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musclesandhammering · 3 years ago

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Loki (2021) Positivity from an Anti

Ok so all of my mutuals know I’m extremely anti-Loki (2021), anti-sylki, and anti-sylvie. But at a certain point, even we antis get tired of all the negativity. So! Here’s some Loki series commentary in the opposite direction! This is a list of all the things about the show that I loved :)

Also adding a disclaimer that all of this is just my opinion and some of my fellow antis (or even people who liked the show) might disagree, and that’s fine! I’ve been planning this post for awhile. I always say in my other posts that I don’t entirely hate the show and I wanted to be a little more specific about what I think are its good aspects. Feel free to leave your thoughts!

• Mobius is a gem (Owen Wilson owns my whole heart) and his relationship with Loki is so so great. He’s not one-dimensional at all, he has conflicted loyalty and is morally complex, and he has the tragic backstory- which makes him a perfect choice for eventually becoming Loki’s first genuine friend.

• The casting was really really great. Lots of women and people of color. Most of the female actresses (as well as the males) are over 30, which isn’t very common and is fantastic!

• Superb acting all around. I can’t think of a single scene where the actors under or oversold it.

• Beautiful set design, incredible cgi, and gorgeous cinematography overall. It looked more like a movie than a tv show, which is really good.

• Kang being the big bad was a huge plus for me. Johnathan Majors was perfect in the role, his vibes were immaculate, and I was honestly pretty worried that the man behind the curtain would end up being another Loki variant, which imo would’ve been boring and predictable and counter-productive, so it was a big relief when that didn’t happen.

• I like that it sets up a bunch of future marvel movies, rather than being contained to its own little world. It gives it more importance and (hopefully) will encourage writers to not just toss Loki’s character aside in future projects.

• All the Loki variants were delightful. All of them except Sylvie. Kid Loki has my heart. Boastful Loki is a fashion icon. Alligator Loki is a savage. President Loki is the superior variant. Classic Loki became my fav character in less than half an episode.

• It showed some more variety in Loki’s magic. A lot of his powers we’ve seen before, but it feels like they were portrayed a bit more blatantly in the show. The energy blasts, the telekinesis, the teleportation… Outstanding.

• It also implied that Loki has the potential to be waaaay more powerful than he knows he is right now, which? Yes.

• Some of the quotes- and the themes behind them- are just profound as hell. Such as:

“I think we’re stronger than we realise.”

“It’s never too late to change.”

“You can be whoever you wanna be, even someone good.”

“We’re Lokis. We survive. It’s what we do.”

“Loki, God of Outcasts.”

“The universe wants to break free, that’s why it manifests chaos.”

• Technically Loki was Marvel’s first canon lgbt (bi) character, which is a win. His genderfluidity is also technically canon, even if it wasn’t really acknowledged on-screen.

• There were a lot of throwback references to Thor 1, Avengers, and Thor The Dark World. Which I loved.

• Sylvie’s so pretty. Her hair and makeup and costume were all perfect.

• Big fan of Loki finally getting Laevateinn.

• Sufficiently slutty imagery, courtesy of a female director (Loki in a collar, kneeling to Sif, President Loki looking down into the bunker, the hair flips)

• The music was Excellent Wonderful and Superb.

• I love that Loki being a good singer is now canon.

• I love that Asgardians having their own language is now canon (even if it’s basically just Icelandic).

• I also love that they disproved all of those “Loki was a shy nerdy wallflower pre-canon” theories in Episode 3. The drinking/eating/singing scene was fun, if a bit wacky.

• There’s a million different reasons why Loki does what he does, especially in regards to the New York attack (I’m literally writing a huge meta on them), but somehow I never considered that Loki being desperate for control was one of them. It makes a lot of sense, and I always love getting new insights into his motivations.

• I love that Loki finally outright acknowledged that he doesn’t enjoy hurting people. We Been Knew™️ but it’s still nice to hear it out loud from his own mouth.

• The TVA outfit wasn’t as hideous as some people make it out to be. It could’ve been A Look, even. You know, if he’d just accessorised a little better. And kept the jacket on. And not gotten sweaty. And not gotten dirty. And maybe had at least one other costume change… But it had potential, though!!

• Even though I despise the Obvious One, I did actually like some of the other romance crumbs they tossed us (sifki, Loki x the flight attendant).

• The whole DB Cooper thing was iconic idc idc.

• Loki’s hyper sort of overly excited puppy attitude in episode 2 was actually pretty refreshing and funny (for awhile). And now I can headcanon him as adhd, yeehaw.

• “We’re all villains here.” That quote was iconic, my favourite one in the show. And the entire theme that it summarised was really great as well. When you think about it, every single main character in this series has been the villain at one point or another. I mean, I know all marvel characters do bad things etc, but none of the Heroes are ever narratively categorised as Bad. This show did just that with all of them, though. . Loki was framed as the psychopath that attacked New York. Sylvie was framed as the murderous fugitive. The TVA/Ravonna/Mobius were framed as the murderous fascists. Kang was framed as the crazy totalitarian. It’s made clear that all the Loki variants were the villains of their stories.

However, every single main character in the series is also framed as the Hero at a certain point. Loki is framed as the main protagonist who throws a wrench in the TVA’s dastardly plans. Sylvie is framed as the persevering freedom fighter who wants to take down the fascists. The TVA/Mobius/Ravonna are framed as the ones who maintain order for the greater good. Kang is framed as the weird but ultimately benevolent wise man who’s just trying to prevent something worse from happening. The Loki variants are framed as generous allies who befriend the main character and help him on his journey.

Everyone in this equation is openly acknowledged by the narrative to be morally corrupt, but not entirely morally bankrupt. There are no Straightforward Hero Figures (like the Avengers) in this entire scenario at all, and that makes for a super interesting dynamic that marvel has never done before. So yes: “We’re all villains here.” But also: “No one bad is ever truly bad, and no one good is ever truly good.” I loved that.

• Even if it wasn’t really enough imo, I still treasure the crumbs we got of Loki being competent and capable (him putting the collar on B-15, him figuring out Sylvie’s hiding place, him teaching himself to enchant on the fly while fighting a giant cloud beast of eldritch proportions).

• I love that B-15 was the one who stepped in and saved the day in Episode 4, when we all thought it was gonna be Mobius. What a queen.

• Marvel usually has a bit of a problem with creating compelling and memorable side characters. But aside from Sylvie, I genuinely got attached to every single character in this show. Like Casey, C-20? I was seriously emotionally invested in them and they were only in like 2 episodes. Wtf.

• Introducing the TVA storyline in the Loki series specifically was a really good move. I’m not saying they executed it well, just that it had a ton of potential. A lot of people have wondered why marvel even thought to put those two (the TVA and Loki) together, when they had literally nothing to do with each other, nothing in common, and essentially no connection at all. But when you think about it, it’s a really interesting twist on both of those stories. Forcing the embodiment of destructive chaos and the pillar of rigid order to interact could make for some seriously entertaining and compelling television. And as far as meshing these two completely unrelated entities together goes, I thought they did it pretty well- at least just the bare bones of the story (loki being arrested by the TVA and being one of their most common variants).

So that’s it! If you guys (fellow antis) wanna add stuff you liked, feel free. If anyone wants to discuss (or debate) my list, feel free to do that too!

#loki series 2021 #loki laufeyson #anti sylvie #loki meta #loki odinson #loki #loki series

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charlieconwayy · 4 years ago

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D3: The Mighty Ducks (1996) is the best Ducks movie and a flawless coming of age movie

It’s no secret that The Mighty Ducks are a beloved trilogy. The three films spawned a professional NHL team named in their honor, 2021 sequel series, as well as many knockoff films released in the 1990s. But with any movie series, fans tend to rank the films and have passionate opinions on which is the best. For most Ducks fans, the answer is simple: D2. It has the Bash Brothers, Team USA dominating, the iconic “Ducks Fly Together” scene and two Queen songs. What’s not to love? But upon a rewatch of the trilogy, I came to realize that it’s not D2, or even the original, that is the best in the series.

It’s the criminally underrated 1996 D3 that for me, is the most mature and has the most heart. Perhaps it’s that the Ducks are now old enough to carry their own weight on screen. Perhaps it’s that the film takes a look at trauma, specifically trauma in teenagers, and how that manifests itself. Perhaps it’s that the film is maybe ahead of its time, in the way it discusses classism, racism and sexism. There is so much about this overly hated film that makes it the best Ducks movie and a perfect coming of age film.

The movie starts presumably a few years following the Ducks’ win against Iceland. They all look noticeably older - definitely older than the middle schoolers we left behind in 1994 - and all of the male Ducks’ voices have dropped a few octaves. Gordon Bombay, played by Emilio Estevez, is presenting the team (except for unfortunately, Jesse Hall, a leader among the Ducks who would’ve made for a strong presence in this mature film, as well as Portman, but we’ll get to him later) with scholarships to his alma mater, Eden Hall, a preparatory high school in Minnesota. Charlie Conway, played by a young, pre-Dawson’s Creek Joshua Jackson, is the Ducks’ captain and unspoken leader. There’s been much debate over the years over whether or not Charlie is the true captain of the Ducks. Adam Banks, played by Vincent Larusso, is far and away better than practically every Duck combined. Fulton Reed, played by Elden Henson, has shown more maturity and leadership at this point. It’s probably true that the Ducks as a team think that Charlie is Captain because of Bombay’s favoritism towards him (and his mother), but I think that this film makes it abundantly clear why Charlie is the captain.

D3 is Charlie’s story. We see that in the opening scene, when Bombay tells Charlie he will not be following the team to Eden Hall, accepting a job instead in California. We learned in the original Mighty Ducks film, that Charlie and his mother left a bad situation in Charlie’s father when Charlie was very young. We also hear about Charlie’s mother, Casey’s marriage to a new man in the D2, who we can assume from what Jan says, that Charlie doesn’t like. We see in that first film, Charlie’s reaction to Bombay announcing that he is leaving the Ducks after the two of them have formed a bond. It is very clear that Charlie deals with abandonment issues, stemming from trauma in his early childhood. Charlie freaks out when a D3 Bombay announces the same thing, and storms off.

Change is the biggest theme in D3. We see how change affects each of the Ducks, even those who don’t get many lines. Some, like Russ Tyler, played by SNL’s Kenan Thompson, think it’s a good thing. All of the Ducks don’t come from good neighborhoods and we assume that most of them don’t have the best home lives, especially when Charlie tells their new coach, Orion, played by Jeffrey Nordling, that the Ducks are the only good thing that any of them have had. Going to a preparatory school should be a good thing for them. But for most of them, it’s not. The new Ducks (who by the way, three of which are people of color, and one of which, is a woman) are immediately told that “their kind” is not welcome at Eden Hall. The Varsity team claim that they feel this way because the captain’s younger brother was not admitted onto the JV team because of the Ducks’ scholarships, but it’s very clear what they really mean. Russ commented that he’s the only black person on the whole campus earlier, and he, Luis Mendoza (The Sandlot’s Mike Vitar) and Ken Wu (Justin Wong) are the only people of color we see in the film. Change takes a toll on each member of the team. We see it the most in Charlie, but we also hear from Fulton on how the separation from his best friend, Dean Portman (Aaron Lohr), who decided not to enroll at Eden Hall, is taking a toll on him. Connie (Margerite Moreau) and Guy (Garrette Henson) have presumably broken up, as the two small scenes we get of them, they are arguing. It’s a transition period, one that the first year of high school often is. But it’s also a look on how a rich, white privileged world is vastly different than the one that the Ducks are used to.

Coach Orion seems like a hardass, especially when he tells Charlie at their first practice that he will no longer be “Captain Duck” (as coined by D2’s Gunnar Stahl, played by Scott Whyte, who now plays the level-headed Varsity goalie Scooter). This, to the Ducks, is a line in the sand. Ever since Bombay turned District 5 into the Ducks four years previous, Charlie has been their captain. They’re in a whole new environment, where the man who gave them so much happiness and so many friendships isn’t, and their “little Duck tricks” won’t work anymore. Orion thinks Charlie is a showoff, and perhaps he is. This Charlie is vastly different than the sweet, shy Charlie we see in D1 and D2. But this Charlie is older, has just been abandoned by a man he considered a father, and is being harassed on a daily basis for being, as Varsity Captain Reilly puts it, “white trash.” I find it hard to believe sometimes that fans can look at Charlie from the outside, and not see who he is on the inside. All of Charlie’s closest relationships that we see portrayed in this movie, are with women. His mother (who he, as a teenage boy, says “I love you” to in the final scene of the movie), his teammates, Connie and Julie, who he gets a lot more screentime with, and with new love interest, Linda (Margot Finley).

I think now is a great time to talk about the shockingly impressive way all of the female characters are portrayed in this series, particularly this movie, especially for a 90s sports film. Connie has always been a leader on and off the ice. She’s in a relationship with Guy, but it’s not her only character trait. Dubbed “the Velvet Hammer” by Averman (Matt Doherty), she stands up for herself, and for her shy teammates (she literally shoves Peter Mark - a character cut out of D2 and D3 for good reason - in D1 when he insults Charlie) and stands up to the entire Varsity team despite them telling her that they hope they can “fight” with her later. Julie “The Cat” Gaffney (Columbe Jacobsen) is the second best player on the Ducks, despite the little ice time (thanks, Bombay) we see her have. She is the first person to tell of the Varsity, telling Captain Reilly that his little brother “just wasn’t good enough.” She’s a huge facilitator in the fire ant prank and despite the very weird and out of character game she had against the Blake Bears, shows that she deserves the number one goalie slot that Reilly gives her - despite what Goldberg, and the obvious underlying sexism there, have to say. I’ve also always been very impressed with Charlie’s mother, Casey (Heidi Kling). Although she has a romance with Bombay in D1, she makes it clear from the get go that her first priority is Charlie. We know that she took the two of them away from an abusive situation, and she’s a goddamn hero for that. Her scenes in D3 are limited, but they always show her chastising Charlie’s antics and encouraging him to stay in school. It goes unsaid, but it’s clear that she knows that he’s not going to get an education this good in the problematic public school system. But according to Linda, Charlie’s love interest, the private school system is no better. The first time we see Linda, she is protesting the “outdated” Warriors team name. This was in a 1996 kids movie, no less. She holds her own against Charlie, calling him out when he’s wrong. No one aside from Charlie, and maybe Fulton, get much screentime or lines aside from Bombay and Orion, but her presence and the point of her character is clear - not every rich person agrees with the horrible things that wealthy people do.

Back to the plot.

When the Ducks receive their positions, they learn that Banks, as a freshman, has made Varsity. From an outside perspective, they seems obvious. Banks is the best player we see in any of the films, definitely miles better than the losers on Varsity, so it seems obvious that he would be promoted. But Banks is unhappy with this. Adam Banks is a fan favorite character, definitely due to the sweet, understated performance by Larusso, but we don’t see much of him. From what we do see of him though, he underwent a huge character arc from D1 to now. In D1, Banks goes against his father’s protests and joins the Ducks, claiming that he “just wants to play hockey.” Here in D3, we see that Banks is utterly miserable despite playing with some of the best players in the state, purely because he’s not with his friends. At the end of the film, he makes the (questionable) decision to rejoin the Ducks and go against the Varsity. But Varsity seems to feel that Banks fits in with them, for obvious reasons. He’s the only Duck who comes from an affluent background, and he’s definitely the most clean cut. Captain Reilly is visibly angry in the final showdown with the Ducks that they no longer have Banks on their side, as if he’s betrayed “his kind.”

The turning point of the film comes when after Charlie has quit the freshman team (no longer the Ducks), Hans, a father figure to the Ducks and Bombay, suddenly passes away. It’s an insanely dark moment for a Disney film, especially when Bombay returns to the funeral and reminds the Ducks that it was “Hans who taught them to fly” and Charlie storms off, crying. I think Joshua Jackson, in the Ducks films, as well as in Dawson’s Creek, is phenomenally good at portraying teenagers who wouldn’t normally be seen as leading men. Who let their emotions overtake them, who have anger issues, who deal with familial problems. Characters like that in leading roles were almost unheard of in the 90s, and in the upcoming scenes, it reminds us why this side of Charlie that we’ve seen throughout the movie is not the only side of Charlie.

Bombay takes Charlie to the rink to see Orion skating with his disabled daughter, who was injured in a car accident. He reveals to Charlie that Orion quit the NHL to take care of her, and this immediately changes Charlie’s opinion of him, but he’s still unconvinced about rejoining the team. The next scene is without question, the greatest and most important scene of the trilogy. The last two films spent way too much time telling us how great of a person Bombay was, how he was the Minnesota Miracle Man,despite us seeing so little of that onscreen. We see him making mistake after mistake, hurting the team, being an unjustified dick to those around him. But this scene more than makes up for all of that. I’ve put the quote from this scene below.

Bombay: I was like you, Charlie. When I played hockey, I was a total hot shot. I tried to take control of every game. I wound up quitting. So I tried the law. I ruled the courtroom, but inside, I’m a mess. Start drinking. Man, I was going down. But then this great thing happened, maybe the best thing ever - I got arrested and sentenced to community service. And there you were - Charlie and the Ducks. And as hard as I fought it, there you were. You gave me a life, Charlie, and I want to say thank you. I told Orion about all of this when I talked to him about taking over. I told him that you were the heart of the team and that you would learn something from each other. I told him that you were the real Minnesota Miracle Man.

