#also. it's going to be unreliable narrator. because my girl alicent is the narrator. | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

horizon-verizon · 8 months ago

Text

You: "but i also wouldn’t order the death of the 16yo girl he was supposedly cheating on me with. rhaenyra’s trauma and paranoia do not excuse the fact that she tried to murder nettles."

And I as a woman wouldn't try to tell my disabled granddaughter to go kill her new husband just so I can get back at the girl whose throne I usurped after having lost every single one of the children I said I wanted to protect by said usurpation AND never having learned the lesson of Jaehaerys I & Saera...but you know 🤷🏻‍♀️.

Apparently the woman who didn't really do anything to die by femicide by her own brother's hand--all for trying to get the thing that her father dictated would be hers in the first place--her descent into tyranny is less understandable or uniquely evil to her than what I just described for Alicent...okay?

Not that I'm saying that Nettles should die. I actually think Rhaenyra committed a great wrong here (in several posts whenever I talk about this). But I find it very interesting, this double standard you're setting against Rhaenyra for another person(s)--Alicent--who endangered another girl, her own relative, for some last dregs of power herself. Because that was what Rhaenyra was really going for, trying to claim some little sense of power through killing Nettles. Not just this immature, banal "my husband cheated on me" as if she was as simple as that.

You: "wrt to the "evidence” i’ve failed to present apparently? i’ve already told you that i can’t bring any actual evidence because we were discussing a hypothetical situation that never happened."

In the first reblog you made of this post, you say this: "you didn’t present any evidence to support your claim that dettles isn’t real.”

You seemed to be asking me to present evidence, which would mean using the text as material for supporting my ideas as that is what that means. Which i said I already did. And to me, it looked like you presented this request as if you did not believe that there was a "hypothetical" situation anywhere. But I could be misinterpreting you.

You: "because we were discussing a hypothetical situation that never happened."

-vs-

"reading F&B, i always thought that nettles & daemon were canon."

Unless I'm way off base here, you kinda contradicted yourself here. You said that we're discussing a hypothetical situation as if you're expressing that Daemon being Nettle's father of any kind is not determined, which is fine because you remain unconvinced. However, I also already argued how since this particular theory exists, your own interpretation-that's-coming-from-a-specific-group-of-in-world-characters becomes a a possibility, not a true undeniable event as you tried to argue. Yes, you say "I think they are canon"...I argue they aren't and that you're reading what was the written historical in-world "canon" and this is different from "canon" as in the undeniable facts GRRM intended to relate his story.

Because Daemon x Nettles is technically another "hypothetical" that the writers/narrators of the book believed AND made convincing to some fans who read the book. Some accept it, other do not. (By "writers" & "sources" I meant Gyldayn & Mushroom but also Norren and any who talked abt Daemon and Nettles in this instance).

I don't know anything about how you thought about F&B when you read it the first time, but let's refer to the common opinion or throwaway line that many fans of either/both the show and book said whenever someone protested against a bad writing/characterization choice HotD made:

"the sources are unreliable" (...as if dates, certain death scenes, etc are doubtful but I digress again)

And i don't mean to be too much, but the meaning of this phrase needs repeating.

The sources are all "unreliable" in the sense that many have a lot of biases or possible agendas, and for one to parse out what sort of agenda or biases, you need to consider the who (who's speaking, who do they hate/like), what, when, where, & how (what context, frame of reference, language, tone, vocabulary, etc do they use to describe a situation). It doe snot mean everyone is either outright lying or stupid and thus nothing in F&B matter or that you can't parse out the most likeliest of truths from the text. The other value of F&B is that it teaches you how much history-writing/narrative making tells you about power: who gets to record and evaluate historical knowledge? Either way, the point is that there are times that source will be unreasonably negative or too positive or too "lenient" or hypocritical or give impossible scenarios that will make you question the information they tell and it's up to us to discern as best as possible (using our knowledge of ASoIaF and its timeline) to what was the likeliest of answers. And while we do that, we don't escape out own biases or ideologies without also keeping those in check. Me, I have to remind myself of Alicent having expected to raise the future king of the kingdoms and become the highest ranked woman in the society--a huge opportunity for any woman bc of how few those come to pass for women. I don't like Alicent, but I know I have to keep that in mind even as I dislike her or criticize her actions or I'll miss more stuff important to the story. Especially how in Fire & Blood, I realized eventually that Alicent still doesn't ever get enough credit of instigating the war by her calling the council. I mean that she's not remembered in history for being a politician in sort of Margaret Beaufort sort of way.

