#also also what is the point of reading a serialized narrative if you expect the characters to stay exactly the same the whole time

[vox-off]

been easing myself back into reading webcomics. got caught up on an old favorite that's still going almost 21 years later and just came across a baffling criticism of said comic which boils down to "everyone speaks in therapy talk now and talks their issues through instead of blowing up"

my guy. we have followed these characters from their extremely messy early 20s to now more stable almost 30s in universe, they would be the most insufferable assholes ever to grace a page if they never learned basic communication and conflict resolution

[superfallingstars]

Personally I think jily is supposed to be idealized (like how James and lily were idealized) to Harry. James gets knocked of his pedestal in swm and so does jily by Harry questioning if his father forced his mother into marriage. Later when talking to lupin and Sirius James and Jily get a slight defense and Harry is back to feeling alright but with the knowledge that things weren’t perfect.

I personally don’t read Jily as abusive (even though I read James as being abusive to snape at school, but I don’t think that violent, physical behavior was extended to Lily) but I definitely don’t read them as a “good” couple (whatever that means). I think you can read it in many different ways given there is so little of them and I think an interpretation that their relationship wasn’t the healthiest is perfectly plausible with the scant information we’re given.

Yeahhhh that’s probably what JKR intended. James and Lily are the fridged parents who are dearly mourned and missed, and as a result, their flaws are completely smoothed over in everyone’s memories. But in Snape’s Worst Memory, Harry learns the hard lesson that things aren’t always what they seem, and that nobody is perfect, not even his dead father. Hurrah.

My problem with this is that I think it’s very boring, LOL. Like it really is probably exactly what JKR intended (given her middle-of-the-road takes on every moral and political question that happens in these books), but man, it feels like such a cop out. James basically ruins Snape’s life for no reason, and the conclusion we’re meant to draw from this is just, well, people are complicated! NO!!!! Bad answer!!! Like, Snape also did some terrible things, but at least he spends a ton of pages actively suffering/atoning for his sins. But James, on the other hand, is only somewhat implied to have changed maybe slightly a little bit somewhere off-page, and we just have to take #1 James Potter fanboy Sirius Black and serial understater Remus Lupin at their word. So if James was supposed to be “redeemed” – or even just excused – wow, it really doesn't work for me. You can't go as dark as "protagonist questions if his father forced his mother into marriage" and then just brush it off like no big deal, Joanne! And it’s so frustrating, because all it would've taken to fix this would've been to show James being a good person instead of just telling the reader that he was one (proof: trust me?). Ugh.

So because of all that, I agree that from what we’re given, it’s quite difficult to read Jily as “good.” We rarely see them interact, and when we do, James’s behavior is wayyyy too similar to the trope of “terrible guy eventually gets the girl even though she seems to hate him with every fiber of her being because his persistence and not taking no for an answer is just toooo romantic to resist.” Which sucks, lol. It feels like JKR is basically being like, “eh, James was young and dumb, whatever” and giving him a huge out for all the grief he caused Snape (and Lily, for that matter) – and she expects that the reader will agree that that is a legitimate excuse for his behavior, and by extension think that it's reasonable for Lily to forgive and eventually marry him. And man, I am just not sure if that is enough to convince me. (And evidently, I'm not alone, considering the “Jily is abusive” meta post that likely sparked this ask!)

With that said, I agree that it’s a stretch to say that James was abusive (or even implied to be abusive) toward Lily. It’s not a completely unfounded take – it could probably be written well in a fic, and even be canon compliant – but you would really have to extrapolate that dynamic from the little information we’re given (as you pointed out). And more importantly (at least, re: that meta), I don't think JKR intended that interpretation at all.

Personally, I just don’t think it makes sense for the narrative for James and Lily to have been in an abusive relationship. And by the narrative, I mean Harry. If Jily is an abusive (or even just bad) relationship, that would have massive ramifications for the way Harry sees his parents. Ideally he would have to come to terms with that at some point – I don’t think it makes sense for James’s and Lily’s relationship to have been this way and not have significantly affected Harry – but imo JKR clearly does not want to deal with that. Like you said, the point of SWM – aside from foreshadowing Lily and Snape’s relationship – was to knock James off his pedestal and basically go, See, nobody’s perfect. <3 And the story is not interested in engaging with James’s behavior on a level any deeper than that lol. Which ok, I don’t love it, but if we’re not going to spend time dealing with morally gray James, then it doesn’t make sense for him to be even more morally gray (or rather, have him fall face first over the line into becoming a downright despicable person) by making him abusive toward Lily.

So that's my Doylist analysis: no way in hell did JKR intend Jily to be an abusive relationship, but she also didn't do a good enough job defending and/or redeeming James after SWM, so we're just left to speculate about how much he really changed. Still, I don't think "JKR is a bad writer" is a very satisfying answer. After all, the only reason that I'm engaging with this text in the first place is because I'm a fan of it, so I think it's also worth looking at it from a Watsonian perspective – or at least, to accept the events of the book as they're written and try to fill in the blanks. (Imo so much of the fun of fandom is trying to fill in those blanks in a satisfying way, to expand upon a character and try to reach a more interesting conclusion than the author did... And I would be remiss not to mention that, because it undoubtedly influences the way that I (and probably also you, if you're on this side of tumblr) engage with the text.)

So for me, as a Marauders era fan, I’m faced with: ok, I don’t really like the idea of these two characters together, but they canonically got together, and I think the story is better because they got together, and it’s better if they genuinely like each other, and it all had to happen somehow – so how can I explain it in a way that both makes sense with the story and is satisfying to me? And my answer to that is twofold.

First, I imagine that James was not always quite such an awful guy (as in, not always as showy, combative, and cruel as he was in SWM). After all, there is a glimmer of goodness in him when he chooses to save Snape’s life during the Prank, revealing that somewhere deep down, he does in fact have a moral compass. And second, I think that he has to have changed. And I mean a genuine change – one that might not have resulted in completely different behavior (after all, he was still hexing Snape through his seventh year) – but regardless, something that makes him seriously reflect on his actions and reconsider his motivations. His behavior in SWM is just too inexcusable for him to get with Lily – partly because Lily is generally framed as a Very Good Person, and partly because regardless of how she is framed, James was still awful to her – without any self-reflection or growth. Of course, the problem then becomes explaining this in a satisfying way!

And I have some ideas in mind – but they’re definitely more speculation than fact, and omg this post is long enough already. Luckily, I received another ask on this topic, so I will save my self-indulgent headcanons for that.

There is one last thing I want to mention, which is (part of) my reasoning for why James may not have been such a bully all the time and why I think he has the capacity for change, and it's been nagging at me ever since I read that meta post (which again, presumably started this whole thing). I think one thing that bothers a lot of people (including me!) about James is that it seems like he chooses to pick on Snape in SWM because of Lily’s presence. He wants to show off to her, so he keeps looking over to the girls by the water, he ruffles his hair, he deepens his voice, and he tries to get her attention by targeting Snape. Following this logic, we can presume that James wouldn’t have done any of this if Lily hadn’t been there – and that’s the part that got me thinking. I have to wonder if Lily was perhaps not the only person who James wanted to impress in that scene… in fact, I think it’s incredibly likely that James would have acted differently if the Marauders hadn’t been there! (Harry has "the distinct impression that Sirius was the only one for whom James would have stopped showing off," and Sirius saying that he's bored is the inciting incident for James spotting Snape...!) Yes it’s going to be a James masculinity analysis because this is what happens every time I talk about these fucking characters apparently. So idk, stick around if you’re into that.

And of course, thank you for the ask!

[weaselandfriends]

Are ARGs the new avant garde?

There's this unfiction ARG on YouTube about a fake video game called Valle Verde. Here's episode 1, there are three episodes:

Watch this and the other two episodes. This is the most technically impressive thing I've seen on YouTube that was made by a single person, and if you watch this video for 54 seconds you'll start to see why.

Once you've watched Valle Verde, you can read this post.

ARGs, or alternate reality games, were a natural outgrowth of creepypasta (as the great Jenny Nicholson once put it, "campfire stories on a global scale"). With creepypasta, people, usually young people, would hop onto the internet and tell a spooky story about a haunted Sonic cartridge with realistic blood or a super evil serial killer who was never caught or Slenderman or something.

Due to the memetic nature of these stories, though, there became an arms race to make them on increasingly elaborate scales. Soon, people were ROMhacking their favorite old games to actually show the spooky haunted realistic blood. A famous example, Ben Drowned, showed modded/corrupted Majora's Mask footage that was generally effective because Majora's Mask is already sort of a creepy game.

Ben Drowned was also notable for being a story that was continually updated. Originally, most creepypasta would be a single story, usually short, posted once. This is an effective medium for horror, which loses effectiveness the more things get explained, but at the same time, when people like something, they want more.

Okay, so how do you make an ongoing horror series that doesn't outright explain everything, and thus retains its horror aspect? The answer, seemingly independently reached by a wide variety of indie horror creators at the same time (Ben Drowned, Marble Hornets, and the godfather Five Nights at Freddy's) was arcane hidden lore.

That's basically what separates an ARG from creepypasta: the "game" in "alternate reality game" is that sprinkled throughout a series of videos are scraps of hints toward a broader narrative, and the viewer is expected to locate those hints, piece them together, and figure out what's actually happening.

The logic is similar to the appeal of a mystery novel, so it's no wonder this took off. Channels like Game Theory posting lore breakdowns of FNAF or other popular series raked in beaucoup views. Indie horror devs would start putting dumbass lore hints in their goofball games to piggyback off FNAF's memetic success. Pathetic things like this happened:

But ARGs are fundamentally different from a mystery novel. In a mystery novel, the terms of the mystery are overtly made known. Someone has been murdered and a world famous detective has arrived to find out who did it/how they did it. By contrast, ARGs are often abstracted to the point that it is difficult to know whether there actually is a mystery. And besides, the mystery in an ARG isn't "who is the killer," it's "what is even the plot?"

Heavily abstracted, often fragmented storylines, with no clear plot, disjointed organization, and only scattered ambiguously meaningful moments that could be arranged in any number of ways to attempt coherence. What does this remind me of?

