the rest, he wouldn't be recognized. "This is Leonardo. He knows about us... for some reason," Neo said. Then Leo took his time to speak up. "I'll explain everything later. Right now, it's getting late - everyone follow me. We're going to my house." With an "oh yeah!" from Red, they set off.

{UNKNOWN.} The woman twirled about, singing a tune, until finally she knelt down so she was eye-level with the cage. "Your friends have forgotten all about you, you know." She was met with a glare from the small person inside. "I'll make it out of here. Just you watch." "Not on my watch. You're too valuable to lose... Ryllae."

#✹⁞ →mun creations×#✹⁞ →verse; she's always on time×#I'M TOO INVESTED IN LEO'S RELATIONSHIP WITH NEO ESPECIALLY AFTER NEO'S FIRST LIFE #BECAUSE LEO REMEMBERS HIS BROTHER BUT NEO DOESN'T

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mrmichaelchadler · 6 years

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Bright Wall/Dark Room April 2018: "The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower: On 'A Little Princess' and 'The Secret Garden'" by Corbin Dewitt

We are pleased to offer an excerpt from the latest edition of the online magazine Bright Wall/Dark Room. The theme for their April issue is "Magical Realism," and in addition to Corbin Dewitt's essay, it also includes new pieces on "The Double Life of Veronique," "3 Women," "Her," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," "Wings of Desire," "Streets of Fire," "Stranger than Fiction," "Jane," "A Life Less Ordinary," "Portrait of Jennie" and more.

You can read previous excerpts from the magazine by clicking here. To subscribe to Bright Wall/Dark Room, or purchase a copy of their current issue, click here.

It begins in green, deep green, accompanied by a low persistent hum that seems to rumble from within, as though heard from inside the resonant chamber of a huge stringed instrument. A golden-yellow script, seriffed with arabesques and meant to appear exotic though the words it spells are Warner Brothers presents, fades in, fades out. Then the voice—a girl's, American, soft but inflected with the canny singsong of storytelling: "A very long time ago, there lived a beautiful princess...in a mystical land...known as...India." Sitar springs up, shimmers. The title, golden-arabesqued too, blooms gold against the green.

Cut to two years earlier: A different girl, in a different film, leads a boy into a walled garden to ask him if it is dead. The boy and the girl snap their way through a tangle of branches, dull brown-grey. He takes a knife from his pocket, slits the bark, peels it back to show her what’s beneath. “This part’s wick,” he says, the music of his Yorkshire accent floating through the register just above adolescent voice-crack tenor. “See the green?”

It’s there—barely there, but there, a pale sliver amid the nothing-colored sticks and the dry grass and the dark russet knit of the girl’s hat. “Wick. What’s wick?” she asks.

“Alive,” he answers, with a shrug and a little smile. “Alive, as you or me.”

The girls are Sara Crewe and Mary Lennox: Only children, wealthy, white, 11-ish, born and raised in India under British colonial rule, and, long before appearing in the scenes detailed above, the heroines of novels by British-American author Frances Hodgson Burnett. The films are A Little Princess and The Secret Garden. Released in 1995 and 1993, respectively, neither holds the distinction of first adaptation. It would be difficult to draw any simple connection between the original author of the stories and the two directors tasked with reimagining them a century after publication (although, if inclined to use magic, which can collapse any difficult task into a simple one, all three—like me—were born with sun in Sagittarius).

One, Alfonso Cuarón, a young man from Mexico City, had only a single feature-length directorial credit to his name—1991’s Sólo con tu pareja, decidedly not a children’s movie—when he found himself facing the opportunity to make A Little Princess. Initially indifferent, he sat down to read the script and, as he told The LA Times later, it was "like it was vibrating. Like it was glowing. I was at Page 17 and I called my agent, and said, 'I've got to do this movie.'”

The other, Agnieszka Holland, read and reread The Secret Garden as a girl growing up in Warsaw during the final years of Stalin’s rule. Already well established as an auteur focused on overtly political stories, like 1990’s Oscar-nominated Europa Europa, Holland wanted a chance to reimagine the book that spellbound her as a child. “'I was very tired of the big subjects—the dead, the war, the Jews, the communists,” she told the UK Independent in 1993. “I decided I wanted to spend one year in The Secret Garden.”