I essentially said that this is one of those times that we really need to look at how, why, who is saying what they were saying.

Finally...

As for Daemon "teaching" Nettles to wash, no, I kinda agree with you. Since this not even making sense even if I was like you and believing that they were lovers, this would then be actually a glaring clue (most likely, Occam's razor) that the information we're given is highly flawed, bc it presents itself as a tall tale rather than an account. An exaggeration bc of how scandalous the viewer(s) thought these two interacting at all.

I should clarify, when I said:

Idk your gender. And yes, it matters here.

I didn't mean I needed to know your gender, I meant that IF you were a woman of this time period and you lost your kids to people who couldn't leave well enough alone...yes you'd default to whatever made you feel more in control. And the need to "prevent" "another" betrayal could very well drive you to do very bad things...

At least the way GRRM is cluing us in and writing it.

Nettles’ Characterization and Gyldayn’s Writing

Some Quotes with Nettle’s Characterization Before Going to Maidenpool

In the end, the brown dragon was brought to heel by the cunning and persistence of a “small brown girl” of six-and-ten, who delivered him a freshly slaughtered sheep every morning, until Sheepstealer learned to accept and expect her. Munkun sets down the name of this unlikely dragonrider as Nettles. Mushroom tells us the girl was a bastard of uncertain birth called Netty, born to a dockside whore. By any name, she was black-haired, brown-eyed, brown-skinned, skinny, foul-mouthed, fearless…and the first and last rider of the dragon Sheepstealer.

(Fire and Blood; The Red Dragon and the Gold)

Mushroom [who was actually at Dragonstone at the time] tells us there were two men on Dragonstone that night who drank to the slaughter in a smoky tavern beneath the castle: the dragonriders Hugh the Hammer and Ulf the White, who had flown Vermithor and Silverwing into battle and lived to boast of it. “We are knights now, truly,” Hard Hugh declared. And Ulf laughed and said, “Fie on that. We should be lords.”

The girl Nettles did not share their celebrations. She had flown with the others, fought as bravely, burned and killed as they had, but her face was black with smoke and streaked with tears when she returned to Dragonstone. And Addam Velaryon, lately Addam of Hull, sought out the Sea Snake after the battle; what they spoke to each other even Mushroom does not say.

(Fire and Blood; The Red Dragon and the Gold)

Some Quotes with Nettle’s Characterization at Maidenpool

Prince Daemon himself would take Caraxes to the Trident, together with the girl Nettles and Sheepstealer, to find Prince Aemond and Vhagar and put an end to them. Ulf White and Hard Hugh Hammer would fly to Tumbleton, some fifty leagues southwest of King’s Landing, the last leal stronghold between Lord Hightower and the city, to assist in the defense of the town and castle and destroy Prince Daeron and Tessarion.

(Fire and Blood; “Rhaenyra Triumphant”)

Why? Because she is a dragonrider and fought bravely at the Battle in the Gullet, where Jacaerys died.

Mushroom [who was not at Maidenpool] would have us believe it was not. By the dwarf’s account, Daemon Targaryen had come to love the small brown bastard girl, and had taken her into his bed.

How much credence can we give the fool’s testimony? Nettles was no more than ten-and-seven, Prince Daemon nine-and-forty, yet the power young maidens exert over older men is well-known.

(Fire and Blood; Rhaenyra Triumphant)

And yet…

The girl Nettles was young, beyond a doubt (though perhaps not as young as those the prince had debauched in his youth), but it seems doubtful that she was a true maiden. Growing up homeless, motherless, and penniless on the streets of Spicetown and Hull, she would most likely have surrendered her innocence not long after her first flowering (if not before), in return for half a groat or a crust of bread. And the sheep she fed to Sheepstealer to bind him to her…how would she have come by those, if not by lifting her skirts for some shepherd? Nor could Netty truly be called pretty. “A skinny brown girl on a skinny brown dragon,” writes Munkun in his True Telling (though he never saw her). Septon Eustace says her teeth were crooked, her nose scarred where it had once been slit for thieving. Hardly a likely paramour for a prince, one would think.

(Fire and Blood; Rhaenyra Triumphant)

And right after, Gyldayn still asserts DaemonxNettles:

None of this constitutes proof that Daemon Targaryen had carnal knowledge of the bastard girl, but in light of what followed we must surely judge that more likely than most of Mushroom’s tales.

