#Hell Fest 2018

[slashthrashandcrash]

I want more of whatever the fuck this is

[taiturner]

TJ MIKELOGAN'S HALLOWEEN 2023 EVENT, Day 23 haunted houses: HELL FEST (2018) dir. Gregory Plotkin

[lumpsbumpsandwhumps]

Welcome to Hell, baby. You signed the waiver, right?

[cherri-fruitcup]

I thought they were pretty cute🖤

[unnamed-blob]

Run Rabbit, Run, Run, Run

⇢ Pairing: The Other/Natalie

⇢ Length: Oneshot

⇢ Synopsis: Months after the gruesome night, Natalie has somewhat managed to move past it to continue with her life. Staying late to study at the library might be her biggest mistake yet though.

Natalie shivered as a brisk fall breeze nipped at her cheeks, mussing her hair as she drew her jacket tighter around herself. She muttered a few choice words under her breath as she quickened her pace, her backpack thumping uncomfortably against her back.

It’d really been entirely her own fault, too caught up in cramming for an exam to notice the sun had long set and the library had closed until a hand landed on her shoulder, nearly jolting her out of her chair as a kind librarian softly notified her to head home. The brunette dug her hand into her pocket to fish her phone out, clicking the buttons and waiting for it to light up.

Nothing. Of course.

She sighed as she dropped it back in. She’d hoped it would have just a bit of leftover battery to let her call Brooke to pick her up, but no luck. The buses had all stopped by now so Natalie was subject to the long, chilling walk back to their shared apartment.

She flinched at each shadow stretching before her, unease curling in her gut at the abandoned streets and the heavy silence that pressed down on her shoulders. Natalie stopped to give another cautious glance around, straining her ears for the slightest sound.

Nothing but the rustle of dried leaves in the wind.

Right, of course, she huffed to herself, picking up the pace once more as she cast a quick glance over her shoulder. Months ago, she and Brooke had refused to leave the apartment, terrified of hands springing out of dark spaces, of a wretched mask leaping at them and a bloodstained weapon lodging itself into their chest. But life moved on, and after months of radio silence Natalie had finally managed to dispel some of the tension that coiled in her frame at all times, brave enough to walk outside without jumping and nearly shrieking at each rustle.

A twinge of pain flared in her neck and she winced as she reached upwards to massage at the sore muscles. She groaned, stretching her neck, as her hand fell limply. She really needed to fix that sitting position, pouring over books for hours, curled like a shrimp was NOT doing it for her posture.

A snap from behind rang out and Natalie startled, whipping around fast enough for her ponytail to slap her in the face, wide eyes darting from each corner of the street to the other, scanning the dark spaces spread out between the streetlamps. She held still enough until she could only hear the thumping of her own heart beat, pulled taunt and tense. Several minutes stretched in silence before Natalie released the breath she was holding, unclenching her fist from the necklace she’d unconsciously grasped in her panic, the metal edges digging into the soft palm of her hand.

Just the wind, nothing more.

She shifted slightly, casting another calculating sweep before she turned back around, focusing forwards.

Her heart froze in her chest, breaths halting in a choked, labored gasp at the figure standing at the end of the street, barely out of reach of the light of a streetlamp, a dark hoodie swaddling their figure. Natalie swallowed past the lump swelling in her throat, a hand fumbling for the pepper spray nestled in her pocket, a slight wave of relief sweeping over her as her fingers curled over the cylindrical object.

She grasped it in a white knuckled grasp, eyes frozen on the stranger. It couldn't be him. Probably just some drunken college student stumbling back to the dorms.

It couldn’t be him. There’d been no signs for months.

It couldn't be him, she’d stabbed him.

The figure shifted slightly, a half step forward into the light that stole all of Natalie’s breath and made her knees buckle under her, threatening to sweep her to the ground in a fetal position, all too reminiscent of how Brooke had cowered before him that night. A familiar, mangled mask with those ugly, lopsided eye holes grinned back at her, the figure’s hands clenching slightly at his sides before he slowly, painfully slowly, shifted.

He raised a hand in the space stretching between them, then crooked a finger at her, beckoning her towards him, tilting his head to the side.

Natalie swallowed past the fear rising in her throat, the painful constrict in her chest, the irregular thumping of her heart. She whirled around and bolted, feet slamming into the ground as she pumped her arms, eyes burning against the piercing cold wind.

Behind her came the dreaded sound of steel toed boots breaking into a run, her legs shaking as the deja vu of the night slammed into her. She nearly stumbled over her own feet as she lurched into the nearest alleyway, pushing off the wall to scramble forwards. She choked on a sob as she heard him behind her, could hear him closing the distance, his panting breaths amplified alongside her jack-hammering heart.