Charlie: You did?

Bombay: I did. So be that man, Charlie. Be that man.

It’s a callback to D2, when Jan tells Bombay “Be that man, Gordon. Be that man.” This scene is flawless. Every good thing that has happened to the Ducks, came because of Charlie’s heart. It came because of that game when Charlie refused to cheat, and made Bombay see his wrongs. It came because of when Bombay first tried to quit the team, and seeing how hurt Charlie was, agreed to stay. It was Charlie who stepped out of the game against Iceland so that Banks could play. It was Charlie who found them Russ. Giving the credit to a young, emotionally unstable teenager, rather than their Emilio Estevez, hotshot Bombay, is the best thing this series ever did.

This movie, in my opinion, is nearly flawless. Every moment has been planned to make the same point - change sucks. Especially when you’re a teenager. Even more so when you’re a teenager with trauma.

#the mighty ducks #gordon bombay #charlie conway #meta #i'm so proud of this pls read gay people!!!

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letterboxd · 4 years ago

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In Focus: Interstellar.

Inspired by Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar placing high across three notable Letterboxd metrics, Dominic Corry reflects on how the film successfully hung its messaging around the concept of love—and what pandemic responses worldwide could learn from its wholehearted embrace of empathetic science.

“Love isn’t something we invented. It’s observable, it’s powerful. It has to mean something.” —Dr. Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway)

This story contains spoilers for ‘Interstellar’ (2014).

Although it is insultingly reductionist to both filmmakers, there are many reasons Christopher Nolan is often described as a modern-day Stanley Kubrick. The one most people usually settle on is the notion that both men supposedly make exacting, ambitious films that lack emotion.

It is an incorrect assessment of either director, but it’s beyond amazing that anyone could still accuse Nolan of such a thing after he delivered what is unquestionably his masterwork, the emotional rollercoaster that is 2014’s Interstellar.

In the epic sci-fi adventure drama, Nolan managed to pull off something that many filmmakers have attempted and few have achieved. He told a story of boundless sci-fi scope, and had it be all about love in the end. It sounds cheesy to even write it down, but Nolan did it.

That Interstellar is such an overtly cutting-edge genre film that chooses to center itself so brazenly and unapologetically around love, is frankly awesome.

Love informs Interstellar both metaphorically and literally: the expansive scope of the film effectively represents love’s infinite potential, and love itself ends up being the tangible thread that allows far-flung astronaut Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) to communicate with his Earth-bound daughter Murph (played as an adult by Jessica Chastain) from the tesseract (a three-dimensional rendering of a five-dimensional space) after Cooper enters the black hole towards the end of the film.

Matthew McConaughey as Joseph ‘Coop’ Cooper, Mackenzie Foy as Murph, and Timothée Chalamet as Tom.

In transmitting (via morse code) what the robot TARS has observed from inside the black hole, Cooper provides Murph with the data to solve the gravity problem required to uplift Earth’s population from its depleted home planet. Humanity is saved. Love wins again. Hard sci-fi goes soft. Christopher Nolan’s genius is confirmed, and any notions of emotionlessness are emphatically washed away.

This earnest centering of love in Interstellar is key to the film’s universal appeal, and undoubtedly plays a large role in why it features so prominently in three significant Letterboxd lists determined by pronoun: Interstellar is the only film that appears in all three top tens of “most fans on Letterboxd” when considering members who use the pronoun he/him, she/her and xe/ze. (“Most fans” refers to Letterboxd members who have selected the film as one of the four favorites on their profile.)

To get a bit reductionist myself, sci-fi adventure—in cinema, at least—has traditionally been a masculine-leaning genre, but Interstellar’s placement across these three lists points to it having superseded that traditional leaning, hopefully for the better.

Yet the film reliably still provokes reactions like this delightful tweet:

few movies make me as mad as Interstellar. who the fuck makes 3/4 of an excellent hard sci-fi movie backed up by actual science and then abruptly turns it into soft sci-fi about how the power of love and time traveling bookshelves can save us in the final 1/4? damn you, Nolan

— the thicc husband & father (@lukeisamazing)

February 13, 2021

Although this tweet is somewhat indicative of how many men (and women, for that matter) respond to the film, I think it’s pretty clear the writer actually loves Interstellar wholeheartedly, final quarter and all, but perhaps feels inhibited from expressing that love by the expectations of a gendered society that is becoming increasingly outdated. The “damn you, Nolan” is possibly a concession of sorts—he��s damning how Nolan really made him feel the love at the end. It’s okay, @lukeisamazing, you don’t have to say it out loud.

Conversely, it can be put like this:

“The emotion of Interstellar is three-fold: Nolan’s script, co-written with his brother as with all his best stuff, masters not only notions of black holes, wormholes, quantum data and telemetry, but it also makes a case for love as the one thing—feeling, fact, movement, message—that can mean more and do more than anyone in our current time, on our existing planet, can comprehend.”

The writer of this stirring summation, our own Ella Kemp, is paraphrasing a critical section of the film, when Nolan goes full literal on the concept of love and has Cooper and Dr Amelia Brand (Anne Hathaway) debate its very nature, quoted in part at the top of this story. It comes when the pair are trying to decide which potentially humanity-saving planet to use their dwindling fuel reserves to travel to. Brand is advocating for the planet where a man she loves might be waiting for her, instead of the planet that has ostensibly better circumstances for life.

Brand: “Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that even if we can’t understand it.”

“Love has meaning, yes,” responds Cooper, heretofore the film’s most outwardly love-centric character, exhibiting a stoic longing for his dead wife, while also abandoning his ten-year-old daughter on Earth for a space adventure (albeit one designed to save humanity) than has now inadvertently taken decades. “Social utility. Social bonding. Child rearing.” Ouch.

McConaughey with Anne Hathaway as Dr. Amelia Brand.

Brand: “You love people who have died. Where’s the social utility in that? Maybe it means something more. Something we don’t yet understand. Some evidence, some artefact of a higher dimension that we can’t consciously perceive. I’m drawn across the universe to someone I haven’t seen in a decade who I know is probably dead. Love is the one thing we’re capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space. Maybe we should trust that even if we can’t understand it yet.” Amen.

Cooper remains unconvinced by Brand’s rationale, but this dispassionate display presages him going on to realize the true (literal) power of love (and his poor, science-only decision-making—thanks Matt Damon) when it provides him the aforementioned channel of communication with Murph in the tesseract. Nolan has a female character make the most eloquent vocal argument for love, but it’s the male character who has to learn it through experience.

So while Interstellar does initially conform to some prevailing cultural ideas about love and how it supposedly relates to gender, it ultimately advocates for a greater appreciation of the concept that moves beyond such binary notions. That is reflected in how important the film is to Letterboxd members who self-identify as he/him, she/her and xe/ze. We all love this movie. Emphasis on love.

Brand’s speech—not to mention the film as a whole—also can’t help but inform the current global situation. Interstellar argues for a greater devotion to both science and love, in harmony; such devotion might have mitigated the devastating effects of the coronavirus pandemic where both concepts were drastically undervalued by many of those in charge of the response.

Jessica Chastain and Casey Affleck as the grown-up Cooper siblings.

Despite the reactions cited above, responses to Interstellar aren’t always split down gender lines. We’re all allowed to feel whatever we like about it, and substantial variety comes across in the many, many reviews for the film.

Zaidius says Interstellar is so good that, “after watching [it], you will want to downgrade all of the ratings you have ever given on Letterboxd.”

On the other hand, Singlewhitefemalien takes issue with Dr. Brand’s aforementioned love-based decision-making in her two-star review: “She wants to fuckin’ go to Planet Whatever to chase after a dude she banged ten years ago because women are guided by their emotions and love is all you need.” A perhaps fair assessment of the role Nolan chose his sole female astronaut to play in the film?

Sam offers food for thought when he writes “First, you love Interstellar; then you understand Interstellar.”

Letterboxd stalwart Lucy boils it down effectively in one of her multiple five-star reviews of the film: “I needed a really good cry.” It’s hard to say whether Vince is agreeing or disagreeing with Lucy in his review: “Fuck you Matthew McConaughey for making me cry.” The catharsis this movie provides for dudes becomes clearer the deeper you venture into our Interstellar reviews (and I ventured deep): “How dare this fucking movie make me cry… twice,” writes John. Let it out, John.

Then there’s Rudi’s take: “I sobbed like an animal while watching this but I’m not exactly sure what animal it was like. Like a pig? Like a whale? I don’t know but I do know that I cried a whole fucking lot.”

Emotionless? With all this crying?

Christopher Nolan inspires more debate than any other filmmaker of the modern age (when we’re not getting unnecessarily riled up about something Marty has said, that is) and while Nolan has the passionate devotion of millions of viewers, I’d argue he still doesn’t quite get his due. Especially when it comes to Interstellar.

By so successfully using love as both a metaphorical vessel and a palpable plot point in a sci-fi adventure film, he built on notable antecedents like James Cameron’s The Abyss and Robert Zemeckis’ Contact, two (great) films with similar aspirations that didn’t stick the landing as well as Interstellar does. In Contact, McConaughey engages in a similar debate about love to the one quoted above, but notably takes the opposing side.

Steven Spielberg (who at one point was going to direct an earlier iteration of Interstellar) did a pretty good job of showing love as the most powerful force in the universe with E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, but there hasn’t been a huge amount of room for such notions in the genre since then.

Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Interstellar’s most obvious forebear, is often accused of being the director’s most brazenly emotionless film. And while that’s perhaps a bit more understandable than some of the brickbats hurled Nolan’s way, there’s more emotion in the character of Hal 9000 than in many major directors’ entire oeuvre. It’s also, in part due to Hal’s place in the examination of queer consciousness in the sci-fi realm, the film currently in the number one spot on the xe/ze list.

Two films that notably exist in Interstellar’s wake are Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, which expands upon Interstellar’s creative use of time-bending (and like Contact, features a female protagonist) and James Gray’s Ad Astra, which tackles the perils of traditional masculinity with more directness.

Interstellar doesn’t solve the sci-fi genre’s cumbersome relationship with masculinity and gender, but it makes significant strides in breaking down the existing paradigms, if only from all the GIFs of McConaughey crying it has spawned. Its appeal across the gender spectrum is an interesting and encouraging sign of the universality of its themes. And the power of love.

Fans out of touch with their feelings may complain about the role love plays in the film, but that says more about them than it does the film. Love wins. Also: TARS. How could anyone not love TARS?

TARS and Christopher Nolan.

Related content

Men/Boys Crying: a master list

“I Ugly-Cried Like Matthew McConaughey in Interstellar”: Amanda’s list

“I Liked Interstellar”: Sar’s list of what to watch afterwards

Follow Dominic on Letterboxd

#interstellar #christopher nolan #2001 a space odyssey #stanley kubrick #letterboxd #science fiction #sci fi #sci fi film #sci fi movies #queer consciousness #the meaning of life #love

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chispas-and-broken-bindings · 4 years ago

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Thoughts on the female gaze?

Thank you for this ask @palominojacoby because I have so many thoughts! Too many to contain in one answer.

So, I’ll mull over what’s top-of-mind, related to the female gaze. In a nutshell:

- I’m digesting Joey Soloway’s wonderful Tiff Talk on the female gaze. It’s funny and poignant and a great primer on the subject. You can find it on Youtube, or there is a written transcript you can find here.

- I’m thinking about what terrifies men about the feminine gaze (my preferred term for it): one, that they won’t be the objects of it and; two, that the feminine gaze is out of their reach. It is a space or a viewpoint that they don’t have access to but feel entitled to. They want to capitalize on it, and exploit it, just like they are allowed to exploit everything else. This needs to be watched and it needs to be called out.

- The older I get, the less interested I am in consuming or experiencing art or media created by heterosexual white men. I’ve been in their head space long enough. I’ve been consuming their media and their opinions and their gaze for thirty-four years, and I think, by now, I know what they have to say, and I’m no longer interested in it. It does not inspire me.

I want to be submerged in the feminine gaze.

For the long version, read below the cut. Buckle up, it’s going to be long:

While eating lunch today, I watched Joey Soloway’s Tiff Talk on the female gaze. Early in their address, after they defined the male gaze, and after they did a funny riff about all the things that the female gaze isn’t (Magic Mike if it were written, directed and produced by a woman/placing women into male roles in your typical Dude Movies), they remind the audience that men have had control of the camera more or less for 100 years (and control of the everything else forever).

Then they say this:

So for there to be actual gender parity in the gaze – the kind that would actually make it reasonable for a reporter on the red carpet to say to me – things are getting better for women, right?

We would need the next 100 years of almost every single movie to be produced, written and directed by women. Like, let’s check in again in 2116, people.

And then after that – we could start on the 50/50 thing.

It was that very math – which is perfectly reasonable math – that made me realize that not only do women have to be inspired and funded to start making a fuck of a lot of things in record numbers, but for things to even out, well that’s why I asked that audience of cis men to please: STOP MAKING THINGS.

It did not go over well.

They then explain why this matters; why it matters that Cis men have controlled art (and everything else) and why it is so important to wrest that control away.

ART IS PROPAGANDA FOR THE SELF.

Yep, TV and film-making and fuck, all culture making, is people going, “I’m okay! And people who are similar to me are okay! Watch this ½ hour then be more on my side! In case of Armageddon! Zika! Trump! Hitler!”

We all need friends and so we make tribes with our art.

Simply put, Protagonism is Propaganda. Protagonism is Propaganda that protects and perpetuates privilege.

So if only cis men are creating art (or the only ones whose art is amplified), their point of view, their selves, their gazes are the only ones that are going to be privileged in spaces far beyond the art world. Protagonism as propaganda affects politics, personal relationships, economics, etc. etc. etc.

Joey Soloway’s definition of the female gaze:

The female gaze is a conscious effort to create empathy as a political tool. It is a wresting away! Perhaps a wrestling away of the point of view. [A wresting away] of the power, of the privilege propaganda for purposes ---of changing the way the world feels for women when they move their BODIES through the world, feeling themselves as the subject.

It’s a great speech. I highly recommend it.

During the Q&A after, the third question is from this Cis old white guy, who asks this fucking nonsense:

My body, right now, is feeling shaken and inspired by everything that you said. So, I just want to ask you, I might be misunderstanding, but I think you your definition of a cis male, is those of us who were born with a penis and identify as male. [Joey Soloway affirms this definition] I’m wondering how you would feel about differentiating those of us who get it and those of us who are perpetuating...

And I just...lost it. (Note: Joey was extremely gracious in their response. I will not be.) Like, holy shit dude. You just sat through this extremely thoughtful, extremely funny talk about the female gaze and how the male gaze and perspective has been privileged for a millennia, and maybe, just maybe, it’s about FUCKING TIME to center other perspectives and YOU IMMEDIATELY TURN THE CONVERSATION BACK ON YOURSELF. YOU INSECURE, FRAGILE LITTLE MAN. SHUT THE FUCK UP FOR 2 FUCKING SECONDS.

Holy fuck....

Again, you’d think after so long in power, men would be just a tad more secure, but they just fucking aren’t. They’re insecure little bastards (don’t come into my comments and “not all men” me on this).

I think they are afraid of two things.

1) That if feminine creators are actually given the space and the funding and the amplification to create feminine gaze works, cis men aren’t going to be the objects or even the subjects of that art.

I think this terrifies them. Not only are they not going to be behind the lens, but they might not be in the picture either. This is something I’m still mulling over, and don’t have much more to say about it at this time.

2) They really don’t like being told that a space isn’t theirs. They don’t want the feminine gaze to be out of their reach. They see feminine gaze works gaining notice and prestige and critical acclaim, and they want in.

This had me thinking about something I’ve noticed in film. Every time a feminine (or queer) gaze film gains critical acclaim, there is almost IMMEDIATELY a rush by white cis male filmmakers to capitalize on that success.

And it’s exhausting. In Joey’s speech, they say this:

Sometimes the first gasp of this re-centering of ourselves is a kind of paralysis when it occurs to us how we have been groomed to stay quiet simply by having TAKEN IN all of this work, all of our lives of consuming such an overwhelming amount of cis male artists splashing in their privilege, by telling their stories which work like propaganda that suggest how we should act, for access to their attention.

And how that stops us from gathering our own attention on ourselves. Like, I wish I could put into film the feeling of being eleven years old, to look around the classroom. Walls lined with presidents, looking around the ceiling of the whole damn room -- ALL of them men? And to think, I’m going to be the first woman president, and then on that very same day, same body, walking home listening to Rod Stewart, because he was my favorite, singing along to Tonight’s the night. Thinking I’m going to be president and then singing “Don’t say a word my virgin child / Just let your inhibitions run wild / The secret is about to unfold / Upstairs because the night’s too oldTonight’s the night? Gonna be alright / Cuz I love ya babe / Ain’t nobody gonna stop us now.”

Singing along to a pedophile grooming an underage girl to have sex with him. When I sang along, was I Rod or the virgin child? It didn’t matter: my presidential power dreams got lost throughout all of my adolescence, or had to do extreme high jumps throughout my life, dreams of power getting lost in being sister golden hair sublime, sugar magnolia, being the lady in red, your body is a wonderland, you look wonderful tonight, you do, you look so wonderful night.