(Fire and Blood; Rhaenyra Triumphant)

And the Maester Norren, the miadservants saying Daemon bathed and bathed with Nettles, lord of Maidenpool, his guard captain, his champion Florian Greysteel, and his brother who were all actually at Maidenpool to see Daemon and Nettles together?

We, the readers, can have an understanding that these people and the entire castle knew that Daemon and Nettles had a close relationship and interacted more intimately than they would expect a famous lord and some random peasant girl with culturally-considered-unattractive features to interact.

Immediately, we have to suspect these people because of what I just said: “interacted more intimately than they would expect a famous lord and some random peasant girl”.

These people would not have liked or that Daemon would act out of his class character by even paying close, friendly, platonic attention to her. And they would already see Daemon as one whose past with seeking virgin sex workers proves that he looked to Nettles for sex and sexual intimacy. Or they could have been so surprised at his and Nettles’ ��audacity” that they then find it easier to believe that Daemon would have sex with Nettles.

(Besides him liking and sticking with Mysaria, Laena, and Rhaneyra for an extended time with no mention of having extramarital sex with his marriages with the last two…and all of whom who would not have been virgins for different reasons).

Example: If Gyldayn/Norren don’t tell us or consider:

how many times the servant(s) actually saw Daemon bathe Nettles and be naked while doing it?

if Daemon were teaching Nettles to bathe herself properly once or twice and that was all, then when the servants/a servant came in witnessed him bathing Nettles – is it not feasible to think that they would talk, gossip, and/or exaggerate?

Was Daemon even naked, then, when he would bathe Nettles?

How big was the tub they bathed in? How big was the bed? (the-king-andthe-lionheart )

How frequently does he actually bathe Nettles when only once or twice would get her to understand so she does it herself? Is this the case of a tall tale? Castles and the work servants do are monotonous and hard– what better topic of conversation and fun than a sex-perverse prince possibly sexing up a lowborn, brown-skinned girl?

Why not consider what @the-king-andthe-lionheart says?: “They may have been sharing a bed because one or both of them weren’t secure in their safety which is completely logical during a war. It’s not that hard of a leap to think they would be targeted at their most vulnerable, as powerful dragonriders, in a situation where they weren’t close to their dragons, as in, in their rooms, resting.”

“These two are away from everyone else they know and they are in a drafty stone castle. What is the weather like? Is it cold? Castles were very cold. In days without heaters, it was common to sleep in the same bed as others to remain warm and just for companionship. We even see this in ASOIAF. The Tyrells are honestly probably the most historically accurate family in real life medieval and Renaissance times that are portrayed in the books. Margaery has a lot of ladies-in-waiting and she shares her bed every night with them. […] Nettles and Daemon are alone. They don’t have their own households with them or any other companions.” (the-king-andthe-lionheart)

“In medieval and Renaissance times you were constantly around other people, which means, you are usually in the presence of other people routinely when even going to the bathroom and bathing. Take the Groom of the Stool for instance” (the-king-andthe-lionheart)

Even Gyldayn gets into an investigation for how Daemon couldn’t have had an affair with Nettles…but he rests his argument on how he believes that she wasn’t “unattractive” because: her looks, how he believed she couldn’t possibly be a virgin (being a low classed girl who had to fend for herself) AND how Daemon refused to allow her to be executed despite Nettles (by Gyldayn’s own implication) not mattering.

In other words, Gyldayn is thinking like a classist and a misogynist and his bias is putting more into a situation than needs be. And these sort of readings really do not tend to reveal real truths but a heavily biased interpretation of events.

Consider this post/reblog by @poorshadowspaintedqueens detailing how credible medieval historians like Gyldayn wrote.

#daemon and nettles #daemon targaryen #nettles #fire and blood chaarcters #daemon's characterization #nettles' characterization #fandom debate #daemon and nettles shipping #shipping #asoiaf shipping

78 notes · View notes

riverdale-retread · 2 years ago

Text

Riverdale s6 Ep 19 (#114: Witches of Riverdale).

Friends! Romans! This episode was unbelievable.

I watched this on the treadmill because I’m an #overseas Riverdale fan and I get these episodes a whole month and change after the stateside folks but I had to get off the moving walkway because I was laughing too much. I haven’t experienced this much untrammeled joy from a TV show in my recent (very faulty) memory.