They reinvented postmodernism!

This realization came home when Skinamarink received a theatrical release in 2022. Skinamarink was an analog horror (another offshoot branch of creepypasta/ARGs) video blown up to cinema length, created by an analog horror YouTuber based on an original 20 minute video they made. Mainstream critics who saw this film, being completely unaware of what analog horror was, extolled the film for its Lynchian, Kubrickian influences. They were unaware its actual greatest influence was Mandela Catalogue. They were unaware that a thrillingly unique, abstract form of storytelling had organically been created by a group of outsider artists on the internet.

Kubrick would be proud.

I find this especially exciting in a mainstream pop cultural milieu that is trending toward, at least in my appraisal, increasing obviousness and simplicity in how it communicates ideas, which is not only boring but also annihilates the capacity for nuance, interpretation, and even meaning itself.

This also comes alongside ARG creators often pushing themselves to new technical extremes, extremes that are absurdly impressive for individuals. Kane Pixels has created amazing found footage videos using Blender-made labyrinths. The Mandela Catalogue guy was doing some crazy shit with puppets(?) last I checked. And, of course, the act of modding old games has evolved into the act of creating whole video games entirely as a vehicle for an ARG. The first example of this I know of is Petscop, and there have been others like Catastrophe Crow (which splices in an extremely accurate pastiche of a retro gaming video essayist, plus period-accurate game magazine articles), but Valle Verde takes it to a new level.

Since you've all seen Valle Verde by now, I won't waste time explaining the seriously impressive stuff it pulls off.

Instead, I'll let the other shoe drop.

I have a fundamental problem with all these ARGs, one that pains me all the more because I am so thrilled by so many aspects of them. The problem is that once you dig into them, once you piece together the underlying narrative from all the tiny clues, interpret the ambiguities, and see the broader picture -

The picture sort of sucks.

Ben Drowned, FNAF, Petscop, Catastrophe Crow boil down to the same residual dew: Children died. (Either murdered or just tragically.) Their spirits haunt the game cartridge/animatronics. All the scant hints point to the cause. (Ben Drowned spoils it in the title.) It's not only sort of banal but also the story that you could probably guess at without reading into the deep lore, just from the story's general vibe.

It's a fundamentally boring answer to a fascinating puzzle, and worse, it reveals that there was no true value in the puzzle being presented as it was. The abstraction and postmodern technique of the narrative contribute nothing to its overall meaning. They exist with the sole aim to obfuscate, because horror only works when unexplained. Rather than leave the horror unexplained, though, the way Kubrick would in The Shining (which deliberately strips out overt explanations that exist in the book it adapts), or Lynch would in anything, these works are attempting to have their cake and eat it: there's stupid lore that explains everything, but it's just a little hard to find. In that sense, rather than being a rejection of the current cultural milieu toward works that make simple sense, this trend seems more like an attempt to reinject that milieu into one of the few genres of storytelling that had effectively rejected it. (It reads similarly to all the Babadook-inspired indie horror films of the past decade where the monster is some transparent allegory for grief or trauma or something.)

So what's the story of Valle Verde?

I won't go into a Game Theory breakdown of every symbol and detail. As far as I can tell, this is what's going on:

Valle Verde, the fiction within the fiction, is a Japanese video game developed with experimental technology called THBrain that gives it a sophisticated and advanced artificial intelligence capable of making on-the-fly alterations to the game's script. Valle Verde, the series of videos, depicts an investigation into certain malfunctioning elements of the game prior to its release. The player character, self-identified as TEST05, is actually played by two "agents" (of what agency is unclear) named Pablo and Robert testing the game and chronicling anomalous behavior.

The series of glitches and other bizarre things they record seems to depict a theological battle between Valle Verde's freemasonic villagers, led by Foxxo (remember that the next elections), and the Catholic Church, led by Pietro (possibly an avatar for St. Peter, the first pope and guardian of the gates of heaven).

Joseph of Cupertino is the patron saint of aviation. It's a "time flies" pun.

It's unclear how much autonomy either of these factions have, even knowing that there is apparently a super-sophisticated AI capable of injecting novel information. Pietro at times breaks the fourth wall and addresses Pablo directly by name; the villagers don't break the fourth wall, but do all sorts of stuff that is described by the tapes as anomalous. The AI seems like the obvious culprit, but in Valle Verde 2, Pablo actually meets the AI, who claims to have sequestered themselves from the rest of the game because they didn't want to partake in the villagers' rituals, and who has even disabled all their language libraries except Spanish to avoid comprehending the screams of the children trapped inside the game.

Oh yeah. Children are dying.

The THBrain seems to not only enable incredible AI, but is a way to upload humans into the video game (maybe this is unrelated to THBrain? I'm fuzzy on that point). Several children have already been uploaded and are presumed dead; currently, an Argentinian child named Matias is trapped in the game. Matias is the only other character besides Pietro capable of breaking the fourth wall, due to being a real person; he is aware of Pablo as an "agent" and suggests at some sort of conspiracy outside the game, which has not been explicated in much detail in the available videos.

The reason the children are dying is eventually revealed: the freemasonic villagers are sacrificing them to their false god, Moloch.

I'm not kidding about the freemasonry. Note the Argentinian flag.

There are other plot elements that are a bit murkier; Valle Verde seems to be a nexus of several unrelated video games, which can be accessed through an in-game library, and it is within this nexus that Moloch lives, and perhaps where the underlying purpose behind the villagers' actions lurk. There is also a recurring motif of a coming Christian apocalypse, likened to Noah's flood. After the freemasonic sacrifice, a doomsday clock ticks closer to midnight. Are the masons unwittingly provoking God's wrath? The series is framed as footage from 1997 that was unearthed in the modern day, so was this apocalypse averted, or did the apocalypse simply exist within the game, with no bearing on reality? The series remains ongoing; future installments may clarify.

But the underlying issue remains that, for me at least, the basic conflict in its simplicity and lack of ambiguity seems inadequately matched to the unique, impressive, and open-ended presentation. It retroactively makes me wonder what the point is of telling the story the way Valle Verde is told, if its story is in essence the Church versus Satan-worshippers, with clear moral and ideological lines drawn. Doesn't a more conventional narrative make sense for this sort of story?

There's a scene early on when the player character traverses a series of rooms corresponding to the Seven Deadly Sins. The sin of greed is depicted, not simply with stacks of gold, but with works of modern art:

As the player proceeds through the room, they discover a dumpster where Renaissance artwork by Titian and Michelangelo is trashed:

The message here is almost fatuous. It's also deeply ironic. Valle Verde is a work that has far more in common, in terms of its formalistic technique, with Picasso than Titian. Is it a lack of self-awareness that puts this here? Or perhaps something else?

The novel Infinite Jest ends abruptly, with none of its plot points resolved. In this way it's similar to the titan of American postmodern literature, Gravity's Rainbow, which peters out without explaining the conspiracy that has driven its narrative. Infinite Jest plays a trick, though, as devious as it is facile. The final 200 pages of the book have been cut off and moved to the front. The story's beginning is a flash forward that, in its lack of context and confusing abstractions, is difficult to make sense of on first read. Upon rereading after finishing the book, though, it clearly contains the answers to all the unresolved plot threads.

If postmodernism could be described as an artistic period of uncertainty and obscured truth that was a response to the similarly uncertain Cold War era, where the inner machinations of governments may at any time cause the annihilation of the entire world, then what Infinite Jest did, published just a few years after the Cold War's end, could be seen as a reclamation of truth.

Truth itself is a concept deeply interwoven with Christianity. In Valle Verde, Pietro even calls it out with a green highlight to indicate its importance:

La Verdad sounds suspiciously similar to Valle Verde. Coincidence?

The context of this quote comes after the villagers destroy the church; Pietro reassures the player that La Verdad remains unchanging, and that this tribulation shall pass.

Might Valle Verde itself then be an Infinite Jest style reclamation, using the formalistic techniques of postmodernism that are so useful for obscuring truth to obscure what is, at its core, a simple and morally black-and-white tale of Christianity versus wicked idolatry?

There is a real-world allegorical undercurrent to Valle Verde that makes this reading even more appealing. Valle Verde's creator, Alluvium, is Argentinian, and the game is steeped in references to Argentinian history and politics.

That's a map of the Falkland Islands and a picture of former Argentine dictator Juan Peron.

At one point, when the villagers destroy the church (with the unwitting? help of the player character, who seems to have no moral interest in anything happening, and who only does whatever anyone asks him, whether it's Pietro or Foxxo), a highly overt reference is made to the death of Pope John Paul I, who reigned for only 33 days in the late 1970s before he died, officially, of a heart attack. The abruptness of his death, and the failure of the corrupt, Mafia- and freemason-connected Vatican Bank in the years that followed, have led to conspiracy theories that John Paul was actually murdered by freemasons within the Vatican so that they may continue to corrupt the Catholic Church.

Specifically, the conspiracy posits the assassination was done by the freemasonic branch P2, or Propaganda Due, an illegal fascistic secret society that contained many high-ranking members of Italian politics (including Silvio Berlusconi), whose goal was to act as a shadow government that could prevent the rise of communism within Italy. (P2 definitely existed; how much it actually influenced Italian politics is a matter of debate.)

Though primarily an Italian organization, P2 had several influential members from other countries, notably Argentina, where several politicians and military leaders at the highest levels were involved. As a nation, Argentina is something of a tragedy; at one point considered a rising economic powerhouse, its excellent geographic and demographic advantages were squandered by a long succession of corrupt leaders, including those involved in P2. It makes sense, then, why an Argentinian creator like Alluvium might be so interested in critiquing the evils of freemasonic corruption.

Valle Verde satirizes Argentina's leadership via Foxxo, not only through his freemasonic devil rituals, but also in more down-to-earth ways. In his introduction, Foxxo provides the player character 100 coins, telling him to "remember that the next elections" (Foxxo's catchphrase, despite him clearly stating he has been given absolute authority over the area by The Smiling One); moments later, when the player turns to leave, Foxxo mugs him from behind and puts him 99,999 coins in debt.

