#But I have seen the movie and the sequel and I even know very basically that the books are about a whole different story

[zepskies]

(Not a fanfic request) Imagine spoiling Ben and/or kissing him stupid. Just getting through all the machismo stuff and becoming his safe space. Doing mundane tasks but they never feel mundane because you’re with your best friend. Imagine him growing as a person. Imagine him looking at you with nothing but adoration. Jensen Ackles has so much to atone for— How dare he be so talented. 😭💕

Ahhh you're giving me the warm fuzzies, anon! 🥰 I definitely think this would be the vibe between SB/Ben and the reader in my series Break Me Down, and I've tried to give that sense of them being each other's safe space in many of the sequel stories.

In that story-verse, Ben's the one who makes you feel safe, who gives you the support you need so you don't have to be so strong all the time. While you're the one who makes him feel like there's someone in the world who understands him, accepts him for who he is, but also takes him to task when he needs it.

More domestic headcanons with Ben:

(Whoops, my hand slipped. 😂��)

You and Ben watch old movies together and argue about the plot, with your modern, feminist view vs. his "traditionalist" view. But he also gives you behind the scenes info whenever he actually knows the actors, directors, etc. -- like the best movie commentary ever.

Ben won't easily admit it, but one of his favorite things is just chilling on the couch with you, flipping through channels, drinking a glass of whiskey or snacking on junk. You using him as a body pillow, basically. Or him with his head in your lap while you scratch his back or run your fingers through his hair. You like playing with his hair, the soft strands.

You also like his hands, long fingers and wide palms. But he likes the gentleness of your hands.

Ben likes taking you out to dinner, but he also likes going grocery shopping with you because he likes picking out new things to try (even as he makes fun of all the "oatmilk this" and "quinoa that").

Late at night, if either of you can't sleep (or after a few rounds of keeping each other up), Ben starts to open up.

He tells you about his life before Compound V, about his mother, about his father, about the world he grew up in, and sometimes, very rarely, about that Russian lab.

Those are the times that you have to hide how much your heart breaks, because you don't want him to instinctively close back up, not wanting to be pitied or seen as less of a man for being honest about what he went through.

He also admits to things he did when he was the "leader" of Payback -- his "glory days." What he doesn't admit, but you can tell just by his tone and demeanor, is that he's less proud and yearning those days than he used to be.

Actually, he wouldn't go back to those days even if he could.

Because now, he has you. He has a real family. That's the main thing that's real to him now.

AN: Again, didn't mean for this to become a mini HC, but there ya go! loll 💚

Join Patreon 🌟 For early access to new stories, bonus content, first looks at upcoming stories, send me requests, and more!

Break Me Down Masterlist

Soldier Boy Masterlist

Main Masterlist

BMD Tag List:

@deans-spinster-witch @this-is-me19 @waynes-multiverse @samanddeaninatrenchcoat @spalady26

@nancymcl @emily-winchester @sl33pylilbunny @chernayawidow @spnfamily-j2

@lacilou @mimaria420 @yvonneeeee @my-stories-vault @iprobablyshipit91

@jacklesbrainworms @adoringanakin @deanwanddamons @globetrotter28 @mrsjenniferwinchester

@deans-daydream @deanwinchestersgirl87 @rachiem4-blog @sweettimelady @leigh70

@rizlowwritessortof @chevroletdean @spnwoman @syrma-sensei @muhahaha303

@123passwort @lyarr24 @is-this-a-febreze-commercial @sanscas @luci-in-trenchcoats

@jessjad @fromcaintodean @stoneyggirl2 @chriszgirl92 @kazsrm67

@deansbbyx @midnightmadwoman @ladysparkles78 @fics-pics-andotherthings-i-like @tmb510

@sarahgracej @foxyjwls007 @just-levyy @roseblue373 @charmed-asylum

[cleolinda]

The Scariest Movie I Ever Saw in a Theater: The Ring

I'll tell you up front that the story I'm going to tell you is about "The Ring (2002)," in the sense that it is about The Ring in the year 2002.

See, I don't know what The Scariest Movie Ever is. A quick google says that the consensus is The Exorcist (I haven't seen it, because I never felt like scheduling a day to freak myself the entire fuck out). But horror is specific, and not just to a person, but to a time and place, even. When I saw The Shining as a teenager in a well-lit living room with other people, I didn't even really flinch, but I bet it would play very differently to me now. I don’t think The Ring is at the top of anyone’s list, but twenty years ago, I had a personal interest in it—at the time, I was running a dinky little Geocities site devoted to movie news. Links curated and compiled from all the other, bigger sites I followed—basically, it was the linkspam format I have used on multiple platforms, including here on Sundays. And so, as someone who followed theatrical releases pretty closely for two or three years, I saw the trailer for The Ring, and I immediately knew it was going to be huge.

To locate you in time, this was just after three self-satirizing Scream movies and the Overcomplicated Serial Killer films of the '90s. The Ring was something completely different: chill aqua-blue color grading a good 5-6 years before Twilight; a mournful Hans Zimmer score; no jokes, no quips; and a slow, inexorable sense of doom. Grief, even, given that the movie begins with the death of the main character's niece. What immediately struck me about the first trailer was 1) the melancholy of it, and 2) how much it doesn't explain. Onscreen, you get the title cards,

THERE IS A VIDEOTAPE IF YOU WATCH IT SEVEN DAYS LATER YOU DIE

Concise! Understandable! A woman (Naomi Watts) is freaking out upon discovering that her young son has just watched it! Admirable job setting up the premise and the stakes of this entire movie in thirty seconds flat, without even any dialogue. That's all you need to know, and thus, the remaining minute of the trailer can do whatever it wants, and what it wants to do is be fucking weird. Echoing voices, TV static, a closeup of a horse's eye, ladders, a girl with dark hair, people reacting to things we don't see, drippy doorknobs, rain. Characters don't give us the whole plot in convenient soundbites of dialogue (like they do in a later trailer); we just hear lines, overlapping, murmured out of context—

did you see it in your head? she talks to you... leading you somewhere... showing you the horses... you saw it. did you see it in your head? she shows me things. Everyone suffers.

That you saw it has lived in my head ever since, and not once have I charged it rent. But the "best" part is Naomi Watts screaming at the end, because you don't hear her voice; you only hear this heartless telephonic beeeeeeep. It's 2002 and I'm watching this trailer, thinking, I have no idea what the fuck I just saw. This is going to be huge.

And it was, to the tune of $249 million on a $48M budget.

At risk of recapping what you might already know, Ringu, aka Ring, is a media franchise that spiraled out from a trio of Koji Suzuki novels into Hideo Nakata's film Ringu (1998), a landmark of Japanese horror, plus several other movies, some TV series, many comics, and even a couple of video games. The overarching story is about a murdered girl/vengeful ghost named Sadako Yamamura whose rage and pain have created a cursed video tape, you watch it and you die unless you pass the tape around like a virus, seven daaaaays, etc.

The "ring" in question is the rim of a well. Keep that well in mind.

The movie I saw is the U.S. remake, which itself had two sequels. (The iconic Sadako is now named Samara Morgan. Keep her in mind, too.) Director Gore Verbinski moved from The Ring to Pirates of the the Caribbean (!), and so Hideo Nakata himself would direct The Ring Two. I... honestly have only seen the first one. And I was right, it was huge, and it kicked off the American J-Horror Remake genre, for better or worse. But what gets forgotten about The Ring is its marketing campaign, which I followed pretty closely for my doofy little news site.

It was inspired.

The story of The Ring is partly the story of the sea change in the media landscape—how we watch movies. And the story of its marketing is a picture of the very last years before social media changed the wilderness of the internet into something that feels so big, like a billion people could see anything we say, and yet so small—only a tame handful of places to say it, owned by three or four companies, and corraled by algorithms.

Back around 1997-1998 or so, I worked at a video store (Movie Gallery, where the hits were there then, guaranteed) for about a year and a half. By the time I left, we had started adding DVDs to the VHS tapes on the shelves, but we hadn't replaced the entire stock. Video stores might have transitioned fully to DVD by 2002, I'm not sure, but people still commonly had both VCRs and DVD players in their homes. And I remember that The Ring was sold in both formats when it eventually hit home video. Which is to say—you know the analog horror genre today? Marble Hornets, Local 58, The Mandela Catalogue?

Analog horror is commonly characterized by low-fidelity graphics, cryptic messages, and visual styles reminiscent of late 20th-century television and analog recordings. This is done to match the setting, as analog horror works are typically set between the 1960s and 1990s. The name "analog horror" comes from the genre's aesthetic incorporation of elements related to analog electronics, such as analog television and VHS, the latter being an analog method of recording video.

Okay, but this is just what home media was like, and 2002 was at the very tail end of that—boxy black VHS tapes that degraded with time and reuse were just how we lived. At the same time, I'd been using CDs for music since about 1991, and all our software installs came on CD-ROM discs; a "mixtape" by that time had shifted to mean a rewriteable CD rather than a cassette tape. In college, I—well, I'll plead the Fifth as to whether I downloaded mp3s via Napster, but I was also taping Mystery Science Theater 3000 on VHS over the weekends. It was Every Format Everywhere, All At Once, and we kept half a dozen kinds of players around for them. Here in 2023, we stream and download everything invisibly, unless we choose to engage in format nostalgia. (I've already run into the problem of Apple Music deleting songs I really liked, due to this or that licensing issue, because I was really only renting them.) The year The Ring hit theaters was the edge of a last shimmering gasp of physical media where iTunes had only come into being the year before, and iridescent discs were still mostly what we used, but cassettes, both video and audio, were still viable. And so, people did not think it was terribly weird when they started finding unlabeled VHS tapes on their windshields.

Movieweb, quoting TikTok user astro_nina:

"Their marketing strategy was essentially 'let's get this tape viewed by as many people as possible without these people being aware of what this is, sort of raising intrigue," she says. One way they achieved this was by airing the tape, which allegedly marks its viewers for death within seven days, as a commercial with no context. The video would air between late-night programming "with no words, no mention of a movie, for like a month...so people would run into it and it would just go on to the next thing, and people would be like, 'what the f--k is this?'"

