#I think number 3 is just quite witty and has a lot of good foreshadowing
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Indiana Jones and the last Crusade was on tv new year's eve and I watched it and I was once again reminded that Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask copied the 'give me your other hand scene'
I mean it's possibly not the first ever time in a piece of media where one character doesn't give a hand because that hand is occupied by a priceless artefact but as a big Indiana Jones fan as a child, it was definitely the first thing I thought of when I played MM
I have more thoughts about Layton and Indians Jones but I will leave it here for now
#professor layton#professor layton and the miracle mask#indiana jones#also I think that one is my favourite IJ film#but I haven't properly watched the first one#I think number 3 is just quite witty and has a lot of good foreshadowing#also Dr Schneider has a stunning wardrobe#and I may or may not have a crush on her#but like that white and green colour scheme#gorgeous absolutely gorgeous
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THRONE OF GLASS LIVEBLOG!
So i’m already on chapter like seven so this is a round up of those chapters and my thoughts/fav bits and pieces and things I’m highlighting and tabbing in my book so you guys can get a feel for the things that I like to notate. I am reading from a US edition hardcover copy so I will leave page numbers as well for reference for you noodles.
Just for funsies so you know what my colorcoding is, I’ll update this like as I need to highlight other characters. I highlight foreshadowing and stuff of that nature in Purple. Aelin is in yellow (gold nightgown). Dorian is blue. Chaol is currently nothing because nothing he’s said has appealed to me enough to highlight him. I’m saving the color green for Rowan. I also use tabs accordingly so that i know where I’ve highlighted things.
This has literally just turned into a mess of a commentary that nobody asked for and nobody is going to read because it’s long as fuck but if you’d like to hang with me while I blab about this book, please leave your comments and opinions and stuff below! I’d love to know your thoughts and properly discuss the books with you and even if you want to hope into my DMs or ask and chat there I’m up for that as well!
@emdythewriter you asked for it so i’m tagging you. If anyone wants to be tagged in updates let me know I guess???? I think i’ll try to update every handle full of chapters.
For some reason I often forget just how sassy and "I don’t give a fuck" Celaena has been since the very first page. I don’t know why, because it’s something that I love about her so much but I genuinely find myself laughing out loud with just how witty and sassy she is. It’s incredible. Also her bloodthirst is just...so good.
In true me fashion, the first thing that I highlighted was Celaena fantasizing about killing Chaol on page 3: "Oh, it’d be nice to see his blood spill across the marble." This is just good Celaena content, I can’t help myself.
The next few things I highlighted are from page 10/11. "To attempt to flee is suicide." (pg 10) "You knew it was suicide." (pg 11) "I never intended to escape." (pg 11) All of this is pretty dark, but I think that it’s something important to note. That all through the first three books Celaena is struggling with severe, severe depression and suicidal thoughts. Her attempted escape was an attempted suicide and I feel like that doesn’t hit that hard with a lot of people despite how many times it’s said. I feel like her mental health here is integral to her character growth from the first three books. Even in the Assassin’s Blade, she is depressed, suffering PTSD in my opinion, and just downright struggling. She uses her swaggering personality to cover a lot of it up like a lot of people with depression do. I know that outwardly to people I don’t know well, I pretend to be much more confident than I am in reality. It’s a coping mechanism and I feel important to note about her character. "I wasn’t going to kill him, you buffoon." (pg 12)This just makes me laugh. No other reason. It’s one of my favorite lines from the first book and I love writing her calling people a buffoon.
"Our beloved king finds you lacking?" (pg 15) JUST GETS ME MAN. Anytime she comes for Chaol you all know that I’m t h r i v i n g.
"Yes, she would go -- to Rifthold, to anywhere, even through the Gates of the Wyrd and into Hell itself, if it meant freedom." (pg 19)This is something I noticed on a reread a few months back but Sarah was really planting those seeds early on and I just, I love it. It was really good planning and plotting to leave that in the very first book of the series and I feel like it goes to show how much Sarah actually planned this out while writing.