Too close, too close!-

Natalie whirled around, shrugging off her backpack as the killer reached for her, fingers ghosting the air above her jacket before she slammed the bag into his face, not daring to waste another second before she spun around.

The world stilled for a moment, the only sound Natalie could hear being her own panicked breathing. Dimly, foolishly, she hoped one of the corners of her textbooks had lodged itself into his eye, that he lay crumpled against the ground in agony. Instead, the sound of his renewed steps echoed in her ears like a shot of a gun.

Natalie panted through panicked breaths, swerving onto a street at random, nearly slamming into a wall as she winced at the painful slice of brick against her shoulder. Her eyes desperately scoured the empty streets. Gosh damn it-

How hard was it for there to be one cop doing his rounds! Or one person to be out! An open shop? Anything!?

She yelped as a shrouded arm caught her in the middle, yanking her back into a broad chest as the killer dragged the two of them into the yawning mouth of an alleyway, arms curled around her like a suffocating snake as Natalie wriggled and kicked and spit like a rabid animal.

She grappled for her pepper spray as a hand covered her mouth, muting her screams. The brunette reeled her arm out before she slammed her elbow into his gut, relishing in the muffled grunt he gave as his hold loosened momentarily. Her hand encircled the familiar shape before she lifted her arm, yanked the toggle out-

A force slammed into the side of Natalie’s head and she blinked as her world tilted, vision suddenly wavering and shifting out of focus. The bottle clattered dully to the ground from her limp hold as her body sagged and tilted sideways, her knees giving out from under her before she was caught with a strong grip around her middle. She blinked dully as the world shifted and wavered to black, grimacing uncomfortable as a wetness plastered her hair to her face. Her head pounded in tune with her heart, the ringing in her ears drowning out any sounds.

She blinked, then her eyelids fluttered shut, her head lolling to the side as she dropped against the arm holding her up.

The Other gave a muffled sigh of relief, his figure visibly uncoiling as he gently tilted her limp head to a better angle, shifting her hair out of the way to brush a thumb over the blood staining the side of her head. He stared at the red liquid thoughtfully, smearing the blood across his fingers as he tilted his head to the side to look at her peaceful expression.

It wasn’t too hard of a hit, she’d heal.

He grunted as he lowered down briefly, grasping behind her knees with own arm and shifting the other behind her back, letting Natalie fall into a bridal hold against his chest as he straightened. He paused for a moment, stock still as his dark eyes trailing over her prone figure, a spark in his eyes flaring from behind the crevices within the distorted mask.

Then he shifted, turned on his heel, and disappeared down the alleyway, Natalie’s limp figure swallowed by the darkness.

The leaves rustled in the breeze, whispered, then fell silent.

[m0theesw0rld]

I had to say it

[deputy-ajay-ghale]

Gavin is so boring. Natalie should’ve been trying to become a throuple with Brooke and Quinn.

[haveyouseenthishorrormovie]

SUMMARY: A masked serial killer turns a horror-themed amusement park into his own personal playground, terrorizing a group of friends while the rest of the patrons believe that it is all part of the show.

Tony Todd and Bex Taylor-Klaus are the sole redeeming factors of this movie. The mod really liked the concept but the execution was very much lacking.

[nowpause]

Hell Fest (2018)

[gravecinema]

Grave Reacts: Hell Fest (2018) - 10/18/2022

In this video, my roommate will be reacting to her very first watch of Hell Fest from 2018. This one really scared her good!

[twilightarcade]

nooo fuck who was that though. Wild CoE fan at splatfest no less

[slashthrashandcrash]

Was reminded again of my love for Hell Fest and the raw slasher x final girl potential they fumbled RIP The Other I will avenge you

[yridenergyridenergy]

Hello. Do you have any idea if anyone has translated or summarized the Bar Boo episodes with DIR EN GREY members? (Ep.s 2, 7 and 18 on Youtube). Also, the interviews during Lunatic Fest 2018, where members signed the chalk wall. I know this is a lot for a request, but thank you in advance!

kyotakumrau and thepriceofbeingaroseisloneliness have posted some translations:

Plus, sometimes you can find kind souls who posted subs in the comments below the videos, like:

Die x Gara episode - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oAxbJDjIrI&lc=UgyCrhY6r54vlvI0VR54AaABAg [This should load the page with the right comment at the top, below the video description.]