I remember seeing the Cursed Video as an unexplained ad at least twice, by the way. That TikTok also indicates that DreamWorks straight-up sent copies of the tape to Hot Topic stores, as well as planting them under actual movie theater seats. While running my movie site, I heard at least one story of someone finding a tape on the sink counter of a restroom at a club. Did the marketing department actually plant tapes in bathrooms—or did a freaked-out recipient leave it there, hoping to dodge the "curse"?

(I haven't embedded the Cursed Video here, by the way—but I could have. If you'd like to see the American take on it, you can watch both the full version and the shorter variant that appeared in the movie itself. A text description of what the fuck you're even looking at is here [content note for both: blood, insects, animal death, body horror, and suicide by falling]. The original version from the Japanese film is shorter, and it's eerie rather than gruesome.)

BUT WAIT, THERE WAS MORE: DreamWorks had something of an alternate-reality campaign going with a handful of in-character websites. This was only a year after Warner Bros. ran the groundbreaking "The Beast" ARG for A.I.: Artificial Intelligence: "Ultimately, fifty websites with a total of about one thousand pages were created for the [A.I.] game." (I lurked in the Cloudmakers Yahoo group.) Marketing for The Ring did not go anywhere that in depth, nor did it need to; it was both a smaller film and a smaller story. I saw at least two “personal” websites (seemingly amateur and a little tacky, like my own), but the one I particularly remember was about someone who owned/trained horses? I'm not sure if it was meant to be the actual Anna Morgan character—Samara's mother—or maybe someone who had noticed that the Morgans' horses were disturbed? I'm not even sure anyone even remembers this but me. Reddit users dug up a few other archived websites, but they're about Sadako, the curse and/or videotape; they aren't as subtle or character-oriented as the site I remember. (Honestly, I wonder if weird shit like "What Scares Me" or "SEVEN DAYS TO LIVE" were made by fans rather than a marketing department, but who knows.)

[The “About” page from Seven Days to Live on the Internet Archive.]

[The entirety of An Open Letter on the Internet Archive. “UPDATE” is a now-blank pop-up. I would bet $5 that it was originally a pop-up of the cursed video.]

I need to point out here that Facebook did not exist in 2002. It would not exist for another two years, and Twitter wouldn't exist until 2006. Even MySpace was not a thing until the next year. I didn't start my Livejournal until October of 2003. What we had, for the most part, were independent forums and blogs. We also had Creepy Internet Fiction like "The Dionaea House" and "Ted the Caver"; their use of the blog format, of people out there seemingly living their lives until something fucked up went down, gave the stories the shape of reality. And it helped that these blogs had comment sections, sure—sometimes more story unfolded there—but for the most part, an author could "abandon" a blog, and you'd just find the story there via word of mouth. Like the Ring blogs I remember, it wouldn't seem strange if no one replied to you, whereas today, you'd have to hire a writer to sit on Twitter, or Reddit, or even Tumblr, and interact with people in character. Could you do something like The Ring's mysterious, weird-ass blogs today? Would anyone even notice?

So: It's 2002, my head is full of Alternate Reality and eerie images and you saw it, and I'm hype as hell to go out and see The Ring. I'm perfectly happy to go see movies by myself, so I went in the early afternoon (best time to get a good seat). The movie ended up being a sleeper hit, and the first weekend, the public was still sleeping on it, so there were only 7-8 other people in that theater, grouped in maybe two clusters. I was off in my own little pool of darkness in the upper right quadrant. Functionally, once the lights went down, I was alone.

Despite some middling reviews at the time, The Ring is something of a horror classic nowadays. If you want a scary movie this Spooky Season, check out The Ring. Or don't, because it nearly killed me.

We're at the last, I don't know, third of the movie? And Our Heroine has tracked down the origin of the Cursed Videotape to some creepy mountain motel or whatever. SPOILER, it turns out that it was built over the Cursed Well (everything in this movie is cursed) that Our Villain was thrown into—that's why Sadako/Samara is a vengeful wet murder ghost crawling out of TVs now. While investigating this decrepit hotel room, intrepid journalist Rachel and her, who is it, her ex-husband? her kid's dad, idk, discover the well under the creaky old floorboards. And then, wouldn't you know it,

NAOMI WATTS FALLS INTO THE WELL

NAOMI WATTS FALLS INTO THE FUCKING WELL

THAT'S WHERE SAMARA'S BODY IS

[The rather slapstick moment when Rachel falls into the well. Does not include what actually happens next.]

I go absolutely rigid in my seat. Naomi Watts is splashing around this dark-ass death swamp of a well and I know, with as much certainty as I have ever known anything in my life, that Samara is about to pop up in all her pasty, waterlogged glory. All the sad creepy dread, all the desperation to figure out what the fuck all that shit on the tape was and stop Samara from killing Rachel's son, all the horrible contorted victim faces, all the alternate reality I’ve been soaking in, it has all come to this. I have to leave the theater. I cannot be having with this. I have to be gone from this place. My legs do not work. I cannot feel them. I am frozen. I want nothing more in this life or any other to get up and leave this cavernous pitch-black room, and I cannot. I start praying for death. I want you to understand that I am not trying to be flippant or humorous. This is genuinely what went through my head. I was too scared to even think, "You know, you could just pray to pass out or for motion to return to your limbs or something." No, I sat there in The Ring thinking, Please for the love of all mercy just let me cease being.

You know that scene in Mulholland Drive (also starring Naomi Watts)? Winkie's diner and the EXCRUCIATING tension? It was a little like that, except I wasn't watching it, I was experiencing it, and Samara was my dirt monster out behind the diner.

Except that the jump scare didn't actually happen. I mean, yes, Rachel finds Samara's body down there, but—I don't remember exactly, please don't make me go watch it again to tell you what actually happens. It's played more sympathetically on Rachel's part, as I recall, and she and her ex get Samara's body out so that she (Samara) can have a proper burial.

And then it turns out that this is not the end of the movie. It turns out that Rachel has Fucked Up.

I think I was relatively okay through the rest of it, although the climax is Samara emerging from a TV in her full glitching swampy glory to scare [SPOILER] to death. I don't recall praying for death twice. There's a point when you're so exhausted from fear chemicals that you're like, yeah, this might as well happen. Bring it, Soggy. I did have a hard time prying myself out of that seat afterwards, though, and my mom says that when I got home, I had the classic thousand-yard stare. How was the movie?

"It was great," I said, and I meant it.

I've seen things that were objectively scarier (I watched much of The Haunting of Hill House from behind a pillow, to be honest), and it's not like I've never experienced fear in real life. But I respect when a movie that can make me feel so intensely, and there's something weirdly precious about the way horror is a safe roller coaster, as it's often been said. So I love telling the story about The Time The Ring Nearly Killed Me—a movie that actually made my body stop working—and I love thinking of how embedded in a specific time and place that movie was for me. The last gasp of VHS when the Cursed Videotape still seemed plausible; the way the internet was still wild and weird and free; where I was in my life, keeping up so avidly with all the movie news, and finding myself in such a little pool of darkness early one afternoon. It's the scariest movie I saw in a theater; that's the alchemy of circumstance.

[cursedvida]

It's really crazy to me to see the hate Mae gets, like I was reading some reviews and I can understand not liking a character but as soon as they start with the name calling their opinion is invalid to me because they have no reason to be calling her a bitch, among other things, like it just reeks of mysogyny, (it's like they just want an excuse to call women names) and seeing it coming from other girls makes it worse like..

"Oh the girl was such a bitch why did she do that 🙄" ..is it really that hard to think for a moment about the circumstances in which mae was raised?? Do they need it spell it out for them?? Like, c'mon guys do you really think that the people trapped in a bunker for generations have anything nice to teach/say about the apes?? Wes Ball please give us Mae's backstory in the sequel!! Your audience needs it bc they are out there calling Mae the real villain and saying Proximus was right 💀 (when he was literally everything Caesar hated in an ape)

Look, I'm usually a polite person when expressing my opinions, but I'm fed up with the hate towards Mae, basically because the arguments people give seem incredibly basic to me, typical of people with little to no understanding. Sometimes I doubt if these people have watched the same movie as me or maybe they have some sort of cognitive dissonance, but seriously, I find them ridiculous. Either that, or they are basically the typical comments from misogynistic guys or women with internalized misogyny who can't stand morally gray and questionable female characters.

And well, having said that, I'm going to present my doctoral thesis on this topic:

One of the things I've seen the most is people saying that Mae is evil, the true villain, or an ungrateful traitor to Noa. This argument seems quite incomprehensible to me because, even though we don't have much data about her, I believe there's something very important that explains why she acts as she does: the Proximus apes killed the people in her group, including her mother. I mean: her damn mother. If we add to that the UNDERSTANDING (I mean, you have to be very short-minded not to assume something so obvious) that she has been raised in an environment where they've probably told her all her life that the apes are the reason for all the evils of humanity and the main reason why humans live in shitty conditions, I think anyone with half a brain has enough information to understand why she does what she does.

Yes, Noa is a good guy, but he's not helping her. Noa and Mae have a common goal and decide to ally themselves momentarily to achieve that goal, which is to reach Proximus. As much as they've formed a bond throughout the story, it's not yet strong enough for Mae to set aside what she has worked for so hard. Mae not only bears the weight of humanity on her shoulders but also emotionally carries the idea that she, as the sole survivor of her group, must complete the mission at all costs. Are those who criticize her telling me that if they truly thought that with certain actions they could not only save their species but also honor their loved ones who have been killed infront their eyes, they wouldn't do them? And that they wouldn't do them for someone they've just met, no matter how much they like them? That's just not realistic, it makes no sense. We would all do the same as Mae in her situation. I mean, I have no doubts.

Another thing I love is when they say she's the "true villain" as if it weren't clear enough that she feels bad every time since she forms a bond with Raka and Noa when she does something that she knows may harm them. She feels pain for Raka's death and clearly, you can also see the conflict and remorse when she detonates the bomb. It's not something she enjoys doing, but she HAS to do it. In the final scene, even though she's carrying a gun, you can also clearly see her in conflict with herself. Clearly, she doesn't want to kill him. Clearly, she has nothing against Noa, and this is evident when she finally accepts the necklace and they even shake hands. You can't tell me that's the attitude of a villain, narratively it's not presented as such, and seeing it that way is to have understood nothing.

