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twh-news · 4 years ago

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To land ‘Loki,’ Kate Herron had to pull out all the stops. How she won over Marvel

As a teenager, Kate Herron was obsessed with the “Lord of the Rings” films.

In particular, she recalls heading to theaters repeatedly with friends who shared her passion to see “The Two Towers” (2002), the second installment in director Peter Jackson’s trilogy based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy novel. She even wrote “Lord of the Rings” fan fiction.

“It was very silly,” the British filmmaker insists, revealing that one of her stories saw the heroic Fellowship traveling through a magical fountain and getting trapped in New York. “Honestly, I was just writing the stories to make my friends laugh. I guess it was kind of that first foray for me: ‘How do I tell a story?’”

Years later, Herron is again involved in telling a story about a protagonist displaced from the world he knows. But this time, her audience is much bigger.

Herron, 33, is the director of “Loki,” the Marvel Studios series that follows the adventures of the titular god of mischief after he has been plucked out of time by an agency charged with maintaining the sanctity of the timeline. Thus, the six-episode series, which premiered earlier this month on Disney+, features a slightly different version of Loki than the fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe have grown to love since his first appearance in “Thor” (2011) through “Avengers: Endgame” (2019).

“I love villains,” says Herron during a recent video call from Atlanta, where she is putting the final touches on “Loki.” “I think that if a villain’s done right, you don’t necessarily have to like their actions, but you have to understand them. And I think that Tom [Hiddleston], in the last decade, has brought such empathy and wit and pain to a very real character for so many people. I just wanted to be part of whatever [Loki��s] next chapter was going to be.”

The series, on which the self-described Loki fan also serves as an executive producer, is Herron’s highest-profile project to date. Her previous credits include directing on Netflix’s “Sex Education,” as well as “Five by Five,” a series of short films executive produced by Idris Elba.

While growing up in South East London, Herron never considered filmmaking as a career. Her love of movies manifested as the aspiration to become an actor, and she often goaded her peers into putting on plays or making movies using a friend’s father’s camcorder. It wasn’t until some astute and encouraging teachers at Herron’s secondary school pointed out that she seemed more interested in storytelling that she changed course.

By introducing Herron to new texts, these teachers — as well as a film studies class that covered films directed by Stanley Kubrick and Akira Kurosawa — helped expand her perspective.

“I just didn’t know that you could have a voice and an authorship over a film, which probably sounds a bit silly. But I just hadn’t really thought about films in that way,” says Herron. Soon enough, she was on the path to film school at the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham, England, where she graduated with a degree in film production.

Herron laughs as she remembers how she believed she would just go off and find work in film straight out of school. “Obviously that did not happen,” she says.

With no post-graduate roadmap (or job offer) to help her break into the industry, Herron eventually started writing and directing short films with “no money” while juggling a day job as a temp. Both experiences provided Herron with material for “Loki,” which introduces a new bureaucratic agency called the Time Variance Authority to the MCU.

“I’ve worked at a lot of random places, which weirdly has influenced ‘Loki’ in some ways because we have this office culture kind of running through it,” says Herron. “I’ve worked in a lot of offices.”

In order to give the retro-futuristic offices of the TVA “a real lived-[in], breathed-in office” feel, Herron incorporated details that viewers could recognize from the real world — from paper files to the posters on the walls — and gave them a fantastical twist befitting the superhero series.

“One of the most exciting things to me about Kate is she has this amazing attention to detail,” says “Loki” co-executive producer Kevin Wright. “That was something that we saw on her very first pitch [and] it works its way into every frame of the show. Every monitor, every piece of paper in the TVA … she has looked over and approved everything you see.”

In an email, “Loki” star Hiddleston described Herron as “a dream collaborator” who possesses “a unique combination of extraordinary diligence, stamina, energy, respect and kindness.”

“Her affection for and understanding of Loki was so deep, profound and wide-ranging,” Hiddleston wrote. “She built a new world for these characters to play in with incredible precision, but she was also acutely sensitive to their emotional journey.”

Herron’s affinity for outsiders is apparent throughout the course of our conversation. There is of course her love for Loki — the heir to the king of Frost Giants raised as the prince of Asgard who has become one of the MCU’s most beloved villain-turned-antiheroes. Herron’s first introduction to the world of Marvel as a kid was through “X-Men: The Animated Series,” about the superhero team with mutant powers that set them apart from average humans. Herron cites Lisa Simpson — the overachieving, opinionated middle child from the animated sitcom “The Simpsons” — as the reason she is a vegetarian who can play the saxophone.

And although Herron describes herself as shy, it’s no match for the passion she brings to discussing film and television.

She calls Wes Anderson’s 2001 film “The Royal Tenenbaums,” co-written by “Loki” actor Owen Wilson, “a perfect movie.” In addition to being obsessed with “The Simpsons,” Herron gravitated toward genre shows such as “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” the updated “Battlestar Galactica” and “The X-Files” when growing up.

As Herron enthusiastically dives into “Loki’s” influences — which include “Alien” (1979), “Blade Runner” (1982), “Brazil” (1985), “Metropolis” (1927) and, yes, even “Teletubbies” — it’s easy to see why Wright knew she was the right person to bring “Loki” to life from their very first meeting.

Upon learning that Marvel was developing a show about Loki, Herron tasked her agents with calling Marvel every day until they would meet with her. And it worked.

“I was just so excited that somebody was chasing the project,” says Wright. “Which sounds crazy, that Marvel would be excited somebody’s chasing us. But it was the early days of us trying to get this Disney+ streaming stuff off the ground, so people were very hesitant … they didn’t know what it was yet.”

Herron’s enthusiasm for the show landed her a video meeting with Wright and executive producer Stephen Broussard. Believing it might be her only shot at the project, Herron came armed with so many stills and clips to illustrate her discussion of the scripts she’d been sent that a simple meet-and-greet turned into a four-hour conversation.

“Over the course of the next week or so,” Wright explains, “it was really figuring out how to set Kate up to succeed when we got her in front of Kevin Feige to pitch this.”

Herron put together a 60-page bible of ideas for the characters, the story, the visual references and more. The rest is Marvel history.

She learned not to wait for permission, she says, after graduating from film school and becoming involved with improv and stand-up to both develop her comedy chops and to meet funny collaborators to be in her short films.

“I think I’d always find excuses, almost, [to not do it],” says Herron. “It was that thing of being like, ‘Oh, well, I’m not ready. So I’ll wait. I’ll wait until I’m perfect at it and then I’ll go do it.’”

Taking inspiration from Robert Rodriguez’s “Rebel Without a Crew” and a SXSW keynote speech by Mark Duplass, Herron realized that she just needed to start making things. She told herself it was OK if the films were messy. If a short was bad, nobody had to see it. If a short was “halfway to good,” she would submit them to festivals.

It’s this tenacious creativity that connects the dots between her early fan fiction, her short films, her pitch presentations — and now “Loki” itself. It’s a trait that has helped her navigate the industry to her current success, even during the periods it’s been most frustrating. As a female director, “I got asked crazy stuff in interviews sometimes,” she says of life on the festival circuit. “I remember being asked, ‘Are you sure you’re ready? Are you sure you’re ready?’ And male colleagues of mine were never asked that in interviews. I think that’s probably why I was so driven to just go out and make stuff.”

#loki #loki series #kate herron #interview #los angeles times #article

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oneweekoneband · 4 years ago

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meet me behind the mall!!!!!!!!!

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I don’t know why Taylor Swift thinks that teenagers drink wine, and I don’t know why she chose to record and release a wistful high-school-other-woman song which left me feeling naked as a frog and therefore furious. Some questions we ask only so as to be soothed by the familiar sound of our own voice, still there after all. The answers are not coming.

The Taylor Swift Teen Love Triangle Triad of “cardigan”, “august”, and “betty” is the part of folklore that makes me most bullish about where Taylor is going as an artist. A turn away from writing songs which are intentionally meant to appear confessional and toward, instead, songs which reveal the personal as refracted through fictitious circumstances and made-up characters is a better use of her big, weird brain, and allows that brain to be unleashed on a broader plain of experience. It’s incredibly embarrassing to be an adult woman with my own problems to manage and to have living in my head Taylor Swift’s demented YA fiction, but it’s an embarrassment that feels appropriate, like I could never really have escaped this fate. On “betty” she gets to play-act as a contrite teen boy who knows he’s done wrong, and while obviously the most charming thing about the song is Taylor saying “fuck” (and also her giving us a little of the ol’ razzle dazzle by way of some light twang), her experiment with imagining what it’s like to be a skateboarding kid who hates dances, trying on an imagined teen boy interiority as a costume, is effective too.

“cardigan” is more removed, less plaintive and shouty. This is a song from adult Betty’s perspective looking back on this period in her life and in her relationship with James, who the song seems to imply she is still with now. While—full offense—I believe marrying your high school girlfriend or boyfriend is a disorder which should have its own listing in the DSM, restoring order by putting the original couple back together so as to make the story one of true love triumphing over adversity, rather than a series of sketches of kids doing fuckup kid things just because it is not easy to be alive and to be alive alongside others and with gentleness, least of all when you are very new at it, is the only conclusion this saga could ever have reached with Ms. Swift at its helm, and I do appreciate the consistent, if baby-brained, internal logic. I’ve never known a teenage girl whose signature garment was a cardigan and, frankly, this Betty sounds like sort of a self-absorbed drip (I do love, love, how Taylor’s own voice comes through so clearly on the lightly threatening, smug lines, “I knew you’d miss me once the thrill expired / And you’d be standing in my front porch light” !!) so I’m not totally surprised she got cheated on, but that’s very uncharitable of me and probably comes from the same meaty polyp in my brain that is responsible for my still loving all the hilariously mean-spirited, woman-hating songs on Speak Now.

“august” is about the other girl. The “her” in James’ rather pathetic defense, “slept next to her, but I dreamt of you all summer long”. “august” tells a story that brings to my mind another story. It is a story I won’t belabor because it is neither exciting nor unique. It will not illuminate an unexplored human experience, as it is, in fact, incredibly boring, regular, an incident which would be at home in any normal Tuesday, ordinary as meeting at the mall. This is a million years ago and there is a boy whose basement I go to sometimes after swim practice. We have matching team sweatpants with our names embroidered above the pocket at the right hip and I like to switch pairs. I’m you and you’re me and when we have pushed and bent the tiredness out of our muscles together, making experimental declarations in hushed voices down there while the furnace groans, well, then I’m you and me and you’re you and me and we are we are we are.

One February day at twilight I bound out of the school building with wet hair and a fleece jacket, but his car is already gone. No worries. Standing at my locker the next afternoon like in a movie he will say, easy as anything, that he has a girlfriend, a family friend, two towns over, she goes to private school. You’ve probably met her, he says. And right then I remember that I have. Last year I did her zipper in the bathroom at a dance. We were fighting but we never really broke up, he says. For months you’ve been fighting? is all I say back. Fighting since October? As if that matters. Like that’s the point. My voice is pinched and ugly and I know I’ll hear that sound forever. Well, anyway... I feel bad. He doesn’t clarify for whom he feels bad. He’s got one sneaker toe working against the other one atop the tile floor that’s the murky green of sea glass. He looks at my St Brigid’s cross necklace, at the blue Masterlock hanging open like a broken jaw, at someone in a hoodie who punches his shoulder as they walk by. Nothing personal, he says, and there is a tiny smudge of cafeteria pizza at the corner of his mouth that I hadn’t noticed until that second and a day ago would’ve reached up and wiped away with the pad of my thumb, laughing. I get it, right? Oh, sure.

The worst of it was not skipping pre-calc to cry in the bathroom, since, I mean, I couldn’t actually do pre-calc and would never learn how, but was inspecting my soul in the dark when I couldn’t sleep that night and finding part of me had known this all along, had chosen to pretend, wanted the wanting so badly I’d knocked from my brain the truth of how it was going to end. This would not be the last false love from which I’d find myself unceremoniously discarded, and in time I’d learn to be the liar myself, too. It’s unseemly to pathologize bad decisions, to take on poor impulse control or self-destructive patterns as an identity, but I do think that just as some people are born serial monogamists, part of a twosome forever with very little mess in-between, some of us were built from the very first cell to live like a pool ball struck and banging teeth first into the wrong mouths and hearts. I can examine my romantic history and tap my finger against the obvious errors, the times I chose what I knew would hurt me, when I ascribed hope to situations where it did not belong, when I, like the narrator of “august”, regarded someone as not mine to lose but still put myself in the position to be harmed by the losing, yet I can’t produce alternative choices that feel realistic. If you are in love and it doesn’t work out, there is mourning, there is pain, but there is all the while a record which shows something happened, it was real. “august” stands somewhat apart in the Taylor Swift catalog as a song neither about the glory of true love or the heartbreak when it’s over, but about the small, paper cut heartbreaks that are inescapable during each day of an untrue love. “It was never mine”. When it turns out you were wrong the whole time, fooling yourself, then even remembering that you’d been happy in the lie is like being trapped in a fun house, body bent and broken in the mirror, a thing not built right for this world.

“august” is about the girl who James was with over the summer, the girl he leaves to return to Betty. Taylor said it’s the first of the three that she wrote, and I fear this has warmed me to her in some new and unsettling way. I fear this means she’s matured as a person and writer, capable now of a more expansive view of situations, to be generous. It’s like how you shouldn’t feed gremlins after midnight; there is no telling what new and more dangerous creature this woman might turn into if she’s suddenly been taught empathy. When Taylor-as-James in “betty” sings, “Would you trust me if I told you it was just a summer thing?” in his effort to woo Betty back I hate him a little, that thoughtless child undeserving of the kind of adoration in lines like, “your back beneath the sun / wishing I could write my name on it.” I try to extend grace to this fictional boy, but I think of the “Do you remember? in “august” and I feel a little sick from being so certain that no... No, he doesn’t. Not really.

“Back when we were still changing for the better / wanting was enough / for me it was enough”. I’d like to think there is no last chance to change for the better. I’d like to think wanting is enough so long as you want the right thing. I’d like to think that God made sure Taylor Swift became a singer instead of a young adult novelist because the absolute last thing this world needed was this freak joining the circus that is YA Twitter. Most of all, I like thinking that Judy Blume knows that her beautiful, searing, devastatingly romantic and also textually gay 1998 novel Summer Sisters is the only important book that has ever been published, and, further, that the world will show me the respect of understanding and accepting that “august”, when removed from the context of the Swiftian child romance trilogy, sounds as if it were specifically written in homage. Taylor, I know I’ve accused you of at least fifty crimes this week alone, but if you want to talk about Summer Sisters, please get in touch.

#taylor swift #folklore

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gibelwho · 4 years ago

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Top 5: Nostalgia Movies

This Top 5 is taking a trip down childhood memory lane to choose the best Nostalgia Movies - films that I loved as a kid and continue to love to this day. The film must have been watched multiple times during my youth and continue to be associated with a memory or tradition that was an important marker of growing up. Therefore, any film produced past 2004, when I graduated high school, has not been considered - and, to even make the cut, the film must be associated with more than just constant re-watches in our downstairs rec room (arranged with a HUGE - well, big for the ‘90s - screen with actual surround sound that my dad installed); rather, these films must be an essential part of my childhood progression into adult-hood and laid the groundwork for a future of loving cinema.

Gibelwho Productions Presents Nostalgia Movies:

5. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

4. X-Men

3. The Little Mermaid

2. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

1. Newsies

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986): As my high school career began to wrap up and I was looking ahead to college (where I had already committed to attending film school), my mother informed me of a proclamation - I was not allowed to leave her household without watching Ferris Bueller. Perhaps she knew that she needed to instill a little bit of rule-breaking encouragement into her straight A / type A child before I was to head out into the unruly world of college, but nonetheless, this film left a mark with it’s delightful adventures of Ferris, Cameron, and Sloane. Years later, I attended an LA rooftop screening where the audience all danced during the Twist and Shout parade, bringing me straight back to the joy of discovering this film with my mom. In the same tradition, I will be sure to make my kids watch this film before they leave our household for the wide world so they can learn to cause a little innocent rule-breaking. Save Ferris!

X-Men (2000): I had a secret obsession when I was a kid - I LOVED Marvel Comics. I had read all of my dad’s comic book collection from when he was a kid, I started my own collection, and had even started tracking the value of each issue. But I was a girl, and did not share this particular passion with my fellow elementary school friends (ahhh, the fear of being judged by your peers). So when I entered a movie theater as a freshman in high school (with my secret still intact) to see an X-Men film and the place was PACKED, I couldn’t contain my excitement that maybe, just maybe, more people would be into these characters and storylines. Then, when I went into my summer theatre program and my friends used X-Men characters as improv inspiration, I thought...this is going mainstream! I still didn’t confide my true colors until the MCU began and my college friends discovered that I knew a...lot more about Iron Man’s backstory than should be possible and I was officially outed. So, fully embracing my nerdom, I traveled to San Diego to the sacred ground that was Comic Con, truly cementing my love of Marvel. And now the rest of the world has caught up to why these characters are so special. That first inkling of a wider world loving what I loved started when I watched X-Men in theaters - seeing my heroes on the big screen, fighting their super villains, and the packed crowd around me was digging it!

The Little Mermaid (1989): One of my earliest memories of opening presents was from my 6th birthday, sitting in the living room and ripping open the wrapping paper to discover the VHS for The Little Mermaid - a film I had seen at school and LOVED - and now it was mine to watch at any time! Truly a special Disney moment, which is also matched with many other memories of Disney animated films (the momentous opening to Lion King and the cut to black that took my breath away in the theater, playing the Mulan soundtrack on cassette over and over singing Reflection, and identifying with Belle’s obsession with reading). I was very much the target audience for the Disney Renaissance, and I ate up all the music, the (slightly) stronger portrayal of women, and our VHS collection only grew to include all of these modern classics. The Little Mermaid kicked off a golden age for Disney Animation and little Katie grew up on the Alan Menken soundtrack.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989): Our family had three fancy VHS boxed sets for three different franchises and we watched these flicks on repeat - Star Trek movies (TOS with Kirk and Spock), the Star Wars trilogy, and the Indiana Jones films. Literally any one of the movies from these collections could make this slot, but since both of the Star franchises have already gotten love in these Top 5 lists, I’m going to pick representation from our resident archaeological professor / international adventurer. My favorite of the bunch is the third - from the thrilling opening of young Indy, to the dynamic between father and son, and the epic ending of selecting the correct Grail (“you have chosen...wisely”). Watching any one of these films is just comfort food for my soul, taking me back to the family settling in to watch in our downstairs rec room, setting the foundation for the nerdom that my parents instilled into me at a young age and that has continued to guide my interests and movie-watching to this day.