Thus the stories begin. Sara—cherished, imaginative, and preternaturally serene—must leave India for an all-girls boarding school in New York, as her beloved father Captain Crewe has been called away to serve in the Great War. Mary—dour, stiff, unloved, and unloving—survives the earthquake that kills both her negligent parents, and sails to England to live with her next-of-kin at a gloomy manor called Misselthwaite.

Sara of Burnett’s book is black-haired, green-eyed, unpretty in the parlance of children’s books, i.e. secretly more pretty than girls whose prettiness smacks of something standard-issue. In Cuarón's film, she’s played by Liesel Matthews, real-life heiress to the multi-million dollar Hyatt Hotels fortune, who more closely matches Burnett’s original description of Sara’s doll Emily: "naturally curling golden-brown hair, which hung like a mantle about her, and her eyes...a deep, clear, gray-blue, with soft, thick eyelashes which were real eyelashes and not mere painted lines.” As Mary, Kate Maberly manages the slow softening from rude, miserable orphan émigré to cautiously joyful friend with such grace and aplomb that she whirls all the way around the circular gauge of visible child-actor technique to arrive back at the beginning, where you dare to wonder whether she's acting at all.

Both girls were industry unknowns prior to casting, and, perhaps more critically, both faded from the public eye as swiftly as they entered it, choosing to decline passage into the world of career acting and thus into a different kind of magic tale, that of the child star. Their present-day anonymity relieves their performances from the burden of later celebrity—no need to watch for the sparkle of fame earned, then seized or squandered. You can just pay attention to what they're doing, and to the worlds they move through, alongside them.

The worlds are green, and they mirror their girls. Like Sara, A Little Princess carries its carefully considered, more-than-real palette and its sympathetic magic as fixed certainties, so self-assured that neither seems a conceit. Cuarón’s team constructed an old-fashioned soundstage universe, stretched its proportions to mimic the vaulted hugeness of the world as seen in childhood, and colored it all in green. The effect looks less Emerald City and more sepia-toned photograph, copper softness patinated into subtle shades of moss and chartreuse. In the film’s production notes, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki explained that "green is the only color in the spectrum that can be lit in either warm or cold tones; that kind of flexibility gives us a range of emotion to work with on every set." As such, the look of the film is artificial, but not in the least cartoonish—the olivine sateen and curlicue embroidery of the girls’ school uniforms glow against a backdrop of browns and tans and creams, grounded by the solidity of “real black stockings and real black boots,” as costume designer Judianna Makovsky put it.

Like Mary, The Secret Garden is a film that greens by degrees—as the murk of English winter thaws to spring, she thaws too, and grows brighter alongside a dappled infinity of leaves and flowers and fields. The visuals are looser, less constructed, more naturalistic; I am reminded of Hayao Miyazaki, another master maker of magical childhoods, who, in an interview with Roger Ebert, explains the crucial function of silence in film. “If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it's just busyness,” Miyazaki says. “But if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension.” In this fashion, scenes of strict realism become a kind of magic. Whole minutes pass devoted to whispering curtains of ivy, candlelight and shadow yawning across walls, the snap and flutter of birds’ wings. “The house seemed dead, like a spell had been cast upon it,” Mary narrates in voice-over as she wanders the halls of Misselthwaite, looking like a ghost herself in a white nightgown and rubber boots, but the house appears to the viewer as a labyrinth of lively faces, watchful tapestries and polished-wood gargoyles, and its halls echo with low moans issued from an unseen source. Every frame seems to breathe, recalling the era of childhood when any place or object or creature stood ready to reveal itself as a secret living being—that is to say, wick, alive as you or me.

One gets the sense that every moment in these films, green or otherwise, is wick. Many films for children flatten the world, rather than deepen it, such that adults find them unwatchable; these two stories honor the truth that adults and children live in the same world and simply see it differently. Take out a knife, peel back the bark, and you’ll find all sorts of forces flowing underneath.