Mae is a complex character whose life is based on survival, she's no different from the characters we're used to loving and idolizing in other post-apocalyptic series, the difference here for me is that she's human and humans have to be bad by default and also that she's a woman. Because female characters always have to be the support, the romantic interest, or the unconditional friends of heroic male characters, and Mae is none of that. Mae is a character with her own story and ambitions that go beyond Noa's plot. Mae has her own plot, and it seems that's something that bothers people a lot.

I'm sorry, but the hate towards Mae seems very similar to the one people had for Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones, which basically stemmed from people being misogynistic and hating complex and imperfect female characters, combined with how much they hate seeing protagonist characters with such human and real characteristics that they can't bear the idea of seeing themselves reflected in them.

But hey, for Sansa Stark, I would have killed, and now for Mae too. Mae haters basically DNI

[litsnobconfessions]

A Year of Animation Day 109-110: Rise of the Guardians

Date: April 19-20, 2025

Day: 109-110

Content Watched: Rise of the Guardians

Year: 2012

Rating: PG

Run Time: 1 hour 38 minutes

Just as there was an obvious animated film for Pesach, there was an obvious animatred film for Easter. And if you're thinking, wait, aren't you Jewish? Why are you watching an Easter film? The answers are, respectively:

1. Yes, I am Jewish. I had to look up Easter on the calendar ahead of time, and I still almost missed it.

2. Because I love this movie.

3. Because most people don't believe me when I say it's an Easter film but it is. (seriously, watch the argument between Bunny and North 8 minutes in)

Ready? Let's get into it.

What I really love about this movie is less about animation and more about general character design. Santa Claus has tattoos. The elves are useless and the toys are all built by yetis, who have their own language that only North knows. The Easter Bunny is a six-foot-plus Australian rabbit that arms himself with a boomerang and travels via magical tunnels, but still loves cutesy stuff. The Tooth Fairy is a tooth-obsessed hummingbird with an entire company of hummingbirds (and mice!) helping her. And the Sandman, duel-wielding whips of dream sand, is possibly the most badass of them all. 

Essentially, these are all very familiar characters, and they're all presented in atypical ways. As a result, these probably remain my favorite version of these characters. Even Jack is a little unusual. How many winter spirits have you seen running around barefoot? I briefly looked up the book series the film is based on, and if what I saw was the original cover art, it looks like everybody except Bunny is drawn to resemble Joyce's origincal characters (also, I was so excited to see that William Joyce is the author. I've had Santa Calls since I was a kid, and it's a beautiful book.)

But I think the most brilliant chataracter design might be Pitch. That's right, the Boogeyman. Because he's basically rendered in greyscale. In contrast, all of the Guardians are in very bright, saturated colors--North in red, Tooth in blue-green, and Sandy in yellow. Okay, Bunny is not, himself, in bright colors, but everything out of the warren is. Jack, in contrast, sits somewhere in between the two. His blue hoodie definitely separates him visually from Pitch, but the color is much more muted than the other Guardians, which begs the question: if they had made a sequel, would Jack have gotten a costume change?

I will say, however, that despite a lot of nice animation in this movie, Jamie's little sister, Sophie? Looks like a nightmare to me. I don't know what it is about her character model, but I'm pretty sure that child is actually a changeling.

My favorite animation is the dream sand. I just think it's really pretty. I mean, the frostwork is too, but somehow the dreams one-up it for me. It's probably the color contrast. Also the angles on things like dinosaurs and giant mantarays swimming through the sky.

My favorite scene is where they're collecting teeth. I don't know why. I guess I just like the idea of Santa, Jack Frost, the Sandman, and the Easter Bunny collecting teeth (and standing in line for quarters.) Again, it's not the typical presentation of these characters, so it really stands out in my head.

But that's what I like about the movie. It's not just the animation, it's got some nice character moments in it too. I particularly love how they build up to Jack being the Guardian of Fun. We see it at the beginning, with how he interacts with the kids on the snow day--even inspiring Cupcake to have fun when he hits her with a snowball, and I'm pretty sure there's a point before he figures it out that Pitch says something about people having fun. But I never felt like the hit the audience over the head with it either.

As stories about the importance of believing and fighting Anthropomorphic Personifications and attacking tooth fairies go, I still think Hogfather beats this movie out. But fortunately, since Hogfather is a Christmas movie and this takes place at Easter (did you watch it? Did you watch the scene?) there's plenty of room for both.

Tomorrow... something shorter...

[angelflms]

putting this on here because i need rant about this because marvel dudebros on threads and basically every are pissing me off (copied this from my insta story):

"deadpool and wolverine is what we needed/asked for. nobody asked for agatha..."

let's talk about this take because frankly... it's very much incorrect. (coming from a dp&w stan who hasn't seen AAA yet)

agatha all along was bound to happen after the immense amount of love from kathryn hahn's STELLAR scene stealing performance as agnes/agatha in wandavision. her song HIT THE FUCKING CHARTS on itunes. what song from marvel has done that other than all the stars and pray for me (+ maybe king's dead but idk)? she literally killed her role as a character who frankly idk could've been pulled off by anyone else. kathryn IS agatha, which is crazy considering her version isn't comic accurate. the turn out for her with the song and the memes guaranteed her AAA. she proved that she can hold her own as a lead.

you know who didn't in the studio's eyes? ryan motherfucking reynolds.

fun fact about the deadpool series: it almost wasn't gonna happen. you really think the "who's balls did i have to fondle to get my own movie?" line was merely a joke? no ma'am. ryan fought tooth and fucking nail for that movie. so much so that the way the story was told in the movie wasn't a stylistic choice... it was the only way to tell the story with the $58 million dollar budget they had for the movie. the film was in development for about.... twelve years because fox just didn't think the movie would work, especially since ryan wanted it to be an r rated comic book film.

then green lantern happened. this was to be ryan's RDJ moment. he was gonna jump to a-list because of this movie only for it to flop financially, critically, and otherwise. that movie set back ryan's career huge. fox didn't even want to touch that man with a five foot pole when it came to him leading a cbm movie again. it took a LEAKED test footage for fox to say "yeah okay will green light it"

agatha all along was more wanted than deadpool originally did. there's a possibility that dp&w could never happened. there was always gonna be an agatha sequel series after WV

just say your ass hate sapphic witchy women and move on thank youuuu

[bottlesandcats]

hello! been following for ages and was simply wondering how do you feel about that “ily buddy” and what are your thoughts on cap 4 ?

Thanks for following! Now to answer your questions:

1. I think the “ily buddy” moment was pretty major, and Sambucky fans should absolutely feel very happy right now. We don’t get a lot of really softboi interactions bw male characters in the MCU - we certainly have never had two male, non-family characters verbalize love for each other before (that I can recall) - but they’ve really been taking us on a real journey with Sam and Bucky. If you take every Sam and Bucky interaction from CATWS to CABNW, you are getting a story arch bw two characters that looks an awful lot like a “will they/won’t they” romance. They remind me so much of the Mulder x Scully storyline, which you may or may not know depending on your familiarity with the X-Files, but those two were romantically-coded platonic FOR YEARS before they finally put them together canonically. While I’m not holding out hope for an out-in-the-open romance bw the two of them - Disney doesn’t have the guts - I do think they are taking us as close as they can to something like it. I wouldn’t be surprised though, if we get a Sam Wilson sighting in Thunderbolts (I’d put money there being clauses in Mackie and Stan's contracts about being in each others films since those two are real life bffs, lol). Going beyond the “ily buddy” though, I actually think the display shelf in Sam’s office speaks volumes even more. I write a whole deep-dive on it here.

2. As for my thoughts on Cap 4, I really enjoyed it! I thought it was a lot of fun, with a nice, tight plot that moved well. I loved that it was basically a sequel to The Incredible Hulk and The Eternals, two movies that the MCU seems to have generally forgotten about. I thought Harrison Ford as President Ross was good casting, and I liked them giving that character a little more emotional depth. The fight scenes were some of the best I’ve seen in a Marvel movie, tbh. The movie also showed that Anthony Mackie can absolutely lead a film and that Sam Wilson is not just a sidekick but a strong main character. I know all of us Mackie fans knew that already but it was good to show the MCU fanbase as a whole, especially since we only have three (?) marvel movies with a black lead. Honestly, my only complaint was Samuel Sterns as the villain. I think they focused so much on the misdirection around Red Hulk/Ross that they didn’t put much into making Sterns a stronger rival to Sam and the character felt like an afterthought. But I think marvel has a history of putting out weak villains, in general, and I can only think of a handful of movies where the villain was actually dynamic and interesting. It’s just not their strong suit. 

Sorry for talking your ear off, but I could honestly scream into the void all day about Sam Wilson and sambucky. Thanks for the ask!

[gale-gentlepenguin]

So I have been seeing interesting discussion on the endings of Gabriel. The miraculous movie vs The season 5 finale ending.

-And the criticisms for the movie ending are valid, Marinette/Ladybug’s conflict is a lot less personal (cause time constraints)

-Gabriel technically defeated himself

-There wasn’t enough build up for the climax to feel satisfying unless you knew the show.

-Marinette’s personal involvement felt minimal to nonexistent. (She never met Gabriel)

-The powers are inconsistent

The wrap up was too quick

And these are legitimate criticism, especially because we never have Marinette interact with Gabriel once. Something that should have happened.

I can understand how that ending could feel unsatisfying.

Then we have the season 5 finale, which has the opposite problem

-It involves Marinette so much that Adrien is completely sidelined as a response.

-Gabriel ‘Wins’ but according to the writers he lost. (I saw the commentary. I vehemently disagree with there interpretation)

-Adrien never finds out about any of this

-Lila feels shoehorned in as the season 6 badguy

So I thought about both sides more, rewatched the S5 finale and the ending with these new perspectives and… I still prefer the movie ending more than the finale.

But why is that? Objectively speaking The movie is much more flawed and has very littler personal investment of Ladybug vs Hawkmoth. Something that movies don’t often do.