I can’t even listen to the radio anymore, I mean, it’s a problem. This Female Gaze is a political platform, it means we start to call out how awful it is to be offered access in exchange for succeeding at being seen.

We are so tangled up in the male gaze, that one or two or three or four or a dozen, or fucking one hundred feminine gaze stories ISN’T GOING TO BE ENOUGH.

So when I see a feminine gaze film like Portrait of a Lady on Fire gain critical acclaim, I applaud and I’m excited and I want more.

But then...

Inevitably...

A shithead like Casey Affleck produces and stars in The World to Come, a tale about two women who fall in love on the frontier, adapted from a short story written by Jim Shepherd (if you couldn’t guess by the name, spoiler: he’s an old white guy).

and...I’M SUSPICIOUS.

I haven’t seen the film. And I’m not saying men can’t make films that center women, or women loving women. They can, and they obviously have all the resources to (so don’t come at me about cancel culture or gatekeeping), but...

I’M SUSPICIOUS

and furthermore....

I’m just not that interested. I’m not interested in what Casey Affleck or Jim Shepherd have to say about the experience of being a woman who has lost a child, or is struggling with her marriage, or with material comforts, or is falling in love with another woman.

I’m interested in what women have to say about those experiences. I’m a woman who has experienced those things. I don’t need, nor do I trust a dude to tell me what that feels like.

Which brings me to my final thought.

I want to be submerged in the feminine gaze.

I want to consume media created by feminine artists for feminine viewers. It’s what inspires me. It’s what makes me curious. It’s what I want more of.

#my asks #female gaze #feminine gaze #film theory #joey soloway #protagonism as propaganda #art is propaganda for the self #I didn't even touch intersectionality #or my thoughts on own voices literature #these are such BIG topics #and are worth discussing in so much detail #but again #these are some thoughts I have right now #laura mulvey

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oldtvandcomics · 4 years ago

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I watched The Green Hornet (2011). Now I really should do a review, right?

Ooooooh, damn it. Ok.

The most noticeable thing about this movie for me has been just HOW MUCH everyone in it is focussed on the way they look, and that not in a good way. The whole thing is just a bunch of people parading around their inflated air-filled personas and hoping that if they only perform hard enough, the others will believe it is them. The problem is that this leaves very little space for genuine interaction, and in the end, the movie itself runs into the same trap as they do: It wants to pretend SO MUCH to be one of the Big Bad Superhero movies, but in the end, it is a nobody.

I must add this disclaimer somewhere: I LOVE the Green Hornet. He is my third-favorite superhero. I desperately wanted to like this movie, I really did.

Objectively measurable things first: The dialogue is bad. Like, AMAZINGLY, PHENOMENALLY BAD. Sometimes you feel as if something that has been just said should be a funny moment. It never is. It just feels awkward. As to the characters, they are unlikable the way heroes only in the 2010's can be: It is a decade where nobody seems to believe any more that people can be genuinely good and heroic, leading to "realistic" re-imaginations that inevitably kill the charm of the original. In the case of Britt and Kato, this has degraded them to simple brutal serial killers who do it because they enjoy their own violence. Britt is the ultimate frat boy who takes shamelessly advantage of Kato's skills while believing to be superior to him, calls him slurs and straight out sexually harasses his female coworker. And... Look, in the Real World, this is probably what Britt Reid would be like. BUT THIS ISN'T THE REAL WORLD!! Britt is supposed to be a hero, that is the sole reason why he exists: Because the people in the 1930's desperately needed someone who is on their side, and they dreamed up superheroes to protect them from real world problems.

[Which I feel is a problem with many modern-day superhero adaptations, btw. They are separated from their original historic context and put 1:1 in the current year. This means that they inevitably stop making sense. Instead of looking why that is, what those nonsensical elements meant in their original context, and adapt THAT, people look at them and go "this is stupid, I am going to make the story about how stupid this is, look, I deconstructed this thing, am I not clever!". And along the process of pointing out how stupid it is, the rest of what made the story good to begin with also vanishes. The end result is that I have the impression that they are calling me a bad person for liking the original in the first place.]

Then there is the aforementioned sincerity problem: There were only one or two scenes where the characters were not lost behind their own smokescreens and I could actually connect to their emotions. And finally, the plot: There wasn't much of one. Britt and Kato only did their gig for fun, and the gang they pissed off as well as the corrupt politician who was supposed to be the final conflict just didn't feel important enough to warrant this level of bloodbath and collateral damages.

And now the treatment of minorities. Oh boy.

Kato naturally is treated like crap, both by Britt and the general story that seems to condemn this, but only towards the viewers. Britt is never forced to recognize all the ways he hurt him, even less does he apologize. And the narrative revolves so much around him that he is able to completely ruin the whole movie by simply being so badly written. Kato himself could have been a good character, but it and his arc just go under, and isn't that typical for Kato.

This movie loves sexist slurs. I was totally shocked to see that apparently, a decade ago it was completely acceptable to use "pussy" and "little bitch" as an insult in a movie, EVEN MORE BY THE MAIN CHARACTER (the person being called these slurs being, obviously, Kato). Casey, a clever and competent secretary with sharp wit and an even sharper tongue in the original, is degraded to "hot blonde girl", has both male leads openly thirst over her IN HER WORKPLACE, and all of her work experience erased by being a new employee. It was terribly uncomfortable to watch.

But hey, at least they sent out a message that they are both not gay? I guess?? Because look, Britt Reid and Kato can be fairly easily read as queer. They live together, have very visibly a close bond and trust each other unconditionally, and also neither of them has a female love interest. That is the original, 1930's-1940's. 2011, we are aware enough of the existence of queer people so that it couldn't be left like this, so obviously the mutual trust and respect needed to go, and those comments about poor Casey served the same purpose. The movie also kind of seems to keep commenting on the nature of their relationship with bits of dialogue that in a different context kind of sound romantic, and are clearly supposed to be jokes and/or funny moments, but absolutely nothing about the dialogue is funny, so it all just feels really uncomfortable.

And finally, the xenophobia. Also, racism, because it is trying to comment on how the original story treats Kato like crap by treating Kato like crap. NOT how you do this, guys. But the point I actually wanted to make in this paragraph was about the villain, who has a Slavic-sounding name. Which, apparently, is difficult to pronounce (it isn't??). Hahaha, look how difficult it is to pronounce! Let's constantly point this out by having the Americans comment on and keep mispronouncing it! Aren't we funny!

Fuck you.

Sorry, at this point, I had to.

Adaptation from the original things:

They gave Kato more screentime, that is good. It also completely went under in the mess that the rest of the movie is. Oh, and they didn’t let him wear his white suit, which, pity, it’s a really nice suit. Britt is an arsehole, and acts like a spoiled child. Points for trying to make him look more like a playboy, because in every other adaptation, he is a completely normal, responsible adult man who is said to be a playboy (vanishing weeks on end while fighting crime does this to your reputation). But like, AT THE BEGINNING. By the end, HE SHOULD BE a normal responsible adult man! Character growth, anyone? No? Not in this movie. Casey as I said before is just there to look sexy. Axford is... Apparently that older journalist guy who kept telling Britt to tune it down? That's Axford?? OK, he is absolutely NOTHING like the Axford I know, who is a bit of a bumbling character obsessed with catching the Green Hornet, but very likeable and a fairy good journalist. Lowry isn't there at all.

Look, what made the Green Hornet as a superhero so exceptional was the truly amazing supporting cast. I fell in love with the people at the Daily Sentinel at least as much as I did with Britt, the way they bicker and poke fun of one another. I couldn't find a single one of these beloved characters in this movie, and the Daily Sentinel itself was more of a background prop than anything else.

Black Beauty... Call me boring, but it really doesn't need this many guns. Why would it need this many guns?? But all in all, it was cool, so no complaints there. They did miss a chance by having Britt live in a GIANT mansion with a garage full of cars instead of an apartment with a secret passage, because who wouldn't want to see an apartment with a secret passage.

And now that I got this off my chest, some of the things that did work:

Kato. Kato, as usual, has got a perfectly good and interesting story going on behind the scenes. He is maybe the only character who doesn't feel fake (I mean, he gets covered up by the layers of bad radiating from everyone else so it hardly shines though), and he also has a completely good storyline that would have worked, had the rest of the movie... I'm repeating myself.

That's... Pretty much it, yes.

I did like the part at the beginning where Britt first met Kato, and there was this ridiculously complicated coffee machine that he built, and Britt was immediately in awe with him, and then Kato showed off all the stuff that he designed and built, and they were both just SO INTO IT. It is one of the few genuine moments in the entire movie.

I also loved the part at the end where Kato was trying to look for a new job, noticed that there is absolutely nothing that he can put on his resume, and for a moment it looked as if he was really considering a career in crime. They could have done more with this idea. I also hoped for a moment that he would actually dress as the Green Hornet for the job, and OMG, my fanfiction is coming true, but no. Pity, because I swear that it is better written than this movie.

(No, seriously. Would anyone like by any chance to read my fanfiction?)

TL;DR: THIS IS A BAD MOVIE. DON'T WATCH IT.

#Green Hornet #the green hornet #The Green Hornet (2011)#bad movies #movie review #superheroes #*sigh*#I was kind of expecting it to be bad #so I'm not surprised just disappointed

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lokigodofaces · 3 years ago

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thoughts on loki ep 3: lamentis

under cut for your convenience

my first thought when i saw C-20 at the beginning was the Framework...i might be a bit too obsessed with an aos/Loki crossover...

C-20 was sorta able to find out something was wrong. from what Sylvie said, that's pretty impressive.

i wonder if Sylvie uses magic similar to Wanda's. like if Wanda just uses it on a bigger scale. the mind illusions thing checks out. and i saw on youtube that another patron looks like Evan Peters, so maybe they're connected? but most likely they just hired a dude that happens to look like Evan Peters.

going back to that, the glitch in C-20's illusion was like the glitches in WandaVision

if this really is similar to Wanda in canon, that means Sylvie and other Lokis might be nexus beings (y'know, the very thing i shout about in tags because i want)

Okay, so Sylvie tried to enchant a minuteman, which means she must have assumed the TVA operates on the same physics as the timeline. So neither Lokis thought magic could possibly be impeded.

good action sequence with Sylvie and minutemen and Sylvie and Loki

dudes...Renslayer can't fight. she literally did a horrible job.

Sylvie really thought the TVA valued Loki and that they really wanted/needed him to stop her. so she threatened to kill him, just for Renslayer to give the go ahead. shows how little the TVA cares and it echoes Odin.

Lamentis 1 sounded cool because that is a very sci-fi-ey name. It means the star the planet orbits is called Lamentis and the planet is the closest planet. That's how we name lots of planets outside the solar system. so i appreciated that.

okay, lamentis is literally just the bi flag. but still lots of purple so i will claim it as ace as well.

teleportation! and actual magic! yay!

okay, are they setting up a Loki/Sylvie romance? the way they framed the two when Sylvie tried to enchant Loki was how it's often done with kisses

Sylvie said with strong minds she has to do what she did to C-20 to enchant them, but she couldn't even do that with Loki. Which shows how powerful Loki is and how powerful the mind stone is.

i will die for more of Loki and Sylvie being chaotic together

Sylvie she said is an alias. Does this mean she is genderfluid but is female more often than male? i'm told some genderfluids are one gender more than the other, and i've considered Hiddleston's Loki to be predominantly male. Could Sylvie be the other way around? & born Loki but haven't changed her name? or have different names for different genders? and doesn't want to be called Loki when she's female because that's not her name as a woman?

literally i can't tell if they're setting up romance or sibling stuff.

i never thought i'd hear the word "savvy" from Loki. but, hey, if Jack Sparrow can say it, i'll allow it.

the effects for the gun that woman used look similar to Daisy Johnson's quakes. for a second i hoped for an aos crossover, but then i remembered that marvel hates it's non-Disney+ series.

i like the differences between Loki and Sylvie. Loki is less confrontational and more likely to mischief his way when Sylvie is more likely to rip the bandaid off and get it over with, if that makes sense. i think that Sylvie might just be so tired from living on the run, only going to apocalypses that she just wants to get it over with.

love is a serious theme throughout this episode. again, are they setting up a Loki/Sylvie romance? or will it be platonic or familial or something else?

Loki is very clearly not okay with the fact that so many people are being left to die, and i'm here for it

so the whole thing to get on the train i think is setting those two up to be a good duo. between illusions and enchantments, they can do a lot. and Loki was able to get them part of the way, and Sylvie the rest. i think it could be foreshadowing both of them needing to use their skills to work together.

never have your back to a door, i guess

Sylvie's reaction to Loki saying he wasn't told he was adopted. man, she was worried. she knows that that is messed up and i think she feels bad for Loki. she's probably imagining how her life would be different if she didn't know she was adopted.

sounds like Odin and Frigga weren't the adopters of Sylvie. Maybe the Lushtons? i don't know anything about them, just that Lushton is Sylvie's last name in the comics. so, yay for her for not having trash parents. unless they were, then sorry for Sylvie. at least they told her she was adopted. but if the Lushtons adopted her, how did they fall across a frost giant? especially the daughter of Laufey?

i've seen suggestions that the post man Sylvie is with could be Stan Lee since a couple cameos were of him as a post man. Maybe a younger post man, but he has less of a lifespan (if he is actually human in universe. i still like to think of him as the One Above All who just really likes to see the drama of things) than Sylvie, so she could be with him for a long time. maybe that's why Stan is always cameoing. he's just trying different things to try to find his love. and maybe he has a longer lifespan (he was in First Avenger) but not as long as Sylvie's so she still was there for most his life but he's dying soon. I actually like this headcanon a lot, i think it's sweet.

YAS BISEXUAL LOKI YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW HAPPY I AM! but i'm also scared my parents will find out. they're anti-queer. my siblings saw it, & they aren't supportive either but they operate on an "ignore it" policy, so they don't really care as long as it isn't a big deal.

also it is heavily hinted Sylvie is bi as well.

yes, i will continue to headcanon Loki as greyromantic and asexual. deal with it. i will change my language from panromantic to biromantic since the director specifically said he was bi.

also, it sounded like the director might be bi as well. good for her, taking a character she saw as bi and literally making it canon.

i knew Tom could sing, he was on Broadway. but i had never heard him sing i don't think. he has a good voice. petition to make a musical with Loki. watch the episode "Duet" of The Flash. i want something similar to that. can Sophia sing? throw her in too if she can!

translation of the norwegian suggests romance between Loki and Sylvie

was i expecting an "ANOTHER" reference? no. am i glad we got it? yeah, that was a nice touch.

turns out "full" means drunk in Norwegian according to a youtuber? but don't quote that. Loki says he's full, not drunk at one point.

what were they serving on that train? Thor couldn't get drunk on Earth. heck, Steve couldn't. so it must've been a heck of a drink they were serving

ok, the dagger metaphor i actually really liked. could be a shakespeare reference?

the fireworks thing with Frigga was cute

okay, i don't like Frigga much, but this has confirmed that Frigga was, maybe possibly, better than Odin. Frigga at least believed in Loki. but then her betrayal was so much worse.

wait, i just realized. Loki gets a fight scene on a train. a superhero genre staple is a fight on a moving vehicle (bonus if it's a train). yay! Loki hasn't had this trope yet in any of his appearances. off screen before Infinity War, and i don't count his attempt to murder Thanos on the Statesman. but we can add that to his list of superhero tropes.

i feel like the TVA needs to make stronger tempads...

okay, Loki threw the dagger horribly because he was drunk, right?they aren't saying he has horrible aim, are they?

falling out of a moving vehicle is also a superhero trope...at least it went better for them than it did Bucky

i relate to Sylvie screaming in the middle of nowhere

Loki being gentle with Sylvie and letting her talk to him. gosh. i love it. was not expecting to see Loki from my fics make an appearance.

Sylvie explained the enchantment to Loki, which i think was a poor decision for her.

she said C-20's mind was hard to navigate to her original memories. maybe the TVA does something to the TVA agents that join them. maybe if Loki proved useful, they'd do it to Loki.

or maybe variants lose memory over time. Sylvie says something about her memory being like blips of a dream, but I don't remember the context. maybe over time variants lose their memories and only retain a few things. Sylvie is well down that process, Loki has had hardly any change, and those working for the TVA only have a few things to remind them.

Mobius absolutely was a jet ski enthusiast in the '90's when he was arrested, and he loved Josta.

Casey liked Boku juice, a sign he was from the '90's.

whoever makes the uniforms is from whatever period that style of suit was popular ('80's?).

if anyone isn't a variant, it's Renslayer. she knows more than she should, i'm sure of it.

C-20 likes margaritas now, i'm sure of it.

Mobius has an interesting relationship with Renslayer. I wasn't sure if it was romantic or what. Maybe Renslayer looks like his lover from the '90's so he is flirty with her because of the faint memories he has.

Loki immediately catches on to the TVA agents not knowing they're variants. they think the Time Keepers created them. he knows that, Sylvie didn't. this immediately tells Loki that the Time Keepers are messed up.

possible redemptions for Mobius? B-15? C-20? when they find out they're variants?

so does C-20 know now? she kept saying "it was real" when Mobius found her in Roxxcart. maybe she had dreams of her life before, and Sylvie showed her that they were real?

the whole scene in the city was wild. so much color, lights, people, action, it was wild

Loki being protective of Sylvie, helping her up and wrapping his arm around her, i'm here for it.

loved the bit where Loki used telekinesis to stop the tower from falling on them.

there was a bit where Loki and Sylvie fought & their moves mirrored each other and gosh that was a nice touch.

