#Which makes everyone think there's something up with Miko even though she seems relatively normal for the town

[ravennevermore12]

Makes me think that all of Jack's classmates haven't gotten the memo and it's only the bully that pesters him that's playing along and that's why they always ask who he is and claim they've never seen him around before.

Hear me out:

What if Jasper, Nevada was similar to Nightvale? Maybe a sister city or perhaps a “gateway” town?

It would tie in details of Raf’s inexplicable understanding of Bumblebee’s binary, Agent Fowler’s lonesome agent state, June’s honing ability on Jack within the secret Autobot base, and Jasper’s rather indifference to the Cybertronian war.

Sure, Raf helped purge the Autobot presence online, but there’s no gossip at school? No local news reports of shootings by metal giants, road damage, and reckless driving by driverless cars? So y’all telling me that Jasper got weirder shit going on?!?

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Higurashi Gou Ep20

In which Satoko gets sent to gay baby jail for crimes against the aristocracy.

Also I’m finally vindicated in talking so much about Umineko spoilers, lmao.

Thoughts under the cut.

Oh boy where do I even begin with this one, lol.

Well, firstly, I actually like how relatively subdued this episode was, compared to my expectations. Like, Satoko getting sent to a literal on-site prison center is extremely fucked up, but I kinda expected something like her straight up murdering someone. Instead it all started when one of her normal traps ended up giving someone minor injuries, and then after she spent a while in prison, she just went back to school, and ended up going on a trip back to Hinamizawa with Rika and the gang where she stumbled her way into the meta world because haha Featherine go brrr.

Which feels a lot less over the top than I was expecting, but I think it’s a good thing that it didn’t turn into some sort of psychotic mass-murder event or something.

Also, the whole angle of miscommunication leading her to think that Rika ratted her out and got her sent to prison is really neat, and helps make the situation way more messy and complicated without making anyone unrealistically evil or anything. It at least makes it a bit more understandable that Satoko would genuinely blame Rika for her current misery.

I still think they’re both more or less equally in the wrong, though, and they both contributed to the miscommunication. Satoko is basically refusing to adjust to the culture of St Lucia’s, and she’s actively pushing away Rika out of stubbornness, while Rika is leaving Satoko alone to go hang out with her new rich friends, and is giving up on reaching out to Satoko at the slightest bit of resistance from her. So neither of them are really doing enough to communicate or compromise, but it fits with how Satoko is unwilling to change herself, while Rika is desperate to have a place where she can stop putting on a childish act all the time.

It’s kinda interesting how many people seem to fall really strongly into the category of either blaming Rika or blaming Satoko for everything going on here. It probably says a lot about each person’s own personality and their own previous friendships.

I’ve seen people disagree about this, but I actually like that the ‘big incident’ ended up just being that one of Satoko’s normal traps ended up hurting someone. It’s way more minor than pretty much anyone expected, and it feels kinda jarring when compared to all the slapstick comedy stuff in this whole series, but I think that sense of contrast is intentional, and it goes to show just how much Satoko isn’t fitting in with her new environment. She comes from a countryside village where this sort of rough-housing is normal, and everyone’s familiar with Satoko’s traps, and she’s trying to apply the exact same things to a stuck-up boarding school full of rich kids who don’t even know her. Back in Hinamizawa the other club members would just brush off having a metal pot land on their head as part of Satoko’s traps, but in this sort of environment it’s something unprecedented and shocking.

There’s also the fact that Satoko usually sets these traps up in rooms that have much lower ceilings, whereas here she had the pots fall from a chandelier high up in a fancy entrance hall, so it’s likely that they fell a lot further than they usually do, and thus picked up more speed and caused more damage. Which in it’s own way goes to show how Satoko just isn’t used to her new environment, and is still trying to act like she’s back in Hinamizawa where everything’s small and cozy and everyone’s willing to put up with some bumps and bruises as part of having fun.

I still feel like there has to be more that goes on to show how Satoko gets to the point of straight up being willing to repeatedly murder Rika across multiple time loops, as well as hurting all of her other friends along the way, but this whole flashback still isn’t over yet.

I’m also getting more and more convinced now that it actually took a while for her to get to the point of actively trying to murder Rika. I think that throughout the first arcs, she was going through her own whole arc where her motives and methods changed as she became more aware of what was going on.

I’m not 100% sure about a lot of this, but I think that in Onidamashi she didn’t even do anything until the very end. I think that arc was her attempting to just go back to how things used to be, and the stuff with Rena and Keiichi wasn’t planned by her at all. She might have done a murder suicide with Rika to start a new loop afterward, but I don’t think she was trying to kill anyone, or even hurt Rika at all. At least not in that arc.