Newsies (1992): Growing up, my family had Friday movie nights, where we ordered from the Pizza Hut that was right next to a Blockbuster; my brother and I were allowed to each choose a movie to rent for the weekend. I went through a phase where I just rented Newsies on repeat. It was as though this film was made just for me - a musical, set in a historical time period, with cute boys singing and dancing, music by the magical Alan Menken - what is not to love?!? I was so obsessed with this movie that in the pre-Internet age, I wrote down the lyrics by meticulously listening, pausing, writing down, rewinding, and repeating - which was an onerous process when one was working with manual VHS tapes. I eventually got a copy of my own, the DVD when it came out, the CD of the soundtrack, and also the piano sheet music. I knew all the lines to the songs, and could probably to this day quote the majority of the movie. Years later, imagine my delight when Disney produced a Broadway musical of the movie - we took a special trip to New York on my birthday to see the show (which of course, doesn’t match up to my love for the film, the true effect of a nostalgic love for a piece of your childhood). Living in LA affords us the opportunity for magical movie-going experiences, and my husband and I scored tickets to a special showing of Newsies at the Disney El Capitan theater - and then the traveling Broadway company of Newsies the musical that was in town and performing just up the street at the Pantages theater made an appearance and performed for the audience after the movie wrapped. This film has held a special place in my heart and is the epitome of nostalgia love for a movie from childhood.

Honorable Mentions:

The Music Man (1962): The two music genres we listened to growing up were 90s country (Garth, Reba, Trisha, Wynonna!) and also musicals. Our family was very much into theater and starting at the age of twelve, I started acting in musicals at our local performing arts program for youths. Our family also watched many of the classic musicals that were filmed in the 1950s and 60s, such as Hello, Dolly, Oklahoma, and Music Man. This last film stands in as a proxy for all those classics, but was also selected in particular because I performed in a production during a summer in junior high, where I was in the background chorus (and featured in the Wells Fargo song!). The music and lyrics of this story, written by Meredith Wilson, are of such cleverness and variety - from the 4-part harmony barbershop quartet to the love song ballads, the pre-hip hop rhythmic talking song to the genius opening number of the salesmen on the train. The translation to film is serviceable and very much in the style of the musicals brought from stage to screen in the 1960s - nothing too clever and some blocking that sought to recreate a theater stage on the film set, but these series of musical films cemented my love for the genre in an accessible way just as I was starting myself to perform on stage.

Jurassic Park (1993): Oh, the raptor in the kitchen stalking the two kids stills brings me chills thinking about it. Watching that scene as a kid, I (more than once) fled the room because it was so scary! This film had it all - creepy dinosaurs, a smart teenage girl and an even smarter heroine that was a scientist, great music (whose theme I diligently learned how to play on the piano), and plenty of action! My family definitely had this on repeat in the VHS player, but I loved the movie so much that I ended up reading Michael Crichton’s novel to experience the source material - and became more aware of how a film is an adaption of a novel’s storytelling, translating from the page to the screen. I do fall in favor of reading the novel before seeing the movie, but if a film helps you discover an incredible book, it can be like diving into an extension of the world beyond what the screen can fit.

#ferris bueller #x-men #the little mermaid #indiana jones #indiana jones and the last crusade #newsies

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izukult · 5 years ago

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the stages of mourning △ {p.p}

warnings / i’m SORRY ok this is sad bitch hours. angst, swearing, death death death, kinda vividish descriptions of death!! she says fuck like 8009482849293929 times

summary / he couldn’t come home every time.

word count / 5.5k (i POPPED off)

notes / PROMISE i give it a somewhat tranquil ending i’m sorry. also please read this it took me so long i put so much TIME INTO THIS. ALSO I COULDNT FIGURE OUT HOW TO DO THE READ MORE THING BC IM STUPID AND I FORGOT IM SO SORRY @ EVERYONE WHO DOESNT READ THIS PLS DONT HATE ME

[gif is not mine]

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denial

when you watched peter parker die, you pinched the skin on the back of your hand; you almost believed it was a nightmare because the physical pain was drowned out by the sight before you.

“peter- peter listen to me, hey-” your knees scraped on the cement of the road, small patches of your blood sliding onto the ground, melding into peters. “hey, it’s me. it’s y/n.” your hand was shaky as it came into contact with his shoulder, “it’s y/n.” you slowly pulled off his mask, grimacing at the discoloration of his face. his breathing was slow, heavy, as he looked at you. you could tell he was struggling with trying to close his mouth, and right when he did, he immediately coughed, gagging and spitting blood onto your torso.

“‘m sorry,” you shook your head, bottom lip quivering.

“no- no, pete, it’s okay. don’t be sorry. it’s okay,” your other hand came under his head, lifting him up slightly and cradling him like a newborn. “you’re okay.”

he smiled, as much as he could, and his eyes lazily scanned the area around you. he looked at the rubble and the indented car and other such mayhem around him. “did we do it? did i do it?” you nodded, clearing your throat to cover a sob.

“you did it, pete. you always do it.”

“spiderman always does it.” he grinned, wincing and shutting his eyes as tight as he could. the gashes on his stomach almost seemed protruding and he had marks of purple from previous encounters of asphyxiation. he clearly had broken ribs, and from the way it was bent, you could tell his left leg was broken. you didn’t look at that, though. instead, you looked at the way his hair still parted perfectly itself.

“no. no, you did it. peter parker did it.” he lifted a hand, almost pathetically, and lightly squeezed your arm.

“always did it for you,” and your heart wrenched. you let out a bark of a sob, your breathing becoming rapid. you wanted to close your eyes, rest your forehead on peters shoulder like you had so many times before, but you made sure to keep looking at him. looking at how he breathed, how his eyes held so much light even as he was dimming. you swiped your thumb over his cheekbone, smearing blood that had formed at another of his miscellaneous cuts.

“oh, sweet, sweet peter parker.” you remember that your voice was a hoarse whisper. at the time, it felt like that was all you could get out. you couldn’t speak louder or you would both shatter. at this point, people were gathering. to your disinterest, cameras were pointed. and, typically, you would’ve stopped them but right then all you could do was look at peter. “i love you so, so much.” and he smiled, he smiled that signature peter parker grin, clad with slightly broken teeth and a crinkle at his eyes. and then he convulsed. and his breathing sounded like hiccups and then it sounded like nothing and the brown of his eyes was almost a gray and they wouldn’t stop staring at you.

“peter-” you felt your heart stop, for just a second. your eyes widened, and you moved both your hands to his shoulders immediately. “peter, hey, peter-” you shook him, his corpse, slightly. “peter, please-.” and the sobs started to wrack your body again. you heard natasha’s gasp faintly over the pounding of your head, and you were sure tony had tried to pull you back but you jerked forward, back to the boy you loved.

“peter, please- please close your eyes, peter.” you shook him a little more, your wheezes erratic and your teeth chattering against each other. “peter, close your fucking eyes. this isn’t funny.” but he didn’t. he didn’t and you knew he wouldn’t. your shriek was louder than the commotion of everything around you.

“no.” your shook your head, maneuvering your arms under his back. “no no no-.” you lifted him up and regretted it as you caught a glimpse of what used to be him fall into the cracks of the ground from his stomach. you turned your head to the side, away from peter parker’s broken, perfect figure, and wretched until you were just dry heaving and sobbing and you didn’t know what was your blood and what was his but your tears were mixing into it. “no, you- you’re-.”

tony grabbed you again, gently trying to guide you from peter- from your peter.

“kid, you-.” you snapped your head to him, tears stains on your now pale skin. “he’s gone.”

“no. no!” you glared at him and you knew you shouldn’t talk to tony fucking stark like that but you didn’t care. “he’s fine. shut the fuck up.” you still held your broken boy in your hands as you looked at tony. “he promised- he-.” your body ruptured into sobs again.

“he said after this we’d- we’d just go home and watch- he promised we’d go to the compound and have a normal fucking night and this wouldn’t be a big fucking deal.” your eyes were wild and your face was scrunched. nothing about you was beautiful in this moment. “he promised.”

“i’m sorry.” never had you seen tony so deflated; never had you seen a town so deflated. suddenly, the air felt different, and the world felt darker. there was no more peter parker to light it anymore.

you turned back to him and sucked in a breath. “oh, pete,” you kissed his forehead, moving to each of his temples. you pressed three soft, pure kisses on his cheeks and nose, letting his blood become a lipstick that he had said was his favorite shade on you. when you kissed him, finally, his lips were starting to cool. they were chapped, as always, but they didn’t have the warmth and energy he radiated. this time, when you kissed him, his hands didn’t move your hair or rest on your waist, but they stayed down. this time, when you kissed him, there was none of him pulling back red and breathless just to look at you. this time, when you kissed him, there was nothing. your forehead pressed with his and your tears gave him the warmth that he was missing. “you promised.”

anger

you littered your body with bruises to match those that peter had; learned all the defenses that could’ve saved him.

handling peters death wasn’t something you we exactly doing. your body was weak; holding out on meals, drinking nothing but caffeine, and overworking daily.

you’d grown accustomed to falling asleep under the pressure of peters arm. you listened to his heartbeat instead of music- once you’d joked that since he was attuned to your heart you should memorize the tune of his-, and used his body heat as a blanket. now, when you closed your eyes, your body was too cold and too hot. now, when you closed your eyes, you saw how blank he became. now, when you closed your eyes, you remembered beating the almost defeated doctor octavius until he followed peter. now, when you closed your eyes, you felt the horror you’d felt when you realized you’d killed him.

your jaw was clenched, teeth grating against each other. your eyes were slits, glaring at the black clad bag. you lifted your hands in a right, left, right formation before following with two immediate left jabs. you stopped taping your hands the day after peter died. you let the sand in the bag crack your skin, push your knuckles inwards, bend your fingers slightly and never cried about it. you never cried. after the first night, you didn’t shed tears unless there was other water for them to blend with.

you hadn’t spoken much about him after that day, besides at his funeral. there was no one who knew peter parker as well as you, and it only felt right for the person he had loved the most to say a few words. and that’s what you did. you said a few words. because, honestly, you could talk about peter parker for hours. you could talk about the way his hands were calloused everywhere except his palms, or how when he laughed his right eye shut more than his left one. you could talk about how he once talked about the flaws of the back to the future trilogy for eighteen minutes and then rebutted his own argument for twenty six minutes. you could talk about how it took him twice as long to fall asleep on his back than it did on his stomach or every difference between his varied tone of voice. you could talk about how he carried the world on his shoulders and still let other people take the credit. but you would not talk about his fall, or his failure. you knew he wasn’t to be spoken about in such a manner, so you uttered as little as you could about his death.

you left his funeral early. after everyone found out he was spiderman, you were getting constantly bombarded with apologizes and praise. peter parker couldn’t even be a regular boy in his own death, and you felt the ceremony was too public.

you couldn’t bare to see him buried, either. part of you, all of you, was still hoping this was a big misunderstanding. that your boy would run to you, wrap you in his arms, pick you up, kiss you, tell you it was okay and that he was there. when you started to understand that he wasn’t coming back, when the shock started to wear off, you changed- your heart filled with more malice than it had before, and every time you touched something you felt that it should break under you. you were angry.

you punched the bag a few more times, throwing your all into in a rhythmic dance before your infuriation started to bubble over again. you hit it with improper form, spontaneously and full of rage. you felt your thumb turn backwards but you pushed farther, letting the sound of the bone cracking mix in with the dull sound of the leather. your vision blurred and you yelled, hitting it more with your fists vertical now, until you were pulled back and wrapped into someone’s arms.

you heaved, looked down, saw the gore from your finger stain their shirt, and pushed them away from you. you didn’t say a word as you panted, let your vexation deflate slightly and stared at the wall past the person.

“kid,” you jerked your neck, your eyes meeting tony’s. you silently, desperately, willed him not to say what you knew he’d say next. “you’ve got to stop, this isn’t good for you.” you swallowed slow, the burning of your throat- the sting of soreness- reminded you that you were alive and peter was not. “he wouldn’t want you to do this.”

and you laughed. at first it was just an exhale, a sarcastic ‘fuck you’ of air, but then it evolved. it turned into a full bodied laugh, your back leaning down in a terrible posture with your arm positioned on your stomach. you stumbled forward, used tony for support, as your chuckling stopped. there had been no sign of a smile on your face. you were eye level with tony, and you kept your hand on him as you looked at him directly.

“don’t tell me what peter would’ve fucking wanted.” your tone was harsh and you pushed yourself away from him- or more him away from you- and your vision glossed over.

“he wouldn’t want this, y/n.” your eye twitched slightly before you closed them both altogether.

“you know what he wanted, tony?” you took a step toward him, “he wanted to impress you.” you pressed your finger into his chest. “he wanted to be good enough for you,” you couldn’t get rid of the scowl on your face. “he was fine as the kid in the fucking pajamas. he was fucking happy.” your voice broke, and you cleared your throat, which seemed to be a common habit now.

“you did this to him. you brought him into stuff he wasn’t fucking ready for.” you knew it was cruel. you knew tony already stomached some of the blame. but you stood tall and clenched your hand into a fist, even your broken thumb, your eyes looking into his, almost challenging him.

“you need to get some sleep,” you scoffed.

“running away from your problems again, stark? how many people have you fucking killed, besides peter?” tony didn’t say anything. he didn’t snap at you, he didn’t apologize, and, more than that, you noticed he didn’t have any hint of emotion on his face.

“it should’ve been you, or at least me.” your breathing was hallow and you turned your torso, your legs still planted and threw a hard punch, wincing at the contact, before turning back to him. “but this stupid fucking team of egoists who think they’re better than every other goddamn person took a fucking child- he was just a child- and made him do their fucking work.” you exhaled through your nose, another quiet laugh spilling from your lips.

“you killed him! all of you did.” after you screamed the first sentence, tears started to pool in your eyes. it was the first time you’d cried in front of someone since you lost peter. you took a step closer and maintained eye contact as you spat on the mat near his feet. “and all of us are going to hell for it.” you walked past him, towards the door, and left past traces of your hands on the punching bag to rot.

“peter idolized you. he lost his life for you, so the least you could do is have a little fucking respect and not act like you know what he would’ve wanted for me.”

bargaining

peter used to joke about how good of a lawyer you’d make when you argued, and the thought consumed you for about six days.

“come on, strange,” you pleaded. his arms were crossed, and he hadn’t even bothered to dignify you with a glance.

“no,” you groaned, your eyes rolling. you were still on edge- still at snapping point, still broken- but you had been focusing your energy into an attempt to bring peter back. you had been surrounded with superheroes and magic all your life so you’d figured there was bound to be someone who could tinker with necromancy.

“i’m just asking you one favor-” stephen stopped moving and turned to look at you. even though his face was blank, he had the evident dr. strange ‘not-in-the-mood-for-your-shit’ aura.

“a favor? you’re asking me to bring someone back from the dead. not only does that go against every one of my teachings as a doctor, but it could also completely obliterate this universe’s timeline.”

“obliterate it? really?” you had disbelief in your eyes which glazed over the hope you were trying to hide.

“yes!” stephen brought his arms to his sides. “peter’s dead.” his tone softened slightly, his sympathy wrapping around your shoulders like a blanket. “i’m sorry.”

you exhaled, shrugging your shoulders, and trying to stop yourself from acknowledging the pressure that formed at your waterline. “no, don’t be. you’re right. he’s just dead.” you gave him a tight lipped smile.

“if you’re not going to help me, i’ll find someone who will.” you hadn’t been able to get any progress on the whole ‘zombie parker operation’. you’d tried everything from lab tests to pleading with some aliens- who tried to kill you shortly after.

you’d never been an overly religious person. you didn’t go to church every week and you didn’t pray before every meal. after seeing all the things you saw, watching people get murdered and assaulted and the people who attack just for the laugh, you got weary with the idea that a god could be real.

at peters funeral, you didn’t show a hint of emotion at the ‘he’s in a better place now’ comments or the ‘god took him to rest with his family’ notion. while it was a nice thought, you felt that peter parker resided in the spot on the street where his soul left him. in your mind, peter lived on through the kisses he’d left on your cheeks and the echo of his laugh through the compound at three am.

after everything, you could only assume god was dead. but, desperate times call for desperate measures.

you’d wound up in peter’s untouched room. your eyes glazed over with a mist and a wet breath fell in sync with a tear. you walked over to his dresser, the rustic wood covered in an array of random shit that peter just couldn’t clean, and looked at the stack of pictures he had of you and him, or just you. your finger traced over the print of his hair; you don’t know how long you held the photo, but when the tears started to slide off of it- form puddles on the lamination-, you placed it back down. you moved to his bed, sat down and inhaled the scent of his pillows.

you looked up at the ceiling peter had definitely tried to do tricks off of. “god?” you cleared your throat. you felt stupid, childish, trying to talk to something you never worshipped before. “hi, uh, it’s me.” your voice was saturated with tears, thick with saliva, but you chose to ignore it. “i know i��ve- i don’t really- i don’t really necessarily do all the things you’re supposed to do when- uh- that you want me to do, i guess.”

you bit your cheek, clenching the cotton of peters pillowcase. “so, if you’re real, i don’t know why you’d do anything for me. i’m not- i’m not really a good person.” you shut your eyes tight, bringing your knees up to your chin. “but peter? peter was good. as good as you, if not better. all he wanted was to help people- he died helping people- he died.” you shook your head, your eyes opening and glancing back at the popcorn material of the roof.

“if you’re real, if you’re hearing this, i beg you. please, bring him back. somehow. please, just keep him safe, he just needs to be safe.” your voice cut off and you didn’t bother to try to bring it back up. you knew it was foolish, that this wasn’t how it worked, but you waited for a voice or for a sign. you don’t know how long you waited, or how long until any hope left your body. you don’t know how long it was until you fell asleep in peters sheets, staining the place you used to lay together with your tears. you don’t remember being covered in a blanket by tony or the looks of pity- empathy- from the other avengers. you don’t know anything else about what happened that night other than the fact that after that you knew peter was gone.

depression

when peter was out patrolling, you often stole his sweaters. the feeling was almost like he was giving you a warm hug, pressing into your skin lightly. after he died, you tried to pretend the little things were him as well.

it only took you about two weeks to go back to school. you knew you had to go back sometime, that just because one life stopped didn’t mean everything else did. people at school looked at you differently now. they gave a softer image to you, bit back every word to make sure it was okay to say. they held your tired eyes in their hands and tried to make sure you didn’t break.

you’d stopped eating, almost completely. unless someone forced you to eat, which sometimes you’d still denied, food was out of the picture for you. overall, your hygiene went down in general. you weren’t doing your homework, showers became less and less frequent and your biggest habit became sleep. so, school was a big step (so was stepping at all).

you sat at your desk next to michelle and ned. peters death hit them both pretty hard, but it didn’t seem to have the same effect as it had on you. all of your class, you’d try not to look over to the empty chair that peter parker used to sit in every day; and when you would look that way, one of them would squeeze your hand. they’d ground you enough so you didn’t float away. but with current circumstances, that was just enough.

flash approached you, clearing his throat and offering you a weak smile.

“hey,” you looked at him, eyes almost permanently stained red, and offered the closest thing you could to a welcoming grin.

“hey.”

“i- uh-” he paused. you could see him bite down on his bottom lip, which was slightly more chapped than peters used to be, watch as he pondered over his next sentence just as everyone else around you did.

“i- i like your sweater. it’s sick.” you didn’t need to look down at the sweater to know what he was talking about. your heart clenched, the fabric that slipped slightly past your finger tips suddenly starting to feel like it was trapping you.

