#I love characters with limited palettes and I really ran with it when I designed this guy lol

[hellosunnycore]

✧ serenity ✧

[thekitchensnk]

and the spider lilies bloomed in the fall (chapter 17)

Rating: T Warnings: Violence Pairing: Gin/Ran Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 13, Chapter 14, Chapter 15, Chapter 16, Chapter 17

“They say that lovers doomed never to see each other again still see the higanbana growing along their path, even to this day.”

A girl collapses on a dusty road one day. A boy takes her home.

The girl lives.

—

(The boy doesn’t.)

"With poor Ayame-chan throwing up outside, there's no one else who's free to do it. It's going to have to be her."

Yuki and Sayaka looked at each other in muted horror, the sheer depths of what they were hearing all too clear.

Sayaka blanched. "Don't you remember what it was like the last time? There has to be another way, Yuki-chan."

Yuki pressed her lips into a thin line, but the goosebumps on her arms gave lie to her stoicism. "Sayaka-chan, there is no other way." She paused weightily. "We're going to have to let Rangiku cook."

---

Really, Rangiku thought angrily, I don't know what all the fuss is about. I can cook.

The cooking roster was an intricate, delicately balanced thing, the product of afternoons of argument and heated deliberation. It was designed to take into account factors as diverse as who’d had the morning off, who was given cleaning duties, who could be trusted to oversee a grocery order, who needed extra time before the work night started, who had performed the task most recently, and who had the most senior positions within the brothel. Only two people had ever managed to worm their way out of it. The first was Chiyo, on account of owning the brothel and therefore being able to do whatever she damn well pleased. The second was Rangiku, who had cooked food so terrible that everyone living at the Floating Moon had voted unanimously that she was never to take up the wooden spoon ever again.

It was only out of desperation that she was even allowed to step foot into the kitchen in the first place. They were severely understaffed for pre-opening chores, with three girls off that morning and Ayame ill, and so it had been decided, with no small amount of trepidation, that it would be Rangiku who would cook the day's meal.

Yuki-chan had hovered at the door nervously, and Rangiku had had to shoo her away to tell her to go and bathe.

"No red bean paste this time, okay?" Yuki had called anxiously over her shoulder as Sayaka had taken her by the arm.

She could not help but harrumph to herself as she chopped garlic, ginger and scallions looted from the ingredient cupboard.

She could cook.

She just didn't see why she should limit herself to boring old rice and accompanying garnishes when she could be making natto takoyaki or jasmine tea curry. She sniffed haughtily. The others lacked her refined palette. That was it.

Gin had never complained about her cooking.

Admittedly, all they'd had to cook with had been rice and a handful of ragged garden scraps, so there had been little room for creativity, but Rangiku felt vindicated nonetheless. There was nowhere to hide when you were only cooking with four ingredients. If anything, that had to mean that she was a good cook.

She hummed to herself as she boiled water in a copper pot. The steam rose in eddies and swirled above the pot. She had steeped the rice in a bath of cold water to allow the starch to wash off, and the water was as pale as a cloud as she sloshed the excess into the sink.

She heated some sesame oil in a heavy bottomed pan made of cast iron, and threw in the garlic. When the rice was done boiling, she drained it, and then put it back in the pot with a lid on top to let it steam.

There was something reassuring about this, about the old familiar routine, and her hands took to stirring and chopping as if her life as a barmaid had been a dream. She could smell the soft, almost babyish, smell of the plain rice fluffing up in the pot, the heady roasted smell of the sesame oil and garlic, and the lively scent of fresh ginger. She stirred the rice into the oil, poked it around with the wooden spoon, and gave a satisfied nod to herself.

She took the rice off the heat, and barely able to suppress a grin, readied herself to alert the other inhabitants of the Floating Moon that the meal was ready to be served.

She swung the mallet at the gong so hard that its shaking, violent vibrations sent it crashing to the floor, filling the old wooden building with a second loud smash. 

There was a beat of silence, as if the world stood in stunned silence.

And then-

"Fucking hell!" someone shouted angrily.

Rangiku grinned, and she began to set the table.

Women began to filter in in dribs and drabs, some with their hair still tangled and mussed from sleep, still wearing their sleeping clothes, and others freshly bathed and jasmine-scented, almost ready for the work night to begin.

Rin was one of the first to arrive. Even her aristocratic manners could not help her when she saw who it was that was standing by the food, wooden spoon in hand.

"...You cooked?" she asked, her eyes wide in alarm.

Rangiku beamed at her.

Rin's self-possession was too strong to let her flee or crumple. She did, however, look at the door briefly as if the thought of running far, far away had crossed her mind. "Good... Good..." she said in defeat. "That's very kind of you, Rangiku-chan..."

Others were less circumspect.

"Rangiku-chan was the one who cooked?" One woman asked alarmed, hovering at the door. "Fuck this. I suffered prawn custard. I'm not doing this again. Rangiku-chan, you're a wonderful girl, but my stomach will thank me."

Kneeling by the table, Sayaka and Yuki prodded at the rice fearfully, as if one false move might cause the whole thing to explode.

Yuki gave Sayaka a cautious look. "It looks... Normal."

Sayaka stuck one of her chopsticks into the bowl of rice, and rummaged about suspiciously, turning the rice over to look beneath it.

"No red bean paste here," she announced, and paused. Goosebumps of revulsion rose on her arms. "Yuki-san," she whispered urgently, "there has to be something. There's always something. It just looks normal."

Chiyo, the brothel owner, who owing to a long life spent in the sex trade was no-nonsense to a fault, was the first to take the plunge. Everyone's eyes focused on her chopsticks as she raised them to her mouth.

"Chiyo's going to die and I'm going to be out of a job and I'm going to have to solicit on the streets, and it's all going to be Rangiku's fault," Sayaka moaned in fear.

Chiyo chewed.

Everyone held their breath.

"Normal," she proclaimed bluntly. Everyone exhaled in relief. "Rice with sesame. Plain. Serviceable. Boring. Well done," she said gruffly to Rangiku.

Rangiku whooped. "Kitchen curse my ass!" she crowed to everyone. "I will accept apologies now, you harpies. After all those lovely meals I cooked for you too!" She punched the air.

"Can it really be edible?" Yuki murmured to Sayaka.

Sayaka continued to poke at her rice. "There's only one way to find out," she sighed, and took a mouthful. Yuki followed suit.

They chewed slowly and deliberately, as if waiting for the hammer to fall.

"Well, the end is nigh," Sayaka announced. "Rangiku can produce edible food. Who knew?" "I knew!" Rangiku interjected loudly.

Ayame chose that moment to enter the kitchen, rubbing her stomach. She looked pale and her eyes were bright and feverish. Her hair was slicked to her head with sweat.

"Food?" she said weakly, and came to sit with them. She piled a small amount of rice into a bowl delicately, and began to eat.

Rangiku and the others looked at her in concern.

"You look like shit," Sayaka said bluntly. "You should ask Chiyo-san whether you can take the night off."

Ayame gave her a piercing look. "I'm fine," she said coldly.

"Alright, alright," Sayaka said raising her hands reflexively. "No need to bite my head off, Ayame. I was just concerned."

"Yeah?" Ayame snapped. "Well, don't be. I don't need your concern."

Rangiku and Yuki shared sidelong glances. Ayame could be fussy- everyone had been on the receiving end of her complaints at some point, even the impeccably mannered Rin- but she had never been one to be so cold. It was out of character.

Hurt bloomed in Sayaka's eyes. "Oh trust me," she said stiffly. "I'm very quickly regretting that decision."

They ate mostly in silence after that, with Yuki and Rangiku's attempts to spark conversation fizzling out like damp matches in the hostile atmosphere.

They were waiting for Ayame to finish her rice when she suddenly stood and bolted to the bin where Rangiku had thrown the scraps from cooking. She clung to the sides with one hand, the other holding back her own hair. Rangiku, knowing what was coming after long nights of overindulging on her own part, rushed over to her and held her hair back. Ayame retched and retched, and the kitchen filled with the acrid smell of vomit. Ayame swayed.

Yuki rushed to get her some water.

"Still think you're fine?" Sayaka shouted.

"Sayaka-chan!" Yuki said harshly. "You're not helping."

Ayame wiped the corner of her mouth clumsily. "I'm fine," she gritted out. "Leave me alone." She shook their hands away- Yuki's, with the glass of water, Rangiku's, holding her hair back- and brushed past them quickly.

Sayaka, Rangiku and Yuki could only look at each other in bafflement. Yuki shook her head in dismay.

There was a beat of silence, and then Sayaka couldn't help herself.

"Ne, Rangiku-chan?" she said innocently, giving her a sly glance. "Looks like we were right all along. You’ve still got that kitchen curse."

Rangiku swore at her, but Sayaka just walked off chuckling to herself.

---

By the time Rangiku was due to start work, Ayame seemed to be fine again, and Rangiku eyed her in suspicion.

“Stop staring at me, Rangiku-chan,” she said brusquely. “Hurry up and get ready. You’ve got a bunch of regulars to serve.”

Rangiku decided to squint at her even harder out of a childish kind of spite, and she made binoculars with her hands just to prove a point. “I’ve got my eyes on you,” she announced dramatically.

Ayame shook her head in consternation, but even then she couldn’t help but snort.

“You’re an airhead,” she informed Rangiku sweetly.

Rangiku stuck out her tongue merrily. She looked in the mirror one last time, considering her appearance, and opened her neckline a touch further, wriggling as she did so, as Sayaka had once shown her with a coquettish wink. It was perfect. A devious expression crossed the face of her reflection. So many tips for the taking, she thought with excited anticipation- so little time.

It was with a spring in her step that she made her way to the front of the house and to behind the bar. One of the girls had been serving temporarily whilst she got ready, given that she’d had the unfortunate triple whammy of cooking, cleaning and having to bathe last. The other girl bowed out gratefully and took her place on the floor whilst Rangiku scrambled into place.

It was early yet, but even then, the sake was flowing, the red lanterns were lit, and the hypnotic beat of the music was beginning to work its way under people’s skin. Already she could hear roars of laughter and voices ebbing and flowing in animated conversation. She could tell already that it was going to be a good night; she had developed a sixth sense for it, an instinct which resonated deep in her bones, for the interplay of people, for reading the atmosphere.

She smiled brightly, flirtatiously, a hint of promise tucked away at the corner of her mouth and in her plunging neckline. She was young still, looking no more than fourteen or fifteen though in actuality she must have been almost twice that, and innocent yet in so many ways, but her regulars loved her, and part of her loved them too, to luxuriate in the attention they lavished on her. They smiled to see her; they roared in delight. It didn’t matter to her whether it was for the promise of booze or the pleasure of her company; she lapped it up anyway.

“Alright, lads, what can a girl get you this evening?” she called out flirtatiously, gazing up at them from under heavy lashes.

“A kiss from you, darling!” A new customer shouted, more drunk on the atmosphere than any alcohol consumed- thought it was always hard to tell in the early evening.

“Rangiku-chan doesn’t kiss and tell!” one of her regulars said fiercely, and she laughed at his protectiveness.

She was always “Rangiku-chan” here, and for the rare and occasional polite customer, “Matsumoto-chan” at a push. It had none of the artless childhood clumsiness of “Ran-chan”, and Rangiku was glad of it; only one person had ever called her that. “Ran-chan” was a trembling girl abandoned first in the grime of a provincial road, and then a second time on a cold winter’s night two years ago, left to shiver alone in a wooden shack. “Matsumoto-chan” had potential- she was going somewhere. She sounded like a lady, someone made of tinkling, bright laughter, yet still full of grace.

She leaned in, and as she did so, so too did her crowd of admirers. She paused, fluttered her eyelashes, and blew a kiss to the man who had demanded one. “That will have to do- for now!” she said teasingly, and she winked at him, and the men cheered her on raucously. She tossed her hair back, with the easy confidence of her youth, and it cascaded about her shoulders like a wave of burnished gold. “What do you boys want to drink?”

It was quickly and authoritatively decided that sake was to be the drink of choice of the evening for this particular gaggle of partygoers, and so she set to filling sake cups.

"And one for our lovely barmaid?" one asked hopefully.

Rangiku let her face fall and her lip tremble pathetically. "I don't have the money to pay for sake on my wages," she whined morosely.

They were so gallant, these daft men. One slammed his fist on the bar counter dramatically. "Unacceptable!" he shouted. "A girl as pretty as you should never be without a drink!" He looked outraged. He paused, and looked around at his companions with the single-minded determination of the drunk. "Cough up lads- we're buying the lady a drink."

Rangiku beamed, and poured herself a cup.

"You've always been my favourite customers," she said decisively, though she had come to the decision only about five seconds before, and was likely to change her mind five or six more times that night alone based solely on how nicely her customers treated her and how much money she could extort from them.

"Bet she couldn't down it though," one of the men said, nudging his friend. "Look at her- a delicate thing like that? She'd spit up a lung." He laughed.

Rangiku's eyes gleamed, and she pounced.

"I'd take that bet. Ten yuan?" she said sweetly.

The man gave her an easy look, his confidence entirely unshaken. He was, Rangiku thought with glee, obviously very eager to part with his money. "Go on then," he said indulgently, as if entertaining a small child.

It was too easy, sometimes. She seized her cup, the sake almost sloshing over the brim in her excitement, and she raised it in a toast. "To my best customers!" she trilled, and she knocked back the liquor in one. It stung as it raced down her throat, and its fiery fumes rose in her nose, but she did not blink and she did not cough. She merely held the man's eye, and she placed the sake cup down on the counter firmly in triumph.

The men cheered. Even the one who had doubted her capacious ability to knock back sake smiled. He handed over her winnings with no grudges.

One cynic amongst them could not help but point out the obvious to the loser.

“Don’t let her looks deceive you, you dolt- Rangiku-chan here can drink like a seasoned pro. How else do you think she manages working here? For her, that was practically free money. And you chipped in to buy the damned drink in the first place, you fool.”

The loser looked aghast. “You should have told me that in the first place!”

Rangiku gave him her most innocent, “what, me?” expression; her round, blue eyes widened, and her mouth formed a small ‘o’. “I have no idea what you mean Minuchi-san!” she protested with feigned shock, as if she weren’t lying through her teeth. “That sake burned going all the way down! I’m pretty sure I can still feel it sloshing around in my chest!” She eyed her own breasts with a conspicuous, exaggerated look because if she had learnt anything, it was that boobs somehow served to diffuse even the roughest of situations, and then she flashed the loser a winning smile. He sheepishly smiled back. The cynic of the group clapped him on the back roughly, and the others ruffled his hair.

(She pondered what she would spend her easy winnings on. Maybe there would be matcha flavoured mochi around in the market when she had time off. She almost drooled at the thought.)

Across the floor, a young man with hair tousled so perfectly that it had to have been the product of at least twenty minutes labour in front of the mirror talked with his friends. It was not his hair which drew her attention, however, but rather the clothes he was wearing; he wore the blue hakama and sigyled uniform of the Shinigami academy brazenly, almost boastfully.

She had seen him drinking here a number of times, always accompanied by his rowdy friends. Her eyes narrowed. He was always wearing his stupid uniform too. Does he have no other clothes?, she thought scornfully. Does he think he’s better than us?

“Hey,” she abruptly asked the men she had just served. “Who’s that hot shot over there with the loud friends?”

One of the men snickered. “Got a crush, Rangiku-chan? Didn’t know braggards were your type.”

“’S why we get on so well, Hisaishi-san!” She giggled at her own joke, and made kissing sounds at him. He flushed slightly, she asked her question again. “But seriously, what’s his deal?”

The cynic grumbled, as was his wont. “He just made it through his first year exams at Shinigami school and now he thinks he’s the Soul King himself. Lordin’ it over everyone- like he’s some kind of hero.” His expression was sour.

“Doesn’t help the way that they all fawn over him,” another chipped in. Off on the dance floor, the shinigami-in-training was being hoisted onto his friends’ shoulders, as if he was a champion gladiator. “Look at that.” The man shook his head. “It’s disgusting.”

Despite his words, he still looked on in envy.

An old thought rose again in her head then, that that could be her, and she spoke before she could quell it.

“Is it difficult?” she wondered. “To become a shinigami?”

The cynic snorted. “Have you seen him? You’re ten times as smart as he is.” He paused, and snorted again. “You’re only twice as pretty though.”

Rangiku paused. “He must spend longer on his hair than I do on mine, though, so it evens out,” she said absentmindedly, her eyes trained on the academy student.

Out on the floor, he was summoning a ball of reiatsu into being.

The air hummed and resonated in strange frequencies above his hand, and it crackled with a bright intensity as a small ball slowly formed. Some in the crowd around him looked on with surreptitious curiosity; others did not conceal their excitement, and nudged each other and gasped out loud in wonder. He grinned to hear their reactions, and the light of his power illuminated their faces. This was the fourteenth district of West Rukongai- closer to Seireitei than Rangiku had ever been,  but still far away enough that to have a local boy become a shinigami was a thing of pride.

Rangiku craned her neck to get a better view. She frowned at what she saw.

The manifestation of his power was… Thin. It was wispy, insubstantial- thin like gossamer thread around the edges.

She could almost see through it.

It was thinner and more delicate than her power, which ran thick and strong, though somewhat wildly. And it was certainly thinner than Gin’s, the pure radiance of which could have blinded her, he had been so strong.

The student was also having trouble keeping a coherent shape. She was squinting from behind the bar, but she could have sworn that she saw the contours of his ball of reiatsu wobble, loose, swaying tendrils of light breaking from its surface.

I could do better than that, she thought suddenly. I could do better than that standing on my head, burping numbers backwards from one thousand.

Gin had made sure of it.

He had sat patiently with her, day after day, back when she couldn’t even materialise her reiatsu at all, and he had guided her gently until he was satisfied that her power would not waver, that it would hold strong and bright in her hands, that it could keep her safe when he was absent and could not.

He would stand behind her even as she whined and complained with the dullness of it all, the monotony of meditation. Very occasionally, she could feel his breath warm the back of her neck, and he would cup her hands, shining with brilliant, violent light, with his own. His touch would be feather soft and gentle, and her breath would catch in her throat. She would be lost in that touch.

And then he would grin, grin that damned grin of his.

“Ya’ form is slippin’, Rangiku,” he would murmur knowingly in her ear, ever so entertained at the reactions he could provoke in her.

And the spell would end, and she would get flustered and shout. “Because you’re distracting me, that’s why!”

Unapologetic he would stretch back lazily, and command her to start again. It was tough and repetitive work, but he would watch her as she did it, and he would not let the lessons stop until he was satisfied.

She tried it out loud.

“I could do better than that,” she said quietly.

The men at the bar turned to look at her.

The cynic gave her a thoughtful look. He cocked his head, and nodded slowly. “She could,” he said gruffly to his drinking companions. “You’ve seen her handle brawlers. I don’t know much about shinigami, or magic, but her light is bigger than his. That probably means something.”

The idea was slowly taken up. “It’s rare that someone every gets a hit on her,” one man admitted.

“The ball in his hand is barely the size of an apple.”

They paused as a wonderful thought began to dawn simultaneously in their minds.

“She could kick his ass.”

“Take him down a peg.”

“Show him a thing or two.”

The loser, who had bet that she couldn’t down her sake, looked at her beseechingly. “C’mon, you’ve got to do it now. It would be amazing.”

Rangiku blinked in surprise. “Eh?”

“I’d take that bet. Show him what’s what.”

“He’s unbearable- look at him! He’s been away for a year, and he already thinks he’s king of this dive. Kick his ass for us.”

Rangiku’s customer-service expression faltered for a moment. “I can’t just go around picking fights with customers!” she argued hotly. “Chiyo will kick my ass and then she’ll chuck me out! I need this job. I need to eat!”

She knuckled down and began to wipe at sake cups with a dishcloth ferociously, knowing deep down in her gut how satisfying it would be to prove that the shinigami student wasn’t as good as he thought he was. But, she couldn’t help but think, he has a right to be proud, and I have no right to drag him down for it. It’s hard work for anyone, getting out of here and up there. No wonder he’s proud.  If only he wasn’t so damned obnoxious.

The cynic smiled a small, grim smile. “It would practically be an act of charity- a public good.”

But the matter was soon taken out of her hands.

As Rangiku had been tossing her head and making her vehement protests to her regulars, Sayaka had been watching on from the corner, the beginnings of a wild smile playing about her lips, barely suppressed. She dragged herself from the wall where she had been draped herself, and now began to move with feline intent across the floor to where the young man and his friends caroused.

They looked at each other in excitement when they saw her, and each began a surreptitious display of smoothing back their hair and improving their posture, one man's chest puffing out comically as he tried to put to best display muscles he didn't actually have.

Sayaka wound her arms about the shinigami student's neck, and bent her crimson lips to whisper in his ear. He looked at her, befuddled at first, and she smiled winsomely at him- and then he looked appalled, and a look of determination settled on his face.

Over by the bar, Rangiku held a sake cup up to the light and squinted.

Sayaka's painted lips stretched into a grin of delight.

The band picked up pace, the shamisen player plucking a rhythmic, off-kilter melody.

The Academy student drew himself up to his full height and began to move in Rangiku's direction, his posse lingering behind him hesitantly.

It was the loser who spotted him first. "Erm-" he started in alarm. "Think we might have company in a minute, Rangiku-chan."

She looked up from the cup she was inspecting. "Hm?" She asked absent mindedly. 

The cynic's eyes were wide and he gestured wildly out into the crowd at the advancing shinigami-in-training.

Rangiku blinked.