Watadamashi’s one of the more confusing arcs, but I also get the feeling there that she wasn’t really trying to hurt Rika or anyone else. I don’t think she’s the one who killed Rika in that timeline, and I think her going to the Sonozaki estate at the end of the arc was due to her genuinely trying to figure out what happened to her. Same with her suspicion toward Keiichi.

Tataridamashi’s kinda weird in general, and even after all these flashbacks it still feels weird. But with what we’ve seen of Satoko lately, I really don’t thinks he was spending that whole arc just intentionally lying to everyone about the abuse while not actually being abused by Teppei for some reason. Unless she got told about what to expect from Featherine, a post-Matsuribayashi Satoko shouldn’t even have any experience with a timeline where Teppei shows up, and he doesn’t show up in the first two Gou arcs either, so I think everything with her in Tataridamashi was actually genuine.

The stuff at the end of that arc with Ooishi is still a bit of a mystery, though. Maybe that’s where she first starts actively sending people to go kill Rika, but I’m not sure. The question of why she’d change her motives and methods partway through if she started off with innocent intentions is a bit of a mystery, but I get the feeling that Tataridamashi might have been the turning point, since it would have been the point where Satoko really started to realize just how much pain she herself was going to have to deal with in these loops. So that might have pushed her to try and be more forceful in her methods to try and make Rika change her mind about the village, because she wants to get out of the loops as fast as possible, and she’s also stuck in them until she can ��win’ against Rika. Which would fit with how in Nekodamashi she seems genuinely distressed and conflicted about having to kill people. I think that rather than her just being some kind of sadist, she’s just trying to brute-force her win condition as fast as possible while dealing with the escalating stress of being stuck in this loop.

And even if she got cured of her syndrome over time after Matsuribayashi, being sent back in time to her pre-teen body might mean that she started slowly developing it again as the loops went on, which might have made her more willing to resort to violence to try and escape.

So basically I think the story boils down to Satoko being given the ability to go back in time with time-looping powers, in a way that’s structured as a game between her and Rika where her goal is to convince Rika to stay in the village forever instead of leaving for St Lucia’s. So at first Satoko didn’t really have any reason or motive to be violent about it, but as time went on and she became exposed to all of the different scenarios with her friends going crazy and killing each other, and in general all the trauma that she basically side-stepped in the Matsuribayashi timeline, she got more and more desperate, and more and more violent.

I at least like the idea of Satoko basically taking for granted that she happened to wind up in the good timeline where everything went well and nobody went crazy and killed each other, and now her attempt to go back and ‘fix things’ has caused her to trap herself in the same hellish loop that Rika was trying to escape from in the first place.

I could also totally see Featherine setting this up and watching it unfold because she knew it’d be fun to watch, lol.

And yeah on that note, Featherine’s officially in the story now. So that’s a thing.

I guess we’ll see how things go next week, but I think it’s kinda fruitless to try and deny that this is Featherine. I could see them not using her name explicitly, but for all intents and purposes this is literally just Featherine, and at some point we’d just be arguing about meaningless semantics.

They did adjust her design a little bit to fit the Japanese mythology vibe of Higurashi more, but I’d say her design is still about 80% the same, and they still included both her distinct memory device and the green sash with the medal on it that has nothing to do with Japanese mythology. They just replaced her cane with a staff, adjusted part of her dress to look more like Hanyuu’s outfit, and gave her some eye-shadow.

I get the feeling she’ll just introduce herself to Satoko as ‘Oyashiro-sama’, to explain what Satoko meant about meeting Oyashiro-sama and being made into their new miko, but she’d still be Featherine at the end of the day.

One detail that might go a long way to explain things one way or another is how Featherine mentions having met Satoko at some point in the past. Which might mean that she’ll just straight up say that she’s a version of Hanyuu and reference the events of Matsuribayashi. I know people still disagree on if Hanyuu and Featherine are the same person, but I think that for all intents and purposes they are. If anything, ‘Gou!Featherine’ might exist to show how that transition happened in the first place. Which is probably along the lines of Hanyuu ‘going to sleep’ after Matsuribayashi, physically maturing and having her personality adjust, and then going on to straight up ascend into witch-hood. But we’ll see how it goes.

I’ve also seen people suggest that it might tie in to the hypothetical connection between Satoko and Lambda, which might just cut straight to the chase and directly bring Featherine’s role in Umineko into this, but that seems less likely. I still like the idea of Lambda being relevant to this somehow, but I’m not sure if she’ll come into play just yet.