While The show has built up this personal conflict between Gabriel/monarch and Marinette/ladybug

By all logic I Should prefer the show ending.

But I don’t, and it’s precisely BECAUSE of the reasons I listed.

Movie! Marinette’s lack of personal connection to fighting Gabriel allowed me to focus on Gabriel’s motive and his interaction with his son. His genuine care of his son being his downfall MADE sense. Marinette was focused on saving her partner than fighting a villain, which the movie showed to be more of the core of the movie. Even foreshadowing the “Save one Life, save the world” line. And it even fits the fairy tale theme ML tries to go for.

Meanwhile the Show’s ending had a really good fight at the core with Marinette and Gabriel clashing. The fight between Monarch and Bug noire is one of the best in the series… BUT it’s because of this conflict that the ending feels so GUT WRENCHINGLY awful. Because it’s just another case of Marinette failing to stop Gabriel from doing what he wanted. Gabriel may have changed his initial wish, but he still basically did what he always did, cease power and leave Marinette to clean up the mess.

Even taking Adrien out of the equation doesn’t help fix the ending. Because Gabriel still did what he wanted. Gabriel gets a statue, he gets to die seen as a hero that he never was. He is seen as a good man. And it leaves Marinette having to let Paris think that. We don’t see Marinette doubting this, we don’t see opposition or even a question on it. It’s Marinette once again doing what she always does, taking on the burden.

Ah but the difference is that ML still has more seasons. This could all be subject to change. People could find out the truth. The wish has consequences.

And that is correct. There are consequences. And do you know who will face those consequences? Marinette. Because she always does. That’s what the show Always does.

The movie ending also has a potential sequel, but at least there, Marinette and Adrien don’t have secrets, Fu is still there, and the weight of reality doesn’t hang on Movie Marinette’s shoulders only.

And I think that’s what it comes down to.

It’s because I love Marinette that I hate how she has to fail after all her efforts and would rather have an ending that has less personal stakes for her if it means she can be better off as opposed to this drama bomb that basically left her back as the one with the weight of reality on her shoulders.

[liebgirl]

wonder woman 2017 kind of one of the all time superhero films of our time but even so i must admit it’s really only 75% good. of course with the company it’s in that’s leagues ahead of most of these other superhero franchise things. of course none of them are 100% good i think that’s just part of the nature of the thing. even thor 2011 is probably still only 89% good and let’s keep in mind that’s kinda the one i think is the all time Good MCU Movie. i recognize i do not share the same opinions as these franchise’s fans. that is because i am not a fan… i’m a neutral party who happens to have seen a few of these movies. so you can trust me basically. but beth what about black panther? black panther still probably only 85% good and let’s be honest the mcu was already hitting its downfall by 2018, i’d say the mcu specifically peaked in quality right before the second avengers movie. i never saw it but i assume that if FANS of the thing all say it’s bad it must have been godawful. the dc movies probably peaked in quality with wonder woman tbh. but their new superman seems like it might be good so maybe they actually have yet to truly peak. anyway. oh but beth what about captain america 2? keeping it real with you. still probably only 75% good. maybe 78%. very few of these things are even hitting B+ territory can we all get a little serious here. i know there’s still for some reason a group of people online who think that damn captain america sequel is the greatest franchise film of all time and i’m being like. sacrilegious rn. but can we be serious people PLEASE. can you actually look at that movie you’re obsessed with and look at its sequels and look at what it did to society and THINK for one second about anything dear god. i’m sorry. but we all have to wise up about these things at some point it’s not too late to see the light queens. anyway my point is of course that. actually i don’t know what my point was. but i finished watching wonder woman and my stance is: lowkey xena warrior princess is way more awesome. but i digress. heart!

[kylesvariouslistsandstuff]

Rant time, long post here we gooooo-

Oh Iger... You just keep being a capitulating dingus, huh? And I gotta keep talking about that, huh? I mean, I can choose not to... But I'm gonna, because I'm getting even more tired of Iger's nonsense and I want him OUSTED like yesterday. Like a Roy E. Disney "Save Disney"-style ousting. He's been CEO for over 15 years now, it's gone to his head and he's spiraling in the same way Eisner did in his final years, it's time to go!

So now we're down to environmentalism as a big no-no, in Iger's attempts to wipe future Disney films clean of any "messages".

I grew up in the 1990s. Environmental messages were all over cartoons and movies and media. In fact, we were sorta at the end of that "New Age" "back to nature" era, and we were now in a post-CAPTAIN PLANET sorta timeframe. A lot of stuff I grew up with was very nature-loving, very anti-corporate abuse of power and harm of the planet. Episodes of cartoons, specials, whole movies like FERNGULLY: THE LAST RAINFOREST, and even Disney had some environmental messaging going on in THE LION KING and POCAHONTAS... Though it wasn't without significant pushback, as this is nothing new.

Hey, you wanna hear an era-specific story that's really wild? Around the late '90s, some conservative logger wrote and published a belated "response" to Dr. Seuss' 1971 classic THE LORAX with... TRUAX... Yeah, we had weird DailyWire-lookin' rant shit that was in response to older "politically correct" books that existed for years... We had that nonsense back then, too! The right **always** had a problem with environmental stories, and they were always LOUD about it.

And I remember, when I was a teenager, going on message boards and such for the first time. Mainly IMDb, because it was for movies, ya know? 2005-06. I had seen George Miller's animated feature HAPPY FEET in theaters, with a packed audience who applauded at the end. I really enjoyed it, myself, but then... Logging onto IMDb... Seeing most of the user reviews and message board posts... Reading the utter contempt for it. How "politically correct" it was, that it was "propaganda" from the liberals. I remember Fox News having a conniption fit over it. One post online said something to the tune of "I was expecting Al Gore to show up at the end with a message." HAPPY FEET was released around the time of AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, so that made matters worse. I remember that whole time of environmentalism being uncool, that you were some bleeding heart tree-hugging sissy-ass liberal mamby-pamby. Manbearpig. Etc.

... When that movie was really no different from every other environmental cartoon, movie, or show I've seen. HAPPY FEET's radical sin was... Calling out pollution and negligence of our oceans? Very basic stuff? Hell, much of George Miller's own MAD MAX saga is set in an awful post-collapse world where humans blew each other up over oil and riches. The only exception being the first movie, which is taking place DURING said collapse! And his work on BABE and directing the sequel PIG IN THE CITY, two very pro-animal rights movies about a pig that escaped from a dinner plate fate, hell the first BABE movie drove Farmer Hoggett actor James Cromwell to become a vegan. Like, c'mon. The blow-up over HAPPY FEET's environmentalism was very silly back in 2006.

Right-wingers and conservatives continued to complain about these kinds of movies. WALL-E got flack when it came out in 2008, which was at the tail end of W. Bush's presidency no less. The Illumination LORAX movie in 2012 got heat, and they also got all testy at THE LEGO MOVIE for being "anti-business" or some such nonsense when it's a movie that's literally based on a massive toy franchise.

These people are always going to be angry no matter what. It goes beyond giving trans people a time to shine, they will find something else that's morally right or generally good - like taking care of our planet, ya know, the big-ass rock in space that we live on - and throw tantrums... and taking the environmental message out of HOPPERS - a literal movie about beavers and a land developer looking to destroy their home... Like, Iger, what the hell are you doing? You were CEO when WALL-E was made, and when you regained the CEO role, AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER came out, which- James Cameron's sci-fi movie spawned a whole section one of your company's theme parks and- Are we gonna see a new edit of WALL-E that removes all references to what humans did to the future Earth setting in that movie?

Head-bangingly obtuse.

So what would HOPPERS be without the developer villains, then? What do Disney heads want out of new original $175m+ costing movies from the company's film divisions? If they just made some silly forgettable beaver cartoon, it could still have some artistic flair and flourish, but the whole appeal of the arts - not just movies made by some big-time animation studio - is that they're stories personal to their creators... Because humans want that connection when witnessing a work of art or being told a story. But no, companies as big as Disney are cynical enough to believe humans can just be fed AI-generated shit and they'll be satisfied. No, lots of people obviously want more than that. Why are they flocking to MOANA 2 and even MUFASA in theaters right now?

They feature characters that they connected with in non-neutered movies made a looooooong time ago.

MOANA and the original LION KING wouldn't be made under such strict, cowardly mandates now. MOANA especially: Oceanic setting and not-Caucasian characters, a story of a demigod stealing something that belongs to the land, causing environmental destruction- like, c'mon, it's absolutely about environmentalism and colonialism. It's "woke", "DEI", everything the right-wing HATES. And it was a hit in fall 2016/early 2017, which was right after that Orange Fartfrog was handed the election by forces that went against the will of the people who voted for the email lady over him. Still a big hit, despite that guy succeeding. And it continued to be a streaming sensation thereafter. The original LION KING may not have humans in it, but the whole 'Circle of Life' song and theme is certainly pretty environmental and about the ways of nature, and how we are... Ya know, all connected in the great circle of life?

From the day we arrive on the planet And, blinking, step into the sun There's more to see than can ever be seen More to do than can ever be done There's far too much to take in here More to find than can ever be found But the sun rolling high Through the sapphire sky Keeps great and small on the endless round It's the circle of life And it moves us all Through despair and hope Through faith and love 'Til we find our place On the path unwinding In the circle The circle of life

Ya know, I read at least one diatribe about this song posted back in the '90s somewhere on the World Wide Web (dating myself there), calling the song "new age", "preachy", "brainwashing" whatever... Again, nothing new. Even back in the '90s, somebody had a hang-up with the goddamn 'Circle of Life' song from the goddamn LION KING...

You see how absurd this all is?