Some disclaimers:

I don’t know anything about Sabrina Pun-Name (I mean really, they gave a witch the last name SPELL + MAN) so if you’re someone who knows the deep lore of that show, please let me know if I’m missing the point entirely. By the way, what I got out of this episode is that Sabrina is an unethical asshole but I don’t know if having context for her life would make me feel differently.

This recap is going to have a lot of fandom asides and performance commentary which I usually try to keep to a minimum.

First thing! Jughead is narrating even though he’s dead. He acknowledges that he’s dead. This is headspinningly funny because he calls himself the narrator, and he’s dead, and he’s also somehow fully aware of what’s going on while he’s technically mostly dead (in the Princess Bride way!) and telling us about it. He’s a dead, literally unreliable narrator who is also self aware that he is both in a story and also talking to me, a Netflix subscriber. Riverdale is genius.

The survivors of the Girls Count When It’s a Shitty Thing version of the Death of the First Born (sons) are in the lovely cemetery paying their respects to Nana Blossom. They are Heather, Betty, Veronica, Tabitha and Cheryl. Nana Rose gets a very beautiful pink flecked marble gravestone that looks like wounded flesh actually, so given that she died of asphyxiation following immolation, this choice is very Cheryl.

I’m assuming that everyone else got a headstone too just gauging from where people are looking and gesturing, but the production doesn’t actually show us, I assume for budget issues.

Poor Cheryl. How come fandom never talks about Cheryl’s trauma? She’s always been so tribal and family obsessed, but one by one all her family has died before she even reached 30.

Percival has the gall to show up to this gathering with Uncle Fucking Frank in tow.

Cheryl, in the throes of her grief, yells at him about killing “my Nana and my Tee-Tee.” Cheryl grieves literally nobody else.

Veronica yells at Percival about killing Anthony because Baby Anthony was a Baby. Percival takes his leave, which makes Jughead sound suddenly energized. He tells us with palpable gusto - “I’ll let you in on a secret.” To which I must wonder - Who does he think he’s talking to?

The funeral was a misdirect, he says, because it wasn’t a genuine funeral since no actual bodies were in the grave. They’re dead, for sure, and in the morgue freezers. Jughead says this like somehow this is exceptional, even though it isn’t.

We cut to Dr. Curdle (no longer referred to as Junior) eating a sandwich dead-eyed and alone in his work room (complete with apple!). I object to this. Dr. Curdle is a fun funky little weirdo - he’s a big fan of Josie and he’s music night date (boy?)friends with Principal Weatherbee. Why is he relegated to having a sad solo sandwich lunch in his depressing workroom? His meal is so wholesome too - milk, apple, sandwich. He is pivotal to all the Scooby plans and yet nobody thinks to invite him to lunch - he is no more or less off putting than Kevin or Jughead at their worst, so what gives?

Then we are given a glimpse of a moment that made the top of my head twist right off:

Kevin tends to a fussy Baby Anthony in his crib. Kevin touches Baby Anthony and tucks him in. Which is more than the now-dead Fangs ever did before his demise.

Kevin, Cheryl, Veronica, Heather Tabitha and Betty take in Alice’s newscast, which claims that it was gang warfare that resulted in so many deaths at the Toni/Fangs wedding celebration at the Whte Wyrm. Betty switches it off, annoyed. Tabitha speculates the reason for Percival not killing every First Born in town - that it would be harder to cover up. Otherwise there might be thousands of deaths. How big is Riverdale again??

We come to the Sabrina (What was Her Name Again) Spellman introduction. She’s Buffy, right? “Cheerleader by Day, Queen of Hell by Night” sounds like Buffy Summers, who had an intentionally silly name and not as on the nose as Spell-man. Heather is doing the exposition dump on Sabrina.

The resurrection attempted by the necromancing witches have to be performed within 3 days. You know. Like that other guy. The guy who came back on the 3rd day. They only have 12 hours left, is what Veronica says, but Sabrina is nowhere to be seen.

Cheryl has decided to display, among all her other art (like the one dedicated to long-forgotten Minerva Marble), her self portrait as a Vixen/ Furry / Fox Head thing to all her friends, who presumably are too wigged out to notice or ask about it.

Kevin wants to know how and why Baby Anthony didn’t die, even though he was a First Born. So how exactly does the First Born business work though?? First born to either parent qualifies? (Jughead wasn’t FP’s first born but I suppose he was Glady’s). Betty points out that Kevin is also a first born. But then again, not every single first born in Riverdale died, so what gives?