[lumpsbumpsandwhumps]

He's canonically a girldad sorry

[welcometothejianghu]

Welcome to another round of W2 Tells You What You Should See, where W2 (me) tries to sell you (you) on something you should be watching. Today's choice: 延禧攻略/Story of Yanxi Palace.

Story of Yanxi Palace is a high-budget 2018 Chinese harem drama about the historical-accuracy-adjacent antics of an extremely baller young woman who gets a job working in the Forbidden City in an attempt to discover the reasons behind her sister's death.

Imagine Nirvana in Fire, but only the scenes that take place inside the Inner Palace. So there's still schemes aplenty, but now these schemes are happening among a cast that's 90% women, all locked inside a walled city with rigid rules, excruciatingly strict hierarchies, and a very limited number of ways of getting out alive.

This show was huge in China. The English-language fandom is almost nonexistent. I'm betting most of you reading this have never even heard of it, and if you have, you have only the vaguest idea of what this 70-episode palace drama is about.

I enjoyed this show a whole hell of a lot. I also had some major issues with the show, to the point where I very nearly did not write this rec. But I'm doing it because I think the good parts of the show are worth seeing, and because I think the problem parts of the show are worth thinking about. Interested? Then follow me through these five reasons (and a few anti-reasons) I think you should watch it.

1. The Real Housewives of the Forbidden City

Tired of c-drama sausage fests? Want to see a bunch of incredibly talented ladies act their faces off? Then this is the show for you.

The vast majority of characters in the show are absolute bitches to one another. They are locked in a cutthroat game of power and manners where the stakes are literally life and death, so they spend their whole lives either plotting to take someone else down or counterplotting so the person trying to take them down gets taken down instead. They all know they can't trust one another, but they also sometimes can't not trust one another. They keep their friends close, and their enemies closer.

Unlike most other schemes-based shows, which are all about one big mystery, Story of Yanxi Palace has several smaller arcs. Remember the sister-murder I mentioned at the start? I was prepared for that to take the whole runtime of the show to solve; it actually gets (mostly) concluded around episode twenty-something. Antagonists arise and fall. Situations happen and resolve. Think of it less like a movie's single narrative, and more like a video game's multiple levels. Hooray, we finished Garden World! Now we get to go back to Palace World, but with way more EXP and powerups than we had before!

I know that looks like a bunch of lovely, high-class ladies in that shot, but it's not. It's a pit of vipers. Any woman in that lineup would straight-up shank pretty much any other woman in that lineup without hesitation or remorse. Every woman there knows exactly where she fits in the hierarchy and has a detailed plan for how to take out every woman above her to get to the top -- except for the one in black, who already did take out every woman above her to get to the top, and that's why everyone has to ostentatiously defer to her now.

If you are a fan of TV shows where folk scheme their way to success, this is really a can't-miss property for you.

This is also a show about how smart women have to become to survive being at the mercy of stupid men. Not only are the women being vicious to one another, they're doing so while simultaneousy having to pretend that they are pretty, delicate, vapid ornaments whose only thoughts are how they want the best for their precious emperor and his beloved mommy. It's all about the exercise of soft power, how to hide your knives behind silk sleeves and a sweet smile.

So okay, it's not quite as trashy as reality TV, but it's still bitchy as hell and incredibly fun to watch.

2. You love to hate her (and her, and him, and her)

Now if you've read pretty much any one of my previous recs, you know I like a good baddie, and this is a show with some good baddies. As I said in the last point, this is a show about bad people doing bad things entertainingly.

However, I am not going to tell you who most of the show's love-to-hate characters are, because the vast majority of them do not start out hateable. If the show introduces a female character and you like her, or a eunuch character and you like him, there is like an 85% chance they're going to do a heel turn. (And then sometimes do a face turn after? Look, schemes are complicated.)

But I will tell you about one bitch who's rotten from her first moment to her last: Noble Consort Gao.

Noble Consort Gao is the scenery-chewing, shit-stirring, absolute meanest mean girl in the palace, and it is so fucking entertaining. She's your major antagonist for the first half of the show. She's strategically mean, but she's also recreationally mean. She does the anime villainess laugh for real. Her actor, Tan Zhuo, has set her bitch dial to 11 and isn't even bothering to chew the scenery -- she's shredding it with those incredible metal claw-nails she wears.

Noble Consort Gao is a good starting antagonist because she's so blatantly evil -- and yet somehow still unstoppable. She's a good example of how you can get away with being pretty much openly sinister if you also manage to mind your manners. The reason she gets away with being so damn awful to everyone else is that she's still playing by all the rules. She's managed to weaponize every convention about propriety to lord her power over everyone else. She's like a fucking HOA.