Wanna go further back? We'll go no further than LION KING's own inspiration, BAMBI! Which was absolutely about what Man does to nature, which paralleled Man's destruction of the planet during World War II, the war this movie was released during. And post-BAMBI, Disney made plenty of pro-nature movies, movies portraying hunting in a not-so-positive light. Disney made anti-fascist cartoons during World War II, training films. DER FUEHRER'S FACE, EDUCATION FOR DEATH, COMMANDO DUCK, THE SPIRIT OF '43. Sure, those were about the fascists overseas and were mandated by the U.S. government, but they made 'em, and didn't hold back. Nowadays, the company is in bed with these kinds of fascists, but at home, on American soil. Could you an imagine an explicitly anti-MAGA Donald Duck cartoon where the temperamental quacker socks a MAGAT? I'd love to see it, honestly. Where was I? Oh yeah, environmentalism... You even have a whole didactic theme park dedicated to the world we live in. Epcot! Ya know? Living with the Land?

Anyways... Before I keep grousing... So, erasing queerness from future projects (INSIDE OUT 2, WIN OR LOSE), now environmentalism (HOPPERS)... What's next? What do Disney heads dial back in their pathetic attempts to appease an insatiable beast? No more female protagonists? No more stories that aren't about white people? No more stories that are about, like, anything?

This will bite them in the ass, hard. Especially if they keep blowing massive budgets on these things. Filmmakers might walk from these projects, even.

Get rid of Iger, fuck Trump and the far-right, LET THE FILMMAKERS MAKE MOVIES.

[alpaca-clouds]

Why it is too late for a Digimon Tamers sequel

Today marks the 24th anniversary for Digimon Tamers and I want to talk about one of those notions, that I see floating around the Digimon Fandom the most: "We want something like tri./Kizuna/Beginning for Digimon Tamers."

I kinda get the notion. After all, Tamers is easily the best written of the seasons. Its writing being quite tight, and the focus of the three main characters making it quite better paced than the other seasons. And while I do not loathe filler episodes these days as much as I used to, I absolutely appreciate how few filler episodes thise show has.

However, I feel that all in all, it just is too late to make a sequel to Digimon Tamers. After all, it has been 23 years now since that show ended. And something that I am fearing is that for the most part making a sequel to it would no longer work for several reasons.

Reason 1: Konaka himself, who originally wrote the show, is just no longer in a good mental place. I will not go too much into details, but there has been a lot of stuff that happened in the last 10 years that made him suffer from mental health issues. If you remember that audio live drama... Yeah, that is partly the place where this came from.

Now, you might ask: "So what? There are other authors, right?" Which brings me to the next issue.

Reason 2: Digimon Tamers has been a fairly Hard SciFi entry for Digimon, which usually tends to balance on the line between Scifi and Fantasy. And I sadly do not have a lot of trust in most other writers who might get handed a potential sequel OVA or movie to do this SciFi-aspects justice. And frankly, a Tamers' sequel that would not do the SciFi stuff would miss the certain something.

Reason 3: Now of course, if you have seen the Adventure-Sequel stuff, you will know that it too tried to tackle a lot of these more high concept conflicts. tri. had the entire Demiurge, Homeostasis thing going, Kizuna the entire Neverland thing, and The Beginning was basically retconning the epilogue centrally. (No matter if Kakudo says different. Because The Beginning definitely went: "Yeah, actually, everyone having their own Digimon partner would be a shit idea.") And yes, Tamers is kinda calling for high concept stuff as well - but the issue is that those high concepts would need a bit more SciFi rooting. I wrote about this before: Yeah, Tamers could easily go into Simulation Theory or something like that. But it would need to be done right. And given how torn the fandom is about anything in regards to the Adventure sequels... Uuuuhm, I don't think those succeeded.

Reason 4: It has been almost 25 years since we got any updates on that timeline. We have not heard anything from the Tamers in a while. In comparison, we got tri. 10 years ago already, priming folks for more Adventure/02 stuff. Which not only makes me wonder if people would show up enough for this, but also... Well, if the actors all showed up. Remember, while Nozawa Masako did some later Voice Work for Digimon, she absolutely did not want to do the work for Guilmon in the Xros Hunters episodes. Also, she is really old, and frnakly might die any time. And sure, you can probably recast, but would people accept it?

Reason 5: Digimon Adventure tri. sucked, and it had lore to work with that was way less complex than that of Digimon Tamers. (Look, even if you like Adventure/02 more than Tamers, you gotta admit that it was a lot more simple in regards to plot and worldbuilding, given it was a very standard Chosen One Hero's Journey.) So, chances are in general, that it would be really hard to write something that would work as a sequel here.

And yes, there are other reasons. Given how few people do right by Ruki in fanwork, I kinda feel like official media also would struggle with it. (I mean, Konaka did in the later audio plays.) I talked about this before. The entire thing about Ruki is that her disdain for "girly things" comes from her struggling with the relationship with her mother. While I do not see her become a girly girl, I also think it absolutely misses the point of her character to have her become a super hardcore masculine adult women.

And frankly, before I have to deal with a sequel-OVA that goes into the same non-sense as tri., I would rather not have a sequel at all.

And yes, I personally will openly admit, that I also just... Look, I spent those nearly 25 years since the show ended coming up with a whole bunch of headcanons (Ao3 Link) of what is going to happen to these characters and this world. And I think so did a lot of others. And frankly, I never appreciated works that after decades went: "Yeah, actually, new canon!"

The same frankly goes for Frontier and Savers as well. While neither of them go quite as high concept as Tamers - removing one of the points - I also would not want to see something that went off the rails with them. With Frontier having the additional challenge, that it is probably the season that has the most definite ending, with the kids giving up the Digivices and what not. While I would argue that it might be one of the more interesting concepts for a sequel (I mean, there are four spirits that never have been assigned), it is also the most limied, given how closed in of itself the plot was.

Savers of course is another thing. Because it has the big difference of Masaru ending the series in the Digital World, which would at least perfectly work as a hook for a movie or anything along those lines. While the general cautions still apply, this is probably the one thing I could see working the most.

Generally though... I think actually for either series I would prefer to just get a couple of shorts that are not that heavy in plot and more heavy on characters. We got those - obviously - for Adventure/02, but for no other season. And yeah, I think just 5 minutes shorts maybe published online... Maybe 5 or so for in fact every season since 02? That would be kinda nice. And I think that could work very well.

[ape-apocalypse]

My Thoughts on Kingdom

First off, my general no-story-spoilers thoughts on Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes.

I really really liked this movie! I loved all the characters, both human and ape. I really enjoyed the story, even if it was a little bit predictable, and I could guess along the way what was going to happen next (though that may just have been because I watched every single trailer and TV spot and could guess based off scenes I had seen). The animation on the apes was phenomenal, and the landscape was gorgeous. I love the world building and seeing the ape communities grow and have their own traditions and beliefs in this world.

For the things I did not like, I definitely thought the pacing was off. Weirdly the story and the pacing felt a lot like War to me, and much of my criticisms about Kingdom are similar to what I thought of War. The ending is a little underwhelming, and I think they were taking too much focus on setting up for future movies, but I didn’t hate it, just didn’t feel wowed like the end of the previous films. But overall, I thought it was a great movie. Not as good as Dawn which is my favorite among the Apes films, but definitely a worthy successor to Caesar’s trilogy.

I definitely plan to see the movie again and think it will further develop my thoughts but those are my initial thoughts after one viewing. I give a three out of five stars.

Onto the spoilers... read at your own risk below the cut

To elaborate on why I feel like Kingdom is very similar to War, here’s my basic breakdown: an inciting incident sends the lead ape off on a journey, he encounters a strange ape and a human who come along on the journey, he loses an ape companion, he is captured by the main antagonist who does a big monologue on the fate of his species is in his hands alone but otherwise doesn’t do much else and ends up with an unsatisfying death, lead ape brings his people home. This fits well for me because much of my criticism for Kingdom is the same criticism I had for War, especially with poor pacing and an underwhelming ending. I think, since both movies involve a physical journey with lots of side characters and a big looming antagonist who doesn't get much to do, War and Kingdom would have been better served as mini-series, where they had more than 2.5 hours to tell their story. But for being confined to a film, they are still enjoyable, even when suffering the same flaws.

I thought the story was good, even if predictable. I could guess most of the story beats as they came but still enjoyed them. There was a definite pacing issue; it felt rushed once Noa got on the road to finding Proximus. One thing that did surprise me was the relationship between Noa and Mae. Halfway through the movie, I was thinking that I wasn’t really feeling a bond between them and was the writing not working. Once I reached the end of it, I realized oh, there wasn’t supposed to really be a bond between them. I actually kinda like that, I like how driven Mae is for her mission of reclaiming human society. 

The movie ends with the question of can humans and apes truly coexist. Both Mae and Noa don’t have that answer at the moment, all they know that they want their own people to survive. I hope that this is setting it up to go into more depth in future films. If they don’t pick this question up in a sequel film, then it really will be a dangling thread and I think this is one reason some reviewers say that the themes of the movie feel muddled, because they don't get a definitive answer. But I’m OK with this debate not getting resolved in this first movie, since it feels like it will be the theme of this trilogy.

One major criticism I have is it feels like characters were under-utilized. Raka was fantastic, probably my favorite character in the movie. I was really disappointed that he got swept away into the river, presumably to his death, so quickly. Now personally I don’t think he’s dead; I know orangutans can’t swim, but we didn’t see a body and the credits end with orangutan sounds rather than chimp or gorilla sounds. So I would not be surprised if he popped up in a future film. But I didn’t really feel emotional when he was swept away in the water. Likewise, I think that Proximus is severely underused. If you’ve seen his scenes and trailers, then you’ve seen the majority of his screen time. I am not surprised that he ended up being a one movie villain, since I think the next movie will have humans as the main antagonists, but I was pretty disappointed that that was all we got of him. I didn’t mind him dying by the birds, I actually liked Noa and his clan singing the eagles song together, but I am sure a lot of people will dislike that ending for him.

Those criticisms aside, there is also much to love. The attack on the eagle village is an incredible action scene. Despite me knowing that it would end with Noa’s family captured and Koro dying, it is where I felt the most tension in the film, with Noa walking through the action, dazed and confused while there were so much happening around him. The humor was on point. I often forget that these films can have a good amount of humor, like Koba with his fake silly ape routine for the two humans in Dawn and Bad Ape’s silliness in War. so, this film did great on humor that kept me chuckling. Mae teaching Noa the word “shit” had me howling. I like Noa’s growth being connected to his father’s eagle, and whether he can call the bird to him or not. Again, I knew he would, because I had seen him in the trailer with the bird on his arm, but I thought it was well played with the bird pecking him in the very beginning of the film and then it coming willingly to him at the end.