Apart and hidden from the others, Kevin tells Betty that he thinks the reason he was permitted to survive this very shoddily constructed plague was to be punished with survival. This is bullshit. He has no answer to what would be worse than murdered or how survival counts as punishment. No answer, none. He just says this so he can join Moose, who has already absconded to NYC. He makes shit up about doing this to ‘protect’ others. Betty arbitrarily says that ‘everyone else will understand’ but actually I think Kevin is RUNNING AWAY FROM single fatherhood with Baby Anthony. Betty understands the urge to run away from being a parent, apparently, but the facts are these:

Baby Anthony is an orphan now, and the person who would’ve been his third parent, the person who in fact began court proceedings to gain sole custody over him is completely abandoning him now that he’s alone in the world (notwithstanding the complete faith that everyone decides to have put in Sabrina). Kevin is a POS.

Meanwhile, Reggie, who I think is also a first born, has just made a delivery to Percival of the Daggers of Megiddo (which google says is a thing invented in the Omens movie series, and are weapons intended to defeat the antichrist) all the way from Rome.

He did what now? Reggie went to Rome and obtained “arcane objects of immense power” on his own and we don’t get to see any of it?

Reggie is a very precise speaker. He says he did enjoy the trip to Rome, but is irked by the death of his ‘high school friends.’ Not “friends from High School days,” not “old friends,” and definitely not “friends” in the present sense.

While Veronica was absent from the Babylonium for all of exactly 60 hours, Percival has managed to call a board meeting, mind control everyone into both showing up and doing his bidding (I presume mind control was involved, though Veronica was not actually beloved by her own board) and got Reggie installed as CEO.

Either Veronica doesn’t know or she doesn’t care, because she’s ensconced at Thornhill with all the surviving girls of Riverdale. Betty bursts in on the sad group, who are just staring off into the middle distance, to say that Mary Andrews asks her what’s going on with Archie, about whom she had a ‘bad feeling.’ Betty sounds rather frantic as she asks what they will tell Mary Andrews if the resurrection plan doesn’t work.

I’m going to do two things here : 1) snort at the idea that Mary Andrews gives enough of a shit about Archie to have any sort of long distance intuition about him whatsoever and 2) be sad at the thought that absolutely nobody, not JB, not Gladys, nobody, has any sort of need to keep in regular contact with Jughead to make the same kind of inquiry.

Remembering she is Catholic only in moments of need (like most of us), Veronica cautiously asks where ‘the souls’ of the deceased are, so that we can get the theology download. They’re all in the Sweet Hereafter!

We get shown what that is!!

They’re playing Fred Astaire’s Cheek to Cheek throughout for this portion. I love this song and in this rendition. “Heaven/ I’m in Heaven/ and My Heart beats so/ that I can hardly speak” is the way the lyrics go. In case we the audience might be confused about what this place is. (The lyrics will do the heavy lifting the scriptwriters refuse to engage with!)

Archie’s Sweethereafter are a wife and two kids in front of a heavily laden dinner table in his house that he never wants to leave. The wife is Betty. They named their kids Polly and Fred.

I don’t understand this culture of naming people after other people, especially not those who lived unhappy lives or died violent deaths. My culture doesn’t do this. Plus there’s something frightening about Betty naming her kid Polly - it’s not as awful as naming her ALICE perhaps, but Betty had a lot of intensely negative, conflicted feelings about Polly. Same with Archie naming his son after his father. Grandpa Fred is such a sainted presence in Dad Archie’s mind, that I am immediately worried about Little Fred.

Little Fred is great at music and sports, but performs academically poorly. How interesting! In Archie’s perfect world, he wants a son who struggles academically and is only good at the things that he himself tried to be good at. I say tried to be, because it’s not clear whether Archie ever got actual A’s in music or if his one child molestor teacher gave him those grades for obvious reasons. This is the opposite of, say, the desires of Forrest Gump, who also struggled but wanted his son to be really good at school. Archie’s heaven is appallingly self serving - he wants his kid to be bad at school so he can comfort his kid about bad grades. He will concede a daughter to Betty that achieves as much as she did.

Oh and his same dog from his childhood is an immortal freak animal that never died. OR he did the Michael Jackson thing and insisted on owning a series of dogs that he called Vegas over and over.