“thanks, it was peter’s.” and there it was, in the open. it was peter’s. the lines of color on the gray sweater were fading and the star wars print had started to chip, but peter still wore it religiously around the compound. “i- i took it from him one day and just never gave it back. didn’t have the time.” the air felt thick. it was hard to swallow, even harder to come back out. you could see the regret on his face, the guilt and the pain.

“he- he was really- i’m- i feel bad. i treated him like shit.” he ran a quick hand through his hair and you nodded.

“you did. don’t worry, pete’s a forgiving soul.” you shrugged, placing a hand under your chin to still your jaw so your teeth wouldn’t chatter.

“he was a good dude.”

“yeah, he was.” you didn’t realize you’d started crying until you felt the warmth on your face. at this point, you hardly recognized when you cried. you felt almost blank, and when you weren’t you just missed him.

“alright, bud, that’s enough.” mj. she protected you, looked out for you, and she was going to end the conversation for you.

flash mumbled an apology, or maybe a condolence, and left back to his seat and you moved to wipe away the tears. mj placed a hand on your shoulder, rubbing her thumb lightly to try to calm you.

“he didn’t mean anything by that. it’s just flash, yknow? he can’t tell a mome-”

“do you think i should’ve given him back his sweater?” your eyes were wide and the precipitation from them amplified their shine in an almost sick way.

“what?”

“peter. do you think he was mad i kept his sweaters?” your nerves started to build up and if you’d had the energy to hyperventilate you would’ve, instead your breaths just came out heavy and slow. “i could’ve done so much more, yknow?”

“hey,” she tried to cut you off, bring you out of the spiral you were falling into.

“no, i’m serious. i- i remember when i got this sweater. he’d just swung right out the window- no reason to hide the identity anymore, yknow? everyone knows- anyway, he’d just left and i already missed him so much. i was so fucking overdramatic.” the laugh that bubbled in your throat erupted as a sob and you felt so stupid for doing this in class but you were wearing peters sweatshirt and he wasn’t there to kiss your cheek or play with your hair or call you his pretty girl or anything and he’d never be there again so crying felt like an okay response.

“i always got so scared when he’d leave, that he’d end up dead and alone out there. he wasn’t alone, though. i was there- i was there and i couldn’t save him. i- i’d missed him so much and i loved this kid so fucking much and there was this stupid fucking sweater that smelled like old spice on steroids and i just- oh my god, i miss him so fucking much.” your breathing had quickened now and everyone was looking at you and you were just looking at the empty chair.

“i shouldn’t have taken his clothes. he’d always make jokes, maybe they weren’t jokes, about how pretty soon he’d have nothing to wear and i shouldn’t have taken his fucking stuff, i shouldn’t-” you paced yourself, letting out a single even breath.

“do you think he knew?” mj didn’t say anything. no one said anything. they just watched you. they felt your pain from your body, from the fabric. “think he knew how much i loved him?” you wiped the tears from your face once more. “god, i hope he did.”

“of course he did.” ned spoke up this time. you could hear his heart in his voice; you could hear everyone’s heart in their voice. queens had lost spiderman, midtown had lost peter parker, and you had lost your family. “you made it disgustingly obvious.” you forced out a laugh and turned your attention to ned, who cracked a smile at you. “it’s not your fault.” you looked at him and the guilt you’d placed behind poorly sewn cotton came bursting through the dam and ned knew you meant so much more.

“peter would never have thought it was your fault.”

“i know.”

“he knew what he was doing.”

“i know.”

“and he loved you so much while doing it.” and you did grin. your fingers closed around the end of the sleeves, and you looked down at the thing that most closely resembled the boy you loved.

“i know.” you were tired; everyone could see you were tired. so, when the two asked to take you to the nurses, no one disagreed. your feet were slow as you walked, your eyes barely bothered to stay open anymore, and you felt like you’d lost your personality in the cracks of the road that day. you knew you’d lost your soul there. when you were sitting on the makeshift bed in the health room, waiting for someone to pick you up, you closed your eyes and brought the hem of peter’s sweater up to your face. you breathed in, felt the tears fall again, and this time allowed them. your mouth didn’t move from a straight line and you felt almost a consistency of numbness but you imagined peter there next to you, telling you you were going to be just fine.

“i love you.” and you stayed like that until someone came for you.

acceptance

the one time peter tried to take you on a picnic, he had to go for his spiderman responsibilities. you weren’t mad, you ended up just looking at the city from the balcony when he came back, but you never got around to the task.

it had been 46 days since peter parker died. over a month since he’d said his last word, laughed his last laugh, kissed his last kiss. slowly, with time and so much pain, you were coming back to life.

you missed him every day, sometimes ignoring it was impossible and you’d break down- fall apart at the seems-, but you were getting better at holding yourself together.

you looked in the mirror, flattening your hair with a hand, pressing it down, and nodded a little. you looked at the outfit and huffed out a breath of air. “i think this was it,” you knew it was, you remembered the photos, but you still asked yourself. you informed someone you were leaving, where you were going, and made your way.

it was your first time visiting peters grave since his funeral. seeing the tombstone was almost too much for you.

Here Lies

PETER PARKER

August 10, 2001 - March 4, 2019

Beloved hero, nephew, and friend.

Long live Spiderman.

your breathing cut off as you read, and for a second you felt an anger at the last part, but you knew that was part of him. it was a big part of him, and of course it was going to be recognized. because it was still peter parker and peter parker was spiderman. you placed the basket down and crouched down to touch the stone.

“hey, pete.” you opened the basket and grabbed the flowers you’d had placed at the top, and left the handful of daisies you’d brought at the base of the marble. “i’m sorry it took me so long to come see you,” you could envision him saying it was okay, that he was just glad to see you at all, and you shook your head. you had to stop hiding in figments of him.

“i thought- i thought we could finally have that picnic?” you let out a quiet laugh, your hand tracing the lettering. “i wore the same outfit, brought the same food- made it the way you’d wanted it.” your exhales were choppy as you started to empty the basket and you whimpered slightly as tears started to fall again.

“i miss you so much, peter.” your eyes were closed, tears moving from your face to your neck, but a small smile tugged at your features. “i say that so often. i hope wherever you are, you’re happy now.” you moved and opened a cart of strawberries, grabbing one. “everyone at school misses you. everyone does.” you took a bite from the strawberry, swallowing it quickly as you remembered something.

“oh!” you wiped your mouth, rubbing the juice from the strawberry on your leg. “there’s a day for you now? like a remember spiderman day thing. there was a vigil, too, it was supposed to be really beautiful. i didn’t go- i couldn’t go.” even though he wasn’t there, even though you felt yourself breaking all over again, talking to him through dirt and stone made you feel the most natural and at home you’d felt since his death.

“saw flash weeping over you, man.” you finished that strawberry and let out a little laugh. “we all love you, parker. i’ve been checking up on may. so has happy, if ya know what i mean.” you laughed again. “sorry,” you played with your fingers, a nervous habit you’d had most of your teenage career.

“i hope we meet again, peter. i know we will.” and as you looked at this stone and all the other stones around, all the memories came back so strong. every moment you’d ever had with peter. you remembered the way he breathed late at night, every time he’d tripped while looking at you, all the stupid fights you’d had, and the dumb ways he’d apologized. every utterly domestic thing about peter came back and it was too little for him. it wasn’t enough to be his whole life. “i think you and me could’ve been forever.” you nodded, chewing the inside of your bottom lip. “in a way, i think we will be.”

you kept a hand on the stone. “you were worth the whole fucking world, peter.” you kissed the rock, which may have been gross but you didn’t really care at the moment. “i’ll think about you, always. i do think about you always.” you remembered how soft his face was under your hand or the way when you were sad he would hug you so tight and so strong. “you’ll always be my favorite boy.” how he looked at you like you were the most gorgeous thing he’d ever seen every moment he saw you. “you’ll always be my favorite hero.” the way he gripped onto your hand when you were never. “i can’t wait to see you again.” you hoped that your tears wouldn’t have any help in the process of eroding the gravestone, but you knew tony would have it fixed if it had so much as a dent.

“i promise i’ll come by more often.” you meant it. you’d continue to come by, visits never getting less frequent. going there was your way of still being connected with him. you went at least once a week, always with a recap and thoughts of him. when you got older, you realized life was moving and you had to move with it. you’d still come by when you could, but visits seemed to hold to maybe once every month or every few months. but, you always thought of peter parker, at graduation, on your wedding day, when raising your children. you saw peter parker’s face in the beauty of the world and heard his laugh in music. and you thought of peter when your time finally came, when you were finally reunited with the boy you kept in your heart all your life.

but, in that moment, you just looked at the daisies and the food. “but, enough about that. let’s finally have this picnic, pretty boy.”

#peter parker x reader #peter parker x you #spiderman x reader #peter parker #mcu #spiderman #marvel #tom holland

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sestra-inestro · 6 years ago

Text

My Wonderous

Summary: In honour of the avengers who have saved the world, you built something for the world to remember them. And you remember your time with your mother, Natasha Romanoff.

Notes: This is the last part of the My trilogy. I had to write one for Nat, she deserves it.

1. My Amazing, 2. My Marvellous

Warnings: angst, character deaths, ENDGAME SPOILERS!! If you haven’t read the first two parts then some flashbacks may not make sense. Enjoy!

You stood tall behind the podium. Eyes looking at you from every direction as the days light illuminated your body on stage.

“Thank you for coming today. All of you.” Your voice was strong through the mic.

The press flashed their cameras and held their own mics out to you.

“We asked you all here today, to commemorate the memory of those we lost to bring everyone back.” Your chest tightened as you thought about them. The three most important people in your life, Natasha, Tony and Steve, who had passed in his sleep a week ago.

“My family risked their lives for this world more times than I can count.” You spoke confidently. “And probably more times than this world deserves.”

A hum rang through the crowd but you kept your face stoic. You did not regret your words, this world is shit.

“But looking around, seeing a lot of old faces that we haven’t seen in a long time, their sacrifice wasn’t in vain.”

“Ms June! Ple-“ A press junkie interrupted you.

Ugo, who sat next to the podium gave a warning growl, and the man closed his mouth and cowered away.

“Please hold all questions til the end.” You raised your hand and Ugo sat back down.

You took a deep breath before continuing.

“As you know, three of the many people who fought for us risked their lives. Our very own, Tony Stark, Steve Rogers...” You pauses for a moment, thinking about the great soul of Natasha Romanoff.

Natasha turns in her chair towards the fuss as Tony burst through the conference room doors, a shivering baby in his arms.

“What the fuck?” Clint asked aloud after a moment of silence.

Tony looked very disheveled.

“What did you do?” Nat asked him.

He turned to her with offended eyes. “Rescued her off the street, what did you do?”

“You found her on the street?” Steve stood, his brows frowned.

“In an alleyway actually. I didn’t know what to do.” He looked down at the baby.

The baby then started to fuss and opened her eyes. E/C eyes shone back at Nat, quickly filling with tears and lips quivering quickly.

“I don’t know what to do!” Tony’s voice rose.

“Oh, for god sake give her here.” Nat stood as the baby began to wail.

Tony shuffled you into her arms and his hands immediately knotted into his hair as he paced. “I’m not ready for kids.” He mumbled.

Natasha cradled you gently and bounced you around, looking down at your face which was currently screwed up in a cry.

She began to quietly shush you and lull you to silence.

Your face quickly came to rest and you looked up at her fiery red hair.

“Hey, there.” She gave you a soft smile.

Your face stayed still as you studied the woman holding you.

“Where’s your mummy? Or you daddy?” She asked and frowned down at you. “Did they leave you alone?”

Your big eyes just stared at her.

“Yeah. Mine too.”

The team behind her were talking and possibly arguing. She doesn’t know, she can’t hear. She’s too focused on the smallest smile your little baby lips give her. Your smile makes her chest flutter with joy.

“Maybe we can look after each other, huh?” She smiled down at you.

“Mumma!” You make grabby hands at Natasha as she walks through the door.

The team had just gotten back from a month long mission and everyone was tired.

“Hey, baby girl.” Nat bent down to pick you up.

You were going through a stage of calling everyone ‘mumma’. Even the men.

“Hey, kiddo.” Tony ruffled your hair as he walked passed, giving you the giggles.

Nat smiles at the sound and carried you to her room. You babbled mindlessly as she plopped you onto her bed and slowly started to strap off her gear.

“You’re a cutie.” Nat said when she saw you in the mirror snuggling up to one of her pillows, which was bigger than you. When Nat was finally dressed into some comfy sleep wear and threw her uniform to the side, she collapsed next to you on the bed.

Turning and facing you, you gave her a big wide eyed smile which made her chuckle.

This is what she needed after a tough mission. Happy smiles and pure innocence that just promised mischief later on in life. She would be lying if she said she wasn’t excited to see the trouble you would cause.

“You have a nap today?” Nat raised her eyebrows at you.

You shook your head against the pillow.

“I want to have a nap.” Nat glanced at the little alarm clock on the bedside table behind you and sighed. “I got a debrief in half an hour. Wanna nap a little with me?”

You quickly nodded and shuffled closer to her on the bed. Your little cold hands rested on her chin and you sighed, your little body now realising how tired it was.

In this moment, Nat felt emotional. The hurt that she wouldn’t be able to have kids of her own faded away as you slept next to her on the bed. She felt safe, even though she was supposed to make sure you were. But she was glad.

She closed her eyes and sighed, enjoying the company of the closest thing she’d ever have to a daughter. Just for a few minutes.

Nat sat peacefully on the couch reading a book. A calm afternoon just waiting to be disturbed. Nat quietly listened to the atmosphere around her and heard footsteps coming towards the living room.

Tony waltzed in with a spring in his step and whistling to himself. He walked straight to the kitchen, the open area allowing Nat to still see him. Soon after his entrance she felt a presence beside her.

Looking down over the arm of the couch she could see you crawling across the floor. Eyes set on Tony.

“I see you.” Nat whispered to you, not too loud so Tony could hear.

Your eyes shot up at the red head and a mischievous grin graced your face. You pulled a finger to your lips and held up a can of silly string, one that you and Tony had been chasing every other around with all day.

She winked down at you and pretended to go back to her book.

You raised yourself from the floor and quietly crept up to Tony, who obliviously was whistling away.

Your stepped slowed and you aimed the can right at his head. Turning to look at Nat, you nodded, who nodded back at you.

“Hey, Snark.” Nat’s voice broke his whistling.

“Yes, Stroganoff?” Tony asked before he turned to face Nat and was immediately met with and mouth and face full of silly string.

You relentlessly held onto the can and emptied it onto him.

Cackling to yourself, you sprung passed Nat who was now laughing at Tony as he spat the string onto the floor.

“Hey! We had a truce!” Tony called after you.

You were stressing out big time. After the screaming match at your door, Nat locked you both in your room and she studied you as you still hid behind your bed, covering your chest.

Ugo was perched on the bed and looking curiously down at you.

“What’s going on?” Nat asked you with her hands on her hips.

You stood, still covering yourself and pouted. “I grew again and now none of the clothes we bought last week fit me.”

Nat glanced around at the many articles of clothing that were thrown across the room, clearly after you tried to push them over your chest.

“Looks like we’ll have to start buying much bigger clothes so we can prepare for your growth spurts.” Nat pulled down a big sweater you had stolen from Steve long ago and forgot about from you open wardrobe. Tossing it to you, she grinned. “Pretty sure Tony wouldn’t mind lending us a few for a shopping spree.”

You pulled the sweater over your head, thankful for Steve’s large shoulders so the material sagged over you newly grown chest.

Nat saw how fast your body was growing and now realised you were heading into your late teens. She sighed.

“Also, remind me to teach you some techniques on how to flip a guy. You gonna start needing that soon.”

Tony made you stay in the room as they brought in Steve. You could see through the glass windows of the room that they were also bringing in Sam and Steve’s friend Bucky, who was shut inside a containment box. As they rolled passed the room, you made brief eye contact with Bucky.

This man who looked broken down and wasn’t resisting is supposedly the same man who bombed the VIC?

You didn’t think so.

Ugo sat next to you as you curiously watched everyone interact, you knew the Accords were way bigger than you could understand at the moment but you knew everyone was having a disagreement over it. You felt divided.

Suddenly, the door to the room you were in was pushed open and men stepped in. Ugo stood to his full height and growled at them, daring them to come closer. “Easy, boy.” You calmed him. He wouldn’t move until you told him.

“Ms June.” One of men spoke. “You have to come with us.”

“The hell I do.” You stood defensively. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“I’m afraid I’ll have to insist.” The guard stepped towards you and grabbed your upper arm, dragging you out of the room before you could protest.

“Hey! Let me go!” Your yell alerted Tony and Natasha who were conversing with Steve and Sam, well more everyone in the room.

Ugo was back in the room and barking at the guards that hauled you away and the ones that blocked him from leaving the room.

“Hey!” Tony stepped forward quickly with his arm raised. “What do you think your doing?”

“This girl is not registered into an educational environment. Therefore, she is deemed neglected by the caretakers.” The guard who held you told him.

“Neglected?!”Tony and Nat yelled at the same time.

Steve wasn’t allowed to move anywhere, so he struggled to watch as worry for you etched into his chest.

“In no way is she neglected and she is constantly in and educational environment. Do you know who we are?” Tony said to the man.

The man shrugged. “The avengers are not responsible enough to care for a child. Especially in a room full of murders.” The man glared at Natasha.

Nat stepped forward to interfere but before she reached you, you kicked the man in the shin and tripped him onto his back. Other guards stepped forward and raised their guns at Tony and Nat with Steve being blocked from getting to you.

“Ugo, ha мою сторону!” You yelled out.

Ugo growled and barked at the guards before barreling towards them. Guns were now raised at the dog as he charged out of the room, through the guards and stood in a protective stance in front of you.

His white fur stood up on his back and his snout pulled up in a snarl as he growled at the guards that had their guns drawn on him.

“Shoot him, I dare you.” You said in a warning tone. “Go ahead and piss him off.”

Your burning glare held the stare of the guard you flipped onto the ground. Nat and Tony walked forward passed all the guards.

Nat looked down at the guard you flipped, proud that the lessons you were having with her were paying off.

“She’s not going anywhere. The safest place for her is with her family.” She warned him.

“With Barnes here she’s in danger.” The guard groaned as he stood up.

“I’ll go to the compound. But you’re not taking me anywhere.” You said to them.

The guard began to protest but Ugo snarled at himself, efficiently shutting him up.

Nat stepped forward and gently placed a hand on your shoulder. “I don’t think you have a say. I’ll will personally see her out.”

Nat had the final say before you both turned to leave.

“Со мной сейчас.” You spoke in thick Russian.

Ugo growled once more before turning and following you and Nat out.

You looked at Nat with thankful eyes. “Thanks, mumma.”

“Pretty soon you won’t be needing my help.” Nat smiled down at you.

You peered down at the gift box that held the beautiful crimson necklace.

It had been an entire year since you had seen everyone and today you had your annual growth spurt. What you didn’t know would be your last.

The little gift note in your hand dawned the writing of your mother figure that you have missed dearly.

‘Hey baby girl, not a baby anymore.

I didn’t forget this year, hopefully. Seems ironic when I finally get hang of keeping up with the time of your growths that I’m not there to give this to you in person.