"Aw shit," she said. "Guys?" But the men around her looked grey and grim-faced. The loser even trembled a little. It was one thing to bad mouth a shinigami behind his back, and quite another to have to own up to it to said shinigami's face. Rangiku sighed, and steeled herself for the worst. “Guys?”

In less than ten seconds, he was standing in front of her.

Customer service face, she thought fiercely. Customer service face. "Good evening!" she said cheerily, in the fakest, most depressingly energetic way she could. "What can I get you to drink, sir?"

From the corner of her eye, she could see Rin and Yuki whispering in each other's ears, shooting her wide-eyed and worried looks.

Rangiku was suddenly keenly aware that the man had half a foot's advantage on her. She had to crane her neck to look him in the eye, even with the bar between them.

The man took in a deep, shuddering breath.

"I've been told-" he paused to martial himself, "-I've been told that there are some people here who have been saying that I could be beaten by some little girl." His eyes were fierce. "I've trained my ass off all year, and I come home to hear this disrespect- in my own home town, from my own folks. I worked so hard." He looked her in the eye apologetically. "I'm sorry, but I can't stand for this. A little girl? Who said that?"

Rangiku was thrown. She suddenly found that she could say nothing- not out of fear, but out of discomfort at the man's emotion.

The shinigami student wheeled round to face her regulars, a wounded look on his face. "Was it you?" In his fury, he seemed to have lost all sense of personal space; the men shrank back, but he followed them.

The cynic panicked. "I- I- I-"

The loser was less sensible. "I'm sorry but it's true," he babbled. "I'm sorry, man, but she's really good! Better than you! No disrespect, but you can't argue with the truth, and that's the truth."

The cynic was white-faced. "Shut. Up!" He whispered, his voice high pitched.

The student's face tightened with emotion and he  loomed threateningly over the pair. He looked genuinely hurt by the thought that someone could even think such a thing.

Please don’t be violent, Rangiku begged inwardly. Please don’t be volatile. Don’t hurt him. That’s not what I wanted.

It was Rin's rich, aristocratic voice voice that cut across the room next. Her voice displayed none of the anxiety evident on her face; it cracked like a whip, her consonants sharp and cutting as glass. By her side, her hands shook.

"Is your pride so fragile that you cannot bare to hear a negative word said against you? Is it so difficult to hear that a girl might outmatch you? Your conduct shames yourself and the very institution you represent."

Yuki nodded mutely yet vehemently by her side, her face blanched with panic.

The young man turned on them next. "But it's nothing but a lie!" He said in anguish. "It's a dirty lie! I'm at the Academy! I'm going to become a shinigami and she's nothing but a filthy whore." He looked around beseechingly, as if looking for support, but the bar was silent.

No one held his gaze, embarrassed by his emotional display. The music played on, and conversation still bubbled, but those who could hear what was going on were deadly silent.

Rangiku's knuckles were white where she had clenched her fists.

Slowly, she loosened her grip.

It was a heinous thing to have said.

An eerie sense of calm drifted over her.

"You apologise to all the girls working here," she said levelly, "and we might be able to forget all this and pretend it never happened."

The young man shook his head violently. "I'm not taking back what is obviously true," he insisted. "I'm better than you, and I'm better than them, dregs of society that you are. There's no way you could be better than me, and if I have to prove it, I will."

She felt a hand clasp on her shoulder. When she looked up, it was to see Ayame's face, which bore a look of pure contempt for the young man. 

"Go for it," she said quietly. "Kick his ass for us."

Ayame, who had always been a stickler for rules; Ayame, who would complain if she couldn't see her face in a washed table.

A few feet away, Yuki nodded fiercely.

Sayaka's eyes were bright.

Rin sighed in weary resignation.

"I'll make sure Chiyo-san doesn't find out," she said with finality.

Rangiku drew herself up to her full height, all of five foot six. She flashed him the most saccharine smile she could muster.

"Right then, Mr Future Shinigami," she said in a voice like arsenic and sugar. "Shall we take this outside?"

---

A small crowd mustered outside to watch them, conversation at a fever-pitch of excitement. In typical fashion for the customer-base of the Floating Moon, odds were quickly placed on the outcome of the fight, and bets were made and taken.

Rangiku tried not to feel hurt that the odds the bet-takers gave were not in her favour.

"People haven't seen you in action," Ayame said calmly. "Don't pay any attention. They're underestimating you."

"Put a bet on for me, Ayame-chan," Rangiku told her suddenly. "Ten yuan that I'm going to win. Go to Akibara-san- he'll give you the best odds."

She could feel nerves begin to bubble sickeningly in her stomach and her throat begin to tighten in anxiety.

She had never fought anyone with actual training before. She was strong- stronger than he was, but the vital fact remained that he knew what he was doing and she didn't. He could pull anything out of the bag, and she wouldn't know what do to counter it.

Shit, she thought. Shit. Shit. Shit.

She had let her big mouth and her big head run away from her. Who did she think she was, mouthing off about being good enough to go to the Academy?

She was trash; trash from the worst recesses of Rukongai, trash left on the side of the road time and time again, good for nothing and good to no one. No one had ever wanted her in her life.

She panicked.

But he had bad-mouthed her friends. Something about that filled her blood with fire.

"Filthy whores" he had called them all; "The dregs of society."

These women had no reputation to speak of, no one who would even think to defend their honour. The crowd had watched on, and they had stayed silent

But she could not let it stand.

Her legs shook where she stood. Her opponent was six foot tall and almost twice as broad as her.

He did not look at her

He was laughing away with his friends, as if she was about a consequential as a mote of dust, as if they barely occupied the same universe.

And that was how she knew suddenly that she was going to win.

"They'll always underestimate ya'," Gin had told her once, "because ya' small and ya' pretty and ya' a girl. Ya' can use that against 'em- take 'em by surprise. Be sneakier than 'em and finish it quickly." He had shook his head, and his voice had been boyish. "They'll never expect ya' to be so strong. That's an advantage an idiot will give ya'."

The fact that he had called her pretty had sent a small thrill down her, and she'd had to hide a smile. "And you won't? Underestimate me, I mean?" She had asked curiously, blue eyes peeping at him sidelong.

He had snorted and looked at her earnestly. "I've felt that right hook of ya's too many times to do anything but take ya' seriously. I mean it."

That confidence in her abilities, even more so than the fact that he had called her pretty, had made her smile and flush, though she had tried to hide it with her arm.

"What?" He had asked in confusion, "Why are ya' smilin'?" And she had turned round, where he could not see her face, and beamed with pride.

She stared down the shinigami in training. Weak reiatsu, she remembered. Tall frame. Bulky. Slow? Ignoring her. No sword yet.

Likely to use his powers then, to attack- to play to the crowd.

She only needed to land one hit, and he was a big target.

"Hey, mister," she called out, the nervousness she felt barely in her voice, "can we get this show on the road? Can't have Yuki-san covering for me behind the bar all night. She's got customers. Some of us have work to be getting on with."

The young man started, and his expression soured. "Ah, right." He raised his hands outwards, seeking to explain himself. "I'm sorry about this," he said earnestly. "But you and your friends attacked my pride, and I can't let that stand."

It was to Rangiku's credit that she managed to maintain her placid facade.

"I'm sure," she said. "Can we get a count down, someone?"

Ayame stepped forward. "I'll give you a count of three. Start when I say 'Go'."

She cleared her throat nervously. "Alright."

"3..."

Rangiku pushed her golden hair out of her face in determination.

"2..."

Her eyes narrowed in focus.

"1..."

She felt time become elastic, like everything was moving was dragging slowly through water.

"Go!" Ayame shouted. It seemed to take twice as long as it normally would.

She moved.

She hadn't been to shinigami school, but that didn't matter.

Her hands filled with bright white light and she darted sharply to the left, low to the ground, out of her opponent's reach.

His mouth was open as he began a long-winded chant.

That didn't matter.

He was slow.

It was to his credit that he did not panic as she came at him from close-quarters. He stopped chanting in favour of swiping clumsily at her, realising suddenly that he would not be able to finish rattling off the incantation in time. His eyes widened in fear as as he caught sight of the reiatsu in her hands, and he stumbled backwards, only narrowly avoiding a hit.

To Rangiku, it was as if he moved in slow motion. Her hair fell in front of her face, and she snarled like a wild cat, her heart battering her ribs.

He couldn't finish his spell. He couldn't draw on his powers quick enough to pull it into his hand like she had. He could only swipe at her frantically, hoping against all hope to land a hit the traditional way.

She ducked and swerved inelegantly, her eyes narrow and ferocious. There was nothing pretty in it. She was fighting, fighting for herself and for her friends, for what was decent and what was just, and that meant that there could be no space in her head for anything else.

And then she saw it- an opening- and she lunged for it, forcing her palm against his chest, holding back only slightly. The shinigami student was solid muscle, and the impact made a dull boom as her fist connected.

His body went wheeling through the air, spinning as it did so. It arced over the heads of the crowd, and they pushed and shoved at each other to get out of the way.

There was a beat of silence.

The world was quiet.

And then-

"Fucking hell!" someone shouted in joyous outrage. And the crowd cheered.

Rangiku blinked, startled back to reality.

"That was incredible!"

"Did you know she was so strong?"

"Where'd she learn to do that, then?"

"A barmaid?!"

She took a shaky breath, adrenaline aftershocks in her limbs and in her chest, and a slow smile spread across her face until she was radiant with it. She laughed and she waved to the crowd, who all suddenly seemed to love her, to need her

Ayame was outraged. "That took literally less than a minute!"

Rangiku gave her a look of confusion. "Huh?"

"You wiped the floor with him!"

"Come on, Ayame-chan- that must have taken at least five."

"No!" Ayame shouted with a kind of excited agitation. "That was definitely less than a minute!" She paused, and pointed an accusing finger at her. "Why on earth are you a barmaid when you can do things like that?!"

Sayaka, who had instigated the whole thing, was grinning again.

Her regulars were whooping. "You kicked his ass!" 

The cynic was nodding enthusiastically. "I knew you could take him. I said that, didn't I? I knew it. I called it."

The loser was smiling beatifically. "I bet on you," he announced giddily. "I'm going to be rolling in it."

She looked around, and everywhere her eyes landed was a person smiling for her. It felt like nothing she had ever felt before, and it blossomed in her chest. She loved it, this sensation of being loved, of belonging, and she knew then and there that from now on, part of her would always be craving it.

Her eyes shone, and she felt dazed all of a sudden.

She stumbled over to where the shinigami student still lay on the ground, her legs trembling slightly, and sat down clumsily beside him.

Everyone held their breath.

"Hey! You!" she said, her voice rough. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hit you so hard."

She couldn't see the young man's face, but she could hear him breathing. It sounded wet- uneven.

She suspected that he might be crying, and part of her felt guilty to have been the cause of that. She had no reputation to speak of; she worked at a whorehouse, and so she was thought of as indecent by mere association with the trade. He had staked the entirety of his self-worth on his power. He had been unfathomably rude and arrogant and had treated her friends with contempt. Part of her purred in satisfaction to see him brought down a peg, but Rangiku had never been the sort to revel long in the misery of others, especially not when they were genuinely pathetic, as this young man seemed to be

He had lost, and he knew it. Everyone knew it. He was disgraced.

And that was enough. It was time for kindness now.

"Do you want a hand up?" She asked him quietly, extending him a hand.

Had he been a truly contemptuous man, he would have hit her hand away, too prideful to accept defeat with grace.

He took the proffered hand instead.

"You have a mean right hook," he offered through his uneven breaths.

"You're not the first person to tell me that." She paused, and offered him a tentative smile. "I'm sorry we had to do this in front of everyone."

His mouth twisted slightly, and he looked away, ashamed. "No," he said in said in resignation, and he inclined his head to look into the distance. "In the end, they were right. You were better than me." He paused and gave her a sidelong glance. " Where did you learn moves like those? Why aren't you at the Academy?"

She mulled the question over. It was a complicated one. She arrived at a kind of half version of the truth, and it was this that she told him.

"I was going to go, I think, when I first set out from home. I didn't have much of a plan, but I think that’s what I thought I was going out to do. But I got scared, I think. I didn't want to go alone. I found a job here, and all the girls- they looked after me. They liked me. I was helping them. They needed me. I wasn't-" her breath hitched as her chest tightened, "-I wasn't alone anymore."

It felt strange, divulging this to a man she'd been fighting so short a time before, but the adrenaline of the fight was still coursing through her. "The longer I stayed, the scarier the thought of going became. I thought 'The Floating Moon’s a good place and they'll all be better than you anyway. You're a good barmaid- who even says you can be a shinigami?'"

She fell silent, contemplating the matter with a far-off look in her eyes.

The young man looked at her agog for a moment and then he snorted.

Rangiku's eyes narrowed. "What?" She growled. "Do you want your ass kicking again?”

He spread his hands out in front of him defensively. "No! No. It's just funny, that's all. You don't realise."

"Realise what?" she huffed.

"How strong you are. I'm in the lower ability class, but I've sparred with guys from the higher class. Hell, I've even sparred with students from the noble families, the only time these 'filthy Rukongai hands' have even got near one of the bastards. Point is- you're good, barmaid. You're really good, actually. You’ve got excellent control for a first year. Maybe some of the best I’ve seen.” He paused. "Well, almost. You'd not only get into the Academy, but I reckon you could make it to the top class without breaking much of a sweat."

Rangiku tried to file away the new information. "Huh," she said dumbly, too shocked to say much.

The young man grinned suddenly. "You have to join," he said longingly. "Oh man, the look on those Seireitei-born bastard noblemen's faces when they see the likes of you." The thought lit up his face and seemed to take away the sting of defeat.

Rangiku was lost. "What do you mean, 'the likes of me'?" She prodded at him.

"Talented. Rukongai-born." He paused. "It'll be like with the prodigy boy from last year. It would be so fucking good. Please," he pleaded, "please think about joining."

"They don't like people from Rukongai?" Her mind flashed without warning to Gin, who'd had the broadest accent she'd ever heard, and her heart sank despite itself.

"They're snobs, the lot of them. The students from the nobility look down on those from Rukongai; those from higher districts look down on those from lower districts." His tone was melancholy. "I guess that's why I was so glad to get home. It was good being somewhere where I was appreciated rather than getting shit on for once."

Rangiku’s expression darkened. He hurried to correct himself.

"But I should have done that without taking it out on other people."

She nodded fiercely. “Yeah, buster. You can say that again. What you said was A-grade asshole trash, and you probably deserved an ass kicking for it.”

He looked her in the eye, and she found some of her own ferocity reflected there. "And I'm going to make up for it right now," he announced. "Because I'm going to buy every single one of you drinks to make up for the things I said."

Rangiku's face shone with delight, and she squealed.

"You-" she said nodding firmly. "You are my new favourite customer. Come back in with us, everyone. Drinks are on him!"  

The night was still young. He would have plenty of time to prove her wrong.

[miss-m-winks]

Instead of a summary of my art from each month of 2019 I’ve compiled a summary of my art from every year of this decade! Finding some of that old art was incredibly difficult.

And making an exact image description of all this would be too long to write or read so I’m going to do my best to describe all this in a concise and interesting way.

2010: I was a sophomore in high school, so about 15 years old. These two drawings are in pencil and colored pencil, one of some random girl character wearing brightly colored clothes and a rainbow shawl thing (??) walking on clouds it seems. No idea what that was meant to be about. The other is a reference for my old oc, the very first one I ever had, based on myself. She looks human but with unicorn ears and a horn, plus wings and a tail. I hadn’t figured out animal legs yet either so she has perfectly normal human legs that just end in hooves.

2011: still mostly pencil, colored pencil, I don’t remember if I had a laptop yet. I would have been 16 years old at this time. I picked a self portrait here, a coloreddrawing of myself in black concert dress playing the trumpet because I got to do a solo in jazz band and I was very happy about it. The other art I picked for this year is digital but in the old ms paint program (you know before it tried to be fancy with a few more realistic tools and was only pixel art tools) I do believe I was still using the family computer for this, with a mouse. I was really creative with the tools. It’s my unicorn girl oc again, flying through the sky. I included a progress image, showing how I made it. I’m so glad I saved the steps and posted them it’s really cool to see my old art process for that.

2012: 17 years old, and I think I finally had a laptop with a good art program on it by this time but I still did mostly traditional art, lots of colored pencil work. I found this old experimental art I did that year, a colored pencil drawing of a girl sitting on a tree branch, but the background is all digital, a painting of a fantasy night sky with three moons. It actually looks kinda good, the edges of the colored pencil drawing are crisp and smooth and the digital background doesn’t look out of place. I mean the shading is a bit of a mess and I used white clouds on a black night sky which is a bit funny looking but it isn’t that bad. The other image is a colored pencil drawing that was really ambitious for me at the time. I had this cool idea to draw Death with sunset colored wings, all poetic and stuff. Why did I also draw death with blue skin and horns? I don’t know. Why is death sitting on an ambiguous brown cliff overlooking a cemetery? Well I guess I just was having trouble finding any other way to make a nice background and have death above a cemetery. I should redo this one, it’s a really good concept.

2013: my last year of high school, 18 years old. I was doing digital art a lot more often this year and expanding the diversity of my ocs. One of these images is a digital drawing of two of my first characters of color, two male black elves (black as in African-based) smoochin. My first black oc was also my first queer oc, jayvyn. A gay elf. There are a lot of issues with the way I originally conceptualized his story but even when I was thinking he was the only queer person in his town and there was homophobia towards him (I was only just dipping my toes outside the mindset I grew up in) I gave him a whole massive group of friends (a boys' lacrosse team he was on don’t ask me why lacrosse I have no idea I don’t even know much about lacrosse it was a weird choice) and those friends were extremely loyal and supportive of him, even to the point of going on dates with him just to make him happy. and again, he was the only gay character I had so I was writing a bunch of straight dudes taking their one gay friend on dates in a town full of people who were at least vaguely homophobic, I definitely had a lot of growing to do in my writing and my own mindset but I’m kinda proud of myself for doing that? I could have done so much worse with my first queer oc and my first real step into characters of color, but I made the whole story about this tight knit group of boys who were all such close loving friends. (Gee I wonder if this had anything to do with my being ace and not knowing it yet). Oh yeah, the other image is also there, that one is from a photoshop class I took. We had a three-way folding mirrors the bathroom at the time so I put on a hoodie, turned out the bathroom lights, folded the mirrors in and shoved my face into the gap and then took a photo with the flash while holding my mouth open in a silent scream. The result is this really cool series of screaming faces at different angles, which I then ran through a few filters and major contrast adjustment. Could be an edgy generic horror movie cover lol

2014: 19 years old, and I just finished a year of community college and then left on a church mission for 18 months. I probably should have used some of my first college art class drawings for this year's summary but I was using my old deviantart gallery to collect these old images so I forgot I had all that college art too. These two digital images are pretty dynamic in different ways. Dynamic lighting and dark skin, an experiment I was doing to figure out lighting better for my characters of color. That’s Jayvyn again I think, with lightning shooting out of his hand because I sure love making characters with lightning powers. The other is dynamic in the posing and I’m still incredibly happy with it, it’s a drawing of a grey centaur from behind, bucking in panic because a kitten pounced on its foot. Definitely still one of the best centaur drawings I have ever made.

2015: 20 years old, I was actually on my church mission for this entire year so finding art from that year was very very tricky. One is just a small pencil drawing on another oc, Ronan with his cool mechanical leg playing fiddle I guess? I was doing a lot of synesthesia doodles that year so there are lots of swirly lines coming off the fiddle. I was also surprised to find this really neat digital art I made of Ravio from link between worlds, I almost forgot I did find a way to make digital art on my mission (no access to my laptop, limited apps we were allowed to use, super limited access to normal computers except for emails and such, always busy doing important stuff) I discovered the drawing function in the iPad notes app and every time I had time I would use it until I figured out how to make it work for me, using only my fingers, the limited color palette options, and this marker tool that had one size and only multiplied (except when using white) this is definitely one of the best ones, but I don’t know where the rest went. I had a lot. I was stunned to find this because it really looks like I could have done it on a laptop, can’t believe I forgot I did that.

2016: 21 years old. Had to get used to a laptop again. Also I created my current main oc Morianten during my church mission so here I have the very first full body digital art of him! I’ve definitely changed his anatomy a lot since then, made him much more bird like. Kinda funny to look at this old one and see just how differently I draw him now, only three years later. I also have here a digital painting of some other members of morianten's adoptive family, his dad and little brother having a father son race in nice racing wheelchairs. I still struggle with proportions when I draw characters in wheelchairs.

2017: 22 years old, and back in college. I really had a focus on figure drawing that year, I was back in college art classes and I found posespace.com which is just full of professionally shot art model photos. I’ve got one digital figure drawing of my oc Talib, another practice in lighting on dark skin. The other image is a charcoal drawing of my oc Parva, I think I did that one in a 30 minute time frame where I was taking pictures at different points to show my process but I’ve lost the process images.

2018: 23 years old, and really getting into color depth with my digital art. I found a really old pencil drawing of a dynamic dancing scene and redid it as a digital painting with extreme colored lighting dynamics and new characters. I also got super into mermay so I’ve included one of my favorites, a rainbow trout gal and her elf girlfriend having a chat after a nice swim. I’m super proud of the colors and proportions here, and the shading is pretty great too.