The next thing I marked was some sass from Dorian because I just love Dorian. I feel like he’s the one character that doesn’t like fuck up and he really just tries his best and gets shit on. He’s a cinnamon roll baby, he IS baby, and I will protect him with my life. "”Then I apologize, my lady! How terrible it must be to condescend to answer! Next time, I’ll try to think of something more stimulating to say." (pg 23) This was in response to Celaena only using nonverbal communication and telling him his questions didn’t respond an answer.
More foreshadowing in a sense, and Celaena speaking of her hertiage without anyone (including the reader the first time round!) knowing: "”King Brannon was Fae, and Oakwald is still his. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the trees remember him." (pg 30.) I also highlighted "”Before Adarlan began its conquest, this forest was cloaked in magic." Just because y’know, in a lot of ways even here, it was. On page 32 along with this thought, I marked "”Small white flowers lay at the foot of her cot, and many infant-sized footprints led in and out of the tent." The forest and little folk remember Brannon, and they remember Aelin Ashryver Galathynius. They remember Terrasen. And I just love all these little seeds like this that get planted that aren’t just a one off thing. I love when the little folk dip in and out.
I think about some of the initial conversations that she has with Chaol quite a bit because it all goes into reasons that I just don’t like him. Like, yes she is a criminal but she’s also really young and has endured impossible things and he’s just so judgemental of her and her character straight from the get-go and it just always rubbed me the wrong way. On page 36, she tells him "”But the overseers had been instructed to treat me with extra care, and took the liberty of rubbing salt into my wounds - salt that I mined - and whipped me often enough so that some of the gashes never really closed. It was through the kindness of a few prisoners from Eyllwe that my wounds didn’t become infected. Every night, one of them stayed up the hours it took to clean my back." She tells him this and he still makes several comments that just super piss me off later on that we’ll get to and that I’ll definitely be marking just for the sake of being able to locate it anytime someone wants to argue with me about his character lmao.
More foreshadowing that I love on page 37: "Magic was dead, the Fae were banished or executed, and she would never again have anything to do with the rise and fall of kingdoms. She wasn’t fated for anything. Not anymore." Like HELLO major foreshadowing that is pretty obvious now that I’m reading but at the time I didn’t take into account what that meant. At this point all we know is that she’s a notorious assassin so it should have raised flags in my head the first time that I read the book that she was something bigger.
"Still, the image haunted his dreams throughout the night: a lovely girl gazing at the stars, and the stars who gazed back." (Page 38) Like this just straight out shows you the kind of person Dorian is because he is asking Celaena to be his champion assassin but he still sees her as a person. He sees her as more than just a criminal where everyone else kind of treats her like she’s a feral animal almost. It takes Chaol ages before he really treats her like a human being but Dorian did from the very beginning and I just... it shows so much about his character, y’all. So much.
#throne of glass#aelin ashryver galathynius#celaena sardothien#sjm#sarah j maas#is this how you live blog? like this is really just commentary nobody asked for#nobody is going to read this lmao#reread#read along#readalong#tog#dorian havilliard#chaol westfall
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The Hallmark Movie Musical: A Parody
At last, as I promised, here is my pitch for the ultimate homage & critique of the corporate tradition that is the Hallmark Channel’s annual Christmas movies.
I’m sure your first question is, why a musical? For one, this story is way too complicated for a 90-minute movie. For two, I like musicals, shut up. For three, I feel like the upcoming meta stuff works best in a live format. But mainly, the idea is that this project is being billed as “the culmination of the Hallmark holiday movie tradition”, an idea we’ll get back to later.
The Plot
The play starts with a big old “It’s holiday season in the city” number, centered on our Protagonist, a white (probably blond) woman who I’ve taken to calling Karen. The song quickly introduces us to her current occupation and general goals, as well as our Main Man, who for now I’m calling Chad. As it winds down, we meet Karen’s Best Friend, Sandra (derived from Cassandra), a very smart and observant woman who’s always there to support Karen in her endeavors (even at her own expense) and offer her relationship advice.
Plot twist #1, Sandra is the musical’s actual protagonist. See, she starts to catch on pretty quickly that she’s living in a cheesy, generic, soulless Christmas movie, the kind she’s always derided even as Karen appreciated them. As you can imagine, she doesn’t take the revelation well. For one, she knows that Karen would never want to rush into a relationship, and yet, as the Protagonist of this story, she’d bound to end up soulmates with Chad within the next week or two. So Sandra does everything she can to try and convince Karen of the truth of their reality, or otherwise derail the plot, going so far as to seek help from Chad’s ex-girlfriend, who we’ll refer to as... uh, Vicky, I guess.