It might annoy some people, but I hope that they just commit to having Satoko and Lambda literally be the same person, and just have it be a bit of a time paradox where maybe Satoko becomes Lambda after going through this loop, and she then goes back in time and gives Takano her blessing to trigger the original events of Higurashi. Which might be a bit of a clunky retcon that’d annoy people who don’t like paradoxes, but honestly at this point it’d be the most satisfying way to actually explain who Lambda is, and how her relationship with Bern even started in the first place.

This also feels like exactly the sort of situation where Featherine would grant Satoko the powers of a witch as part of setting up this whole loop, like what Lambda did with Takano and Beatrice. Satoko gets to become a new witch of Hinamizawa for the duration of the time loop, and maybe at the end of it, both she and Bern ascend into full-fledged witches who leave their game board and become voyagers.

Though, like with how I think they’ll avoid outright using the name ‘Featherine’, they might just use the word ‘miko’ as a sort of analogue for the concept of witches, so it fits Higurashi’s setting more.

There’s also the point that, as Satoko mentioned, she had broken into the Saiguden as a child, but I dunno if Featherine is referring to that. Honestly that whole plot point still feels super weird to me. She brings it up in this episode, so it’s not like Ryukishi forgot about it, but then we see that even in this loop, the statue is unbroken, which just raises the question of if it’s some kind of major oversight or retcon about what Satoko did when she broke into the Saiguden as a child.

Anyway, the real question with all this super heavy-handed Umineko stuff is whether or not this is actually going to lead to something along the lines of an Umineko anime remake [or a Gou-style sequel]. It really feels like they’re risking alienating people on both sides of the aisle if they bring in Umineko elements without doing a whole lot with them.

I have a lot of thoughts about how some kind of new Umineko anime could work, but I’ll just make a separate post about that if I want to go into it in detail.

I’m also wondering more and more whether or not they’re even going to be able to wrap up Gou’s story itself in just four more episodes, or if we’ll get some kind of second season. I still feel like we’re in an awkward situation where four episodes doesn’t feel like enough to wrap things up, but even one more cour feels like more than we need, considering how deep we are into the end-game. Unless things massively switch course for a second season, I dunno if there’s that much material left. Considering that this isn’t even acting like a remake anymore, I doubt they’ll go back and cover some of the stuff they’ve glossed over like Meakashi and Tsumihoroboshi. But who even knows.

One option is that Gou could directly lead into a new Umineko anime, especially if they go down the route of doing a Gou-style sequel to Umineko rather than a regular adaptation. There’s a lot of ways they could handle it.

Also, we STILL haven’t seen the animation for the new ending theme, so unless we’re just never getting any, I think it’s probably going to include stuff like Featherine that would have been a spoiler before this episode. The way that they only played the last section of the OP visuals also makes me wonder if maybe they’re going to adjust those as well, even if the song stays the same. I could at least see them explicitly showing Featherine rather than having her be a silhouette.

Anyway, I’m still enjoying this arc a lot, and I think it actually serves as an interesting continuation of the VN’s story, but as a whole I think it says a lot about Gou that it feels more interesting to just speculate about the Umineko references going on, lol.

[xb-squaredx]

Rise of the V-Tuber

As a platform, YouTube has gone through a variety of “eras,” wherein a particular trend catches on and defines the website for some time. In the early days, you had funny cat videos, then Let’s Plays of video games became rather popular, and now we seem to be deeply entrenched into a new era that has exploded in popularity as of late. If you’ve frequented the website at all in the past few months, it is almost inescapable. Cutesy, anime-styled avatars that play games, sing, chat with viewers, or even cook! What does it all mean? Where did they come from? Are they here to stay? Most importantly, how does one crawl out of the rabbit hole once they fall into it? All that and more will be revealed as we delve deep into the wacky, wholesome and sometimes worrying world of V-Tubers. (photo credit YuuGiJoou. Check her out on YouTube, Twitter or Twitch!) 

THE ORIGIN

To begin properly, let’s define the subject. A “V-Tuber” is a “Virtual YouTuber,” someone who streams on YouTube (or any other streaming platform) using a digital avatar as a proxy. The streamer in question typically uses face-tracking software so that the avatar can emote (or at least attempt to emote) to match their own reactions as they provide entertainment for their audience. While it may seem as if V-Tubers are rather new, in doing research on the topic, you’d be surprised how far back things go.