And then it’s 2019! This year! I’m 24! For this one I used three images instead of two, all digital. My ocs Talib and Kouto as persephone and hades in a really quick painting I did but the colors and lighting are intense and fun. No outlines painting of Morianten with some pretty intense lightning lighting. That one took ages and I’m still not entirely pleased with the way I drew his face there but I’m proud of it. And I never actually posted this last one, it’s a new oc created exclusively for the DC superheroes au I dabbled in with @askmissbernadette, a young hero called Lion riding a skateboard in a dark city with a long coat on because that’s a fun way to replace the common superhero cape design.

Overall, it was really fun to go through my art for the entire decade and see how much it’s changed over time. And to see how much my characters have changed. Hope 2020 is a good year, hope the 20s in general are good. Here’s to another 10 years of change and progress!

[obfuscobble]

SO I got my hands on the Japan Animator Expo 2015 collection and I thought it a good time to rate each short because I have some very concise opinions.

1. Dragon Dentist 4/5 Girl volunteers to be a dragon's dentist in the midst of a war. Inventive, compelling, beautiful.  Works incredibly well as a short, managing to tell a story far longer than its timeframe without leaving us wondering what happened or what will happen.  A very strong start to the collection.

2. Hill Climb Girl 3/5 Girl wants to be a great bicyclist, and the first step is beating her friend up the hill to school. Pretty good for cel-shaded computer modelling.  If you like Yowamushi Pedal, you'll like this.  Not stand-out but it's an endearing.

3. ME!ME!ME! 4/5 Boy gets dunked on by his own objectification of women. A truly stand out music video not just for this collection but within the genre.  That said, you do have to rewatch it closely to glean its themes and true place as a condemnation of misogyny as seen through the self empowerment male fantasies used by the boy to combat his own misogynistic fear of female desire and deep shame over his otaku life.  And there is quite a lot of female objectification in his life.

4. Carnage 3/5 Gunslinging girl seeks revenge for her family and her arm. Great attention paid to the one armed gunslinging.  The conclusion openly and somberly lays out what will happen next as this old town must pay for its sins, even if it perpetuates the cycle of girls losing those they love.

5. Gundam key animation 1/5 Literally the key animation drawings from Gundam shown side to side with the classic footage. Pretty cool for animation nerds and gundam fans but otherwise not really compelling as a storytelling vehicle.  I have to take off points on that account, but it is really worth a watch to see the keys.

6. 20 min from Nishi Ogikubo Station 0/5 not actually 20 min long. Just kidding! 4/5 woman turns into a cockroach, much to man's dismay. The sketchy art style, soft colouring, and jittery movement add perfectly to the piece's theme, making them obviously intentional choices.  The piece is still fluidly put together, with inventive plays on human/cockroach interaction and the how's of being so small.  The woman as cockroach is envisioned naked, but I feel that this is presented in a naturalistic (ie she just shrunk out of her clothes) and not at all prurient way.  Didn't think I was going to like it as much as I did!

7. until You come to me 1/5 Oh Shinji boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling. Shinji silently misses Kaworu or five minutes. I mean I don't blame him but... Nothing happens, and if one has no inkling about Evangelion, this short has absolutely NO meaning.

8. Tomorrow from There 3/5 Woman avoids responsibilities, calls from her mom, and the creeping sense of adult dread, until she reconnects with her inner sense of joy. A wonderful counterpoint to ME!ME!ME! that focuses on universal human fears and dilemmas, without objectifying women.  Uplifting with a powerul backing song.  But I have to be honest and say that its visuals aren't going to stick with me as powerfully.

9. Electronic Superhuman Gridman 3/5 You are a human with the capacity for joy and wonder, so you will appreciate this heartfelt ode to super sentai live action and robot anime. Comes complete with character design details to reflect the rubber suits and even the tiny screw to hold on the back of a model's head.  Has nice internal logic about the Gridman.exe who fights monsters with the power of the electrical grid, such as circuit power ups and smashing a tv screen to get at the enemy.  Even for those unfamiliar with the tropes, it's just a fun 6 minutes.

10. Yamadeloid 3/5 An ode to historical fighter anime with neat brush-line visuals and fitting soundtrack. But it just didn't grab me by my heart's cockles like Gridman did, probably coming entirely down to what shows I grew up on.  It was also a lot more fourth wall breaking, which is entirely subjective for one's enjoyment, even from one short to another as you'll see.  So I'd like to give it a 2, but I know that nostalgia was the only thing inflating Gridman to a 3, so I'll be fair.

11. Power Plant No 33 2/5 What if we just... turned off our millenial facebook phones... and really lived.... yanno? The instantly gripping visuals of a society powered by a beast that creates electricity, which must then go on to fight a space robot, are immediately undermined by the totes not subtle digs against modern technology.  I get it, technology is literally a destructive beast.  I get it, we should unplug and learn to live freely.  The animation was great but the moral was giving me the feeling that I should get off a luddite's lawn.

12. Evangelion Another Impact Confidential 2/5 Tall woman looks for her daughter, finds hostile wasteland. But what a woman!

13. Kanón 3/5 A Japanese take on a Slavic philosophic parody of Jewish folk mythology, or, "On Solipsism." Actually fascinating as a piece.  It moves very very quickly though, leaving little time for the jokes and philosophy to set in, but I feel the frantic pace was meant to reinforce the confused, overworked, utterly helpless feelings that the main character was experiencing.  The fourth wall break right at the end completely charmed me and even elevated the piece.  Loses points for the inherent misogyny of the novel it was based on, but otherwise worth a watch for the curious, and one of the most interesting Japanese takes on Judaeo-Christian tradition I've seen.

14. Sex & Violence with Machspeed 0/5 Just because you admit that you're being gross for gross' sake doesn't mean you're not gross. Look I could get into it, but I just hated this one.  If you liked Panty and Stocking, maybe give it a try.

15. Obake-chan 3/5 A series of charming shorts about a girl who wants to be a spoopy ghost.

16. Tokio of the Moon's Shadow 4/5 Boy who has, I goddamn assure you, THE. SHINIEST. eyes in the universe saves earth and his radio penpal from a space creature. Come for the innovative mix of animation styles, stay for the dance sequence.  Just watch it.

17. Three Fallen Witnesses 2/5 Ambition: the Anime. Like seriously, this is the 3d animation equivalent of the Ambition games.  It's also a very ambitious premise, based on prosecuting attorneys using "DNA time travel" to gain evidence on a murder case.  Alas, I really feel it should have had longer to play in its world and the case itself.

18. The Diary of Ochibi 3/5 Edible stop motion is here!

19. I Can Friday by Day! 5/5 Tiny space squirrels fight tiny space rabbits, each piloting robot teenagers. Highly creative, wondrously fun, and yet with a good plot and even characterisation to hold it together past the visuals.  I'd love to see this as a short series, as I feel the premise, world, and character sketches could easily be filled out into a humourous and yet compelling larger narrative.

20a. ME!ME!ME! Chronic 1/5 Basically a remix.  Lacking the narrative of the original hurts it because then its just boobs and yonic symbolism and the guns that shoot them.  Still good music.

20b. The Making of Evangelion Another Impact Confidential 1/5 Interesting if you want to see how the short was designed and technically compiled.

21. Iconic Field 2/5 Never try to fit 13 episodes into 6 minutes. This is obviously angling to become a longer syndicated series but not only did they rush too many of their ideas and subplots into it, but they obviously ran out of money and production time.  Some shots are replaced with concept sketches, and there was no voice acting when clearly it was intended to be present.  It's creative in its character and mecha design, but the plot is another riff on the seeded earth hypothesis whose unanimated conclusion you can still see a mile away.

22. On a Gloomy Night Nippon Banzai! Nippon Banzai! Nippon Banzai! Nippon Banzai! Nippon Banzai! Nippon Banzai! Nippon Banzai! Nippon Banzai! Nippon Banzai! 1/5 Never try to fit 13 episodes into 6 minutes using Auld Lang Syne as your backing track.

23. Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen 1/5 Honestly not sure how to classify this one.  It's about a sex worker, it's presented with a quite effective animation style, but in the end it's all about the sex worker accepting abuse from another as her tragic role in the world. Ehn.

24. Rapid Rouge 4/5 In the world of the techno-daimyo, there is only loss. BRILLIANT use of a limited colour palette.  Loses one point due to not fully delivering on the emotional character-sacrifice punch it wanted and for being unartfully open ended.  If it delivers on a second episode like it promises, I might amend my opinion.  It was so close to being perfect, yet didn't manage to get me to care enough about its characters in its short run time, unlike...

25. Hammerhead 5/5 Highly violent, yes, but emotionally impactful to the extreme; I cried both times I've watched it. Update: three times. Wonderful traditional animation, powerful emotional centre, and perhaps the best animation I've ever seen to portray a human's physical demeanour in deep emotional distress.  I absolutely recommend watching this.

26. Conte Hitman 3/5 Manzai routine with clever twists and turns.  Porque no los dos, the sketch.

[thecostumeplot]

Episode 13: His Girl Friday & Roman Holiday

Please consult these Instagram slideshows for accompanying images: His Girl Friday Roman Holiday

Both:  

Welcome to The Costume Plot.

Jojo:  

I'm Jojo Siu.

Sarah:  

and I'm Sarah Timm. We're professional designers with a passion for costume design and the performing arts. Our podcast does contain spoilers.

Jojo:  

We hope you'll join us every other week as we delve into the wonderful world of costume design in The Costume Plot. [music]

All right.

Sarah:  

[sings] Welcome back, welcome back.

Jojo:  

Welcome to The Costume Plot. [both laugh]

Sarah:  

It's us again!

Jojo:  

Yaaaay! what are we on now? Month four, five?

Sarah:  

Good question. Yeah?

Jojo:  

I've lost track. It means we're that far in.

Sarah:  

and we're still enjoying it...

Jojo:  

That's a good sign.

Sarah:  

...which is good.

Jojo:  

Yes. Some little bits of homework, but at least we're enjoying the process.

Sarah:  

Hey, it's-- every time I'm like, "Oh, no, I have to sit down and watch that movie," I end up really enjoying myself. And I do my research. And I like the research part. So I'm still having fun. Even sometimes I forget to make time to do it. [both laugh]

Jojo:  

It's true. All right. So today, our theme is going to be black and white movies.

Sarah:  

Yeah.

Jojo:  

We haven't really covered this yet. So this is kind of a new platform to talk about costumes. And one of the things that we are going to talk a lot about, or I assume we're going to talk a lot about, Sarah, is that, you know, how do we do costumes? And how do we differentiate characters when you're limited to a color palette of only monochrome.

Sarah:  

Yep.

Jojo:  

Because you know, now we're not looking at 1000s of saturate colors and ways to parallel you know, characters and things like that. So there's a very fine art of knowing how to balance textures and patterns and things like that in a black and white film. So, really excited about that. I'm going to be going first today, so I'm super excited.

Sarah:  

Yay!

Jojo:  

I'm going to be covering his girl Friday, which features Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell. I'll tell you a couple fun facts about that in a second, but it was released in 1940. So there's a lot of 1940s silhouettes that you'll see in our costumes for this one. It was directed by Howard Hawks, who actually was a humongous conglomerate in the film industry. He did Scarface, Bringing Up Baby...

Sarah:  

Wow.

Jojo:  

... Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Only Angels Have Wings. So he's actually worked with Cary Grant quite a few times. I think Russell-- or sorry, Rosalind Russell was probably not one of his regulars. But she got really famous through this movie. So we'll talk a little bit more about that. The costume designer was Robert Kalloch. I don't know if that's how you say his name, K-A-L-L-O-C-H? Someone can correct me out there. He was actually...

Sarah:  

"Kall-oak"?

Jojo:  

Kalloch...? [both struggle and repeat the name, laughing] Not good at that kind of pronunciation. But he ended up becoming the chief designer for Columbia Pictures. And actually, he was really, really the heyday designer of the 1932 to 1940 period, specifically for screwball comedies, which-- this is considered one. And he also did quite a few projects with Howard Hawks. So "It Happened One Night", he did "The Awful Truth", "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington", and he also did "Only Angels Have Wings" with Howard. So again, a lot of these are much older movies, so if you haven't seen anything prior to like, you know, 2000, then maybe these are some new titles for you. But just know that, you know, these two were really kind of big in their heyday of being in the film industry. And Robert actually went on to be one of the mentors for Adrian, who is well-- very well known for all of his costume designs, pretty much from the 50s on, essentially.

Sarah:  

Mmhmm.

Jojo:  

So I'm going to talk a little bit about the actors themselves, because again, the Age of Hollywood, especially in the 40s, it very much became about who you knew, the celebrities that you recognized. At least from the kind of common people became... I mean, celebrities are still very important for us today. But there's a lot more celebrities all over. So we see musicians as celebrities, we see, you know, advertisers and promoters as celebrities as well. Whereas this time, it was mostly mostly movie, Hollywood filmmakers, or-- sorry, Hollywood actors and stars that became really in the public eye. So this was actually a piece that focuses a lot on the groundbreaking look at women in a man's world and one of the things that made Rosalind so popular for this movie. Interestingly enough, she was actually-- she jokes that she was the 15th choice because Howard went through basically every other person. Irene Dunne, he went through, I think he went through a Berlin Irving, or I don't know, I'm...

Sarah:  

Irving Berlin?

Jojo:  

I'm making up names now.

Sarah:  

Irving Berlin?

Jojo:  

No, no, I'm thinking of the wrong name.

Sarah:  

Oh.

Jojo:  

...because that's not a female.

Sarah:  

That's not a lady, no.

Jojo:  

[laughs] But he basically went through the entire list of all the other Hollywood female stars at this time. And basically, I think only one of them was actually unavailable. But I'm pretty sure everyone else on his list basically said no to the project. So interestingly enough, when he ended up with Rosalind Russell, he, you know, multiple times told her and she knew that she was not the first choice. So she found out in the public, because I think it ended up in the news that he had gone through all these other people before asking her, so. What a weird way to walk into a project, knowing that you're not first choice, but she totally ran with this. She ended up actually-- because the dialogue is so snappy in this in this particular film, because it's about reporters, she actually ended up hiring... I can't remember who it said she hired. She hired someone to basically help kind of clean up the dialogue and help them make it faster and make it really-- paced really well. So because of that, Cary Grant actually ended up becoming really good friends with her while they were filming together and ended up asking for his own personal training with the same coach, basically.

Sarah:  

cool. It's almost like a script supervisor, but like, your own personal one.

Jojo:  

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So again, she really brought a lot to this project. And like, you know, didn't get discouraged by the fact that she wasn't first choice, she just totally jumped right in, and just really gave it 110%, which I really love. And that's very much like her character in the movie as well. So again, she is, you know, the most powerful female in this in this giant room of mostly male actors. And she really carries her own very well. And even in the, you know-- there's small scenes where you could argue that there's some sexism going on, and all of that. But she really holds her own gravitas very well throughout this movie. And I think that they did a really good job of not just making her this kind of meek female that's surrounded by all these other male reporters. She certainly knows how to stand on her own, she's very independent. And they actually do contrast her with another character who is a little bit more seen as weak and naive and more feminine, kind of drawn to her own emotions and overwhelmed by her own emotions. So seeing that in comparison to how she portrays Hildy, who is our main character, you really see a lot of that contrast. And they did that really well. And again, this is in the 1940s, when most women weren't really in what they call a professional environment. You know, they're the professions that were kind of given to women at this time, were either secretaries, teachers, in education, or in the nursing departments. And there's nothing bad about any of these departments. But it was a very limited place for the woman in the work field. And so having her in this role as a reporter really made her stand out against everyone else. So the fact that she made such a huge impression on on women everywhere after this movie, I think it just goes to show how much power she had, even though she wasn't first choice. And how much she made a positive out of this kind of negative start, for lack of a better term.

Sarah:  

Well, I mean, on "Drag Race" last week, Anne Hathaway was on and she said she was the eighth choice for "The Devil Wears Prada". So I think you just kind of have to look at it as like, "well, it was meant to be," you know, "none of those other people were right for it, but I am. So I need to take advantage of the fact that I'm here and they're not."

Jojo:  

Right, right. Instead of looking at all the negative...

Sarah:  

yeah.

Jojo:  

... that comes with that. Yeah. Okay, so let me go ahead and share my screen. Alright, so I am gonna pretty much go in order with this movie, there aren't going to be as many costume looks for this particular episode. But a lot of it was because most of this happens, within a span of less than 24 hours. Right? So...

Sarah:  

both of our movies do, which is so funny that we picked-- we both picked some, that are like that.

Jojo:  

[laughs] Yeah, it's crazy though, 'cause in the-- you know, in this time, you're not really looking at years and years of time. A lot of times you are focusing in on a moment in time, or a span of 24 hours, or even a couple hours. So it's kind of crazy when you're watching the movie because you're not thinking about how little time has passed because it just seems like so much is happening.

Sarah:  

Yeah.

Jojo:  

And then you're like, "Wait, it's only been 24 hours." [both laugh] So yes, I do love that. So just to give you a little bit of background on the story, and again, there are spoilers. But Rosalind and Cary Grant play Hildy, who's the wife and-- or, ex wife. And Cary Grant plays Walter, and Walter basically runs his own newspaper company. He's really like-- he's always been a reporter that's always after the story. And the opening credits actually start with this whole quote about how, you know, when you're a reporter, it's all about the story. Nothing else matters, to the point where it goes to extremes, like murder, and all these other things in order to get the story. And it's very much kind of the presence of what this story is about. So Walter owns this company. Hildy used to work for the company. But they've since gotten divorced. It's been probably a couple months now since they've gotten divorced. And she's the one who actually asked for the divorce. And her argument in the beginning, or her justification was that Cary basically-- or, I should say Walter. I keep saying Cary, because that's the actor.

Sarah:  

'Cause it's Cary Grant, yeah.

Jojo:  

Yeah, everyone knows who Cary Grant is. [laughs] But she ends up asking him for a divorce because she believes that he's basically too tied to his work. So he hasn't paid enough attention to her as a woman, he hasn't taken the time to appreciate her and really show her what a husband doting on his wife should look like. And again, you don't really see that change for Cary Grant the entire movie, because I mean, even at the end, I don't think that he necessarily suddenly turns into this doting husband. But you know that because he's not the one who asked for the divorce, he still is very much in love with her. And so the movie is very much about his kind of sneaking around and trying to manipulate the situation so that he can try and win her back. And of course, all of that comes at the cost of a story that they end up breaking onto.

Sarah:  

Mmhmm.

Jojo:  

So the first scene, when she comes into the office, is actually when she's trying to tell Walter that she is about to get engaged to another man. So she has been dating someone else since they've gotten divorced. She's fallen in love with this man and you meet him. But you don't really know that he's the engagee until she goes into the office and talks about this engagement ring. And she's covered her hands with gloves, so you don't even see that she's actually coming in for this purpose. So the movie really just starts you right in the middle of it. But the first thing that you see her in is this beautiful chevron two-piece suit with matching hat.

Sarah:  

Incredible.

Jojo:  

I love that the designer has really created such a huge contrast, not just with her and the stripes on her, and like-- the black versus the kind of lighter color. Interestingly enough, they said that the actual garment is supposed to be black and pink, which... it's so funny that this is how it's reading to us, because we always see black and white, or gray. But to know that this is a pink suit gives us a whole different, you know, understanding of this garment. But the opening scene, she walks through the first kind of row of all these other reporters and she's the only thing that stands out. And part of the reason they're able to do that so successfully is because Robert Kalloch, I'm gonna say that name wrong every time, Robert Kalloch ends up keeping everyone else around her in these pretty solid colors, or they're really subtle patterns, if there are any. And because she's the only thing that's got any kind of a vertical--or even pattern--on her body, she's the only thing that you see in the room against everyone else that's in these kind of solid versions, or hues and tones, of gray. Let's see, I think-- I do love also that he has put a lot of the women in these scenes in very powerful colors, because there's only... I think there's maybe one or two other women that she passes in the office. And you can tell one of the other women, who may also be a reporter? You never really see her again after this first scene. But she's also in this really dark black.

Sarah:  

Oh.

Jojo:  

So that's not her, that's actually the assistant, but you can tell even the assistant is in this more subdued gray behind her really vibrant stripe. Uhhh... nope, I guess I didn't grab it. Well, anyways, she's in essentially a-- what looks like a black two-piece skirt suit. So again, she's one of the ones that kind of stands out against everybody else. But it's really-- in that scene, it's just Hildy and this other woman in this black two-piece suit. So really making our women very strong in this world of kind of... for lack of a better term, hazy looking colors for all the other men. So that way, they really stand out a lot more. So this was something that I wrote just for my own interpretation of this suit. Obviously, I think it's a beautiful stripe. During this time. They also mentioned that because they had to ration everything, since it was entering into World War Two. Robert ended up, you know, kind of changing the direction of the stripes in order to save every piece or scrap of fabric.

Sarah:  

Oh!

Jojo:  

So you see that not just in the lapels on this, but you also see that in her second suit that she changes into later, to travel. But one of the things I really loved is that, for me, I feel like the stripes in the vertical lines in both of her outfits--so not just in this one, but in the second look that we'll look at--it shows a very tight laced woman, you know, she obviously has to be extremely strong and like hold her own, in a world full of men who are constantly trying to talk over her. And that's a big part of this movie, too, is that every character is constantly talking on top of everyone else, but you really focus in on her verbal language and communication with her ex husband. And you focus on that not just because of their dialogue, but also because I think we see, and focus, on her in the image because of her stripe, too.

Sarah:  

Yeah.