Through the use of masonic slogans like liberté, égalité, fraternité (which is written over what appears to be a portal to Hell) and masonic symbols such as the Statue of Liberty and Washington Monument, there's an undercurrent that expands this freemasonic secular/Satanic conspiracy beyond Argentinian politics and into the post-Enlightenment secular governments that have come to rule the so-called free world. "Progress is God," the freemasons state during their child sacrifice ritual. (Foxxo is joined in this scene by the village's museum curator, representing knowledge, and its scientist, representing progress.)

It's this kind of framing that makes me wonder about the previous scene depicting Picasso paintings as emblematic of the sin of Greed, compared to Renaissance paintings in the dumpster; is there a general theme here raging against modernity in all its forms, compared to a fundamentally good and absolute Christian religious truth? If so, it makes sense why Valle Verde is presented as it is, so abstractly; it shows a world rendered incomprehensible by modernity, but one that can be sifted and parsed to find incontrovertible religious salvation still shining underneath.

It is a rejection of "progress," using the formal techniques of "progress." In a milieu where the promises of the Enlightenment seem to have hit a dead end, where the freedom secularism once promised has given rise to corruption and abuses akin to those the Catholic Church of the Renaissance once inflicted, perhaps the sense of going back appeals.

The English literary world post-Infinite Jest itself also seems to have returned to the past; the works published today are realistic in style and scope, eschewing most formal techniques pioneered across the preceding century. Though I doubt that was David Foster Wallace's goal, it's what he created. Valle Verde, which is so explicit in its fundamental belief in Christianity, is probably far more deliberate in its rejection of the world as it currently exists.

Though there have always been voices calling for a return to the past, perhaps this is a mindset particularly enticing in the information age, when meaning seems so fragmented as to be ungraspable. Though Valle Verde is conscious of what it is doing formally in a way that, say, Ben Drowned is not, the inner simplicity of these ARG narratives obfuscated by abstraction strikes me as a collective yearning for clearly explicated, graspable truths in a world where such a thing seems increasingly impossible. Almost a fantasy: If only this incomprehensible eldritch horror could be explained by a 10-minute Game Theory video!

(The eldritch itself is a horror rooted in incomprehensibility. Making it explicable banishes it entirely, the way the protagonist of Valle Verde banishes a demon by holding aloft a crucifix. La Verdad triumphs. Couldn't our lives be so simple?)

Not every ARG is like this. Kane Pixels, another creator I would highlight for their exceptional technical talent and avant garde storytelling, has created far more nuanced and ambiguous narratives with works like The Oldest View, which deals with themes of nostalgia and memory without being resolvable into a simple pat sentence synopsis. Overall, I consider this entire collection of web original horror creators to be blessed with both the talent and mindset to create truly innovative works of fiction, even if many of them are outsider artists fumbling around just trying to scare someone; as outsiders, these confused anti-confusions of theme and meaning might be par for the course.

Valle Verde is an impressive work of art, even if it is an avant garde work that paradoxically rejects itself. Perhaps in that paradox more could be said than had it remained fully self-consistent. Either way, I eagerly await what comes next.

[clairedaring]

I’m enjoying spare me your mercy and love JJ and Tor but I wish the series was 12 eps instead of 8 eps so there’s more time for the plot and to develop their relationship haha. Their relationship development feels slightly rushed now

Hi nonnie 😭😭😭😭😭😭

sighs. loudly sighs again... i get you anon, really i do. i'm really just here constantly mourning about how condensed they've made this series out to be when the source material they're trying to adapt is so long. i think @waitmyturtles 's latest post about smym ep 4 sums up well what some non-novel reader audience will feel about kantew's relationship.

detailed discussions with novel spoilers under the cut, read at your own risk 😭

since it's probably no longer a spoiler since the series has adjusted to change the culprit, i can probably discuss spoilers from the first novel in this post for comparison sake.

so at the end of book 1, Dr. Somsak is revealed to be the murderer for most of the deaths presented but he also knows that Kan has been euthanising patients -> They get into a gun fight -> Dr. Somsak gets fatally shot but isn't dead and got sent to the hospital -> Kan kills Somsak (his first intentional murder) before he could testify in court but the case is closed because all the deaths were indeed caused by Somsak.

I think in this sense, Book 1 made more sense because this was all happening while Kan and Tew were in an established relationship, henceforth in the latter half of Book 1 when evidences were starting to point at Kan, it paid off well to see Tew so distressed and hurt because he didn't like being lied to and he couldn't believe his lover who's he been fucking is a serial murderer (even though he isn't).

The betrayal comes around again in Book 2 when Tew finds out he's been lied to AGAIN. And you could tell the angst hits harder is because we SEE them together as a couple, as boyfriends in a budding established relationship, not as people who have only been seeing each other for a few weeks.

I understand the need to adjust and cover the big plot points but yea I feel the same way anon... their source material was more than enough to be covered in 12-16 eps as opposed to 8 eps. or alternatively as @waitmyturtles suggested in her comment here, it would have been much better to present kantew as an established couple from the beginning and flashback to the past before starting to unravel their relationship.

sighs.... i think Tor and JJ are killing it with the material they're given though. Carrying this type of script is just hard though because sometimes chemistry and acting skills alone isn't enough for a convincing romance narrative.

loudest sighs... lord i wish we got more KanTew scenes before they killed Dr. Somsak off to move tbe story along like pleaseeeee. I was robbed.

I wish I could be mad at Lux but then again they've been able to really incorporate a lot of debates on Euthanasia which Book 1 severely lacked into these first four episodes (something @lurkingshan has also noted here) I can't be entirely mad because you can't say there aren't good adjustments...

But it just so happens that Spare Me Your Mercy has ended up more of a series about clashing opinions on Euthanasia than a crime investigation/romance/suspense series... but the actors have promoted it to be the former rather than the latter so I've really only got myself to blame for expecting more on the relationship development 😭😭😭😭😭

also my apologies nonnie for dumping all this on you... smym is shaping up to be my no. 1 series of the year (because of all the euthanasia debates) but not at all for the reason i expected it to be (for the romance between the cunty and charming doctor and the dorky righteous gullible cop)

[alpaca-clouds]

Why the Pacing in Castlevania feels slow - but actually isn't

Okay, based on my long, long write up from yesterday, where I went into the theory of pacing narrative media, I want to talk quickly about one thing. Because I love Castlevania, and I think - outside of season 4 - the pacing in this show is pretty spot on. Mind you, the pacing in Nocturne is a bit better than in the original show, however, the reason that a lot of people feel that Nocturne is much faster paced than the original four seasons.

But the reason why people have this feeling is... actually kinda funny.

It is the editing. I say it right now: Castlevania is edited in a way that is untypical of how visual media is edited. And to this day, I am not fully certain who made the call. Was it Warren Ellis or was it one of the directors? I am not sure. I am assuming it was Ellis, given that the directors are the same in Nocturne - and the editing is very different in Nocturne - but that is just me assuming things.

So, what do I mean by this?

It is fairly easy: Usually TV shows have episodes with an A plot and a B plot. At times there is a C-plot too. And those two plots are interspliced. Meaning, you usually get a scene in A, then a scene in B, back to A, back to B, then maybe a bit of C, then back to A, then B, C again, A, B... You get the idea. This is usually something that is still around because it was needed in more episodic storytelling, but even in serial storytelling these days the idea remains. And as such, the creators try to engage the audience a bit more, by switching between the different plotlines. There is more change, hence the pacing subjectively feels faster.

Castlevania does not do this. Castlevania goes about the different plotlines more in the way a book is going to do. Basically, a large chunk of plotline A will play out, and then a large chunk of plotline B. If there is a third bit for the episode, then also a large chunk of this.

So, in each episode of Castlevania, it usually goes like this: We first spend about 8-10 minutes with one or two characters. And then 8-10 minutes with one or two other characters. And eventually at some point maybe 4-6 minuets with someone else.

The one episode that does this differently is season 3 episode 9. Yes, the rape episode. Where the intersplicing of the scenes clearly tries to communicate something - which is a lot more clearer here, of course, because the show normally does not do this.

When we go into actual analysis however, Castlevania covers about as many plot beats as most other streaming series do, per episode. It just feels slower, as it feels as if the scenes last longer - just because we linger with the characters. Mind you, if you ask me, the pacing is actually still too fast, because of streaming. As I said before: Ye olden days, when shows got 25 episodes per season were better. In a nice world, what we got as Castlevania, would have gotten at least like 50-55 episodes, with some good old fillers in there, that would allow us just to get to know the characters a bit more.

There is just two issues here.

For once... I do not know how else to put this, but: Yeah, people are tiktok brained too much these days. Basically a lot of folks feel bored with an episode lingering with one thing for almost 10 minutes.

And also... look, streaming and the "binging model" has really, really messed with how people consume media and how they expect pacing to go. Because in general pacing these days is too fast. And because of this, the audience is given way less chance to linger with the characters. And that is not a good thing.

And yeah, I will admit, this is topic that starts to annoy me. My two favorite movies from last year (outside of Wicked) were Heretic and Conclave, both of which I watched in December. And reading through the reviews of both movies, I saw so many people complaining about how supposedly slow the pacing in either movie was.

And... Okay, I will openly admit: The first half of Heretic is slow. Like, it about 40 minutes of people just talking around a table, before the "horror" aspect of the movie starts. However, I will argue this works very well, because it builds up properly.

And meanwhile Conclave? Frankly, this was one of the fastest paced movies I saw last year. Just there was no action. But the plot? The plot was in constant movement. Like, there was an important plot development literally every few minutes for the entire two hours. It is just, that of course most of this happens through "people talking".

But guess what: In a lot of media "people talking" will move the plot forward. Not everything needs to be action with fast editing.