And you'll notice I'm speaking about her with such fondness because she's delightfully awful. In fact, pretty much everyone in this show is delightfully awful. There are exceptions, but on the whole, you want to see them go down, yet you're also going to be a little sad when they go. Even Noble Consort, by the end, you get where she's coming from, and you feel a little bad for her on the way out.

Do you like vengeance? Because we've got some vengeance for you here. Many, many people in this show have been wronged, often by the people they trusted most. And of course they all respond to this in a healthy manner, seeking justice for themselves and for their loved ones through proper channels and reasonable means.

Ha ha, just kidding, everybody here is completely unhinged! The primary difference between a good guy and a bad guy in this show is how many innocent people they wind up taking down with the guilty party. It's messy as hell and we are making popcorn about it.

This is a show full of villains. In fact, this cast is pretty much entirely bad guys, semi-bad guys, potential bad guys, and good people who had to do bad things to survive. There are maybe two non-child characters who are Just Plain Good that don't get nuked almost immediately. Everyone else is some shade of grey. Even our hero (and we'll get to her in a minute) is pretty yikes-inducing cruel when she needs to be.

Going to say this as clearly as I can: This is not a show for people who cannot tolerate moral ambiguity. This is a show for people who love to watch clever bastards work. And pretty much nobody's more of a bastard than Noble Consort Gao.

Ladies and gentlemen, the cunt is served.

3. No, seriously, this is actually what it all looked like

If you are at all interested in this actual time period, you owe it to yourself to see this dedicated work of historical recreation.

The amount of research and detail that went into this production is honestly mind-blowing. Because this show is set in the 18th century, we actually have some pretty great documentation about the places, objects, and people involved in this story -- including some (slightly later, obviously) photographs! The production went all out in its attempts to replicate the setting, including using period-appropriate techniques to create various accessories and objects.

The outfits are amazing -- and excruciatingly accurate in several aspects. I've seen more than a couple people say that their first reaction to the costumes was, ho hum, kind of boring. Well, yeah, compared to some of the absolutely bugfuck-complicated wearable works of art from earlier periods, these are a little understated. But then you start paying attention to the million little details: the embroidery, the hair ornaments, the layers, the fabrics. A whole team of people clearly put a huge amount of work into these outfits.

Nearly every royal character in the show is a real person. You could spoil yourself for several major plot beats just by going to Wikipedia. In fact, I accidentally did this, because I was reading the show's DramaWiki page and thought, oh, that's interesting; I understand why the actor names are links (because it takes you to the actors' pages), but why are so many of the character names also links? Turns out: Wikipedia! So, uh, careful where you click.

One of the great things about the show is how utterly claustrophobic it is. Most of it takes place within the heavily guarded walls of the Forbidden Palace; on the very few occasion it goes somewhere else, you're just traveling to other walled manors and villas. There's one brief scene in a forest, and the psychological difference is enormous. You see a few trees and you're immediately like, oh, so that's why these women are going crazy in their gilded cages.

The drama even shows how some of the least glamorous parts of the Forbidden Palace work: the chamber pots, the coal for furnaces, the mopping, the weeding, the laundry, the fire brigades. It's an enormous production, keeping what is basically a 178-acre city-state running to imperial standards. It's nice to see a drama that acknowledges that while rich people may want to see only clean walkways and fresh sheets, those things don't happen by magic.

If anything, knowing about all this detailed research makes the unintentionally funniest scene in the entire show -- the one with the eunuchs playing Western instruments -- ten times funnier. You had artisans spending months doing exact recreations of historical hairpins, and you couldn't spend thirty seconds asking the internet "when were saxophones invented?" or "does an accordion make noises like a string quartet?" Perfect. No notes.

Trust me when I say you'll get used to the queue haircuts on the dudes. It helps that most of the time, they're facing the camera so they just look like they've got their heads fully shaved, and most of them have heads that look very good shaved! ...Most.

4. The kind of girl who'd make Mei Changsu say damn

The show has a strong ensemble cast, but the woman at the core of all the action is the tough-as-nails protagonist, Wei Yingluo.

The details we have on the actual Lady Wei are sparse. She doesn't really exist as a person in the historical record, to the point where we don't even know her given name (if she even had one) or when she showed up to the palace. We mostly know when she got given her titles, how many kids she gave birth to, some of what she did later in life, and when she died. The show takes these historical gaps and just runs with them, weaving into the silences a narrative that, while implausible, could have happened!

