#DAMN YOU WHEDON

[bumblebeebats]

One thing that I really admire in long-form storytelling is when the writers/showrunners/etc. aren't afraid to make Big and Permanent Changes. There are so many series that I've eventually fallen out of love with simply because everything stays the SAME - no one ages, no one dies, no character arcs feel like they're ever really resolved. Sure, maybe shit gets shaken up for an arc or two, but eventually everything returns to the status quo. It feels like being fed the same dish over and over again; you liked this in S1, so surely you want the exact same thing now in S7???

And like, I can SEE where it's coming from. A story is a huge and finely-tuned machine, and it takes guts to just throw a wrench in the works, especially if your audience loved it the way it was to begin with. Any change, even the good kind (going off to college! Getting that job you wanted!) comes with grief. (What about your family - your friends - that old corner store across from your house with the ice cream you loved? That one coworker who you were kind-of-sort-of buddies with, but not enough to properly stay in touch?) But that's just life. And that's why I feel like I connect far more with stories that actually evolve, and show their characters evolving with them. Your mother dies. Your best friend loses their magic. You lose your sword arm. Your home burns down. None of it is coming back. The old times were good - but the new times can be good too, in a different way.

[orionsangel86]

I watched X-Men 2000 tonight. Yup the Deadpool and Wolverine brain worms got me - at least for a little while - so I figured I'd rewatch the old movies that I havent seen in over a decade and have basically forgotten entirely at this point.

You know what really stunned me? Even more than the slow pace, serious tone, actual dedication to telling a coherent and interesting story with layers of meaning and social commentary attached to it, as well as a sincerity that's been missing from most superhero films since the MCU was born (thanks Josh Whedon).

Nope, what shocked me most was this:

This is a perfect specimen of a man. Look at him. He's gorgeous. But look at his chest? His arms? He's muscular, he's pretty well toned, he's hairy. He's definitely got a six pack - but it's nicely covered by a healthy layer of fat. His skin is plump, he has a bit of squish to him. He'd probably be great to hug (Jean Grey certainly gives him a good squeeze lol).

When he sits down he looks like his stomach will roll just nicely. Like a stomach should.

I know my point here is obvious. It's just that scrolling the Deadpool and Wolvering tag is basically 50% "oh they definitely fucked in the Honda Odyssey" (yes lol) and the other 50% is just horny posting over Wolverine's topless scene like the entire site suddenly adopted Deadpools horny brain.

I gotta give props to Hugh Jackman for his dedication to turn himself into an actual comic book character - because that's what this new movie does. It gives us a comic accurate Wolverine in practically every way (except for his height lol) the suit is amazing, the cowl was a joy to see brought into live action. The body too though was straight out of a comic book artists male power fantasy.

What I wanted to emphasise was that this:

Is extremely tough on the human body. What I wanna know is how long he starved and dehydrated himself for before filming this scene? How long before they shot this did he last drink some water? Because damn that must have been tough. The oil and the lighting probably help further emphasise the muscle, vein, and sinew definition. It's probably similar to how body builders prepare before a show.

Nothing about body building is healthy though. So in the coming weeks as the whole entertainment industry rides on the coat tales of this movies success, and everyone goes crazy over Hugh Jackmans physique, please don't feel pressured into thinking that his 2024 physique in the movie is remotely realistic - or realistically attractive. Like I get the fantasy sure, but come on. I'd personally rather lie on a cushioned bed than a concrete floor.

Deadpool may disagree with me, but he's a masochist lol.

Oh and whilst I stand by the shade I threw at the MCU above, I think Wolverine's different physiques in the movies is a good standard of comparison for how much superhero movies have changed. Because when superhero comics first started getting adapted I think a lot of the choices made were about how to bring them to live action realistically and believably and the attitude was to try not to make them look ridiculous. The first X-Men movies definitely do this.

It was about bringing the comics to life in a way that fit in our world. But over the years, as audiences got more and more used to comic book movies the movies became more and more like comic books and less like a realistic adaptation of a comic book. Does that make sense? So as the movies attempted to bring the comics to life in a way that was less realistic and more comic accurate, the demands on the actors to sculpt their physiques to meet the standards of comic book art became normalised.

I think Deadpool and Wolverine is the MOST comic book accurate of all superhero movies made in the past 2 decades. Half the time the images from the movie look like they could be literally pulled from the pages of the comic books. The story is convoluted and stupid, the plot is barely there and is full of gaping plot holes and elements that don't fit any past stories. The action is ridiculous, extremely fast paced, gratuitous, and violent to a hilarious level. But it's so entertaining, joyful, exciting, and laugh out loud hilarious throughout.