Death is here; a bellowing elephant, a popped black balloon, a creaking wooden swing, a soldier’s limp hand smeared with mud. Sex is present too, though held at a distance: the aura of mystery that cloaks Mary’s dead mother and her secret twin; the drip of silliness that ripples the smooth flow of storybook romance pursued by Miss Amelia, the boarding school’s blowsy and soft-hearted second-in-command, who lusts after the milkman—when he comes to the kitchen door she pants, trembles, extends the rack of empty bottles like a hand to be kissed as the girls in her charge look on and laugh. The boys of Misselthwaite aren’t milkmen yet, but they’re on the way: Colin Craven, Mary’s haughty, ailing cousin and the source of the manor’s ghostly wails, has skin like a sweating glass of skim milk held up to sunlight, bluish-translucent and unwholesome; Dickon, a young Andrew Knott plush with dimples, is the cream off the top of the pail, purest product of hot-breathed animals and the clean grass of the Yorkshire countryside, rich in the sense of nourishment rather than capital. (A friend and I once theorized that every man in the world can be typed as either a Colin or a Dickon, and if you imprinted on either as a child you’re fated to find something of their spirit in anyone who turns your head afterwards. Guess which one I liked.) Holland’s adaptation treats their relationships with Mary with the requisite subtlety and intensity: in late-childhood, almost-adolescent friendship, sometimes grabbing someone’s hand is nothing, but sometimes a force of mutual curiosity shivers in the air like a wall of ivy waiting to reveal hitherto unseen doors.

When conflict enters, it is not as a supernaturally powerful nemesis to be battled but as garden-variety human cruelty and indifference, much harder to weed out. The closest thing these movies have to villains are Miss Minchin, school headmistress, and Mrs. Medlock, Misselthwaite’s head housekeeper—played with waspish grace and iron-grey pompadours by grande dames Eleanor Bron and Maggie Smith, respectively. As front-line enforcers of socioeconomic boundaries, Minchin and Medlock snip at their charges as though they were privet hedges, pruning the curiosity and openheartedness of the children in their care towards more callous and correct adult behaviors.

Moments after Sara arrives at school, she is chastised for trying to befriend Becky, the school’s scullery maid. Cuarón cast Vanessa Lee Chester, a black actress, in this role, bringing new dimensions of particularly American tension into the moment when Sara ventures upstairs to say hello and startles Becky, who drops the ice she’d been using to soothe her throbbing feet and says, “Begging your pardon but we’ll both be in trouble if you stay.” Through earlier scenes of Sara’s life in India, we are meant to understand that she’s accustomed—encouraged, even—to socialize across divisions of class and race, giving her a veneer of righteous empathy that obscures details like, for example, what she and her father are doing in India to begin with. Miss Minchin icily tolerates Sara’s whimsical disregard for such social conventions insofar as her father’s checks keep clearing; when a black-suited solicitor appears to explain that Captain Crewe has been killed in action, she slams down the piano lid mid-ragtime razzle-dazzle, sends Sara’s schoolmates scurrying, and explains to the stunned girl that she is now a penniless orphan who must work for her keep alongside Becky. Exiled to the servant’s quarters up in the attic, Sara finds a piece of broken chalk and draws herself a clumsy circle of protection, then curls up on the floorboards and sobs for her father. No one answers. The camera lingers on the room’s cavernous darkness, the pouring rain outside, as if demonstrating the universe’s indifference. It’s a moment that harkens back to Minchin’s earlier jibe about Sara’s blithe insistence on making up happy endings for every story: “I suppose that’s rather easy for a child who has everything.”

Mary, on the other hand, demonstrates a calcified certainty in her place in the world, standing stiff and stony-faced in the opening sequence as two unnamed Indian women dress her in lilac linen. She tries this same pose on Mrs. Medlock, only to become hotly embarrassed at the latter’s expression of incredulity that she cannot dress herself. "My Ayah dressed me," she says, as though such an arrangement were a law of nature. Unimpressed, Medlock sets her back with a curt reminder that she won’t be dressed by servants now that she’s come to England—“we’ve far too much work already,” she says.