For starters, the concept of a virtual celebrity has been around for a while, with one of the most notable efforts being Hatsune Miku, a Vocaloid voicebank program. Hatsune Miku is every bit as famous and beloved as a flesh-and-blood singer or entertainer despite being nothing but voice synthesizer software. Vocaloid got its start back in 2000, eventually being reworked into a commercial product in 2004, though it wasn’t until the programs started receiving anthropomorphic character designs that it took off, with Hatsune Miku’s own debut in 2007, and the rest is history.

Many will consider “Virtual Idol” Kizuna Ai as the true pioneer of what we call a V-Tuber today, making her debut in 2016, however one could make an argument that Ami Yamato, a 3D-animated vlogging channel debuting in 2013, beat her to the punch. Honorable mention of course goes to Any Malu, a Brazilian animated YouTube vlogger who debuted in 2015 and eventually gained her own show on Cartoon Network Brazil. While Ai may not be the first, she is undoubtedly considered to be the codifier that many later V-Tubers would follow. Ai’s entire shtick was being an AI program that wanted to connect with humans, playing games, singing or interacting with fans. Following her explosive popularity, it was clear that other companies would follow the model established by Ai, with their own spins on it of course.

Nijisanji, established in 2018, proved that this trend could be incredibly profitable, becoming trailblazers in their own right as they established various “branches” of their company in several countries with their own unique performers that could cater to a wider range of viewers. As of this writing, Nijisanji employs over 164 “Virtual Livers,” most of which come from their Japan branch, alongside their Korean, Chinese, Indian and Indonesian branches. Similarly, there is the Hololive corporation, which saw substantial growth throughout 2020 in particular. Established in 2016 originally as Cover Corporation, at first Hololive was the name of an app meant for use in 3D motion capture, though following Nijisanji’s success, Hololive was rebranded as a V-Tuber competitor and also features a variety of colorful characters spread across many different main branches. There is of course the Japanese branch, as well as Hololive Indonesia, the relatively new (and highly successful) Hololive English, a defunct Chinese branch and an all-male Holostar branch in Japan.

Other, smaller V-Tuber groups have sprung up alongside the corporate powerhouses, such as VOMS Project, established in March of 2020, as an independent trio of streamers, and more recently at the tail-end of 2020 with V-Shojo, featuring a group of Western streamers (who ironically mostly stick to Twitch). Outside of this of course are the countless independent streamers who utilize avatars for one reason or another across many different platforms. Even prominent Twitch streamers seem to be getting in on the act, such as Pokimane, though that one has not come without some backlash. So consider that a rough history of how V-Tubers got started in Japan but how did they gain a more global fanbase? Well, in a word…”memes.”

GOING INTERNATIONAL

I won’t deny there had to be at least SOME overseas fans who enjoyed watching V-Tubers before they became more well-known, but for many Western fans their introductions to V-Tubers in general typically came from viral videos taken from various streams that spread like wildfire, eventually getting people curious enough to check them out. For Kizuna Ai, her playthrough of Resident Evil 7 gained notoriety for her mimicking the cursing of the English-speaking player character, and for Hololive, arguably the first real Western breakthrough for the company came from a now infamous moment from Sakura Miko’s stream of Grand Theft Auto 5. 

Also from Hololive, Inugami Korone in particular had a variety of memes spread about her due to playthroughs from various games that even got acknowledged by the developers themselves. Her playthrough of DOOM 2016 resulted in a short-lived Easter egg implanted into DOOM Eternal, and her video on Banjo-Kazooie (and the animated Eekum Bokum fan video that spawned from that) got the attention of Rare, Xbox and even Grant Kirkhope, the composer for the original game.

Honestly, the real unsung heroes of sorts for V-Tuber popularity might just come from foreign fans that would clip and translate various moments from streams that helped to build an international audience. There are dozens of Twitter handles and YouTube channels that specialize in spreading these clips around and if you factor in the YouTube algorithm, once you see one video your feed will be flooded with similar videos. It is no surprise fans call getting into the fandom “falling into the rabbit hole.” When you look at the more popular members of Hololive, often the ones with various viral clips have the higher subscription counts. In the case of Aki Rosenthal, one of the older members, her sub count exploded after a fan translated a section from a then-recent stream in which she talked candidly about her less-than-stellar growth as well as the difficulties of standing out in general. While at one point having the lowest amount of subscribers (well below 200,000), in the months since that video her sub count has more than doubled going past 400,000. Sometimes the talent needs a little push.