It reminded me a LOT of my attempts at reading through the Deadpool comics (I've read a lot of them but no where near all of them).

To sum up this rambling message with multiple points, I'll say that Deadpool and Wolverine is a really fun movie that I thoroughly enjoyed, but make no mistake there is nothing real in it at all. It is almost literally a comic on screen. Don't expect anything more than that and you'll enjoy the experience.

[billdecker]

✨ a film for every year of my life ✨ | The Avengers (2012) dir. Joss Whedon

There's no throne. There is no version of this where you come out on top. Maybe your army comes and maybe it's too much for us but it's all on you. Because if we can't protect the Earth, you can be damned well sure we'll avenge it.

[creulsummer]

“You're missing the point. There's no throne, okay? There is no version of this where you come out on top. Now maybe your army comes, and maybe it's too much for us, but it's all on you. Because if we can't protect the Earth, you can be damn well sure we'll avenge it.”

The Avengers (2012) Dir. Joss Whedon

[dr-spectre]

After 19 years, they finally let Shadow use a gun again.

Let's. Fucking. GOOOOOOO!!!!!!! WOOHOOO!!!!!

Im gonna be for real with you guys, I'm cautiously optimistic about this movie. Because on one hand, everything to do with Shadow and Adventure 2 looks absolutely spectacular and everything i wanna see out of an adaptation of an IP that I hold near and dear.

But.... when this blue fucker talks... UGH.

"Somebody better call Google Maps."

"Konichi-whaaaaat?"

"Trickshot!"

"Dude... I'm standing right here."

"Okay he took us all at once."

SHUT UP!!!!! GOD JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!!! SONIC DOESN'T TALK LIKE THIS!!!! HE NEVER DID!!! CAN YOU STOPPPP!!!! Sonic is a guy who knows when to take shit seriously but always has a feeling of fun around him. He's like "aww yeah bring it on! Let's go!" He's not making references to fucking god damn google maps or olive garden.

"But it's an adaptation and they are gonna make changes." And I think those changes fucking suck and movie Sonic feels barely anything like game Sonic. Movie Tails is fine, movie Knuckles is okay and it's clear that they mixed in a lot of different elements across his appearances into a single character, movie Eggman is good because it's fucking Jim Carrey, and movie Shadow looks absolutely phenomenonal... but Sonic? No man... nuh uh...

Knuckles is written perfectly decently and I liked the Detective Pikachu joke because it sorta makes sense and fits because they are in Japan and Tails is a fluffy yellow creature. But everything to do with Sonic is just... no. Stop. Enough. God damn.

Im not saying Sonic can't have fun and can't make jokes, I'm just saying that they need to handle it better, because one of my least favourite things in media is when you have something with a lot of emotions and personal stuff that's so intriguing and interesting, and it gets undermined and trampled over by awful jokes.

It's like this movie is being written by two different writing teams, one team that loves Sonic and the Adventure titles, and another team who's just a bunch of Hollywood writers that have been fed a diet of mediocre action comedy movies and Joss Whedon movies.

I really wanna fully love what I'm seeing here, but I can't ignore the blue stain that's bringing it down....

Im also really worried about what they are gonna do with Gerald Robotnik but I have a feeling that Eggman is slowly gonna realise that Gerald is more crazy than he first thought and that there's gonna be a twist in the movie. There HAS to be one and we're gonna see the insane Gerald we know from SA2, right?.... RIGHT?!??!! I HOPE SO!!! OR ELSE IM GONNA GET REALLY MAD!

Sorry if I seem negative, I'm just voicing my opinions and i don't want others to get swept up in the hype and think that this movie is gonna be a masterpiece and have their thoughts muffled. Because this movie won't be a masterpiece, no movie can be.

Im not saying that if you are excited for this movie then you're a dummy, fuck no, IM EXCITED TOO!!! I GREW UP WITH THE BLUE RAT! IM A LONG TIME FAN!! BUT IM ALSO REALLY NERVOUS!!

All I'm hoping for is that I walk out of the theatre and I feel satisfied and happy. I dont wanna feel mixed, I don't wanna feel like my time has been wasted, I wanna feel like this movie is fucking great. And I'm praying with all of my damn heart that it is.

[pooslie]

Post gifs of your 10 favourite TV shows without naming them

@ellebeesknees sent out a tagged free for all, so...

(Couldn't find a gif for this one)

Tagging everyone who wants to get excited and share their favourite shows!

[peppermintquartz]

man, if tumblr had been around during season 6 of Buffy... (spoiler under cut)

and whedon put amber benson into the opening credits and killed her character off IN THE SAME EPISODE

i guaran-damn-tee you the site would have exploded.