That work, of course, comes from maintenance of the vast estate in addition to caring for the bedridden Colin, whose own imperious commands and temper tantrums keep the staff at their wits’ end. Behind all Medlock’s fussiness and anxiety, and all Colin’s attention-seeking morbidity, lies the specter of Colin’s father, Lord Archibald Craven: a remote Byronic shadow whose grief-stricken indifference casts a pall of misery over the house. When Mary finally sees him to ask, circuitously, permission to revive his dead wife’s garden, he waves her away with a spindly aristocratic hand. “Take your bit of earth,” he says to her, “but don’t be foolish enough to expect anything to come of it.”

To my adult eye, these films have become stories about class, race, colonialism, patriarchy. That Sara and Mary are wealthy and white is integral to understanding their stories; the upending of their previously stable social hierarchies is what drives their narratives forward. The lives of the laborers necessary to create Sara’s world seem indistinguishable from her own until she’s forced to inhabit their circumstances herself; Mary, on the other hand, learns to see her servants as people in the country where they’re white. Meanwhile, their lives hinge on the whim and resources of the men in their worlds. Cuarón and Holland both lay out moment after moment depicting the decidedly unmagical forces underpinning the worlds onscreen and off—so much for Holland’s exhaustion with “the big subjects.”

The other major force in these worlds is magic. Unlike the universe of, say, Harry Potter—where magic is linked to questions of heritage and education, and functions as an element or resource over which mastery is encouraged—Frances Hodgson Burnett's worlds posit a magic already present everywhere, in all substances. As Sara knows and Mary learns, this magic becomes accessible to anyone capable of recognizing that if this immanence is real, they’re already part of it, and not the other way around.

When magic in these films crosses from implicit to explicit depiction, it’s often accomplished using India as a vehicle. The most striking visuals of A Little Princess appear along with Ram Dass, manservant to the school’s wealthy next-door neighbor. He illuminates the austere green universe of the film with the colors of Sara's remembered India: bright cream, warm orange, glowing gold. Nowhere is this imagery more iconic than in the scene of the saffron yellow breakfast. Sara and Becky, banished to bed after being promised a day of starvation as punishment, fall asleep make-believing a feast and wake to find their barren attic room transfigured into a sunshine-colored dream: billowing curtains of silk, quilted robes, gilded slippers, vases of sunflowers, table laden with gleaming china and silver trays of sausages steaming in the morning light. Ram Dass gives them a wordless nod of acknowledgement from the window next door. This moment is more beautiful to recollect than any of his stilted, vaguely mystical dialogue, or indeed than the moment Sara wiggles her fingers and chants at a cruel classmate in order to cast, in her words, “a little curse I learned from a witch back in India.” Mary’s India is yellow-orange too, dim and dull like the flickering firelight in the scene where she and her companions cast a spell around a bonfire to call Colin’s father back from a trip abroad. They, too, wiggle and chant, playacting at exotic witchery.

Such inclusions of India, in myth and fragment and stereotype, can accurately be summed up with the term cultural appropriation, but to do so risks oversimplifying. To the contemporary eye, it’s clear the thorny questions of identity—of who tells which stories, and how, and why—had not yet grown to flourish in public discourse as they do today. That the most cringe-inducing moments happen where the films depart from their original source material only tangles matters further—for example, Cuarón’s choice to include a portion of the Ramayana as a frame story recounted by Sara becomes a choice to paint Liam Cunningham, the Irish actor who plays her father, a lurid indigo so he can double as Prince Rama. If the film were to be released now, it’s easy to imagine the discursive spiral weighing the positives of representation and attempted inclusivity against the clumsy overreach and exotification present in the final product. Then, of course, there are the source texts themselves, written by a white woman who’d never even been to India. The stickier truth is that both Mary and Sara are canonically from there—as white colonizers, yes, beneficiaries of systemic exploitation and cruelty, but also raised by women whose stories shaped them, seeped into them, regardless. As Mary and Colin put together a puzzle depicting a map of the world during a rainy day, she tells him that when it rained in India, her Ayah used to tell her stories—like the one of a boy who lived with cows but kept a whole universe down his throat. Incredulous, Colin presses her to explain how such a thing could be possible. “It doesn’t make sense,” he says.