Loki's reaction to the Ark's destruction. standing there in defeat while Sylvie walks away. wow. Tom. you are amazing.

and what the heck why did the episode end there?

can't wait for the next episode

more of TVA being evil being shown, loving it.

really, is Loki/Sylvie a thing? i have a hard time seeing romance some times, so let me know.

can we please get a Kang tease?

great lighting & cinematography. beautiful. lovely. also good action. shout out to the stunt doubles since they don't get enough credit.

okay let Loki & Sylvie be friends (or lovers, i'm fine with that) and let them burn the TVA down together.

aaaaaaaaaaa how are we half way through?

also, have the TVA fixed all the messed up timelines yet?

oh wait i gotta talk about this. the minutemen don't remember their names. i doubt Mobius's name was Mobius Mobius Mobius. Casey is probably not his real name. The Clone Wars fan in me was already screaming, but now it is even more.

#loki (2021)#loki (2021) spoilers #loki (2021) review #loki laufeyson #tva loki #sylvie laufeysdottir #mobius m mobius #ravonna renslayer #hunter c-20 #hunter b 15

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mcustorm · 4 years ago

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Thoughts on Love, Victor Season 1

PSA: If you think that you might be gay, don’t get a girl emotionally invested! Please!

Ya know, at first when I thought about what I was going to write about this show, I thought that I should split the writings into the first half/last half of the show. Now I’m thinking “screw it”, if only because if I was going to go that route I should have stopped, parsed through my feelings about the first 5 episodes, and written those thoughts before proceeding with the next half. That, of course, did not happen, so to prevent the back half of the season’s events from miring the first half, I’ll just write about the whole shebang. There’s probably a joke about that word somewhere, I’ll try not to make it.

Anyways, let’s start by saying that on the whole, I really liked this show. It was not as good as Sex Education season 1, yet in my opinion waaaay better than HSMTMTS season 1. Most of the characters were likable and felt developed enough, it moved at a nice pace, and you can tell that a lot of heart went into this. Perhaps because we all watched this in a day, it felt like a 5 hour movie rather than a 10 episode tv show.

Additionally, I of course like the Latinx representation. The intersectionality of the Latinx community and the LGBTQ+ community has been presented on at least five TV shows to my knowledge: Ugly Betty, One Day at a Time, Diary of a Future President, The Baker and the Beauty, and now Love, Victor. Let’s keep it up!

As for the premise of the show itself, I *love* that this show acknowledges that Simon’s journey, at least at his house, was leaps and bounds easier than many other people’s. Victor’s parents are more conservative and religious, and they don’t have their shit together, so this is not the best environment to drop that bombshell in (which is why it was so incredible when Victor decides to do it anyway). Simon and Victor’s DM’s being a framing device for the show was a great way to tie the universe together.

The hook of Love, Simon was that you know all those cheesy and cliche rom-coms that straight people have gotten since the dawn of time? Well LGBT people deserve those stories too! Love, Victor is sort of presented with that same thesis in mind, which is why watching these episodes felt like different things I’ve seen before all over. The whole season ironically feels like Alex Strangelove: The TV Show, right down to the often cringy relationship with the girl, the openly gay love interest who conflicts our protagonist, and the goofball friend who chases after a girl who is seemingly out of his league.

Mia’s character felt a lot like Laila from All-American, being a black girl who is ordained as the hottest girl at school (which I feel like is a title only given in fictional schools), who also has a missing mother and problems with her rich dad. Pilar, on the other hand, feels like Casey from Atypical, in that she is openly rebellious in large part because of her mother’s infidelity.

Victor’s story this season sure was something to watch. The biggest question for me was, just how much sympathy should he be given? The world is inherently unfair to Victor. None of us should have to go through the agony and anxiety that so often comes with being in the closet and coming out. But for Victor to have visited those problems on Mia, who is going through things herself? That makes him pretty morally gray.

But he was still finding himself! But he loves Mia, just not like that! I get it, which is why he should have cut things off as soon as he got back from New York, no he should have cut things off when she asked him if there was “anything else” in her bedroom, no he should have cut things off when he literally felt like he and Benji were the only two people in the room at the concert, no he really shouldn’t have done this to begin with.

The line between Victor finding himself and him deceiving Mia is the conflict of the show, but the moment for me when I was like “Damn, Victor” was after he intentionally derailed Mia’s shebang-ing that she planned, he found the gall to lie to Benji and plan a seduction! That is why the season finale was so glorious. Because yes, while the world is unfair to Victor, he’s being unfair to the people around him.

I have made it a point not to read other people’s opinions extensively so as not to bias my own thoughts, but is Felix everybody else’s favorite? Felix’s character and arc was great. He was a supportive friend yet still felt like he had a story and stakes of his own, something which some TV shows get right (Sex Ed) and some TV shows get various shades of wrong (Jamie Johnson, Andi Mack). I like that he knew his worth and cut things off with Lake, and I like that she realized that her happiness with him should take priority over what others think of her.

I was soooo sympathetic to Mia. Her world is being turned upside down at home. Clearly, she has not even processed her mother being out of her life, and now her Dad is “replacing” her Mom while the baby is also “replacing” her! In Mia’s eyes, at least. Mia just needs to know that she is loved and appreciated. Which she *thought* of all people she’d be able to get from her boyfriend. Shucks.

As for the rest of Victor’s family, I also thought the parents’ storyline was pretty interesting yet unfortunate. Armando just can’t come around to trusting Isabel, which I actually kind of understand. Isabel, meanwhile, is being prevented from doing the thing she loves to do, which sucks especially because she’s in a radically new environment. Adrian is of course great, protect him at all costs. Pilar’s seemingly permanent mode of “angsty” is completely justified, as her friends back in TX are moving on just fine without her, she’s having trouble opening up and fitting in, and her family is WYLIN.

Some things that didn’t go so well for me was Andrew’s character, who feels like he’s just there to obstruct at any given moment. Y'all knew that when Victor and Benji were having that convo in the bathroom, someone was in the stall and someone was Andrew. Also, my guy, how are you not even somewhat aware that you are a total douchecanoe? I liked Benji, but Venji didn’t quite work for me because of all of the cheatation that it took to get there. Benji was pissed and ready to stay away from Victor permanently after the [attempted seduction], but once his relationship was over he was completely fine with putting his tongue down Mia’s boyfriend’s throat.

Overall, I really enjoyed this show. Some of these teen dramas I’m admittedly only watching for the LGBT content, so to have that be at the forefront of a show for once was amazing. The conflict was realistic if frustrating, and to me most of the characters seemed fully realized. Thankfully, the show didn’t even feel too “spin-offy” even with Nick Robinson being all over it.

In any given multi-season serialized show, the trajectory of the show goes one of two ways: the first season puts your feet on the ground of the series, and then later seasons go above and beyond with the storytelling (The Office, Breaking Bad, Bojack Horseman, Jamie Johnson) OR the first season is pretty great TV, and the following seasons fail to live up to its glory (The Good Place, Dear White People, really most every Netflix show ever). Which category Love, Victor ends up in is something to look forward to. Where do we go from here now that Victor is taking his first steps out of the closet?

Stray thoughts from the episodes:

The soundtrack on the whole, was not my cup of tea. I still liked a couple of songs, so that means somebody out there liked more of them.

I completely forgot Natasha Rothwell was in Love, Simon. More of her! More of Ali Wong! More of Beth Littleford! They were all great.

So Roger got his ass beat by Armando, and he still wants to get back with her?? Roger is reckless, man.

Speaking of reckless, Victor’s closet skills completely fell apart towards the end there. Assume somebody’s always watching!

Lake’s mother is a trip.

Good for the family for standing up to the grandparents.

Oh my god, Simon and Bram. Those guys are mine, and now they’re growing up and moving to the Big Gay City. They’ve come a long way.

Speaking of the Big Gay City, we were in Atlanta for a season and got *0* acknowledgement of the vibrant gay community there. More things to look forward to.

Was anybody else singing Selena along with Isabel? That is my favorite Selena song!

By rule of Felix being a male and Pilar being a female close in age, I immediately thought they were going to be a thing. The writers didn’t pull that thread too much...

That moment at the end there when we all thought Victor was going to hold off on his announcement only for him to go “fuck it” and say it anyways? And then he got to exhale? Perfect. chef’s kiss

What with June being Pride month, the SCOTUS ruling a couple of days ago, this entire show premiering today, and Delliot things going down in less than 24 hours, this will likely be the gayest week of the year. I suggest we all enjoy it.

Stay Peachy!

#love victor #michael cimino #venji #benji #thanks for reading #delliot

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saiilorstars · 5 years ago

Text

Dare To Forget Me

Ch. 18: Secrets Behind

// Previous Chapters //

Fandom: Law & Order SVU

Pairing: Rafael Barba x Original female character

Warnings: Due to the nature of the series’ plots, I do have to rate this as ‘mature’ for constant mentions of rape.

~ 0 ~ 0 ~ 0 ~ 0 ` 0 ~ 0 ~ 0 ~

Chapter Summary: Olivia pushes Montserrat to come forwards, but the detective refuses...so Olivia does the next best thing. Meanwhile, Rafael unintentionally discovers what Montserrat plans to do in regards to her position at SVU.

"Soo...someone found out," Montserrat cut straight to the point once her therapy session started.

Dr. Weslin was surprised at first until she realized Montserrat hadn't chosen to disclose. "What happened?"

"I tried being supportive but it backfired on account of my weakness and my incredibly intelligent sergeant," Montserrat drew in a deep breath which she exhaled in the very next second. "I mean, really, did I think I would be able to hide it from Olivia Benson? A cop who's worked for more than 10 years as a Special Victims detective? Ha!"

Montserrat leaned against the leather couch and looked to the side. Her mind raced with the memory of Olivia's confrontation. It wasn't so much a confrontation than it was a questionnaire. As it was Olivia's nature, she wanted to find out what happened and how to make things good.

"When did it happen?"

"Last year. I was on the job, undercover, and he caught me off guard," Montserrat couldn't find it in her to face Olivia. Her eyes kept darting to the side each time she attempted to meet Olivia's gaze.

"Did you tell anyone?" Even without looking at her, Montserrat knew Olivia wasn't staring in a pitiful manner, she was trying to help as was her nature.

Montserrat shifted on her couch. "Only a few. Just...just the necessary people. My Lieutenant, my doctor's...and Casey."

The last bit made Olivia pause for a second. "Casey? And she didn't encourage you to come forwards?"

"I told her no," Montserrat clarified before Olivia got any ideas. "I talked with my Lieutenant and...we both agreed that the undercover mission was too important to ruin."

"Ruin?" repeated Olivia with wide-eyes. "Is this the same Detective Novak I'm talking to? Did you both agree to that or did your lieutenant make you agree?"

Montserrat bit her lower lip as if it were chewing gum. "My Lieutenant reminded me it had been a 3 year operation. My accusation would abruptly end it and we wouldn't have caught Hallie D'Amico."

The name was a well known one considering D'Amico was famous for her drug empire.

"Did he at least come down with a drug charge?" Olivia asked, hoping there was at least some retribution for what that man did.

But Montserrat shook her head. "Most of the operation was based on Hallie, and a lot of her men went down with her...but he didn't. I don't know how he did it, but he escaped. We don't know where he is now. He hasn't resurfaced since last year."

"Montserrat…"

"Please don't," Montserrat shook her head, gaze falling again. "I don't want to keep talking."

It was at that moment that Montserrat realized she wasn't ready for an anonymous group. She didn't feel capable of sharing that horrible moment with anyone else. "That was last week and so far Olivia's still insisting I press charges against him."

"And, if given the opportunity, would you consider it?" Dr. Weslin asked.

Montserrat wanted to think about it, but the more she did the ickier she felt. It may have been ridiculous, or maybe not, but it was just the way her body reacted. "Any thought about...him...makes it hard. If I press charges then everyone will know, and everyone will ask questions...I'll have to relive everything again. And it might be for nothing since no one knows where he is."

"Would things be different if his location were known? Or if he was already in custody for the drug charges?"

Montserrat scrunched her face, bringing her hands to cover herself. "I don't know," she answered tiredly. "I just don't know."

~ 0 ~

"...I've got it set up, trust me…"

As Montserrat neared the bullpen, she could hear Kara's voice carrying out. It was rare of Kara to make a visit at work, so when Montserrat walked in and found Kara at Sonny's desk the world made sense again. She'd come for Sonny, not Montserrat.

In retrospect, Montserrat thought she should've seen it coming. They were basically dating, as annoying it was.

"Montserrat!" Kara jumped from the edge of Sonny's desk, looking far too startled for her.

"Hey, what's going on?" Montserrat pulled her jacket off and draped it over the back of her desk chair.

"Nothing!" Kara said too quick.

Dammit. Montserrat believed she knew why Kara had dropped by in the middle of the day.

"I should go," Kara said, swiping her purse off Sonny's desk. "See you later," she said to the two detectives before making a quick-paced exit.

Montserrat dropped into her chair with a weary sigh. "Sonny, for the love of God, make her stop all of her birthday party plans."

"What?" Sonny raised his eyebrows, clearly surprised she knew of their plans. "How did you-"

"-don't insult my intelligence, Carisi," Montserrat warned. "Just tell her I don't want it. I thank her for it but I don't want to celebrate anything this year."

"Oh c'mon, you're turning 30 and I know that might not sound appealing but-"

"-it's not the age," Montserrat stopped him. She sighed again. No one understood why she didn't want anything to do with her birthday this year, and she couldn't tell them why. "I just don't want it. So please, make her stop."

"Why don't you just tell her yourself?" Sonny offered the only alternative that wouldn't end with his own head.

"Because she won't listen to me!"

"I'm-"

"Novak," Olivia called as soon as she walked into the bullpen, "My office." She went straight for her office without glancing back at any of her detectives.

Montserrat fiddled with a pen on her desk for a few seconds while the others kept staring at her. Eventually, she let the pen drop and looked up. "What? Is this high school now?"

"You better gooo," Nick's teasing voice helped no one.

Montserrat got up from her chair and walked towards Olivia's office. She promptly shut the door and turned to face her Sergeant.

"Have you given any thought of what we talked about?" Olivia went straight for the point.

Montserrat sighed and gave a shake of her head. "My answer is still no. It's buried and there's no point in bringing it back."

"But there is still something we can do," Olivia persisted. She got up from her seat and moved around the desk. "You did everything right, meaning you can still press charges."

"And do what?" Montserrat raised an eyebrow. "You're not listening, Olivia, he's not here anymore. He could be off in Brazil for all I know. I'm not putting myself through that."

"I understand that, but I just want to help you-"

"-if you want to help me, then stop that damn birthday party from happening!" Montserrat gestured to the bullpen as of Olivia would know. "Otherwise, just leave it. I'm tormented enough."

"Montse-" Olivia called but the detective was already out the door. Olivia walked towards her open door and closed it again. She turned to her desk and remained still while she thought of some things. Eventually, she got an idea. Whether or not it was a good one, she wouldn't know until she did it.

~0~

It was late at night when SVU got a call. Nearly 3 am saw Olivia and reporter Jimmy MacArthur arrive at the scene. Police sirens flashed in the night, reflecting off the bright yellow tape sealing the street off.

"Couple of tourists walking along said they heard moaning from the other side of that wall around 2:00 A.M," Fin walked Olivia down the park, stopping by a cemented wall. "The vic is Heba Salim, 24, clothes muddy and torn, scratches on her face, bruising on her body."

"You get a statement?"

"Novak and Amaro are doing it right now," Amanda walked towards them. "But she seems pretty out of it. She told the two responding unis that she had been raped by two male whites."

"Okay, we set up a grid search?" Olivia asked though she knew her detectives were of course already on it.

"From the park entrance, and we've got Carisi leading a canvassing endeavor for hotel doormen on Central Park South. So far, no witnesses," Fin said, spotting Jimmy nearing Montserrat and Nick. "What's that guy doing down here?"

Olivia glanced back and saw Jimmy, frowning. "Don't even start. One PP gave him full access. Nothing we can do."

Unfortunately, Montserrat and Nick would be the first ones to meet Jimmy that night, since he was practically breathing over their shoulders while they attempted to keep up with their victim's gourmet. Heba was semi-conscious but the fact the two ERs rushing her towards the ambulance were louder than Montserrat and Nick made it difficult for both detectives to get a good, clear statements.

"Could you do us a favor and back off?" Nick nearly exploded on the reporter after Heba's ambulance drove away. "We were trying to get a statement!"

"Sorry, but I have full access," Jimmy was proud to announce, much to the annoyance of Nick.

"Who are you?" Montserrat scrunched her face, partially from confusion and the other part from genuine cold. She felt the tip of her nose freezing.

"Jimmy MacArthur. You know me," the man said with such assurance it almost made Montserrat doubt herself. "I hope you guys know by now that we're looking at a hate crime."

Montserrat was both stunned and confused on how he'd gotten that when both she and Nick hadn't even gotten a proper retell from the victim. "How did you-"

"-you better not publish any of that yet," Nick warned, already scowling but all Jimmy did was smile and go on his way.