[tainbocuailnge]

i think ive mentioned this before but something that I keep running into with replaying the game in german is that i was often remembering the english version as like, more thematically coherent than it was. so people will remember drk as being very good because they're like remembering the shadow on the wall of a single person getting angry on your behalf and of running yourself so ragged that your own self preservation instinct has to step in and remind you saving everyone includes yourself, and then you actually read it again and it's like damn do you really have to talk like that? but it's not just with drk even though that's got some of the biggest differences i keep running into scenes all over the game where it feels like the english translators weren't aware that something was a theme so they end up de-emphasising various elements that were supporting that theme. and it's very often that this de-emphasis comes paired with presenting wol as uniquely tortured and special, as opposed to ultimately just one of many people trying to do the right thing, which is part of a larger pattern of being scared to let characters be motivated by genuine complex emotion instead of being gruff and cool. and that's setting aside how much they hate women. calling (the english version of) dark knight very american in ideology is almost too on the nose but it really is a very succinct way to put it. and again having seen john crow speak on panels and knowing he did the english translation for drk it's really not surprising that the guy who talks like a joss whedon character would be overemphasising how cool and edgy and tortured dark knights are at the cost of most of the emotional sincerity.

[litcityblues]

I'll Never Forgive Netflix For This

They canceled Kaos after one season.

Now, to be fair, we had been evaluating the number of streaming services we paid for and were planning on canceling Netflix already, so I can't honestly tell you, dear reader, that our decision to cancel Netflix was solely based on the fact that they canceled Kaos after one season, but it sure as shit didn't convince me to stay.

I get that people have feelings about Joss Whedon these days, but not since Fox canceled Firefly have I been this outraged at a decision to cancel a show. I don't know- as it seems like streaming services cancel shows left and right these days, but man when Hollywood is struggling and the firehouse of streaming content is delivering way more quantity than quality, I don't get how you dump a show this damn good!

It doesn't help that I am a mythology nerd. I devoured old Penguin classics on 'Heroes and Legends of Greek Mythology', and I read The Illiad and The Odyssey (multiple versions, but the Emily Wilson translation of The Odyssey is gorgeous-- her translation of The Illiad is on my shelf now) at an absurdly young age. This shit is my jam. I love this. If you are making a movie or a television show about mythology, I'm going to judge the fuck out of it.

(Parenthetical Time: Disney's Hercules is an abomination and I loathe it. Hades was never the bad guy. Troy with Brad Pitt was god-awful, but Troy: Fall of A City on Netflix was an incredibly good adaptation of The Illiad. I know everyone just loves Hercules The Legendary Journeys and Kevin Sorbo these days, but that show also did a really great job with the mythology of it all. Also, shout out to Madeline Miller for The Song of Achilles and Circe, both incredible, amazing books.)

All of that being said: Kaos was the best modern adaptation of Greek mythology that I have ever seen and unforgivably, they ended this show on one hell of a cliffhanger.

The story opens with Zeus (Jeff Goldblum in a bit of serendipitously perfect casting) ruling over a modern Greek world, where mortals are expected to pay frequent homage to him. An Olympia Day monument is vandalized in Krete and he becomes convinced that people are not paying him sufficient respect. He notices a small wrinkle and suspects that's aging (something that shouldn't happen to an immortal) and worries that it represents a line from a prophecy he was given by the Fates.

Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan) visits, hoping for more divine responsibilities, and when Zeus rebuffs him and Hera (Janet McTeer) sneers at him, he leaves, but not before stealing Zeus' watch. Zeus goes so far as to summon Prometheus (Stephen Dillane) to seek assurance that his prophecy will not come to pass.

Meanwhile, the mortal Eurydice (Aurora Perrineau) meets Cassandra (Billie Piper) who tells her that today is the day she will leave her husband Orpheus (Killian Scott) because she has fallen out of love with him. She goes to visit her mother, a Tacita Priestess of Hera's (Michelle Greenidge) who reminds her of her prophecy. It's the same as Zeus', which shouldn't be possible, but on her way home, she's hit by a semi and killed. A heartbroken Orpheus tries to commit suicide to follow her to the underworld, but Dionysus tells him there's a way for the two of them to be reunited again.