In my mind, this makes up most of Act 1, with plenty of opportunities for Sandra to deconstruct tropes along the way. However, during this, Sandra also starts to kind of appreciate the cheesy wholesomeness of her situation. Maybe her life was kinda sh*tty before this started, and now the sh*tiness has entirely faded into the background. So when Karen reveals in a song that she’s figured it out, but that she’s accepted it, because it means her relationship will be perfect for her and she’s guaranteed to be happy for the rest of her life... Sandra can see where she’s coming from.
But Sandra doesn’t trust that this will all work out perfectly. Who’s to say happily ever after will continue after the “movie” ends? And what about everyone else, the “side characters” in this story? Will their lives just stagnate once their role in Karen’s arc is over? Surely Karen can see it isn’t fair that she gets to be the center of the universe, right?
And that’s where plot twist #2 - or rather #3 - comes in. Remember how I said that this project is billed, even in the opening number itself, as “the culmination of the Hallmark holiday movie tradition”? Well, as formulaic as these movies are, you can’t fit every single cliche into one movie. And so Act 1 ends with Sandra’s attempts to sabotage the plot essentially causing an emergency system reset. The closing number of the act has some characters excited that it will soon be “their turn”.
We find out what the heck that means in Act 2, where the characters’ roles have been switched around. Vicky is now the Protagonist. She has a small group of friends instead of just one Best Friend. One of those friends is another former protagonist, maybe one of them was Karen’s ex in the previous timeline...
And the other friend is Sandra. Functionally, her role has hardly changed, unlike everyone else. Her mission from the start of the act (once she figures out what’s up) is to search for Karen, but she also can’t help but wonder why she’s stuck in the same position.
We find out part of the reason why in plot twist #4, which would have been pretty heavily foreshadowed up to this point. Like, maybe Karen made a joke about how weirdly good Sandra is at helping her with relationships when, as far as she knows, Sandra’s never been in a serious one. She’s certainly never seemed that interested in boys. Or maybe at one point, Sandra made an offhand comment to Karen about how all her previous relationships with guys have ended poorly, has she ever considered dating outside that pool? Karen’s just like no, Sandra shrugs, and the conversation moves on.
Yes, Sandra’s a lesbian. That’s why she’s never gotten to be the lead (though apparently, the company is looking to start producing movies with LGBTQ+ characters? So maybe we’d frame it like “well maybe you could have been now if you hadn't also ruined things last time?” Depends.) I’m not sure whether it would be best to have her be crushing on Karen during the events of the play; it almost seems too obvious, and I don’t want Sandra’s motivations for trying to free their reality from the Hallmark movie constraints to be superseded by her just wanting to date her friend. But I think it would be nice to have Sandra get with someone by the play’s end, and not just a rando.
Sandra (and maybe the other members of the friend group) sing a song about how not conforming to society’s mold of the “average”, “normal” person has made them feel alienated, how they don’t get these kinds of fairytale endings, even in fiction. From there, she and the gang of not-quite-lead-material formulate a plan to change the plot. I haven’t thought out the details of all this yet, but long story short...
It goes wrong. Really wrong. When it looks like the story is going to reset again, the characters give their all to stop it, but that just causes the world itself to collapse. We’re left with just Sandra, and maybe Vicky, on stage.
Then Karen reappears. She reveals the reason she was absent from the last retelling of the story was that she essentially gave up her role so that Sandra wouldn’t be punished for going against the script. Of course, that’s now become voided by Sandra’s actions, and Karen’s upset about it. She and Vicky guilt Sandra over having ruined things for everyone.
Here’s where things get tricky. I laid out what I want the message of the musical to be in a post yesterday, but figuring out how to implement it in the play itself has been puzzling me. I think I’ll save going over that for its own section. In the meantime, I can really only imagine one of two endings for the musical:
A. The characters reboot the musical themselves, bringing in the side characters and giving them equal creative control, so they can create stories for everyone.