Jojo:  

So even though she does a lot of sarcastic joking with Walter, and I feel like she's constantly-- she kind of keeps up with his sarcasm really well. But I think, you know... that femininity comes from the fact that she wants to be loved as a wife, and she wants to be treated as a woman. But I think with the stripes, it definitely gives her that more masculine kind of authority or power that she has in the room. And it certainly makes us, the viewers, focus in on her her power a little bit more.

Sarah:  

Mmhmm. Totally.

Jojo:  

Moving on. So, Walter's first suit. So in contrast to her dark and kind of bold lines, you see Walter in this really kind of pale and subdued... it almost looks like linen? Or... I'm not sure exactly what the material is. But he-- in this particular scene, he's also the only person in this kind of double breasted suit.

Sarah:  

Mmhmm.

Jojo:  

So that also is another way to sort of stand them out, especially with the limited color, by changing up the silhouette of the jacket and looking at the way the lapels cross. He also-- you do see other reporters and double breasted jackets later, but he's the only one that kind of remains in this lighter hue. So I love that they've definitely kept that to his look the entire time. Again, this is all within 24 hours. So this is literally the outfit he stays in the entire day. [both laugh] So I was like, "great, nice and easy, one and done." I do also love that if you look closer, which... you can't see it as much here. He actually does have a pretty subtle, almost like windowpane, plaid.

Sarah:  

Mmhmm.

Jojo:  

And again, you don't notice that until you're looking up close and personal, and it's after you're staring at the jacket for, you know, a couple minutes before you notice it. So you don't see it when she first comes in. But that initial contrast of the really light suit versus her really dark stripe is just a really nice way of looking at their characters too. Because I think the light heartedness of his character is very much reflected in how vibrant--or, I say "vibrant," but, you know--how light his suit jacket is.

Sarah:  

[laughs] Yeah.

Jojo:  

Because even when we see him later with Bruce, who's the engagee, there's this really nice kind of play of different tones of gray. So you see the dark is with Hildy, and the almost black is with Hildy. And then you see the kind of medium tone with Bruce, and then Cary Grant is in the the lightest tone of gray.

Sarah:  

Mmhmm.

Jojo:  

When we first meet Bruce--again, just looking at the kind of difference in silhouette--you can immediately tell that Cary Grant is our very sharp sleek business man. And he's always in these very straight vertical lines. His suit is very cut. And it's tailored very nicely, and it's much more vertical and slim fitting. Whereas with Bruce, the first time we see him he's in a trench coat. It's almost a little baggy on him, we don't really see the shape underneath. And it also gives him a much more casual, and a little bit of a naive, vibe. And I think he definitely has that throughout the movie. We certainly see him as like-- it almost looks like his mother has kind of dressed him? Like, he's got a nice suit, but it's not quite the same fit. He doesn't take care of himself in the same way that Cary Grant does.

Sarah:  

Right.

Jojo:  

And even the way that Hildy does. And I think both of them are very Metropolitan in comparison. So yet another comparison of the two of them... this is not the best example of the light versus dark because you don't really see his gray suit yet. But again, just that idea of the the trench coat being kind of oversized on him versus Cary Grant's more tailored jacket.

Sarah:  

Oh, wow.

Jojo:  

So then, halfway through the day, basically, Hildy ends up telling Walter that she's heading down to Albany with Bruce later that day, like within a few hours' time. And they're basically going down to Albany to get engaged--or, sorry--to get married, and they're bringing his mother with him. So she's trying to plan this train ride to go down to Albany and get married, and get hitched. And of course Walter, you know immediately that everything is kind of working in his brain to try and prevent this from happening. He's trying to get the train schedule changed. Like, he literally is calling people to be like, "Can we stop the train from happening?" Which... it's kind of crazy that he's got that kind of power. But literally doing everything in his power to try and stop her from getting married to this other guy. So of course, the biggest part of this is that there's this big scoop that's happening that all the reporters are trying to get on top of. So the side story, and all of this, is that there's this man, Earl Williams, who has been... I can't remember the exact situation because it was very late at night last night. [laughs] But he basically ends up shooting someone that was unintentional. And of course, his argument is that he didn't do it on purpose. I believe it was a police officer that he ended up shooting, but he didn't do it on purpose. He thinks he's in jail innocently, and all of this other stuff. So all of the reporters are trying to find out what actually happened, why he's claiming himself innocent. He happened to also be talking to a woman, I think they had one conversation. But then the news reporters--and you'll see this a couple times in this movie--you know, the news reporters are all about writing his story. So whether it's true or not, you'll see a lot of them actually make up facts, or they'll over exaggerate what's actually happening. So there's a lot of, you know, false news out there. Which ironically, today that's very applicable. [both laugh]

Sarah:  

Buzz word!

Jojo:  

...and very, you know, kind of what's happening. So again, this idea that all of them are trying to get the real news out there versus the fake news. And so this huge story kind of falls into their lap. And so, Cary Grant's character knows this. And so he kind of brings it up on a whim, hoping that it'll basically get Hildy convinced to kind of come back and work for him instead of going and getting married. And he knows her well enough to know that that's probably what she'll end up doing. So she keeps getting stalled and stopped. And everything keeps going wrong. Like she-- you know, every time she tries to meet up with Bruce, or every time she tries to get him on the train, something else happens. So there's all these... it's like a series of different things that Cary has basically manipulated to get Bruce in trouble and prevent them from going down to Albany. So this is her in the news reporter room, and you see her with all the other news reporters here. And even though their colors are very similar, just the fact-- again, that she's got the most prominent stripe going on with her two-piece skirt suit. And again, this is another place where they talked about Robert really recycling the direction of the fabric so that he could still reuse essentially every leftover scrap of what they had to make this suit. And it's just so tailored, very well to her body.

Sarah:  

Mmhmm!

Jojo:  

It fits her beautifully. And again, it just gives her a lot of power in this scene, especially with all the other reporters in the room. I think the only one that really has any kind of texture is this more... dumpy looking character, for lack of a better term. [laughs] And he's kind of like... they're all a little bit goofy. And I think they're all a little bit cutthroat, but not necessarily in a bad way. They're just all trying to scoop the story.

Sarah:  

Yeah.

Jojo:  

And it's funny, because you'll see all of them appear in and out of the room trying to get the newest scoop. And so they'll all just update stories, and a lot of them are made up, you'll hear them saying things that are totally in contrast with what's actually happened. And they'll just say some random statement to put in the, you know, the front line of their newspaper. So yeah, it's an interesting look at just how false news can travel so easily, and how it can easily be misinterpreted or just mis-told. And of course, Hildy is the one that's trying to honor the original story. So she actually befriends Earl Williams, she goes and talks to him. And again, very much pointing to the fact that as an independent woman in a man's world, she is really the go-getter, she takes a lot of initiative, she knows how to get the right scoop, she knows how to go to the right people to get the story that she needs.

Sarah:  

Mmhmm.

Jojo:  

Okay, so... one of the things-- we do see her in that pinstripe suit for a good chunk of this scene when she's with the other reporters. But when she first appears, we actually see her in this beautiful fur coat. And again, this is just... again, continuing to show all the different ways in which we have to find other venues, or means, of being able to differentiate characters. And he certainly-- Robert has certainly done that really well, with even just making her the center of focus, because she's totally got a very different texture than everyone else around her. And it's also a much lighter color. So she's the first thing we see in the room. And I think they mentioned this with the movie as well, but she's always kind of the center of attention here. So it's never-- you never lose her on screen. Let's just say that.

Sarah:  

Right.

Jojo:  

Okay, so this is another example of the contrast between Cary and Bruce. And you can see here Bruce's darker suit, which if you look really carefully, he does actually have a really subtle pinstripe in there. But when you first look at him, and you see the three of them eating lunch together, you can see the very clear contrast of color. So Cary is actually-- he normally would have his blazer on. But in this particular scene, this is when they're talking about Hildy. And it's interesting, because Bruce is talking very romantically about Hildy in this scene, but Cary Grant is trying to basically throw him off the scent by saying like, "Oh, yeah, Hildy, she does all these horrible things. You don't want her to, you know, she's gonna just fight you back." And like, basically trying to put a bad light on her. So that Bruce will always see that negative. And, of course, it's his sneaky way of trying to get Bruce away from her and get her back for himself, of course. But we see this scene where he's got his jacket off, and... how do we make someone in this period look sexy? And in this case, it's almost like different levels of undressed versus dressed.

Sarah:  

Mmhmm.

Jojo:  

And so whereas... the conservative look of Bruce in this fully suited, you know, blazer and vest and pants. And then we see Cary Grant here, who's still doing up his tie, and buttoning up his shirt, and kind of leaving a little bit more of the exposed neck. And then seeing a little bit of his body form through his shirt, without the jacket on. And of course, he eventually puts the jacket on, and even then it's much more clean cut. But just seeing that kind of level of like, "Okay, I have my kind of casual... my jacket's off," and then putting it back on to kind of get himself back together.

Sarah:  

Yeah.

Jojo:  

So then I just wanted to show you a quick contrast of looking at textures on the screen. Because again, it's not just about... especially in a black and white movie, it's not just about what your costume looks like on the actor. You also have to look at, how are they up against the background and up against the other characters? So this was a good example of just-- she's obviously got this dark color, but it's enough of a block in the image that you still see her as the main prominent person in the photo. Or sorry, in the screenshot. And yet, you still have all these really dynamic lines in the background. And then this is Earl Williams, who she's questioning. And just trying to kind of befriend, so that they can get along, and that she can hopefully coax the real story out of him. So this was one of the other females that I wanted to focus on. And again, she doesn't appear for very long, and then--spoiler--she actually commits suicide eventually. Because she is... so this is Molly. Molly Malloy, I think is her name, let me check my notes. Yes, Molly Malloy. So she's kind of the representative of the overemotional female. She's very, very easily stressed out, easily anxious. She talks to Earl Williams once because, you know, he just he's very depressed. And he needs someone to listen. And so after that happens, of course, all the news reporters run this whole story about how they're lovers and how she is keeping a secret for him. And she's gonna bust him out of jail, and all this other stuff. And of course, she ends up being the butt of all of these lies. And so she gets understandably very stressed from all of this "fake news." And so she comes in and tries to just defend herself and explain herself. But I love that they've sort of contrasted her with with Hildy, because Hildy is such a strong image and presence in the scene. And then you see her come in with these very... I mean, again, nothing wrong with being feminine, but there's a much more softness to her look. In terms of just even the curls that she's got in her hair, the flowers that she's got. Especially the frilled kind of collar that she has, and then just little puff sleeves that she's got, and the fact that this is almost slightly transparent, even.

Sarah:  

Yeah.

Jojo:  

It tells a lot about how waif-like she is as a character. And she is very... blown back and forth by the breeze, and by all the reporters in this very man's world, so it was a good way to sort of showcase what other women at this time were experiencing in comparison to this very strong character of Hildy.

Sarah:  

Well, and it's-- it's always interesting. I mean... this is a very "old movie, not very 21st century way" of portraying women on screen, or in any media...

Jojo:  

Right.

Sarah:  

...it's that... making one woman strong by making the other one look weak.

Jojo:  

Right.

Sarah:  

So that the strong one looks stronger by comparison. And she's very "not like the other girls," you know, she can hang with the men. So that's kind of tough to see. But it's very much... it's very much changing. So that's good.

Jojo:  

Yeah, yeah. And it shows you how far we've come, too, as women.

Sarah:  

Yeah.

Jojo:  

So... but yeah, I just thought that was interesting, that they played such a... because there are other females in this movie, like I said, but you only see them for two seconds. And the one other really strong woman in black was at the very beginning, and then we never see her again. So the fact that they had this person, you know, as a contrast was was interesting. It certainly made you emphasize and respect Hildy a lot in that scene. So this was just another example of the different ways in which we can contrast different fabrics. I wanted to show just, you know, all the multiple ways we can even put black onto a screen. Like, this is not just a straight black, because obviously they would read as the same color. But the fact that you see a difference between this black and the gray stripe versus this black and a black pinstripe.

Sarah:  

Yeah.

Jojo:  

And then even the difference in the two suits between the two gentlemen. we have this character Pettibone, who... he's totally just kind of the floppy character. And he's kind of our comic relief in this particular scene.

He's the clown.

Yeah, he's definitely our clown character. And he comes in... trying to remember what I wrote in my notes. Let's see, I wrote that he basically-- the three-piece suit gives him this sort of stuffy feeling, but then it's almost like it's suffocating and burdening him, because he comes in sort of all over the place and a little bit chaotic. And then even just the way that his hair is kind of askew. And then he's got the bowler hat, which is also-- it's not a comical hat. But I think in this scene, because everyone else is in these really sharp fedoras, just seeing him in the bowler gives him a very specific character. So I think the costume designer did that really well. But even being able to see the difference in the suit jackets, not just size wise, but pattern wise, and just being able to fine tune those little details in black and white. I think that was my last one!

Sarah:  

Okay!

Jojo:  

I might have put them out of order a little bit. But yes, so again, not a lot of different costumes. But you can see how subtle the costume designer was, with really making sure the emphasis was on the people he needed it to be on.

Sarah:  

Mmhmm.

Jojo:  

And even the characters that were more similar in silhouette or color, they didn't appear for very long. So you never saw them on screen for very long together, if that makes any sense.

Sarah:  

Yeah.

Jojo:  

But yeah, you-- I mean, you absolutely know that Rosalind is the center of attention in this movie.

Sarah:  

Those stripes really tell you.

Jojo:  

In every scene she's always the one that you focus on as the viewer.

Sarah:  

Yeah. Completely. Such an interesting challenge, like to try to differentiate your lead from everybody else when you don't have color!

Jojo:  

It's true. And I was actually thinking about that, because, you know... how often do we really do projects where you're only limited to black and white? I don't think I've ever even done that.

Sarah:  

I haven't either.

Jojo:  

So I was like, "Huh." I haven't really thought about how I would have to see color and what it reads like in black and white, versus me seeing it in color in front of me. [laughs] And trying to process. What does that look like? If I only have black and white as my color palette?

Sarah:  

You would have to be constantly doing camera tests, like taking pictures and desaturating them to make sure that it looks how you think it's gonna look.

Jojo:  

It's true. Well, and the thing that's interesting about this, too, is that... like I mentioned before, her first chevron suit, it's not actually black and white.

Sarah:  

Right.

Jojo:  

Like, it's black and pink. So how does pink read on a black and white camera versus seeing black and white on a stage? Because I've designed shows where they wanted the color palette to be black, white, and red or something like that. But it's like-- that's a very different-- you're making very different choices, as opposed to when the whole entire screen filter is black and white. And it's not just the clothing that's black and white, but it's also that the actor has to look, you know, filtered through black and white. So very different challenges to face.

Sarah:  

Yeah, totally. And it's... back then they didn't really preserve stuff as much as they do now.

Jojo:  

Yeah.

Sarah:  

So if we have stuff that's been preserved, it's not in great condition. So I wish that we could know what color things were originally, and I'm going to talk about that a little in mine, actually...

Jojo:  

Yeah.

Sarah:  

...because there are a couple things that I don't know what color they were.

Jojo:  

Right.

Sarah:  

So it's... I wish we could see, so that we could contrast that with what it looks like on the screen. But we can't because...

Jojo:  

I know, I do wish that was one thing that I found more information about. I just didn't find a lot of information about the original colors of these. So it's like-- I mean, other than the... and even the black and pink, it was like, it's supposed to be black and pink. Like, they don't actually know.

Sarah:  

But WAS it, yeah.

Jojo:  

So like, who knows what color it was in real life?

Sarah:  

Well, and everybody who worked on it has passed away so we can't ask them. [both laugh]

Jojo:  

Yeah, exactly.

Sarah:  

Well, great job.  

Jojo:  

[as if to people who have passed away] Tell me!

Sarah:  

Great job. I need to rewatch that movie.

Jojo:  

Thanks, Sarah!

Sarah:  

...that movie's so fun.

Jojo:  

Yeah, it's definitely fun, and it's free on Amazon Prime. So... that was nice.

Sarah:  

Nice! Nice.

Jojo:  

Woo-hoo, I'm so excited about this movie.

Sarah:  

Yay! I was-- it was really nice to watch this again. So my movie is "Roman Holiday". One of my faves. The great Audrey Hepburn, directed by William Wyler, it came out in 1953. And the costumes are by none other than Edith Head.

Jojo:  

Ah!

Sarah:  

Who is... I'm so excited to have the opportunity to talk about her, because she truly is the most famous costume designer of all time, I think. And probably the first famous costume designer.

Jojo:  

I know, I'm surprised we haven't covered her sooner.

Sarah:  

Well, I mean...

Jojo:  

But I guess we haven't talked about a lot of old movies.

Sarah:  

Her career was very long.

Jojo:  

Mmhmm.

Sarah:  

But she stopped working in the 70s. So we haven't really covered anything past the 80s....

Jojo:  

That's true.

Sarah:  

...yet. So I'm excited about it. She worked, like I said, for decades. She was nominated for 35 Oscars, the-- obviously, the most of anybody, any costume designer. And then she won eight, which is so many Oscars.

Jojo:  

Yeah, it's crazy.

Sarah:  

She is one of only two costume designers to have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. And the other one is Ruth E. Carter, who designed "Black Panther". And she just got her star last month! So until last month, Edith Head was the only costume designer on there.

Jojo:  

That's fantastic.

Sarah:  

I know.

Jojo:  

That's so crazy to me, though.

Sarah:  

We need to get more costume designers on there!

Jojo:  

I mean, awesome that, you know, the second person is a woman of color too!

Sarah:  

Yes, yes.

Jojo:  

But like, that's crazy.

I know. I read that, and I was like, "really?" [both laugh]

That's depressing!

Sarah:  

No Colleen Atwood? No Sandy Powell? No... come on. No Eiko? I mean, come on!

Jojo:  

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Especially, after she's passed.

Sarah:  

I know!

Jojo:  

I just feel like that should be, like, an honorable thing.

Sarah:  

I know, I don't know what qualifies you. Like, do you have to get nominated to do it? I don't know. I'll nominate... people.

Jojo:  

Yeah, I don't know. That's a good question. Question for one of our listeners out there. Someone tell us. [both laugh]

Sarah:  

Yeah! So this movie did win the Oscar for Best Costume Design in the black and white category.

Jojo:  

Ooooh.

Sarah:  

So I learned this: until 1967, there were two different costume design Oscars, one for color, and one for black and white.

Jojo:  

Nice!

Sarah:  

The categories first started in 1949. Most of the Academy Awards for Best Costume Design in black and white were given to contemporary movies. Because the movies that were being shot in Technicolor were really big, bombastic musicals, fantasies, stuff like that. So... it's so interesting that since they got rid of the black and white category, pretty much all of the winners for Best Costume Design are fantasy, sci-fi, you know, some setting other than contemporary.

Jojo:  

Yeah.

Sarah:  

And that's how it's been since then. And like, only three movies that are contemporary have won since they got rid of the black and white category. So I just thought that was really interesting.

Jojo:  

Mmm.

Sarah:  

Edith also won Oscars for "Sabrina," "All About Eve," she also designed movies like "Funny Face," "White Christmas," one of my personal favorites.

Jojo:  

Mmhmm.

Sarah:  

"To Catch a Thief". So, she's really behind a lot of the iconic looks of her time. She's-- also, Edna Mode from "The Incredibles" is based on her. [both laugh]

Jojo:  

I know! I love it so much.

Sarah:  

Her iconic little round glasses, which were often dark, and it was said that she wore the dark glasses so that people couldn't see her eyes in meetings. So they couldn't really know what she was thinking, which I love!

Jojo:  

That's so smart, I need to start doing that. [laughs]

Sarah:  

I know! Just wear sunglasses as a power move, to a meeting.

Jojo:  

It's true. My problem is I smile too much, because... so even if you didn't see my face, I feel like you just read it in my mouth. [both laugh]

Sarah:  

That's funny. So yeah, that's a little background on Edith. The setting for this movie is 1950s Rome, Italy. The typical silhouette of the 50s is based kind of on... it kind of started with Christian Dior's New Look in 1947, which I think we've touched on a little bit. But the New Look was revolutionary at the time because it was such a deviation from the silhouettes of the previous decade of the 40s. Because like we said, in the 40s there were a lot of fabric restrictions and rationing happening. So the silhouettes were really streamlined, not very showy at all, very utilitarian, sometimes military inspired, even, because of the war.

Jojo:  

Mmhmm.

Sarah:  

So the New Look kind of exploded onto the scene as... quite literally, a very new look that people were not used to seeing. It's characterized by small waist and an hourglass silhouette, which emphasizes the feminine features of a woman's body: a full bust, full hips, small waist. And it uses a lot of fabric in the skirts especially. So it's-- it's a very joyful thing to have happen after so many years of being restricted, not being able to use as much fabric as you would like to use.

Jojo:

Mmhmm.

Sarah:

So that's a little background on the 50s. So let's talk about Audrey Hepburn's character, Princess Ann. So in this movie she's she's basically this princess, and she's on sort of like a European tour. I don't know what country she's supposed to be from, didn't really look into it. [both laugh] I don't know if they ever say.

Jojo:

i know, I was like, “i don't know if I remember either.” It's been so long since i've seen the movie.

Sarah:

She has sort of a non-regional British sounding accent. But she's basically on this tour, and she feels very restricted by all the rules she has to follow. All the public appearances she has to make where she has to be polite and shake hands with people, and just be a perfect princess. And she's really struggling with feeling restricted by her life, which is kind of where we join her in the— at the beginning of the movie. So this is the beginning, she's at a ball where she's meeting all these dignitaries and stuff. So… she's beautiful, obviously. [laughs] She’s Audrey Hepburn. One of the most beautiful women of all time.