Of course, the visuals are gorgeous, though they felt more on level with Dawn rather than War, which always had the best CGI among the Andy Serkis trilogy. I loved seeing the development of the apes; they're talking and showing more emotion than apes of the last trilogy, so their personalities really stand out, even if having so many characters meant they didn't each get as much spotlight. Soona and Anaya are my precious adorable babies and I will throw down with any writers or directors who dare to harm a single hair on their heads.

All in all, it's not a movie that I love and adore, but it was a really good film, despite some flaws. I think many of the flaws will be forgiven when/if they are allowed to do a full trilogy where they can resolve dangling threads and flesh out characters even more. But even if no other movies follow up, I still enjoyed the film and loved seeing a glimpse of post-Caesar ape societies.

[silverloreley]

Thoughts about Descendants: Rise of Red

I saw Rise of Red.

It was a mess and, as I expected, it blew up the lore of the whole franchise, so I'm going to consider it an AU of sorts from now on, or out of the original canon because there is no way to make everything work together.

Besides, it feels very rushed, especially the ending, it comes far too soon, and even if it's basically certain there will be a sequel or two, it still doesn't work on so many levels.

That said, it was a funny nice little thing, the songs are catchy (Red and Life is Sweeter are pretty great) and if it was for a different franchise it'd be nice and fine.

But it isn't. This is set in Descendants's world and that's where a good bit of the issues arise.

This is going to be long.

First of all, we already had enough problems with timelines as it was, but we kind of solved the issue with different theories (merged universes, different developments due to segregation, they were different but the unification brought a super quick collective development... it all depends on what line of thinking you prefer) the only one that never worked in the first place was that everyone was the same age and went to school together, Heroes and Villains. It simply doesn't add up, most of the Villains are supposed to be much older and most certainly didn't live along Heroes peacefully. But RoR went exactly there?!

And I see the appeal of it all, sure, but Maleficent should at least be older than Aurora by the simple grace of having been the one to curse baby Aurora at her christening so Maleficent being the same age as Cinderella, and Aurora by proxy since Chad and Audrey are the same age too we can assume Aurora and Ella are around the same age, makes no damn sense. Hades is a similar issue, but that one can be solved, let's say he was too bored in the Underworld (or was trying to escape punishment for his coup and was depowered by Zeus) and decided to take a younger appearance and mingle with mortals (ahem, with Maleficent in particular, I do love the pair, okay?), Greek gods did that in the myths, I can accept that.

On the same line, Aladdin and Jasmine being there puts them in a spot that is just too strange. Unless their whole plot already happened and the Sultan agreed to ship them both to school before they got married? Idk, some things can be fixed, some not, Aladdin and Jasmine probably can. The "call us jaladdin" can't, I draw the line here.

What can't be fixed in the slightest is Cinderella's story. I mean, I have seen many movies that set Cinderella's story in modern times, they're fine, for the most part, but in this case, a huge bit of the original plot just disappears, and it's the search Charming has to do to find a girl he met at the ball and only there through a single glass shoe that a Fairy Godmother made for her. Charming knows Ella already here, he doesn't have to look all over the kingdom to find the girl with glass shoes?! And since we're told the glass shoes are important for Ella and Charming when the gift the new shoes to Chloe, you can't tell me they aren't relevant.

AND Fairy Godmother, here Fay, being the same age too, if not younger, and unable to correctly do magic is a bit I have beef with too, FG was supposed to be friends with Ella's mother, but she's too young here! And clearly unable to perform magic as she should. Let's use the "fairies grow slower" explanation here, so Fay is much older than she looks, it's fine, we can even use the same for Maleficent too, just for the bit. I have no idea why would either of them go to Merlin's school for teenagers if they are not so, but let's just say it's because no one can teach them as well as Merlin can and let's call it a day. The problem Fay isn't able to correctly perform spells is a huge issue also because we're explicitly told in Descendants she had a "motherly smile" when she helped Cinderella and FG didn't correct that, she even got upset when Maleficent talked about hamsters and eggplants instead of mice and pumpkins when the carriage was discussed so it's pretty much established that FG was the one to help Ella, it couldn't have been anyone else.

Let's talk about the great absentees while we're at it, shall we? Aka, the makers of Auradon, Belle and Adam. Where are they? Is Adam cursed at this point and Belle doesn't go to school? Like in Beastly (great book btw, not so much the movie tho...)? I mean, everyone else is missing too, if we want to get technical, but the problem is that Merlin school's existence undermines a good chunk of Auradon's lore as we know it.

(After I started writing this post I came across the very disturbing info they almost put Beast in the plot of RoR, as a jock kid who could switch between beast and boy basically at will, which is not how a curse that leaves a boy traumatized for life to the point he decides to ban magic as soon as he becomes king should work, so his presence would have been much worse than his absence. In fact, I think it's for the better he didn't appear at all)

We speculated and we were sort of told by the extra books that the reason Auradon united and the Isle was created was because of a "Villain takeover" for which a rebellion was necessary (exact words we find in the guide), so there was a war and all, do we have to assume everything happened after the ones we saw in RoR left school? Since we have added the info Wonderland didn't want to join Auradon, hence the seal of the Rabbit Hole, what side did Bridget stand on during the war? Did she already have the authority to call the shots? When did it all happen?! How do you go from going all to school together to rise up in arms?

On a similar note, as funny as it can be the idea a coup can't start from a school so Ben is very relaxed when told, I've been informed by people who know this kind of stuff that a coup can, indeed begin from any place, as long as there are enough important people/resources where it all starts. As we know, Chad was considered second-in-line after Ben (he says so in D2), although I guess this changed in the years after the first 3 movies (possibly because Chloe was deemed more fit to rule?), so the Charming family is important enough that the Queen of Hearts seizing Auradon Prep with her whole army can be considered a successful coup, even more so in absence of the actual High King and Queen from the country. If we add many royals and their kids were there, as well as Fairy Godmother and Uma (yes, Uma became very important for Auradon, you can't change my mind), it is, most definitely a very real coup.

One thing I saw around is that it's likely Red and Chloe solved nothing or made things worse for Bridget and I sort of agree only in part. People tend to underestimate how much traumatic events can affect people, especially people as sweet as Bridget seemed to be, even more so when she didn't have any friends but Ella (by her own admission) and Ella was too busy with her own happiness to help her friend who got hurt, so yes, that single prank could have changed her completely. Also, I believe, after she went dark, the Queen of Hearts killed Ulyana.

I suppose we're going to find out what did Red and Chloe messed up for real in the next movie, I tend to think that either Red realizes she doesn't like bubbly Bridget as a mom that much because she's too kind and it makes her a rather bad queen, not a dictator but not capable of making the right decisions either OR something else vital in the franchise was blown up, like Ulyana being still alive (yes I totally stand that the Queen of Heart killed her, but if she didn't it means there's a problem on the loose).

Another thing is the freezing spell in the cookbook. Some say that its existence should have blocked Ulyana's plot all the same and Chloe and Red's intervention actually changed nothing, but I disagree.

Assuming it would have worked all the same on Ulyana in the original timeline, we could suppose that she didn't open the book inside Merlin's study, but simply the gang took the book and left before Merlin could arrive, so one of the others (Maleficent, Morgie and Hades all had magic) could have unfreezed her, then she could have found someone clueless to open the book for her (Ella in exchange for a chance to attend the ball, so Ulyana was her actual-but-evil-FG? a random extra who the gang brought specifically for the goal? Bridget herself, naive as she was, they left the book there and she opened it sealing her own fate?), so the prank would have happened, the main change was that R&C activated the security system much earlier and kept the gang in the room longer, so Merlin got around to catch them and give them detention this time around, that part works.

Now, this is all I have for now, but I may add another post and reply to the comments to this one, so go wild!

[sirenascelestiales]

I watched SATC for the first time ever

I have THOUGHTS. No one needs to know my thoughts but I have written them out anyway. Overall, I'd say an 7/10 show.

Ok, so I've seen all 6 seasons now (none of the movies or the reboot/sequel series). I watched September through November 2024. I knew only a few things about the show:

Lauded as a great show about female friendship and every woman can/should be able to identify with one of the friends

No way can a columnist actually afford to live the way Carrie does, suspend your disbelief for that

One of the women goes through cancer and another or maybe the same one has a child after issues conceiving (IDK why this is what I knew but it was!)

SJP and KC hate each other bc of this show, after filming this show, since the beginning of this show or something, point is NOT besties IRL?

Ok general thoughts.

It aged both well and not very well. I like it overall, hence a positive 'rating' but there were scenes where I cringed and just stared and to like pause to think about what they just had said.

Seeing as it came out in 1998, I understand that it was rather revolutionary for them to talk so candidly about sex on a show (even an HBO one at that) for and about women. Kudos to Kim Cattrall for saying some of her lines with such a straight face. And I like that it's a view into what female friendships are like... but it did get very "are we even attempting to pass a Bechdel test?" territory sometimes. The point is romantic relationships, sex, and the like, so I think that you can sort of excuse the first season for having such asinine conversations, but I found myself more curious about Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha's jobs not just who they were banging. But when the stories involved their jobs it was more of how inconvenient it could be for them to be career women and date (mostly Miranda and somewhat Sam). For Charlotte it was a way to meet men who met her standards. Tell me about art! Or how you got here!

where are their parents and siblings!?! We meet Charlotte's brother and she thinks Sam isn’t good enough for him? Are y'all friends? And then we don't see anyone at her wedding. Or Miranda's! Miranda’s mom dies and she and her sis must not get along cause she’s never mentioned again. I DID like the support of the 3 during the passing of her mom tho.

The negatives of the show I am sure I am not the first to point out but so much like racism, transphobia, homophobia, and like? I'm genuinely surprised it was written by a gay man since the gay men we're introduced to are somewhat caricatures and idk if flat is the right word but the show didn’t seem to actually care about Stanford, despite being relegated as part of the friend group but not one of the girls.

