#Brothers Book 2

[legobiwan]

"First, let's get something out of the way: a human's ability to grasp reality is painfully limited. You don't even have free will! Don't believe me? Okay, rip a dollar in half right now. Didn't do it? Didn't think so!"

~~~~~~~~~~~~

"PS: Look what I just ripped in half! Suck it!"

~~~~~~~~

I love Stan so, so much for this.

[invader-reggie]

Someone revive the reverse falls fandom

Reverse Falls BillFord when???

I want some toxic possessive Stanford this instant.

My man deserves to be the unhinged "YOU ARE MINE" one in the relationship after all the shit Gravity Falls Ford got from Bill.

[arthursfuckinghat]

Jack Marston oh Jack Marston they could never make me hate you.

They could never make me hate you for being raised by outlaws and then trying your best not to become one.

They could never make me hate you for getting trapped in the cycle of generational violence.

They could never make me hate you for suffering the consequences of violence and loss.

They could never make me hate you for failing to break free from a troubled past.

They could never make me hate you.

[littlemut]

my year of rot and rumination

[wilcze-kudly]

Tlok is so weird about abuse, particularly when their female charcters are abusive towards their male characters.

Like Eska's abuse by Bolin was played completely for comedy. Despite him being shown as clearly uncomfortable, and crying on multiple occasions.

This is especially upsetting because Bolin has been shown as being a rather vulnerable individual with trouble setting healthy boundaries and an aversion to saying 'no'. But even when he does actively express his discomfort and attempts to end the relationship, his autonomy is violated and he is literally forcefully engaged to Eska. And we are supposed to laugh.

He is shown to be so traumatised by the experience that he still actively panics when shown even a picture of Eska and is clearly very hurt that Mako didn't offer him more help in the situation. Which is honestly understandable.

Speaking of which, Mako and Korra's relationship in B2 was... troubled to say the least. Now, Korra had a lot on her plate and was rightfully stressed by the events happening. However, it seemed that she often took her stress out on Mako, getting into arguments with him and yelling at him.

She kicked his fucking desk across the room. While Mako may have upset her by going behind her back and ratting her out to Raiko, but this is no way to react. But we are supposed to be annoyed and angry with Mako, and we are meant to see Korra reacting so violently as justified. [While I don't like Mako's actions in B2 he didn't deserve this.]

This is not helped in the slightest after Lin enters the scene, and comments on thw mess, saying that he 'got off easy'. And she implies that she committed even more property damage after Tenzin broke up with her.

Ah, Lin. I think while Korra and Eska's actions toward Mako and Bolin have been called out sometimes, we tend to overlook how fucking horrifying what we're told about Lin's reaction to Tenzin breaking up with her is.

Because, if we think about this for a little, this is a scary situation. Lin is a very strong and physical person who has been shown to be quick to violence. Air Temple Island is Tenzin's home, and the home of multiple Air Acolytes, full of fragile artifacts that we are shown that he values tremendously and for which he feels personally responsible for.

Ans it's honestly hard to believe that Lin didn't know this about Tenzin, since they persumably have known each other for a while. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if she damaged the temple because she knew it would hurt him.

And it's understandable that this wasn't presented as a very morally wrong thing to do, since the 'crazy ex girlfriend' isn't an unpopular trope in comedy, but it is damaging. Since it plays women doing genuinely scary and upsetting things towards men for comedy, therefore making it more difficult to take such behaviour seriously.

But hey, I guess we can kinda pretend that Lin most likely damaging Air Temple Island with earthbending is comparable to egging someone's house or keying their car. So let's let that slide.

Oh yeah, she also abused her position as chief of police in order to try and get rid of a romantic rival.

Which is extremely fucked up, especially with how Lin presents herself as extremely professional and serious about her job, yet she apparently used it to terrorise a woman for 'stealing' her partner. What kind of bunny boiler shit is this.

And all of these scenes presenting Lin as a vengeful, borderline abusive ex to Tenzin are presented as comedic, further driving tlok's most likely unintentional message of normalising female on male abuse. It's not as in your face as Eska's abuse of Bolin, to the point that without the context of Eska and Korra's behaviour, I wouldn't really point Lin out, but with this context, you can't help but consider it.

Once is by chance. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is a pattern.

And I hate to make this argument, but if the genders were reversed in these situations?

If a boy were pressuring a young, emotionally vulnerable girl into marriage, treating her as his slave, manhandling her, getting angry when she speaks to a male friend?

If a young man were to scream at his girlfriend multiple times and go so far as to throw her desk across a room?

If a male policeman implied he caused severe property damage at his ex girlfriend's house after she broke up with him and if he tried to use his status to arrest her new partner? (you know, actually 40% of cops are- *gets shot*)

I feel like we'd have a completely different perspective.

While male on female abuse is still often stigmatised and overlooked, I still think that Eska, Korra and Lin's actions would be scrutinised more closely and reacted to more negatively if they were men. Concurrently, I think we would treat Bolin, Mako and Tenzin with more leniency and gave them more of the benefit of the doubt had they been women.

I want to think that this wasn't a message that was presented on purpose, but it's still one of my least favourite aspects of tlok and I genuinely dislike the part of the fandom that trivialises these actions by Korra, Lin and Eska.