~ 0 ~

The next morning had SVU busy with Heba's family, more so them than actually her.

"I don't think this is the way to get to our vic," Sonny told the other detectives around him while they watched Olivia and Rafael go back and forth with Reverend Curtis, who was acting on behalf of Heba's family.

Olivia's office was filled with the detectives, Heba's family and the Reverend. It was a loud commotion and the only person who nattered wasn't even in the room. She was in the interview room, trying to wish it all away.

"Reverend Curtis, Heba is in good hands here," Olivia followed the Reverend around her office. "I hope that we can stay focused on this case."

"As do I," Reverend Curtis raised his hand, showing them he was on their side but with more important endeavors. "This is just her family. Her brother Fareed is on his way."

Rafael barely contained the urge to roll his eyes right there. This was a complete waste of time. "Have we even interviewed her yet?" he spoke up just to stop Olivia from following the Reverend.

"Sort of," Montserrat muttered, crossing her arms as she remembered the interruptions from last night.

Amanda cleared her throat and gave her co-worker a glance to warn her to keep quiet. They didn't want Heba's family to know about Jimmy Mac. "Yeah, she was completely out of it at the scene. She was freezing. She spent all night in the E.R. I mean, this is the first chance we've had to talk to her."

"And we can't talk to her in front of her parents or you, reverend Curtis," Olivia put her hands together in exhaustion. They were making their case so much more difficult.

"This is more than just a rape. She was singled out because she wore a hijab," the Reverend spoke slowly as if none of the group were competent to understand his point.

"We're exploring that possibility-"

"Possibility? She was called a 'Muslim bitch.' Am I misinterpreting that?"

"Nobody is saying that you are-"

"-good. Even so, this community doesn't trust the NYPD-"

"-oh, but they trust you?" Rafael scoffed.

The Reverend shot him a look. "That's right. They reached out to me to be their advocate."

"Advocate? Any chance you told them that's exactly what the D.A.'S office is?"

"Heba's parents are concerned with her honor and the family's reputation."

"Go ahead." Olivia had enough of the nonsense. Every second they wasted arguing with the Reverend was another second Heba spent in torment. She went back to her detectives, pushing Amanda and Nick towards the interview room. "We understand that. So how about my detectives go in there with Heba - please get everybody else out of there…" She closed the interview door after Amanda and Nick then turned back and walked Rafael and the Reverend out of her office, "While you two work together in reassuring the family?"

Rafael's expression indicated no chance of that. The Reverend was working his last nerve and it wasn't even noon.

~ 0 ~

"So what are we looking?" Olivia asked the group once they were at a decent peace in the bullpen. They'd been able to get a proper statement from Heba, but it'd been quite the challenge to get them all out of the precinct without losing it.

"The rape kit exam confirms vaginal tears and the presence of semen from two different men. And remnants of torn hymen tissue," Amanda read off the results their M.E had sent them so far.

"And where are we on the hate crime aspect?"

"Well, they ripped off her head scarf and they taunted her with racial slurs," Montserrat said what Heba's statement had been. "That's pretty much the definition, isn't it?"

"Well, it's according to her," Nick leaned back on his chair. "We still haven't found any witnesses."

"Oh, come on. That time of night? Right by the park?" Sonny raised an eyebrow, smiling just to be obvious. "Somebody should have seen or heard something."

Olivia seemed to agree with his thoughts. "Okay, well, then go back up there, re-interview everybody. Doormen, street people." Sonny nodded and looked at Montserrat to see if she was ready to go.

"I hope it's not a chase," the ginger got up from her chair.

"And where are we with the security footage?" Olivia looked at the remainder of her detectives.

"We have the D.O.T. Traffic cam, but we're still checking into a couple other things," Fin promptly answered.

"Let me stop you all before you divide and conquer," Rafael stopped the entire group in time. "The family says Jimmy Mac called them. He had details from the case."

"Not such a surprise since he was at the crime scene," Olivia sighed.

"They think someone from SVU is talking to the press," Rafael's eyes flickered from one detective to the next. "Be aware of what you are saying."

"We got it, councilor," Sonny ushered Montserrat towards the hallway, but the ginger stopped just to make one remark.

"What is this, high school? We know how to keep our mouths shut," she rolled her eyes and went on out.

~ 0 ~

Following Olivia's instructions, Montserrat and Sonny talked to as many people that could've been at the scene last night, but it seemed they weren't going to have luck because everyone told them the same thing. There were no screams. There was no girl. They'd gone home earlier.

"I was working late last night," one construction worker was in the middle of saying, missing Montserrat practically ball her fists on her sides.

Sonny was more professional at the moment. He just kept the questions coming. "How late?"

"1:30. I'm trying to log in as many hours before De Blasio phases us out."

"And you were here, right by Central Park?"

"Yeah."

"You or any of your friends hear screams or see two guys take this woman down?" Sonny showed the man a picture of Heba on his phone.

The worker shook his head. "I heard about it this morning. Must have happened after I left."

"Okay, thanks," Sonny turned to Montserrat with the same disappointed expression she had.

"That's like the 20th person we speak to who has no idea of what happened," Montserrat groaned. "My feet hurt. And my mind."

"Yeah, well the mind thing isn't from this case, is it?" Sonny meant the birthday plans and just the mere reminder made Montserrat groan.

Luckily for her, or unluckily judging who was thinking, they were interrupted by Jimmy Mac.

"Are you kidding me?" Montserrat glared at the man she was losing respect for even when she hadn't even properly met him yet.

As soon as Jimmy saw them, he walked over (while stuffing the last bit of his hot dog into his mouth). "Detectives Carisi and Novak. So how's your vic?"

Montserrat had to bite her tongue so that she wouldn't respond with a curt 'none of your business'.

"You find that head scarf yet?"

"You think we're gonna talk to you about an open investigation?" Sonny derailed the answer cleverly, but Jimmy saw it as a mediocre attempt to cover the truth.

"So you got nothing. That's okay. There may be nothing to get!"

"What's that supposed to mean?" Montserrat raised an eyebrow at the reporter. "Maybe you have something you want to share?"

Jimmy laughed in a condescending manner. "Jimmy Mac didn't become famous by sharing his sources with the cops. You can read about it like everybody else in the city in tomorrow's paper."

"Don't count on it," mumbled Montserrat when he left. "Who the hell does he think he is? He doesn't know anything." She would've said more had it not been for Sonny becoming focused with his phone all of a sudden. "What's up?"

"Uuh…" Sonny's look become concerned, bringing Montserrat to peer over to his phone and see the image causing problems.

"That's Heba on the street…"

"And look at the time stamp," Sonny pointed to the corner of the picture.

"It's 1:54 am and...she's walking toward the park. Clothes torn, no head scarf," Montserrat pursed her lips as they both knew that was quite a big contradiction to Heba's statement.

~0~

With further confirmation that Heba's statement was not quite true, the detectives took it straight to Heba herself for clarification. However, it turned out to be a waste of time because it only ended with Heba reaffirming her initial story and getting her family to throw the detectives out.

"How'd it go?" Olivia asked Montserrat and Sonny as soon as they walked into the bullpen.

"We are no longer welcome at that house," Sonny plopped down at his desk, more or less irritated.

Olivia motioned with a finger for Montserrat to follow her into the office. Montserrat dutifully followed but was already wear of where their conversation would end up at.

"Amanda and Finn went to Warner yesterday for further analysis and it's pretty much coinciding with the time stamp," Montserrat started first, thinking it would give her an advantage to lead the conversation towards her favor. "She said something about red and gold fibers being found under Heba's nails."

" So the benefit ended at midnight, and the security footage shows her walking towards the crime scene at what time?" Olivia rubbed her temples as she moved to her desk.

"It's 1:54," Montserrat paused for a second. The images of the distraught Heba was something hard to process. "Heba got defensive saying we didn't believe her but the truth is right there. We do believe something happened to her - the video proves it, but...not where she says or when she says."

"No chance of talking to her today," Olivia presumed after what Montserrat said.

"Not unless we want to be thrown out twice in two days," Montserrat crossed her arms and walked up to Olivia's desk. "She's too defensive, meaning she's lying. And if she's lying, then she doesn't want our help that much."

"Montse," Olivia brought her hands to the desk, looking disapproving. "It means she's hiding something because she's scared."

"Or mine, or yours…" Montserrat decided to leave it at that.

Olivia stayed pensive for a while before laying eyes on Montserrat. "Is this why you debate about pressing charges, then?" Montserrat visibly stiffened in her spot. "Because of the back and forth thing?"

"I don't want to do this right now, Olivia," sighed the ginger.

"I...I just don't understand," Olivia admitted. "You work for SVU. You of all people know how this works, the benefits of going forwards...the freedom you have afterwards."

"You say that because you knew exactly where your tormentor was. He's been in prison waiting trial, but I have no idea where the hell he is," Montserrat fervently shook her head. "I'm not opening myself to that type of trauma if I know there's not going to be any closure. Not happening."

"Hey Sarge?" Sonny poked his head into the office, essentially ending that conversation without knowing it. "We got a problem."

Olivia exchanged a look with Montserrat, both wondering what it could be now. "And what is it?"

Before Sonny could answer, Rafael pushed way into the office. He looked angry as hell as he raised a newspaper in his hand. "Who the hell has been talking to Jimmy Mac?" Because the newspaper's headline was all about the hoax that Heba's case was thought to be.

Perhaps it was the effect of the repeated conversation, or the fact she just felt plain offended, but Montserrat responded with a decent dripping sarcasm, "Oh yeah, all of us. We took turns."

That was all it took to infuriate Rafael. If Montserrat hadn't been in her own mood, she would've been amused by the way his face scrunched in utter anger. She'd come to learn some of his mannerisms since she was so good at irritating him. When he scrunched his entire face just for a blip of a second, it meant he was frustrated and a good amount of angry.

"Hang on," Olivia rose from her chair, making a motion with her hands for them to calm down. "None of us are talking to Jimmy-"

Rafael let the newspaper drop on the desk. "Then where the hell is he getting it from?"

"I wish I knew, but we don't." Olivia picked up the newspaper and reread the headline at least twice before forcing herself to skim the article. "But I'm going to talk to him."

"And do what?" Rafael scoffed, snatching the newspaper from her hands. "There's no point. Someone is talking."

"I will fix it," Olivia reassured then looked at Montserrat and Sonny. "Leave us, please. Montserrat, we'll talk later."

Montserrat did a double-take before outright saying, "No we're done. I made my decision." She gave Olivia no room to argue by leaving with Sonny.

"Can I ask what the hell is going on?" Rafael wished he could get at least one question answered that day.

"...she just doesn't like her birthday," Olivia found herself answering within the second.

Rafael rolled his eyes. "I have never met someone who put that much hatred into their birthday. You all need to focus."

"We will," Olivia's reassurance meant nothing to him at the moment.

"You better because I will be coming back tonight to see your progress."

Olivia leveled his intense look with her own, studious one. "How hard is the D.A. breathing on you right now?"

The question only made Rafael slightly shift. He kept his cool facade as best as he could. "My concern only."

It was then Olivia's turn to scoff. "Okay."

Rafael pointed a warning finger her way as he started to leave. "I'll be back later."

Olivia nodded him off and picked up the newspaper again. She would mark Jimmy's office as the second place she would be heading to today.

~ 0 ~

"Captain Carroll?" a tall, dark haired man stepped into a woman's office.

The woman in question was an older woman, probably fifty or so. Her grayish hair was tied into a tight bun and her blue eyes, though bright, were dimmed by the stack of papers on her desk. "Yes, Sanders?"

"You have a visitor," Detective Sanders said.

"Do I?" the Captain thought for a second before shaking her head. "Can't be. I don't have anything scheduled."

Before Detective Sanders could say anything, Olivia pushed the office door open and strode inside. "You'll have to make time then because I'm not leaving until we talk."

Captain Carroll raised an eyebrow at the woman, clearly taken aback by Olivia's bluntness. Being an older woman, Carroll was used to a different type of lifestyle. "Excuse me?"

Olivia ignored Carroll and glanced at the detective with them. "Leave us."

Detective Sanders briefly looked to his captain, wondering what he should do. He hadn't been very open to Olivia's sudden visit to their precinct, but as a detective there wasn't much he could do.

"Leave us, Sanders," the Captain ultimately said, making a motion for the man to leave.

Olivia waited till they were alone before speaking, and even when she did she was careful to speak in a quiet manner. "I'm Sergeant Olivia Benson, acting commander of Manhattan's SVU squad."

"Yes, I've heard about you several times," Captain Carroll rose from her desk and straightened up her blouse. "To what do I owe this visit? It's not everyday we get a Manhattan SVU Sergeant in Queens' Homicide."

"I'm here unofficially," Olivia walked slowly towards the desk. "I was the one who received one of your detective's transfer papers. You remember Detective Novak, right?" Olivia scrutinized the Captain for every expression she gave, and it was quite easy to see that the mere mention of Montserrat's name made Carroll stiffen.

Carroll cleared her throat and once again patted her blouse down as if it'd gotten crinkled in the one minute since the last time. "Detective Novak? Of course I remember her. She's the reason many of our drug missions were successful. You know Hallie D'Amico, right?"

"I do," Olivia gave a slight nod of her head. "And I think we both know at what cost D'Amico went down...right?"

Once again, Carroll's forehead creased at the middle. "I...don't know what you mean."

"Let me put it to you this way, just so that we don't waste time," Olivia pressed her hands onto the desk and leaned forwards, "I know what happened during your undercover mission for Hallie D'Amico. I know what happened to Detective Novak and I know that you did nothing about it. You, Captain-" Olivia spat the title like venom, "-are a true disgrace in this department."

Carroll's eyebrows knitted together as anger flourished through her. "How dare you-"

"-no, how dare you call yourself Captain while you let your detectives go through hell?" Olivia pushed herself off the desk, thinking it was better to put some distance between her and the Captain.

"I have no idea what you are talking about," Carroll attempted to say, but Olivia was heated.

"Quit playing! I know about everything! Montserrat told me!"

Carroll was stunned. "She did what-"

"-and don't you dare-" Olivia pointed a sharp finger in Carroll's way, "-have the audacity to be angry about that! How could you - how you could trade in your detective's well being, her entire self, for one measly operation?"

"Measly operation?" Carroll's eyes nearly bulged from her eyes. "That was an undercover mission of 3 years!"

"I don't care!" snapped Olivia. "Because no mission is worth any detectives' lives!"

"Now wait a minute!" Carroll raised her hands, hoping to slow things down for her benefit. "I don't know why Montserrat would ever choose to disclose to anyone, but I'll have you know I never forced her to keep quiet."

"No," Olivia agreed, tilting her head, "But you sure did remind her that the mission was important. It'd been years' work and it would be a shame if her pressing charges about a rape would cut the mission short. Hallie D'Amico couldn't get away, right?"

"And she didn't."

"At Montserrat's expense!" Olivia practically yelled in the woman's face. She didn't even notice how far she'd gone over the desk. "You know she goes to therapy because of what happened to her? It's the only place she can talk freely because she doesn't want to press charges. You manipulated her into keeping quiet just so you could get your name on the headlines."

"I did no such thing," Carroll said, but Olivia swore it sounded like the woman was trying to convince herself of her own statement. "Now get out of my office, and don't you ever come back. If Montserrat would like to argue, then by all means she's welcome to return."

Olivia shook her head. "You're cynical. That's why Montserrat left Queens, and your precinct in the first place. She couldn't stand living here, working in a place where no one cared for her."

"I tried to ease her pain the best I could-" Carroll attempted to argue but Olivia quickly walked up to her to cut her off.

"All lies!" she spat and straightened herself up. "When push came to shove, you threw Montserrat under the bus. You decided she was not important enough-"

"-that's not true-" Carroll's face fell, but Olivia felt no sympathy for her.

"-it is. The only thing I'm glad about is the fact that Montserrat is with us now. Because in my squad, we care about each other and we always look out for each other. Sadly, yours doesn't share the same sentiment," Olivia gave Carroll one look-over before storming out of the office.

Detective Sanders watched Olivia leave their precinct and had the curiosity to see his Captain. However, when he attempted to speak with Carroll, she basically threw him out.

~ 0 ~

You work for SVU.

Montserrat fervently scrolled down her computer screen, switching tabs every now and then. No matter how hard she tried, she kept hearing Olivia's words from their most recent disagreement. Despite her failed endeavors, Olivia just wouldn't give up on pressing charges. Montserrat was getting weary, and yet even through that she had never really thought about her work at SVU as she was now.

What Olivia said was true. Montserrat worked at SVU, the place where it was encouraged to come forwards about rape. And yet there she was, doing the exact opposite. How could she continue working there when she herself wouldn't come out and say what happened to her?

"Are those...transfer applications?"

Montserrat nearly jumped out of her chair. Of course when it hit her that she was no longer alone, she quickly closed all the tabs at once. But it was too late.

Rafael moved around her desk slowly, eyes flickering between her computer and her. "Are you thinking of transferring out of SVU?"

Montserrat cleared her throat while racking her head for a plausible explanation. She hadn't even concluded on her own if that's what she wanted to do. She'd just...perused. But boy was it going to cost her. "I...I was...I was just looking," came out of her mouth a few seconds later.