I’m sorry that I couldn’t be there to give this to you, and I pray that you understand why. You’re a smart girl.

I love you June, I miss you everyday. But I will see you again soon. Just don’t forget me.

Nat x’

The necklace was a bright red, reminding you of Nat’s hair. You smiled at the gift, knowing you could never hold resentment towards her. She was defending what she believed in. And you looked up to her for that.

You lifted the necklace and clasped it around your neck, you missed her, hell you missed them all.

The world seemed dull after 5 years of everyone gone. Everyone had made a start to move on but had really just divided again. Trying to keep themselves busy and distracting themselves.

You spent most of your time between places with Tony and the compound. You thought about trying to stay in one spot permanently but you couldn’t be away from one of the others for too long. They were your family.

You were also lonely, seeing that Ugo was one of the creatures that vanished when Thanos won.

You stepped into the compound to see Nat in her usual spot, trying to find people to help and trying to find Clint.

You sighed as you took in her tired appearance. Her hair was well showing after growth but she couldn’t find the will to care about the colour of it any time soon.

“Hey, mumma.” You said, smiling at her.

Nat looked up and gave you a warm smile in return. “Hey, baby girl.” She stood and hurried over to hug you. “How’s Tony?”

You stepped back and shrugged. “The usual. Wishes everyone would come around for dinner at some stage so put that in your schedule.” You pointed before walking with her further into the room and finding Steve. “Hey you.”

“Hey June.” He smiled and stood to hug you as well.

You sighed and fell into a seat at tree table they were seated at. “So,” You relaxed into the chair. “What’s been happening?” You ask, knowing that the answer will be the same as it had been for the last 5 years.

You stood at the panel with your arms crossed and a pout on your face, watching everyone suit up.

“Why don’t I get to go?” You grumbled.

“Because, I told you, we don’t have enough Pym Particles to take everyone and we need someone to man the compound while we are gone.” Tony said as he set up.

“You will literally only be gone a few seconds, Bruce said so himself.” You tried to reason.

“So it shouldn’t be a problem. And your only thirteen.” Tony raised an eyebrow. “Younglings stay here. Plus you look crazy.” He gestured to your scratchy hair and glare.

“You make me crazy.” You mumbled.

“He makes everyone crazy.” Nat said from behind you. You turned to see her smile at you. She pulled you into a hug. “You’ll be okay. We’ll be back before you know it.”

You sighed and hugged her tighter.

“Nat, come on. We are going back in time, not off to war.” Clint said from the platform but you ignored him.

Nat pulled back and lightly touched the necklace around your neck, that one you hadn’t taken off since she gifted it to you.

“Still beautiful.” She said trying to brush your hair down before moving passed you to the platform.

You sighed before moving to the station.

“Alright, June. Just flip the switch right in front of you in five seconds and we should all be back with our stones.” Bruce nodded to you.

You nodded back to him, still salty that you didn’t get to go with them.

“See you in a minute.” Nat said with a smile and you waved.

“In three, two, one.” Bruce counted down before the portal took them.

You sigh before counted to 5 in your head.

Slowly, you flipped the switch you were told to and the portal started up again and in a flash, they were all back.

“Did we get them all?” Bruce said with a hopeful smile.

Clint fell to his knees, a pained expression on his face. You frowned before noticing the empty space next to him.

“Where’s Nat?” You asked, panic rising in your chest.

You were met with silence and your panic was confirmed. You had lost Natasha.

You all stood at the wharf at the lake near the compound. The men argued behind you as you stared out into the lake.

You had just lost the only mother figure you had in your life.

Numbness crawled through your body as you thought about her. The warm smiles she always gave you. The cuddles on scary nights, the amount of naps you had together, the things she taught you so you could defend yourself from anyone who tried to take advantage of you. Tears slowly rolled down your cheeks as you grasped the crimson necklace around you neck, you’d never get to feel her hug again.

Your body buzzed with your powers as they continued to argue behind you, agitating you.

“It was supposed to be me.” Clint’s voice cracked. “She sacrificed herself, she bet her life on it.”

Bruce growled next to you before picking up the wharf bench and tossing it into the lake.

You stood still with your arms crossed as you watched the bench fly across the lake before making a splash.

You took a deep breath before turning to the men.

“Then we can’t sit here and let that go to waste.” You said, your voice strong.

“How are we supposed to move on with this?” Bruce growled at you.

Anger rose in your chest as you looked at the green man. He was supposed to be smart. You knew he was angry and sad but he was being stupid.

“If we don’t, then she died for nothing! She believed in this plan, to make it work! If we just sit here and wallow in grief then her belief and her sacrifice was for nothing.” You told Bruce. “If you guys want to sit here and bitch about it, then fine. But I’m going back in there to make sure my mother died for something.” You said sternly before marching passed them all and back to the compound.

They all soon joined you again and began working hard on making the gauntlet. Tony placed a hand on your shoulder and smiled. You smiled back, knowing you were going to give this all you could.

Don’t worry, mumma. I’ll make sure they remember you.

“And Natasha Romanoff.” Your voice trembled slightly through the mic.

There was a shift in the crowd as you named the members of your family.

“All three who have passed away, fought the fight that bought the people of this world back. They sacrificed themselves, left their own lives behind so that the people of this world could thrive again.” You said with a slight smile on your face. Even though you would miss the whales that swam through the Hudson, you were glad to have Ugo back.

“These people will never be forgotten. And to ensure that that never happens, we have built three monument statues in their honour.” You said proudly and nodded towards the workers next to the stage.

They pulled ropes that held up a large curtain behind you and revealed the three, major statues of your three family members behind you. The press and audience in front of you cheered and clapped as they saw the detailed sculptures. You knew Tony would’ve loved it, Steve would’ve appreciated it and Nat would’ve cringed. But they all deserved it.

“I would also like to announce that a plaque has been developed and a new therapeutic clinic has been constructed and named after our one and only Bruce Banner, who brought all who vanished back.” Down the stage stood Bruce will his arm still in his velcro support. The surprise in his eyes said it all and the other Avengers who stood next to him clapped him on the back. The press and audience clapped again.

“This team will go on fighting for the world, no matter how much it doesn’t deserve it.” You still believed that this world was shit.

“Our new team of Avengers will be officially working with the government. This organisation was developed for a reason, and we will stay that way. Thank you all.” You quickly ended your speech and turned from the podium, Ugo followed you closely. The press rose to their feet and yelled questions at you but you ignored them.

The smiling faces of your new family greeted you. Sam and Bucky stood together, Wanda stood with Carol and you knew Peter was watching from the audience. Bruce smiled warmly at you and placed a hand on your shoulder.

“You didn’t have to do that, June.”

“You brought half the universe back. You deserved more than a clinic but you already have the Nobel Prize.” You shrugged your your shoulders.

Bruce smiled down at you and pulled you into a one armed hug. “Thanks, kid.”

You smiled up at him. “No problem.”

You glanced at Sam and Bucky. “They all would’ve loved it.” Sam complemented.

“Actually, Nat would’ve hated it.” You glanced up the her statue. “But she gets it anyways.” You smiled to yourself.

“What happens if people graffiti on it?” Bucky asked.

“Well they all have little cameras up their noses. So if someone does graffiti, we’ll know who it is.” You gave a devilish smile. You looked down at Ugo who whines a little back at you. You leant down and scratched his ear.

“You truly are a Stark.” Bruce said smiling at you.

You nodded proudly and walked passed them, you clutched Wanda’s arm and carried on back to the car.

“Let’s head back to the compound, there’s Clint’s retirement party to organise.”

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startselectscreen · 5 years ago

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Gears 5 Video Game Review

3 STARS OUT OF FIVE

Ah Gears of War, the franchise that popularized the cover-based mechanic built to regenerate health and shoot locusts from cover to cover. It’s what generated the basis of fun with its horde mode and online competitive matches and of course, the chainsaw lancer which never cease to be satisfying everytime that goes off. Those 360 games were just a blast to play from the never-ending shooting gallery of locusts to the witty and awesome banter between Marcus Fenix and his COG friends, sure there are some douchey moments, no thanks to Dom but everyone just feels like space NFL quarterbacks with their hunky space armor and chainsaw lancers - its just awesome.

However, afterwards the GoW 360 trilogy ended and games like Judgment and Gears 4 appear, it really lost its charm and appeal, its just the same old Gears game streamlining the cover-based mechanics and just basically another shooting gallery of disappointment to say it at least. I mean, having Marcus back as this “old retired” COG alongside a squad of new kids just has been done before and sadly Epic and eventually The Coalition really didn’t entice new fans but still feed into their old Gears fanbase. Now with Gears 5, it just feels like another disappointment and I feel like they really did not improve much since Gears 3 although there is a new Escape and Horde mode which seems more playable like before the 360 games.

The game picks up right after Gears 4, you start as JD, Marcus’ son as he, Del, Marcus and Kait from the previous Gears, want to launch a rocket into outer space and activate the Hammer of Dawn so the COG can be able to combat the Swarm. It is very much a controversial and risky move as it can also affect tremendous human casualties. The game starts as JD but you mostly play as Kait Diaz as she constantly gets headaches and hallucinations from her mother’s amulet and heirloom which somehow is connected to the Swarm. She and her squad goes and ventures through a perilous journey to find the root of her problem and stop it. Much like the Gears game, there will be sacrifices and climatic movie style moments,

The gameplay didn’t really change since GoW 3, it’s the same “stop and pop” action and some new additions. Again, it’s just another Gears’ shooting gallery of never ending Swarm enemies until you have reached the next checkpoint and then rinse and repeat. It’s really the same old conventions and they seemed to downplay it to death. There seems to be only a few new weapons and as well as old and new enemies with painted weaknesses that you hit before killing them. However, it is nice to have corrupted Baird’s DeeBees in the mix of Swarms, it seems to be a nice combination of facing bastions shielding Scions and huge creatures as a new way of creating intense action rather than just jump from cover to cover. It is just a nice touch to the gameplay.

The AI of your teammates however aren’t as smart as the developing Swarm despite having a new ability to target them, it seems countless of times, the AI will just run to the enemy without taking them down and in harder difficulties such as Experienced (Hard), it seems to be a hindrance of trying to revive them one by one as they stupidly get picked off by Swarm while you are trying to survive Wardens and Swarm drop-shotters that will blow up you instantly. Although, the first Act seems nice, when you are fighting in the settlement that you received a distress call of a Swarm invasion, you can summon Baird’s robotic reinforcements and you have the choice of picking Guardians or Sentinels which is fun, albeit only for the first Act and afterwards you mostly are facing the corrupted versions and they really don’t tell you why they are corrupted, although there are just malfunctioned. Again, it just feels like the AI, the part of the gameplay seems really outdated with the typical fixed gun sequences that seems to be aggravating due to annoying cooldowns from those sequences. Granted, it makes those moments hard with no moment to breathe but there are a lot of them and it is not due to its spiked difficulty that I’m playing. And of course, enemies like Brumak and others still the typical video game painted coloured sections where you shoot to take them down.

One main component of the campaign is Del’s, well your trusty robotic friend, Jack as a companion in this game. Introduced by Baird, this new robot is an upgrade from Dave’s short yet untimely demise and still has the cute Wall-E charm to it. These flying robots have been in previous Gears’ games but they are part of the COG army and not playable at all. This new companion has a set of abilities whether passive, combative or defensive that will greatly benefit you against the Swarm. Ranging from Shock, Stim, Pulse and passive abilities that can camouflage, instantly revive and so on, it’s pretty much an arsenal of useful perks in your disposal. These abilities aren’t restricted to a RPG-like tier trees but will require an amount of components to unlock them which can be found during both the main and side missions in chapters. In addition to the three unlockable abilities, there is a fourth and final skill that unlocks only through main and side quests that is the ultimate perk of that specific ability (i.e Shock final unlock can freeze enemies for a period of time and such). During gameplay, you can toggle these two sets of abilities, combative and defensive which when used has a cooldown timer after you have used either of them. It really is a life saver to have these abilities, especially stim which can buff up your health and can be upgraded as an instant revive while you are down. Other useful things such as retrieving weapons/ammo from hard to reach areas or in an intense dogfight or laying shock traps/mines can really save you from those large, intimating Swarm creatures from decapitating you

Another new addition to the game is revealed in Act 2 as open world and unfortunately there is a lack of one or rather bland and boring one. They chatted a big deal of a Gears game being open world but it resulted in a couple of side quests and activities that only rewards more components, big weapons and main components for abilities/parts of them in some cases for Jack and nothing more. These quests are only there for them, nothing more, whether or not you choose to pursue them is up to you. At first, it does feel like a stripped up version of the recent God of War’s open world as these main and side missions can be identified with yellow flags by them indicating there’s something to be done as well as the banter between the squad “to go check it out.” Like God of War, you have a method of transport to reach these areas, a skiff which looks like some sort of ski sledge with a parachute in front that accelerates how fast you ride from the wind. The skiff can seat four with you controlling and driving the skiff and mostly Del who sits and navigates, although you do all of the work. The navigational seat be used in Co-op where players can only mark the map (which you yourself can do while driving). Also, you can stow two weapons (heavy weapons like RL-Salvo Rocket Launcher to the Tri-Shot Gatling Gun) on each side of the skiff that can be used in these missions, it’s like a small storage space for your guns but only can be retrieved after you dismount from the skiff. The map itself seems to be an illusion of being an open world game, but it just feels linear, in Act 2, when you reach those communications' towers in part of the main mission, you can scan for these side missions in some sort of frequency mini-game that only appears in this whole Act, sadly not afterwards. It is also attributed that the skiff can take damage and in later cases, explode and kill everyone as there are sandstorms and obsoletes you’ll need to dodge and maneuver and it feels intense much like in combat with the Swarm.

From a graphical standpoint, the game still delivers. Forgoing the brown and gruel colours of the Gears’ trilogy on the 360, it feels very vibrant and impressive much like the previous game. Each Act really delivers distinct areas to explore in this “open-world” game and it really looks pretty as you ride your skiff throughout the snowy terrain of Act 2 to feeling like Doom or Total Recall in Act 4 with its red sandy desert. It’s too bad that they didn’t make it more open-world to fully realized its graphical potential as it is resulted in a lack of activities to do. Nevertheless, each locale looks great even though it has been done in other better games. It’s also nice that they put nice touches to the characters during these Acts whether having Kait, Del and others wear winter jackets to Act 3 where they wear goggles and less clothing for the hot red sandy desert. The dynamic lightning only looks nice in main missions as the sudden change of effects change when you enter them and it feels weird with a short cut scene to substitute a loading screen in the mix. It does not hinder the visuals at all, the game looks pretty as it is and characters and enemies’ design with the Kait and his team as well as the opposing Swarm just looks menacing as hell.

Unfortunately for the powerhouse of a game, it falls short on its technical problems. There are always problems with Early Access games, sure and the developers are fixing the bugs/glitches and problems with aspects like the online multiplayer matches whether its Horde, Escape or versus mode but it really is aggravating that I still experience these problems two days after the release. Things like the game freezing at spots reverting back to a save checkpoint, some bad audio clicks and the worst of all, seeing the “fail to load save” pop-up and doing the whole chapter again. The “always online” component of the game is a nice trend to prevent illegal privacy but sometimes people like me have a spotty internet connection and I sometimes get disconnected at parts of the game where I finished a brutal firefight and have to do it all over again which is annoying.

Speaking of online, I didn’t really play it, after ten hours of finishing the campaign, I'm really not inclined to pursue Horde or Escape mode as I have a spotty internet connection. As part of a pre-order, you get Sarah Connor and a T-800 Terminator to play online alongside a roster of characters from the main campaign and surprisingly, Spartans from Halo Reach. You can customize them, their banner and taunts for the online aspect and thankfully, I will never touch them. Everyday, when you log in, you can also receive a daily cache of points and other perks, maybe cosmetic items for your character. However, Horde and Versus mode feels like they finally brought back the fun part of those 360 games and implement it with better features as what was said from them. Escape mode is basically an intense firefight where you and other players have to kill waves of enemies in some sort of Swarm hive mind while green gas is approaching behind you in a race to the finish. It seems like a challenging effort but requires a set of friends to really make it in this mode. Also, you and two other players can play the main campaign as Co-op where one of the players can even control Jack and his abilities, making it gameplay interesting.

Other than that, Gears 5 is really a disappointment. The same, derivative combat that has made popular with its cover-based, has done better in other games since then. The game also promises open world which doesn’t have up its expectations with a bland and boring yet beautiful landscape to ride in and from a few side missions. It’s just sad that the Coalition didn’t really implement new features and only maintain it for Gears’ fans and not new players, well only Jack as a Co-op option but again it still suffers from the old “stop and pop” action even in harder difficulties, it just feels last-gen to me with the AI as well. Should it be recommended, only to Gears fan who are really interested in its online multiplayer and the ten hours of the main campaign just feels repetitive and boring to say it at least.

#gears 5 #xbox one #game reviews

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narwhallove · 6 years ago

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Behind the Curtain: Interview with Romy Writer Ludi-Ling

House of Cards actually started out as a random smut scene that burgeoned into something far, far more.

@ludi-ling goes meta in our final interview about her writing process; how the Romy fandom’s changed over the years; alternate universes (AU); and the role of smut for Romy fans. (Spoiler alert, our heroes are hot.)

No surprise that it’s a pleasure interviewing Ludi. I kept sending her more questions (25 total!) because her responses fascinated me and inspired me to ask more. It’s a rare person who writes visceral, startling prose and can also talk about her work with clarity, intelligence, and an affection for her characters that doesn’t occlude good writerly judgment.

The superlatives don’t end there. Anyone who knows the community knows that Ludi is a friend to her readers and to her fellow writers. As we all enter a heady 2019, reading Mr. and Mrs. X together, Ludi is someone to cherish.

If you haven’t read our other interviews, please check out: Part 1 of interviews: X-men Origins Part 2 of interviews: Going Dark

As a scholar of fan studies, do you believe Romy fanfiction fulfills needs that Marvel never can? What needs might those be, for Romy fans?

Certainly I think that fanfic is built on the premise of filling in the gaps, scribbling in the margins (to quote the seminal fan studies scholar, Henry Jenkins!) and fixing perceived wrongs. Comics are unique in that regard because the characters and stories within them continue for years and even decades. Comics continuities are convoluted and complicated, and there is a constant churn of writers working on them. Many fans have followed characters for far longer than the writers, and may know the characters more intimately than the professionals. Comics are full of retcons and contradictory takes on the characters. And I think fanfic is an important medium for allowing fans to “fix” that, to negotiate it. Because of the ongoing nature of comics, and because the futures of the characters are always going to be nebulous and subject to the whims of Marvel and the writers indefinitely, I think it’s going to continue to be important. Romy may be married in the comics, but there will still be plenty to write about—kids, divorce, a reconciliation . . . who knows? ;)

What do you think Romy readers seek out when they read fanfiction? If it’s wish fulfillment, what kinds of wishes are being fulfilled? If it’s looking for “gaps” that the comics skip over, what have you found to be the most common sorts of gaps?