The show starts when Wei Yingluo enters the Forbidden City, not as a royal lady concubine, but as a regular little maid. She's got an agenda, though -- as mentioned earlier, her sister has died tragically, and she wants to figure out why. The stakes get higher as it becomes clear just how much people don't want this question answered, for their sakes as much as for hers.

She very quickly realizes that she can't just live a quiet life and snoop around casually. Too many people are out to get her, and if she's going to survive, she's got to fuck with them before they fuck with her. And they are wholly unprepared for the self-destructive lengths to which she will go to to fuck with them.

Wu Jinyan deserves all the accolades for turning in a great performance. She has to be completely all over the board emotionally and energy-wise for seventy whole episodes, and she brings it. She's very funny and physical when the show calls for her to be! She's willing to flail around and stuff her face and ugly-cry. Then she turns on the don't-mess-with-me stare and the temperature in the room drops ten degrees. Did she get some award for this? [checks her DramaWiki page] Okay, she got several awards for this, good. Even in a huge cast this talented, she's an absolute standout. I can't wait to see her in the Double, which is definitely on my to-watch list.

I'm not going to call Wei Yingluo a Mary Sue, because that's not accurate, but this girl does have some serious plot armor on. You never get the sense that she hasn't earned it, though. She's smart, capable, and more than a little completely fucking crazy. The show makes you believe that the reason she survives most of the shit she pulls off is that everyone is just so baffled that anyone would try it at all that they don't even know how to respond.

I thought about starting out this rec post with Wei Yingluo -- putting her above the cut, in fact, because she really is that compelling. She's back here, though, because it's with Wei Yingluo that we start to slide into my points of critique. Too often, female protagonists are here to solve the problem with their cuteness and quirkiness and extra-special perfectness that shows up all the other girls and captures the heart of whatever boy she needs to save the day. And no matter how this show starts off wanting to make her something different, it ultimately can't conceive of a female lead who isn't at her core just like that.

The writers can never decide how much Wei Yingluo's Manic Pixie Dream Girl act is an act, and how much she means it. The show introduces her as a stone-cold psychopath who is capable of feigning being a carefree brainless uwu smol bean. Later it decides, actually, she's really at her core a spunky, soft-hearted creature who likes to goof off and is just capable of switching on Scheming Bitch Mode when she needs it! And it's like, are you kidding? You just spent like forty episodes telling me that it's all a big trick when she does this, and now you're saying it's not anymore?

It's like they made a character capable of decieving men, and then got decieved by her, which you have to respect. Any fictional character can fool another fictional character; only true legends fool their creators.

sidebar: fuck that dude

The show can never fully commit to this bit, because he's supposed to be our big heroic love interest, but the emperor fucking sucks.

Hands-down the show's biggest moral is that All Emperors Are Bastards -- yes, even the ones in relationships we're supposed to find cute; yes, even the ones whose lifestyles we're supposed to envy; yes, even the ones played superbly by the devastatingly handsome Nie Yuan. While watching we repeatedly invoked this tweet:

Being a billionaire must be insane. You can buy new teeth, new skin. All your chairs cost 20,000 dollars and weigh 2,000 pounds. Your life is just a series of your own preferences. In terms of cognitive impairment it's probably like being kicked in the head by a horse every day

He is the dumbest, most easily played motherfucker in China. Getting horny makes him stupid, and he's horny all the time. He has absolute power over the lives of everyone in the empire, and you can distract him with the mere suggestion of a vagina. He has taken a full You Girls Fight It Out Amongst Yourselves stance toward his scheming harem. This will not go well for anyone.

And speaking of those wives, no matter how many times they loudly profess their undying devotion to him, I have a rough time imagining these women feel anything for the Emperor beyond exhausted contempt. Well, okay, maybe the Empress who married him before he took the throne, since she had a chance to get to know him before he was in full Emperor Mode. But none of the other women should ever stop dunking on this guy like the gullible shitbag he is. If you (like me!) are already skeptical about any given heterosexual romance in fiction, be prepared to roll your eyes through the Big True Love Story this one tries to sell you.

5. Right on the cusp of a fascinating feminist conclusion!

I may be on this one for a while; skip ahead if you like.

Okay, so: What little English-language buzz I've seen about this show has used the word "feminist" about it -- mostly in conjunction with how the show's popularity made the CCP sour on its failure to portray appropriate communist values (???). So I went into it expecting feminism! And I got a show with a whole bunch of female characters in it! And hoo boy, are those two things not necessarily the same!

This show is a great example of how merely passing the Bechdel-Wallace Test doesn't make something feminist. Sure, it's mostly about a single woman who, through her plucky nature, rises in the ranks of power. But that is feminist only by the shallowest, most girlboss, Lean-In-ass definition of the word.