“It doesn’t have to make sense. It’s the idea of it,” she counters.

“It’s so stupid,” he says, tone tightening into his customary derision.

“No it’s not,” she says, her tone tightening, too. “It’s magic.”

“You can’t really be that stupid,” he says.

“I am not stupid,” she says, shoving the puzzle back at him, scattering the pieces of their unfinished picture of the world. “You just don’t understand. You don’t want to.”

What is green is new, is inexperienced. I admit that my heart belonged to these movies before I was old enough to grasp the flat facts of them, let alone the world around them: A Little Princess is the first movie I ever saw in a theater, so in a way it is the movie, bound forever to the memory of what going to the movies means, a memory less of the mind and more of the muscle, rooted in that breathless moment when the lights go dark and the throat tightens at the first strains of music. I remember these films with my whole body.

When my mother tells the story of bringing me and my best friend to see the film together, the standout anecdote comes at the movie’s denouement: a harrowing, high-gothic escape across dizzying heights between two top-floor garret windows, where, lashed by sheets of rain, Sara lowers a slippery plank out of the attic to flee Miss Minchin and a cadre of black-suited police. As Sara's boots slipped and clacked on the shaky board, my friend and I leapt from our seats to cheer her on, crying YOU CAN DO IT! YOU CAN DO IT! and thrusting our hands towards the screen to channel our pure belief. Our words echo back to me in the terse murmurs of Mary and Dickon urging Colin to take his first few unsupported steps across the garden. You can do it, they say, you can do it, low and firm and certain, like a spell. Sara's board tumbles into thin air, but her hand snaps up to grip the wet concrete sill and she hauls herself bodily out of free-fall; Colin, half-crouched and cautious, stumbles across the picnic blanket and into Dickon's wide waiting arms and a lamb bleats and the three children shout with joy; at 3 years old, I sobbed in the dark cinema aisles with fear and wonder and relief. Now, having watched and rewatched, I am amazed to find that something in me still lights up every time: green, of course, meaning go go go.

It is not about what happens, in the end. Many fairytales end in death and ruin but in Hollywood a fairytale ending means happily ever after. At one point, jaded, I convinced myself that the impossible endings to these films—Captain Crewe back from the dead; Colin and his father healed, physically and spiritually—invalidated their beginnings, their beauties. In my reality, any promise of salvation feels unrealistic if it wears the shape of a father; beyond that, there’s the bitter certainty that thinking beyond the confines of the story necessitates remembering the joyous resolutions won’t last. No magic can erase the conflicts and forces that will ultimately tear their protagonists out of the world of childhood magic and into an uglier world of adult realism.

It’s this last truth that drives the stories towards their conclusions—a fear that the adults in the story will behave in accordance with this knowledge and fail to see the magic, fail to see how a universe could fit in a human throat, fail, in other words, at empathy. What would a realist say? Take your bit of earth, but don’t expect anything to come of it.

Or, perhaps, as a derisive Miss Minchin tells Sara: “It's time you learn, Sara Crewe, that real life has nothing to do with your little fantasy games. It's a cruel, nasty world out there and it's our duty to make the best of it—not to indulge in ridiculous dreams, but to be productive and useful!”

Sara acknowledges she understands this. But as Miss Minchin turns to go, satisfied at having instilled the lesson at last, Sara says, quietly: “But I don't believe in it.”

“Don't tell me you still fancy yourself a princess!” Minchin says, face twisting into a mask of incredulous fury. “Good god, child, look around you!”

“I am a princess,” Sara says, stepping forward. “All girls are! Even if they live in tiny old attics, even if they dress in rags, even if they aren't pretty, or smart, or young, they're still princesses—all of us!”

I have never once seen any woman get to the end of this scene dry-eyed—including, actually, Miss Minchin, who slams the attic door and, by the light of an iron candelabra, wipes angrily at her wet cheeks. Everything about the speech is too corny, too dramatic, too ridiculous and yet—and yet. To hear in tones of clear conviction that your circumstances do nothing to diminish your worth does not feel ridiculous at all.