I think Romy is a very interesting example of the “wish fulfillment” function of fanfiction. Because part of the mystique of that ship (no pun intended) is that they can’t touch, they can’t consummate their relationship . . . And fanfic is a way that fans can get them to touch, to work out that angst. I think that one of the staples of Romy fic is the sexual tension between the two, and how they resolve that; the push and pull between them. Sometimes these take place in epic, superheroic backdrops, sometimes in AUs, where they have no mutant powers and where the tension between them is born from other factors (such as already having significant others, or being enemies, or in illicit lines of work).

What draws you to AUs? Your stories aren’t a case of fanfiction filling what’s “between panels”; you tend to shift characters and relationships to entirely different settings, whether it’s a Strange Days–like world or another genre, like a Southern gothic procedural. Can you talk about AUs and how they play out in your imagination?

What I’ve always liked is world-building. One of my first large-scale writing projects was a fantasy trilogy called The Legend of Elu. Most of the fun I got from that was actually building the world, the kingdoms, the mythology, the theology, the languages, the history of that story. That definitely bled into my fanfic.

Now I tend to write canon stuff as one-shots, and novel-length stuff as AUs, because they give me more space to play with world-building. That was something I realised I enjoyed more when I wrote Threads. Writing all those little worlds in a series of one-shots felt too “small.” HoC was originally an expansion of the Threads tale Touch and Go, but it grew into something else, and since then, I’ve preferred to go the AU route for the longer-form stories. :)

We’re living in peak Romy times—I think we’re still reeling from the wedding! Let’s say you had the power to go back in time and drop a pin into an earlier moment in the Romy timeline that you felt truly represents what Romy means to you (which isn’t the same as when they’re happiest!). When and in what universe? Why this choice?

There are so many iconic moments from Romy’s past, but, for me personally, I always go back to their time in Valle Soleada (in X-Treme X-Men). That’s not because they’re happy per se, but because I think that that period was the perfect example of how great they worked together on every level, and was proof positive that they were a good match. I often say it, but I will say it again here, because it’s the truth, and y’all can fight me to the death over it—if there was a time they would’ve got married and I would’ve bought it 100%, it would’ve been in Valle Soleada.

On Tumblr, it seems a large contingent of Romy fans are women in their 30s who discovered Romy at a tender age, thanks to the animated series. This includes you and me! There are exceptions, of course. What’s it like for you to have been in the fandom from the early aughts? What changes in the fandom have you noticed between 2003 and 2018?

I really joined the fandom at an exciting time for Romy—they’d just got back together properly after all the turmoil of the Trial of Gambit. X-Treme X-Men was a treat for Romy fans, and Claremont wrote such a great dynamic between them. As fans we were all excited and happy and well-fed on all that Romy goodness.

So it was weird (not to mention disappointing) when the 2004 reboot happened, and Marvel did everything they could to tank Romy. Which is one thing, and I can stomach it if [it were] logically and well written, but it was just so terribly done that I think many of us just tapped out of the fandom completely. I’d say 2005–2018 were fallow years for the Romy fandom. Most (if not all) of the fan friends I made at that time completely left the fandom. For myself, as someone who enjoys writing AUs, it was the perfect time to branch out from writing in canon and fitting Romy into my own world.

Who are your influences? What writers do you feel a particular affinity for? Are there writers whom we might be surprised to discover informed your work, but you feel have, despite appearances?

I was heavily influenced by the dark, modern fairytales of Angela Carter about the time that I was writing Queen of Diamonds and Threads. She had a really magical way with words—her prose was lyrical, sensual, and unbelievably rich. She was a huge inspiration, but later I moved away from her tone, firstly because I felt I was doing a poor imitation of her, secondly because it wasn’t really appropriate for the direction I wanted to move my fics in, and lastly because I was becoming self-conscious of my insane verbosity and wanted to pare down my prose. That’s something I’m still working on!

At some point during the writing of House of Cards, I finally got round to reading Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and I think it was Douglas Adams who convinced me to move away from Carter’s beautiful but too-flowery prose. I loved the way his narrative just sizzled. I’m bad at capturing that energy—but I do think that from HoC onwards, I’ve tried to learn to be more economical with my words—which is hard for a florid soul like mine.

Threads—structurally at least—was influenced by Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller, and later, by David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas.

Let’s say you can pair your fiction with other works of art—of all forms, films, paintings, music, etc.—as if you were pairing wines to foods. What other pieces of art might you say go along with yours?

Wow! OK—that’s hard. Threads I’d probably pair with Cloud Atlas (the book, not the film, which I haven’t yet watched). HoC—I don’t know that there’s any one thing I would pair it with, but you can bet a load of post-apocalyptic stuff was thrown into that stew, along with a bit of The Matrix and probably some Inception.

52 Pickup was influenced a lot by Asmus’s Gambit run, cos I really wanted to write a heist fic with Remy and Rogue rather than Remy and Joelle (who I freely admit kicked ass). But if I had to pair it with a piece of media, it’d be with the video game Remember Me, which dealt a lot with themes of how memories inform our identities, and the ethical concerns of having memories essentially become “documents” that are uploaded and shared digitally through the cloud.

This is a good segue to talk about high-low culture. We may not want to believe in a hierarchy of culture, but we can certainly talk about the differences between fanfiction and “regular fiction.” When you read fanfiction, do you approach it differently than you would regular fiction? Are your expectations for form, reading pleasure, or anything else different? If so, how so?

Interesting question! I don’t know whether I approach it differently per se, but I think that readers have different expectations of fanfic. Hopefully we all read “regular fiction” for the same reason we read fanfic—for pleasure. But I don’t think there’s really a binary between regular and fanfiction. I think both exist on a continuum. There is a lot of “regular fiction” (I prefer to call it “profic” or “professional fiction,” because I think that’s where the binary between the two exists) that is actually very close to fanfic, and vice versa. By that I mean that there is plenty of fanfic that is epic in scope, deals with serious themes, and might be considered “classics” if they weren’t fanfiction.

And there is also profic, like romance, that is more similar to fanfic in terms of the kind of functions that it serves. There is an illicit pleasure to reading romance—for example, it’s not the kind of thing you’d openly read in public! There’s a similarity between that and fanfic, and I think, as readers of fanfic, we anticipate some level of illicitness when we approach it—even if the illicitness is only in the format (i.e., it’s fanfiction!), not in the content.

Fun question: What role do you think explicit smut functions in a fic? How do you deal with smut in your work? There’s an interesting moment that’s not in HoC, in which you write about Gambit and Rogue’s first time having sex in his point of view. It’s a separate chapter that exists as its own entity on your fanfiction.net page. Notably, it is much more explicit than the scene in Rogue’s perspective. Can you talk a little bit about this decision?

Well, I do think that fanfic is a safe space for writers to explore their sexuality (and I think that’s a huge part of the reason why fic is looked down upon), and smut plays a significant role in that. And smut certainly plays a part in my own fics. HoC actually started out as a random smut scene that burgeoned into something far, far more. Generally, I do try to make the sex scenes have a purpose in the plot (’cos I’m kind of anal about plot structure!), but in the particular case of Slow Burn and the other HoC vignettes, those are more self-contained one-shots where I could explore things that I couldn’t explore in the main story. So I could indulge in the smut a bit more! And let’s be honest—Gambit’s dark sexuality makes it thrilling to write smut from his perspective—of course his “thoughts” are going to be more explicit! ;)

But I also think that it’s interesting to write their individual perspectives on their sexual encounters, because of that tension between their characters. Rogue is the quintessential virginal Southern Baptist gal who’s inexperienced; whereas Gambit is the sexually aggressive alpha male who’s probably never had a woman turn him down in his life. That makes for a very combustive love affair between the two, and makes it fun to write that love affair (and all the smut in-between) from both their points of view.

#ludi-ling #fanfic #fanfiction #romy #rogue and gambit #house of cards #interview with author #interview with fanfic writer #fanfiction studies

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doomonfilm · 6 years ago

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Ranking : Top Films of 2018

Here we are... that moment that every critic simultaneously loves and dreads : the Year-End Top 10 List. At worst, we are forced to scrape the creative dredges and cobble together something that resembles a best of list that will bring glory and honor to the year. At best (like this year), we are forced to leave personal favorites in the dust and judge the larger quantity of offerings on a much tougher scale in order to truly represent the top quality work of the year.

As I’ve said in many pieces this year, 2018 was a joy in terms of being a film-lover. This list was not an easy undertaking, and it more so resembles a snapshot of how I’ve felt over a judging period than it does a concrete group of selections in a fixed order. Take this list as more of a jumping off point for discovery than you do the gospel of DOOMonFILM.

Note : I am not sure when I will get a chance to see Vice or The Favourite, which I am sure will skew my results once I do see them... I will address those films in their respective reviews, however. Forgive me in advance.

Honorable Mentions

Damsel Even if the Zellner Brothers weren’t representing Austin beautifully with this gem of a film, it’d still be on my radar simply for the fact that it is a unique twist on a genre that most figured had seen every presentation imaginable. Add to that a strong female lead character, and you’ve got a winner on your hands.

The Endless A science-fiction modern day classic, and apparently part of a possibly bigger line of stories (with some of the best integration of aspects from another film I’ve ever seen). This film is chilling in its approach to the concept of cults, as well as its use of the concept of ‘the danger that lurks just off-screen’.

Isle of Dogs Had this year not been full of stellar animated films, this one probably would have made the main list. More groundbreaking animated films, combined with personal feelings about the films of Wes Anderson, however, regulated this one to Honorable Mention status.

Mid90s I was all set for Eighth Grade to be my bit of nostalgia, or my reflection on what it’s like to be a kid again, and for what it’s worth, it was a great film. The thing is, Mid90s directly spoke to me in a way that Eighth Grade unfortunately could not, simply because Mid90s was like looking in a time-traveling mirror.

Thoroughbreds I really wanted this to be on my top 10, but ultimately, it was too ‘quiet’ of a film to make it in a year full of big noise. Thoroughbreds will certainly be a future favorite for public screenings and friend viewings, but a couple of films this year hit the same notes on a higher frequency.

Black Panther The cultural impact of this film is one that cannot be ignored. It took February, a month that is generally a box office bust, and it put up unparalleled numbers that not only lasted throughout the year, but were topped from within rather than by another Hollywood studio. The respect given to the characters and their African heritage did not go unnoticed, either, as several think-pieces and a number of curriculum were spawned from those researching elements of the production design. The narrative is strong, and it righted the Marvel villain boat prior to the big MCU bombshell that was lying in wait.

The Favourite I really wanted this to make the top 10 of the year... I thought long and hard about what film I should remove or replace. What I came to realize, however, is that despite The Favourite being a world-class comedy and production, it simply falls short in the realm of the spectacular : it does not contain visual innovations, it is not a reflection of the times, and it didn’t completely break my brain. That being said, on any given day, I’d happily name this one of the top 10 films of 2018... it’s essentially like having 11 cakes on the table and having to pick the 10 best.

Avengers : Infinity War This movie was the true film event of the year. Marvel has been building up to this singular event for nearly two decades, and in my opinion, the payoff more than succeeded. Thanos tiptoed the line between anti-hero and villain with purpose perfectly, and the rapport between characters worked both in terms of advancing narratives and being mined for humor. I am definitely looking forward to Avengers : Endgame this April, and I know the masses are right there with me.

10. BlacKkKlansman

Not that I ever doubted Spike Lee had it, but after a few abstract offerings and documentaries, one wonders if their style can translate into an ever-expanding world of film language. Luckily for Lee, it seems the world has grown into his cinematic vision, with an older true story serving as the perfect backbone for many of Lee’s trademark tricks to be implemented for maximum effect. The ending will put you in tears if you have anything closely resembling a soul.

9. Blindspotting

This film really deserved a bigger run than it got, as it hit race relations of today on the nose without coming off as preachy or heavy-handed. Daveed Diggs proved that his charisma translated on both stage and screen, and his integration of hip-hop into both realms will hopefully have positive long-lasting effects. The chemistry between all members of this cast is kinetic, the story is told with perfect pacing, and the movie rides visual highs that match the narrative ones. I would love to see this movie receive some high-degree nominations.

8. Annihilation

I came into 2018 with high expectations for this film, as I’d spent the previous 16 months or so completing the Southern Reach trilogy in its book form. Then I started hearing things about the production and the release that gave me a bad feeling : a Netflix distribution deal that seemed to all but kill a true theatrical run, trepidation from the studio in regards to the director’s vision, and other whispers that attempt to sink a film. Then I saw this movie, and was taken away to a completely different world. We may not be getting a faithful, trilogy-length adaptation of the series anymore based on what happens in Annihilation, but if these are the moments I’m left with, I’d consider myself happy in the long run.

7. First Reformed

It took me longer than I intended to get around to this one, but knowing that Paul Schrader wrote and directed it made it a must-see. The film was drawing comparisons to Taxi Driver (not a surprise, based on the aforementioned Schrader involvement), and surprisingly, it more than lived up to that hype. The tension is equal, but updated to reflect the times in a way that could impact any of us.

6. Suspiria

This movie will make it extremely hard for me to blanket-debate against remakes simply because it does all of the right things in regards to updating a classic. The film does not rely on existence as a new millenium version of an old film... rather, it boldly takes concepts only touched upon in the original and fully embraces them, presenting a true psychological horror gem in a year full of them. The film also looks amazing on top of everything, which was a high bar to meet considering the original movie is basically driven by its visual style. A 2018 must-see, film buff or not.

5. Spiderman : Into the Spider-Verse

Easily the most fun I’ve had in a theater all year. I was blown away by the animation, and can’t wait to see further installments of the Spider-verse specifically to see how that enhances over the years. There was such a high volume of homage and Easter Egg placement in this film that it warrants repeat viewings, and it was one of a handful of films that I wanted to instantly own as I was walking out of the theater.

4. Mandy

Like Spider-Man : Into the Spider-verse, I wanted to own this movie the second I walked out of the theater as well. The trailers intrigued me, a recommendation of Beyond the Black Rainbow fully sold me, and the final product did not disappoint. This film certainly is not for everyone, and funny enough, the two biggest aspects that would place it on that ‘not for everyone’ list sit in opposition of one another : the film is a bit indulgent on the style at the sake of what would be considered normal pacing, and it has some extremely violent moments. That being said, Mandy is easily one of, if not THE, most beautiful films of the year.

3. Roma

This seems like the closest thing to a Fellini film that us modern day film lovers will ever get. The story itself is intriguing, as it juxtaposes class issues, political issues and the barrier of trying to raise a family in a crazy world all in an intriguing tapestry. The cinematography is calculated, observational, and the choice to film the movie in black and white adds an instant timeless quality to it. Director Alfonso Cuaron even manages to get in a little cinematic and visual humor, albeit mostly subtly, but it definitely pays off if you’re in tune to what he’s doing. Easily one of the best pictures of the year, worldwide, and a party that I was certainly late to.

2. You Were Never Really Here

If Mandy is a bit too over the top for your tastes, then You Were Never Really Here may be the jarring experience you need in 2018. This film is almost as visually stunning, but the narrative is far more calculating, deceptive and intriguing, both on the surface and as you dig deeper. The hectic camera setups, editing and score put you in such a disjointed state of mind that Joaquin Phoenix becomes the only thing you can hang on to, and your involvement in his journey is completely immersive. In a year of performances that focus on the anti-hero, this film found a way to scrape to the top of the pile.

1. Hereditary

Something strange is happening here... who would have thought that a horror film would be my favorite film of the year? Hereditary is no run of the mill horror film, however... it treats its audience as intelligent, and there is so much texture in the film that it’s impossible to see it all without multiple viewings. The close of the first third of the film is horribly unsettling, but it propels the narrative forward so abruptly and intensely that you’re locked in from there out. A genius film, and an instant classic.

(Editor’s notes)

- Original post date : 12/27/18 - Revision date : 1/8/19 (Roma added to position 3, Black Panther moved to Honorable Mentions) - Revision date : 1/10/19 (The Favourite added to Honorable Mentions) - Revision date : 1/22/19 (Suspiria added to position 6,Avengers : Infinity War moved to Honorable Mentions)

#ChiefDoomsday #DOOMonFILM #TopFilms2018 #Damsel #TheEndless #IsleOfDogs #Mid90s #Thoroughbreds #BlackPanther #BlacKkKlansman #Blindspotting #AvengersInfinityWar #Annihilation #FirstReformed #Spider-ManIntoTheSpider-Verse #Mandy #YouWereNeverReallyHere #Hereditary

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ayearofpike · 6 years ago

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The 2010s reprints, all at once

So if Simon & Schuster is going back to the well for Pike’s vampire books, what’s stopping them from bringing back other stories from their one-time best-selling young adult author? Form factor, perhaps. It’s the twenty-first century now, and no self-respecting teen would be caught dead reading a pocket-sized paperback. We need something big and beefy to show that we’re Serious About Literature even as we read about murderous insane girls. Fortunately, he’s written more than a couple continuations that will link together into a handy packaged bind-up. But a lot of these books were originally written twenty years ago or more, when the absence of technology and communications wasn’t something that needed to be addressed to explain why these bastards weren’t better informed. Indeed, new audiences (the ones we in education call “digital natives”) might not even understand the characters’ rationales for action without being able to step back in time and forget what they take for granted.

Is it worth rereading these new editions? How different are they from the originals? Lucky for you, I’ve decided to find out.

Remember Me

Compiles Remember Me, The Return, and The Last Story Simon Pulse, 2010 789 pages ISBN 978-1-4424-0596-7 LOC: PZ7.P626 Re 2010 OCLC: 646299604 Released July 6, 2010 (per B&N)

Since this was the magical bestseller that made Pike who he was in the first place, it shouldn’t be too surprising that not much is changed or updated in this edition. Still, the very nature of the YA market having morphed into the vehicle that allows these stories to be reprinted throws a pretty massive wrinkle (like, even worse than the fact she’s publishing under her white name) into Shari’s expectation that her mom will never read Remember Me. Come on, dude — I guarantee she already read about the vampires.

The only changes I found through all three stories were giving Lenny the Latino gangbanger a CD player rather than a cassette (because 2010), saving the final story on a jump drive rather than a floppy disk (again, 2010), and swapping Shari’s green pants for blue jeans (I guess to match the outfit Jean is wearing when she falls off the balcony?). One thing that hasn’t changed: Third Book Whitewashin’ Shari is still an asshole. You’re lucky I’m so determined to be thorough, otherwise I would have never reread this shit.

To Die For

Compiles Slumber Party and Weekend Point, 2010 408 pages ISBN 978-0-545-26432-1 LOC: not listed OCLC: 679759450 Released September 1, 2010 (per B&N)

Little weirdness here, as this is a Scholastic joint rather than Simon & Schuster, but the covers are all coordinated, down to the typeface. Not sure whether the two houses worked together to try to sell their books (at Pike’s agent’s suggestion?) or whether Point saw an opportunity to mine some back catalog and tried to copy the existing presentation as close as possible.

The oldest viable stories (read: not Cheerleaders) must have some major rewrites pending for a modern audience, you’d think, but it’s not that drastic. The main complication would be these kids being able to reach someone outside the immediate group and report problems, so Pike quickly writes around that with a single line in each story establishing the locale as beyond cell service. They also both turn emergency CB radios into walkie-talkies, which isn’t even close to the same thing. It’s a little hinky at times, especially in accepting that Lara Johnson has packed an alarm clock instead of a phone, but it does the job.