Jojo:

Oh, yeah. I just love Audrey Hepburn. Like, timeless. It's like Edith Head, she just lives on forever-ever in your memory.

Sarah:

Forever. Legend. And also just a really good person? Like, she was a real philanthropist.

Jojo:

Mmhmm.

Sarah:

she was cool.

Jojo:

yeah, everything about her life was… I don't know, it's just so—

Sarah:

she seems rad.

Jojo:

…respectable.

Sarah:

yeah!

Jojo:

that's not enough of a good word to describe it, but you know what I mean. [laughs]

Sarah:

yeah just like… the embodiment of grace and goodness, in my opinion.

Jojo:

Mmhmm.

Sarah:

so this is her gown that she's wearing. Very 50s silhouette, although the fullness starts at the hip instead of at the waist, which is… I mean, it was pretty typical of the time.

Jojo:

Yeah.

Sarah:

beautiful off-the-shoulder gown. It's got beading on. And apparently in real life, it was sort of silver? I saw a picture of it on display somewhere, and it has really yellowed. So I didn't pull that because I was like, “well, that's not actually what color it was. We don't need to look at that.”

Jojo:

[laughs] It’s not gold.

Sarah:

So yeah, is this…? Here's a full length. And apparently…

Jojo:

Oh, it’s so beautiful!

Sarah:

Yeah, it's it's really iconic. I love the sash, you know? It's sort of like a royal… sash on it. With some metal-looking…

Jojo:

It makes me think very Anastasia.

Sarah:

Yeah!

Jojo:

Even though I don't know if that's actually the country she's from.

Sarah:

Who knows? I sure don’t.

Jojo:

But that sash makes me think of Russian. [laughs]

Sarah:

Yeah. Apparently in her screen test, the people—maybe the director—was worried that it was too long. But Audrey was an accomplished dancer. They were like, “can you dance in it?” And she was like, “oh I can DANCE in it.” [laughs] Like, “WATCH me dance. Don't worry about it.”

Jojo:

Oh, again, just… good at everything!

Sarah:

And then she's got beautiful, you know, jewels on. Tiara. Just…she looks like a perfect princess. I love her hair, it's sort of like a crown of braids, beautiful. And then…

Jojo:

Ooh, yeah.

Sarah:

Yeah. This is kind of… i'll brighten this picture up when I put it on Instagram, it's a little bit dark.

Jojo:

Mmhmm..

Sarah:

And then this is a fun little shot, because during the scene her feet really hurt. So she starts to  shift her weight and take her shoes off and kind of stretch her feet out. And so you get this nice shot of what the underneath of her dress might look like. And I don't know if this is what it actually looked like, or if it’s… it's probably some sort of thing they made just to shoot this.

Jojo:

Like, doctored up.

Sarah:

Yeah, like a half a petticoat, crinoline thing. But I thought it was really fun, this little peek underneath the dress.

Jojo:

Mmhmm.

Sarah:

Oh and here's the rendering. Beautiful.

Jojo:

Ooh.

Sarah:

Edith Head made beautiful renderings. I don't think she ever really knew how to sew herself, but a lot of designers don’t.

Jojo:

Yeah, I think there's a lot of articles about that.

Sarah:

Yeah. That's okay. I mean, it helps but you don't have to. [laughs] Clearly.

Jojo:

There's a lot of designers, actually, that don't know how to sew.

Sarah:

Yeah.

Jojo:

I would say more than… more than not.

Sarah:

Yeah, it's interesting that the sash is red in this picture. I wonder if it was red in real life. Probably.

Jojo:

Yeah, it's so interesting to me too, when you're rendering for a black and white movie do you render it in black and white?

Sarah:

Yeah.

Jojo:

Or do you… you know what I mean? Because you're not… you're never going to ever see that as red in the picture. So it just makes me wonder, where do you make that decision to… do I just do this in the black and white that I want to see? Or do I do it in the color I think is going to read as this shade of gray?

Sarah:

I think she she rendered in color.

Jojo:

Mmhmm.

Sarah:

I didn't find any other renderings from this movie, but I have a big coffee table book that I was looking at, and it seems like all of her renderings were in color no matter what the movie…

Jojo:

Mmhmm. Yeah.

Sarah:

If it was or wasn’t.

Jojo:

Oh, okay.

Sarah:

Yeah.

Jojo:

Oh, so beautiful.

Sarah:

So next we have her nightgown, and this is when she's in her bedroom talking about how much she's tired of her life, and she kind of goes into hysterics. And they end up drugging her with a sedative so that she can sleep, which is… makes me sad.

Jojo:

[laughs] Yikes.

Sarah:

Yeah. So this… it's definitely period, but it looks kind of young. It looks like childlike and very prim, and I think that that just tells us more about how she's kind of being restricted. She's not allowed to… she's not being permitted to be a normal young woman. She's kind of being held back and kept in this life that she doesn't necessarily… it's not that she doesn't want it. It's just that she's feeling like she needs to escape for a while. And I love this, this is her… I called her in my notes her “handler.” But I think she's a countess of some kind.

Jojo:

Her handler. [both laugh]

Sarah:

Yeah, she's just going over her schedule.

Jojo:

I do love that.

Sarah:

I was like, I don't know. She's in charge. I like her gown, it looks… I don't know what fabric this is.

Jojo:

Mmhmm.

Sarah:

It could be some sort of faille, where it's got the little tiny ribbing on it.

Jojo:

Oh, yeah.

Sarah:

Or, is there one called moire or something, that has sort of like a…

Jojo:

Moire? Yeah.

Sarah:

It makes sort of shiny patterns? Yeah. I like it a lot, I think it's really cool.

Jojo:

It's beautiful.

Sarah:

Yeah.

Jojo:

It's funny, because like, her… if you just looked at her head and her face, she does actually look a little bit like Edith Head.

Sarah:

[laughs] Yeah, the glasses too!

Jojo:

Uh-huh!

Sarah:

That's funny, that's very funny. So then, she sneaks out of the palace while under the influence of a sedative. [both laugh] Hijinks ensue. And so this is the outfit that she puts on to escape, and I think she… the sedative doesn't kick in until she's on the back of a truck, escaping.

Jojo:

Oh, jeez. [both laugh]

Sarah:

Yeah.

Jojo:

Moving vehicle and sedative do not go together!

Sarah:

Honestly yeah, she's lucky she didn't get kidnapped and die. [both laugh] But this is… so, this is the outfit she puts on that she basically, she wears for a lot of the… most of the movie, in the middle. But it goes through kind of a transformation as her day goes on. So it starts very buttoned up, she's got sort of a little tie at the top. You can see her teeny, teeny waist.

Jojo:

Yeah.

Sarah:

And maybe I'll talk now about… I read some stuff in my Edith Head book about Audrey, and I don't want to make a habit of commenting on actors’ bodies. But this relates to the costume design, so that's why I'm going to talk about it.

Jojo:

Okay.

Sarah:

So anybody who's sensitive to that kind of discussion might need to skip ahead a little bit. So she suffered from—Audrey—suffered from malnutrition during World War II. She's Belgian. And she was very thin, which was not really the ideal body type of the 50s. Obviously, they were all thin, but they… like I said, the ideal was sort of a full bosom and full hips, hourglass silhouette.

Jojo:

Mmhmm.

Sarah:

And so Edith talked a lot about like wanting to de-emphasize Audrey's thinness, so that's why she has sort of a long-sleeve shirt. She said her collarbones stuck out a lot, so she tried to cover those, and then she put her in full skirts. Like, no form-fitting skirts, because her hips were so slim.

Jojo:

Mmhmm.

Sarah:

And then she had really muscular legs because she was a dancer.

Jojo:

Right.

Sarah:

And they were probably sinewy, you know? Like, thin and muscular. so she doesn't wear anything shorter than a midi length.

Jojo:

Mmm.

Sarah:

So that was… that kind of influenced Edith’s choices when she clothed Audrey. And then just another tidbit is that her waist was 19 1/2 inches.

Jojo:

Oh my gosh! That's crazy!

Sarah:

That's teeny tiny.

Jojo:

That's like, half of a lot of people's busts that I know. That's like, only measuring from underarm to underarm.

Sarah:

She was a petite lady.

Jojo:

That’s insane. So crazy.

Sarah:

Yeah. Very, very little.

Jojo:

So was she… well, and I don't want to spend too much time talking about this. But was she intentionally malnutritioned, or was it just something from when she was born, that she just didn't get enough?

Sarah:

Oh no, I think it was during the war,

Jojo:

Oh, okay.

Sarah:

A lot of a lot of people in the war did not have access to food.

Jojo:

Got it, got it.

Sarah:

So people went hungry during a lot of the war. I don't know specifically about Belgium during World War II, but a lot of the countries… I don't know if they were invaded, but if the Nazis came in… like, they took all their resources.

Jojo:

Well, and Belgium was known for being constantly overtaken by multiple countries.

Sarah:

That's what I thought, I read that in a book.

Jojo:

It was right in… it was that tiny one in the middle of everything, so every country was invading Belgium.

Sarah:

Yeah. So it’s… if she was sort of… she was probably a teenager during that time. Or a child?

Jojo:

Oh, that’s true, that’s true. That makes sense, then.

Sarah:

Yeah, if she wasn't getting food during the time when she was supposed to be growing and developing, then that's kind of what contributed to how slight she was.

Jojo:

Right, got it.

Sarah:

So yeah, that's it, that's all I want to say about that. Okay, so this skirt. I don't know what color it was in real life, I really wanted to know, just out of curiosity.

Jojo:

[laughs] Yeah.

Sarah:

On the poster that they colorized, they made it blue. But then in some colorized images it's beige-tan.

Jojo:

Okay. I know, I was thinking blue initially, but then I was like, “who knows?” [laughs]

Sarah:

I don't know. And I did a light Google, I didn't do a deep Google of it. So if the information's out there, I couldn't find it.

Jojo:

Mmhmm.

Sarah:

Yeah, so this is— she's a princess in disguise, you know, she needs to look kind of normal and blend in. And then here's Gregory Peck in his one outfit that he wears. [both laugh] Just like Cary Grant, he kind of just sticks to… he sticks to a suit. And he's also a journalist in this movie.

Jojo:

Oh!

Sarah:

So he looks a little bit more rumpled, because he's definitely poor. Because, you know, they go back to his flat and it's one room, it's tiny.

Jojo:

Mmhmm.

Sarah:

So he's kind of like a penniless American journalist in Rome, but he's still a heartthrob. So he still has to look good. Here's a picture of her, this is from her screen test. But this is kind of what the outfit transforms into? Like, rolls up the sleeves, unbuttons the shirt, puts a scarf on. I tried to figure out where she got the scarf. Could not figure it out. [laughs] Like, in the movie. In the world of the movie.

Jojo:

In the movie, you mean practically speaking? [laughs]

Sarah:

Yeah, so she starts in a pump heel, and then she buys the sandals from a street vendor. I love the sandals.

Jojo:

I do love those.

Sarah:

But the scarf just appears, and it doesn't explain where it came from. [both laugh] That's okay, maybe I just missed it, I don't know.

Jojo:

Oh, that’s funny.

Sarah:

And then she gets her hair cut too! Which is, like… this haircut is so iconic. So cute. Love it.

Jojo:

M. Very Audrey Hepburn.

Sarah:

Like honestly, I would wear this outfit, and there are probably some outfits I have worn that look kind of like this. It's so cute, so timeless.

Jojo:

Mmhmm.

Sarah:

And also, apparently they shot during the summer and Rome was very hot. So I think it's also very practical for shooting outside in the summer.

Jojo:

Yeah.

Sarah:

Here’s another picture, this iconic picture of them on the stairs.

Jojo:

So cute!

Sarah:

Yeah, just adorable, I love it.

Jojo:

I know, this makes me want to go back out and get more blouses again. [both laugh] I’ve run out of a lot of— because we've been stuck in quarantine, I'm just wearing sweaters and sweatpants.

Sarah:

I know. My sweatpants have like, holes in them. Because i've been wearing them for a straight year.

Jojo:

[laughs] That’s how I feel too! I was like. “I've had some of these pants for so long,” and I don't have the money to go out and buy a ton of new clothes. So all of my jeans have now gotten holes at the crotch and the knees and like…

Sarah:

I have powerful thighs, so that’s where it wears out.

Jojo:

…I really shouldn’t be wearing these anymore. [both laugh]

Sarah:

I just patch it. Patch it and move on.

Jojo:

I need to do that. [both laugh] It was recent holes, for the jeans. But yeah, some of my other sweatpants, I was just like, these don't need to be patched. These just need to get given away or thrown away.

Sarah:

My one favorite pair of jeans, I patched. Because I have thighs that rub together, because I got chub rub. And I patched them in the crotch so many times that I finally… like, there's no fabric left to patch, like it— and I still have them! Because I refuse to let go. But I can't wear them anymore. [both laugh]

Jojo:

That’s how I feel with some of my jeans! I was like, “but I love these jeans! They fit so well!”

Sarah:

It's so sad to have to let them go.

Jojo:

Mmhmm.

Sarah:

Anyway.

Jojo:

Side note. [both laugh]

Sarah:

Yeah, so you can see a little bit more of her blouse in this shot. I think probably they had multiples of this, obviously, since she wears only this. But if you look at the long sleeve version versus the short sleeve, it doesn't look like THAT much sleeve is rolled up into that much roll.

Jojo:

Yeah, I was gonna say. I was like, “there's no way.” [laughs]

Sarah:

Yeah, so a little, you know… a little bit of movie magic. Switch it out for one that is shorter so that it doesn't look so bulky on the arm. What else did I say… oh yeah, throughout the day you know, as she's sort of going about her day and having fun in Rome, she gets a lot looser and more free. And that's reflected in the in the clothes, of course.

Jojo:

Mmhmm.

Sarah:

She doesn’t— I don't think she stands out. I mean, she stands out on screen because she's Audrey Hepburn. But I think the idea is that she blends in because she doesn't want people to recognize her.

Jojo:

Right.

Sarah:

Love the sandals. I need to get some sandals like this.

Jojo:

I know.

Sarah:

…do I have anything else to say about his suit? No, he looks good. It's just… I think it's definitely… it's nice to contrast it to the one that Cary Grant was wearing, because I think it's a lot less sharp than that one was.

Jojo:

Mmhmm.

Sarah:

A little more relaxed, you know? Probably summer weight, because it’s hot.

Jojo: Yeah, but still very much of that time period.

Sarah: Yeah.

Jojo:

Kind of, you know, the wider leg is starting to be— I shouldn't say “starting to be,” but it's returning in the 1940s, I think.

Sarah:

Mmhmm.

Jojo:

Or, this is 1950…?

Sarah:

’53, yeah.

Jojo:

’53, okay, yeah. So it's actually, yeah, it's getting wider in the 1950s. Because I think it was still pretty slim in the 40s because they were trying to save fabric, so…

Sarah:

Yeah, yeah yeah.

Jojo:

Yeah, tells you a lot about the period, for sure.

Sarah:

And it's fun to, like— it's fun to cover a contemporary movie, but that was contemporary at the time, you know?

Jojo:

Mmhmm.

Sarah:

It’s obviously not contemporary anymore. But it's so interesting to see. They're not trying to do any specific period, they're just doing their time, 1953.

Jojo:

Right, right. What's contemporary at this time is now period for us.

Sarah:

Exactly.

Jojo:

But then, what's contemporary for us will be period, you know, 10 years from now.

Sarah:

Yeah, exactly

Jojo:

So yeah.

Sarah:

Always makes me wonder, what will our decades be characterized by? It's hard to really tell when you're in the middle of it.

Jojo:

Yeah especially since— I mean, we have… we're going through fashion so quickly.

Sarah:

So quickly.

Jojo:

So it's almost it's hard to kind of pinpoint what is characteristic of our generation.

Sarah:

Yep, completely, so interesting. So this is her look at the end, when she's gone back to the palace and she's having a press conference. Because they lied and said that she was really sick, and she's just kind of out saying, “I'm better now and I'm going to continue my tour.” So Edith Head— I watched an interview with her from like, a thousand years ago, that they made about this movie. And she said this is lace, and I was like, “oh yeah I guess it is lace!” Because like I looked at it and I went, “is that organza?” But it's not, it's lace.

Jojo:

[laughs] Yeah.

Sarah:

It's very pretty.

Jojo:

So beautiful.

Sarah:

Back to the, you know, feminine, light, princess-y sort of thing. I love this little hat and how it emphasizes her new hair and her face. So pretty. And the pearls are beautiful too.

Jojo:

Mmhmm.

Sarah:

Here's a full body shot of it, the silhouette is just gorge.

Jojo:

Oh my goodness, I can't believe the entire thing is in lace.

Sarah:

I know, so pretty!

Jojo:

So beautiful.

Sarah:

It's so romantic looking, so feminine and demure, but… still just like, “yeah I'm the prettiest in the room. What about it?” You know? [both laugh]

Jojo:

I'm not gonna lie, I love this sleeve, and I think— I mean, we've been working on this for the photo shoot we keep talking about. But that giant kind of like, lantern sleeve is just so… I mean, hers stops at her elbow. But I just I love that look, and it being transparent too, and being able to still see the delicate arm underneath is… I don't know, there's just something really beautiful about that.

Sarah:

I love the sleeve. I love the length of it, I love everything about it.

Jojo:

Mmhmm.

Sarah:

And once again, we have the volume starting at the hip instead of starting it right at the waist…

Jojo:

Yeah.

Sarah:

…and that just calls more attention to her figure, you know?

Jojo:

Yeah.

Sarah:

And then this is her seeing them at the press conference and realizing that they actually know that she— they knew she was the princess all along. Oh no. [laughs] I was gonna talk a little bit— I did this in a weird order. This is his— he changes into this outfit on the second day, and it's more of a tweed blazer. I like it. You know, it’s…

Jojo:

I do, too. I love a tweed blazer.

Sarah:

It changes up the texture. Yeah. I think it's a fun way to be like, well, he's changing his clothes. It doesn't look that different, but it looks different enough that we know that he's changed.

Jojo:

Yeah, I feel like tweed is one of those textures that I always want to like… pet. [laughs]

Sarah:

Yeah!

Jojo:

Like, you can feel it even when you see it on screen. You know it's tweed, but you also— I feel like I get a tactile texture when I think of tweed, or when I see tweed.

Sarah:

It's also delightful to work with, because it's often very loosely woven and woolly. And things that are that way are really easy to manipulate and make them do what you want them to do.

Jojo:

Yeah.

Sarah:

So anybody who's ever made something out of tweed is like, “oh yeah. Piece of cake.” [both laugh] It just does what you want it to do, you don't have to even argue with it.

Jojo:

It's like the little slubby texture I love.

Sarah:

Right. So this is Irving, he's sort of our sidekick-y guy. He's constantly getting things spilled on and getting tripped, and it makes me feel very bad for him because he's nobody ever really apologizes about it. [both laugh]

Jojo:

Oh, no.

Sarah:

It's just like, he keeps trying to spill the beans. And Gregory Peck's character keeps stopping him from spilling the beans by pouring water on him, or tripping him at the restaurant, and it makes me sad.

Jojo:

Poor guy!

Sarah:

But I really like his outfit. It's a nice like sort of wide neck t-shirt with a high-waisted pant, and then sort of a jacket. And I like how casual he is compared to Joe… which is Gregory Peck's character's name that I haven't used until just now. [both laugh]

Jojo:

It’s okay, I kept using “Cary,” so…

Sarah:

So yeah, he's just like… he's just more casual, and I like the sort of other example of “1950s guy” clothes. Because it's a very tight t-shirt, it shows his chest very nicely.

Jojo:

It's funny because he actually looks very contemporary.

Sarah:

Yeah!

Jojo:

Because this fashion trend is kind of returning for menswear. So I just— it's like, we look at this even though it's from over 50 years ago, and it still looks like, “oh yeah, I could see that guy on the street today.”

Sarah:

High-waisted pants are coming back for men and I could not be more excited. I think they look so good on men.

Jojo:

Yeah, me too. Mmhmm.

Sarah:

I think they look so good on men. I… wear more of them, dudes. They look good on you!

Jojo:

[laughs]

Sarah:

Yeah, I mean— this outfit, I could see on a TikTok guy doing fashion outfits.

Jojo:

Yeah, uh-huh. Love it.

Sarah:

Yeah, totally. And then here's one more shot of them at the end. A little more formal because they’re, you know, visiting the palace. Just a nice— he's got a stripe, which differentiates him from everybody else in the shot. And then Irving is nice sort of compliment in his lighter tone.

Jojo:

Yeah, even in this last image he looks like— I think he just has a really contemporary face, too. Maybe that's the other thing.

Sarah:

Maybe that's it, yeah. Oh, the other thing I wanted to talk about a little bit is something I learned on Wikipedia. Which is that another designer had a big hand in this, in Audrey's daytime look. And her name was Sonja de Lennart, she was a European fashion designer and she was the inventor of the Capri pant.

Jojo:

Wow!

Sarah:

Which was a just a piece in her Capri collection, but it's the only one that has retained the name Capri, because it was distinctive, and it became famous.

Jojo:

Mmhmm.

Sarah:

So Edith Head recognized how revolutionary her Capri collection was and put it in this movie. So this belt and this skirt are from the collection, I think.

Jojo:

Ooh, nice.

Sarah:

And Audrey Hepburn went on to wear Capri pants in “Sabrina” as well.

Jojo:

Mmhmm.