And from there, this show takes off! We find out about Ari and King Minos, and what happened to her brother Glaucus. The Trojans are here too-- refugees from the fall of their city. Riddy thinks she can pass through The Frame in the underworld, only to find that she can't, because Orpheus stole her coin and she's got to work 200 years before she can pass through and be Renewed. She meets Caeneus who, as it turns out, has the same prophecy as her and Zeus, and little by little, we find out that Prometheus has waited patiently for a chance to take down Zeus and he's not the only one then just when we're setting up for one hell of a cliff hanger with Zeus bleeding, the Meander fountain, the source of the Gods' immortality stops flowing and Hera leaves for an unknown destination, telling one of her children to 'gather the troops' and Ari strikes a deal with the Trojans against the Gods themselves.

And then, Netflix canceled the show.

I cannot tell you how awesome this show turned out to be. Joe McGann shows up as a one-eyed bartender named Polyphemus-- the name of his bar? The Cave. Suzy Eddie Izzard shows up as one of the Fates, Lachesis. Debi Mazar is an excellent Medusa. David Thewlis is Hardes, Cliff Curtis is Poseidon this cast is awesome! From Jeff Goldblum on down it's all just so goddamn amazing. The storylines, adapted from the original myths are updated so intelligently for a modern setting. But it's really the bickering, back-biting, scheming Deities themselves that this show absolutely nails. Hera is mean. Zeus is a tyrant. It's just all so perfect!

Overall: This show deserves at least one more season to finish the story and the internet was rightfully outraged that it was cancelled. As am I. My Grade: **** out of ****

[olderthannetfic]

https://www.tumblr.com/olderthannetfic/734462964053245952/ontf-youre-older-than-i-am-youre-highly-media

So imagine you're a young, insecure guy. Maybe you're queer or nuerodivergent or otherwise just Not Like Other Boys, but you haven't gotten all that sorted out yet. You don't know much about feminism, but you have recognised the toxicity in mainstream masculinity and you want other options, but you don't know what those options might be. You are also insecure and young and want to be taken seriously as a man.

And then you watch Firefly, and it shows you a world where men are able to express their feelings and have healthy and fulfilling friendships -- with other men and with women -- and still be masculine. And, importantly, these characters are cool and badass and taken seriously by other characters and by the fanbase. They aren't jokes or losers, when they express emotions they aren't mocked or told to man up.

It also shows a world where women exist as more than just girlfriends and wives and mothers -- women are friends and colleagues and valued for their skills and personality as much as for their looks and relationships.

It blows your mind, because you are young and dumb and this is the first time you're seeing somethig like that outside of media made for and by women.

And then you grow up and realise that you're gay and you read up on feminism and find that Whedon was doing a very surface level baby playtime thing. You hear women talking about how Whedon's female characters fall into harmful stereotypes and in retrospect, yeah, they're right, Whedon's female characters might have been more plentiful and varied than what you were used to at the time, but they're still pretty damn stereotyped and most of them are still defined by their relationships with male characters.

But at the time, it was baby's first introduction to the idea that a man could have a healthy friendship with a woman or express an emotion without being called a faggot.

So that's why I thought Whedon was the bee's knees when I was a teenager.

Also, I thought the quippy humour was pretty fun and the band of misfits on a junky spaceship was cool and exciting. I still think found-family-on-a-spaceship is a cool trope, but the humour was only fun for its novely and it wore thin pretty quickly.

--

[burningexeter]

Here's a damn fine solid amount of all the different kinds of media that I think both can definitely fit well in and could legit share the same universe as what is in my opinion one of the best trilogies ever made, Gore Verbinski's Pirates Of The Caribbean Trilogy, which you can both read and see below for yourself right about here:

• Jon Turteltaub's National Treasure Duology

• Stephen Sommers' The Mummy (1999)

• John Carpenter's Big Trouble In Little China

• Joe Johnston's The Rocketeer

• Soman Chainani's The School For Good and Evil (Book Series)

• Tomm Moore & Ross Stewart's Wolfwalkers

• Chris Sanders & Dean DeBois' How To Train Your Dragon Series (1 - 3 & TV Series)

• Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones Series (1 - 4) & The Adventures Of Tintin (2011)

• Julius Avery's Overlord (2018)

• Andrew Adamson's The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe & The Chronicles Of Narnia: Prince Caspian

• Andrew Stanton's John Carter (2012)

• Warner Bros.' Wizarding World Series (Harry Potter 1 - 8 & Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them)

• Guillermo Del Toro's Crimson Peak

• Remedy Entertainment's Alan Wake & Control

• Michael Dougherty's Trick r Treat & Krampus

• Mark Waters' The Spiderwick Chronicles (2008)

• Matt Reeves' Let Me In (2010)

• Kathryn Lasky's Tangled In Time (Book Duology)

• Robert Beatty's Serafina (Book Series)

• Katherine Arden's Winternight Trilogy (Books)

• M.J. Bassett's Solomon Kane (2009)

• Chris Carter's X Files Series (First nine seasons, Fight The Future, Millennium & The Lone Gunmen)

• Joss Whedon's Buffy The Vampire Slayer & Angel

• Vince Gilligan's Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul & El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie

&

• Kurt Sutter's Sons Of Anarchy & Mayans MC

[takerfoxx]

On the night of the election, I had an honest-to-God dream where I woke up and found out that Harris had shockingly come in from behind and won the election. I remember how relieved I was that the nightmare had been averted. That we did choose to not elect a senile fascist back into office. That most of my country weren't willing choosing evil over progress.