At the beginning, you can kinda tell this was written, produced, and directed by men. By the time you get to the end, you can absolutely tell that the production team was dudes from top to bottom. This, to me, is the big tell: that the show cannot conceive that anything these women are doing could be interesting unless it's trying to stab another woman in the back. There is a time jump very near the end, where the few female characters still standing agree to stop being shitty to one another -- and then fast-forward a decade, because why would we care about seeing what their lives are like when they're not being shitty to one another?

The show is incredibly constrained by Actual History. At the end of the day, it's a Cinderella story, and as such, we have to cheer for the social and legal mechanisms that make it possible -- even when they're grotesquely misogynistic. The show lets its female characters pay lip service to how awful it is that women are little more than breeding stock, but it doesn't let them do anything about it. Mothers can be obliquely sad that their daughters are being fed to the same patriarchy machine that fucked them up, but talking is the most they can accomplish ... because those daughters were real people who were actually fed into the patriarchy machine. We know this. We have documentation. China is very good at keeping receipts.

Wei Yingluo starts out as a servant, and throughout the first half of the show, she moves up and down in the servant ranks -- and all the while it makes the point that being a servant fucking sucks. Maybe it's better when you get to work directly under someone you really like, but the actual job sucks shit and puts you at the mercy of everyone above you in the palace hierarchy. Your life is not your own. You're barely a person. You can easily get executed for merely working in the same household as someone who broke the rules.

The feminist answer to this dilemma is to notice that the system is bad and either a) refuse to participate in it, or b) use your power to mitigate its badness. The show, however, clearly thinks that the real problem with this whole setup is that the people we like aren't at the top of it. Somebody has to take the abuse; you just don't want that somebody to be you. Once Wei Yingluo gets to a place of real power in the palace hierarchy, she starts behaving very much like the people who used to be shitty to her and takes no steps to prevent the early-show damage she suffered from happening to other people.

Now: You can make the argument that if she'd done all those radical things, she would've been dead meat -- and I think you'd be correct! But the show never indicates that it gives a second thought to how abusive and unfair this all is. Survival in this system means exploiting the people below you. There's not a neutral option. And this show expects you to cheer for exploiting the "right" people.

The show never quite seems to internalize what the stakes are -- at least, not for more than a moment or two at a time. I made the Real Housewives joke because the show more or less treats the consort-on-consort schemes as fun catfights by mean girls wanting to be the prom queen. It almost gets to the point of realizing that a woman's place in the harem is literal life-and-death shit for her, and that if she can't produce a son and work him into a powerful position, she's fucked. It always bunts when it gets there, though, choosing to play up vanity and petty grievances instead of the absolute desperation these women must be feeling.

It gets so close with Consort Shun to a real discussion about how awful it is that the men in their lives see them as pretty objects to be bartered for favor and power with other men. But it can't fully go there, because that would undermine the structures propping up this Cinderella story, and then we couldn't feel good about the Cinderella story. And we want to feel good about the Cinderella story. We will burn every other female character in the show if we get to feel good about the Cinderella story.

I've made a lot of jokes about lesbians in this show, but the truth is, it is chronically deficient in lesbianism. Lesbian sex would have improved the lives of at least half the characters here, if not more. Unlike a lot of other historical c-drama shows, Yanxi Palace acknowledges the reality and possibility both male and female same-sex sexual desire -- but it does so in order to say that both are bad. (I legitimately cannot tell if the production is doing this to show how regrettably anti-gay the past was or to play on the audience's expected homophobic disgust. I suspect the latter, but I genuinely don't know.) While it does the fascinating thing of showing desire and coupled relationships between women and eunuchs, it has no idea how queer those setups are, nor does it acknowledge the possibility for same-sex pairings to fill that same positive dynamic.

So why on earth would I list this whole mess of problematic attitudes as a reason for, and not against, watching the show?

Because it is fascinating to think about. Look, I've burned a lot of time and brainpower here writing several paragraphs that no one is ever going to read about how interesting the show's moves are. It has the weird problem where it understands what happens when you lock a bunch of women together in a high-pressure situation keyed to a brutal hierarchy -- but it doesn't ever appear to quite get why. At least, not beyond the sense that people will claw their way to the top of any hierarchy they have access to, just because it's there. (Watch how it treats the few exceptions to this, the rare nonambitious characters. See how long they stay nonambitious.)

As I said when I labeled this point, the show is just on the edge of a smart conclusion, and that smart conclusion has to do with how awful it is that women are both the people who suffer most under heteropatriarchy and the people who work the hardest to uphold it.