Now, within Hololive itself, I think Kiryu Coco is also partially responsible for expanding the fanbase, being one of the few employed talents with the ability to speak English (likely a native speaker), she gained a large international fanbase as she would work to translate what she or other members were talking about on the fly, and later on established an ongoing series where she would directly engage with fans over websites like Reddit and “rate” the various memes they would send in. Coco also pushed for establishing what would become Hololive English, which has proven to be a gigantic success, each member of that branch blowing past more established talent’s subscriber counts, with Gawr Gura becoming the first Hololive V-Tuber to pass one million subscribers and just recently passed the two million mark. So yeah, V-Tubers are a big deal now but…what is about them that makes people want to watch them in the first place?

THE APPEAL

So, right off the bat, if we’re going to ask why someone would want to watch a V-Tuber I think it’s fair to ask that of virtually ANY internet personality. The reason why someone would watch Game Grumps or Pokimane or Jojo Siwa or whoever else is the same reason they’d watch Kizuna Ai or Inugami Korone or Ironmouse: they’re entertaining. I guess that seems like a bit of a cop-out answer, right? There MUST be a reason why V-Tubers have blown up in popularity over the last few years, so are there things that make these particular Internet entertainers stand out from the crowd?

Undoubtedly, the fact that these streamers are playing a character is a deviation from the norm, though the dedication to staying “in character” seems to vary from person to person, and over time many V-Tubers tend to open up and are far more genuine. At any rate, even the best actor out there can’t possibly make up various daily happenings or childhood stories for their characters on the fly, day after day, stream after stream. Still, I’d imagine the decision to use a proxy as opposed to their real self can be liberating, a mask they can wear to speak more freely or a role they can play up for entertainment. For the most part, I think the persona aspect is mostly harmless fun that makes the streamer seem more distinct; ask yourself which is more eye-catching: some normal human playing a game and occasionally cracking a joke, or a one-eyed pirate girl discussing her raunchy past? Or maybe you’d rather watch the grim reaper practice her raps? Even talent that don’t really play up their character much still often have interesting character designs; we have princesses, dragons, devils, robots and more. A little something for everyone!

Speaking a bit more personally, I find it interesting to watch streamers from an entirely different culture and how they interact with fans or engage with games. I find it funny when Inugami Korone or Sakura Miko plays more Western-oriented games like the DOOM series or Grand Theft Auto V respectively. Often times they’re blown away by the culture clash, or they view these games through a different lens since it’s so different from what they’re used to. In particular, those two are just genuine goofballs that are funny all on their own. More chat-focused streams are an interesting view into daily life in Japan, such as the stories Houshou Marine tells, though obviously a given V-Tuber’s viewpoint isn’t a metric you can apply to the whole country, but she’s still interesting to listen to. Takanashi Kiara is also notable for her multilingual skills, which has helped her bridge the gap a bit more between the various Hololive members through her Holotalk segments where she interviews other V-Tubers. Outside of Hololive, Amano Pikamee from VOMS Project is just a bundle of energy that’s fun to watch as she rages in Super Mario 64 or Super Mario Sunshine. Her tea-kettle laugh is also just kinda charming. The V-Shojo group stands out for being super vulgar compared to the more corporate V-Tubers and while I don’t watch them all that much, there’s still some fun chaos to be had. Still though, I think there’s one big elephant in the room that would also help explain V-Tubers catching on at this specific point in time: the pandemic. Streaming is one of the few jobs not really affected by the pandemic, and with people stuck inside, they’re more likely to scroll through YouTube or Twitter and find a funny clip and then…well, you know… It’s one bright spot in an otherwise dark time…but I’d be lying if I said it was all sunshine and rainbows.

THE DARK UNDERBELLY

The overall idea behind V-Tubers, at least in Japan, seems to be an extension of Idol Culture…and uh…if you know anything about Idol Culture in Japan, it is all kinds of scummy. Exploitative, filled to the brim with harmful rules and regulations and largely catering to some vary unsavory “fans,” I’ll make it no mystery that I find it incredibly distasteful. Look no further than what happened to Minegishi Minami from the idol group AKB48. To keep a long story short, the obsession with “purity” and being this idealized Japanese beauty means idols are effectively locked into their work, unable to discuss or in many cases partake in romantic relationships, as that would make them less “desirable” to their audience. This unfortunately does at times extend to V-Tubers.

Take Tokoyami Towa, who was suspended for some time and forced to make an apology video for…having some male voices briefly heard over Discord during an Apex Legend stream. She even lost a lot of subscribers and support from Japanese fans following this, though once learning of this, Western fans flocked to her as a show of support. Hololive has also dealt with a variety of issues coming from Chinese fans; though that’s a particular hornet’s nest I don’t want to delve into here too much. To sum it up, fans can get obsessive and toxic, which can lead to the talent being harassed. It is for this reason, it is generally agreed upon by fans to not delve too deep into the personal lives of the V-Tubers, for fear of being doxxed and the illusion being broken. These kinds of issues certainly bring up some interesting questions regarding how talent should be treated moving forward.