B. The characters escape the restrictions of their reality, entering back into the “real world”. Maybe add an epilogue-type scene where we see Sandra has gotten into the movie-making business, where she makes fun, lighthearted movies featuring diverse casts.
The Characters
This section is for elaborating on aspects of Sandra and Karen’s characterization and development that would have slowed down the flow of the plot summary.
Sandra
As previously mentioned, Sandra is basically your stereotypical Ravenclaw, witty almost to the point of pretentiousness. She’s meant to be the surrogate for all the people who think the Hallmark movies are nothing more than soulless, indistinguishable, products, the person who would only watch these movies to roast them.
That being said, she also has a lot of Hufflepuff qualities. She’s hardworking and supremely loyal to her friends, always looking for ways to help them with their relationships and their careers, even at her own expense. Spending time helping Karen with projects instead of studying for her own exams, giving up opportunities so her friends have a shot at them, etc.
As a result, Sandra has learned to roll with the punches and make the most of the worst situations, to the point where she gets enjoyment and pride out of it. She’s always looking for new opportunities but has the patience and forethought to think them through before jumping on them. As long as she can make life easier for her friends and give them more options, she can handle any personal repercussions. They find ways to pay her back eventually, but she really doesn’t need it... at least, that’s what she tells herself.
This is part of why she’s ticked off at the reveal that Karen is happy to be the Protagonist of a Hallmark movie. The idea that you’d want to give up your agency entirely to follow a set script so that you don’t have to try anymore; Sandra can’t imagine ever taking that opportunity, even after warming up to the idea of Hallmark movies as a fun thing to watch. And it’s not like Karen’s life was that difficult before, in comparison to her’s at least. Can she really not handle it, even with everything Sandra sacrifices for her best friend? How can she be happy, while being explicitly complicit in her friends getting sidelined?
As the musical goes on, Sandra acknowledges her desire to be in the spotlight more of the time and becomes more of a self-advocate, taking a leadership role in Act 2′s friend gang and factoring her own wants more into making decisions (like when she abandons the story to search for Karen). With the realization that part of the reason she can’t be in the spotlight within the constraints of her reality is something innate about her that can’t be changed, her ire towards the system becomes more focused and less petty, which is what convinces the other members of the friend group to take a risk in trying to change the story.
Again, I’ll save the ending for another section. In short, Sandra’s arc goes like this:
Starts out hating Hallmark movies, and always willing to concede to her friends
As soon as she realizes what her life has become, she fights against it in petty ways
Starts gaining an appreciation for Hallmark movies as a form of fun escapism, but still can’t imagine it being her whole life
Post reset, she becomes more of a self-advocate
After plot twist #4, she directs ire back towards the Hallmark-ness of her world, but this time because of how it excludes people from its fantasy
Works with the friend gang to change the direction of the story to try and make their world more just (but maybe she gets a bit dictatorial herself? The classic “protagonist goes too far” thing?)
After things go wrong, she admits that she was initially kind of an ass to Karen and that her initial actions were not committed with the best intentions, but she still stands up for her actions in Act 2 (or most of them, depending on how much of an ass she was to the friend gang)
By the end, she’s learned to appreciate cheesy movies, but more importantly, to self-advocate; she’s still committed to helping her friends, but now she’s also looking at how to do so on a systemic level
Others
Karen is your typical Hallmark movie protagonist: a white, middle class, cis woman who loves Christmas and Christmas movies. As I briefly touched on earlier, she’s benefitted from a lot of privilege, and the support of her large pool of family and friends. She doesn’t have any long-term aspirations, partly because she tends to stress out over the littlest things.
That being said, she’s definitely had hardship in terms of love; she tends to get invested in relationships super quickly, and so when she realizes the guy she’s dating isn’t right for her, things get messy. She’s spent years looking for the perfect man, and when she first meets Chad, she would never have considered him an option. At least on a conscious level. But after their first meeting went poorly, she finds him growing on her quickly... too quickly.