Then I woke up, literally and figuratively.

Obviously, this has been a heavy blow. Honestly, as someone who was raised as a conservative Christian, who was a huge fan of Linkin Park, Kanye West, JK Rowling, Joss Whedon, Neil Gaiman, and the Undertaker for years, and who felt like I could trust my friends and family to have my back, it's been like these last few years have been a relentless train of disappointment and disillusionment in everything and everyone I once believed in and looked up to, and who I would go to for escape when things were bad. I know you should never meet your heroes, but damn, could they just have been like salty jerks who were caught being mean to the waiter instead of fascists, abusers, bigots, and so on? Could the entire world view that I had been raised in and fervently believed for over half my life not have turned out to be so awful? And yeah, I'm including the friends and family part in that as well.

Obviously, since the election, there's been a lot of finger pointing. Did Harris run a bad campaign? Did she abandon the working class? Was it the Gaza issue? Was it the fault of moral abstainers or third-party voters?

And honestly, I get it. Given the sheer horror of what we're facing, I get being frustrated with people who don't help and/or vote against their own interests only to go all Shocked Pikachu face when the worst possible scenario occurs. But I've been doing some thinking, and I personally believe that even if all those groups came out in support of Harris, whether it be because they do support her or even just as a way to block Trump, she still would have lost. This is the first time in a long time that a Democratic nominee lost the popular vote, after all. I think Biden would have lost too, and he only won in 2020 because of the very unique circumstances caused by the pandemic.

I think we need to face the facts. America's been sliding into fascism for decades.

Reagan. The extremism that erupted after 9/11. Birtherism. Gamergate. The Manosphere. The far right has been busy, whether it be stacking the deck politically or pinpointing the fears and insecurities of every generation and tuning their messaging to draw people in. They tell them what they want to hear, that it's not their fault that they aren't getting what the American dream promised them, and it's all the fault of (insert minority group here). It's been targeted. It's been methodical. And it's been working.

Trump won. He's going to get away with everything. The far right won. This sucks. I wish I had some inspiring words about never giving up the fight, but I'm not that guy. And honestly, I'm starting to feel that spiteful part of me come out, the one that sort of hopes that everything does get much worse so that every braindead moron who voted against their best interests gets exactly what they got coming to them.

But I also know how dangerous that line of thinking of. So please, Do NOT listen to me. There are plenty of people still rallying the troops, still encouraging people to fight, people who are in far more danger than I am. I'll be fine. I'm just a tired and disappointed middle-aged white guy living in a boring California suburb. I'm safe. But there's a lot of people that aren't. And those are the voice that you need to be listening to.

As for me, I'm not giving up, I'm going to keep voting, going to keep supporting the causes I believe in, and going to keep helping how I can. But I'm also going to go away for a while. Not long, probably just a few weeks or so. But I'm going to disengage from social media for a bit to keep from doomscrolling and just focus on writing, because that's all I really know how to do. And when I do come back, I'll have a lot more stuff for you guys.

In the meantime, please be good to yourselves. Be good to those who are scared and hurting. The world needs you in it, now more than ever.

[glittering-snowfall]

At the time even the film's creators seemed nervous about what they had created. Like, when Diablo Cody in defending the film's same-sex kiss talked about her intense female friendships, how she "wanted to sleep at my friend's house every night, I wanted to wear her clothes, we would talk on the phone until our ears ached." Yeah Diablo, I had that with some of my guy friends as a teenager too, it was called being gay. The article that quote is from still finds the time to chide Cody for not doing good feminist representation, though, and I guess that makes me somewhat sympathetic to Cody here. Did she know that culture was in fact going to be too dumb to get the way Jennifer is both a predator and victim, the way her love for Needy is at turns beautiful and toxic, the way expressions of queer desire get warped into complicated, problematic forms by a diseased culture?