To come back to Castlevania: The one season I will argue was not ideally paced is season 4. Because it is fairly clear that Ellis at least hoped to have a few more episodes. I talked before about how neither Sypha, nor Hector properly get to finish out their respective character arcs. Sypha's arc is set up in season 3, and then just gets abandoned in season 4. And Hector's arc mainly plays out off screen. We never get to see him going from: "I am miserable and I was used and abused" to "Okay, I need to do something about this". We get the information that his happened at some point in the 6 week time skip between the ending of season 3 and the beginning of season 4. But we never get shown it. Same with Carmilla's descent into madness and how exactly Striga and Morana got to the point they are in episode 4. Other than that, season 4 is not particularly rushed. Basically it is just that the time skip skips about stuff, that would have been nice to have. But then within season 4? The pacing is fairly okay. Not quite as well as especially season 2 and 3 (mostly because it is fairly uneven), but pretty alright.

But overall? Castlevania is fairly well-paced. Just in terms of how many plot and character beats happening per episode. It is just presented in a way, how you would normally present the story in a book or maybe even a comic - rather than in the way that is way more common for visual media. And because of it, it feels slower.

And in the end I will say one thing: As an autistic person, I actually gotta say, I do prefer the way those four seasons present the story - with the long chunks, rather than interspliced. It gives my autistic brain a lot more time to focus and get into each scenario we get per episode, rather than having to switch back and forth between different scenarios.

Ironically it does remind me a lot of early 2000s Japanese horror media (including anime), that often was edited in a similar way. Though I do have no idea if this was somehow intended or not. But in general the pacing does remind me a lot of Ayakashi, Mononoke and their peers.

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #67 – I Was A Teenage Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones

I’d never heard of Stephen Graham Jones at the start of the year, but I’ve at this point read three books of his, seen him speak at a con, and can probably consider myself a fan. Beyond the general positive association I grabbed this book knowing literally nothing but the title, mostly just to have something I could get him to sign. Which worked out much better than it often does! This wasn’t really what I expected from that title (something more comedic or over-the-top), but it was a lovely read. It even managed to make a meta genre-tropes-are-actual-metaphysics plot compelling to me, which is basically impossible these days.

The story is set in a tiny nowhere town in 1989 West Texas and stars Tollie Driver, 17-year-old and already most of the way to being a burnout who is not at all over his dad’s death the year before. It’s written 17 years after the fact as something between memoir and confession, an older Tollie writing on some shitty computer about what happened over a few climactic days to him, the town, and the six classmates he brutally murdered.

He’s a slasher, see – it’s apparently something of a blood-borne ailment, and he was infected while enjoying an involuntary front-row seat to the first set of high school students getting karmically murdered that month, right after a bit of drunken bullying and a peanut allergy just about killed him. The plot is, after that excitement, mostly a matter of Tollie recounting his transformation and the life, relationships, and whole social world permanently destroyed by it.

There are, it sometimes seems, more books these days playing with the trappings and aesthetics of the horror genre than there are actually using them to tell horror stories. This is kind of that – there’s a level of psychological horror to becoming a murderous monster that you’d have to try really very hard to to erase, but it’s certainly not trying to leave you jumping at things rustling in the dark. It’s incredibly the case, though, that this is a story about a slasher and commenting on the slasher genre that is in no real way a slasher story.

Which is to say, Tollie’s best friend Amber has an older brother she idolizes who was a horror movie fanatic, and so she quickly realizes (with the iron-clad certainty of a teenager with a limited reference set) exactly what he is becoming – not even a ‘slasher’ as in a supernatural, vengeful serial killer, but a slasher as the monster at the centre of a particular kind of narrative, whose existence reshapes the world around them to follow its demands. It’s all very tv tropes – Tollie discovers that he moves at least twice as fast as he can run, as long as he’s limping and no one can see him, there’s some banter about the logistics of driving when the only machines that will work for him are murder implements, the sheer force of narrative causality turns a closeted gay guy and a sincere saving-herself-for-marriage Christian girl into a couple who go fuck in an abandoned camper van at night so Tollie can find them. It’s actually a major plot point that the mere fact of being a Final Girl will forcibly reorganize your personality to be a diligent, studious good Samaritan. All of which is order of magnitude more meta than I can usually stand, but it works here (more or less).

It feels a bit silly to say this book reminds me intensely of My Heart Is A Chainsaw – of course it does, that’s the last book by the same author I’ve read. But they both do similar things using the genre apparatus of the Slasher as scaffholding to tell stories that are really only tangentially/obscurely examples of the genre. Also, extremely close first person narration from a low-achieving teenager in a small town. Now, this is a far, far easier read than Chainsaw – not in terms of subject matter, just in keeping track of what’s happening versus what’s fantasy or extended tangent – and, I think, a bit more elegant in its use of the genre, but the similarities are still very clear.

As for what the story’s actual about – I mean first and foremost, it’s a period piece. Lamesa, Texas is a nowhere town, but it is a particular, specific nowhere town that Jones was familiar with in his childhood and (gong by the acknowledgements) went to no small effort researching to perfectly recreate it as it truly was in the late ‘80s (plus or minus a massacre or two). It’s no coincidence that Tollie was born the same year the author was, or that it’s set specifically in West Texas. The whole book is run through with a deep (if jaundiced) nostalgia for the whole milieu. Given how high concept all the slasher stuff is, the firm, deep grounding is pretty much a necessity for making the whole story feel real enough to land.

It helps, too, that the late ‘80s USA is the slasher movie’s natural habitat. All the tired tropes really do fit much more naturally in the culturally environment that spawned them then they do when dragged into the modern day. If I wanted to be slightly cynical I’d say this is a big part of why every modern slasher story is so very self-referential – if you’re not leaning on lineage and metanarrative the bones of the stories themselves just don’t make the same sort of sense anymore. Many such cases, I suppose.

Even the framing device is a period piece, in a rather charming way. Tollie is writing his confession on a cheap, shitty desktop in the back office of a junkyard in 2006, and this informs his narration all through the book. It even shapes the book as an artifact – the fonts and formatting used are all ones that would have been available, right down to only being able to underline instead of bold or italicize for emphasis. Which is absolutely a gimmick, but one I honestly kind of love.

Aside from being a love letter to West Texas 40 years ago, the book is about being a monster. About the cold math of it all making it impossible to deny that the world would have been better without you in it. About leaving people you love behind and never, ever looking back because you can’t bear to confirm the sick certainty that just being connected to you probably ruined their lives as collateral damage. Of spending your life trying to be anonymous and inconsequential, and mourning the loss of a life where you were only the normal and pedestrian sort of fuckup. Of looking through the past as a preordained tragedy in one instant and grasping at all the lost chances and missed turns that might have made it different on the other.

It’s a pathetic narrative – that is, one that’s mostly there to deliver pathos. It definitely worked, at least for me? It was a very affecting read, especially the ending. But your enjoyment of the book will depend more or less entirely on whether you find Tollie’s internal monologue compelling and sympathetic, I think. But with that caveat, I would recommend it.

[cheesebearger]

agatha all along had a really tight, well-constructed narrative until episodes 8 and 9. i actually think the conclusion episodes undermine what was working so well at the beginning. my main points:

Alice should not have died to, as Jac Schaeffer said, "punish" Agatha; having a woman of color die to "punish" a white woman flattens her character into an object designed to inflict white pain;

the revelation regarding who bound Jen's power reduces her trauma to a joke and disregards how interesting her having been "bound" by trauma rather than magic would have been;

Agatha's backstory fails to engage with the "why" motivating her serial killing or with her emotionally negligent and abusive parenting irt Nicky and the reveal that she can control her powers is significantly less interesting than if she cannot;

and Billy being revealed as responsible for the road and the trials fundamentally changes the significance of every moment of the show - to the point where you have multiple women dying for what is, literally, no reason due to his actions.

To preface: I never expect anything well written from the MCU or Disney, but about 65% of this show was surprisingly well-written. However, like with most Marvel franchises or TV shows, they just ruin it with their last moments by shoehorning in something, or having a very choppy constantly shifting emotional tone for the conclusion. I'm just glad that the show didn't end with a huge CGI battle sequences like Moon Knight and WandaVision did as they are the definition of a cop out for story telling.

As to point one: Alice's story was left unfinished. Multiple characters mention they made no effort to save her. Agatha is revealed to have complete control over her power, too. So ultimately, Alice dies for nothing. To "punish" Agatha, but that flattens her into an object, a weapon, directed at Agatha. She's no longer a person, she's merely a tool being wielded by the writer literally, and narratively by Billy and Agatha. Rio's words to Alice additionally make no sense - she tells Alice that she's a "protection witch who died protecting someone," but she didn't. She began to protect Agatha, and then Agatha consciously made the decision to kill her (as we know she has complete control over her power). Alice is murdered. She doesn't die heroically protecting someone. She dies for no reason, and dies with her story unfinished and unfulfilled. Is that how life goes sometime? Yeah, obviously. But this is a story, where the writer made a conscious decision to kill off a woman of color to "punish" her white main character. Alice fully deserved a complete character arc and the fact she did not have one is due to racist objectification of her.

Point two: Jen's power should have been revealed to be internally suppressed rather than bound by Agatha. Firstly, because making Agatha responsible makes the entire thing a joke - Agatha is flippant, she doesn't even remember necessarily how it happened, it completely undermines her "I left you alone..." comment to Jen. Secondly, the show introduces Chekov's Racist in episode 3 and, as a result of the reveal regarding Agatha, his existence in the story fails to have any significance. In fact, it reads as Jen simply being too blind or too foolish to "understand" who took her power from her. It robs her of the weight of her trauma at the hands of a violent racist and completely reduces the depth and affect of the trauma from racism that Jen experiences. Rather than having her cope with and come to terms with the reality of the trauma she experienced at the hands of the unnamed doctor, her entire story comes to be one of a woman "foolishly" misinterpreting her own life and lived experiences. It also would have been more interesting if Agatha had, genuinely, left Jen alone out of respect for her midwifery; that allows both characters to exist within the complexities of their own traumas without sacrificing one's pain for the other.