Sarah:

So Edith head introduced the Capri collection to the world, basically, through Audrey Hepburn. But the Capri pants are the ones that really made a lasting legacy. And Sonja didn't get any credit, in the— you know, in this movie. But…

Jojo:

Yeah.

Sarah:

…now we know that that was her contribution.

Jojo:

Right.

Sarah:

You know, I think that's pretty common, for them to have— it's like, Edith Head designed it. And by “design,” we mean she pulled whatever she needed to pull in and put it all together, and that's designing. And that's totally valid. But I think it's important to recognize the work of Sonja.

Jojo:

Especially for such a revolutionary garment like that.

Sarah:

I know, I know.

Jojo:

And that lasted for a long time.

Sarah:

And we still call them “Capri pants”! So like, clearly it's a legacy.

Jojo:

Right!

Sarah:

So I thought that was interesting.

Jojo:

So interesting!

Sarah:

Yeah, so that's “Roman Holiday”.

Jojo:

Yay, thank you Sarah! Good job.

Sarah:

Thank you.

Jojo:

I know, it's nice to always have those extra fun facts, especially when you… I mean, we talk about costume design so much, but we also both came kind of from a fashion background as well.

Sarah:

Mmhmm.

Jojo:

So it's like you have a little bit of that tie-in from both ends, and a lot of the same skills kind of translate through both. So I'm glad that it shows that they're working with fashion designers all the time. And even today, you'll have stylists on movies in addition to the costume designer. Sometimes they'll work together, sometimes it's kind of like they'll trade off what they work on, or what costumes they do. And so yeah, there's a lot of crossover between fashion and costumes.

Sarah:

Absolutely, and I think it's in the Wikipedia article, it was like, “she didn't get any credit.” I'm like I mean— that's not that uncommon. Like, it’s not that I think that Edith Head was stepping on her to take her success. I think it was just that she found clothes that she really liked and put them in her movie, and since she was the one who found them and put them on the actor, she was credited as a designer. And that’s— I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But I do think that it's important now that we know where it came from, you know?

Jojo:

Yeah, and the hard thing, too, is that with costume designers a lot of times we are choosing clothes.

Sarah:

Yeah.

Jojo:

That already exist. So like, to credit every single designer brand that's on your clothing, you know… it's like, when you do have to do that project where it's like, you have no budget and you have ten dollars to your name to try and costume 100 people. It's like, well then, a lot of stuff is gonna come from Target or Goodwill.

Sarah:

Mmhmm.

Jojo:

And it's like, you can't just go to a brand and say, “okay, I got that thing from Goodwill. Sorry, Goodwill needs to be credited on the…”

Sarah:

[laughs] Yeah.

Jojo:

You know, it just doesn't make sense to be crediting stuff like that. Because clothes are just a natural part of our job.

Sarah:

Exactly, especially in contemporary movies, and it was a contemporary movie at the time. So it totally makes sense.

Jojo:

Right, yeah, so… but it's good that we're recognizing that now, you know, years later. [both laugh] Better late than never, I guess.

Sarah:

Yeah, and I think she was— she had a successful career, so it's not as if Edith stole this and she never had success again. She was a successful designer, so…

Jojo:

Ah, cool. That's a fun fact.

Sarah:

It is a fun fact, right? [both laugh]

Jojo:

Cool, well that's our episode. Hopefully you guys enjoyed that! I’m hoping we get to cover more black and white movies in the future.

S arah:

Yeah.

Jojo:

There's many more out there that we we probably have on our list.

Sarah:

Totally, and I'm sure we could find some examples of contemporary movies now that are done in black and white that would be interesting to talk about.

Jojo:

Yeah, I actually I was thinking about that when I was trying to pick up which movie I wanted to cover. Because I just watched “Malcolm and Marie,” which is also all in black and white.

Sarah:

Ohh.

Jojo:

And they're literally— again, it's like one scene that happens over less than 24 hours, it's overnight, and it's just two characters the entire scene. And it's just them going back and forth between fighting, and then making up, and then fighting again.

Sarah:

Wow.

Jojo:

So it's a really interesting movie. It's definitely one of those things where it's a lot— like, it's a deep thinking movie. You have to kind of understand what the director was trying to do. But again, looking at how black and white shows up on the screen and how to really costume for that.

Sarah:

Mmhmm. Totally.

Jojo:

Definitely more movies to cover in the future.

Sarah:

Yeah, so send them send them our way if you have suggestions as always. All right!

Jojo:

Perfect! Well thank you so much for everyone who's listening. Again, don't forget to review us, we're still donating a dollar for every review that we get.

Sarah:

Yes we are!

Jojo:

Sarah, do you want to remind them what… did we pick a charity that we're donating to?

Sarah:

I think Dress for Success is a good candidate. I think we should do Dress for Success.

Jojo:

Great.

Sarah:

Because they help people find professional wardrobes so that they can get employment and stuff. And I think that that, especially right now, is an important thing to be doing.

Jojo:

Yeah, absolutely. So yes, just if you're able to review us, I believe Apple Podcasts is where you can review us?

Sarah:

Please do.

Jojo:

I don’t think you can do it on Spotify yet, right?

Sarah:

I don't think so, I've looked into it and I don't know how to do it. If you know how to do it, please do it but I don't know how. [both laugh]

Jojo:

Yeah, exactly.

Sarah:

But the ratings and the reviews are what will get us to a bigger audience. So if you like us and you want us to find more ears, then that's the best thing you can do for us.

Jojo:

Yeah. Thank you so much, for everyone who's supporting us. We've been seeing even just new followers within the last week!

Sarah:

Mmhmm.

Jojo:

Which has been really exciting. So for those of you who are new and just joining us, we're hoping you're still as excited about costumes, to talk about them every week, as we are.

Sarah:

Yeah.

Jojo:

Or, I should say, every other week. Yeah, and if you guys have suggestions on any other topics or themes that you want us to cover, or just specific movies you want us to cover, know that we are adding them to our list. [laughs] Our very extensive list. And we'll try to get to them as soon as we can.

Sarah:

Yeah, we definitely will.

Jojo:

Thanks everyone!

Sarah:

Thank you!

Jojo:

So I'm Jojo.

Sarah:

I'm Sarah.

Jojo:

Thanks for listening to The Costume Plot!

Sarah:

Thanks, bye!

Jojo:

We'll talk to you next time!

[OUTRO]

Jojo:

Thank you for listening to The Costume Plot! You can follow us on Twitter and Instagram at @thecostumeplot. If you have a question, comment, or movie suggestion you can email us at thecostumeplot@gmail.com.

Sarah:

Our theme music is by Jesse Timm, and our artwork is by Jojo Siu. Please rate and review us wherever you listen to your podcasts.

[terribleco]

Top Fives: Ade The Terrible’s Top 5 Skateboarding Video Games

With this Coranavirus shit kicking off, and the sensible advice being to STAY THE HELL INDOORS, it’s understandable that you might get bored and have that itch to skate. Unless you have your own private skatepark, you’re gonna have to get creative and dig out some video games so you can still shred. With almost 10 years of experience working in the games industry, and as someone who has held a BAFTA, I know what I’m talking about when it comes to all of this video game malarkey, so join me as I talk you through my top 5 skateboarding video games.

5. Thrasher: Skate And Destroy (PS1)

This game had literally everything going for it back in 1999. It had the Thrasher license. It had legit, authentic skate spots like the Brooklyn Banks and Southbank. It had gameplay based on getting kicked out of spots by security guards (#sorelatable). It had a realistic approach to skateboarding that made tricks difficult, yet satisfying. And it was published by (arguably) one of the best video game companies in the world - Rockstar Games. However, it near enough flopped, because a competing skateboarding game came out a month later and completely trounced it in sales and critical praise. That game was Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. For this reason, not as many people probably know about Thrasher as they should.

The only thing Thrasher didn’t have was actual pro skateboarders. The game had a bunch of unlicensed generic skater characters who you could customise, so at the very least you could alter them and create someone who looked like you instead - something THPS wouldn’t get until the second game. It had an awesome hip hop soundtrack (which, to me, isn't really in keeping with Thrasher, but when the soundtrack is as good as Skate And Destroy’s, you could see it getting a thumbs up from the Phelper), and the gameplay was far more slow paced, methodical and grounded in reality than THPS. It doesn’t particularly hold up well today, but it’s well worth a look.

4. Session (PC)

Despite being in early access on Steam, Session is already a far more satisfying experience than half of the stuff that came out in the “extreme sports” boom of the early 2000’s. In many ways, despite people pinning their hopes of it being a spiritual successor to EA’s Skate, it has far more in common with the previously mentioned Thrasher: Skate and Destroy. It’s authentic, urban location gives me strong Thrasher vibes, and it’s slower, methodical gameplay, where combos and scores are non-existent, rewards practice and patience. It exhibits details that other games have largely ignored, like boards having different deck and wheel sizes, or stance literally mirroring your controls, or the ability to do pressure flips.

Recently they just added Update 0.0.0.3, which adds Skate-like controls and some new levels to play: whilst some (myself included) hoped this might improve the experience, it becomes painfully clear this game was never meant for Skate’s control scheme. To have the option, however, is a nice touch if you are itching for something like Skate. The new locations in the game add a “modified” version of the Brooklyn Banks designed by the developers, which adds a ton of stairsets, ledges and handrails. There’s a lot to skate here, and a lot of fun to be had. There’s also a mini ramp, but (and this is probably a symptom of the game still being in early access), the transition skating is extremely buggy and doesn’t work properly at all. This is a problem Session’s main competitor, SkaterXL, also suffers from. I worry these newer games are going to get transition skating all wrong, which would suck, but it’s still too early to judge either one.

The game very obviously lacks the budget and scope of a AAA console game made by Activision or EA, but in many ways that gives the whole thing a scrappy, DIY feel. Comparing Skate to Session is like comparing Fully Flared to a local scene video - they are doing completely different things and going for completely different vibes, despite both being about skateboarding. One has a near infinite budget, and the pick of every pro on the planet, and the other scrapes by on what the people behind it can throw together within a limited budget and a small crew. I think the hope of Session being “Skate4” might have hurt its reputation slightly, but if you go in with fresh eyes and judge it on it’s own merits, you’ll have a lot of fun.

3. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 (PS2)

This game is on my list because it is, I feel, the culmination of the best features in extreme sports games at the time. I liked the THPS games that came after (OK, maybe not THPS5… or the ones where you stood on an actual skateboard), but the new ideas in THUG1 and 2 just felt like they started to veer away from authentic skateboarding and turned the game into “Jackass: The Video Game”. THPS4 felt like the last game truly grounded in skateboarding culture, with challenges that truly referenced stuff you had seen in skate videos, with little jokes for skateboarders, and a list of locations which had a few nods to Thrasher: Skate and Destroy’s level selection, but through the lense of Neversoft’s excellent level design.

The game cribbed features from a competing game of the time - Aggressive Inline (developed by Z-Axis, who had been the team behind Thrasher), featuring no strict time limits, and treated each level as a mini open world, allowing players the freedom and time to just skate freely and pick up challenges at their leisure. This was the first THPS game to do this, and compared to the constrained time limits of past games, it felt like a true evolution for the series. The basic building blocks of the THPS controls were at their peak here as well, with spine transfers being a big edition which made you feel like you could flow skateparks like Grant Taylor at the push of a button (or, Rune Glifberg, to use a more era appropriate comparison).

2. Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 (PS1)

Yeah, I know, this makes it look like I ran out of games to put on the list. But, this choice is intentional. There are so many other PS1 skateboarding games I could mention here (Grind Session immediately came to mind, if only because Ed Templeton was in it), but THPS2 has a special place in my heart. It is the reason I started skateboarding; without THPS2, this blog wouldn’t exist. I remember THPS1 being a fun game, and it definitely grabbed me, but THPS2 is where I remember the series really stretching its legs, and the authentic elements of skateboarding really expanding. 

The weird downhill levels were gone, and the level selection was a combination of great real life parks (Marseille, Love Park and FDR in Philly), and references to skate videos (The Bullring from Tony Hawk’s part in The End was expanded into a full level!). Character creation, and park creation, were added, to give you infinite hours of fun building your dream skate session. The soundtrack is, still, I think, the best soundtrack to grace a skateboarding video game.

Manuals were added, as the first step toward THPS giving you the tools to land never-ending combos. There are a lot of jokes about THPS feeling like a weird, unrealistic, arcade game - but at the time it was genuinely the closest thing you could get to playing a game that had the perfect cross-section between authenticity and playability. Even better, with the “sim physics” cheat, the game felt far more realistic, and skating the mini at Skatestreet Ventura felt like skating a real ramp. It is instant nostalgia for me, and I feel it is the most replayable of the THPS games.

1. Skate 3

EA’s foray into skateboarding seems like it was over within the blink of an eye, but they bashed out 3 games very quickly in that time. 2007’s Skate, 2009’s Skate 2, and 2010’s Skate 3 are perhaps the closest we have ever got to the “game-feel” we expect from AAA games perfectly aligning with the authenticity of skateboarding. Skate 3, for all of it’s unfortunate, weird glitches, is still the peak of the series, with a wealth of features that give players the tools to skate and create. Even 10 years after release, I play Skate 3 far more than any other skateboarding game I own (even newer games like Session and SkaterXL get ignored in favour of Skate 3), and having the game on the Xbox One’s list of backwards compatible games has been one of the best things to happen during this console generation.

Skating street in Skate has always felt natural and intuitive. You can literally frontside flip a 16 stair and feel like Andrew Reynolds from the comfort of your living room. The room for inventive street skating is limitless within the game’s main city, and the park creator gives you a palette of options to create even more insane spots to invent tricks on. Transition skating has always been a bit hit or miss in these games, with vert/mega ramp being the only thing which they nailed. In Skate 3, however, they got the closest they had ever got to making it fun and realistic. With small touches like characters “dropping in” from tail and nose stalls, footplants which behave (mostly) in a way you would expect and a good selection of pools and mid-sized transitions for realistic skate sessions; Skate 3 had just enough to it for anyone wanting to skate transitions properly. I’ve debated with people whether the transition skating was really that good in Skate 3, but Nollie BS Bigspin Tailstalls and Noseblunts look so, so good in it - so I think it gets a pass.

Skate 3, for me, represents a gold standard for skateboarding games - perhaps even open world games in general. In many ways it pre-empted gaming trends that would come years later; an increased focus on user generated content, online connectivity (originally used to create a sense of community not unlike a local skate scene), and tutorialisation and a wiki for game mechanics to aid accessibility. The game was welcoming and intuitive for most players, and made bombing hills fun and rewarding. It’s deep selection of tricks was engaging, and it’s open world (although splintered into 3 hubs) was fun to explore and navigate. There was a real feeling of discovering new spots, and maybe being the first person to skate something. I can see in Skate 3, what I saw in THPS2 - an experience that sums up the raw, creative, positive energy of skateboarding, and a game which could inspire millions to get out and skate in real life. For these reasons, it is my favourite skateboarding game, and will take nothing short of something akin to “Skate 4” to top it.

[eddycurrents]

For the week of 9 October 2017

My favourites this week are both endings; Rocket #6 by Al Ewing and Adam Gorham and The Woods #36 by James Tynion IV and Michael Dialynas. Published by Marvel and BOOM! Studios.

Since at least the “Grounded” relaunch/expansion of the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise titles, Marvel has been producing some extremely high quality, well-written, beautifully-illustrated series that I always feel cheated out of when they’re “cancelled” instead of rightfully referred to as limited series. Particularly those of these last two groupings including Star-Lord, Gamora, I Am Groot, and the two excellent Rocket Raccoon series, first Matthew Rosenberg and Jorge Coelho’s Rocket Raccoon, and now this, Al Ewing and Adam Gorham’s Rocket, which I’d wager could possibly be the best Rocket Raccoon series since Bill Mantlo and Mike Mignola’s series back in 1985 (which this series references and draws from).

Al Ewing crafted an interesting story with "The Blue River Score”, layering it in the genre trappings of a hard-boiled caper, including the typical hard-hitting narration of a Raymond Chandler or Richard Stark novel, a femme fatale in Otta Spice, and an impossible heist, and then mixing it with colourful “obscurish” Marvel characters like the members of Technet and setting it across the backdrop of the more zany corners of Marvel’s cosmos.

Rocket #6 even brings it back around to the original Rocket Raccoon mini-series and Rocket’s old continuity, behaviour, and such with the correlation a lot of people were probably wondering about regarding Otta and Rocket’s otter-love, Lylla, being revealed here as one and the same. Not only does it add Ewing’s penchant for mining the depths of continuity for story payoffs and inspiration, but it also makes the story resonate a bit more with emotional impact.

Adam Gorham’s artwork is wonderful. He excels at drawing strange and wonderful creatures, but also has an added roughness, a scratchiness to his linework that perfectly fits the hard-boiled narrative. His overall design sense, from page layout to panel transitions also make this fun to read. There appears to be extensive thought that’s going into how the story is being told, from both Ewing and Gorham, and it results in an immensely enjoyable comic.

Particularly, I think more comics, not just crime comics like Rocket here or much of Ed Brubaker’s work, could do with a “prose gutter”. I highly recommend this to people who love off-beat crime comics.

The Woods #36 is the conclusion to a series that has dabbled in horror, fantasy, and sci-fi, but at its heart has always been a coming of age tale centred around the kids who had their whole world upended by being stolen away to a strange and dangerous realm on the other side of the universe. The ending is suitably epic as the former children show that they’ve truly grown and matured as they fight to find their way home.

Michael Dialynas has been delivering some incredible art since the series began, but these last few issues have been truly breathtaking. The double-page spreads this issue alone, juxtaposing two different types of battle going on are a treat, showing an ability to make both the quiet character moments and the high action compelling and interesting visually.

The story James Tynion IV has been telling is largely one about growth and change, of transformation through adversity, and occasionally needing to fail. The finale throws the biggest roadblocks and gives the opportunity to show how far the characters have come since that first issue, even antagonists like Adrian get a chance to shine.

This issue also shows how seamlessly Dialynas and Tynion have grown as collaborators. The scene between Isaac and Ben works well both in dialogue and in art, giving a huge emotional impact both in how it appears and in the heartfelt conversation.

Overall, this has been a great series and this is a very satisfying conclusion.

Quick Bits:

Atomahawk #0 collects the shorts that ran previously in Heavy Metal. While a new series is being published in Image+, this is a good time to pick up what came earlier in one place. Aside from just a balls to wall story from Donny Cates, Ian Bederman’s art remains phenomenal. His style reminds me a lot of Peter Kuper and the way that he constructs his characters, action, and page layouts are just fantastic. Highly recommend this special and the serial in Image+.

| Published by Image

Babyteeth #5 gives us one of those game-changing reveals that Donny Cates should be known for producing now based on at the very least Redneck and God Country. Sadie’s world just got a whole lot bigger and a whole lot stranger as she starts getting clued in to what’s going on with her and her baby.

| Published by AfterShock

Birthright #27 reminds me that I probably don’t talk about the colourists enough. Take, for instance, Adriano Lucas’ work here. Andrei Bressan’s linework would still look good, but it’s Lucas’ colours that really elevate the story and put us in a more magical reality with a shift here from standard “realistic” colours to the brighter, softer, and more colourful world inside a more fantastical realm. It just shows the impact that the colourist has on the overall tone and atmosphere of the book.

| Published by Image / Skybound

Daredevil #27 continues the twisting arc of DD’s mentoring of Blindspot since the beginning of this volume. Charles Soule gives us a more thorough backstory for Blindspot and reveals what has happened since the “Dark Art” story-arc. It’s pretty...um...dark.

| Published by Marvel

The Dying & The Dead #6 is still the most beautiful, possibly inscrutable, hidden history comic being published. 

| Published by Image

The Family Trade #1 is something different. And pretty fantastic. The premise and setting of the Float, a kind of extension of some of the politics of the Italian city-states during the time of the Renaissance, is brilliant, serving as a perfect backdrop to the populist political allegory that Justin Jordan and Nikki Reed are presenting here. The characters, and the idea of a family of assassins meant to keep society in check is also compelling, particularly the lead, (Jessa Wynn, who I’m fairly sure isn’t even named in the first issue, I grabbed it from the solicitation info), in her somewhat bumbling way.

Morgan Beem’s art also adds greatly to the overall feel and tone of this world. She has an art style that looks highly influenced by European artists, with a soft watercolour palette atop, achieving a very distinctive look for the comic.

Oh, and there’s “talking” cats. Every book should have talking cats. Every one.

| Published by Image

GI Joe #9 concludes this volume from Aubrey Sitterson and Giannis Milonogiannis. The end features some really nice action in the art from Milonogiannis. It’s nice to also get another series up to speed finally for the First Strike crossover, even though the GI Joe: First Strike comic that also comes after this series is already out. ROM looks like it’s the only hold out still before I can finally start reading that. The other highlight of this issue being the revelation of the new Cobra Commander.

| Published by IDW

God Complex: Dogma #1 is an impressive looking comic. The artwork from Hendry Prasetya is slick and layered in thick solid blacks, highly suitable to the futuristic mystery presented in the story, which is then elevated by the colours and sheen that Jessica Kholinne adds on top. Visually, it perfectly evokes that kind of Blade Runner feel. 