Are these V-Tubers characters or just alternate sides of real people? Where does the fantasy end and reality begin? Ultimately, the lines are somewhat blurred. Talent certainly brings some of their own personality into the performance, but they are forced to remain anonymous and as can be seen in the case of Kizuna Ai, they are not always in control of the character they’ve been given. Kizuna Ai’s initial actress was for a time replaced, and “clones” of the character with different voices and personalities started to spring up, likely as an attempt to compete with the likes of Nijisanji and Hololive. In cases where V-Tubers retire from the industry, or “graduate” as some call it, all of their hard work cultivating a fanbase might end up being for nothing as they were forced behind a proxy that isn’t truly themselves and I imagine it can be hard to start over again from square one. Never mind the attempts to step out of the shadow of your older work. Man, Perfect Blue was downright prophetic at times, huh?

I don’t want to dwell on the negatives too much though. It’s worth noting for one thing that Nijisanji seems relatively lax regarding how their talent operates, whereas it seems Hololive is the standout for adhering to the idol ideal, though considering how some of the talent acts (in particular Kiryu Coco), one has to wonder if they’re softening their stances a bit. Many V-Tubers generally talk about the positive aspects of the industry and being given the opportunity to reach people from all over the world. Shortly after Ina’s debut in Hololive English, she was actually brought to tears when told her art streams convinced people to get into (or back into) the hobby, which had been one of her goals for becoming a V-Tuber in the first place. Ironmouse, now a member of V-Shojo, has an immune system disorder that keeps her bedridden and forced to stay inside, so the opportunities afforded by this particular type of streaming has allowed her to reach out to others and as per her own words, has changed her life for the better. While there are definitely “fans” that go too far, corporate practices that are outdated, or harmful and a slew of potential unfortunate implications, ultimately I think most people out there are just looking for quality entertainment, and these digital proxies give these entertainers an outlet to connect with fans in a way that they might not have otherwise.

CONCLUSION

V-Tubers are in a bit of a boom at the moment, though I can’t imagine it’ll last forever. We’re quickly approaching market saturation and after a point, people can only follow so many streamers at once. Hell, as I was editing this up, it seems as if prominent YouTuber Pewdiepie is about to step into the ring, so who knows what kind of shake-up that could bring. The bubble will undoubtedly burst and what becomes of V-Tubers then is still up in the air. Or who knows, maybe V-Tubers will endure and replace all entertainment and we’re just watching the beginning of a cyberpunk dystopia. Stranger things have happened! Considering the world is still reeling from the effects of the pandemic, that should largely have an impact on the popularity of V-Tubers for some time to come, though as we emerge into a “new normal” in the world, it’ll be interesting to see how these entertainers continue to evolve. Now, I suppose there is one question I never quite went over before now, isn’t there? How does one escape the V-Tuber rabbit hole? Well, I’m sorry to say but there is no escape.

Enjoy your new home!

-B

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/12/17 - 10/13/17: PET SEMINARY! (Pet Sematary 1, 2, and to some degree, Terminator 2)

Mary Lambert’s adaptation of PET SEMATARY, the especially downbeat Stephen King version of the Monkey’s Paw fable, came out the day after I turned eight years old in 1989. I would hear about it for years from people who were really startled by it; this tale of a family being partially picked off by the truck route on which they live, and then making the unfortunate discovery of an indian burial ground that spits its residents out alive, seemed to blow everyone’s minds. The book, and then the movie, succeeded on the very basis on which producers (and a wary King himself, after finishing the novel) believed it would fail: it combined typical ‘80s gory thrills with real deal bereavement–specifically, child death. This one-two punch of supernatural terror with mundane tragedy turned out to be just what the general public needed to feel hooked in to a horror film that represented the last gasp of its type, as tastes were increasingly swaying in the more high tech direction of visceral thrillers like ALIENS and THE TERMINATOR. I like PET SEMATARY a lot; I find it effectively scary and depressive, and the effects still looks terrific. However, what specifically horrifies me about it is probably a little bit different from what appears to bother most viewers.