Point three: Agatha's backstory was rather limp. I think it could be immediately improved if a single line of dialogue was added, from Rio to Agatha. If, when Agatha asked what Rio would want to allow her to keep Nicky, Rio had responded, "I'll give you as much time as you give me bodies." From there, it would be easy to see why the loss of her son would drive her to engage in that ritual serial killing even more out of grief and out of resentment for being so alienated from her community. Personally, though, I think the backstory we needed was actually Agatha in Salem, being put on trial. Though I do think it's interesting to have Agatha make her son bait for her victims, thus making him an accomplice in her murders, and doing so using a song he wrote with his mother out of love; I just wish it was presented as how disturbing it all actually is - the episode itself never quite gets the emotional tenor it needs, it needed to empathize with Nicky as a child who is absolutely being emotionally neglected and abused, existing with the knowledge that he must help his mother murder.

And point four: Billy being revealed to be the creator of the road immediately destabilizes and reduces the show's stakes. I suppose I should lump in here the fact the road is a con by Agatha as part and parcel of this issue. I feel like the show kind of shied away from committing to the idea of the Witches Road - a really cool concept that, if well executed, could have been the stage for a great story from start to finish. By having Billy create the Road, we actually have Lilia's entire life become centered around him - the time loop she is trapped in, across her entire lifetime, is because of him. Not because of her, not for her, not for her growth, not for her coven. She dies for Billy. She dies for nothing. And sure, everyone ultimately dies for "nothing" if we want to get nitpicky. But how sad is it, for Lilia to be trapped dying in Billy's mind-road, for her entire life. Everything she is, flattened into a mere device for Billy's pain and growth. Way to completely ruin an incredible episode of TV by adding additional context lmfao.

Ultimately, I think the show is fine. Just fine. It could have been much better, which frustrates me. My assumption of what the show was going to be was this: the Witches Road exists as a journey wherein one must overcome their fear of death and strengthen the bonds of the coven to ward off social death, and to ultimately experience a form of "death" at the end of the road wherein the coven would be reunited, fundamentally changed as a result of their journeys. I thought that the meaning appended to "Death" in the show was going to align with the meaning of the tarot (upright: spiritual transformation, new beginnings, letting go, endings, sudden upheaval, etc.; reversed: inability to move forward, fear of beginnings, etc.) given they went through so much effort to put together the "correct" tarot spread. I'd also note that the "What's Missing" was community - so having the ending of the season be most of the coven permanently dead leaves that "What's Missing" still unfulfilled.

[david-talks-sw]

At what point do you ask yourself if the Prequels did this to itself.

Sure having Gen X creatives probably doesn’t help. But I still see a lot of younger folks and prequel kids have a “the Jedi we’re wrong” narrative. We can argue whether or not it’s because of those Gen X creators sure.

But a film or film needs to speak for itself and convey the ideas of the creative and not have people research what he or she says. It can be fun sure but at some point the film needs to do the work.

Course if you think the film does the work that also is a debate worth having. But the fact that we still have this debate at all must say something and I don’t it’s simple as “older fans don’t get it” maybe that’s part of it but I still think there is something about the prequel’s execution to be desired.

Guessing you're the same anon from this post.

It's not as simple as "older fans don't get it", but that is the starting point of the issue, because the older fans are the ones who generated the content that the Prequel kids would go on consuming.

And you can see a trend in all Star Wars merchandise. Around 1999 to 2005? The marketing, the books, the comics, all tend to frame the Jedi in a positive light, but more importantly focus on the intended narrative, that Anakin brought this down on himself.

And the haters, well, they're arguing that the Jedi are a bunch of idiots and incompetents, that Anakin is whiny and changes his mind and joins the Dark Side to kill the Jedi on a whim.

These are very uncharitable reads but at least they track with the intended narrative.

The Jedi are always playing catch-up, calling them "incompetent" is tough but fair.

Anakin is whiny, arrogant and petulant but he's a teenager. That's how they are. That's the point: he's a teenager and he's trying to get married and settle down and have a family, etc, "because i love her and she loves me" when even the woman he's in love with tells him "that's not how things work, buddy, there's other factors, this will spell out destruction for everyone". Eventually she gives in, but that doesn't make it any less destructive.

Anakin does turn to the Dark Side immediately. That's how scared he is. That's how traumatized he is. He hasn't slept in days and he's not thinking straight, he's scared shitless and he's panicking and here's this space sorcerer who says he can stop people from fucking dying?? Of course he'll join.

But the other thing is... those are criticisms coming from an adult perspective. AKA not the intended viewer. Cuz I sure wasn't thinking any of that when I was a kid. I was deep in the story and going along with it. I have a friend whose kid watched the films first, same deal, he's not asking that.

These are movies meant for kids. Is the plot slightly more complex than your average fairy tale? It is. But it remains a fairy tale in, especially considering its target demographic.

And this fairy tale was made by an experimental indie filmmaker from the Baby Boomer generation with a background in anthropology (hence why there's so many mythological callbacks in the films), cinema vérité documentary filmmaking (explaining the cinematography of the Prequels) and editing.

It reflects who he is and what his values are. He's ahead of the curb in his way of thinking, but some of his values reflect the generation he was a part of.

Finally, the films reflect a particular style he's emulating, the 30s matinee serial. Everyone speaks a certain way, sometimes it's bland, sometimes it's straight up corny, but it's all on purpose.

These films kept being scrutinized by people who saw them as "blockbuster scifi films" and reviewed/analyzed them as such.

They're not. They're indie movies with a big budget. They're fairy tales in space.

They're this weird little niche thing that this funny weirdo from Modesto with a fascination for pyschological motifs in mythology came up with. Remember: the first Star Wars movie was released with an expectation from everyone, including Lucas himself, that it'd be panned and despised.

As they years go on, a lot of the adults who hated the Prequels try to do the decent thing and find a way to like them... but the story seems so stupid to them, as it is.

But then they either think or come across an interpretation, a prism through which to see the Prequels... that - holy shit - actually makes them better, and have more depth. The theory is... 

What if Jar Jar is secretly a Sith Lord?

What if the Prequel Jedi are meant to come across as dispassionate? I mean, isn’t that what being a Jedi is, apparently? You purge yourself of attachments aka emotions, and act only logically. 

Wow, that… that actually makes the Prequels sound better. Like, think of the implications: 

The Jedi are too systemic, they’re more prone to violence than they’re supposed to be, they’re meddling with politics, and if you read the EU, they’re essentially kidnapping babies, brainwashing them, indoctrinating them, and if they don’t pass the tests then they become farmers or get kicked out. They’re high and mighty assholes who preach peace but also frequently get into fights. Also, to become a Jedi, you need to have a high enough midi-chlorian count which shows how overly-organized they’ve become, rather than allowing themselves to ‘feel’. 

Qui-Gon is not just a maverick: he’s ahead of the curb. I mean, he’s the first guy to become a Force Ghost, he’s gotta be doing something right that the others aren’t, right? Also, he’s got a love interest, he gets angry when she gets killed. Y’know, a human reaction? Like the one Anakin has and tells himself he needs to repress, like a Jedi apparently would? 

And you know what? Maybe that’s the problem that makes Anakin go to the Dark Side: these guys took a 9-year-old slave and forced him to repress his emotions until he finally cracked. He just wouldn’t fit in the mold, they kept pushing, until he finally broke. Sure, Palpatine leverages Padmé’s life, but Anakin would never have been in that situation if the Jedi had been compassionate enough to notice he was in pain and distress. Yoda literally tells him to “rejoice” at the thought of someone dying. What kind of idiotic advice is that? It’s clear, the Jedi are no better than the Sith, they’re just two sides of a different coin. One feels too much, the other doesn’t feel at all. 

Holy shit… this is all making so much sense…! The Prequels might actually be secretly good! Or if not good, at least more coherent, now! 

And oh! Oh! That’s what makes Luke special! Cuz yes, Luke is special again, thanks to this interpretation! 

He finds a middle ground between the unfeeling Jedi and the Sith, who have become slaves to their emotions. He uses the Dark Side to beat Vader, but uses it like a tool, keeps himself in control (like some sort of Jedi in the middle... like… a gray… Jedi). Like, sure, Anakin can be the Chosen One, whatever, but Luke? Luke has found the balance, he succeeded where Obi-Wan, Yoda (who wanted Vader dead instead of believing he could be redeemed) and the other Prequel Jedi failed. And the EU books that follow Return of the Jedi seem to confirm this, as you can get married within the New Jedi Order, and Luke can use Force Lightning and he can take on an army of Yuhzan Vong by himself!

Wow. You know what? For all their faults, the Prequels make sense. Maybe Lucas is a genius after all.

Some of the people are in a position where they can create new Star Wars content. So they set out to fix something that, in their view, was broken... but that from Lucas' POV, wasn't. Some of them think they're setting out to clarify a narrative (but are actually focusing on an aspect that wasn't meant to be scrutinized and challenged that deeply in the intended narrative).

And they crank out this content, because Lucas didn't particularly give a fuck about the EU. When they have the chance, they push the new narrative, and nobody stops it because, hey, at least they're engaging with the material, and the original narrative was stupid anyway.

What happens? The Prequel kids grow up with this content being pushed on them more and more.

And they're immersed, right? So when a new book makes Obi-Wan come across as an asshole, they don't think "Obi-Wan would never say that" they go "oh shit, turns out Obi-Wan's an asshole!"

So now THAT generation, that's just going by the canon that was put out post-movies, is slowly but surely growing up with the same interpretation (me included).

There's also a more psychology-aware culture, and more and more Anakin comes across as someone who's being mentally abused by the Jedi. He's got some sort of mental disorder, he's socially anxious. He's not whiny, he's crying out for help. Those values of the Jedi (that Lucas shares)? They're actually weird and archaic!

So that whole aspect gets thrown into the mix.

Fast-forward to today, and the newest generation of fans grows up with "the Prequels show the Fall of the Jedi" as common knowledge, and the High Republic, New Jedi Order and Dawn of the Jedi is where it's at. Those Prequel Jedi are real dogmatic, tight-assed fuck-ups, wow, amirite?

TLDR:

No, I don't think the Prequel Trilogy did it to itself. I think it accomplished exactly what it wanted to for the people it was meant to do it for (kids).

It's just that a bunch of people came right after it and retconned the fuck out of it, then proceeded to say "yeah, it was always this way, even the original author said so" when he didn't.

