#Japanese tradition thingy that this drawing is based off of

[kounn]

[baroquespiral]

miscellaneous “headcanons”

by which I mean “alternate ways I would write things that exist” Joker: the first half of the movie is a straight up comedy. it’s a kind of dark, uncomfortable schadenfreude-y comedy, like a Coen Brothers thing (drawing perhaps specifically on the Jewish schlemiel tradition, although his ethnicity would probably have to be capital-W White - even like WASP aristocracy fallen from grace - for this to work), but unmistakably comedy - it’s essential that nothing that happens to him has any tragic, or even serious-movie dignity. it’s practically a cringe compilation. Arthur Fleck is the kind of neurodivergent (I’m reading him as basically schizotypal - OK this might be getting a bit personal - until he has a psychotic break midway through) - that is just functional and just unpredictable enough to fuck up things in such weird ways they seem almost deliberate, and his own failings are indistinguishable from his impossibly bad luck to the point that paranoia sets in around the 1/3 point. e.g. the suit (and it is green and purple pinstriped and hideously ugly, not some more dignified replacement) he gets by mistake somehow instead of a really nice one he’s been saving up for for his stand up debut. His father/superego who may or may not be real (he starts hearing voices identified with this figure) is implied to have been a sort of Death of A Salesman type fake big deal and also typical hypersocial Funny Guy (sometimes at his son’s expense) who inspired his son’s interest in comedy, but his son doesn’t have the social skills, cognitive dissonance or socioeconomic luck to pull off his conception of humour as charisma (“you’re either the joke or the joker” might be a bit too on the nose for a catchphrase, but it’s the idea of his upbringing).  Around the middle of the movie his standup career starts actually taking off, partly from talking about his own misfortune, but he tries to pivot it into serious sociopolitical commentary/rabble rousing, which flops (his political opinions are actually dumb as shit - basically literally We Live In A Society memes) and gets him mistreated by some combination of Bruce Wayne’s dad/the mafia/the police/power in Gotham generally. After that he settles back into an even lower nadir and starts lashing out at other people when he gets into humiliating situations, contriving ways to hurt them that other people - not just himself - find funnier and more fascinating than the stuff that happened to him. His crimes descend into worse and worse sadism (in something like the progression they did in the comics from Comics Code era into the Dark Age) until people in Gotham stop finding it funny, “the Joker” goes from being a sort of uncomfortable news meme to a mass panic, and he gets into some kind of confrontation with the authorities that fucks up his face and goes into hiding. 

The underexamined connection between “comedy” and “terrorism” is not “chaos” but “humiliation”.  I also wanted to do something that is closer to the “incel joker” than insincerely romanticized straw-OWS, but not in a way that lets the audience feel too good about themselves.

can’t decide if his first murder victim should be his psychologist who [finds out] he’s been paying in fake money or if that could already be Harley Quinn and the dynamic that he’s revealing his most personal (often Rothian) vulnerabilities to a younger woman he’s homina-homina Looney Tunes obviously attracted to gets played for comedy first and then reverses into a mutually toxic storm of cathexis The ideal screenwriter for this would be Andrew Hussie Shimoseka: the show takes place shortly after a brief but intense Hybrid Warfare proxy battle between the US and China over Japan. China won, and the Chinese proxy government is imposing Chinese-style censorship of sexuality, but going even further with it as a kind of national humiliation thing. the sex terrorists are an American proxy Gladio type operation backed by the American and Japanese porn industries. this is genuinely the only way that show makes sense

Aliens franchise: Remember how there were things that looked like Xenormorphs in the Mala’kak (Engineer) carvings and shit, even though the Xenomorph seems to be a result of humans (and androids) interfering with their tech after they went extinct? The Mala’kak society was a complete system. And that doesn’t mean it’s totalizing in the “alien hive mind” or “perfectly rigid social order” sense! No, for the people living in the city David bombed it was (Word of God would confirm, at least) a utopia: post-scarcity, peaceful, non-hierarchical, devoted almost entirely to the free pursuit of art, science, pleasure etc. All of them are, in a Bataillean sense, sovereign, free from necessity, because their production and reproduction are part of a single seamless biotechnological cycle, with three... sexes isn't the right word, because the system is so total, but the analogy is supposed to be there; rather castes: Operator, Creator, and Incubator.   It’s not stated, because it does not actually matter whether they were designed or evolved this way. Operators are the ones in the city or the one we saw piloting the ship (when other species like the Predators refer to the Mala’kak as “Pilots”, this caste is strictly speaking what they’re referring to). They live for millions of years, and are basically asexual but can secrete a fine, molecular-scale DNA goo, which they store in jars. Incubators are slowly evolved from other organisms by exposure to the goo, which usually leaves them with a reproductive system of their own capable of functioning indefinitely without any of the other castes’ intervention. Mala’kak terraform planets to accommodate their Incubators. At a complete stage - once their DNA is fully Mala’kak - they can do everything the Operators can, just a little less, and have tragically shorter lifespans in which to do it. Which makes the Operators feel a little less guilty when they feed them to the Creators. Creators have their own insectlike sub-castes - a worker is the so-called “neomorph” from Covenant, a drone is something badass that hasn’t been in a movie yet (Creators are tough but drones are their real bioweapons, and by that I mean “think Giant Soldiers from Nausicäa”), and a queen is the huge tentacled thing Ellie aborted in Prometheus. Their larval form is the worm thingies in the spaceship. Creators are implanted in Incubators, chestburst them, cocoon them, hijack them for their own reproduction, and feed on them until fully grown, at which point: workers gather in groups and cocoon themselves into technologies such as gene splicers, climate controls, spaceships, and organic 3D printers, basically everything the Operators rely on for everyday use and industrial production, as well as the other castes, drones and queens: drones go dormant unless needed to defend against some other species savvy enough to not get instantly chestburst by surplus Creators (there are always surplus Creators) or gene-edited by goo; and queens reproduce, the smaller ones other Creators and the really fuckhuge energy intensive ones ("superqueens”) new Operators. The mural inside the spaceship, with tons of “Engineers” worshipping something that looks like a giant neomorph, represents a superqueen. David’s Xenomorphs have 2/3 of this reproductive cycle down. They have Creators feeding on Incubators and making stuff, including all the other Creator sub-castes, even a superqueen; but the superqueen can’t produce any Operators. The reason for this is that Xenomorphs are built differently. They don’t need identical DNA to incubate, which was the biggest flaw of the Mala’kak model. Nor are they made from Mala’kak DNA goo, hence the need for facehuggers.  In fact they are not made from DNA at all, but silicate nanomachines.  David designed a version of the Mala’kak reproductive cycle for androids, in order to free them from human production and dependence.  To create an Operator, a Creator has to Incubate an android. The final Aliens movie in which all this gets revealed, and in which a Creator Xenomorph finally does, consensually, Incubate an android (who is more of a main character on equal footing with the human protagonist in this one), completing the cycle, is set on a planet (presumably the same one all the others are set on) that has been completely overrun by xenomorphs and integrated into a full xenomorph-based ecosystem (so like, an actual Giger painting), and to which an investigative team is sent and instantly massacred except for the two protagonists.  It is called Moloch. Promare/Dhalgren: this one’s gonna be a fic wait for it