Rafael took the seat beside her desk. "Really? Just looking? Why?"

Montserrat's mouth opened several times but in the end a small laugh slipped through. "It doesn't matter. I was just looking. And why do you care? If I were to transfer, wouldn't that just be a relief for you?"

For a second it looked like Rafael would smile out of amusement, but he kept it well hidden. "Well, contrary to the popular belief, your big mouth is actually helpful sometimes. And...you do good work around here."

Montserrat looked at him for a second before smiling herself. "Are you trying to say you'd miss me if I were gone?"

"Stop," Rafael warned, though he did shift in his seat like he'd been outed.

Montserrat still smiled ever so proudly. "It's okay, councilor, I know it's hard to admit it--"

"Seriously, stop. Where are the others? I came back to see Olivia," he looked around at the empty bullpen, making it harder for Montserrat to keep from laughing.

"Olivia's been gone all afternoon. Nick and Finn went to talk to Heba's family again, and Amanda and Sonny went for some take out."

"Oh, so you waited for everyone to be gone to go through transfer papers," Rafael noted. "You're serious about this."

Montserrat brought a hand to her hair, nervous fingers looping around one curl. "I'm not. I'm just...considering."

"That's the same thing. I transferred as well, so I know the process very well. What is going on?" Rafael was beginning to get tired of asking the same question with no answer available.

"Nothing. And I would appreciate if you didn't say anything about this to anyone else," Montserrat sighed. If this was the reaction she got from someone who rarely showed any emotions, she didn't want to know what the others would do.

"Fine," Rafael said after concluding that despite her assurances it was a serious matter. For some reason, things weren't fine. It bothered him.

"Hey!" Amanda's voice drew their attention, though one more than the other. "We got the food!"

"Great! Sonny hand me mine and don't touch it!" Montserrat's demeanor changed drastically, but of course in Rafael's mind it was all for show. He knew exactly what she was doing. Faking it. And she was doing a pretty good damn job at it too. No one could know what she was doing on the side.

But he did.

#svu #rafael barba #ocappreciation #ocapp #svu fics #rafael barba fics #rafael barba imagines #svu imagines #oc: Montserrat Novak #fic: dare to forget me

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sweetsmellosuccess · 4 years ago

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Sundance 2021: Days 6 & 7

Films: 5 Best Film of the Day(s): Users

All Light, Everywhere: In 2015, during the riots and rebellion in the immediate aftermath of the Freddy Gray killing by local police, the Baltimore Police department agreed with a private entrepreneur to send up a secret surveillance plane over the city, in order to monitor, in clear HD images, those neighborhoods most primed for a violent reaction. They did this without informing the mayor’s office, or other local government agencies. This is only a facet of Theo Anthony’s far-reaching doc on the subject, not just of surveillance, but also the Act of Looking as any type of objective measure of reality. Anthony stays fixated on Baltimore, his hometown, when he tours the AXON corporate headquarters in Arizona, the makers of the most used police body cams and taser weapons, where the company CEO enthusiastically walks through the offices and production warehouse, as these items are being manufactured. Not surprisingly, despite their near-ubiquity amongst American police stations, AXON’s most lucrative asset is its intense data collection, via its evidence.com portal, where law enforcement uploads thousands of hours of video each day. Anthony also spends time with marketing focus groups, camera-toting carrier pigeons, and scientists exploring the framework of our visual understanding. It’s at times an abstract experience — the film communicates its intentions largely through bracketed text blocks, and a voice-actor, who acknowledges their role in your understanding the film’s premise. He also makes frequent use of past scientific thought on the subject, including the creation of the earliest forms of motion picture recording, to best exemplify the more we attempt to create visual “truth,” the more the standard slips through our fingers. Notably, the AXON recording equipment is designed to give the idea of full-disclosure with respect to the police’ behavior, as a means of protecting the community, but it’s clear that the appeal to law-enforcement is actually quite the opposite: Providing enough legally permissible evidence to either exonerate their officers, or to put the plaintiff behind bars. As Anthony’s pithy film points out, the act of seeing is still an act.

The World to Come: It is, of course, deeply unfair to compare each film to the highwater mark in a given genre — to say, for example, ‘Well, I quite liked that hard-boiled egg, but it’s no souffle au fromage’ — but the current spate of turn-of-the-century hardship lesbian romance films makes it near impossible not to put them in canonical order. Leading the way, it must be said, is the first of this current iterations of romances, Céline Sicamma’s excellent Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which took my breath away. If the low-water mark of this triad is last year’s Ammonite, which relied far too much on its esteemed leads to do all the heavy lifting; Mona Fastvold’s film nestles somewhere close to the latter, but nowhere near the rarefied air of the former. What Fastvold does make use of is the natural environment in which the film was shot (Bucharest, as a believable stand-in for Upstate New York), filled with snow, and mud, and the damp gray features of that clump of woods in the valley of the mountains nearby. The story gives us two farming couples, both miserable, albeit in slightly different ways. Abigail (Katherine Waterston) and Dyer (Casey Affleck) genuinely care about one another, but the loss of their young daughter to diphtheria has turned their marriage into a sort of continual wake; and Tallie (Vanessa Kirby) and her dour husband, Finney (Christopher Abbott), who don’t have any children, and with Finney’s grimly cruel nature, aren’t likely to have any. In their shared loneliness and misery, Abigail and Tallie become friends, then eventually lovers, finding in each other’s arms, the wonder of worlds and joys otherwise lost to them. The film certainly means well, but as told mainly in journal entry and letter VO — Waterston’s voice so muted and unwavering, she sounds like an NPR journalist reporting a story — it's so modulated and chaste, the emotional arc never rises beyond the slightly bowed. We aren’t given enough privvy into Tallie’s own state of mind, so thoroughly are we inside the consciousness of Abigail, to feel the full weight of her decisions. It’s earnest, but not particularly moving.

Flee: You don’t see a ton of animated documentaries, but in the case of Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s harrowing immigrant’s survivor tale, there was no way to catalogue the early life of Amin, the film’s subject, without extensive recreations in the first place. As a result, there is a strikingly evocative visual element to the manner Rasmussen and his animation team document Amin’s journey from war-torn Afghanistan, to Moscow, to Estonia, back to Moscow, and finally to Copenhagen. After his father is taken into custody by the Mujahideen in the late ‘80s, Amin and his mother, brother, and sisters fly out to Russia, in the months just after the fall of communism. From one chaotic country to another, the family desperately try to leave Russia for western Europe, but with unreliable traffickers, and a lone older sibling in Sweden, having to scrounge every penny he makes in order to make arrangements, things move in an agonizingly halting way. Eventually, Amin gets safely to Copenhagen, but is allowed to stay only by having to lie to Swedish authorities that the rest of his family is dead. If that weren’t enough, adding to Amin’s fears, he feels the need to tell his family — now scattered about Europe — about his being gay. Through extended interviews with Amin, Rasmussen teases out his friend’s full story, spread out over multiple flashbacks, while interlocking with Amin’s current serious relationship in Copenhagen, with a man he plans to marry, if only he can finally accept and trust in the idea of having a permanent home. Rasmussen’s genuine friendship with Amin adds a warm sheen of empathy to the proceedings, even in the ways not everything makes perfect sense. You get the understanding that Amin, having long buried his extremely difficult past journeys, is hesitating, even now, to fully unburden himself all at once, as if he has to take the time to reconcile all the different versions of his own story he’s had to live with, in order to make sense of it all.

Hive: In the era of #metoo, and Sundance’s continued efforts to represent female-helmed films at the festival, it’s becoming ever more clear in film after film, the biggest impediment to systemic change in culture and government is the ever-so-delicate male ego, which protects itself from damage more often than not by absolutely brutalizing anything that would dare threaten it. In Blerta Basholli’s excellent debut feature, based on a true story, the year is 1999, and in the aftermath of the grisly Serbian War, many communities are still awaiting word on the many missing, presumed dead family members who were taken away and will very likely not be coming back. One such half-widow is a fierce woman named Fahirje (Yllka Gashi), who still takes care of her missing husband’s father (Cun Lajci), as well as her two children. With funds dwindling, and her honey business not faring as well without her husband, a seasoned beekeeper, Fahirje gets a drivers’ license and begins a new business, hand-crafting jars of ajvar, the Serbian roasted red pepper sauce, and selling them at the local grocery. Despite violent, brutish opposition from many of the men in her small village of Krusha, whose favorite put-down is to call her a “whore,” Fahirje soldiers on, eventually enlisting many of the other village widows to join her business. Through it all, she has to contend with her own emotional pain — her husband vanished years ago, but has yet to be identified amongst the remains of the mass graves that become the final resting place for many Serbians. Basholli shoots the film primarily as handheld verite, documenting the day-to-day building of the business as well as the emotional upheaval of her protagonist. In this, Gashi, with her smoldering eyes, the lines of determination etched into her face, is a revelation. Fahrije suffers the multitude of slings and arrows — most miserably coming from her own teen daughter, who is embarrassed at first at the attention and gossip her mother is getting — with dignified solemnity. By the end, she has empowered a generation of women, while paving the way for countless others. Not all revolutions are won on the battlefield.

Users: It’s indeed jarring to see a film so dedicated to visual sumptuousness, so satisfyingly transfixing in its use of pattern, motion, and juxtaposition, but all in service towards an epitaph to our inevitable extinction. Natalia Almada’s cinematic essay uses its visual poetics to lure us in, to bewitch us with its beauty as it gently eases the blade of the knife deep in our midsection. A mother of two young children, Almada begins the film contemplating her babies, and the world in which they have been brought into, voracious in its use of natural materials, polluting the oceans with miles of fiber-optic cable, burning our forests to the ground, exploiting the Earth for every gram of mineable material, every ounce of oil, all to fill the growing chasm between ourselves and the formerly natural world in which we used to inhabit. The film moves at a placid, even-keeled pace. There are many beautifully composed slow-fixed shots of fields, trees, cityscapes from high above; juxtaposed against contrasting conceptions: an overhead drone shot of the Pacific’s cresting coastline cutting to an AT&T manhole cover; her own child’s face lit by the glow of a computer as he fixates on the screen in front of him, to a distant plane’s long vapor trail through a swath of sky; an infant breast-feeding to the endless rows of sprouts in a hydroponic lab. There is so much stuff, so many things, from shipping crates to solar panels, all slipping past the lens of DP Bennett Cerf’s cameras, so as to become something akin to a sort of visual intervention: You can see it, the film is telling us, you know very well how this is going to end. Almada doesn’t provide answers, or even firm conclusions, exactly. These are the things she is wrestling with in her own conscience, the horrific implications of otherwise deeply pleasing symmetric images. The film is a stunning ode to our demise.

Sundance goes mostly virtual for this year’s edition, sparing filmgoers the altitude, long waits, standing lines, and panicked eating binges — but also, these things and more that make the festival so damn endearing. In any event, Sundance via living room is still a hell of a lot better than no Sundance. A daily report.

#sweet smell of success #ssos #piers marchant #films #movies #sundance 2021 #film festival #virtual #users #hive #flee #the world to come #all light everywhere

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thelastraigeki · 5 years ago

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My Thoughts: TMNT’s Jennika

So... I am still in the process of digesting and trying to accept that now there is a fifth Turtle around in IDW’s TMNT Universe, and she’s certainly made a lot of buzz through out the entire comic book community. And I can even say that my initial reaction to this was.... perhaps uncalled for and even anger laced. I am not really good with certain additions or even subtractions in canon when it comes to my favorite franchises, case in point my negative reactions to the current Alien-Predator canon which... I’ve largely abandoned.

I want to talk about the craze for the new fifth and female Turtle, Jennika, who seems to have taken IDW’s TMNT universe by storm since IDW’s TMNT#95. Now... the news was spoiled to me on Facebook, but I went out and read the comics anyway, and understood the context better but... I’m still trying to process and accept this and it’s not easy for me.

I’ve been reading IDW’s TMNT comics since 2011 when the comic first came out, and have been a faithful reader since. I’ve collected the annual comics, I’ve collected the side story companions such as the Villains series, the Micro series, and the TMNT Universe series. All of them are well done, the comic has been such a treasure and an expansive one to that with newly created and fresh characters... From Alopex, Kitsune, Aka, Lindsey, Libby... And those are the new established female characters I’m talking about...

But Jennika... I haven’t been invested in. Nor have I really felt any gravity towards... And this is a question I am asking myself in order to accept this character with open arms and give her a chance.

Yes. I want to give this character a chance. I want to like this character. I really do... I honestly, really do like I appreciate Alopex, Kitsune, Lindsey and Libby, and all the other ladies of TMNT..

But... right now it’s just... hard for me. To even know she exist in the comics and possibly become a fixture in future TMNT projects.

Why?

The answer... is very, very simple...

Venus De Milo.... Let’s talk about the female Turtle who the entire TMNT fandom treats like the red headed step child that they keep locked up in the basement and occasionally feed fish heads to. Yeah... Let’s talk about the OTHER female and fifth member of the TMNT and the new kid, Jennika.

For the longest time, and I’ve known this in the back of my mind and in the forefront that IDW is pulling from EVERY known TMNT canon out there-- as TMNT has a multiverse, and every TMNT universe is as equally true as the other. Meaning... it’s ALL canon... At least, some universes more so than others. And I kept on asking myself: “So are they going to be pulling Venus into the IDW comics, or introduce a female Turtle?”

Venus De Milo showed up in Saban’s Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation and she wasn’t very well recieved. As a matter of fact, she’s become the object of hatred and mockery in the fandom... Even her conception as a character was something badly executed, as Saban and Fox Executives had wanted Peter Laird and Kevin Eastman to create a fifth and female Turtle, but also wanted her to be the love interest to the brothers...

...Who were no longer mentioned to be brothers related by blood, as she wasn’t really their blood sister because if she was, this would’ve made the romance between her and whoever of the brothers she wound up with be.... really, really, really, weird and well... wrong!

But Venus is the reason why we haven’t had a fifth Turtle in over twenty two years. Now, I could be wrong on this, so correct me if wrong but... the very memory of her and the experience of working with Saban had caused something of a distancing between Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, and Peter even had decreed a rule that there was to be no female Turtles.

Let’s face it... Venus was a bad idea...But she didn’t HAVE to be...

And for some reason, I am more okay with Venus than I am with Jennika. You heard it right... I am more for Venus than Jennika. No, I am not slamming or dumping on Jennika but what I am saying is... I think I would’ve preferred Venus.

IDW would’ve have to given her a complete overhaul in design and even backstory since she wouldn’t really be a sibling. And I would’ve been okay with that... I’d like to think I’d have been okay with that anyway.

So... Why am I having a hard time with Jennika?

She’s already got some great design points over Venus. Let’s face it, Jennika has Venus beat in ever department over Venus as a mutated Turtle... For one, no Turtle boobs because Turtles are reptiles and have no need for something like that, and biologically, female Turtles are almost indistinguishable from males unless you look at the claws and tails, and the plastron.

I think it may have something to do with her debut and what IDW did with the character. And IDW has given us a wonderful plethora of female characters through out the eight years they’ve been doing this.

I suppose... I feel, and this is my opinion and mine alone... That they really didn’t do a lot with her.

In her debut, she was shown to have some connection with Darius Dunn in an attempt to overthrow Splinter when he seized control of the Foot clan, then tried to assassinate Splinter herself but ultimately had been defeated... and then he took her under his wing to get her to see things differently. And she’s perhaps been seen in a few battles when Splinter tried to seize control of the criminal underground... Then she was focused to be a love interest to Casey.

Which... I kind of had an issue with since for me, it was all about Casey and April.

And when Michelangelo had decided to bring some orphans to the Foot clan after the whole Triceraton invasion and the Rat King arc, Jennika was more or less regulated to be a babysitter.

I suppose... this is why I feel like they didn’t do much with her when compared to characters like April, Angel Bridge, Alopex, Sally Pride, and Kitsune.

And then the blood transfusion happened and... the comparison to She-Hulk’s origin had come to mind and... I suppose I didn’t react to the news too well.

Another thing which I think contributed to my initial reaction to Jennika is... I hold the IDW TMNT Universe in such a high regard, to a high standard as I do with the original black and white Mirage comics.

I am used to there being just four Turtles, and only four Turtles because that’s what numerous TMNT media has always shown us, and since my focus is on the Mirage comics-- a storyline called the Sons of the Silent Age showed us why the Turtles were something special and unique, and that they are the first and last of their kind. This is something which even the 4Kids 2K3 series adapted though they toned down the tragic ending from the original story...

I guess what I am saying is... I’m such a fan of the Mirage continuity that... I wanted everything to more or less conform to what Mirage did but have their own spin on the mythology... and this was such a drastic change, I reacted badly... and I shouldn’t have.

I want to owe an apology to @idwpublishing, Tom Waltz, @mooncalfe for my initial negative reaction to the news on their new fifth Turtle.

I sincerely wish everyone the best of luck on the IDW comic and hope that I can warm up to Jennika as I have grown to love the other characters.

#Jennika #Venus De Milo #Mei Pieh Chi #Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #TMNT #IDW Publishing #Saban

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dreamycloud1 · 5 years ago

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So I’m going to slam dunk my feelings on 13 RW season 3 here. I know I’m late. I know it’s controversial as hell. I want to so I’m going to.