My stance, as usual, is best summarized by this metaphor:

[1eos]

Prev anon, I WARNED YOU THE BOOK WOULD RAISE YOUR BLOOD PRESSURE BECAUSE OH MY GOD THE GIRL LIVED AND DIED AS SAC OF DONATABLE PARTS! I READ IT AT 16 AND CRIED SO MUCH BECAUSE SHE JUST NEVER HAD A LIFE. SHE DIED THE MOMENT SHE GOT FREEDOM. THE WORST ENDING PLOT TWIST BUT OH MY GOD. (Also I’m a bish so I was hoping other sister would finally tap out and be like “I have VASTLY overstayed my welcome on this planet at the sake of my sisters health and wellbeing” which she technically was ready to do but she ended up having a long life???? . Also white privilege is that the brother never goes to jail).

when i got to the part where the dad is like 'he wants to be punished for being a serial arsonist so i'll do the worst thing to him--giving him a hug' i thought abt the ask u sent me earlier and thought thats what u meant bc that pissed me off bad BUT IT ONLY GOT SO MUCH WORSE. like it was ooooooooooooooooooooo weird the book did all that about that child having no autonomy or choice just to kill her off and her organs donated without her conscious consent. it was such a cop out. even if she went through all that decided ykw? i DO want to give a kidney that wouldve been a bit defanged on the whole autonomy from her parents BUT deeply realistic or hell even if the car crash happened and the sister said HELL NO i do not want this kidney im ready to go. like its so odd that in this specific narrative the sister is like im done suffering i feel like such a burden bad things keep happening to my family bc of me and then her sister dies and shes in the throes of agony but just takes the kidney.

im just kinda let down bc this book requires you to 1. fill in a lot of emotional blanks. like i can fill in the blanks and say the sister took the kidney despite being ready to die earlier bc she already felt like she had to live for her mother or it would be a waste of the sisters legacy. but it wasted so much time on that useless ass love story when it couldve been fleshing out the emotional ramifications of the ending

which leads to point 2. a LOT of the parents shortcomings are just glossed over? the parents emotional neglect 2 out of 3 kids and the 3rd feels like a black hole that's ruined everyone's lives with a disease that's beyond her control but its quite clear to me the author expects us to believe the fitzsgeralds are good ppl just 'doing their best'. like its sooooooooooooo white american early 00s middle class w no care for anyone but themselves it honestly makes me fucking sick. the mother especially like basically had a favorite child and lowkey resented the son for daring to want to be loved and was clear about how the youngest was expendable. and the book emphasizing on how much she mourned 😐ok but u got what u wanted lmaoooo. like im sorry idk where i was supposed to get the feeling that she loved all 3 of her kids at all 😭😭😭😭😭 and then the brother turning his life around all bc his father negated consequences for him AGAIN. not to be a cynic but ppl don't change just with a fucking hug lmaooooo he shouldve gotten 15-20 years. gotten out in 5-10 for good behavior, started a prison outreach program and THEN maybe i'll believe he's changed.

[lucas-deziderio]

Dezi reads Pact

I am a newcomer to Tumblr and have just found out about liveblogging books. It seems pretty darn fun! So I decided to try my hand at it to both exercise my literary analysis muscles and to maybe make a few friends in this site. And I've decided that my first subject on this will be John “Wildbow" McCrae's web serial Pact.

I've been a huge fan of his other work, Worm, for years now (though I do have a couple issues with it). And I'm also a big fan of urban fantasy stories with well designed magic systems, so the premise of this book is already very appealing to my tastes.

I have actually started reading through it before but put it on hold for a while. I am currently sitting in the middle of Signature 8.7 and will be picking up the story from there. I'll try to post once I finish each chapter, sharing my overall thoughts and analysis, and maybe once I finish each arc to stitch them all together and make predictions about the plot.

The road so far

Here are some assorted thoughts I've had on what I've read of the story so far:

Blake Thornburn is definitely a protagonist of all time. This little wet blanket of a man has successfully fled his toxic family, survived homelessness and got adopted into a found family of queer artists only to then be dragged back into his family's issues. And the skeletons in his grandma's closet want to eat his soul.

Also he totally fumbled a threesome. My dude simply can't get a win.

Rose Thornburn is a character who is completely devoid of any trans subtext, thank you very much. At the beginning I thought she was an excellent addition to the story, being a tool to get Blake to externalize his thought process and opinions. The first arcs would have been really dry without her. But she has grown so contrarian; convincing her to help is now an additional step Blake has to do every time he comes up with a new plan of action. I suspect she might become an antagonist even before the end. Is it just me? Is it some kind of ingrained misogyny?

Evan is the best character in the story. He's such a ray of sunshine that every line of his is like a breath of fresh air in this dark and gritty narrative Blake is trapped in. Please, let him become a fire bird. I beg you. He's just a cinnamon roll too pure for this world.

The magic system is maybe the best I've ever seen and is definitely what makes the story stand out. It feels like what I, almost instinctually, always imagined magic should work like. But defined and refined to a point where it actually becomes a usable set of rules. Everything from true names, binding, spirits, demesnes... It's ugh, so good! I will probably dig more into each of those elements as they come up in the next chapters because there's so much to chew on.

The monsters. The author has this amazing ability of grabbing well-known concepts of mythological creatures and giving them their own spin while at the same time seemingly distilling them to their core appeal. After meeting Wildbow's goblins, that's how I expect all other goblins to be like. The same goes for demons, fey, ghosts... As with the magic system, I'll dig into each of those as they come up in the next chapters.

During the discussion of the binding contract, the imp Pauz has mentioned some “inviolable rules", which caught Blake's attention for a second but were not clearly explained. This has been living rent-free in my head since then and I am very sure it will come back later.

Isadora, the sphinx, could step on me. Also, she has mentioned the fact that in the classical Greek myth Oedipus actually gave the wrong answer. I've been dying to know what is the true answer the the classic sphinx riddle, but unfortunately I don't think it will be revealed...

The way they defeated Conquest was, to me, a total copout. I couldn't fully follow Blake's plan until it was all over, and I can't understand why Conquest needed to travel into the mirror world to catch Rose when previously he just pulled her out of it like it was nothing. It just felt anticlimactic to me.

Also, please, can we actually just give him an actual arsenal of stuff he can use? I know Wildbow likes to keep his protagonists as the underdog but this is getting ridiculous. This magic system allows for basically anything but still our main man only has two or three tricks up his sleeve at any time and is constantly losing resources as fast as he can get more of them.

Last time I saw Blake he was swallowed whole by an ontophagic demon, being completely erased from reality as we know it and leaving Rose to steal his life. I know he'll come back, he's the protagonist after all, but I'm really excited to see how it will play out. Will he fight his way out Hell itself? Like Kratos??

The spoilers I already got

I don't care that much about spoilers, but still would like to avoid them if possible. I decided to list here what I could already gather from the future of the story simply by osmosis from the fandom:

There will be a mermaid called Green Eyes who is super cute in a “bite your face off" kind of way.

Blake will become part tree(?).

The ending is bittersweet at best.

Next

[greenerteacups]

Hello! I wanted to let you know how amazing your fic is, it seems my life now revolves around Friday mornings. I think it may be one of my favorite series ever, not just fics, your stuff is better than most published works I have read. I really could go on and on. Suffice to say, thank you x1 million for just putting this out there for us.

I had a couple curiosities! Is it ever hard to restrain yourself and just post 1 time per week? Or is that necessary for your creative process?

Also, your fic is rapidly growing in popularity, do you ever get worried about how that might change your audience?

Thank you again for the amazing thing you've written, I feel super lucky to be reading it in real time because I know this is going to be one of those legendary classics.

Thank you so much! You're wonderfully kind, I really appreciate it, and I hope I can live up to your expectations!

Weekly posting: Posting once a week is actually something I started for my own sanity — posting it regularly/serially is better for audience response, so there's a natural incentive to do it, but it also gives me more time to write ahead. And having all of a book prewritten in advance is really important for me creatively, not only so as to avoid the possibility of cliffhangers, but also to feel immune from the pressure to change the story based on what audiences want.

Growing audiences: Oof, it's been wild. I've been sort of boggled by the response to my little fic; it was entirely unexpected and the most I can do is work hard to deserve it. For the most part, an increasing audience has been a wonderful, wonderful thing, and I've been so grateful for everyone who's been offering support and praise. I'm seriously insanely lucky. My only point of frustration is that, in general, as a fic grows, readers seem to perceive increasing distance between themselves and the author. For instance, people in my comments have increasingly started to address each other instead of me, or have left comments seemingly without the expectation that I'll read them. But when someone comments on the fic, they're still sending that message directly to the author, and I think that some people might... well, they either don't know that, or they don't care. Like, the audience/author distance might be greater than it is for a fic with only 300 hits, but it's not like I'm a showrunner, or some other media production bigwig who'll probably never see 99% of the feedback generated by fans; it's still my pet project that I read basically every scrap of feedback for.

And sometimes (rarely — most of my comments are just so wonderful, and I don't want to sound ungrateful, but) people do say weird or unnecessary things. One comment for the last chapter read, "if krum dies im gonna drop this fic ngl," and that just irritated the hell out of me. Like, if that's your opinion, cool. Your reading habits are none of my business, and I sincerely encourage everyone who needs to take a break from Lionheart — or, hell, even loses interest — to go find something that sparks joy instead. Reading fic should bring you pleasure. No hard feelings, swear to God.

But my frustration with that comment, in particular, was: you do realize that you've sent that message directly to my inbox, right? You realize that was the first thing I read when I opened my comments section after a long afternoon of writing? Someone directly informing me, the author, that a narrative decision (which, either way, I already made about 4-5 months ago) will lose me a reader? And how does this person expect me to react? "Oh, no! I have to go back and rewrite 90,000 words of the story — God forbid I lose you, Single AO3 User Who Left No Other Comments! How can I live with myself if you're not here??"

It's just a bit frustrating. And, to the point — I say this politely, with respect — but if you seriously can't handle seeing characters die, then maybe don't read the fanfiction that's rewriting a series where very many characters die. Just a thought.