Most of the rest of the changes hinge on contemporary references. Slumber Party loses its Richard-Pryor-lighting-himself-aflame-while-freebasing joke, but keeps the kids watching Dr. Zhivago at the first fateful party. Weekend has to adjust a lot more — party music is no longer on record, David Bowie becomes Bono (replacing a ten-year-old reference in 1985 with a ten-year-old reference in 2010), Angie’s Datsun is now a Camry, and song leaders are finally just cheerleaders. At times, he’s just wiped out a reference altogether: gone are Pat Benatar, Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw, Fonzie, Michael Jackson, and most tragically the Carpenters, which undoes a joke at Sol’s expense and removes any understandable sense from the passage they once were in. Oh well. At least he spelled “gringo” correctly in this edition.

Until the End

Compiles the Final Friends trilogy (The Party, The Dance, and The Graduation) Simon Pulse, 2011 846 pages ISBN 978-1-4424-2252-0 LOC: PZ7.P626 Unt 2011 OCLC: 693810612 Released August 30, 2011 (per B&N)

I’ll be honest: I’m not sure what this compilation is doing here. Did anybody clamor at the bit for Final Friends even back in the day? I mean, there must have been some demand to let our boy write a trilogy, but even as a teenager I saw the problems embedded in this tale. Simple time-shifting adjustments weren’t gonna fix those. And this is the beefiest book of the lot, maybe to appeal to young readers who like the huge format and want to show off how much they can read. (I had it in the waiting room of my kid’s doctor this week and another dad said it was the biggest book he’d ever seen.) It’s a lot to plow through for the sake of completeness. Still, we’re committed, right?

I got like 200 pages in and did not see a single change — not even in the computer lab where Bubba is “hacking” into the district grade data bank — which made me worried I was going to just be rereading the same stories over again. And 650 pages later, GUESS WHAT. Literally the only difference is that Jessica, in bemoaning her travails with Bill, says she was “trying to seduce a gay guy” instead of merely “a gay.” Like, even the part about it taking all day to transfer 40 megabytes via modem and filling up a school computer’s hard drive is still there. This was NOT done for new fans. But reading it so fast and soon and smushed together did help me realize that The Rock does indeed have a given name. (I’ll save you the research time: Theodore Gordon.)

Bound to You

Compiles Spellbound and See You Later Simon Pulse, 2012 490 pages ISBN 978-1-4424-5971-7 LOC: PZ7.P626 Bo 2012 OCLC: 777602521 Released August 7, 2012 (per B&N)

Maybe this is the only bind-up where the two stories could have been anything. (The Point book: those were his only two under Scholastic, so it makes sense.) There’s a back catalog of literally two dozen books not otherwise committed that they could compile. So why these two together? OK, sure, we’re four years away from the phrase “sexy lizard teens” entering the lexicon, but for sure Scavenger Hunt is better paired with Spellbound than a story about nuclear war survivors time traveling out of regret. See You Later seems like a really obtuse deep cut to me, but if he was committed to it why not pair it with The Midnight Club, which is similarly about love lost to inevitable death? I don’t really see the connection, and am too lazy to do any rationale research. But I’m not actually mad at the books — they’ve shown as two of my favorites in this reread.

Spellbound, being the oldest of the S&S catalog, does need a little reworking, particularly in the racist elements of an African shaman going to a podunk Old West high school. Pike didn’t take them all out, of course, because we have to know what a dick the boyfriend is by his connection of the dude to savage cavemen. However, the lack of cell phones is very glaring in the bits where they’re trying to find the brother/potential murder victim, and Cindy has to sit around the hospital waiting to be paged. In 2012 it’s inconceivable that high school kids wouldn’t have SOMETHING. You tried to reach the brother at his house, at his friend’s, at his girlfriend’s ... did you call him directly? Such a simple fix: “He’s not answering his cell.” It probably would have made the unease even stronger.

See You Later, hinging as it does on the main character understanding a video game, has its own needs for updating, and does it better than the Final Friends remake. Still, it’s a little slapdash. Becky works in an electronics store instead of a record store, but do these places even sell physical media computer games anymore? Even six years ago that shit was all download-only. And Ray STILL works in a bookstore ... do those still exist? Mervyn’s definitely doesn’t; they went bankrupt in 2008. As for the game itself, it requires 12 gigs of RAM rather than the paltry megabyte, which is what my newish machine runs six years later. (At the time I had ... two gigs?) Also, in the original Mark asked who won the 2010 World Series, which isn’t the future anymore in 2012 ... but it’s weird that he’s now asking about 2020, just eight years off rather than twenty. Most unsettling, though, is how the tenor of international violence rhetoric still rings true for the setting of this story, even though we’re not worried about Communists anymore. The Cold War is long over, but we’ve swung through tolerance and hope and are right back on fear.

Chain Letter

Compiles Chain Letter and The Ancient Evil Simon Pulse, 2013 456 pages ISBN 978-1-4424-7215-0 LOC: PZ7.P626 Ch 2013 OCLC: 852941511 Released July 23, 2013 (per B&N)

Chain Letter was also not originally published by S&S, so it’s interesting that they’ve gotten the rights to print it in this volume. (Though they were compiled in the UK in 1994, so maybe it wasn’t too hard.) By now, though, it feels like they’re reaching, as the teen fiction world shifts yet again to futuristic dystopias and Pike doesn’t really have anything like that. Thirst was on its way out too; the fifth book appeared just before this, and we’ll note that even though Pike didn’t finish the story the sixth has yet to emerge. Curse you, unpredictable teen girls!

Not too much is different from the original editions here. Obviously Pike was throwing in his timely references that had to be cut for understandability (Nastassja Kinski?), but by Chain Letter 2 he’d learned to rein that in. Also, there’s a moment in the first one where Alison yells “Hate you!” at the attacking Caretaker, which always struck me as awkward. This version changes it to “Screw you!” which makes me think Pike originally wrote it as “Fuck you!” and had to bowdlerize for YA. Of course they have to throw some shade at snail mail, too, since that’s how the letters arrive in the first place.

But the main differences are cassette recorders and phones. Obviously the kids aren’t going to tote around a whole bunch of old-school tools when we are now six years into the smartphone era. There’s some nice cleaning up in The Ancient Evil, writing around the idea that people need to (or even CAN) look numbers up in the phone book, but in lots of cases it just makes things awkward. Like, why is Joan going after the driving controls to turn the incriminating recording off if it’s on Kipp’s phone in the backseat? Why do Alison and Brenda have to sit around the kitchen waiting for a return call? Why is Kipp waiting until he gets home to check his voicemail? Did he seriously leave his phone in his room while he ran to the store and left a seven-year-old sister alone at the house? It just makes less and less sense.

You might have seen somewhere online a mention of another compilation, collecting Last Act and Master of Murder. This book does not actually exist. The ISBN and OCLC numbers associated with the title both lead to a British printing of the second half of Final Friends, by Hodder Publishing. I emailed the house just to make sure I wasn’t missing anything, and they responded that they’ve never printed these two stories together. There’s no record of it anywhere else, certainly not on Simon & Schuster’s Pike page, and reviews I’ve found where people have attempted to buy this collection attest to the fact that they’ve actually received a copy of Final Friends Part 2 But Not Book 2 Even Though the Second Half of Book 2 Is In It.

There also used to be another one named on Wikipedia called Time of Death, which was supposed to compile Bury Me Deep and Chain Letter, but why the hell would they do that when Chain Letter has its own sequel already? There’s not any verifiable record of such a book anywhere online, not even a flawed cross-listing like the first.

So fuhgeddaboudit. I’m done reading compilations.

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justanotherdumpingground · 6 years ago

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Chapter Reviews: March 12-16, 2019 + ATV's Comeback

High School Story: Class Act Chapter 5:

Did I just support Rory's campaign after supporting the twin's? That I did. I laughed at the options to hold the dance off at the parking lot and pick a heartbreaking ballad. That would be an interesting choice.

I'm starting to dislike the twin for disrupting Rory's campaign. Not once did Rory disrupt the twin's bake sale, and the fact that the twin had the gall to not wait shows their foul play. I debated a bit to supoort the twin or Rory, and ended up going with the latter. Not to mention that the twin's support for more sports falls flat because there's more emphasis on it than cheer and band. Back in the first trilogy, Book 1 focuses on getting a new quarterback after Brian transfered to Heart, and Book 2 has Ashley Faris diverting funding from cheer and band to the basketball team as part of her embezzlement scheme with her brother.

Skye's birthday party is sweet, though I don't want mine held at a graveyard. The irony is that there's a cemetery in the same street I live in. Anyway, what's more important is that Skye's happy. She deserves true happiness, away from her horrible family.

Right now, I'm just curious to see how the trip with friends turns out. I wonder whether there will be more election-related drama, even though I dread it.

The Heist: Monaco Chapter 15:

Yes! I succeeded in getting Sonia to my side. For a moment, I thought she'll stay loyal to Ansel. And that premium scene with her is hot. It's like I finally stole her heart after she stole mine. So glad I picked her as my main love interest because she's the one I find most compelling. Even better was when she distracted Ansel and helped me escape.

Glad to see my training with Jones and Ulrich's gloves paid off. They were worth the diamonds because I got to see my MC being badass and making good use of important tools for the heist. I even stole a necklace that looks like Zenobia's along with the diamond. And the scene where I called Carlisle out for his exploitation of customers was much needed to blow off steam towards him.

The premium escape scene was really badass as well. Seeing Rye and Eris escape in style was cool, and having Fabien drive the main trio to safety was a relaxing calm before the storm. Now all I gotta do was punch Ansel in the face. It's now or never.

Desire & Decorum Chapter 12:

The corgi's back! I missed him! Just kidding. That's just another corgi with the same model as the one in TRR. Nevertheless, I miss the TRR corgi, and it's nice to see some Welsh because it's not a widely spoken language. Too bad I didn't watch the street performers, but after seeing how many of them have recycled models from TC&TF, I cry a little bit inside.

Anyway, it was fun being deceptively polite to Duke Richards and snarky at the same time. Makes me feel good about playing this series. Oh, and Felicity's back even though she's meh.

If there's one thing this book should do regarding the conspirators led by Duke Richards, it's to do justice to the showdown against them. It better not be like The Junior, where Nathan monologues and gets easily exposed, and the clues don't give any special advantages besides putting Beau and/or Kassidy in jail. Seeing that it closely involves the MC being married to Duke Richards, I say have that duke killed in the end.

America's Most Eligible Chapter 9:

Honestly, Piper's still the same smug snake like before. Even when her new show is doing well, I still don't trust her.

After seeing Eden wanting to confess her feelings to Kiana, I say why not? At that time, I thought she could get eliminated, so last chance, perhaps? Even after I've been proven wrong, I still don't regret my decision. It was sweet to see Eden mustering her courage.

Man, Bianca gets done dirty in All Stars, brought back only to have just one premium scene and she gets eliminated this chapter or earlier. I seriously wonder whether or not Pixelberry disregards the potential she brings just because she's female, and PB just wants to cater to its "target audience" despite their illogical demands. Anyway, she deserves better than this.

I really should be careful of Ivy not honoring our deal, especially since I have a negative relationship with her. Nevertheless, Slater gets eliminated, leaving me with one less tough competitor to deal with. The funny thing is that he's still friends with me. Let's see if he and Ivy wind up being interchangeable because of their pragmatism.

The Elementalists Chapter 1:

The opening scene with the girl Goeffe tried to protect and Discount Dorian Pavus got me thinking that the new book's plot will focus on the nine masters of each attunement. From the fight between them and his assumption that the other masters are weak for not realizing their potential, it seems that the nine elements rests on some sort of delicate balance, and the villain wants to use his powers to the hightst potential possible.

Anyway, back to Penderghast. I'm so glad Atlas and Aster have enrolled. I can't wait to see more of them, especially since Aster was severely sidelined in Book 1. I was shocked and amused to see that Greygarden Waithe looks like Yusuf Konevi with blue hair, blue skin, and yellow eyes. Boy, Pixelberry sure loves recycling character models. On another note, I hope I get to see more of the dynamics between the different races of the setting, especially since Aster mentioned the Wand Wars being a sour point in relations between humans and wood nymphs. It's too good of an opportunity for Pixelberry to pass.

I'm thinking of renaming the friend group from Five Stars to something else, probably The Week, with each member for each day of the week. As for the tour around Penderghast, I encouraged Atlas and Aster to focus on their studies. They're in a place of learning, so they should make the most of their enthusiasm for learning. I know Aster's the kind of person who wants to learn more, so that's a plus.

I like the element symbols on the choices. It makes me easier to choose which kind of spell depending on the situation at hand. Especially when it comes to the environment. It's helpful.

So we can get impression points with Discount Dorian Pavus, eh? Well, He's probably lying when he said that he knew MC and Atlas's parents, but I also think it means impression points will have more impact than before. I hope this new villain has a complex characterization and is very effective at his actions. So far, he has a colorful personality, which is better than Raife Highmore, who is bland and forgettable.

Ride or Die Chapter 9:

Why does it sound like Mona traded one undesireable situation (jail time, which shouldn't be bad for her) for another (ending up with the Mercy Park Crew)? It doesn't help that she has no problems continuing her life of crime. And why destroy a functioning car even if it's old? I swear, she doesn't have much of a personality besides being a criminal who doesn't regret her actions, but then again, I pick her out of "pity" and not because of her personality.

Because I sided with Darius, he visited my MC as well as calling her in the previous chapter. As part of me roleplaying (or trying to) her as an informant dedicated to justice, I told him to just trust me, since the Brotherhood is implied to be the antagonists, and he better stay away from being collateral damage.

Colt and Kaneko, you idiots! I get that the Brotherhood is E.V.I.L., but recruiting Salazar despite how much of a snake he is? Hooray for MPC logic! Another reason to throw them under the bus, though it's part of my plan all along anyway.

Open Heart Chapter 5:

I enjoy the friend group of this series, but I also worry that this competition for the diagnostics team position will jeopardize their friendship. As for Aurora, I told the group that she's not as bad as people say. Despite her aloof personality, disregard of small talk, and an unacceptable remark, there's more to her than meets the eye. She resents being associated with her aunt, is actually good with patients like Annie, and makes no attempt to ruin oter people's performances. It's extremely naïve to assume she shouldn't be a complex character, given her understandable annoyance of being seen as Harper's niece and hidden depths with Annie.

Hello, familiar faces. I kinda laughed at Senator Lucius, Kyle Garza, and Percy Mendoza's faces at the baseball match. Pity I didn't buy the premium outfit, but thr baseball manager's so darn relatable on his lack of familiarity with medical terms.

So, Rafael is a love interest? Not surprised because of his popularity among the fanbase. Didn't pick the premium option to fly with him, so I watched on YouTube, and it was okay. I get to know a bit about him and that he looks up to his uncle, which is nice. Not to mention that the sunset view is beautiful.

More thoughts on Across the Void's return:

As I've said earlier, I'm not excited for it to return. I'm wary of Pax and Eos for being nuisances, the love interests lacking sufficient development for me to care for them, and the Vanguard vs Jura conflict lacking enough focus to the point that I don't know enough of them to care. Maybe Pixelberry will fix this issue by focusing more on the gray vs gray conflict they've set up. After all, this story is supposed to be an adventure that allows us to experience various areas of the conflict.

#choices stories you play #choices high school story: class act #choices hssca #choices desire & decorum #choices d&d #choices the heist: monaco #choices th:m #choices america's most eligible #choices ame #choices open heart #choices oh #choices the elementalists #choices te #choices ride-or-die #choices rod #choices across the void #choices atv #chapter reviews

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weekendwarriorblog · 4 years ago

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The Rest of the Weekend Warrior’s 2020 Top 25… and His Terrible 12 Movies!

If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll notice that my Top 10 has already appeared over at Below the Line, and you can either go there and read those first or start with the movies that fell just outside my top 10, including a few movies you might not have heard about.

Back at the very beginning of 2020, I made a private resolution that I would watch more screeners. This is because I had become quite legendary for publicists sending me screeners and me just not getting the time to watch them with all the running around I was doing to screenings. I will never make a resolution like that ever again. (In fact, if my 2021 resolution was to have more sex, I only really need to do it once.)

This year, I wrote (no joke) slightly under 300 reviews, which may be more than I wrote in the three years prior. Part of this was having extra time from not travelling around the city trying to get to screenings, but also, once I decided to transition my weekly box office column into a review column, I decided that I was gonna watch and review as many movies as I possibly could this year. I’m sure there are others who do this all the time, but man, I don’t know how you do it. There were days where I got so burnt out at staring at my laptop for 15 hours every day that I just had to stop.

Still, when you’re watching 300 movies in a single year, any movie that can get into my annual Top 25 (or even get an Honorable Mention) should feel somewhat honored.

Anyway, onto the second 15 movies in my Top 25 (click on the title for a link to each of my reviews!):

11. Herself (Amazon Prime Video) – One of my more recent viewings is this film directed by Phyllida Lloyd (Mamma Mia!) and starring British actress Clare Dunne (who also co-wrote the script) as a mother of two young girls who got out of an abusive marriage with a man who still shares custody with her daughters. She wants to give her girls a place to live so she decides to build her own house on a plot of land given to her as a gift. It’s such a simple premise but Lloyd and Dunne have made a wonderful not-too-heavy drama that still slams you with its raw emotions.

12. Jungleland (IFC Films) – I really enjoyed Max Winkler’s earlier movie Ceremony, but this underground boxing drama about two brothers (Jack O’Connell, Charlie Hunnam) was also a solid crime-drama that follows them on a road trip to deliver a mob boss’ mistress (Jessica Barden) back to him on their way to a big match. Winker really outdid himself in terms of the storytelling and somehow managed to avoid most of the normal boxing movie cliches while allowing this to stand up to some of the greats.

13. Palm Springs (NEON/Hulu) – One of the first of this year’s Sundance movies that really connected with me, Max Barbakow’s sci-fi comedy starred Andy Samberg as a guy stuck at a horrible wedding who ends up in a Groundhog’s Day situation with the wonderful Christin Milioti was so much fun. Adding to the madness was JK Simmons as a guy who seems to be out to get Samberg’s character for reasons we don’t learn until much later. Such a brilliant and hilarious movie with so much great re-watch value.

14. Soul (Disney•Pixar) – The latest from the animation studio that seemingly can’t do wrong – but that depends on who you ask – follows jazz pianist Joe (voiced by Jamie Foxx) who dies and ends up “The Great Beyond” desperate to get back to earth having just gotten his big break. Helping him (sort of) is a soul voiced by Tina Fey, and things don’t go quite as Joe helped. Co-written and co-directed by Kemp Powers, the film goes in a different direction from Docter’s last animated film, Inside Out, but still retaining some of the same metaphysical fabric that made that Oscar-winning animated film connect with adults just as much as with kids.