The film is full of uncomfortable joke/horror ambiguities, which were at least grasped by some critics (the film did have a number of favorable reviews, though they couldn't compete with the horrible marketing). As far as I can tell, the developing blogosphere, on the other hand, understood none of this from the moment they got their grubby cheeto dust covered fingers on the script before the film's release. Diablo Cody had amassed a considerable loud hatedom at that point, of both the aforementioned cheeto boys and their female counterparts,  going apoplectic over the "fantasy" that "Diablo Cody is a magical snowflake who can spray her unique pixie dust on an otherwise conventional script and give it indie cred". Perhaps the film's obsession with female relationships characterized by violence, jealousy, and crab bucket behavior cut too close to home for such critics?

Or maybe they just genuinely hate Diablo Cody's "twee dialogue". You hear about this? Yeah, Diablo Cody writes twee dialogue. This mantra seems completely unassailable now, basically accepted by even her defenders. What's so god damn twee about it though? To be sure, I remember mentally grouping Juno in with Napoleon Dynamite and Little Miss Sunshine. Jennifer's Body reveals just how much "twee" is a function of the film in its totality, though. I mean, I feel like this should be obvious but the exaggerated quippy dialogue comes across a little differently in the context of a film featuring sexual assault, people being burned to death, ritual murder, demonic possession, and teenagers being sadistically eaten alive.

In that context her dialogue comes across more like a nightmare funhouse mirror version of Joss Whedon's now eye-rollingly ubiquitous quips. Whedon and his bazillion interchangeable hack studio vat clones never aspired for much actual wit beyond the "umm well THAT just happened". Cody's dialogue on the other hand is baroque, in love with weird wordplay and uncouth associations. Needy refers to Jennifer affectionately as "Vagisil". Jennifer, in a line that caught me totally off guard midway through taking a big sip of water, jeers that Needy needs to "Move-on dot org". Yeah, no man, you're right. This isn't how "real" teenagers talk. Also, Jennifer's not "really" possessed by a demon, it's a thing we call "Movie Magic".

Though, actually, it's not totally unreal. This baroque, warping dialogue feels now like how teens trash talk under ideal conditions: on the internet. This movie's dialogue is posting. Like Homestuck, the point is not to capture a literal representation but instead a vibe of the kind of unrestrained, often vulgar and offensive dialogue of teens shit talking each other over America Online Instant Messanger or replies to their friends' Xanga posts. It makes perfect sense that both Jennifer and the various Homestuck teens would call each other retards, for example. There's a real sense in the film of characters pushing boundaries, testing the limits of their ability to perform adulthood. It's not just an act in the sense that it's a movie you plodding dullards, but in the sense that these characters are performing their idea of maturity.

There's nothing of that performance when Jennifer, in the back of a van going who knows where, sobering up and getting a grip on her real situation, asks the members of the band Low Shoulder, "Are you guys rapists?"

The climactic flashback, late in the film, when we witness the band's brutal murder of Jennifer, still has plenty of quips, of course. It's just that now Jennifer's ability to perform any kind of mature confidence has been brutally ripped away by a bunch of third rate emo douchebags. All the quipping, over top of her desperate pleading for her life, issues from the douchebags, who treat the whole scene as a joke. The affect of this scene feels complex to me. It's still Diablo Cody's script so there's some pretty good one liners. Megan Fox, though, is playing the scene for pure horror, so the humor adds to the horror for me. For these guys, rape and murder is just, like, kind of a fun night out. They can sing pop songs while ramming a bowie knife ("Bowie! Nice!") into a teenage girl's body because their biggest concern is whether or not they can get their shit band on Letterman. 

I think it's notable that for a solid number of people--particularly though by no means exclusively women--this scene is not damaged in its horror by this dissonance. At least not now. And why should it be? Horror has never just been about what's "scary" or worse about startling people with jump scares. Horror has always partaken of a complex mix of affects: fear and visceral startlement, yes, but also grief, shock, disgust, rage, contempt... attraction... humor. The best horror might fuck with the viewer's head, prompting arousal or humor simultaneous with disgust or fear. Why play these things off each other? Maybe to destabilize us. If we feel a moment during Jennifer's brutal murder where we're just a little bit charmed by these self admittedly cute boys, maybe that prompts a question like: what other monsters might be hiding behind charming façades?