[watching-pictures-move]

Put On Your Raincoats | Sweet Savage (Perry & Samples, 1979)

I probably can't give this a fair review as the transfer I watched this on was pretty dreadful, looking like several layers of vaseline had been smeared over the lens, to the point that I had trouble telling certain performers apart, at least those without substantive dialogue parts and who had superficial similarities in appearance. For what it's worth, the movie does appear at times to be artfully shot, framing the performers, the sets and the scenery in visually pleasing ways, even if its visual style seems heavily indebted to hippy drippy flower child aesthetics that at this point were a decade past their expiry date. But such qualities were difficult to fully appreciate in this subpar presentation.

This is probably most notable for two things. One, for starring washed up Hollywood actor Aldo Ray, who took the role during a period of financial and personal troubles. Before you ask, he does not get to fuck, although a topless Carol Connors does rub up against him at one point. (Connors' husband Jack Birch also appears in this, so you could make some half baked argument that this represents a link between the past and present of American cinema's margins, with Connor and Birch being the parents of Thora Birch. Yeah, let's go with that. Connors also does a rendition of "Red River Valley", which provides one of the movie's highlights.) He's fine, although as far as mainstream actors in villainous non-sex roles in pornos go, he ranks quite a bit below James Hong in China Girl. The other notable element is that it was shot in the Apacheland Movie Ranch, meaning that it actually looks pretty credible as a western. (There's a pretty interesting article on the film's production by the reliably thorough Rialto Report that's worth a read.)

On that note, this is very much in the revisionist vein of the genre, presenting the Old West as a place where (sexual) violence is met with (sexual) violence, where male aggressions and racial hatred leave mostly female victims in their wake. The Native American characters are played in pretty broad strokes, as one might expect, but to the movie's credit, it does try to distinguish motivations between different Native American characters rather than treating them as a monolith, and frames their cruelty as a response to racially-motivated cruelty instigated by the white villains. So there are some points in the movie's favour, although they're undermined by how boring most of this is. Beth Anna is not a strong enough actress to hold this together, and there is hardly any tension for at least the first half hour, with many dry stretches after. And at the risk of sounding like a serial killer, even though I say something to this effect with troubling regularity, the rape scenes, while being nominally unpleasant for what they depict, are nowhere near forceful enough to work on a narrative level. So this is probably most interesting as a curio, although you might zone out for a good chunk, and if you watch it on the transfer I did, squint for the rest.

[badassbutterfly1987]

The Butcher and the Wren live read ch. 1-2

You ever watch or read something isn't particularly good but something about the potential is compelling and you keep thinking about it? Yeah, that's currently this book for me. There are things I like, things that could work if done differently, and things that really feel like first draft mistakes. I am not going to note grammatical errors or odd sentence structure because narrative and character problems irk me more and are worth more discussion.

The Butcher and the Wren is a 2024 novel by Alaina Urquhart, perhaps better known as one of the hosts of true crime podcast Morbid. It's about Wren Muller, a forensic pathologist in Louisiana bayou, and Jeremy the active serial killer whose victims she is examining.

And I am going to be spoiling the mid-book twist almost immediately so if you want the intended experience you should probably read the book first. Why am I spoiling it? Because a) it doesn't particularly work as a twist on a character or narrative level and b) it's much easier to talk about early chapters if I can reference the full context. Okay so-

Chapter 1:

first we meet Jeremy, our titular butcher, and we immediately get a clumsy info dump on his backstory. While not horrifically abusive in the way one would usually expect in this kind of genre, his parents were very much not good, being suffocatingly affectionate one day and barely acknowledging his existence the next.

His usual method is to get to know someone first and then kidnap and kill them, like he will be attempting with Emily, his bio lab partner at Tulane University School of Medicine. Matt and Katie, the victims trapped in his basement, were enticed with the promise of drugs and are notable exceptions.

I really like his personality. Yes, he's a terrible person with a superiority complex and lack of empathy. But his condescension towards any other human and his control freak tendencies and short temper make him a somewhat amusing perspective. That he wants to get to know his targets and specificially wants people who interest him are potentially self-sabatoging but make for an interesting layer. His motivation isn't outight stated but so far it just seems like boredom. Also he likes to think he's Not Like Other Serial Killers, which is objectively funny.

Big Reveal Turn Back Now: Jeremy's chapters in the first half or so are actually flashbacks to roughly a decade before Wren's chapters. Wren is going to be revealed to be Emily, the only victim to escape and survive him.

Some tidbits of relevance: he's keeping two people in his basement in a Louisiana bayou. He references his distaste for Drake's Hotline Bling (came out 2015) and much prefers music from the 90s, citing his opinion that he was born in the wrong generation; combined with the average age of a second year medical student makes him roughly mid 20s.

Thoughts: how many buildings in swampy terrain can actually have basements? How old is Jeremy supposed to be? How long has he been doing this for him to both be in his 20s and have an established method? How does he have time to torture/kill people on the weekends, take medical classes at an university under a fake name, and also a job (next chapter point)? Why is he even going to medical school under a fake name, is it really just to find a target? If he's spending time to get to know his targets first, isn't there a higher chance of him being noticed and identified as a suspect?

I'm not saying all of these are impossible but combined together and all conveyed in the same chapter stretches disbelief. Having the audience ask questions about character and worldbuilding can be good, asking how basic narrative elements are possible is less good.

Chapter 2:

we meet Wren, a forensic patholigist at a crime scene in what is generally a stronger chapter. She investigates a body found at the edge of a swamp, a woman with a slashed open stomach and a horror anthology book found nearby. That the book was carefully wrapped in a shirt suggests it was left there with the intention of being found. She guesses from the lividity and bruises that the victim was strangled to death roughly 10 hours before.

this is notably the second victim, another woman being found behind a nearby bar with some book pages shoved halfway down her throat two weeks before.

I like the glimpses of Wren's personality. She's professional but a little playful, examines the body while using the opportunity to teach her (unnamed) young coroner helpers. She's empathetic but tries to desensitive herself while at the crime scene. She mentions her fascination with killers but being even more fascinated by their victims and what they felt in their final moments.

She also wears heels which isn't an important detail but does stand out as inconvenient apparel at a swampy crime scene.

You'll notice that we did not get a backstory dump with Wren. While lack of insight may become a problem later, this mostly works for an introduction. We also did not get even a mention of her happily married husband at home or the close friend on the police force she usually works with but I guess you can only cover so much over a dozen or less pages.

remember, Wren is actually Emily 10 years later. Is there any vague foreshadowing to her once almost being the victim of a serial killer? Nope. While she does have empathy for the victim they find, it just registers as they way any criminal investigator might feel. No reference to her once being under a killer's knife as well, no indication of related trauma she's tried to bury. All it would've taken was one ominous hint that might not mean much to a first time reader but would stand out in hindsight.

[starlight-time-machine]

Week in Review

01/05/2025 – 01/11/2025

Sunday

Week 48 of missing Cipher Academy

Played through a lot more of The Thousand-Year Door today and got through Chapters 4, 5, and 6, and thankfully the game’s picked up a lot more momentum for me. I liked the atmosphere of Chapter 4 (that stained glass window was amazing), the bodysnatching was a fun little plot point, I liked eavesdropping on the crows, and of course Vivian was extremely cute (I’m honestly pretty impressed that Nintendo reinforced the fact that she’s trans). Chapter 5 was alright; the dungeon got a little annoying at one point, but it felt really nice to finally turn into a boat and be able to sail around and reach all these areas I’ve been seeing throughout the dungeon and in Rogueport. And then Chapter 6’s setting was right up my alley – I love a classic mystery on a train, but I wish it was a little meatier (though I guess this is the extent of what I can expect from a Mario game). But the little twists and turns of the narrative kept me entertained, and that ghost Toad actually kind of got me when I tried to read his diary. But man…the map sizes for each area just feel so much smaller and more barren when compared to Origami King’s…but no matter. I’m having a decently fun time anyway.

Monday

Heard some rumblings about stuff happening in SpyFam so I quickly caught up with the two chapters I hadn’t read yet, and I’m so excited that things are rapidly hitting the fan.

Tuesday

Nothing…

Wednesday

Watched the episode of Make Some Noise where they had those wife guys try to out-wife guy each other, but I can’t really say that much of the humor in this one landed with me.

Of course we only got around to watching The Muppet Christmas Carol about a week after Christmas, but it was still pretty fun regardless. Michael Caine engaging with these raggedy little Muppets seriously was so cute, but unfortunately I think I just don’t care for the original story lol 5/10.

Thursday

I’ve always wanted to get into the Wallace and Gromit series, so my friend and I decided to marathon a few of them today. We started with A Grand Day Out, and (spoilers) it was probably my favourite of the bunch. The Claymation is just really cute and humble-feeling, and I loved the surreality and silliness of building a rocket in your basement and eating cheese on the moon. I also loved the robot creature, and I was so so so happy to see it realize its dreams by the end. Just a super cute short all around, so I’ll give it a 7/10.

And then we skipped rather abruptly to A Matter of Loaf and Death, and the difference in both animation quality and writing style was really stark. I loved the Rube Goldberg sequence at the beginning, but then the rest of the short lagged a bit for me. I don’t really like plots that hinge on a character who’s not allowed to listen to or believe another character until it’s too late (the Cassandra trope, I suppose you could call it), and while the concept of a serial baker killer was pretty amusing, it was a little annoying that the whole thing basically boiled down to a joke about her weight. And in general, the super wacky hijinks that went down didn’t appeal to me much. At least her dog got to be happy by the end, I guess. 3/10.

And we moved onto the main event, The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. I’d actually watched bits and pieces of this movie on TV as a kid, but I never got to see the ending, so it was nice to finally rectify that as an adult. It was a pretty cute movie, with punny and referential writing throughout and a nice circularity to all the bits and plot details brought up being paid off later. It wasn’t anything especially mind-blowing, but it was just a solidly fun time. 6/10.