Roger Ebert, reviewing The Secret Garden, said "watching it is like entering for a time into a closed world where one's destiny may be discovered." Any fairytale is like this: Suspend your disbelief as you listen to what you know cannot be real, then emerge transformed. You can hear "all girls are princesses" and understand its meaning as a series of beautiful surfaces, thinking yes, each of us deserves the status, the hair-bows, the yards and yards of yellow silk, the attention, the accolades, the father-protector, the huge bedroom with carved sandalwood doors flung wide to the lush and sprawling estate in India, built with money and security that has materialized from means and processes and dull details with which we need not concern ourselves. This would be, as Miss Minchin says, “to indulge in ridiculous dreams.”

Or you can hear "all girls are princesses" and then hear what comes after it, an idea that is simpler but in no way easier: that every human person is in possession of an undeniable essential dignity—“even if they dress in rags,” Sara says, “even if they’re not pretty, or smart, or young”—and it is the duty of any person alive in the world to recognize and honor that dignity in every other. When peeling back the bark this way, the moral is less about claiming what one is owed, and more about learning to see not only how a universe could fit down a human throat but how, in fact, it’s already there. There’s a universe inside every human throat. You just have to be willing to understand.

The most beautiful scene in either of these two films, in my opinion, is one that occurs halfway through The Secret Garden, as spring comes to Misselthwaite. It’s a time-lapse sequence: roots dig into earth and flowers unfurl into air with visceral, almost flesh-like liveliness. Crocuses, harebells, daffodils, roses—petals split wide, multiply. A monarch butterfly pulls itself from its sticky chrysalis. Light and shadow race over the mauve-brown moors until they flush into sudden, gorgeous green.

It was this scene I thought of years later when I first encountered Dylan Thomas’ poem:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

Time, here, seems a destructive force, ready to crush youth into decay, health into sickness, a living body into a corpse at which the worms go. It’s easy, when talking about childhood, to slip into a similar stance—we grow older, familiar spaces shift, simple stories open into complex ones. The passage of those first green moments can feel like a loss.

But there's a beauty in returning to old places and finding them changed. The rooms of buildings known years ago seem to have shrunk, but the trees outside have gotten taller. It's the beauty of time made visible, tangible—the beauty of finding not only a change in the world around you, but within yourself, too. Each time I watch these movies—though I know them by heart—I live the impossibility of my earliest memories returned in flawless clarity. Some moments have come to feel like too-small rooms, cramped and uncomfortable, but some have burgeoned and bloomed into arrays of beauty I never could’ve imagined when I was a seedling myself.

These stories insist that the aliveness of the world is irreducible and everywhere, that it moves through everything, and that despite this, it is often invisible to us. Sara, as a storyteller, and Mary, as a gardener, discover ways to bring that aliveness to light. I no longer find redemption in the hermetic promise of happy endings; instead, I see it in the muddled, moving centers, in the gestures and attempts the girls make to channel the magic into something that can be shared, even as their attempts are met with indifference. The process itself is enough.

A storyteller does not invent, but reinvents, taking familiar elements—dirt, water, light—and transforming them into something new. No magic is bound to occur with raw material; sometimes a mound of mud in the sun is just that. But with the right conditions, and a scratched seed, sometimes something grows. Movie-making, as a form of storytelling, could just as easily be called photosynthesis: images of light, strung together in sequence, blossom into something beyond their beginnings.

A Little Princess is a little princess because, as Sara says, all girls are princesses. The Secret Garden is the secret garden because, as Mary says, if you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden. Their stories, their roses, live beyond and outside them. Thomas’ poem ends at the worm, but worth remembering is what happens after: The worm eats the corpse in the winding sheet (and the poet in turn), excretes rich dirt. The blood and wax of the body, sucked in by silvery roots, sprout back up, twice digested, as a plurality of new green fuses. We die. The story continues without us. Realistically, the perpetual process of change is the only magic there is.