The post-9/11 years and incipient Obama cultural revolution were unfortunately for Jennifer's Body a time for dumb affects. We pretended Rudy Giuliani hadn't spent several years turning NYC into a characterless, facile police state before bungling the 9/11 disaster response. Clear Channel, now the insipidly named "iHeartRadio," banned numerous songs for fear of causing even a shred of offense. The FCC got more censorious, waving its own dick around to far more culturally degenerate effect than any superbowl nip slips. Even researching this period is tedious: the articles I access are full of euphemistic phrases ("Mr. Bush was caught on videotape last July using a common vulgarity that the commission finds objectionable") so tortured they could have been dreamed up by the Bush admin's army of Eichmanns. I did discover that the maximum penalty for saying "fuck" went under Bush from a draconian $32,500 to a wild-eyed spittle-mouthed $325,000. People who objected to the dogshit state of culture and politics were drummed out of society, as The Dixie Chicks were. Or, more commonly, folks sorta slipped out of the public eye after getting played off at awards ceremonies, quietly shelved.

The primary objection to all this unfortunately did not come from anything really resembling a left but libertarians, constitutional bill of rights fetishists, and South Park. Democrats, never willing to lose an opportunity to supplicate themselves in spineless nematoad subservience to reactionary forces, attacked the Bush FCC for not fining stations MORE for Janet Jackson's sexual harassment by Justin Timberlake. Cool!

I wanted to talk about how this extended into the Obama years but here's the weird and ominous thing: a lot of the statistics and research material on the FCC's censorship actions just sorta stop in 2006. A lot of the relevant links from the FCC's own website are dead now. I doubt that means things improved under Obama. I mean, why should the FCC have stopped fining people for saying "dickhole"? It's not like any of the natsec state's border wars ceased, or the detaining of people without trial in the torture pits of Guantanamo, or the deportation of migrants, or the wiretapping of civilians. The prosecution of whistleblowers actually increased drastically under Obama, as did the lobbing of drones at wedding parties.

We bore this because Obama offered an alternative to divisiveness and the stale politics of the Bush era. We didn't have to tear down and dismantle what the Neoconservatives and Bible-brandishing Evangelical cultists had built through rancor and strife, we simply had to present a different way. A way that would unite the country. A way of hope. THROUGH THE TREEEES I WILL FIIIIIND YOU I WILL HEEEEAL THE RUINS LEFT INSIIIIIDE YOU

Now Needy's increasingly frantic sense that something is very wrong and all the memorial rallies and posters in the world can't fix it resonate pretty strongly with me. And, of course, after watching Low Shoulder brutally murder a teenage girl the whole grief and recovery (with a hit song!) thing feels like a cathartic confirmation of what I felt a lot during this period: that all sorts of cynical fucks were exploiting tragedy to their own ends. It never seemed to be quite the right time to bring up how cloying and often disturbingly fascistic a lot of the Strong In The Face Of Tragedy pop culture was. It was either offensive to the victims of terrorism, or offensive to Our Troops, or, extremely conveniently, before the critique even had a chance to be levied it was suddenly old hat: the Village Voice sneeringly dismisses this film's "routine “risky” digs at 9/11 kitsch". It was hard to tell Republicans to go lick a d*ckh*le when President Obama was wearing flag lapels and having grotesquely performative "beer summits" to bring together a completely innocent black college professor with the racist pig that arrested him. You wanna talk kitsch? Obama was so fucking kitsch, homeskillet. Kitsch and twee to a degree no Diablo Cody dialogue could ever sink.

Here's something that's not kitsch or twee: Needy finding the sacrificial knife that stole her friend/love interest, and using it and inherited succubus powers to murder the shit out of every member of Low Shoulder. That's cathartic as hell. I said earlier that no one in this film really deserves what happens to them. Low Shoulder are the exception, and it's so satisfying to see that knife buried to the hilt in the lead singer's shitty torso.

from We Were Too Stupid for Jennifer's Body

[cal-daisies-and-briars]

🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸

Hi!

108 new sentences for Long Death:

---

“You okay?” Buck asks. His eyes are flickering between Eddie and the house, obviously noticing the intense way he’s staring at it. Eddie gets it; it seems weird. He was inside the house earlier today. He shouldn’t be so thrown off. 

“Nervous,” Eddie admits. 

“Of the house?” Buck frowns. 

“Of Sophia,” Eddie clarifies very quietly. 

Buck’s expression darkens. “Well, don’t be. She’s put her ass on the line to look for you. She’s the only reason I won the custody fight for Chris.”

“Oh,” Eddie exhales. 

“Your sister loves you a lot.” Buck says. “Go put her out of her misery. She’s probably chewing her nails off in there.”

Eddie feels like a jerk. 

He nods. “Alright. Let’s go, then.”

The moment he steps through the front door behind Buck, Eddie is more or less tackled. His sister throws herself at him with such force, he’s nearly knocked off his feet. She squeezes him fiercely, in what is a fantastic impression of a boa constrictor.