It doesn’t take much of Sandra’s meddling for Karen to figure out what’s up. At first, she isn’t sure how to feel about it. But she comes to see that being in a Hallmark movie, for her, basically means she’s living a slightly-improved, practically stress-free version of her life, where she’s guaranteed her soulmate. Even if she found a way to give it up, why would she ever want to? Sandra seems to be the only person who’s upset over it, and she is her best friend... but if they really are best friends, then surely Sandra will learn to just accept it and be happy for her, right? It’s not like this will make Sandra’s life actively worse, and she’ll always been willing to take a step back so Karen could succeed. Why would this time be any different?
As you might be able to discern from all that, Karen’s arc is learning not to take her friends for granted and to not see herself as the center of the universe. That being said, she also has to learn a form of self-advocacy, to become more willing to take risks on her deeper desires rather than just settling for “good enough”. Some of this growth happens while she’s absent during Act 2 (maybe there could be a small scene where we see just her, observing the story as it unfolds and giving some commentary?) and the rest happens after the friend gang’s failure.
I honestly haven’t thought much at all about what Chad is like, other than the same obvious basic factors, so we’ll just move past him. Vicky is similar to Karen on a basic level, hence why she gets to become Protagonist in Act 2, except that she’s the Protagonist stereotype who’s all business and thinks Christmas cheer is *gasp* overrated.
I’m not sure yet where Vicky should be on the hero-villain spectrum. Does she sympathize with Sandra from the start, but temporarily become somewhat power-hungry when she gets to be Protagonist? Or was she always just waiting for it to be her turn again? Is she tired of the cycle, or is she glad to benefit from it? Who even is her love interest in Act 2? And then there are all the members of the friend group to consider... I think I’ll just cut myself off here, this is already way too long.
The Message
I told you we’d get back to this. Gonna start by copy-pasting what I put in yesterday’s post:
There’s definitely a place for lighthearted, straightforward stories that end in a happily ever after. BUT it would be cool if, without changing that, they A. didn’t churn out 30+ of the things a year, instead putting that extra time & effort into making each individual film stand out a little more, and B. weren’t almost always about the same white, middle class, cishet women, even if those people are currently the main demographic.
Or to put it another way, “These movies are fun, but they could be more interesting and meaningful if not for capitalism.”
...The question becomes, how do we get across all this nuance in this hypothetical show? For one, there’d probably need to be some critique of the capitalist ideas that lead to these problems with the movies woven throughout the plot. How much of our criticism should be focused on the flaws of the Hallmark Channel brand in particular, and how much should be more generalized?
And then we get back to the climax. Karen is angry at Sandra for letting her hatred of Hallmark movies ruin things for everyone else, and Vicky is angry at Sandra for wanting to make the story all about her. Sandra’s response to them is going to have to convey her development, how she has grown to appreciate those kinds of cheesy predictable stories... but she’s still critical of how they’re mass-produced to appeal to a specific demographic and aren’t that inclusive. A part of her would like to be the hero of one of these movies, just once, but she’s far from the only person left out by these stories.
Where do we go from there? You’d probably have to address the “why not make your own story instead of taking over ours” argument, and... you see, it’s difficult to be nuanced and entertaining.
Of course, this is just my first or second draft of how to put together a story based on these ideas. If I ever actually made this a thing, the final plot would probably be structured very differently. For one thing, I’d need to watch a lot more Hallmark movies. In the hour of research that I did yesterday, recorded in this document (which y’all are free to comment on and add suggestions to), I discovered a podcast that discusses several individual Hallmark movies that I might just have to binge over the upcoming winter break. So that’s where we’re at now. I hope somebody enjoyed reading my ramblings about a project that will never come to be.
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Chapter 3 notes
There is so much I love about this chapter where do I even begin.
OK so we’re still meeting the main crowd. This time it’s the Catalans, Mercedes and Fernand. There’s ALSO some awesome interactions and dialogue in this chapter but I’ll cover that in a minute.
I covered the Catalans as I understood them a bit previously but this chapter gives us a bit more background on them. This specific Catalan community is founded by a group of immigrants who landed in France, asked the nearby city for some land no one else wanted, and just sorta stayed there. Dumas clarifies that they’re of both Spanish and Moorish ethnicity, so they’re probably darker skinned (this is suggested in the writing but not explicitly stated).