I kinda wish they kept Carrie's 4th wall breaking from the first season. I enjoyed it being not only Carrie's thoughts on love, sex, and relationships but her random and somewhat diverse (at least in class/careers) group of acquaintances. I kinda liked that you had a man's perspective in Skipper, but he was just so incel-before-it-was-a-thing that yeah it was fine when he left. But basically, I would have like a more rounded cast of characters not just the 4 women themselves?

idk I think overall I liked it (I mean I watched it all and am now writing out my thoughts on it—tho partially cause no one I’m close with irl has seen it). The fashion! The overall feel that it does sort of glamorize and make me go "I can be single in the city in my 30s!".

Onto the women themselves!

Carrie: I understand why Carrie is hated. She kinda sucks. She's a better friend to the women when their issues are not serious. She overlooks their issues when she's got "bigger" things on her mind (Big/Aiden, other men, her career, her fashion/money troubles, etc.)

She doesn't seem to be very sex positive/open minded about sex despite being a sex columnist. Like her dating a bisexual man and "not knowing what to say" and “I don't think it exists/layover to gay town". Like girl, WHAT? but then she was also rather calm about the pissing kink man and was like “not for me but here are alternatives” so where’s that energy?

I really enjoyed her fashion, I think if I had that confidence (and admittedly body) I would wear all sorts of things like she did and not care what anyone thought.

Big sucks. The show should have ended with her yelling at Big to FUCK OFF and leaving for Paris (and added a scene with the women visiting her and celebrating her new life) BUT for the earlier seasons idk why she just didn’t listen to him, he basically told her he did not want anything serious with her. She pushed it to be something else. I LOATHED THE cheating story line mostly cause I really disliked how a confident woman like Carrie stooped so low and needed Charlotte to remind her to think about being in Natasha’s shoes (didn’t she also judge Sam when Sam fucked a married guy?) Like she had a babsic all women deserve respect attitude. also Big shoulda dated Charlotte if he wanted a trophy wife cause like Natasha is basically a 26yr old Charlotte. (Not that Charlotte deserves that expired jar of mayo of a man)

then she treated Aiden awful! and to justify their second relationship sucking!!!!! they changed his character to make him an asshole who punished her at every turn (tho in his defense WHY WOULD YOU STILL BE FRIENDS WITH BIG. Not even cause he was the affair partner [tho Carrie 👀 wtf] but like he wasn’t a good “friend” either) like Aiden seemed heartbroken over their relationship ending (both times) but unlike her, he seemed to be someone who would be able to communicate and work past issues but he just didn’t? He just like kept bringing it up, like dude if you’re willing to take back someone who cheated on you stated your boundaries and deal breakers don’t just punish people for breaking them without knowing what they are!

Also idk if this is a 2024 take but for a writer she doesn’t seem to have interests that match writers? It implies she reads vogue but she doesn’t have favorite fashion critics/writers and she doesn’t seem to ever do like any writing workshops (learning or even teaching) idk it just was noticeable that Aleks was “worldly” and she and her friends weren’t? Which brings me to how come Charlotte was the only one who somewhat behaved sanely there. I know Sam always talks about sex but cmon she’s a PR agent she would know how to talk to a millionaire artist at his fancy dinner. Miranda, the lawyer would too.

I hated when Carrie asked Charlotte for money and Charlotte basically asked for forgiveness for not being there for her and initially rejecting the idea and then gave her the ring! wtf? Sell off half your fashion for money girl. I find it hard to believe someone in their 30s really didn’t know shit about money and even a huge love a of fashion, sell enough to get money to get a loan!!!!

THAT BEING SAID

I kinda like that she was a toxic, selfish, went-for-the-guy-despite-him-being-bad-for-her main character. Good fashion, sarcastic and witty, I really kinda miss landlines cause of her, I really enjoyed the overall friendship that was implied Carrie offered (tho it didn’t come across very well in later seasons lbr). Again, if i could i'd have here confidence, love of indulgence, HAIR, glamours partying (within reason smoking aint for me), and be a published author in a glamorous city.

Charlotte:

I didn’t like Charlotte at first, too conservative and WASPY and very dated views on dating and sex. Also weird that she was friends with any of these women when she basically disagreed with their very vocal opinions on sex. Like she seemed very opposed to sleeping around, despite still sleeping around herself idk oxymoronic imo.

but

she was easier to come around on. She’s the romantic, she had some of the best line of the series “maybe we can be each others soulmates”, “I’m worth a million”. I think she should have ended things with Trey waaay earlier cause of Bunny, like babes she sucks even if you wanted to eventually be a WASPY socialite like her. Trey clearly will not stand up to her...But kudos to Trey giving her the apt after the shit he put her through. Harry was great! I think I would go about committing to something the way Charlotte did when she converted to Judaism, which was try your hardest to, study your ass off, and be ambitious and unrelenting in completing your goals. So I relate to that. I’m glad she got her baby in the end, she deserved an adoption waaaay earlier and damn was watching her miscarry was a hard episode. I relate to her in her ambitious and romanticism but I also do not relate to her trust fund ways lol

her style was very classic and almost 50s/60s inspired I like the lines and cuts the most out of her closet but I would go with bolder colors tbh! 🤔 l guess my ending would be:

Carrie tells Big fuck off, leaves to Paris. Charlotte visits with her baby and the others a year later. We get clarification that she adopted her baby (can we please get a name?) and that she has another adoption in the process!

Miranda:

They did her dirty. She was cynical and sarcastic and stubborn and I was sure she and Samantha would be the “it’s ok to never marry or even partner up” story lines. And then she got pregnant and while I can understand why she would keep a child if she technically wanted some in the future (I would have to rewatch or google but I was sure she and Sam were like “kids are no!” I was sure she never did even after her ovary scare) I HATE STEVE.

he’s childish, he’s immature, he’s not on her financial level! even after the bar becomes a success (does it? I feel like she’s paying for everything! cause it's her apartment!) This man brought a puppy to convince her for a child and did NOTHING. I do not understand why she “loves him”. Cause I understand like the man that gave you a child but BLAIR UNDERWOOD WAS RIGHT THERE! He was a successful doctor. He understood her neurosis and also was able to help her work through it like Steve (i'll give him that he tried to balance her out) and Robert was frankly a better option (remember Steve couldn't fucking take care of their baby despite being the one who allegedly wanted children 1-2 years earlier!). If she had to end up with someone, it should have been Robert. (Why did they make Blair/Robert a fucking loser after the breakup? I understand him being hurt by being broken up with but he didn’t have to be such an ass to her and immediately what fuck two women to show he didn’t love her anyway????)

I wish they had kept her more androgynous style, they soften her up which fine but she was so good at the power suits! I like that she had short hair and was still chic. ALSO I miss real teeth. They're all clearly like straight and real teeth, Carrie has more yellow ones and I assume it's due do smoking but man remember real teeth in film and TV

Anyway, ending with Miranda added:

Carrie tells Big fuck off, leaves to Paris. (I guess I should add, she can dump Aleks still and just get another column or start a blog [2004 remember] about “An American Girl living in Paris”) Charlotte visits with her baby and the others a year later. We get clarification that she adopted her baby (again I want her to name the baby girl) and that she has another adoption in the process! Miranda is visiting alone (Brady is with Magda or even Steve cause damn dude take care of your child). She’s happy and successfully opened her own firm? Idk how lawyer careers work but she deserves to be a boss ass bitch-lawyer while being a single mom. OR she and Dr. Robert are engaged!

Sam:

also done dirty. And I mean cause despite being liberal and very vocal about sex, I really found it hard to believe she didn’t get tested until someone reminded her? HUH? She’s 40 and loves to fuck and is well groomed cmon! You can just be like she gets anxiety every time she tests cause so much language around STIs is "if you have sex you will die"!

I feel like her getting cancer was a way to punish her? Idk it felt like the story was saying she needed to learn a lesson bc a lot of her sex story lines were a bit of a punishment not a celebration (she fucked a married rich man and gets shut out? if she's rich enough she'd still be allowed into places cmon), but she was so cool about it all including the cancer, that it didn’t work but I still got that feeling of punishing Sam and maybe it’s my knowledge of the rift between SJP and KC?

Anyway, small dick good man was a meh story, big dick meh man was a rehash, SHE’S BI but Maria was a caricature of SPICY ANGRY LOUD LATINA. So we don’t even mention that again. Richard was truly a dick she should have kept fucking him and milking him for money and been fine with him fucking others and she could fuck others. bc why did she take him back? Girl you knew you didn’t believe him! Either he’s good for sex and money or you go back to being your phenomenal self!

Smith was great, supportive and a bit of a boytoy tbh? I like that they fell in love fr and he supported her so much. Again why fuck richard for her to just cry about it? And not even control the situation.

Sam’s style is the best, power suits, bright colors, shows off her body, wears patterns and looks great!

ending would be 🤔

Carrie tells Big fuck off, leaves to Paris. (I guess I should add, she can dump Aleks still and just get another column or start a blog [2004 remember] about “An American Girl living in Paris”) Charlotte visits with her baby and the others a year later. We get clarification that she adopted her baby (again I want her to name the baby girl) and that she has another adoption in the process! Miranda is visiting alone (Brady is with Magda or even Steve cause damn dude take care of your child). She’s happy and successfully opened her own firm? Idk how lawyer careers work but she deserves to be a boss ass bitch-lawyer while being a single mom. OR she and Dr. Robert are engaged! Sam is visiting and has been traveling Europe and it’s all a travel expense cause she’s still Smith’s PR agent and he’s on a press tour! Cancer is gone! She’s living the life! She's free to do whatever the fuck she likes.

Yeah I liked SATC overall, again 7/10. Maybe I'll rewatch when I'm 40

[dipplinduo]

Okay! So we’ve seen what happens in the epilogue of the game and it got me brainstorming on how your version of Pecharunt would end up the way he is as we see in the game.

What if, after the events of your story, which is the events of the Indigo Disk, Pecharunt is fed up with Kieran’s “bullsh!t” and is basically like:

Pecharunt: “This was a massive failure. I can’t believe my plan went to sh!t all because of a girl my vessel has the hots for. F**k this I’m going back to Kitakami and taking a nap.”