At least she’s not afraid of him. 

“Hey, Soph,” he manages to choke out, returning her hug. 

Sophia hugs him for another five full seconds, silently, before pulling away. There is a steady flow of tears running down her cheeks. 

“Fuck you,” she hisses, then swats at his chest. He curls inward to defend against her.

“What the hell, Sophia?” He demands. 

Buck exhales heavily, wincing, and walks off towards the kitchen. Leaving Eddie to this oh so happy reunion. Traitor.

“Half a year, Eddie! No word from you! Nothing!” She scolds. She sounds a little bit like their mother. But if he says so, she’s pretty sure she’ll murder him. “It was worse than waiting for you to be blown up overseas! We didn’t even know if you were alive!” 

Fuck.

“I’m sorry,” Eddie mumbles, eyes downcast. 

“Do you have any idea what you put us through?” She demands. “You couldn’t have left a fucking note?”

“I’m sorry,” he says again. There’s nothing else to say. He can give her every reason in the book for what he did. Not one will erase her pain. 

Pain, if he’s honest, he didn’t think she’d feel quite so intensely. 

“If you ever pull shit like that again, I’ll hunt you down, and stake you like a Joss Whedon villain of the week,” she warns. 

Damn.

“Noted,” he mumbles. 

She huffs, steps forward, and hugs him again. 

Eddie feels completely whiplashed. 

“Buck says you’re the reason Chris is coming home,” Eddie says, while she’s still attached to him. “I can’t fucking thank you enough, Soph.”

She pulls away and sniffs. 

“Yeah, well… I just wanted to do right by my nephew.”

Okay. He can tell from the firm line of her mouth that she doesn’t want to talk about it yet. Whatever it was she’s had to do. Whatever consequences it’s had for her. It’s the same expression as when she competed in a spelling bee in the fifth grade and completely choked on the word diligent - said a instead of e - and bore this same expression for close to a week before anyone could dare mention the competition, the word diligent, or general literacy without risking her ire. She’s still the same little sister he remembers. He just has to get to know her again. 

“I like your hair,” he tries instead. “It suits you.”

Her lip twitches in a half smile. “Thank you. It’s new.”

Buck comes back a moment later with a glass of water and a peanut butter sandwich and hands them to Eddie. 

“Not a home cooked meal, but it’s something,” he mumbles, as Eddie practically begins devouring it.

“No. Thank you,” he says, mouth half-full. “I’m so hungry.”

“How have you been, uh, feeding yourself?” Sophia asks.

However he can. 

Eddie shrugs. He’s not ready to talk about everything, either. Sophia seems to understand the answer in his silence. 

“We can talk about everything later,” Buck says. “Eddie, I’m sure you’re exhausted. Why don’t you shower, and I’ll change the sheets on the bed and get your clothes out of storage?”

A shower sounds fucking fantastic. He has not had a lot of access to running hot water. And if he did, they weren’t often of the private, nice bathroom variety. Gyms, campsites; those kinds of things were more common. Eddie misses reliable plumbing. Not as much as, like, his kid or his people. But it’s pretty high up on the list. 

“Don’t worry about sheets,” Eddie says, finishing his sandwich and turning his attention to the water. “I can sleep on the couch.”

Buck’s expression shifts uncomfortably. “It’s your room, Eddie. Your bed.”

Yeah, and Buck gave up his entire fucking life to live here for his son and bring him home. 

“It’s fine, Buck. I’ll be fine on the couch.”

“Yeah, not up for debate, actually.” Buck says. There’s that authority again. 

[msfbgraves]

I have no idea what this says about me, but I was rewatching Serenity (owned a second hand DVD for over a decade Whedon isn't getting any money from this), and...

Yes, yes we all love Wash but Jayne Cobb is hilarious. Seems like the more of an asshole Mal becomes (and Whedon just has to have him in the dourest, most insufferable mood he can write him), the funnier and borderline decent Jayne gets? And I still ship him with River.

"Yeah what you plan and what takes place aint ever exactly been similar."

"You shoot me before they take me [shot fired] 😮 "now don't you be first!"

He aint no good man, our Jayne, but he's more upfront 'bout it than the gorram Cap'n. And possibly, he is a better man than Malcolm Reynolds sans Book and Inara. Mal is as unpleasant as in the pilot for Firefly, and only with Inara there he sounds vaguely like himself (the version of Mal Whedon doesn't like to project on). Still, if Jayne's more pleasant than your hero, that's pretty damning even twenty years ago.

[supernaturalblogwhyyyy]

Say what you will about Joss Whedon, but the man's appreciation for whump has resulted in some damn fine television