[deliciousdietdrpepper]

The amazing thing about emperor cleon is that his perceived infallibility is the thing that makes him utterly wretched. He made this perfect system of self aggrandizement… a utopia of the ego… and it fucking bores him to death! The ennui is so palpable he literally nukes planets to death on intergalactic television just to feel something! When he goes to bed at night he can’t sleep because he’s haunted by himself. He is actually, actively chased around in generational circles by different versions of himself and his own face so that he can never escape his own self-loathing! He’s trapped in this snow globe of a palace with this ancient Grecian level of torment for (ideally) all eternity and what does he do about it? Serves cunt and kills people. Iconic. I hate him. I love him. I want to do a wildlife documentary about him

[henry-fox-biggest-stan]

I have the Stranger Things: Worlds Turned Upside Down: The Official Behind-the-Scenes Companion book, I got it in 2018, so here are some fun facts from it

In the party’s dnd charts it says Will’s class is “magic-user” 👀👀 and one of his abilities is “true sight” 👀👀

The first scene written and the first scene filmed are both the dnd game at s1 ep1

Mike supposedly has rainbow blinds in his room (as a reference to E.T since Elliot also has rainbow blinds)

When El throws Lucas against a wall, that was Caleb, not a body double. Apparently he was excited to film without a double and asked for it (he was thrown against a mattress). Called said he had so much fun.

During the scene where El sends the van flying, the duffers said than when they first tried it (without filming) it all went as it was supposed to, it flew the right directions. The first time they filmed, tho, the van fell on top of one of their cameras and destroyed it.

Steve is in his last year of high school (as opposed to Nancy, who is in her second, or Jonathan who is in his first)

Steve plays basketball and baseball. He was supposed to be an asshole and die the first season, but Joe Keery came and gave a bit more depth to Steve’s character.

243 people auditioned to play El

Some of El’s powers include biokinesis, teleportation, and psychometry

Hopper fought in Vietnam 

At first the upside down wasn’t supposed to appear on screen at any moment. We would have heard what happened over walkie talkies or radios.

A demodog is just a teen demogorgon (I think this was explained at the show, but I have seen people say they are different creatures)

Jonathan does cycling, is in the school newspaper, and the photography club

Caleb is very good crying on command

Mike’s bike is the newest because his family has the most money, Dustin begun painting his bike but hasn’t finished it yet, and Lucas has a fluorescent saddle

At first they weren’t allowed to use ghostbusters costumes but they talked to Ivan Reitman and eventually got green light 

Dart was supposed to appear in the first season but they didn’t have enough time

The upside down was originally called the underworld 

Nancy and Jonathan (their relationship) are inspired by David and Jennifer from WarGames (1983). Also by Willie Scott and doctor Jones from Indiana Jones

Bob was supposed to die on ep 4 instead of ep 8

For the scene with Will and Morse code (when he’s tied to a chair) the duffers just told Noah to watch a YouTube video on Morse code the day before 

Talking about Noah, after being possessed and convulsing to the point everyone was amazed with his acting, the moment they stop filming he just gets up and asks for a cup of tea like nothing happened

For the upside down spores they actually used dandelions 

Hopper is repeatedly described as a cowboy lmao

In s1 when the boys dress El up in a wig and a dress and Mike does her makeup, they are dressing her up in their vision of what a girl is

Finn said than it was only halfway through the second episode than Mike realized than El is a real girl, a real person, and not E.T.

The duffers were inspired by the breakfast club for the making of Nancy, Jonathan, and Steve’s characters!!

Nancy played volleyball, was in the cheerleader team (?!?!?!), was in the French club, volunteered at church and did social volunteering, and did a writing workshop

Barb played softball, the clarinet, was part of the Mathematical Olympiads, volunteered at the library, and was a babysitter.

[literallyjusttoa]

I’m in my feels about Leto rn.

She a mom!!!! You don’t understand she’s a MOM!!!! And she was left all alone after the titan war (most titans were banished to Tartarus) and then she fell in love with this guy with all these red flags but they were genuinely in love!!! They sang songs and talked about deep things and Leto and Zeus LOVED EACH OTHER!!!!! And then she was made to suffer so much for it but she never took any of it out on her kids, and then they were basically taken away from her by Olympus!!!! And she was alone again!!!! But she loves her kids so so much so she built a safe place for them on Delos to come home to!!!! And she knows she can’t protect her kids from the monster the man she loves has become but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t try!!!! Leto tries so hard!!!!! And both of her kids fucking love her with all they have!!!!!!! Family is so important to all of them despite the fact that one member has become a horrible dickwad!!!!! They love each other!!!!!!!!! AHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!

[essektheylyss]

literally every time I look at Verin's stat block in Netherdeep I laugh a little bit. he poses like he's in an emo photo shoot. he's referred to as a beacon to the town despite being the elven equivalent of 23. his weapon of choice is a glaive. absolute best boy, he might be a let down to his family but he sure is successful at carrying on the Thelyss name for drama.

[kenobihater]

of all the star wars movies, which of them do y'all 1) enjoy the most 2) consider the best quality and 3) think you've rewatched the most. add your answers in the reblogs or replies, i'm genuinely curious how much of an overlap there is within everyone's three answers. mine don't overlap at all! they're revenge of the sith, empire strikes back, and the force awakens :^)

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.

[legendoflozer]

Long Night

[caus34concern]

you open michael's closet and it's filled with weezer shirts

[clarissaweasley-10]

The people who are calling lyrason a slow burn would burn if they read Keeper of The Lost Cities or Percy Jackson

[es-3]

if i had a nickel every time florence pugh’s character got married to timothée chalamet’s character but as his second choice, i would have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice

[desmonddemesne]

Chapter 2 of my fic, Ocean Pines ⛵

Thanks to all who read Chapter 1, which you can read here.

Share with friends and be sure to tune in next week for more!

Have a fantastic day! ⭐