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therealandrewcameron-blog · 6 years

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Characters Names from Super Mario and their Origins

When I discovered that out I did two things. To begin with, I whipped out the message of mine (yes, I maintain it that real/nerdy that I continue to have a well used NES connected in the room) of mine and then made certain I can still beat the game at will. (I can. Childhood not wasted.)

Secondly, I initiated down a rabbit hole of reading through Mario internet sites and Articles and Wikis. In the procedure, I stumbled upon the etymologies of the brands of a number of the key players in the Mario universe. Therefore, in honor of the video game which often changed the planet, here they are, given in handy 11-item list form.

Mario.

When Mario debuted to the arcade game "Donkey Kong", he was just known as Jumpman. (Which also is actually the generic brand associated with that Michael Jordan dispersed leg Nike logo. Two of the most legendary icons ever before each have generic versions of themselves referred to as Jumpman. But just one has today reached the attempt of remaining extremely powerful that he shaved himself a Hitler mustache prior to filming a business and nobody had the balls to fix him.)

In 1980, as the Nintendo of America crew shipped Jumpman to raise him right into a franchise-leading star (Hayden Christensen style), an individual seen that he looked like their Seattle office building's landlord... a person called Mario Segale.

Mario Segale did not obtain a cent for turning out to be the namesake of probably the most prominent video game character ever, however, he most likely is not insanely concerned; in 1998 he sold his asphalt business for over $60 million. (Or 600,000 extra lives.)

Luigi.

Luigi actually has one of probably the weakest brand origins of all of the mario characters with names in the Mario universe (once again showing exactly why, for life that is real, he'd have a larger inferiority complicated compared to Frank Stallone, Abel or that 3rd Manning brother).

"Luigi" is merely the result of a team of Japanese men trying to consider an Italian brand to enhance "Mario." Why was the Italian name they went with? When they all moved from Japan to Seattle, the pizza spot nearby to the Nintendo headquarters known as Mario & Luigi's. (It has since gone out of business.)

Koopa.

Koopa is a transliterated model of the Japanese rap for the adversary turtles, "Kuppa." Stick with me right here -- kuppa is the Japanese word for a Korean recipe called gukbap. Basically it's a cup of soup with cereal. From what I definitely inform it's absolutely unrelated to turtles, especially malicious ones.

In an interview, Mario's author, Shigeru Miyamoto, said he was deciding between three distinct brands because of the high-speed of evil turtles, every one of that were called after Korean foods. (The other 2 were yukhoe and bibimbap.) And that means among two things: (one) Miyamoto likes Korean food and needed to give it a tribute or (two) Miyamoto thinks Koreans are evil and really should be jumped on.

Wario.

I sort of missed the debut of Wario -- he debuted in 1992, right around when I was hitting the era where I was extremely awesome for cartoon y Nintendo games. (Me and the middle school buddies of mine have been into Genesis just. I was back on Nintendo within 4 years.)

Seems his name functions both in Japanese and english; I kinda assumed the English way but didn't know about the Japanese element. In English, he is an evil, bizarro marketplace mirror image of Mario. The "M" turns to become a "W" and Wario is produced. The name likewise operates in Japanese, when it's the variety of Mario and "warui," which means "bad."

That's a pretty high quality scenario, since, as I covered thoroughly in the summary 11 Worst Japanese-To-English Translations In Nintendo History, not every language distinction finesses back and also forth that smoothly.

Waluigi.

When I first seen "Waluigi" I assumed it was hilarious. While Wario became an all natural counterbalance to Mario, Waluigi sensed extremely comically shoehorned (just tacking the "wa" prefix before Luigi) -- including a huge inside joke that somehow cleared every bureaucratic step and cracked the mainstream.

Well... in accordance with the Nintendo men and women, Waluigi is not only a gloriously lazy decision or an inside joke gone substantial. They *say* it's based on the Japanese phrase ijiwaru, which means that "bad guy."

I do not understand. I feel like we'd have to supply them much more than halfway to buy that.

Toad.

Toad is built to look as a mushroom (or perhaps toadstool) thanks to the massive mushroom hat of his. It is a great thing the games debuted before the entire generation realized the right way to earn penis jokes.