15. Mangrove (Amazon Prime Video) – The debate on whether Steve McQueen’s latest “Small Axe Anthology” should be deemed a TV series or five separate movies continues to rage as Amazon decides to save the movie for the Emmies. At two hours long, Mangrove is the closest of the series to being a great stand-alone film, and frankly, I thought it was better than McQueen’s Oscar-winning film, 12 Years a Slave. This told the true story of restaurant owner, Frank Crichlow (Shaun Parkes), and how he’s persecuted by the racist local police in the late ‘60s, but when he teams with a local Black Panther activist (Black Panther’s Letitia Wright), a protest march turns into a tense court trial for a number of people involved in it.

16. I Will Make You Mine (Gravitas Ventures) – Actor Lynn Chen’s directorial debut was actually the third movie in a trilogy of indie films centered around musician/songwriter Goh Nakamura, who appeared in all three films. I watched this the first time thought it was just okay. When I realized it was part of a series of films, and I went back and watched the other two movies, I was completely blown away by what Chen did within this finale. With movies, you generally only have a limited time to explore its characters, but like Richard Linklater’s “Before” movies, this movie helped to really create depth in the characters by revisiting them. I was kind of shocked that I hadn’t seen the other movies – few critics have – and though only 18 other critics reviewed this one, the film is still 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, which should tell you how good it is.

17. Sylvie’s Love (Amazon Prime Video) – Tessa Thompson and Nnamdi Asomugha starred in Eugene Ashe’s 50s-60s-set romantic drama about an early television producer and a jazz musician, following their relationship after a summer fling that ends with him leaving for Paris. Separated for years, she remarries and raise the child from her former lover, but then they reconnect and… well, you’ll have to watch it for yourself. It’s on Prime Video right now, so if you’re a subscriber, you have no reason not to. (And Erik Davis of Fandango had a great idea… watch this as a double feature with McQueen’s Lovers Rock from “Small Axe Anthology”!)

18. The Traitor (Sony Pictures Classics) – Last year’s Italian section for the Oscar International Film was a fantastic The Godfather-like crime-thriller, this one starring Pierfrancesco Favino as Tomassso Buscetta, a Palermo-based Casa Nostra family member responsible for the heroin trade in the ‘80s who flees to Brazil. It’s an amazing story showing that filmmaker Marco Bellochio did his research to create a movie that didn’t really get the critical love or attention it deserved.

19. Weathering With You (GKids) – And here is Japan’s selection for the Oscar International Film, a rare Anime film, this one by Your Name director Makoto Shinkai, this one more about a fantasy-romance about a young man who meets a young woman who can control the rain, which they turn into a lucrative business. I didn’t love it quite as much as Your Name, which was a truly inventive turn on the “body-switching” movie, but this also had some of the same characterizations that make Shinkai’s work so terrific, so it was impossible not to enjoy how it translated into his latest feature.

20. Lingua Franca (ARRAY Releasing/Netflix) – Trans filmmaker Isabel Sandoval’s film was released in the same weekend as another movie with a trans lead, Flavio Alves’ The Garden Left Behind. While they were both good, Sandoval wrote, directed and starred in her movie which was about her character Olivia having a romance with a guy surrounded by transphobic bros. Olivia is also trying to get her green card, and the immigrant aspect of the film really added a lot to what seemed like a deeply personal film.

21. The Outpost (Screen Media Films) – I’ve been a fan of Rod Lurie’s work for almost as long as I’ve been writing reviews. In fact, one of my very FIRST movie reviews was for his movie The Last Castle in 2001. I’ve also been fortunate to call him friend. I’ve watched Rod transition into quite a skilled television director, but I been waiting over ten years for him to make a movie as good as his amazing political thriller, Nothing but the Truth. Working from Jake Tapper’s non-fiction novel, Lurie created a full-on and unapologetic war movie as good as Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor, Blackhawk Down or any other modern war film… but also a film as personal as any others released this year.

22. The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Netflix) – Aaron Sorkin’s second film as a director stepped things up, WAY up, as he decided to take on one of the more noted events that signified the famed “Summer of Love” of 1969, as a number of peaceful protesters were tried by the federal government for “inciting a riot.” The amazing cast included Eddie Redmayne, Sacha Baron Cohen, Yahya Abdul-Mateen 2, Michal Keaton, Mark Rylance, Frank Langella, Jeremy Strong and many more. It was an abundance of acting riches and when you have such a fine wordsmith in screenwriter/playwright Sorkin, it’s hard to go wrong. The thing is that by the time I saw this, I had already seen Steve McQueen’s Mangrove, which in my opinion is a far superior version of a similar story from the same time period.

23. Words on Bathroom Walls (LD Entertainment/Roadside Attractions) – A movie I didn’t expect much from but totally fell in love with was this romantic drama starring Charlie Plummer as Adam Petrozelli, a young man sent to a Catholic School where he hopes to keep his schizophrenia a secret from his new classmates. The film co-starred Taylor Russell from Waves as Adam’s friend and love interest, who also gets worried about Adam’s erratic behavior whenever he goes off his meds. Adam’s condition was shown by the personalities he interacts with, played by Anna Sophia Robb, Devon Bostick and Lobo Sebastian, but the movie also stars the great Molly Parker as Adam’s mother and Walton Goggins as her live-in boyfriend. All of this adds up to a great coming-of-age film from Thor Freudenthal that also became one of the first couple movies since March to test out theatrical waters months after the pandemic shutdown.

24. Sputnik (IFC Midnight) – An amazing Russian sci-fi thriller from Egor Abramenko (remember that name!) that’s likely to be compared to Alien but adds so much more depth by taking place in communist Russia during the ‘80s. It stars Pyotr Fyodorov as a cosmonaut who brought something back with him from space and Oksana Akinshina as the psychologist who has to figure what is happening. It starts quite, reminding you of the original Russian film Solaris, but by the end, it gets pretty insane. More than anything, it finds a way of doing something original within an overused sci-fi trope.

25. Parallel (Vertical Entertainment) - Similarly, I had pretty low expectations for Isaac Ezban’s sci-fi/horror film about a group of Silicon Valley friends who discover a mirror that allows them to travel to and from alternate versions of their own dimension, which they use for criminal activities. Soon, some of them have gotten out of control with the power and money that this access gives them, but like Palm Springs, it’s a great take on another overused sci-fi trope that’s done so beautifully. (Warning: There have been a LOT of movies with this title in the last five years. Make sure you choose the right one!)

Honorary Mentions: The Prom (Netflix), Kindred (IFC Midnight), On the Rocks (A24/Apple TV+), Yellow Rose(Sony), Misbehaviour (Shout! Factory), Premature (IFC Films), Spontaneous (Paramount), The Climb (Sony Pictures Classics)

Oh, and as a reminder, here’s my top 10, this time with links to my reviews where applicable:

10. One Night in Miami.. (Amazon Prime Video) 9. Pieces of a Woman (Netflix) 8. Sound of Metal (Amazon Prime Video) 7. Mulan (Disney+) 6. Synchronic (Well GO USA) (Tied with Disney+’s Hamilton) 5. Nomadland (Searchlight Studios) 4. News of the World (Universal) 3. Minari (A24) 2. Corpus Christi 1. Promising Young Woman (Focus Features)

And some MORE DOCS I liked that didn’t make my Top 12 over at Below the Line:

13. Robin’s Wish (Vertical) 14. PJ Harvey: A Dog Called Money 15. 76 Days (MTV Documentaries) 16. Rebuilding Paradise (NatGeo) 17. The Fight (Magnolia) 18. Collective (Magnolia) 19. Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story (Shout! Studios) 20. We Are Freestyle Love Supreme (Hulu) 21. My Name is Pedro (Sweet 180) 22. Crock of Gold: A Night with Shane MacGowan (Magnolia) 23. You Cannot Kill David Arquette (Super) 24. Feels Good Man 25. Suzi Q (Utopia Distribution)

The Terrible 12 of 2020!:

And it’s the moment you’ve been waiting for -- and the reason I guess most people are reading this -- so I apologize for making all five of you read through all the great movies and docs of 2020 before getting to the juicy stuff. Let’s get to it!

12. Superintelligence (HBO Max) – There was a time when I loved Melissa McCarthy – years before Bridesmaids – but her success after that film and her decision to keep making movies with husband/director Ben Falcone has only led to a few halfway decent comedies. (I didn’t think The Boss was that bad, but that��s cause it co-starred Kristen Bell.) So imagine if you’re one of the first big studio comedies to be dumped to Warner Media’s new streaming service, HBO Max, and that was almost SIX MONTHS BEFORE COVID HIT! How bad could a movie be to have that little support and confidence from the studio? Well, I found out that very thing, as I sat through this horrible movie that had McCarthy play another one of her usual “everywomen,” this one who encounters an Artificial Intelligence, voiced by James Corben, who has achieved sentience. Trying to learn what it is to be human, the AI starts giving McCarthy’s character everything she wants, including a relationship an old workmate, played by Bobby Canavale. The movie wasn’t very funny but it also branched into a rom-com plot that just didn’t suit either McCarthy or Canavale, so yes, quite an epic fail.

Rotten Tomatoes Quote: “'Superintelligence' is not a term I'd use for whoever greenlit this piece of crap.”

11. Hubie Halloween (Netflix) – I don’t think that Hubie Halloween was anywhere near Adam Sandler’s worst movies ever, and probably not even his worst for Netflix – although there have been some VERY bad ones. The problem is that any opportunity Sandler was given in this movie to show he can deliver something other than “more of the same” had him instead resorting to the physical humor that appealed to his fanbase. And yet, it wasn’t even the worst movie to come out that week it debuted on the streamer. (See below.)

Rotten Tomatoes Quote: “A perfectly fine Netflix movie, not something I’d ever want to have to sit in a movie theater watching with others.”

10. Max Cloud – This sci-fi-action-comedy didn’t have a terrible premise – I mean, I enjoyed it in all three Jumanji movies -- but it was marred by being such a monumentally badly made movie that stars one of the one actors in the business, namely Scott Adkins. Set in 1990, Adkins plays the title character in a video game, in which a teen girl finds herself transported as a character. If you wondered what a Jumanji movie would look like in the hands of a completely incompetent cast and crew, well, here you go.

Rotten Tomatoes Quote: “Pretty awful, a bad faux video game movie that should have had its plug pulled.”

9. The Stand-In (Saban Films) – Not to be outdone by her frequent co-star Adam Sandler, Drew Barrymore threw out all of the love she’s garnered from previous movies and her new talk show by playing dual roles of a raunchy comedy star best known for her pratfalls (so kind of a cross between Sandler and Melissa McCarthy?). Barrymore also played her nearly identical stand-in who didn’t get as much acclaim but gets to stand in for her famous lookalike when the latter goes on a bender and ends up hiding in her mansion for five years. Not sure why Barrymore thought this would be a good way to put her back on the movie screen, but yikes… one of her character’s big gimmicks is falling face first into a pile of horse shit – not funny and just plain gross.

Rotten Tomatoes Quote: “Guarantees Barrymore a double-dose Razzie nomination.”

8. The War with Grandpa (101 Studios) – For whatever reason, I decided not to review this Weinstein Co. cast-off family comedy starring Robert De Niro and Uma Thurman. Maybe that’s because I hated the movie so much I could barely get through it, and with a Friday review embargo, I just decided not to waste any more time thinking about it. So why didn’t it end up lower, you ask? I have no effin’ idea.

Rotten Tomatoes Quote: N/A

7. Pearl – There have been some bad young adult romances over the past few years, and while I don’t think Bobby Roth’s is actually based on any existing book, it might as well have been, because it was very, very bad. It stars Larsen Thompson as a 15-year-old piano prodigy who is sent to live with her unemployed film director uncle, played by Anthony LaPaglia, who was so super-creepy in that role. I don’t remember much else, since I deliberately scrubbed my memory of this movie’s existence. Little did I realize that I’d be watching an even WORSE version of this movie a few months later.

Rotten Tomatoes Quote: “LaPaglia is way too good an actor, who deserves better than this.”

6. Black Water: Abyss – Another movie I watched late in the week and just didn’t have time or bother to review. Honestly, I remember very little about this. I think it involves crocodiles? Who knows, who cares? Not me or anyone else I expect. Everything about this movie was pretty bad.

Rotten Tomatoes Quote: N/A

5. The Turning (Universal) – Probably the biggest studio movie to wind up on this list, and possibly the only reason I didn’t review this was because I interviewed the director, Floria Sigismondi (The Runaways), who is generally a pretty awesome artist. But I love the original source material on which this is based and seeing how much better Netflix’s The Horror of Bly Manor was a few months later just made me a little sore that a movie starring the great Mackenzie Davis with Finn Wolfhard and Brooklyn Prince could end up with one of the lamest endings of a horror movie in recent memory.

Rotten Tomatoes Quote: N/A

4. Butt Boy (Epic Pictures) – Tyler Cornack’s comedy-slash-thriller was my worst movie of the year for many, many months until the three movies below it reared their ugly heads. Still, this one is pretty ugly as it stars Conack himself as Chip Gutchel, a man who becomes obsessed after a proctology exam so that things just keep vanishing up his own asshole. Yeah, I think my RT quote is fairly apt.

Rotten Tomatoes Quote: “I wouldn't recommend this to my worst enemy.”

3. Buddy Games (Saban Films/Paramount) – The fact that Josh Duhamel’s directorial debut came out the same week as Superintelligence yet ended up lower on this list is fairly telling. It involves Duhamel and a group of his friends taking part in ridiculous competitions for money, and shows what happens when these friends reunite five years later to throw another Buddy Game. It was just very low-brow and disgusting and a not particularly funny take on the Jackass movies. There was scene that almost made me stop watching.

Rotten Tomatoes Quote: “To call Buddy Games moronic, idiotic or even asinine, would be an insult to morons, idiots or asses, who are also likely the movie's target audience.“

2. Sno Babies (Better Noise Films) – This poorly-conceived “Afterschool Special” that follows a high school senior named Kristen (Katie Kelly) and her ever-growing drug addiction was almost like a young adult version of Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem for a Dream if just about everything about the movie was bad from the writing to the acting to just really horrible images that no one would want to watch or be put through. If the film just followed Kelly’s character, maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad, but it’s a narrative that follows a bunch of characters including a couple wanting to have a baby… and when Kristen becomes pregnant due to her being on drugs, well, you can probably guess where it’s going. The only movie this year that had me literally yelling at my laptop like a lunatic.

Rotten Tomatoes Quote: “The people who made this movie should never be allowed to make another movie again.”

1. Dead Reckoning (Shout! Studios) – Scott Adkins makes his second appearance in the Terrible 12 with a movie in which he plays an Albanian terrorist. In fact, when I first heard about this movie and the fact it was directed by Andrzej Bartkowiak, the cinematographer/director behind Romeo is Bleeding and lots of trashy action flickers from the Aughts, it made me expect something in that vein. Instead, this is another young adult drama set in Nantucket with K.J. Apa from Riverdale playing Adkins’ brother who falls for a local teen lush, played by India Eisley, who proceeds to chug alcohol in every scene. Oh, her parents were killed in a terrorist act… coincidence? I think not. Eventually, we learn that Adkins’ character is planning a terrorist act by blowing up a boat on the 4th of July, and that’s maybe an hour or more into the movie. And yeah, there’s a number of action scenes awkwardly shoehorned into the story as well… Adkins’ fight with a nurse trying to help him was particularly hilarious. But the fact that the movie is being sold as “a thriller inspired by the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013” just makes the whole thing even more awkward and insulting. This one ends up in the “What on earth were they thinking, whoever financed this movie?” box.

Rotten Tomatoes Quote: “The only way to have any fun watching this disaster is to play a drinking game where you take a drink every time Eisley's character takes a drink.”

That’s it for this year…. Happy New Year and on to 2021!

#TheWeekendWarrior #EDsTerrible10 #EDsTop25 #Movies #Reviews

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deadparrish · 7 years ago

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BOOKS READ IN 2017

total count: 78

goodreads: punknicole

i’m going to give a rating and a brief review of each book— just a sentence or two, depending on how much i remember about the book. this is mostly for fun, but I hope someone gets some use out of this! happy new year and happy reading! and, of course, possible spoilers ahead.

I’ll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson: 5/5. Everyone and their mother has read this, so I’ll keep it short and sweet. I really enjoyed this book because I found it difficult to support just one specific character— everyone had flaws and they were all multi-dimensional. I appreciated the fact that each part of the story eventually matched up with the others.

Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon: 4/5. This was a cute book. I didn’t have too many strong feelings about it when I first read it, but it was enjoyable in a passing way. I thought the diversity was really wonderful but it was a bit overhyped.

The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater: 5/5. I was rereading this and I loved it even more than the first time I read it. I feel like if you follow me you’ve probably read this, since this is a mostly trc blog, so I won’t go too deep into this. It’s wonderful.

The Color Purple by Alice Walker: 5/5. I loved this a lot!!!! I think that the style it was written in is really interesting and the fact that it’s about a black lesbian is wonderful. It’s also a classic so I’d say that this should be on everyone’s reading list!!

The Foxhole Court by Nora Sakavik: 4/5. I never got as into these as everyone else seemed to. It was good and I read it really quickly, but it isn’t something I’d want to read again? I only read it because it had lgbt+ representation and honestly I think that’s all it has going for it.

The Raven King by Nora Sakavik: 4/5. Again, I read this really quickly. I can’t really remember what happens. I think this is the book that triggered me a bit— there was some pretty awful sexual assault.

The King’s Men by Nora Sakavik: 4/5. I remember being really disappointed in the ending, but I’m not sure why. I think I expected something a little more dramatic. Again, I read the whole trilogy over the span of two days, so it all kind of blended together. I’d suggest reading these so you can understand what all the tumblr posts are about, but they aren't my favorite.

The Elements of Style by William Strunk JR. and E. B. White: 4/5. Ah, the first book that I finished that was for school! This was basically a mini textbook, and I found it really informative if a bit dry at times. I’d recommend reading it if English is something that you’re passionate about.

Another Day by David Levithan: 2/5. This was awful. I had high hopes for it, because I really liked Every Day, but this just gives you insight into how awful the main character is. It’s completely unnecessary, and I wish I hadn’t read it.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: 5/5. I LOVED THIS!!! I read it for school and I absolutely fell in love. It’s extremely heavy handed on symbolism, but the language is so beautiful. I have a twitter thread about how I think that Nick is in love with Gatsby here.

We Are the Ants by Shaun David Hutchinson: 5/5. I really liked this too, and I recently gave this to my mom and grandma to read and they loved it too!! I think that the storyline was really interesting and it dealt with some really existential issues about life, which I always really enjoy.

You Know Me Well by David Levithan and Nina LaCour: 5/5. This was really cute!! I remember really enjoying the wlw representation in this, because most lgbt books focus on white guys, so this was refreshing.

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes: 5/5. I bawled my eyes out reading this. I can’t even explain it but it is... so fucking good.

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway: 2/5. Ugh. I didn’t even finish this. I know it’s a classic, but I just really couldn’t get into it. I might try again in a few years but it just didn’t work for me.

Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente: 5/5. I tried to find this books in stores for at least a year before I finally took the leap and ordered it online. I love it so much— it’s one of the first books on my reread list. The language is really beautiful and I love the aesthetic, but it is a bit dark.

Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls: 5/5. A book straight out of my childhood! I love it just as much as I did when I was a kid, and I cried even more than I did the last time I read it, which had to have been at least ten years ago. It’s timeless and beautiful and I think it’s a must-read!

Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur: 4/5. Honestly, I think this book is a bit overhyped. I enjoyed some of the poems but it didn’t leave a huge lasting impact.

Beauty Queens by Libba Bray: 3/5. This was a really fast read for me, and I sort of liked it? It was lighthearted and kind of funny and had incredible representation, but it wasn’t a favorite for me.

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde: 4/5. I love Oscar Wilde, so I’m a bit biased, but I thought this was enjoyable. It was clever and passingly funny, but I think it would be better to see it performed live.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini: 5/5. This was my second time reading this, and I loved it even more than I did the first time I read it. I read this for school the first time and I’d definitely recommend that everyone read it at least once! It’s an incredible story and it really touches your heart.

The Black Swan by Mercedes Lackey: 4/5. I consider this a guilty pleasure book but I’m not exactly sure why. I read it when I was really young, which might be part of the reason why, since it has some really mature themes, but it’s a good read.

The May Queen Murders by Sarah Jude: 2/5. I remember seeing a lot of posts on here about this book, so I was disappointed when it ended up being really boring. I just didn’t like it, and I wouldn’t recommend it.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck: 4/5. I read this for school, and I’ll probably never pick it up again. I didn’t hate it, but it definitely wasn’t a favorite. I would recommend it, though, just because it’s a classic and it’s something that you Have To Read at least once.

Tell Me Again How a Crush Should Feel by Sara Farizan: 4/5. This was another book that I had really high expectations for because I saw a lot of hype for it on tumblr. I did like it, but it wasn’t life changing like I expected it to be.

The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde: 5/5. This is probably my favorite book of all time. I can’t say enough good things about it, so just read it.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison: 5/5. This was incredible! It really makes you think about American standards of beauty and how that affects your day-to-day life.

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros: 4/5. I’ll be honest, I feel like I missed a huge part of this book because I read it really quickly, but I still liked it.

1984 by George Orwell: 5/5. Everyone needs to read this, especially in our current political climate. There are quite a few parallels between what happens in the novel an what’s happening today, and it’s really helpful when it comes to trying to understand what people on the news are talking about when they say we’re “living in 1984.”

This is Where it Ends by Marieke Nijkamp: 4/5. I remember being a little disappointed in this, but I still really liked it! I think I cried but I’m not super sure? I guess it didn’t leave as lasting of an impact as I thought it did, but I remember liking it as I read it.

Vampirates: Tide of Terror by Justin Somper: 4/5. This is definitely a guilty pleasure book and I’m not ashamed to admit it. My cousin recommended them to me at least ten years ago and every so often I get into a phase where I want to reread them. The title is pretty self-explanatory— vampire pirates.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak: 5/5. One of my favorite reads of the year! The narrative style is really interesting and it’s really beautifully written. I absolutely recommend it!!

The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson: 2/5. Ugh. Again, I couldn’t even finish this, and I’m not sure why. It just seemed so boring! I’ll try to reread it at some point but definitely not any time soon.

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath: 5/5. I really enjoyed this!! It also got me into the good graces of my english teacher this year (she saw me carrying it around school and talked to me about it) so I’d recommend it!

Animal Farm by George Orwell: 5/5. I first read this in middle school and really liked it, so I figured I’d reread it and see if it held up, and it did. It’s another classic that I think should be on everyone’s read list!

The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner’s Dilemma by Trenton Lee Stewart: 5/5. These are really fun books that I’d recommend you read if you have a free afternoon! They’re clever, engaging, and easy to read.

Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie: 3/5. I didn’t like this and I can’t remember exactly why. I think that it was a bit dry for my liking, although it might have just been because I didn’t like all the talk about mothers. Either way, I wouldn’t recommend it.

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Calahan: 5/5. This was really interesting! I don’t usually read memoirs, but my mom gave this to me to read and I actually really liked it.

The Scorch Trials by James Dashner: 4/5. I’ve tried to get into the Maze Runner series a few times, but it never quite manages to get me interested enough. I liked this well enough but it didn’t leave me invested enough to go out and buy the next book in the series, so it’ll probably be another year (at least) before I revisit this series. Oh well.

The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux: 4/5. The movie with Gerald Butler is yet another guilty pleasure of mine, so I really wanted to like this, but it kind of fell short. It was decent, but it took me a while to read, which always means that I’m not loving it.

The Holy Bible: 1611 Edition, King James Version by Hendrickson Bibles (compiler): I can’t write a real review for this because I only read certain parts of it for school, but I counted it on my goodreads because I wanted it to count towards my 2017 reading challenge. It was interesting, I guess?

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett: 4/5. I didn’t expect to like this as much as I did! The characters were really sweet and I enjoyed their growth, and the plot was interesting.

Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg: 4/5. I picked this up because I had just watched Kill Your Darlings and I wasn't as impressed as I wanted to be. There were some good poems but nothing that stuck with me.

The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket: 5/5. The beginning of my series of unfortunate events reread! I love these books a lot and they were a huge part of my childhood. Everyone should read these books! I don’t have much to say about each individual book but I’ll try to make a comment or two on each one.

The Reptile Room by Lemony Snicket: 5/5. I love snakes so this is one of my favorites out of the series!

The Wide Window by Lemony Snicket: 5/5. This book helped create my tentative fear of heights. I always remember being horrified of the image of Aunt Josephines house.

The Miserable Mill by Lemony Snicket: 5/5. Nothing about this one really ever stood out to me besides my own outrage at child labor.

The Austere Academy by Lemony Snicket: 5/5. This is my favorite of all the books!! I think it’s because I’ve always been obsessed with the idea of boarding school.

The Ersatz Elevator by Lemony Snicket: 5/5. Climbing an elevator shaft would suck.

The Vile Village by Lemony Snicket: 5/5. I would love to live in a village filled with crows.

Mythology by Edith Hamilton: 5/5. I read this for school and it was really fascinating! I already knew a bit about Greek and Roman mythology (mostly because of Percy Jackson) but it was cool to learn more about it and Norse mythology.

A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin: 5/5. All I have to say is that A Song of Ice and Fire is so much better than Game of Thrones.

Witch & Wizard by James Patterson and Gabrielle Charbonnet: 3/5. I had found this in a box and wanted to reread it, and it wasn’t as good as I remember it being. It was a really fast read and fairly interesting, though, simply because of the magic.

The Hostile Hospital by Lemony Snicket: 5/5. I feel like this is when the books really take a dark turn, which makes them really interesting to read.

Blockade Billy by Stephen King: 5/5. I listen to this in the car with my dad whenever we take a long trip, and I always really enjoy it. There’s nothing super special about it, and I’ve never been super interested in books about sports, but this story is cool because it’s also about murder.

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood: 5/5. This is amazing! It’s another book that’s been in the news a lot due to the Trump presidency, so I’d say give it a read simply because of that, but it’s incredible and should be read in its own right. A total cliffhanger ending.

Witch & Wizard: The Gift by James Patterson and Ned Rust: 3/5. Honestly, I can’t remember what this was about.

The Carnivorous Carnival by Lemony Snicket: 5/5. Those lions deserved better.

Holes by Louis Sachar: 4/5. This is one of those books that you’re supposed to read as a kid that I never got around to. I did like it, but I think I would have liked it a lot better if I had read it ten years ago.

How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas Foster: 5/5. Another really awesome pseudo-textbook! It really teaches you a lot about certain aspects of literature that you’ve probably never thought about before, and it’ll really change the way you read!

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll: 3/5. This was really boring for me to read and I’m not sure why. I think I just expected it to be something else, and I didn't really like it.

Medea by Euripides, translated by Rex Warner: 4/5. My World Mythology class read this out-loud and it was really entertaining. It’s not a necessary read but it’s kind of fun.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: 5/5. This is super hard to read so I’d definitely recommend paraphrasing it as you go, but it’s a classic, so you definitely need to read it at least once.

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: 3/5. Again, this was a book that I really wanted to like, but just couldn’t force myself to. I think I ended up skim-reading at least three-fourths of it.

The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks: 4/5. I think this is probably the first straight up romance novel that I’ve ever read, and I actually kind of liked it. It wasn’t my favorite, but it was cute and I cried a little bit at the end.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon: 5/5. This was excellent! I’d never read anything like this before, and the format was super unique as well, and it was all around a good read. It was also really sad and made me really uncomfortable at times, which I think speaks to how well it’s written.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: 5/5. Super good. I read this for class and I’m really thankful for that, since I think there’s a lot of deeper meaning to the book that I was able to examine thanks to class discussions.

All the Crooked Saints by Maggie Stiefvater: 4/5. I liked this okay, but it’s definitely not on the same level as The Raven Cycle. I really enjoyed the characters in this— they were all extremely different from one another, and that was refreshing.

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins: 5/5. This started a minor obsession with murder/thriller novels!!! It was extremely well written and had me guessing until the end (I didn’t see the final twist coming!) I actually leant this to my mom and she also loved it!

The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien: 4/5. I was desperate to like this more than I actually did. There were parts of it that I really liked, and parts of it that had me literally falling asleep.

Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding: 3/5. Ugh. I didn’t like this at all. It’s only redeeming factor was that it’s a really fast read.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber: 3/5. Extremely underwhelming.

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien: 5/5. I wasn’t super into this in the beginning, because I don’t like war books, but I had to read it for class and I ended up loving it by the end. There’s definitely some triggering content but the book mainly focuses on the idea of truth and storytelling, and it’s really fascinating!

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson: 4/5. This was okay. I found myself getting annoyed with how dramatic everything was, but it’s a story about overcoming odds and finding strength within yourself, which I know some people are into.

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger: 3/5. Yikes. The narrator is so fucking annoying in this that I couldn’t take it seriously. I know it’s a classic, but I really didn’t like it.

The Giver by Lois Lowry: 4/5. This is another book that I wish I had read in a classroom setting when I was a little younger because I feel like I missed out on a lot of the deeper meaning because I sped through it in an hour or two. I did really enjoy it, though.

The Martian by Andy Weir: 4/5. This is one of the rare instances where I prefer the movie to the book. I liked this book okay, but there were big lengthy descriptions of the “science” that I found really tedious.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn: 5/5. I wish I had read this before I watched the movie, though I still really enjoyed it. It’s another book that leaves you guessing about what’s going to happen until the very end, and it leaves you feeling really unsettled.

Misery by Stephen King: 5/5. This is my first Stephen King book that I actually read (aka didn’t listen to)! I’m glad I picked this as my first book of his to read, because it’s shorter than some of his other stuff without being boring. It’s more violent and gory than I usually go for, but I still really liked it!

And that’s it! Happy new year, everyone!

#mine #books #books read in 2017 #books read #book recommendations #book rec #2017 books

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aesarctic · 7 years ago

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Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard: The Ship of the Dead, by Rick Riordan

The third book in the Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard trilogy. Finished it a month ago, but I just got the review done.

Read on Goodreads

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

FOR THE SUPER NON-SPOILERY AND THE NON-SPOILERY PEOPLE: This is the third book. Can't say much. Here: The Sword of Summer

FOR THE SPOILERY PEOPLE: Oh. My. Dear. Gods. Let's talk about my thoughts pre-book. I got this book maybe two days after it came out--in my defence, it was a busy time in my life. Marching band is a big deal. Marching band ending in my senior year of high school is a bigger one. After marching band, school got in the way. I wasn't able to read the book. A sad life, I know. I was looking forward to this book for forever at that point. (Where "forever" = about 1 year) But then. A four day weekend was coming up. It was time. I picked up the book. And I read it. Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard: The Ship of the Dead is an end-book. The last book. It's the last book in the Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard trilogy. I've read three other end-books by Rick Riordan: The Last Olympian, The Serpent's Shadow, and The Blood of Olympus. The Last Olympian is by far my favourite of the three. In fact, it's high up on the favourite-end-books list. It's amazing. TLO SPOILERS: The entire thing is dedicated to the battle that has been built up for four books. The battle is amazing. There was the right amount of death. The ending was near perfect. I loved it. END SPOILERS To be honest, I don't remember much of The Serpent's Shadow. If I wasn't on a rereading ban, I'd probably reread that series. And then, Blood of Olympus. We all have feelings about that book. Mine aren't the best. Not the worst, but not the best. The point is, I didn't know what to think about this book. Was it going to be a good end-book? Would it wrap up everything? What the heck was going to happen? Percy Jackson is my all-time favourite character in any Rick Riordan book in the history of Rick Riordan books. When I finished the second book, Annabeth ended the book by saying it was time to meet Percy.I remember thinking that this meant Percy was probably going to make a cameo at the beginning, teach Magnus a couple things, and be on his way. AND I WAS RIGHT. Some people I knew thought that he'd be throughout the book, and they were angry because of it, but no. Nope. Personally, I'd love more books with Percy as the main character. I know he needs a well-deserved break, but he's still my favourite. I'd even go for a series that just follows his current life. Anyway, I loved the beginning. And we finally got to know what Percy's baby sister's name is! Estelle! It feels like such a difference from the other names in these books, and it caught me off guard at first, but I actually really like that name. And he's so excited to be an older brother! I love Percy. Moving on, fast-forward to looking through Randolph's place. We get to see more of Alex's sass, which I love. The whole cast of characters in this series is fantastic. I didn't really think much of anyone other than the main four until this book, but now I love all of them. Which I'll get into later. Spoiler for The Shadowhunter Chronicles: Anyway, so originally, when naming Magnus Magnus, Rick asked Cassandra Clare if he could use the name Magnus, since Cassie also has a character named Magnus in her books. And Magnus gets together with Alec. In these books, Magnus gets together with Alec. I don't ship either, but I love the parallels. When we meet Sam, we find out that it's Ramadan, and I think this is really cool for a children's book to touch on. It also shows how powerful Sam is. She's an amazing fighter, and she can do all of it while going through the month of Ramadan. Talk about a powerful character. She's incredible. Sam has been struggling with her shape-shifting and resisting Loki when he tries to control her. Magnus says to her,"You'll find a way. A way that works for you." And it's never really mentioned in the book if she does. It's highly implied, shown in pages 363 and 373 (hardback, first edition) when she resists Loki. I do kind of wish we got a line about figuring it out, though. Chapter nine: I Become a Temporary Vegetarian. This needs a shout-out because this was definitely one of my favourite moments of the book. Aegir asks if there are any dietary restrictions. Sam imediately says that it's Ramadan. Aegir: "I see. Sorry. Yes, I don't think dwarves are halal. I'm not sure about elves." And I love this, because Sam then says, "They're not, either. In fact, it's Ramadan which means I need to break my fast in the company of dwarves and elves, rather than eating them or being around anyone who does eat them. It's strictly forbidden." Conclusion: Sam is amazing. But it gets better: Magnus claims he's a vegetarian and Alex claims he has green hair. Green hair of course means that he can't eat dwarves or elves. There are so many other funny moments and lines I wish I could highlight on, but I don't have the time to type all of them out. When Magnus challenges Loki to a flyting, Loki refuses. This made me so excited. It didn't occur to me that he might refuse. Probably predictable, but I was excited for the plot twist. Very, very excited. Then a couple pages later it turns out they're having a flyting and I could never describe the disappointment that arose from that. I have to say though, Magnus' speech had me kind of speechless. And embarrassed. I really liked it. I'm a sucker for friendship stuff, and it made me feel. In the end, we get a phone call between Magnus and Annabeth. This next bit contains spoiler's for Riordan's Trials of Apollo series. ToA and MCGA take place at the same time. In The Dark Prophecy, Apollo joins up with Leo and Calypso, they go through some times, and then the book ends with Apollo meeting (waking up) Grover Underwood. I admittedly don't remember too much, but that's what I think is a good summary. So, I don't know about you guys, but Grover coming back to reality seems pretty good to me. I missed him. So, when Annabeth seemed to be crying, you have no idea how badly I wanted the third ToA book. What happened? What's the bad news? Gods of Olympus I need to know. It was intense over on my end when I read that chapter. END SPOILERS Magnus and Alex opened the mansion for homeless kids in need, and I thought that that was incredibly noble and true to Magnus' character. I loved it. All in all, the book was good, I'm not sure where I'd place it with the other books, though. The first was my favourite, then maybe this one? I really liked getting to know the characters in this book. However, as a series ending, it wasn't the strongest. I expressed earlier how worried I was that it would be a bad ending, and it definitely wasn't the best I've ever read. I think major battles should feel major--not a couple pages long. Also, every Riordan book ends with a huge meet-and-greet with the gods at the end. I've read it so many times, I'm ready for something new. There must be some other way to end these books. A lot of our characters develop in this book, or we get to know them better, and I thought it was incredible. Here's some highlights and thoughts: Alex: She seems to be a lot happier in this book, and her relationship with Sam is strong The piece of evidence I have on me right now is on page 168, where Alex is texting Sam because she wouldn't just leave Sam on the boat without updating their cellphone plans and making sure they're able to text at all times. Alex even says, "Well duh. Gotta keep in touch with my sister." Maybe it's small, but as someone who is close to her sibling, it means a bit more to me. Also, her relationship with Magnus went through some major developments. Most of it was pretty embarrassing for me, and I really don't have much to say about it. Speaking of Alex, she has a lot of moments where it seems like she's forcing gender identity into the reader's face. I think that this is good. This is a children's book, and it's good to introduce kids to these things, because they're reallyimportant, to some more than others. It may even help out someone who's reading the book. It's also important to just educate the audience as a whole. And if you're wondering how I'm deciding to use which set of pronouns, I use the pronouns that match the section of the book I'm talking about, and if I'm talking about a generalization, I use she/her pronouns because that's when Alex said to do in the second book. TJ: He cannot back down from a fight. This is why he must fight Hrungnir, and we get to know a lot about him. We got a glimpse of what his life was like and how he came to be involved in the war. It was glimpses, but it's also a huge deal. Mallory: First, we learned how she died, then we learned who her godly parent is (Frigg, only the queen of the Aesir), where she is told that she's the key to retrieving Kvasir's Mead. Mallory then kills all the thralls, which of course gets them a step closer to getting the mead. That's a really short version of it all, but it made me from hating her character to liking her, and I was impressed. I still don't understand why Magnus wants to call her Mack, though. Halfborn: We start learning about Halfborn when he tells Magnus that they're heading towards the places that Mallory and Halfborn died. It gets worse as the crew heads towards Fläm, and it's revealed that that is Halfborn's hometown. Sixty pages later, we learn that Halfborn wanted to get out of Fläm--he wanted to be known. Be famous. Then, later on in the book, Fläm gets insulted, and Halfborn was not having it. He has a rather one-sided conversation about it with Magnus, and it was really nice to have a bit of closure to Halfborn's mini get-to-know-him arc. Halfborn's not my favourite, but at least I can respect him as a character now that he actually is one. I was really happy to know that we were getting to know his story as well (because this was before I knew we were getting to know everyone's stories.)

#MCGA #The Ship of the Dead #Ship of the Dead #SotD #Rick Riordan #book review

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