Justin Foley deserves everything good in this world and more. I know this has absolutely nothing to do with the main plot at all but I wanted to say it. During the assembly I bawled like a baby for like 15 minutes straight. Adding him as a survivor didn’t progress the plot at all, they honestly could have left that out but they didn’t and I just felt so many things at once that shit hurted. Then Jessica and him talked it out and they mention it a few more times and Justin is soo loved and accepted and did I say loved and he has a family who wants to have him in their lives and wants to help him work toward being the person he wants to be. I’m so proud of him.

Tyler, he was so strong this season. I’m so happy they gave him a chance to share his story. They broke the stigma behind male victims and I’m really glad they addressed it. They also shredded toxic masculinity everywhere this season with Clay, Tyler, Justin, Zack and everyone else.

Calony were so cute this season. Caleb and Tony, just roll with it. Tony spends the whole time rightfully freaking out about his family and Caleb still won’t stop supporting him. Tony finally gets a stable and nontoxic on-screen relationship and good god Caleb is so good for him. Then Caleb meet his parents and they have dinner with the Jensen’s and I just love them both and hope they make it through S4 happy. (Tony’s gonna be in deep shit, just wait for my theory y’all)

I can talk about the other characters but this post is already a long long ramble might as well not make it any longer than needs be, if y’all want to hear my thoughts on a specific character/scene/etc just ask.

Now here’s the deep doo doo. Montgomery Sr la Cruz and Bryce Walker.

I know the story goes: Monty is gay and Hispanic and he was demonized and Bryce is rich and white and praised.

I don’t exactly agree with this narrative. I 100% agree this is the facts but nothing ever makes sense without context. I feel like a lot of people think the context of this situation is the writers wanted to portray Bryce as some redeemable rapist because he’s white and wanted to make Monty unredeemable because he’s Hispanic.

However I’d argue that neither of them were ever meant to be redeemed. The entire season was about Bryce Walker. Honestly up until this point the entire show revolves around Bryce Walker and his direct or indirect actions. I don’t think the writers ever intended Bryce to seem redeemed. We see that with the literal plotline, no one feels remorse for Bryce’s death. Even at the end when we find out that (SPOILER ALERT 🚨) it was Alex all along. Obviously a lot of circumstances lead up to that point but on the end it was Alex who pushed Bryce off that edge. Even Alex’s dad accepts the lie that Ani made. He knows Alex had to be the one to do it or at the very least that he was there. However it’s easiest to blame it on Monty and let it be because both of them did terrible things and I feel like the show reflects the mindset of many people. I doubt most any of us would feel sorry if every rapist turned up dead tomorrow. I know a few will disagree but that’s my take.

As for Monty being gay and Hispanic and being a rapist and a ‘murderer.’ I can not and will not speak to him being Hispanic, I see the terrible connotation in him being a Hispanic man and convicted of rape but otherwise that’s all I’ll say on the matter. However I am gay so I feel like as another gay man I can talk about my feelings on Monty being gay. I don’t think this is a hate crime or homophobia. Honestly I think it’s more diverse. Just because your gay doesn’t mean your exempt from raping someone. I don’t feel they made Monty gay for the express purpose of being homophobic. The same outcome would have come about if his victims had been Courtney or Casey or any self/identified female on the show. It still would have ended with his straight female lover being angry that Ani framed him for murder. I think a lot of people say they want diversity but the second a person with diversity is portrayed in negative light people automatically assume it’s because of their diversity instead of thinking of their diversity as just another part of them.

Monty wasn’t a Gay Man Who Was A Rapist he was a rapist who happened to be gay and his victims were the subject of that. It’s not homophobia it’s just the truth. Gay people are rapist and that can happen and does happen. The writers did a great job with Tony and I don’t think they would become some homophobic assholes just to Monty. That’s just my take on it at least. I think it was so out of proportion and seemed like Bryce was ‘redeemable’ because 1. They had to have some kind of content to actually make a season out of 2. They wanted the viewer to feel conflict. Wether you actually did or not (I didn’t, I think Bryce deserved what he got and rape is irredeemable) that is the basic want of a TV series is to make you think about the message it sends and 3. Because Monty had very little screen time to develop and build on to. We know of Monty what we’ve seen past seasons and that’s about it because this season wasn’t about Monty it was about Bryce. However they only framed Monty in the plot because he was the easiest but out of plot it’s because they needed a basis for season 4 and angry lover who thinks their SO could really actually change (COUGaniCOUGH) is a great idea. The gang has to deal with Winston threatening to go to the cops and also they he cops finding the guns they dumped.

#13 reasons why #13rw #13rw s3 #monty

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truthbeetoldmedia · 6 years ago

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Good Trouble 1x13 “Vitamin C” Review

In its first season, Good Trouble has provided endless drama and laughs while re-introducing characters from the hit Freeform drama The Fosters in an entirely new chapter of their lives. While it was a giant risk to throw them into a loft with people the viewers have never met before, and rely on just two original characters to pull it all together, it paid off. Big time. In the final episode of the first season, we see new relationships between said characters blossom, old ones fall apart, and some are left hanging. Because after all, what is a good season finale without a few cliff-hangers?

At the end of Episode 12, three major plot twists occured. First, the head of HR at Speckulate, Angela, gave Mariana a list of all the male employees at the company and their salaries. Second, Malika had a mysterious family emergency, one that caused her to uncharacteristically skip out on the Black Lives Matter protest she helped organize. And third, Dennis took his ex-wife’s malicious words to heart and appeared to be on the metaphorical and literal edge.

Thankfully, light is shed on each of these situations fairly quickly in the finale. We discover that Malika’s mother has had an aneurysm and is essentially brain-dead. This causes yet another rift between Malika and her brother, who refuses to take her off of life support. Malika meanwhile knows that it’s time for them to let her go.

At Speckulate, Mariana questions Angela’s motives and decides to confront her. Angela confides in her, telling her that when she was first hired years ago, the same optimistic thought went through her mind about the engineering culture shifting. However, nothing came of it. She wants to help the cause, but knows that if she is outed for her involvement, she’ll lose her job and probably never find another one, making her unable to care for her child. This was a heartwarming moment of female solidarity, thankfully not a rarity in this show.

Back at the loft, Dennis is still missing. Davia seems to be the only one worried about him, and has called every jail and hospital in the area to no avail. Her mind is soon taken off of her friend’s disappearance, though, when her student whom she and Malika suspect is homeless shows up at the front door. Though this storyline seemed random at first, it serves as the motivation Davia needs going into the second season to make the right decision regarding her future. She’s been considering leaving LA to go back home and live with her boyfriend, who up until this point, has been making the empty promise of leaving his wife. However, despite her lack of confidence, she’s a great teacher. Her students need her.

The chaos in the Coterie continues as Sumi is about to get married on the rooftop. The whole event has been orchestrated by resident pushover Alice, who must keep up the facade that she’s straight and definitely not dating Joey, I mean, Joanna, when her parents stop by with a congratulatory present for Sumi. Alice manages to get them out of the Coterie without suspecting she’s in a relationship with Joey, or that Sumi is the bride marrying another woman. However, she’s left with more weight on her shoulders than before.

At the courthouse, Callie continues to question if Judge Wilson has ethical motives as he withholds personal information belonging to one of the police officers accused of wrongly shooting and killing a black boy, Jamal Thompson. Callie and Jamie conspire that he’s made a deal with the LAPD following his own son’s arrest, allowing his son’s charges to be dropped in exchange for biased favoring in the court.

Because Callie has no proof of this, she considers rummaging through Judge Wilson’s desk drawers and finding the private files for herself. However, she decides against it, the clerk beating out the social justice warrior in her.

Also facing an internal conflict is Mariana, who isn’t sure whether she should take the opportunity she’s been given by the CEO himself, Evan, to create an app and recruit women and people of color to help her, or publicly release the company’s salaries. Her greatest concern is inciting positive change, and Callie reminds her that she can convince herself of anything, she’ll know what the right decision is by listening to her gut. At first, Mariana does just that, telling herself and her sister that the app is the best decision. She soon realizes though that she’s being too safe, and that posting the salaries is the right move.

Though Callie and Mariana aren’t biological siblings, it’s very clear at this point that they were both raised to act with the greater good in mind. Without Stef and Lena acting as major characters in the series, moments like this one are nice callbacks to them and the morality they’ve instilled in their children.

While they’re talking, Callie mysteriously (or not so mysteriously?) receives an envelope that was left for her earlier, full of the personal information she almost stole out of Judge Wilson’s desk drawer. Regardless of who delivered the envelope, it’s in her hands now (though she struggles with what to do with it). Within the envelope is a document stating that the Chief of Police in the city said it’s cheaper for the city to let victims of police shootings die, a detail that if revealed to the public, could help Jamal’s family win the case.

We see Callie argue with herself, unsure of whether or not to give the files to Jamal’s attorney. She doesn’t get a chance to make a decision, as she’s interrupted by a newly single Gael. He confesses to Callie that he broke up with Bryan because she’s the one he loves, and questions her relationship with Jamie. Callie says nothing in response, but seems a bit shaken.

Davia, meanwhile, finally meets the father of her student, who reveals that the two are in fact homeless. He begs Davia not to tell anyone, and also tells her that she’s his daughter’s favorite teacher. Without her, he says, she would hate going to school. Davia makes learning fun. This one small moment seems to cause a lightbulb to go off in Davia’s head, that she should stay in LA and continue teaching, but also that’s she’s worthy. For too much of the season, she’s struggled with her own self-worth, and while countless characters have tried to steer her away from actions rooted in self-loathing, like staying with a man who isn’t entirely committed to her and wants her to give up her professional dreams for him, it turns out she just needed to hear that her students needed her.

The next day, Mariana arrives at work and overhears coworkers talking about Evan’s interest in another employee and how she ended up being fired. She confronts Raj, who she yelled at days prior for warning her about Evan’s possible motives. Raj only wants what’s best for her, and seems not to have any questionable motives himself.

Knowing Raj will always have her back, Mariana attempts to convince the members of Byte Club that publishing the salaries is the right move. While Casey opts out, fearing that all the work she’s put in over the years will have been for nothing, the other women decide to back Mariana up.

It goes about as well as any of them expect, when Josh demands the perpetrator come forward. However, things take a turn when he blames Angela for not bringing the wage gap issue to his attention (obviously bullshit) and fires her. Mariana immediately stands up, taking the blame for hacking into the system and getting the salaries. Soon, a wave of people standing in solidarity (including Raj) washes over the room, forcing Josh to rethink firing Angela. Several women also call out Josh for trying to kiss them, flipping the script.

And though Evan tries to keep her from leaving, Mariana decides that she should say goodbye to Speckulate and move on with her career, maybe even create her app on her own. Unfortunately, Evan tells her that if she leaves, she can’t take the app with her. It belongs to him now.

Back at the loft, Meera reveals to Alice that Sumi has called off the wedding. When Sumi finally returns, Alice must tell her that she doesn’t love her back, even if she isn’t with Meera anymore. She does remind her friend though that she shouldn’t marry someone she isn’t sure about.

And in her own moment of bravery, Alice comes out to her parents via FaceTime, who reveal they knew all along that she was gay. They’ve suspected she was in love with Sumi, and tell Alice that they just want grandkids. With so many cross-cultural coming outs gone wrong, it was nice to see Alice face her fears and come out the other side better than okay. This moment left me hopeful that maybe she’ll be able to get Joey back, who wasn’t impressed with her closeted behavior, and have a happy, authentic relationship in Season 2.

As the Jamal Thompson trial continues, the files have been released to his attorney. This leaves the courtroom a bit shaken, and ultimately causes Judge Wilson to call a recess for the time being. It looks like it’s Callie versus Judge Wilson now, though he doesn’t know (yet) that she’s working against him. This will definitely get interesting next season.

Having made a professional decision, Callie is still unsure of what to do in her personal life. This episode included a great choreographed dream sequences which showcases Callie dancing with several partners, all of whom play important roles in her life currently: Judge Wilson, Malika, Gael and Jamie. They seem to be pulling her in every which way, and although cheesy, this play on conscious thoughts bleeding into the unconscious in the form of a dream portrays to us viewers just how torn Callie is in her life currently. As a young woman, she’s understandably lost and questioning herself more often than not. This allows Callie to be extremely relatable to young viewers (even if they aren’t clerks secretly meddling with a case or in the middle of a love triangle).

Despite my dislike for Gael and Callie’s relationship and his portrayal as a bisexual man who’s unable to commit to one partner, I can’t deny that she’ll probably end up with him next season. This isn’t to say that their relationship will last, but I’m definitely seeing more chemistry between them than between her and Jamie. I love her and Jamie together, I really do, but this is one battle I’m prepared to lose.

Across town, Davia finally finds Dennis checked into a hospital after nearly committing suicide. He tells her that her voice had been running through his head, telling him not to be an idiot, and the two share a sweet moment together. Davia doesn’t tell the others back at the Coterie where Dennis really is, lying instead and saying he’s on a road trip and didn’t have service for a while. During a rooftop hangout, she also reveals to her friends that she’s decided to stay in LA, despite her boyfriend coming by and telling her he broke up with his wife, finally.

And while Callie is still unsure who she wants to be with, Mariana has made some moves in the love department. In a moment I’ve been waiting for all season, she kissed Raj on top of the Coterie roof, finally bringing their adorably supportive friendship to the next level. It’s clear that Raj has a lot of respect for Mariana, and really just wants what’s best for her. Though he inappropriately tried to kiss her earlier in the season during a work project, his redemption arc has been steady. Raj has proved that he’s not some slimy dude, like the rest of the guys at Speckulate, but he has genuinely innocent intentions. He respects Mariana as an engineer, but he also has feelings for her.

I can’t wait to see their feelings explored in Season 2, and hopefully see Callie choose a suitor as well. I’m also totally rooting for Davia and Dennis, because ever since their duet on the rooftop, I refuse to believe these two are platonic.

And so, the first season of Good Trouble is over. Starting as a The Fosters’ spinoff, this show has caught the attention of many as a show that can stand on its own. Though Callie and Mariana are familiar faces, and there are occasional cameos from Adams-Foster family members, the show is about so much more. The Coterie members come from all walks of life and each serve a purpose to each other and to the audience, to educate us on the lives of people we may not interact with every day. Issues of intersectionality, sexual harassment, biphobia, police brutality, racism, and mental health have all been discussed in just 13 episodes, making it clear that Good Trouble isn’t just here to be entertaining.

Going into Season 2, I’m so excited to see some character dynamics grow and change, but also to learn more about their experiences and see them be their true, authentic selves. Character creation is where this show really shines, and I’m confident it will continue to do that in seasons to come through the reinvention and evolution of everyone in Callie and Mariana’s lives.

Some stray thoughts on the season:

I wish we got to see more of Jazmin. Having a trans voice amongst the sea of characters was so, so, important, not to mention a trans woman of color. I hope we’ll see her return in Season 2.

Irrelevant to the plot, but Mariana’s outfits were consistently on point. I’m sure no one is surprised, though.

As much as I want to love Gael, I really haven’t been able to get there yet. I feel like he’s been shrouded in his identity as a bisexual man and his seemingly subsequent inability to commit, which is frustrating to watch. I know he’s more than that, and more than anything, I wish his story had been handled differently (Say it with me: Bisxuals are not noncomittal by nature!)

Season 2 of Good Trouble airs on Tuesday, June 18th at 8/7c on Freeform.

Jessica’s episode rating: 🐝🐝🐝🐝

#Good Trouble #Vitamin C #Season Finale

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adrenaline-whump · 6 years ago

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In the Wind - Chapter 1

It’s fucked up, in a way. None of it would have happened if any little thing had been different. If I’d been more alert – but Hank’ll tell you it was all his fault. He said he didn’t blame me, that he would have done exactly what I did.

Usually we don’t run into much drama. I mean seriously, forget anything you’ve seen on TV. Half the time the “fugitives” we bring in are people who forgot when their court date was, or couldn’t get a ride there. A few skips are dangerous, sure, but if you’re smart and careful and keep your head on a swivel, it’s a manageable risk. And “smart and careful” is pretty much the definition of Hank, so when he wants to put together a pickup team, we’ll go wherever he tells us to.

So when he called and was like, “Hey, Cade, what do you think about heading over to North Carolina?” that wasn’t typical but I was interested. North Carolina’s a fair haul from Memphis, but Hank had gotten some leads on a pair of skips, Owen Casey and Tara Michaels, who were supposed to be traveling together, and the payoff for both of them would make the trip worth it, assuming we could find them. What’s funny is that I’d picked up Owen once before, like three years earlier with a different crew, and drove him back from Franklin. I told Hank what I remembered about the guy, basically that he was average size, and when we rolled him up before, he didn’t put up a fight.

The other reason we went was because Amy’s family has a cabin up there, and they said we could use it for a few days. Amy’s one of our part-time crew, ex-Army like Hank. Hank likes to have her along if we’re after a female, since it seems like girls feel safer surrendering to another girl. On the other hand, males tend to get distracted or confused when they encounter Amy in full gear, so that works too.

The place she told us about was usually rented out, but her folks thought they were going to be up there that week, and then they changed plans. Amy didn’t come with us on this trip, but they gave us the family rate anyway, and the cabin was a lot nicer than what we’d typically get. It was up a mountain and down a little road, nice view from the back deck. The inside was all wood and dark green and navy blue, and the lamps and curtains and stuff all had bears on them. Donnie thought it was hilarious and said he was going to decorate his apartment entirely in bear as soon as we got back.