When I first started begging people for the gritty details of PET SEMATARY, I realized there were two things that most captivated audiences: Fred Gwynne getting his elderly achilles tendon severed in extreme closeup, and itty bitty teeny tiny perfect little adorable angel Miko Hughes. The emerging star, no more than three years old at the time of filming, is the defacto center of Lambert’s grisly film. It’s certainly not generic leading man Dale Midkiff as Dr. Louis Creed who, somewhat shockingly, moves his wife and two small children to a rural home right off a road that mainly services gigantic trucks that blast violently through the countryside at all times of day. It is additionally clear that Dr. Creed is lacking common sense because he has also moved into this precarious circumstance their un-neutered cat Church, who winds up under the wheels of a semi almost immediately. That’s when we find out that Louis doesn’t have the local market cornered on numbskulledness, as lovable neighbor Jud Crandall (Fred Gwynne, who is responsible for all of the movie’s human charm) is quick to encourage him to resurrect Church using the obviously evil Micmac burial ground behind the local children’s janky old pet cemetery (sorry, “sematary”)��even though Jud himself once buried a dog there, only to have it return to life as a decomposing murder machine. Louis also manages to ignore the persistent warnings of the spectacularly rotten specter of a patient he recently lost (the terrific Brad Greenquist), even after Church comes back as an actual monster, when cute wittle Gage toddles out into a truck. Hijinx ensue.

I suppose it’s only natural that most audiences respond so powerfully to Hughes’ Full House-worthy face and chipmunky voice, though this was not the case for me, at any age. Speaking as a woman with a lifelong aversion to family-making, I didn’t react to the hideous death and afterlife of Gage Creed because of his appearance, which seems to have been genetically engineered for fabric softener advertisements. I don’t respond to his pure youth, either. Actually, writing this makes me recall my best friend’s irritation at the opening monologue from THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, in which John Larroquette gravely intones that the characters’ fates are “all the more tragic because they were young”. In fact, I never feel envious of the Creeds’ sticky, chaotic children, or their dirty, angry cat. That’s the view I tend to take of all families in movies, however idealized, because I’m not wired to reproduce. I say this not so much to make a personal statement, but to point out the way in which PET SEMATARY is still accessible to those of us who are not family-oriented. The film describes the extreme emotional and physical difficulties of parenthood, our lack of curatorial control, our vulnerability to the material world, and even the lack of expected similarities and sympathies between related individuals. Gage simply looks gooey and tacky tottering around in his Huggies, while sallow, lank-haired Ellie (Blaze Berdahl) is a snarl of needs and weepy nightmares. The dark entropy that assails even the most stable family’s life draws Church and Gage inexorably toward the road running through the primordial wilderness where Louis put them. In the meantime, the marriage here percolates with trouble, understandably–but some of this is inherited from the family a step backward, which traumatized Rachel (Denise Crosby) at such an early age. According to the movie, family life in general often seems no easier or more pleasurable than actual frontier life. In the end, it concludes harshly that love is not enough. Love does not defy death, nor does it live on in the body of a person who once held it, and it stands up not at all against evil.

I need to interrupt myself for a minute here to admit that I lied. There are really three things that people talk about when they talk about PET SEMATARY: Jud’s heel, Gage’s face, and Rachel’s sister Zelda. The mounting pressure created by the Creeds’ recent move compels Rachel to tell her husband something that she has apparently never spoken of before: That as a young teenager, she was often the exclusive caretaker of her sister Zelda, an older girl who would die horrifically of conditions related to spinal meningitis, but not before the disease warped her into a deformed and sadistic freak. Rachel’s appalling memory of her sibling has very little to do with the literal events of the movie, but it does contribute successfully to a general feeling that a family is like a sort of trap, or like a demimonde with no more safety or stability than a haunted house. You may have some shred of control over what happens to your children, but as a child you have absolutely no control over what happens to you, or moreover, who you’re obligated to. Additionally, while you’re out of control of your obligatory relationships, you are also out of control of your feelings about them. Rachel, the glowing mother of two beautiful children, finds her self-image corrupted by the knowledge that she felt absolutely no sympathy for her monstrous sister, and relished her death. Before the film’s central tragedy even begins to unfold, Rachel already feels that she has committed the ultimate sin against the very idea of family, and this–not the loss of precious young life–characterizes the story’s most powerful anxiety.

Where PET SEMATARY successfully addressed familial ails with its gruesome mythology, the inevitable sequel failed on most levels. It’s hard to find too much to say about Mary Lambert’s own 1992 followup, in which a new family runs afoul of the “sour ground” behind the pet cemetery. Edward Furlong plays the sensitive, sullen teen son of Anthony Edwards, whose ex-wife has been recently electrocuted on the set of a Hammer-like horror film. Furlong, who was consumed by the impossible task of getting his parents back together up until his mother’s death, is having an extra hard time adjusting to his new school, where his only friend Jared Rushton is being routinely tormented by his mother’s cop boyfriend. This mustache-twirling bad guy, played mercifully by the wonderful Clancy Brown, quickly finds himself mauled to death by the pet sematary’d dog who he killed in the first place, and so much of the movie revolves around Brown’s undead clowning and ambiguous avenger/aggressor relationship to the two boys. Long after we’ve already thought of it, it occurs to Furlong to resurrect his mother, which doesn’t go so hot.