Yes, the world into which these women have been thrust is awful. But they make it ten times more awful because they're all semi-voluntarily engaged in a vicious, Highlander-esque zero-sum competition. They could cut one another some slack, but they're more invested in continuing the cycle of abuse to maintain an intense, repressive order. The ones that try to be kind about it get repeatedly fucked by the ones who have no interest in kindness. They all have to engage in performative rituals that mimic sincerity without actually producing a single genuine emotion toward one another. It's horrifying and paranoia-inducing in the extreme. And they're doing most of it to themselves.

If it were really feminist, the moral of the Story of Yanxi Palace would be it does't have to be like this. This dynamic is not inevitable; this is a choice perpetuated by generations of people who benefit from it just enough not to question its correctness.

Sadly, there's still enough promise in patriarchy that being a Good Girl will save you from the shit we put the Bad Girls through -- so don't you want to be a Good Girl? All we need you to do is throw all those icky Bad Girls under the bus. It's their fault for being Bad Girls anyway. But you? You don't have to be afraid. We're not going to hurt you. You deserve all the good things we're giving you. You're not like all the other girls. You're different. You're special.

Just don't forget to watch your back.

If anything, I think the CCP is terribly wrong: This show is an excellent demonstration of communist values, in that if these women had just joined together in solidarity, all their lives would have been so much better! The Emperor should have been posting helplessly on Reddit like "My (55M) consorts (40F, 36F, 31F, 28F, 22F, 19F) have unionized" so the entire internet could come for his ass.

Care to watch?

This is another of those shows you can find in a whole bunch of places! Here's the ones I know about:

YouTube

TVBAnywhere

Viki

Tubi

iQiyi

I know seventy episodes is a commitment. I know eighteenth-century palace drama is a lot. I know that last selling point of mine seemed to go on for-fucking-ever and you probably didn't read any of it. But this show is a beautiful work that I think more people should see, warts and all. Besides, if all we ever consume is ideologically "pure" media, how do we learn to think critically about anything?

True story: My Chinese colleague, knowing I was watching this show, taught me slang for "lesbian." It's 拉拉 (lala). Very useful.

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[Valentine Special!] Be Mine, Valentine

⇢ Pairing: The Other/Natalie

⇢ Length: Oneshot

⇢ Synopsis: Valentine's sucks. Pair that with trauma from a certain horror fest and you've got yourself a great concoction. It'll be fine though, a certain someone is here to make sure Natalie isn't alone this Valentine's!

“I’ve got a Valentine’s gift for you ;)”

Natalie blinked down at her phone, a wry grin stretching at the edge of her mouth at the text from Brooke. She snorted before she sent back a thumbs up, pocketing her phone and returning her focus on the dull lecture. 

The brunette wasn’t ever quite a fan of the holiday, first reminded of the crushing fact she was constantly single, too busy juggling her scholarship, classes, and a job, then later grimacing in distaste at the obvious marketing ploy and overpriced goods with a heart stamped onto them. 

But, Brooke had always been the more romantic of the two of them and Natalie wasn’t about to rain on her parade. Especially when it was supposed to be a holiday she’d celebrate with Quinn, before- 

She swallowed thickly, gripping her pen tighter and ducking her head, forcing her attention to the scrawled words on her papers. 

It’d be best to leave the thought, nothing that could be done anyway. 

⪢⪡⪢⪡⪢⪡⪢⪡⪢⪡⪢⪡⪢⪡⪢⪡⪢⪡⪢⪡⪢⪡⪢⪡⪢⪡⪢⪡⪢⪡⪢⪡

By the time Natalie was shuffling up the stairs of their apartment, fumbling for her keys in her bag, the darkness had crept in, only a glimpse of the sun’s rays remaining over the tops of the buildings. She hopped up the remaining steps, muttering a few words under her breath as the keys clattered away from her, jingling tauntingly at the bottom of her bag but stubbornly out of reach each time she felt around for them. 

Glancing upwards, Natalie blinked at the realization she hadn’t even needed to bother, the front door slightly ajar. She frowned, hesitantly pressing her palm against it to swing it open, creeping a half step closer to scan the dark interior. 

Brooke had been just as jumpy and paranoid as Natalie after the night, maybe moreso considering she’d been nearly gutted, helplessly splayed out on the floor in front of the killer, unable to do anything but plead for her life. The female crept in, tense, acting more akin to an intruder than the fact she was entering her own home. 

There was no reason for Brooke to leave the door unlocked. 