The story is also pretty interesting, Paul Jenkins hooks us fairly well with the murder and mystery of the Church of Trinity. The mix of a mysterious, possibly fictitious “one god” and the real, tangible deities of Delphi’s Rulers is something we’ve seen variations on before, but it’s still a compelling examination of faith vs. direct knowledge. The world, based on Glitch’s toy line, is fairly broad. The lead, Seneca, serves as a bridge between the two aspects and Jenkins delivers a little twist on the narrative partway through that has you reexamine the narration itself, making you go back and re-read the comic in that different light.

| Published by Image / Top Cow - Glitch

Grass Kings #8 focuses on Pike and his backstory, giving depth to the Grass Kingdom’s man of few words. In addition to his history, it also serves as a broadening of the mystery of the potential serial killer among the people, showing the other perspective of the conversation from last issue regarding Ms. Handel’s “suicide”, making us question even more.

| Published by BOOM! Studios

Harbinger Renegade #8 finally gives us the reunion of Kris and her parents, a plotline dating back right to the first story-arc. As has been the case for much of this series, it’s not exactly pleasant. It is, however, still satisfying and probably one of the happier moments in the series, even if bittersweet. The push towards Harbinger Wars 2 is also more apparent, with a drive for a Renegade army and training becoming more imperative. Animalia is also one scary little kid.

| Published by Valiant

Harrow County #26 is heartbreaking, even if you’ve grown to hate the character who dies this issue, it’s still heartbreaking. Kammi’s assault on Emmy’s life, friends, and whole world grows this issue, even with the devastating blow in the beginning of the issue, and it raises the question as to how far Kammi is going to take it, how much more loss the series is going to deliver, and what it might drive Emmy to do. Cullen Bunn and Tyler Crook are firing on all cylinders with this arc.

| Published by Dark Horse

Hulk #11 is another dramatic shift in tone, suddenly reintroducing Jen’s ability to break the fourth wall, hitting for a story that is more humorous in tone, and in some cases being silly, as the last issue before the Marvel Legacy “relaunch” back to She-Hulk and legacy issue number. Personally, I’m not sure I like it. It’s by no means bad, but it’s still a dramatic departure from the more serious “Deconstructed” arc and continuing with the more ridiculous aspects of the last arc with the food vloggers. It works for what it’s going for, recapturing some of the humour that previous incarnations of She-Hulk have presented, I just find it a bit of a jarring change.

| Published by Marvel

Jimmy’s Bastards #4 finally clues in the leads as to what we’ve known since the announcement of the series. This issue also hammers home that I think the wider joke of Garth Ennis’ black humour and piss-take of current identity politics is missing the mark.

| Published by AfterShock

Mech Cadet Yu #3 is still every bit as fun and heartfelt as the previous two issues, this remains an incredible all ages story with giant robots and invading bugs. Greg Pak has created a character in Stanford Yu that you just can’t help but smile at his stumbles and achievements, so incredibly likeable that you want to read more as soon as the issue’s finished. Takeshi Miyazawa also gets to reveal the Sharg this issue, setting up what looks like a battle between the cadets and the monsters for next issue.

| Published by BOOM! Studios

Noble #5 is my first issue of this series and I feel in a similar position to ostensibly the POV character, Astrid Allen, a little in the dark. Brandon Thomas uses an unreliable narrator in Lorena Payan explaining to Astrid what has been going on with her husband, the titular Noble, and the changes that have turned him into a superhero and it’s fairly compelling. Certainly enough that I decided to pre-order the Noble: God Shots book out later this month collecting the first four issues. I wonder how this issue’s reality and the previous issues will align. The artwork from Jamal Igle is a high point. The action scenes of Noble trying to save a commercial airliner are particularly well done.

I also have to say that how they’re numbering these books is also interesting. They’ve got a main issue number for the overall series, but they’ve also got a volume and issue number for story-arc/trade as this is Volume 2, Number 1. It makes story delineations fairly easy to see where breaks and potential jumping-on points occur.

| Published by Lion Forge / Catalyst Prime

Optimus Prime #11 begins the “Primeless” arc, acting as a kind of non-branded tie-in to the First Strike event, covering what’s happening to the Cybertronians on Earth cut-off from Cybertron and left in the dark. I haven’t begun reading the First Strike crossover yet, as I’m still waiting for the last issue of ROM to land to be up to speed, but it doesn’t feel as though I’m missing anything here having not read it yet. In fact, in some ways, it puts me in a similar position to the characters in the book as I don’t know what’s happening either. In any event, John Barber does a good job of ratcheting up the tension between the different factions on Earth and amongst the rest of the Council of Worlds. I also need to reiterate that there really should be at the very least a Thundercracker mini-series.

| Published by IDW

Redlands #3 shifts point of view to Laurent, a bounty hunter without a license, gator man, and apparent lover of Bridget of the coven, who was introduced as a prisoner in the first issue. I really like how Jordie Bellaire is telling this story, in somewhat non-linear waves that keep rippling outward introducing new characters and interactions while still advancing the overall plot. The epistolary backmatter of clippings of gator man sightings and how to field dress a deer are also interesting touches. It adds a nice depth to the world.

And as since the first issue Vanessa Del Rey’s artwork is incredible. Dark, moody, and at turns erotic. This book is pretty much as sensual as it is horrific and bloody, and I think that’s a very welcome choice from Bellaire and Del Rey for this story.

| Published by Image

Retcon #2 is still...something. Between the first two issues, we’ve got some kind of government conspiracy involving black ops superhuman/magic-user teams. That seems pretty straight-forward and is fairly interesting. The problem is that the interviews and backmatter with the creators imply that they’re doing something else with the series and that just doesn’t come through in the narrative. So, if you’re looking for something that kind of taps the same vein as Doom Patrol meets Automatic Kafka, this is up your alley.

| Published by Image

Royal City #6 kicks off a new arc set in 1993, delving into the teenage years of the Pike children, back when Tommy was still alive. Jeff Lemire’s story gets more layers to it as it shows the personalities of the children in their genesis, and starts easily putting together some of the pieces as to what we’re going to see happen in the first arc, including Richie’s girlfriend, Tara’s relationship with Steve, their mother’s affair, and maybe what happened to Tommy. Lemire is great at weird, and great at small town family dynamics, and this series puts them all together in a beautiful illusory package.

| Published by Image

Sheena: Queen of the Jungle #2 adds some more depth to the story and more mysteries as Sheena chances upon the guy who’s been watching with drones and the two of them stumble upon unknown ancient temples in the jungle. Marguerite Bennett and Christina Trujillo are still treading common ground, but it’s still entertaining and they’ve managed to make Sheena a fairly interesting character in her own right, and, with Moritat’s art, great to look at.

| Published by Dynamite

Star Wars: Doctor Aphra #13 concludes the “Enormous Profit” arc and with it Kieron Gillen & Kev Walker’s run on the title. Gillen will apparently be back to co-write the next issue before fully transitioning to the main Star Wars title and I’m not sure what Walker is doing next. Suitably this issue features some nice action, some duplicitous intrigue, and the trademark sardonic humour. What the murderbots, Triple-Zero and BeeTee-One, have up their sleeves after being unshackled of morality earlier in this arc is a frightening prospect.

| Published by Marvel

Wormwood - Gentleman Corpse: Mr. Wormwood Goes to Washington #1 brings back Ben Templesmith’s comedy horror opus to tackle corruption in politics and it’s a very welcome return. It’s ridiculous, it’s over the top, and it’s actually scary that the bigoted plutocrat scrambling for more power in politics is now a believable reality and not just a caricature.

| Published by IDW

Other Highlights: All-New Wolverine #25, Alters #7, Amazing Spider-Man #789, Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows #12, Baking with Kafka, Black Science #32, Defenders #6, Despicable Deadpool #287, Eternal Empire #5, Falcon #1, First Strike #5, Inhumans: Once & Future Kings #3, Lazaretto #2, Runaways #2, Sacred Creatures #4, Scales & Scoundrels #2, Slam!: The Next Jam #2, Star Trek: Boldly Go #12, The Unbelievable Gwenpool #21, Uncanny Avengers #27, The Wicked & The Divine #32, X-Men Blue #13 

Recommended Collections: Animosity - Volume Two, Black Cloud - Volume One: No Exit, Coady & The Creepies, Harrow County - Volume Six: Hedge Magic, Ladycastle, Low - Volume Four: Outer Aspects of Inner Attitudes, Secret Warriors - Volume One: Secret Empire, Seven to Eternity - Volume Two, Star Wars: Screaming Citadel, TMNT Universe - Volume Two: New Strangeness

d. emerson eddy can both walk and chew gum. If he tries really hard, sometimes he can even achieve both at the same time. But only sometimes.

[hopeatermain]

The main problem I have with Unity. This is a rant.

Ah, Unity. The Black Sheep of the Assassin’s Creed franchise. Is it because of the love story? How the real history context was handled? How Arno was handled? The glitches?

I do not have any issues with those, mainly because:

Yes. Yes the love story was cliché, but it did not stop anyone from crying. Honestly, I don’t really care about love stories, but this one was genuinely heartbreaking. (In an alternate Universe, Élise became the Grandmaster Templar, made peace with the Assassins and the Order now rule an idyllic world with the Assassins there to make sure liberty of expression is respected and no one can tell me otherwise)

I am no history buff, so I don’t really care, but I can see why people would take issues with the portrayal the ‘‘good guys’’ being aristocrats during the French Revolution. But, the fact that the assassins are on the side of the bourgeoisie demonstrate that they are losing their ways, which goes hand-in-hand with Rogue.

OF COURSE ARNO WAS BADLY HANDLED. Everything in this game was badly handled. That is my second biggest issue with Unity: on paper, it was brilliant, but Ubisoft wasn’t able to execute it properly due to the once a year politic they had for the franchise. Since they decided to release AC: Origins two years after Syndicate, I’d say this was a good lesson for them not to rush things.

I don’t play video games, but I can see why people would think that they fucked up. Again, time limit.

No no no no no no. My biggest problem with Unity was... the co-op system.

Of course, I did not play AC: Unity. I don’t have the necessary supports, so I’m not going to complain of the gameplay of the co-op. However, the fact that they just decided to make these characters with a great design into palette swaps as made me bitter. They all had so much potential, and they decided to do palette. Swaps. 

I don’t know, make them secondary but important characters, if you must. Make them relevant to the story. Or give them a cameo, I don’t know! Or better: separate the story in fragments with each missions having the options of two characters: Arno and another member of the co-op. Like, Greencoat at the start, Axeman in the middle and Icecream at the end. Or even better: remember the Time anomalies? They are the protagonists of these. Or use the original idea of the game and separate the game in fragments. 

I’m going to use my headcanons of the assassins for this: Agape for a time before the French Revolution, when gypsies where seen as less than human and his fight to make a safe haven for them, only for the same haven to get corrupted into La Cour des Miracles. Arno during the French Revolution, trying to make peace with the Templars but being seen as a child. Thomas during the reign of Napoleon, trying to stop a good man who has gone mad with power not for the creed, but for his friends. And Edgard during the Second World War, a german man who ran away from Germany when Hitler took the power to get help, only to discover that France was under the thumb of the Reicht. And at the end, an epilogue with one of their common descendant (maybe Cal) à la Revelations, where they entrust their work to the new generation. (SHIT THIS IS EVEN BETTER THAN MY FIRST IDEA).

They didn’t even give them a name, damnit!

So, do I think they could have done better with Unity? Of course I do. We all do. Does this mean Unity is a bad game? We won’t go there. It had good ideas, but they were poorly executed. So yeah. Sorry for my rant.

[clairehosking]

Reading Notes

Ian Bogost wrote a piece in the atlantic, here are some of the notes I took on my second reading, as in-line replies.

A longstanding dream: Video games will evolve into interactive stories, like the ones that play out fictionally on the Star Trek Holodeck. In this hypothetical future, players could interact with computerized characters as round as those in novels or films, making choices that would influence an ever-evolving plot. It would be like living in a novel, where the player’s actions would have as much of an influence on the story as they might in the real world.

Okay straight off the bat that seems a pretty specific definition of story, which requires:

complex characters

Player Influencing plot

“Living in a novel” (which I’ll take for meaning complex simulated environments)

It’s an almost impossible bar to reach, for cultural reasons as much as technical ones. One shortcut is an approach called environmental storytelling. Environmental stories invite players to discover and reconstruct a fixed story from the environment itself. Think of it as the novel wresting the real-time, first-person, 3-D graphics engine from the hands of the shooter game. In Disneyland’s Peter Pan’s Flight, for example, dioramas summarize the plot and setting of the film. In the 2007 game BioShock, recorded messages in an elaborate, Art Deco environment provide context for a story of a utopia’s fall. And in What Remains of Edith Finch, a new game about a girl piecing together a family curse, narration is accomplished through artifacts discovered in an old house.

Okay so environmental storytelling is seen as an attempt at holodecking b/c it allows for rich environments, while artifacts imply or relate the life histories of complex characters, and player has influence in the sense that they move the plot along.

The approach raises many questions. Are the resulting interactive stories really interactive, when all the player does is assemble something from parts?

I think you doing the assembly rather than having someone assemble something for you is still a meaningful difference.

Are they really stories, when they are really environments?

I think I can only answer this when I understand what your definition of story is.

And most of all, are they better stories than the more popular and proven ones in the cinema, on television, and in books?

On this measure, alas, the best interactive stories are still worse than even middling books and films.

I’m a little confused by this standard. In terms of storytelling, are games falling short of the holodeck, or falling short of books and movies? b/c they seem like different questions to me. The holodeck question is about whether games meet the specific criteria to become the dreamed-of interactive movie. If the question is whether they measure to books/films, it’s more about whether games have equivalent ways to express characters and events but not necessarily whether it matches up to a linear, player-involved, immersive environment standard.

In retrospect, it’s easy easy to blame old games like Doom and Duke Nukem for stimulating the fantasy of male adolescent power. But that choice was made less deliberately at the time. Real-time 3-D worlds are harder to create than it seems, especially on the relatively low-powered computers that first ran games like Doom in the early 1990s. It helped to empty them out as much as possible, with surfaces detailed by simple textures and objects kept to a minimum. In other words, the first 3-D games were designed to be empty so that they would run.

An empty space is most easily interpreted as one in which something went terribly wrong. Add a few monsters that a powerful player-dude can vanquish, and the first-person shooter is born. The lone, soldier-hero against the Nazis, or the hell spawn, or the aliens.

Those early assumptions vanished quickly into infrastructure, forgotten. As 3-D first-person games evolved, along with the engines that run them, visual verisimilitude improved more than other features. Entire hardware industries developed around the specialized co-processors used to render 3-D scenes.

Ok so games are kinda doing the complex simulated environments part?

Left less explored were the other aspects of realistic, physical environments. The inner thoughts and outward behavior of simulated people, for example, beyond the fact of their collision with other objects. The problem becomes increasingly intractable over time. Incremental improvements in visual fidelity make 3-D worlds seem more and more real. But those worlds feel even more incongruous when the people that inhabit them behave like animatronics and the environments work like Potemkin villages.

But failing at the complex interactive characters part. True. (Some interesting experiments by SpiritAI and the game Event[0] however.)

Worse yet, the very concept of a Holodeck-aspirational interactive story implies that the player should be able to exert agency upon the dramatic arc of the plot. The one serious effort to do this was an ambitious 2005 interactive drama called Façade, a one-act play with roughly the plot of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. It worked remarkably well—for a video game. But it was still easily undermined. One player, for example, pretended to be a zombie, saying nothing but “brains” until the game’s simulated couple threw him out.

Also failing at the plot-influencing part and emergent events part (but some interesting experiments -- blood and laurels, for instance).

Environmental storytelling offers a solution to this conundrum. Instead of trying to resolve the matter of simulated character and plot, the genre gives up on both, embracing scripted action instead.

In between bouts of combat in BioShock, for instance, the recordings  players discover have no influence on the action of the game, except to color the interpretation of that action. The payoff, if that’s the right word for it, is a tepid reprimand against blind compliance, the very conceit the BioShock player would have to embrace to play the game in the first place.

True, this is what 3D games do. But I’d argue that other games give up on the fully simulated environment in order to resolve simulated characters and/or simulated plots. All three of these things are happening they’re just not happening in the same games.

In 2013, three developers who had worked on the BioShock series borrowed the environmental-storytelling technique and threw away both the shooting and the sci-fi fantasy. The result was Gone Home, a story game about a college-aged woman who returns home to a mysterious, empty mansion near Portland, Oregon. By reassembling the fragments found in this mansion, the player reconstructs the story of the main character’s sister and her journey to discover her sexual identity. The game was widely praised for breaking the mold of the first-person experience while also importing issues in identity politics into a medium known for its unwavering masculinity.

Feats, but relative ones. Writing about Gone Home upon its release, I called it the video-game equivalent of young-adult fiction. Hardly anything to be ashamed of, but maybe much nothing to praise, either. If the ultimate bar for meaning in games is set at teen fare, then perhaps they will remain stuck in a perpetual adolescence even if they escape the stereotypical dude-bro’s basement. Other paths are possible, and perhaps the most promising ones will bypass rather than resolve games’ youthful indiscretions.

I love Gone Home but I certainly don’t think it shows the limits of what can be achieved at all, even within this palette of techniques. So far it feels like this article is trying to point out the weaknesses of games trying to holodeck, but Gone Home never felt like an attempt to. It felt like it was trying to glean which storytelling techniques come naturally to games and explore them.

* * *

What Remains of Edith Finch both adopts and improves upon the model set by Gone Home. It, too, is about a young woman who returns home to a mysterious, abandoned house in the Pacific Northwest, where she discovers unexpected and dark secrets.

The titular Edith Finch is the youngest surviving member of the Finch family, Nordic immigrants who came to the Seattle area in the late 19th century. It is a family of legendary, cursed doom, an affliction that motivated emigration. But once they arrived on Orcas Island, fate treated the Finches no less severely—all its lineage has been doomed to die, and often in tragically unremarkable ways. Edith has just inherited the old family house from her mother, the latest victim of the curse.

As in Doom and BioShock and almost every other first-person game ever made, the emptiness of the environment becomes essential to its operation. 3-D games are settings as much as experiences—perhaps even more so. And the Finch estate is a remarkable setting, imagined and executed in intricate detail. This is a weird family, and the house has been stocked with  handmade gewgaws and renovated improbably, coiling Dr. Seuss-like into the air. The game is cleverly structured as a series of a dozen or so narrative vignettes, in which Edith accesses prohibited parts of the unusual house, finally learning the individual fates of her forebears by means of the fragments they left behind—diaries, letters, recordings, and other mementos.

The result is aesthetically coherent, fusing the artistic sensibilities of Edward Gory, Isabel Allende, and Wes Anderson. The writing is good, an uncommon accomplishment in a video game. On the whole, there is nothing to fault in What Remains of Edith Finch. It’s a lovely little title with ambitions scaled to match their execution. Few will leave it unsatisfied.

And yet, the game is pregnant with an unanswered question: Why does this story need to be told as a video game?

(This sort of conjures up the idea that game designers sit down with a linear plot and attempt to holodeck it, which I feel is less and less of a thing)

The whole way through, I found myself wondering why I couldn’t experience Edith Finch as a traditional time-based narrative. Real-time rendering tools are as good as pre-rendered computer graphics these days, and little would have been compromised visually had the game been an animated film. Or even a live-action film. After all, most films are shot with green screens, the details added in postproduction. The story is entirely linear, and interacting with the environment only gets in the way, such as when a particularly dark hallway makes it unclear that the next scene is right around the corner.

One answer could be cinema envy. The game industry has long dreamed of overtaking Hollywood to become the “medium of the 21st century,” a concept now so retrograde that it could only satisfy an occupant of the 20th. But a more compelling answer is that something would be lost in flattening What Remains of Edith Finch into a linear experience.

Yep, I would agree with that.

The character vignettes take different forms, each keyed to a clever interpretation of the very idea of real-time 3-D modeling and interaction. In one case, the player takes on the role of different animals, recasting a familiar space in a new way. In another, the player moves a character through the Finch house, but inside a comic book, where it is rendered with cell-shading instead of conventional, simulated lighting. In yet another, the player encounters a character’s fantasy as a navigable space that must be managed alongside that of the humdrum workplace in which that fantasy took place.

Something would be lost in flattening most “walking sims” and narrative investigation games and that’s the experience of space itself, perhaps the most prized thing holodecking adds to stories (after all, if you want to participate in an ever evolving, player influenced story, you could do d&d instead).

These are remarkable accomplishments. But they are not feats of storytelling, at all. Rather, they are novel expressions of the capacities of a real-time 3-D engine.

I disagree. “novel expressions of the capacities of a real-time 3-D engine” are the “telling” part of storytelling.

The ability to render light and shadow, to model structure and turn it into obstacle, to trick the eye into believing a flat surface is a bookshelf or a cavern, and to allow the player to maneuver a camera through that environment, pretending that it its a character. Edith Finch is a story about a family, sure, but first it’s a device made of the conventions of 3-D gaming, one as weird and improvised as the Finch house in which the action takes place.

Such repurposing was already present in earlier environmental story-games, including Gone Home and Dear Esther, another important entry in the genre that prides itself on rejecting the “traditional mechanics” of first-person experience. For these games, the glory of refusing the player agency was part of the goal. So much so that their creators even embraced the derogatory name “walking simulator,” a sneer invented for them by their supposedly shooter-loving critics.

But walking simulators were always doomed to be a transitional form. The gag of a game with no gameplay might seem political at first, but it quickly devolves into conceptualism. What Remains of Edith Finch picks up the baton and designs a different race for it. At stake is not whether a game can tell a good story or even a better story than books or films or television. Rather, what it looks like when a game uses the materials of games to make those materials visible, operable, and beautiful.

Right, so it rejects holodecking and tries to convey character, plot and space according to its own language. This feels like saying games are bad at holodecking, not necessarily bad at stories.