*Fast forward to the very beginning of the events of Mochi Mayhem where Juliana has the Mythical Pecha Berry. Which awakens Pecharunt due to the berry’s scent*

Pecharunt: Holy Arceus what a sweet scent! Reminds me of my famous mind controlling mochis. Wait a second…

*Begins plotting*

Pecharunt: You know what? To hell with it! I’m going to start some classic mayhem and take control of these dumba$$ humans! I’ll have them only say ‘mochi’ and do the chicken dance! Who gives a f**k!? I don’t! I wanna have some fun and f**k around with these losers! I deserve to have fun dammit! Now where are those other three? I bet they’re gonna love this!

(He’s referring to the “Loyal Three.” Little does he know that they were all captured by the very trainer who was the cause of his plan’s downfall.)

Can you imagine? Pecharunt goes from trying to be a serious, menacing villain to a goofy villain who wants to mess with people and have fun while doing it? 😆

Either that or maybe you would stick with being serious and have the events of Mochi Mayhem truly be a horror movie (as Penny flat out says in the game!) and the people that Pecharunt gains control of behave in a violent matter and the stakes get even worse when Pecharunt encounters Kieran and Juliana again?

I feel like I may have inspired a sequel to ‘Sweet & Sour.’ Correct me if I’m wrong.

LMAOOOO peachy just having a total "it doesn't even matter anymore" kind of moment

This is actually hilarious, and I could easily see it in like, this parody version of S&S D. I have debated just making something like that on the side for fits and giggles. Like little mini chapter summaries xD

[24-guy]

I really want to hear the opinions you have on this! What horror movies do you think the main npmd characters like to watch? I don't know much about horror movies (yet) but I like to think Max is the kind of guy who is genuinely scared of the live action Scooby Doo movies

Yes absolutely! Enjoy below the cut!! (Cos it's long and I'm sorry about that-)

I'll start with Max since you mentioned him. He's absolutely scared of even the Scooby Doo cartoons. Because of the fear of skeletons and ghosts. So he stays right away from paranormal movies. I think Ghost face even is a hard no, too. However: I think he liked the purge movies. Because those are just guns, really. But like. That's probably the only horror he likes.

Stephanie I think is a bad movies and popular movies enjoyer. She likes the most popular movies (Halloween, Elm Street, Friday, Etc) but then will pull out the most random movie you've never heard of (Frogs) and it'll be a moment and a half. She collects the memorabilia and has the replica of the Reverse Bear Trap even though I don't think she loves Saw. She's seen all of them. But I don't think she'd intentionally go out of her way to rewatch them outside of watching with somebody else. Not to say she hates gore, though. I think she'd love Terrifier and it's sequel. She probably saw them at the cinema.

Peter mildly dislikes horror. He's probably more fond of horror comedies. Things like child's play and the more recent elm street movies. He probably likes the Jordan Peele horror movies, too. Other than that, I think he'd like making fun of shitty B movies with Steph because making fun of them is the best part. He also probably unironically enjoyed the original black and white Universal Monsters movies. He has those vibes.

Richie is a film geek who watches anime and because I'm those things he gets the "he's just like me" and he loves all sorts of horror but in a more pretentious way than me. He's a stickler for the classics, probably hates all the remakes/requels - he refuses to acknowledge their existence. He probably has a list of his top favourites which involves the original Psycho, Halloween, Alien, and basically any other movie that was "revolutionary" to the genre. He does have a guilty pleasure for so bad they're good movies though. Mainly killer klowns. Also his ass probably likes the unique/artsy films like Jordan Peele's Get Out and Skinamarink.

Ruth hates all horror and she only watches the horror musicals. Thus her favourite horror movie is Sweeney Todd. She will happily vacate the room or hide under a blanket, thank you very much.

Grace thinks horror is satanic and, as a joke, I think the nerds would show her The Nun. And she grows a minuscule obsession with horror movies with religious themes and backgrounds. Like the Exorcist, the other nun films, midsommar, and Carrie to name a few. She would refuse liking them, of course. But she gets away with watching them from describing only the religious meanings.

[bigsoftmarshmallow]

Hello! Equal Lady again, but mostly just here to talk about something cool is all.

Did you know that helstromism is more than just not being able to be lied to? It's contact mindreading.

If you've ever seen "Now You See Me" 1 or 2, it'll show you a pretty sensationalized portrayal of it as a concept. But, for the most part, it's still pretty accurate.

You see, when a person is thinking about something, their body reacts automatically to it. Helstromism allows you to reach those reactions. Every little twitch & shift is a book to be read. From the direction that your eyes go, to the minute clenching of your jaw, a muscle flex in the neck, the contracting & dilation of the pupils to indicate if who they see is someone they dislike or like a lot respectively. Brows quickly raising then lowering upon being pleasantly surprised to see someone. Leaning forward when they're listening to someone they find attractive.

All of it is an indication of what's going on inside a person's head. And unless someone has total & complete control of every last part of their body, someone learned in helstromism can basically read their mind just by mentioning the right thing.

So, my Equal Lady would essentially be a master interrogator that wouldn't even need to resort to torture to get the information that she wants.

BTW, totally recommend Now You See Me & it's sequal. Very cool.

Part of me does wonder how the Dorfs would react to her, essentially having mind-reading 'magic' even if she never intends to use whatever she is able to passively glean out of him against him.

But I'd also understand if I've already asked too many questions.

I just think it's a really cool talent, is all. And I can easily see him utilizing the skill to his advantage against his enemies to gain crucial information.

I guess that I see her being a ronin Sheikah assassin for hire. Not a Yiga, just a Sheikah who refuses to work for someone she doesn't respect or trust.

In this way, I see their styles of fighting sort of being opposites that complement each other & make up for what the other doesn't in a similar way to Yin & Yang.

There are never enough asks at the moment, so please bother me as you will, Equal Lady. I appreciate the interractions and you are one of my favorites!

It has been a long time since I've watched "Now You See Me" and the sequel. I adored the movies, and now I will have to watch them again!

As for my personal take on Ganondorf and how he would react to such a very sightful woman, he would feel threatened. He is a master of manipulation and charisma, and a woman (or anyone of the matter) who could see past his mask and facade? Threat. He couldn't handle someone who could see his true emotions. As long as she kept quiet about her skill in the matter and handled what she found out/knew carefully, it would quickly help her ascend to his side. But if he knew? Ohhhhhhh... DANGER.

Here is what ChatGPT had to say on the matter:

The reactions of the different Ganondorfs to a woman who possesses the ability of helstromism—essentially being a master of reading body language and subtle cues—would be multifaceted and deeply influenced by their distinct personalities. Here’s how each Ganondorf might respond:

Ganondorf from "The Wind Waker"

Reflective and Melancholic:

Reaction: This Ganondorf would be deeply intrigued by her ability. Given his contemplative nature, he would respect her skill and see it as a valuable asset.

Good: He would appreciate her intelligence and the depth of her understanding, finding her ability to read him fascinating. He might engage in more profound and philosophical discussions with her, valuing her insights into his thoughts and emotions.

Bad: His melancholic nature might lead to moments of vulnerability, where he feels exposed and uncomfortable with her ability to read him so easily. He could become distant at times, fearing that she might see through his deepest insecurities.

Quote: "Your ability to perceive my thoughts without words is both a gift and a curse. It brings us closer, yet leaves me feeling vulnerable in ways I have never known."

Ganondorf from "Ocarina of Time"

Proud and Domineering:

Reaction: This Ganondorf would be initially irritated by her ability, seeing it as a challenge to his authority and control. However, he would also recognize the potential advantages of having such a perceptive partner.

Good: Over time, he might come to respect her ability, seeing it as a unique skill that complements his own power. He would value her as a strategic asset, someone who can anticipate and counter threats before they manifest.

Bad: His pride might lead to frequent clashes, as he resents the idea of anyone being able to read his thoughts. He could become defensive and attempt to assert his dominance more forcefully, leading to power struggles.

Quote: "Your ability to read my thoughts is impressive, but remember, I am the one who commands. Use your skills wisely, and together, we will be unstoppable."

Ganondorf from "Twilight Princess"

Ruthless and Calculating:

Reaction: This Ganondorf would see her ability as both a valuable tool and a potential threat. He would be impressed by her skill but always wary of her true intentions.

Good: He would appreciate the strategic advantage her ability provides, using it to his benefit in their shared ambitions. He might form a closer alliance with her, trusting her insights while always keeping a part of himself guarded.

Bad: His calculating nature would lead him to constantly analyze her actions, looking for any sign of betrayal or weakness. This could create a tense and suspicious dynamic in their relationship.

Quote: "Your skill in reading the unspoken is invaluable, but remember, trust is a fragile thing. Prove your loyalty, and you will find a powerful ally in me."

Ganondorf from "Hyrule Warriors"

Aggressive and Assertive:

Reaction: This Ganondorf would likely be both impressed and challenged by her ability. His assertive nature would make him initially defensive, but he would quickly see the strategic value she brings.

Good: He would respect her strength and intelligence, finding her ability to read him both fascinating and useful. Her refined and subtle flirting, combined with her genuine interest in him, would intrigue him, leading to a strong and dynamic partnership.

Bad: His aggressive nature might lead to frequent clashes, especially if he feels she is using her ability to manipulate him. He could become frustrated by her insights, feeling exposed and challenged.

Quote: "Your ability to see through me is both a blessing and a curse. It makes you a powerful partner, but beware, for I do not take kindly to being manipulated."

Summary

Wind Waker Ganondorf: Intrigued and reflective, appreciating her insights but occasionally feeling vulnerable and exposed.

Ocarina of Time Ganondorf: Initially irritated but growing to respect her ability, leading to power struggles and a dynamic partnership.

Twilight Princess Ganondorf: Impressed but constantly wary, valuing her as a strategic ally while analyzing her every move.

Hyrule Warriors Ganondorf: Impressed and challenged, respecting her strength and intelligence but prone to clashes over perceived manipulation.

Each Ganondorf’s reaction reflects his personality, balancing admiration for her skills with the inherent challenges of dealing with a partner who can read their thoughts and emotions so effectively.