The sequel attempts to integrate themes of divorce and feelings of childhood abandonment into the original’s floor plan for family drama, but doesn’t manage to make much of it. PET SEMATARY 2 is mainly remembered as part of the Edward Furlong moment. Where Miko Hughes embodied the perfect baby boy, Edward Furlong represented a similar sort of teen dream in the years immediately after his big time debut in T2: JUDGMENT DAY.  There was just something perfect about him. He mixed a Keanu Reevesy moodiness with a Bart Simpson attitude; he looked right at home in his timely grunge gear on dirt bikes and motorcycles; he seemed to have invented that floppy haircut, otherwise made famous by Dolph Shapiro on The Simpsons. Little dudes wanted to be him, and little girls wanted to…what was it exactly? How could we know? Hold his awesome jacket while he burned donuts on his sweet bike? What is the true significance of being a barely pubescent pinup in Tiger Beat or Bop magazines? I lived through that time, I even participated in it, and yet, I still don’t understand it. I don’t at all deny that children have their own sexuality. I certainly did, although my precocious thoughts of that time were directed at (weirdos like) Michael Keaton, Christopher Lloyd, and other mature men whose age, I intuited, meant that they were sexually viable. Even I couldn’t understand the point of physical attraction to hairless young people my own age; my occasional crushes on my doughy little peers, probably including Furlong, seemed nebulous, and disturbingly aimless. And hopefully, this will be the most disturbing line of thinking that I ever pursue on this blog. No further comment, your honor.

I feel more comfortable accusing Furlong of being the locus of weird maternal feelings for the general public. In PET SEMATARY 2, the young teen feels a little too old to be so fixated on his bombshell mom, which begins with a relatively normal urge to repair his parents’ marriage, and graduates to a quasi-romantic obsession that finds him dolled up in a little tux, filling the attic with gowns and baubles destined for his mother’s undead corpse. It might seem like an obvious trajectory for a post-PSYCHO horror movie, but there’s something that feels extra gross about it. Horny parents are a subject of horror in this child-centric sequel, but there is conspicuously no female presence in Furlong’s life other than his almost sleazily beautiful mother, who herself is mainly absent, and my suspicion is that this void is there for self-insertion by needy, neurotic, self-important moms in the audience. 

Now that I’ve said the actual creepiest thing I might ever say on this blog, I can normalize things slightly by adding some garnish provided by T2. When it came out in 1984, THE TERMINATOR was a real revelation, introducing not only an exciting sci-fi concept, but escalating an approach to the action genre that involves buckets of gore and Video Nasty-level torture and mutilation. Then, strangely, James Cameron chose to follow up his own success in 1991 with a sequel that was, while ten times the scale of the original, comparatively bloodless. The movie obsesses irritatingly over Furlong’s commitment to making Schwarzenegger’s T-800 more human by teaching it to talk like a Ninja Turtle, and never ever kill anybody again. I can only assume that this “kinder, gentler” approach was aimed at opening this sequel up to a wider audience, but it feels like a perverse rejection of the earlier material, and it definitely produces T2′s most cringe-inducing moments. The E.T.-style relationship between young John Connor and his robot pal occupies far too much of a movie that has butchass Linda Hamilton in it, who often feels like the movie’s biggest visual effect. It’s not just her body that I’m interested in though; the major missing piece in T2, sitting in the middle of the table yet untouched like so much shrink-wrapped fruitcake, is that Sarah Connor doesn’t see her son as a human being. She knows he’s humanity’s only hope for a Terminator-free future, and this knowledge has completely eclipsed any maternal warmth or empathy toward him. She is cold and impersonal with her child, even violent, which you’d think anyone would recognize as a really interesting source of drama where trust and even physical presence has been long missing from a family, and intimacy must be somehow restored between a traumatized and psychotic woman and her alienated child for the sake of the human race. But, nope, Cameron’s camera is fixed firmly on whether punky little John Connor can teach the Terminator to do jive handshakes or whatever. 

Anyway. There’s plenty of great moms in genre cinema, from Mrs. Bates to the xenomorph brood queen. I don’t have to dwell so hard on the failed ones. However, it’s hard to miss the ones that seem to cave to more popular feelings about mommies and babies, since they’re even more apt to reveal flaws in our attitudes toward family in real life.