* * *

Think of a a medium as the aesthetic form of common materials. Poetry aestheticizes language. Painting aestheticizes flatness and pigment. Photography does so for time. Film, for time and space. Architecture, for mass and void. Television, for economic leisure and domestic habit. Sure, yes, those media can and do tell stories. But the stories come later, built atop the medium’s foundations.

What are games good for, then? Players and creators have been mistaken in merely hoping that they might someday share the stage with books, films, and television, let alone to unseat them. To use games to tell stories is a fine goal, I suppose, but it’s also an unambitious one.

lol

Games are not a new, interactive medium for stories. Instead, games are the aesthetic form of everyday objects. Of ordinary life. Take a ball and a field: you get soccer. Take property-based wealth and the Depression: you get Monopoly. Take patterns of four contiguous squares and gravity: you get Tetris. Take ray tracing and reverse it to track projectiles: you get Doom. Games show players the unseen uses of ordinary materials.

And if I take a story, shake it up and scatted it all over an environment? Is that the aesthetic form of storytelling?

As the only mass medium that arose after postmodernism, it’s no surprise that those materials so often would be the stuff of games themselves. More often than not, games are about the conventions of games and the materials of games—at least in part. Texas Hold ’em is a game made out of Poker. Candy Crush is a game made out of Bejeweled. Gone Home is a game made out of BioShock.

The true accomplishment of What Remains of Edith Finch is that it invites players to abandon the dream of interactive storytelling at last.

This doesn’t make sense to me. You’ve made a good case that games can convey character and plot well through “novel expressions of the capacities of a real-time 3-D engine”, and you’ve made a case that environmental storytelling doesn’t achieve holodecking, but I’m not going to rule out that other techniques might.

Yes, sure, you can tell a story in a game. But what a lot of work that is, when it’s so much easier to watch television, or to read.

A greater ambition, which the game accomplishes more effectively anyway: to show the delightful curiosity that can be made when stories, games, comics, game engines, virtual environments—and anything else, for that matter—can be taken apart and put back together again unexpectedly.

To dream of the Holodeck is just to dream a complicated dream of the novel. If there is a future of games, let alone a future in which they discover their potential as a defining medium of an era, it will be one in which games abandon the dream of becoming narrative media and pursue the one they are already so good at: taking the tidy, ordinary world apart and putting it back together again in surprising, ghastly new ways.

But this sort of gets why games have stories at all, which is that they are necessities to explain and contextualise the weird things game engines produce. I’d argue that regardless of whether you feel game stories are as good as books, some  “novel expressions of the capacities of a real-time 3-D engine” need narrative context to be understood and enjoyed by players. Rapture is less rapturous without its story. 

[doujinshijo]

HQS Statue - Eyeshield 21 Devil Bats

I’ve left this revelation rather late, and I feel kinda bad for it, but...I love Eyeshield 21. A lot. This was actually one of the very first manga that I ever read - I remember seeing it on Goodreads, being swayed by the positive reviews and deciding to give it a shot. I still don’t really know why I picked it over so many other popular manga - I didn’t like American football then and I still don’t now. Yet there’s something about this sports manga that gripped me and wouldn’t let me go. Yes, it’s the typical story - underdog athletes decide to make a team and take on the best players in the sport. I think what sets this apart are the characters. Every character - and there are a lot of them - contributes something unique and interesting to the palette of this series.There’s a lot of personal development going on too, with some of the characters struggling with some real personal issues. I ended up buying all 37 issues in the series and chain-reading them back to back. I still remember the withdrawal symptoms when I ran out and my next issue hadn’t been delivered yet.

I have plenty to say about Eyeshield 21, but for today I’m going to keep things simple and focus on one thing; my Deimon Devil Bats cast polyresin statue.

The Devil Bats HQS (High Quality Statue) is made by Tsume Art. Their HQS range is made of polyresin/PU, and this one is limited to just 400 pieces. I need to say this now - Tsume figures are awesome. I mean, insanely awesome. The detail and the paintwork are phenomenal, not to mention the sculpts themselves - all Tsume statues feature dynamic and exciting poses, often involving diorama-like props and environmental features. The tradeoff is that they’re pretty expensive; this statue cost me 339EUR, and that’s pretty cheap for their HQS pricing. Ouch.

From the very start, every little detail has been carefully thought out. Even the card packing box is emblazoned with the Deimon Devil Bat’s insignia. It all feels very luxurious.

Inside the card shipping carton is the figure’s actual box. It’s reproduced in glorious full-colour. It’s so funky and beautifully designed.

Check out the images on the back. I actually think that the images don’t do it justice - the figure itself is so unbelievably gorgeous it really surpasses these proto shots! I think it would have been nice to have a pattern or print behind the images to break up some of the excessive black empty spots but...meh. Who really cares about the box anyway?

This is what it’s all about. The cast figures are held in polystyrene, along with the turf base, a detachable 3D Devil Bat logo and the limited edition plate with your figure’s number on it. There are about 3 layers of polystyrene holding everything in. Kurita is so huge he pretty much spans all three layers.

The paint-job on this figure is outstanding. I honestly don’t think I have seen higher-quality painting. Look at the shading on Kurita’s face, shirt and hands. In my experience, shading on white clothes is normally overdone in blue on statues and figures; this is absolutely perfect.

Look at the subtle shadows in the creases of his fingers:

Now for Hiruma. Ahh, Hiruma. Hiruma is one of my favourite characters in, well, just about anything. His casting is beautiful. The football is detachable and held in the palm of his hand by a magnet. It’s powerful enough that there’s no risk of the ball falling free. It’s a little tricky to get it to sit properly against his fingers without any gaps though, and doesn’t really look like he’s holding it...more like it’s kind of floating in his hand. I don’t know why they didn’t just mould it to his hand. It’s a nitpicky point though. Check out the details on his leg pads and shoes. Even the freaking ball looks amazing.

What can I say? His face is perfection. They’ve captured his trademark sneer to a tee.

Here you can see what I mean about the magic floating ball. It’s not a big deal, really.

Finally, there’s Sena. Like the other two characters his casting is wonderful - it captures his gritty underdog determination and his limber speediness - not easy to do in a static figure! He balances on a dust cloud which a metal peg in the bottom of his feet press into. It’s a bit of a tight fit, and since he’s cast polyresin and his feet pegs are metal there’s not a lot of flex in them if you’re trying to force them. His cleats are meant to fit into little gaps in the cloud too to prevent him from leaning to one side, but they are shallow and can pop out of you knock him.

Sena comes with a replacement Eyeshield 21 head - it’s the only replaceable part of the statue. As much as I love the Sena head, I kind of think it’s more appropriate to display Eyeshield in all of his incognito glory. The head’s immaculately detailed down to the green eyeshield, safety bars and branding on the side. 

I had to recreate my favourite ES image - the one where Eyeshield 21 emerges from the dust in his first game against the Cupids. 

Here is the whole crew:

This cast figure weighs about 5kg and is around 25cm square, so it’s pretty hefty. It’s also one of the only Eyeshield figurines you can buy (dammit, why wasn’t it more popular?!). Tsume-Art have now sold out but you can probably find this in the aftersale market, e.g. Ebay etc. If you’re an ES21 fan, needless to say this is a must-have. You will not be disappointed by the super-high quality production of this statue.

[musingmonkee]

Antioch

At my day job, I literally sat around for four and a half hours. Wednesdays are typically pretty slow for delivery services, but “slow” usually means I only do one trip per hour, not nothing at all for several hours. I couldn’t help thinking of all the other things I could be taking care of: going to physical therapy for my shoulder, writing some pages on one of the four scripts I’m working on, laundry.

I wished I had at least remembered to bring the book I am reading about William and Elizebeth Friedman. They were codebreakers, self-taught, who basically pioneered our national intelligence agencies. When I left off, Elizebeth was working for the Coast Guard helping to catch rum-runners during Prohibition. The bootleggers had broadcast their instructions over the radio using code words and phrases, and Elizebeth had been able to figure out their entire scheme. She had just testified in open court against some pretty powerful mafiosi, and the author hinted multiple times that Elizebeth would soon be in danger.

Finally, in the last half hour of my shift, I was sent to pick up two separate orders. The first one was pretty small, only three bags and a half rack of Sierra Nevada pale ale. The second one, though, was a pretty large order - at least a dozen heavy bags, plus two cases of water and a half dozen 12-packs of soda. And a case of Bud Light. 

“Who drinks Bud Light?” I thought. Just the idea of it gives me a headache. 

Most customers, unless they are elderly or in some way disabled, eagerly come out to my car to help bring their groceries inside. Then, after confirming delivery with a signature, they typically hand me a few dollars as a tip.

The Bud Light woman, though, simply stood in the doorway and watched me. She did offer a polite “thank you” for each set of bags I set at her feet, but that was all. Literally. 

I don’t ever actually expect a tip, even though it is the bulk of a delivery driver’s income, and even though customers are fully aware of how little people in my position actually make once expenses are factored in. But I know that if I start expecting a tip, it will affect my attitude about what I’m doing, and I don’t want to be a dick to people. 

I did expect a tip from the Bud Light woman, though. Her attitude conveyed an “I’ll just pay for it” view of the world, whether “it” was having her grass cut or having her groceries delivered to her doorstep. When she didn’t even offer a perfunctory couple of bucks, I felt betrayed. 

Afterwards, I went straight to my night job instead of stopping home to take a nap first like I usually do. My first stop was a young Black woman getting off work whom I picked up from her office building. Our conversation led to the subject of Stephon Clark, the young man who a few weeks ago had been gun downed by local police despite being unarmed. She told me that she had very little sympathy for what had happened to Clark.

“My father was a criminal” she explained, “and he said that he [Clark] was a stupid criminal so he deserved what he got.” 

I did not give in to curiosity and ask, “Really? In what way was your father ‘a criminal’? What did he do?” 

Instead I said, “Well, I still don’t think he should’ve been shot to death just for vandalizing cars.”

She replied that no, of course that wasn’t okay, and that the whole thing was a tragedy. She said she’d heard on the news that even the guy who originally called the police because someone was breaking into his car felt incredibly guilty for Clark’s death; that if he had known the police were going to respond the way they did, the guy wouldn’t have called them. But she still thought that Clark was stupid. 

My next pick-up was an older Vietnamese couple who spoke very little English. Their daughter had first phoned me to confirm that I would be okay taking them all the way to Antioch, which I was (delighted actually), thinking of the large fare. 

The ride to Antioch was pretty quiet. The woman spoke only enough to convey that the music I was listening to quietly in the front was pleasant and didn’t bother them. The man said nothing. 

My GPS, as it usually does when I’m going that way, sent me around the delta on the much smaller state highways rather than the major, more direct interstate route. It makes for a more interesting drive, landscape-wise, but the delta route, with its single-lane roads and lower speed limits, can also take longer to get there. Since it was still very much rush hour on the interstate, I didn’t see that it made much of a difference which route I took. Even if it was technically longer going around the delta, at least we would be in constant motion, which we most certainly wouldn’t be in taking the interstate. And the couple seemed to have no objection - at least they didn’t make any sort of indication that I was “going the wrong way”. 

There were several places along the way that I wished I could’ve pulled over and snapped some photos - the wind farm, for example. Dozens of high-tech, wind-powered turbines that still have a very futurist design dominate the bright green countryside. Sometimes sheep or cows or goats graze peacefully among them. It’s as if Christina’s World had been painted by Robert Heinlein. 

The Vietnamese couple’s home was in an older but common style of housing development. As I pulled up, I found that I couldn’t stop directly in front of the house due to there being three or four old, white vans - the kind with the double doors in the middle instead of a single, sliding one - parked in front of it. There were also two more cars parked in the driveway. I wondered if the vans belonged to their household, then wondered why, with so many vehicles, none of their owners had offered to come and collect the couple. 

As the man and woman got out of my car and thanked me politely for the ride, I noticed through their open garage door that there were several large, black leather sofas. These were huge and shiny, and really stood out against the white and grey color palette of the garage, bathed in the glare of fluorescent lighting. The sofas were simultaneously completely out place and not at all unusual. 

On my way back I stopped in to visit some theatre friends during their rehearsal for A Funny Little Thing Called Love. The play is a series of vignettes about different ways people fall in love, or rather try to. My friend “Jack” is directing the play and “Jill” will be in two of its scenes. After first greeting my friends, I sat quietly in a seat next to Jack, who was making notes as his actors ran the first scene. 

The most noticeable thing about community theatre is that, while many people may have a decent level of acting talent, very few actually “look like an actor”. Sure, there is the occasional beautiful young ingenue or fresh-faced leading man with the acting chops to match, but eventually even they are overtaken by middle age and start to blend into the rest of the company. 

As I watched the actors work through their blocking up on stage, my primary thought was “What a wholly unattractive group”. One of the women, who was past the sell-by date for the airy-fairy “peace and love” persona she presented, I was sure smelled like patchouli, cigarettes, and feet. Her flat leather sandals slapped across the plywood stage as she stormed off in disgust, which really took the bite of her character’s anger. 

The second woman I’d first met when she was a cute young character player, the one who was always cast as the “sassy secretary” or “flirty waitress”. She had and still has flaming red hair. I’d seen her in several of the company’s productions, but she hadn’t done any of their recent shows. I’d always thought she had an inordinately large head, but in the time since I’d seen her last, her weak jawline had finally been overtaken by her growing double chin. She now looked like a walking human thumb with hair. I felt bad for her. After all, she can’t help having a weak chin; and what’s she supposed to do, never look down? 

I then tried to calculate the amount of suspension of disbelief that would be required for me to accept that the third actor, a middle-aged man with his belly hanging out from under the front of his shirttails, is a three-timing Lothario whom each of the three women he is dating agree to keep seeing as long as he ditches the other two. 

“He has to know” I later told my Bestie, who is also friends with these actors. “How can he not? How can he just... walk around like that??”

On my drive back, I recognized how judgmental I was being. Still, there just isn’t any un-awkward way to tell someone that everyone can see their gut hanging out, so it remains the person’s own responsibility to keep track of it. When they don’t it’s somehow insulting to the rest of us.

“Take that, sartorial common sense! And you too, public at large!”    

[the-buyers-guide-blog]

GoNNER: The Buyer’s Guide

Released: 12/10/16 (PC), Raw Fury Platforms: Windows, Nintendo Switch Developer: Art at Heart Cost: 10$ (USD)

The video version of this review can be found HERE - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBw80Zfb_Jg&t=182s

BUY IF: You’re a perma-death junkie, you buy games on the basis of art design or you’re happy to shell out ten dollars on an enjoyable five hour experience WAIT FOR A SALE IF: You like fully randomized gameplay DON’T BUY IF: You’re looking for something meaty to hold your interest for dozens of hours or you’re easily frustrated While you’re in the area, why not try: Downwell - http://store.steampowered.com/app/360740/Downwell/ Tumbleseed - http://store.steampowered.com/app/457890/TumbleSeed/ Some neat little games from Ditto, GoNNER’s developer - https://ditto.itch.io/

Perhaps the unkindest thing you could say about GoNNER is that it’s a tech demo for a bigger game. For a genre that boasts masses of randomized content, this particular rogue-lite is extremely light on the kind of variables that ensure replayability – weapons, power-ups and (in GoNNER’s case) snazzy backpacks and detachable heads. GoNNER is a beautiful, satisfying and chaotic platforming-shooter with randomly generated levels and enemy placement. It bears only tangential resemblance to other games in the nebulous rogue-lite genre, but is perhaps most readily comparable with 2015’s Downwell. The player assumes the role of Ikk, a drop of water, who goes on a quest to help his friend, a sad looking whale named Sally. If this sounds like the setup of a picture book for particularly simple children, it probably won’t be a surprise to hear that the plot is mostly perfunctory, and yet the character design is charming and the limited story told well enough through visual narrative. 

The simplicity of GoNNER’s gameplay hinges on two basic elements, movement and loadout.

Ikk has a variety of movement options: he can move horizontally, jump, double jump, slide down and climb up walls (à la Mega Man X), bounce off enemies, and boost himself by firing certain weapons against adjacent surfaces. The game places a huge focus on momentum and chaining together kills to earn the game’s currency and de-facto life bar (glyphs), but also as a way of maximising the player’s score, so I was a little disappointed to find that I never felt like I was moving particularly quickly outside of combat – continuing with the Megaman inspiration, a simple slide dash would have made an appreciable difference to the player’s sense of speed.

In rushing from one engagement to the next, hoping to keep up my chain, I frequently ran into situations where the game’s randomly generated stages and Ikk’s slightly stilted manoeuvrability made it impossible for me to continue my combo. Movement is for the most part fluid and responsive, but it still feels limited for the kind of game GoNNER aspires to be. Special mention must be made of GoNNER’s bizarre and unwieldy keyboard controls, which wouldn’t be a problem, except they can’t be remapped (as of the time of writing). Playing with a gamepad seems to be the intended control option, and I found the Nintendo Switch version to be greatly preferable to having movement mapped to the arrow keys and actions locked to Z, X and Y.

GoNNER’s load-out system exposes one of the game’s most severe problems.

Ikk can carry three items: a head, which grant a variety of benefits such as extra health or a triple jump, a backpack, which are active-use items with a short cool-down, and one of seven guns. Between these three categories, there are around twenty items to choose from, a very limited pool of combinations and synergies. What makes the limited item variety particularly problematic is that a few items are so much better than the others that you’ll often feel obliged to use the same combination (the shotgun, hardhead and the reload was my go-to) because they’re unequivocally better than the others, and the game does little to reward changing up your play-style. 

The reload backpack in particular stood out to me as a baffling bit of game design – ammo is a resource, dropped by enemies on death, and running out of ammo could force a player into engaging enemies via alternate means, or risk sacrificing their kill streak. And yet the reload kit is unlockable from the start, has essentially no cool-down, and renders the entire ammo drop system moot with the inexhaustible press of a button. I didn’t even realise that the game sought to encourage ammo conservation, because I became so accustomed to automatically restoring it. When I eventually unlocked other kits, I used them for maybe a run or two, but quickly found myself unwilling to abandon the familiar for something largely inferior for the sake of game balance or variety.

Hardhead, the first unlockable, alleviated my biggest problem with GoNNER’s gameplay – when Ikk takes damage, he drops everything (head, pack and gun) and must scramble to recollect his equipment. If he takes damage without a head, it’s game over, irrespective of remaining health. Interesting in theory though this may be, I frequently found myself dying in ways I found unfair. The head is too small, and often too similar in colour to other objects to be readily discernable. Although the player is given a three second invincibility window, hitting the jump key will cause Ikk to reform and be susceptible to all forms of damage, forcing the player to play ultra-conservatively and in doing so, breaking the run-and-jump flow of the game. In my first ten runs, nine of my deaths came from taking damage while headless. When I worked out that hardhead remedied this complaint by getting rid of this system entirely, I opted for it almost exclusively – other heads had useful gimmicks, but I was more than happy to forgo a triple jump in favour of not having runs cut arbitrarily short by bad head placement.

The guns, for their part, are extremely satisfying to use. The laser and the shotgun were particularly tactile, and made mowing down rooms of enemies a real joy. There’s less of a dichotomy between useful and not useful (excluding the feeble starting rifle), and although I preferred particular weapons to others, this was one of the few aspects of GoNNER that I thought promoted varied gameplay and different approaches to tackling more-or-less identical challenges. The game is beautiful: I loved the way platforms were illuminated and disappeared as Ikk approached them, the changes to the colour palette as the player built up a chain of kills, and the whole design of the game’s third and penultimate world. Aside from the issue with the discarded head highlighted above, the game does an excellent job of letting the player know whether something is friendly or hostile through colour coding. Even amidst the stark minimalism of the third world’s white backdrop, I was never in any doubt as to what I was meant to shoot. The music is similarly exquisite, ambient and haunting, and I particularly liked the soundtrack to the game’s load-out screen. Even after five hours with GoNNER, I continued to enjoy the understated electronic loop, although I’d more or less been listening to the same variation since I’d started playing. 

As is synonymous with the rogue-lite genre, GoNNER is difficult, but its difficulty is tempered by the game’s short length and predictability. Whereas the success or failure of a run in The Binding of Isaac can be determined by item rooms, enemy placement, or boss spawns, GoNNER leaves very little to chance. The same bosses spawn at the end of their respective levels, load-outs are pre-determined for the most part, and even the randomly generated stages feel very samey after a few play-throughs. Player skill and familiarity with particular items are valued above all else, and I welcomed the ‘hands off’ approach to player development. There was just enough enemy variety to keep combat interesting, but the enemy pool was not so diverse as to cloud the player’s expectation of any given stage.

 THE BOTTOM LINE:

I wish there was more to GoNNER than there is. There are some really terrific elements: a score system multiplied by a currency that can only be earned through player skill and momentum, an imaginative and dream-like setting, and an outstanding and distinct aesthetic. Yet the game’s innovative systems and tight gunplay are let down by an absolute dearth of content, poor balance, limited motivation for player experimentation, and crucially, a lack of replayability. I played four hours of the game on PC, by which time I was fairly certain I’d seen all the game had to offer. After another five or so hours on a new save file on the Nintendo Switch, I’d simply run out of things to do.

That being said however, GoNNER is, while it lasts, an addictive and enjoyable experience, and one that probably benefits from the Switch’s portability. This is the first commercial release from Art in Heart, a one-person studio, and ultimately there are far worse ways to spend ten dollars. GoNNER is available on Steam and the Nintendo eShop.  The game’s official website can be found here.