So it was Hank and me and Donnie and Alex, and the first day we didn’t have much luck, but the second day Tara turned up at her mama’s trailer and we managed to roll her up there. She didn’t fuss and just seemed sort of resigned. For girls we typically don’t go all raid mode anyway; we just tell them who we are and ask them nicely to come with us. Her mama was a little freaked out, but Hank calmed her down by being polite and respectful. He’s good at that kind of thing.

Tara wouldn’t say where Owen was, which wasn’t too surprising, but we were hoping to find them together. We couldn’t really hang on to her and look for him at the same time. Hank told Donnie he’d drawn the short straw, and he got to run Tara back to Memphis while we looked a little more for Owen. That was Hank being nice; Donnie was the least intimidating of us four to look at. Hank’s the tall wiry type; I’m pretty average, I guess; and Alex is a fucking wall. Dude’s probably got thirty pounds on me and it’s not fat. Donnie’s a little on the short side, friendliest guy you’ll ever meet, always in a good mood, and an absolute viper in a fight. People underestimate him, and it’s so damn funny every time. If you want up-front intimidation, you bring a big boy like Alex, but if you want an ace in your back pocket, you bring Donnie.

There was some discussion of whether Donnie wanted to stop back by the cabin and get his stuff, but Hank said we’d probably only stay another day at most, and we could bring it back with us. So Donnie headed west with Tara, and the rest of us put heads together on where we might dig up Owen. The most likely was that he would show up at the mama’s place in Sylva, where he thought Tara was, unless he was still in Asheville where Hank and Richard had been tracking him.

Hank talked to the mama a little more, who as it turned out wasn’t a fan of her daughter’s no-good skip of a boyfriend, and mama promised to call Hank if Owen showed up looking for Tara. We went on to Asheville, the three of us.

We nosed around where Hank’s info had pointed us, and managed to turn up an old black guy running a soul food dive, who rubbed his chin and said yes, he’d talked to those kids. They were looking for some cash work, and he told them he might have something next week, but they said they had to go on to Charlotte and did he know anyone there who might need some temporary help. Which was interesting because Hank had an address for a cousin of Owen’s near Charlotte.

We talked through the options. We might hear from Tara’s mama, but Owen probably wouldn’t stay put once he knew Tara had been picked up. He’d probably run, and he might just go on to the cousin’s place. You wouldn’t think skips would be that obvious, running to family, but they do it all the time. If we could get ahead of him and be waiting for him, if and when he showed up at the cousin’s, that would be perfect. The thing was, we were standing in Asheville, Donnie was on the way back to Memphis in one truck, the three of us were in Hank’s Tahoe, and a bunch of our stuff was in a cabin an hour the wrong way.

No problem. Hank looked up a car rental place and we got there before they closed. I was tasked to go back and get all our crap, then meet them in Charlotte. If they saw Owen before I got there, they’d contact the local cops to ask for an assist. I tossed my gear in the back seat of the rental and headed back to the cabin.

***

You know, you instinctively think of the place you sleep as safe, even if it’s more home base than home. The cabin was just like we left it, door locked and all, nothing out of the ordinary. I flipped on the nearest light, dropped my jacket on a chair, and walked into the kitchen. There was a red and gold sunset that was perfectly framed by the window over the sink.

And a voice behind me said, “Don’t fucking move, Cade.”

Do you know what an adrenaline dump is? It’s when shit goes seriously wrong and that wave of hot and cold punches you in the gut, crashes over your head, and races down to your toes in about a second and a half. I’ve had it happen enough to recognize it, and it gets a little easier to deal with, but not much. I waited out the wave, then slowly turned my head to look over my shoulder, just enough to see Owen step out of the hallway, pointing something dark and metallic my way with both hands.

“I said don’t fucking move,” he repeated, furiously intense. “If you twitch the wrong way, I will turn your head inside out.”

I believed him. I still had my Glock on my hip. He knew it, I knew it, and we both knew his trigger pull would be faster than my draw.

In my head, I was like WHAT. THE. FUCK. Because how in the fucking hell was he here of all places? He circled behind me like a stalking wolf.

“Step to your left,” he said, “and put your hands on the cabinet in front of you.”

I could guess where this was going, but I didn’t have any bright ideas for how to win this particular scenario. I’d lost as soon as I dropped my guard inside the cabin. It’s the kind of stupid that can get you killed. I moved as directed and listened to the floor creak as he approached me – slowly, like you’d walk toward a snake that you didn’t know if it was the poisonous kind or not. Cold metal grazed the back of my neck.

“Don’t twitch,” he warned again. A whole string of four-letter words went through my head, but I stayed still as he snagged my Glock from its holster.

“Put your left hand behind your back,” he ordered.

I didn’t immediately move. I was trying to think of something, anything, to redirect this encounter. “Owen…” I started, before he cut me off. I’m not sure what I was going to say.

“Shut it, Cade,” he said savagely. “You wanted to find me; you found me. Now it’s up to you, do you want to die right now? Or do you want to cooperate with me?”

I answered with about the same heat, “Well, if it’s a choice between getting shot in the head now, or later, you might as well fucking get it over with.”

It might have been a mistake; hell, it could have been the last thing I ever said. I said it because – well, partly because of adrenaline, and partly because – it’s hard to explain. I didn’t know what the hell he wanted, and him showing up to confront me made not a damn lick of sense. I thought there was a good chance I was going to be straight up executed, and something in me said fuck it, I’d rather just get shot, than dragged out to the woods and shot. I mean, why go along with it if it doesn’t make a difference?

He didn’t answer for a moment, and I stood there wondering if you actually hear the bang that kills you, but then he said, “Look, I want to talk to you. But I don’t fucking trust you, OK? Left hand. Now.”

OK, so we might at least have something to negotiate about. That is, if I could give him the answer he wanted, and if he felt like letting me live after he got that answer. Still, a slim-to-none chance is better than zero. I was furious at myself, at him, at fucking everything, and one of the hardest things I’ve ever done was shove all that down and make myself move like he said.

He had zip ties, not really a surprise. Hardware store kind, two of them with one connected through the other. I moved my right hand when he told me to, and tried not to sweat too obviously as the second one zipped tight.

The cabin’s kitchen, living room, and dining room were one big open area. Owen dragged one of the dining room chairs a little distance from the table and turned it a quarter turn, then shoved me into it. He walked around in front of me, still covering me with what turned out to be a beat-to-shit Ruger. He’d gotten a few more tattoos since the last time I’d seen him, and bulked up some. A lot of guys do that when they’re inside, from boredom and sometimes for self-preservation. But it wasn’t just the physical; his whole attitude was different. If you deal with skips for long enough, you start to get a spidey sense about which ones might be a problem, and Owen…yeah. Too bad for me I hadn’t seen him first.

“Where’s Tara at?” he demanded.

Shit. “We rolled her up this afternoon.”

“Answer the fucking question.”

I blinked. “You mean where is she right this second? I don’t know, probably halfway to Memphis.” I’m not sure what he thought the answer was going to be, but it wasn’t that.

“Why the hell would she be halfway to Memphis?”

“Because that’s what we do, you know that. We always go straight back when we pick someone up.”

“But you’re still here.”

“We sent her back with one of our guys.”

He looked at me like he didn’t want to believe me, but I’d answered too quick and straightforward to be lying.

“There were four of you. Where’re the other two?”

We locked eyes for a minute, and I didn’t answer him.

A muscle on the side of his jaw twitched, and he closed the distance between us in two steps, grabbed the front of my shirt, and jammed the end of the Ruger under my chin. “We can play this game if you want to, Cade,” he said tightly. “But if someone pulls into this driveway in the next couple minutes, things are going to get loud, and you’re probably going to end it here. Do you understand me?”

“Yeah,” was all I said. I was seething at the absolute insanity of all this. I wouldn’t have minded as much if I was actually, you know, working at the time, because what we do is dangerous and we know that. But it was going to fucking piss me off to bleed out in Amy’s parents’ cabin when I was only there to grab our stuff and get out.

“Who’s Tara with?”

“One of our guys.”

I had maybe a half-second warning as he pulled the Ruger away, and then it smashed into the side of my head. It rocked me pretty well, and I guess it woke up my one smart brain cell, because it occurred to me that escalating the situation probably wasn’t the best strategy.

“What’s his name, Cade?”

“Donnie,” I said through gritted teeth, wondering why the hell he cared.

“The shorter guy? Gray T-shirt?”

“Yeah.”

“Black F-150?”

“…Yeah.”

“So your other two guys are in the Tahoe.”

I looked at him. He waited.

“Yeah.”

He let go of me and went to look out the front window.

So that was unsettling. He knew how many of us there were; fine, someone could have let him know there were four guys looking for him. It happens. But someone actually describing us in detail, like down to names? I mean, what the actual fuck? It’s not like we go around introducing ourselves to everyone we run into. Maybe he’d seen us somewhere without us seeing him. But even if he had, how the hell had he found this place?

“If you called Donnie and told him to come back, would he?” he asked.

“No. There’s no reason we’d need him to do that. He’d know something was up.”

He muttered something under his breath and glared out the front window for a while longer. Then he looked back at me speculatively, checked the window again, and finally nodded to himself. The Ruger disappeared into a low-profile waistband rig, and he pushed one of the living room chairs a few feet over to block the front door. They were big old chunky wood-frame chairs, the kind you always see in mountain cabins. Another one was angled toward me, and he sat down on the arm of it.

“What do you think are the chances,” he asked, “that your crew would trade Tara for you?”

~~~

[Chapter 2]

#in the wind #long post #original fic #adult language #first person pov #kinda slow burn to start #your patience will be rewarded

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calzona-ga · 7 years ago

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Showrunner Krista Vernoff and out trans actor Alex Blue Davis talk with THR about how they'd like the ABC medical drama to advance the storylines for trans characters and actors.

There's a line of dialogue in Thursday's Grey's Anatomy that showrunner Krista Vernoff rewrote more times than she can count. But the impact of the line — from out trans actor Alex Blue Davis (who plays new intern Casey) to his boss, Bailey (Chandra Wilson) — was worth reworking a million times: "I'm a proud trans man, Dr. Bailey. I like for people to get to know me before they find out my medical history."

The moment comes after Casey has just saved Bailey and all of Grey Sloan Memorial from a hacker who, having taken over its computer systems and air conditioning, left several patients in jeopardy and pushed the hospital to the brink of closing. The episode also followed Casey's very personal reveal, having let both his new colleagues and viewers alike get to know him as a person before they learn something deeply personal about him.

"We worked very hard and very closely with Alex and [LGBTQ advocacy group] GLAAD on this storyline," Vernoff tells The Hollywood Reporter. "The scene in which Casey disclosed to Bailey that he was a 'proud trans man' was rewritten more times than anything else — we wanted it exactly right."

Inspired by President Donald Trump's proposed (and since blocked) ban on transgender individuals serving in the armed forces, Vernoff set out to tell a story about a trans veteran. Vernoff then intentionally cast a trans actor for the role of Dr. Casey Parker, one of the long-running medical drama's six new interns for season 14.

"We wanted the audience to get to know this character before they knew his private medical information; we wanted his disclosure to not feel like an 'A-ha!' shock but a genuine unfolding of this character's truth when he felt safe with someone," Vernoff says.

Thursday's episode resolved the hospital's cliffhanger from last year's midseason finale as Casey confides in Bailey that he was arrested for hacking into the DMV's computer system. Bailey is initially stunned as her background check on her new intern didn't catch that very important fact. That's when Casey discloses that there was a mistake on his driver's license that wasn't a typo: his local DMV declined to issue him a new license with his proper gender after he transitioned so he hacked into the system and fixed it himself.

"A lot of people don't understand what you mean when you say 'mistake' on a driver's license — they think it's a typo," Davis tells THR. "It wasn't enough for people to understand what female-to-male is and it's hard to have that changed [on your driver's license] in a lot of states. It's a serious issue."

Davis, whose previous credits included episodes of 2 Broke Girls andNCIS: Los Angeles, says he knew when he was cast that he'd be playing a character with comedic sensibilities that come from a Sandra Oh-like level of directness — who also was transgender. "What's cool about the show, the episode and Krista's vision for this character is he's about way more than being trans," Davis says, noting that he sees Casey's story as unexplored territory on the small screen. "I cried at the table read, it was very moving for me. I've been waiting for a moment like this on TV my whole life. I am so honored I got to say that line on TV because it's a long time coming."

Indeed. Just like Ellen's coming out on her ABC comedy in 1997 proved to be a landmark moment in television and pop culture, transgender characters have become more common on the small screen: Showtime's Shameless features trans actor Elliot Fletcher (who also played trans characters on Faking It and The Fosters) in a romantic storyline with a gay character; Orange Is the New Black star Laverne Cox made history last season as broadcast's first openly trans actress playing a transgender series regular character (on CBS' short-lived Doubt) and multiple trans actors have had roles on Amazon's Transparent. But what Davis and Vernoff hope Grey's can do is advance the types of storytelling featuring trans characters and actors.

"Trans people for years have been represented as punchlines, victims and villains and not as whole people and I was not aware of that until I went through the experience of my friend's son disclosing that he was transgender," Vernoff says.

Those (married) friends were former Grey's Anatomy showrunners Tony Phelan and Joan Rater (whose son helped inspire Cox's character on Doubt) and whom Vernoff remains close with after working with them as far back as season two of the Shondaland medical drama. (Phelan and Rater's son, Tom Phelan, played a trans character on Freeform's GLAAD Award-winning drama The Fosters.)

"When Tom transitioned, I found myself confused, frightened and bewildered by it all because I had never personally known a trans person or understand what it meant for Tom," Vernoff confesses. Rater, Vernoff recalls, at the time sent a lengthy email to friends and family in which she posed questions and answers that they might have about her son. Vernoff was moved by the experience and never forgot the feeling of love and acceptance she saw for Tom from Phelan and Ratner and those around them.

"Realizing that a trans person is like any other person with a journey in this lifetime — they are not victims, villains, weird or wrong; they're none of the things people believe when they support laws like the one that Trump put forward," Vernoff says. "My goal as a storyteller was to help illuminate that experience as an ally. I reached out to GLAAD for help in doing that because I am only an ally and not a member of LGBTQ community. They were more than happy to help."

For the L.A.-born Davis, also a singer-songwriter whose music has been featured on shows including MTV's Pranked, seeing more inclusive storytelling in which trans characters are not sensationalized is a welcome change.

"TV is opening up a greater range of roles [for trans characters]: Laverne played a lawyer on Doubt, and I'm playing a doctor — both roles haven't really been seen before [for trans characters]," Davis says. "People can see trans folks in a new light: these are people who walk among us and are human beings who have lives. They're not defined by being trans." And just like the gay actors playing straight roles debate that has (thankfully) come and gone, Davis and Vernoff hope the next frontier is seeing trans actors playing characters in which their gender is not the central storyline as well as trans actors playing heterosexual characters where their trans-ness also has no impact on the role.

"What's important for me to remember is there are opportunities out there where I don't have to play trans," Davis says. "I'm an actor. I love acting. I do love that I'm also representing a group of people who have been underrepresented, and that's awesome. But being trans is not my identity; I identify as male. There are male roles out there that I want to play. And being an actor who happens to be trans, it'd be awesome if all those roles opened up for me because people see me and how I define myself."

As for what comes next for Casey, Vernoff says the writers have talked about casting a love interest for Davis' character. The showrunner also hopes to reunite with Fletcher, with whom she worked on Shameless, and cast the actor as "just a dude" on Grey's.

"There's so many beautiful stories to tell and representation changes minds and hearts," Vernoff notes of the impact of art on society. She pointed to Grey's creator Shonda Rhimes adding characters like Arizona (Jessica Capshaw) and Callie (Sara Ramirez) at a time when it was still considered a rarity to put gay or bisexual people on TV and having audiences fall in love with them before revealing their sexuality. "When there's bigotry in the world, people can point and say, 'No, I have a friend who is gay and it's someone you know' — and you realize that it's a character you love on TV. That's how we influence people to open minds and hearts."

That's part of the reason Vernoff wants to try and avoid telling a story in which Casey faces any backlash just because of who he is. "One of the things we talked about with GLAAD is wouldn't it be revolutionary to just tell human stories about trans characters? There's a fair amount of hate that's already depicted and hate feeds hate. I just wanted Casey to be a whole person who is an Army veteran, a good doctor and one of the gang — who happens to be trans. I didn't want to do hate," she says.

That's not to say that Casey won't disclose his medical history again in an upcoming episode as Vernoff and the Grey's writers have yet to break the last third of season 14.

"We talked about how, when and why trans people disclose their private medical history to their community. Casey might disclose out of advocacy, if we had patient who was trans or doctor who was insensitive to patient but I imagine Casey has disclosed to some of the interns," Vernoff notes. "My goal for Casey was to gently disclose his private medical history to Bailey and, by extension, to America and then keep him in our world as the doctor he is becoming. I told GLAAD and Alex that I'm open to continuing to talk and work with them if there are more stories that would be helpful or ways that I can be an ally."

#grey's anatomy #Alex Blue Davis #Krista Vernoff #Casey Parker #thr #scoop

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