Friday

Lexi Love is so good in Drag Race this season… In general, even though this talent show had a lot of lip sync dance performances, I still thought most of them were performed really well and with a lot of energy. But Lexi was truly the standout for me, especially for that lip sync performance against Crystal Envy. It was such a treat to see the energy of the song so wholly embodied like that, and I’m glad she got her deserved win. As for my Fantasy Drag Race roster, I think I’m going to be boring for the third season in a row and just go with the one person who I think will win, which in this case is Lexi. There’s just no one else this season that I feel like has the range and the sense of self to win (and not to brag, but my track record for predicting the winner has been pretty strong thus far). (Also oh my god I really didn’t like the runway theme/showing this week…oh well…). Anyway, here’s hoping she goes all the way.

Saturday

I just went ahead and finished TTYD lol It was pretty fun. I liked ploughing through enemies on the moon base and in the area past the Thousand-Year Door, and the final boss was fun to whale on. I’ve always heard it touted that TTYD has an amazing story, but I felt like this was pretty by the book in terms of cartoony RPGs? Like yeah, it’s a step up from the original Paper Mario, but that’s still not saying much. I do see that they made an effort to shift away from the comedy hijinks of the original into a slightly darker and grimier tone in TTYD, but it still wasn’t anything that particularly surprised me. I just had fun going through the RPG motions, I suppose. I still have the Pit of 100 Trials and completing all the badges and recipes to do, but for now I’ll say TTYD is a 7/10. It’s fun, but unfortunately for me it wasn’t anything special.

[viscericorde]

well here we are at the end of things. as much as i like liveblogging my thoughts, it's also a principle of mine to reserve final judgment until i actually finish a book. so now i think i can safely say that the primary reason why exquisite corpse fails is because andrew compton is such a wet fart of a character.

what i feel like andrew is supposed to be is a sort of catalyzing agent for the book. he is supposed to be the reason that the balance tips and the undoing of the other three major characters happens. of the cast he's the only "foreign element" that enters new orleans, everybody else is a sort of local fixture that people Know, and they also have a kind of cagey on-the-brink-of-exploding tension with each other that just needs One Thing to happen to make it go to shit. andrew is the One Thing. hypothetically.

for reasons i cannot conceive of, he does not in any way interact with any other major character until we are more than 140 pages through this 240 page book. the development of his psychosexual romantic obsession with the other gay necrophile serial killer of the novel is then speedrun in the same chapter they meet, smash cut to the next morning and now we are basically at the end point of the toxic codependency. like hello. hello???? you want me to be invested in this now??

this also kills the progression of serial killer #2, jay's, arc, which ngl in concept i find very interesting. he can only love a corpse--as much as he wants to keep his lovers with him, once he develops an attachment to them, he must kill them. it's practically compulsion. cannibalism, consumption, then becomes the only way he sees he can preserve them ("their meat becomes my meat"). this is until he becomes infatuated with tran, the third main character, and is genuinely conflicted about whether or not he wants to keep him alive. should he be "preserved" by letting him go free, by jay intentionally stopping his pursuit of him and letting their lives diverge? or should he be "preserved" through consumption? hypothetically andrew is the weight that tips the scales in favor of consumption as their mutual codependency grows and jay chooses him over tran. except remember, andrew and jay's relationship has been speedrun, which means that jay's inner conflict about tran has also been speedrun, which means andrew points to tran and says "we're going to kill and eat him jay" and then they immediately begin planning to do that like fuuuuuckkkk dude. god forbid i be invested.

tran is the sort of character who you know is doomed from the start so i wasn't expecting him to get out of the book alive because of the type of story he's in. his personal plot starts by being kicked out of the family home in a sort of mutual "you can't fire me i quit" sort of way, he can't fall back on his long-time boyfriend for support because of a recent breakup, all of his other friendships have atrophied over the years, and his plan A is hoping to exploit jay's obvious attraction to him to crash at his place. the second we meet tran we know he is going to die. but the leadup to that is condensed, like every other pivotal moment in this book, so we do not get the kind of watching-a-train-crash-in-slow-motion suspense that would have made this a more satisfying read. and on a note that's just kind of like, personally sad to me, tran gets p much nothing in terms of an arc. it's not even that it's purposely cut short because of his murder it just feels absent. he is the object of obsession for two separate men, both of which project their own unfulfilled desires and fantasies for how they believe he can bring meaning to their lives, how they can be "saved" by enacting those desires onto him or him accepting their affection, and that just feels like the kind of thing that is begging for some kind of narrative counterpart in tran's arc and there is just a very conspicuous absence. man.

speaking of conspicuous absence, luke, i haven't talked about luke yet. he is main character #4, tran's long-term toxic ex bf, and i hate him in the way that we tend to hate characters that are the type of annoying you feel like you could encounter irl. that part's definitely an intentional character flaw but he still annoys me metatextually too. he is in a similar boat to jay in that conceptually there are things about his arc that i want to like but it just gets so squashed into the last third of the book. he is stuck in the genuinely shitty situation of being a gay man with HIV in the mid-90s, but he simultaneously wallows in his self-destructive habits and bitterly lashes out at everyone in his life. at his core he wants to tear apart the world he believes tore him apart, bring everyone down with him regardless of the cost to himself. when he finally admits that, he then overcompensates and pivots to repairing things with tran--there's the projection i mentioned before, "if i reconcile with him, then our relationship will save me," etc. unironically i love that. he's just trading one form of selfishness for another while thinking he's moving forward, and we as the audience know it's going to crash and burn because we also know that tran is going to die.

but remember we're in the speedrun now so all of this is happening in the last like forty pages of the book so we don't get any time to breathe here because we really needed like twenty pages of andrew fucking around in pubs killing people an entire ocean away back in the first half of the book. him and luke get a confrontation at the end because they are the two who make it out alive. on one level i find this interesting--both of them have had the object of their obsession killed by the other (jay for andrew and tran for luke) and they both have to live with it now. you've staked all your feelings on another person and they've been ripped away. their killer is in front of you but you can't bring yourself to take their life. now both of you walk away knowing that the other one is still out in the world. we don't talk about any of that though. andrew is monologuing about how actually, luke is just like him, and he could have been his equal if he wasn't too pussy to start serial killing, actually. where is this coming from, and why are we focusing on it instead of the objectively more interesting similarities between them instead. i don't know, the book is over now. missed opportunities and frustrating pacing choices: the novel. two and a half out of five.

[macabremoons]

Ah, I should have specified! I meant longform whump. And I don't mean whump in a series of oneshots, I mean an actual long form whump stories. That bitch but novelized. Whump itself works when it works. It's a fine genre. I ain't coming for it.

It's more... I have consumed a lot of long form dark fiction and I often find myself bored because I feel like there is a genuine lack at attempt to serialize the story. Dark fic is a bunch of near plot points. The main character almost stamps their foot down, but they don't so the "plot" happens, but they also don't lift up their foot. It's kinda like their foot gets metaphorically vaporized until we need it to appear again so they can hold their virtue. It's a bunch of screenshots of happenings without a rising and falling of action and inaction.

Or the tension of the darkness is evaporated too quickly. Yuck.

Though I am curious why you seem to assume that I am calling for the genre to be lighter? Like:

Not to read about a character being comforted after, or healing, or escaping, or finding their will to live again.

I would not define that as slight brevity. Wait. *googles* huh. Mhm. I swear to God that could be used to mean catching your bearings. OOPS. I invented a word again, goddamn it.

Anyway, I'm really not calling for whump to be lighter LOLLL. Whump is a whole lot like smut. I don't need character arcs in a smut one shot, but if I am reading an original work, I do need the characters to have motivations outside of when they have sex because they are not pre established like in fanfiction and therefore I have no emotional investment. But would having them have moments when they are not having sex making the sex less sexy? No! It's still just as steaming, but now it actually is put into a NARRATIVE. I want long for dark fic to actually try to be a narrative and not to just oops no fingers all over my phone screen.

(I am saying phone here because most of my attempts at engaging with dark fiction has been fan content. Which really doesn't change my expectations of how the plot should work. Yes, long term fanfics are not the same as OG works since they do not have the same expectations of defining the world and characters, but they do have vastly similar if not identical responsibilities when it comes to plot)

But I'm of the slightly jaded opinion that we will not get good long form dark fiction for years. With the trend its having right now on tiktok, punching bag of the internet, there is going to be backlash to it because a lot of what is being churned out isn't that good. And then, once snuffed, we won't have many visionaries to reinvent the genre as it so fucking desperately needs. And then the cycle will continue of often either not fully thought out tragedies or shock content being made and criticized, and the genre will continue being considered low art despite the merit it has. Sigh.

But yeah, not going to lie, whump got in my crosshair, but it mostly got strays. It has a lot of reasons why it does work without more narrative structure. The others tho? No. Get out a plot graph and make it work, sis. I am tired of dark romance just ending weak as hell because they never committed to the MC having a personality or a brain so MC can't really develop Stockholm syndrome. And also can literally anyone who uses Stockholm syndrome as a plot device do bare ass minimum research into abuse victims and how they interact when they hold their abusers in high regards? That dynamic is not just an instant BONK of "oh well, I guess it's okay" it's more often a systematic desensitization to being treated poorly and to a systematic sensitization to the "faults" of the victim. Not to mention how most dark fiction seems to think that smacking "dark" on top of it means it can just be sexist and no one will notice.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

TL;DR: Until some absolute FREAK takes the literature world by storm and makes an academic deconstruction on how dark fiction does and doesn't work (or makes a work so good people deconstruct it themselves) I think I will continue to be cry and sob over the most LUKEWARM, BUMASS, BARELY ENGAGING FICTION I'VE EVER READ.

P.S.: Fluff... also has the same issues. It really has little to do with dark fic and more to do with extremes and how usually people tend to throw out writing conventions in the wake of them.

crying and sobbing y'all when people said that you only add scenes that advance the plot they didn't JUST mean the overarching plot. they meant the plot of the book... entirely. like a conversation between two friends can advance the plot by characterizing them and grounding them with a meaningful relationship. if your book doesn't have "filler" it's missing emotional beats. which are plot. which are important. fun and whimsy aren't mutually exclusive from what "needs" to happen in your book. the advice isn't bad it's just taken too literally stop come back.