Natalie stopped, straining her ears for any sound, hardly daring to breathe in the whispering silence. 

Or maybe she was overthinking it. Brooke might’ve left it open intentionally for her, knowing she’d be home soon from her classes. 

Natalie quietly shut the door behind her, shrugging off her backpack in the foyer, still waiting for any sound. 

“Brooke?” She hesitantly called out, wincing at the raw fear bleeding into her voice. She shuffled over to the light switch, blinking abruptly at the sudden brightness before her eyes were drawn to the scattered rose petals on the floor, leading a decorative trail that disappeared into her bedroom doorway. 

Natalie’s shoulders slumped in relief as she snorted in amusement, carefully sidestepping the flowers to pad to her room. Of course Brooke would go the extra mile, Natalie really should’ve expected as much after being her best friend for years. (And, maybe, it was a way to mask the grief for the holiday, for Brooke to expel her attention onto Natalie instead of the boyfriend who she should've been with today). 

Natalie paused at her doorway, squinting into the dark room, tensely waiting for Brooke to jump out at her. When nothing happened for several seconds, she leaned in to flip the switch on, glancing around cautiously. The rose petals were there of course, scattered all across her room (Natalie was definitely going to make Brooke help her clean up the mess she’d made), and a heart shaped box of chocolates nestled on the edge of her bed beckoned her over. 

Natalie shuffled closer, glancing it over. Definitely bigger than she’d been expecting for such a goofy joke. She leaned in, hands extended to pick it up before the smell hit her, nauseatingly sweet and overbearing, assaulting her senses. Natalie swore, straightening abruptly as she clasped her hands over her nose and tried not to gag. She finally noticed the red peeking out from under the box, staining her comforter as she grimaced then rolled her eyes. 

If Brooke covered her bedsheets in strawberry syrup, she was going to be the one scrubbing at it until it came out. Natalie steeled her nerves, mentally sighing as she left one hand clasped on her nose and the other to nudge the top of the box off, the flimsy cardboard falling alongside it to reveal its insides. 

She froze, skin prickling in discomfort, needles stabbing into the back of her neck at the sight of a- a mass of red, the covered scent of iron slamming into her nose. 

She stumbled back a step, breath hitching as she couldn’t tear her eyes off of the innocent, red box, knees trembling hard enough she wasn’t sure how she wasn’t on the ground yet. 

A heart. 

A red, blood bathed, human heart. 

She was a Nursing major, she damn knew what it looked like-

“Br-“ Natalie gasped for air as the iron invaded her mouth, coughing against the tinge coating her tongue. “Brooke!” She called, scrambling out of the room, stumbling into the doorframe as she lunged for the hallway. “BROOKE!”

She slammed into her door, gracelessly coming to a halt in the middle of Brooke’s room, her labored breaths echoing in the stifling silence. She’d missed the light switch in her haste, leaving the room bathed in darkness as her eyes desperately adjusted, scanning the space. 

Nothing- nothing, she wasn’t there. 

Natalie wasn’t sure to feel relieved or horrified, slowly backing out as her brain flipped through every scenario, through every possibility, through each location she knew. 

Where was Brooke? She wouldn’t-

Natalie’s thoughts came to a stuttering halt as a broad chest pressed into her back, wide arms curling around her frame and hugging her close before she could even gasp. She froze, tense, trembling, as the figure nosed at her neck, flinching at the warm breaths blowing across the back of her neck. 

She didn’t want to turn around- didn’t want to acknowledge the only person it could be, the killer she’d left splayed out, wounded and bleeding out on the floor. Actually- she doubted she could, not with how numb her body had gone, trembling uncomfortably against her will, nor with the way the male pressed herself against him, without a gap of space left. 

A flicker in the corner of her vision and Natalie snapped to it in a panic, heart threatening to burst from her chest at the sight of what the killer held. A knife? One from the kitchen, they didn’t leave them locked, there’s been no reason to. An axe like the one he’d slashed at Brooke with, a syringe like the one he’d killed Asher with-

She blinked. 

A card. A small, dainty card held in a large hand, unfitting for his size, slowly coming to rest before her. 

Natalie stared at it with wide eyes. It was a store bought one, covered in eye-gouging pink and red even in the dark, with too many hearts and overbearing cute images, cupids holding bows and blowing kisses. He’d obviously added his own touch, a red liquid splattered in random sections with a message in a messy scrawl, topped with a heart. 

The killer pressed her impossibly closer, inhaling her scent as Natalie traced the words until they blurred in her eyes, trembled in his grasp, and couldn’t feel her own legs. 

Be Mine, Valentine?