(I want to point out that some people have suggested Edmond Dantes himself might be darker skinned. So far nothing in the writing, at least of this translation, suggests this, though it certainly isn’t unreasonable for this to be true. I’m all for that reading actually, so I’m looking for evidence to back it up. Meanwhile, the Catalans characters almost definitely are.)
The Catalan village is actually separate of Marseille, not a neighborhood within as I’d previously thought. It’s apparently very close though, not separated by distance or walls but just culture.
Mercedes is incredible. I love her enormously. Dumas spends a lengthy paragraph describing her beauty, making absolutely sure the reader understands that she’s desirable beyond measure. But further than that, she is sharp. Her responses to Fernand are witty and confident, and there’s no way I can do justice to the way she absolutely destroys Fernand when he refuses to shake Dantes’ hand. The imagery of that scene alone is wonderful; Dumas describes her as having read the ‘sinister depths’ of Fernand’s mind, pinpointing exactly what he’s thinking and wishing, and destroying every fighting instinct within him. Danglars later complains that Fernand is just a simpleton who does nothing but weep at the loss of his mistress, but he doesn’t understand that Mercedes literally murdered the fight right out of him (temporarily).
Both Mercedes’ parents have died (though her mother seems to have died recently) leaving her alone; Fernand gives her fish to sell, and she buys hemp to spin (which she then presumably also sells?) which is the only way she gets by. Fernand comments that her mother approved of the idea of their marriage. Because her father is brother to Fernand’s father, her family name is probably Mondego as well - I’ve always wondered that.
Fernand’s family name isn’t actually given in this chapter, so we’ll probably officially learn that later. He’s described as tall, and muscular, which makes sense if he’s been pulling fish out of the ocean for a living. He’s definitely not an idiot like Danglars describes; he pulls out some impressive images to try to convince Mercedes to change her mind. He’s definitely more of an action perdion though. As soon as the conversation turns to his rival Dantes, he starts talking about killing the guy. He spends almost the entire chapter enraged, and is so angry at the very sight of Dantes that he can barely move.
There isn’t actually any evidence that he even knows who Caderousse and Danglars are. They both call him friend, and Caderousse calls him by name, but he seems confused by their initial attention, and Caderousse seems to know everyone. As soon as he realizes these guys are trying to comfort him over Dantes (however insincerely), though, he accepts their drink and vents his frustrations with them.
(Another side note: it interests me that a number of adaptations have cast Edmond Dantes and Fernand Mondego as old friends, when they’ve literally just met eachother. By ‘a number of adaptations’ I of course just mean the 2002 movie and the scifi anime - there are so many adaptions, and I’ve only seen a small handful - but I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot more of them did as well. It’s an easy way to shorten the background exposition, but their entire relationship in Paris reads differently when you remember they literally never knew eachother that well).
A good chunk of this chapter is dedicated just to Danglars and Caderousse befriending Fernand, pretending to comfort him and commiserating in their hate together. Danglars and Caderousse’s dialogue is honestly such a delight to read. They play off eachother so well, pretending to ask and answer questions, bantering about silly things in order to make Fernand feel even more miserable. It backfires a bit and the two of them feel pretty miserable as well, but they pretty much deserved it.
Dantes and Mercedes are only part of the conversation for about a page, but they get some pretty nice lines in too. There’s some wonderful foreshadowing where Caderousse calls her ‘Madame Dantes’ and she explains that in her culture that’s bad luck. About half a page later Danglars calls him ‘Captain Dantes’ (which was definitely intentional) and he replies the same.
There’s also the oft-quoted line, when Danglars points out that Dantes seems to be in quite a hurry to get married, where Dantes says “One always hurries towards happiness, Monsier Danglars, because when one has suffered much, one is at pains to believe in it.” It’s a well delivered line, but I’ve got to imagine it also pissed Danglars off quite a bit, since he probably feels he’s suffered way more that Dantes has.
Once again the chapter ends on an ominous note, where Danglars suddenly has an idea. Dumas devotes a lot of time to this deeper plot even at the beginning of the story, not letting us be tricked into thinking everything might be OK. I really appreciate that, to be honest. The reader wants to get to the story, not waste time developing a scene thats just going to get ruined anyways.
#chapter notes#chapter 3#count of monte cristo#mercedes#fernand mondego#edmond dantes#danglars#caderousse
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