Anyway, in Japan, he's considered Kinopio, which is a mixture of the term for mushroom ("kinoko") and also the Japanese version of Pinocchio ("pinokio"). Those mix being something along the lines of "A Real Mushroom Boy."

Goomba.

In Japanese, the guys are labeled as kuribo, that results in "chestnut people." That makes sense because, ya know, if somebody asked you "what do chestnut people look like?" you'd almost certainly arrive at food roughly similar to these heroes.

Once they were shipped for the American version, the group stuck with their Italian initiative and called them Goombas... based off the Italian "goombah," which colloquially means something as "my fellow Italian friend." Furthermore, it type of evokes the photo of low-level mafia thugs without too many capabilities -- like people's younger brothers as well as cousins who they'd to work with or mother would yell at them. Which also is true for the Mario Bros. goombas.

Birdo.

Birdo has nothing to do with this particular initial Japanese name. Right now there, he's considered Kyasarin, that typically results in "Catherine."

In the instruction manual for Super Mario Bros. 2, where Birdo debuted, the persona explanation of his reads: "Birdo thinks he is a girl and additionally likes being named Birdetta."

What I do believe all this means? Nintendo shockingly decided to generate a character who battles with his gender identity and then called him Catherine. In the event it was a bit of time to go to America, they got cold feet so they decided at the very last minute to contact him Birdo, even though he's a dinosaur. (And do not give me the "birds are descended from dinosaurs" pop paleontology line. Not buying that connection.) That way, we would just understand about his gender misunderstandings in case we look at the mechanical, and the Japanese were pretty sure Americans had been sometimes too lazy or perhaps illiterate to accomplish that en masse.

Princess Toadstool/Peach.

When we all got introduced to the Princess, she was regarded as Princess Toadstool. I suppose this made good sense -- Mario was put in the Mushroom Kingdom, so why wouldn't its monarch be called Princess Toadstool. Them inbreeding bluish bloods are usually naming the kids of theirs after the country.

No person appears to be sure the reason they went that guidance, nevertheless. In Japan, she was known as Princess Peach from day one. That title did not debut here until 1993, when Yoshi's Safari arrived on the scene for Super Nintendo. (By the manner -- have you ever played Yoshi's Safari? In an off-the-wall twist it is a first-person shooter, the only person in the entire Mario the historical past. It is like something like a country music superstar putting out a weird rock album.)

Bowser.

In Japan, there's simply no Bowser. He's simply referred to as the King Koopa (or similar variants, like Great Demon King Koopa). And so exactly where did Bowser come from?

During the import method, there was a concern that the American masses would not recognize how the small turtles and big bad man could certainly be called Koopa. So a marketing staff put together dozens of selections for a title, they liked Bowser the very best, and slapped it on him.

In Japan, he is still hardly ever called Bowser. Over here, the name of his has become extremely ubiquitous that he's even supplanted Sha Na Na's Bowzer as America's most famous Bowser.

Donkey Kong.

This's a more literal interpretation than you think. "Kong" is based off of King Kong. "Donkey" is a family friendly way of calling him an ass. That is right: His label is an useful variation of "Ass Ape."

Super Mario Bros. is a video recording game released for the family Computer and Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985. It shifted the gameplay far from its single-screen arcade predecessor, Mario Bros., in addition to instead showcased side scrolling platformer concentrations. Although not the very first game of the Mario franchise, Super Mario Bros. is the most famous, along with launched various sequence staples, from power-ups, to timeless enemies like Goombas, on the basic concept of rescuing Princess Toadstool from King Koopa. As well as kicking off a complete series of Super Mario platformer online games, the untamed good results of Super Mario Bros. made popular the genre to be a whole, really helped revive the gaming sector once the 1983 video clip game crash, as well as was largely accountable for the original good results around the NES, with which it's included a launch name. Until eventually it had been finally surpassed by Wii Sports, Super Mario Bros. was the very best marketing videos game of all moment for nearly three years, with more than forty million copies sold outside of us.

#mario characters with names

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