Jughead’s heaven is markedly different. He is served coffee by Pop at the thriving Diner, with an array of Mad House Glads, his comic book, laid out in front of him. I know this is exposition but the egotism of this is so funny. Jughead in heaven is only inspired by the evidence of his own prolific creativity. Oh, and further, Jughead has great draftsmanship in Heaven, instead of his sad stick figure art that he had to make do with in reality.

Toni and Fang’s joint heaven is a very weird mishmash. I suspect (because I don't like Fangs) that this is Toni’s heaven and Fangs is just along for the ride (much like Heaven Betty is in Archie’s fantasy).

Serpents and the Ghoulies sign a peace treaty on what looks like parchment paper. They have expensive pens in a little marble and brass stand like they’re at a summit of actual political leaders. I am surprised they don’t have tiny flags arrayed to mark the occasion. Toni’s vanity is on a scale I had not expected from her to date. She wants to act like head of state, and for GANGS to function like sovereign nations. Toni takes the title Serpent Queen really very literally. (I also think she doesn’t know a whole lot about the way treaties between warring nations frequently DON’T function, but she studied social work and not history or polisci so I will have to let this go.)

Fangs says that Riverdale will be ‘more unified’ but I’m not sure what this means. The two gangs are no longer at war, so are they diving up territory? Did they merge??

Anthony is all grown up and looks older than both of his parents. And Twyla is there with her son Timmy. The two boys look at each other meaningfully. I’m very surprised by how much Anthony is styled like Malachai, formerly of the less Disneyfied Ghoulies - cut off sleeves, curls, muscular. And Timmy the Ghoulie Prince is Jughead coded.

Back in the real world, Kevin is hurriedly packing up. I hate him because he takes care to pack a big framed photo of Baby Anthony in the act of abandoning Baby Anthony wholesale. There was no discussion at all whatsoever for who should be responsible for keeping this infant alive in Kevin’s absence, you know, but gosh, Kevin will take A PHOTO with him. He is met at the door by his father and Uncle Fucking Frank, who say Percival wants a word.

Meanwhile, Reggie invites his father to come over and enjoy himself at the Babylonium, dancing and swaggering alone in the CEO suite in front of his own Lodge-esque portrait. Reggie’s main connection to anything in this world, love or hate, is about his father, but his main influence is Hiram.

And finally! We are introduced to Sabrina Spellman, who took her own sweet time coming over to Riverdale because there were other things happening in other “realms.”

Then follows what must be a crossover or something because I just lost my mind.

But I have to also ask: Am I supposed to hate Sabrina Spellman after seeing her in action? Is this what she was like on her own show? A self serving, obnoxious liar?

The next bit is loosely organized into a list of Sabrina Spellman’s Sins Against Riverdale:

Sabrina Sin 1: Forced conversion under a situation of duress

They are down to a precious few hours to resurrect the dead, and the first thing Sabrina makes everyone do is convert to a new religion. They have to do a bunch of things - sign a document, chant a chant, do a dance. All while the confirmed actual witches wink and smile at each other like creeps. By the way, the conversion ritual is done in common speech, but I will note that Sabrina also uses Latin for her spells! The ones that count!

However, the ceremony looked like a lot of fun and the Catholic Church could take some notes.

Sabrina Sin 2: Give incomplete information

Sabrina forced desperate people to convert to her religion, then tells them only in implication that there are OTHER ways beyond the thing she wants to do first, for her own personal reasons.

She also only explains that the dead have to WANT TO return only after they have Jughead out of the freezer and on their ceremonial table. Except, of course, this also turns out to be a bald-faced lie.

Sabrina Sin 3: Sabrina doesn’t have to pick the body of a person she finds fuckable as the test subject to bring back from the dead as the No 1. candidate. But she picks Jughead on the basis of finding him more fuckable than Archie. (Given that they’ve left a baby behind, shouldn’t Fangs or Toni be the first one she picks, you know, for humanitarian reasons??)

Sabrina Sin 4: Sabrina does not need to be the one to go, at all, to persuade the almost-completely-dead to return. She has no connection to Jughead (or anyone) but she insists on going so she can fuck her boyfriend using Jughead’s reanimated corpse.

The truncated bits of information she delivers is passive-aggresively designed to dissuade Jughead from coming back to life, more than anything else. This is a complete nonstarter, to say to someone who is in some version of heaven, Come Back and Fight a Terrible Battle.

Jughead turns out to be aware he is dead and in heaven and to have a memory of his own death which he recalls with pain. To be fair, Jughead’s death was the most terrifying - he was absolutely alone, underground and afraid and in pain. Jughead also has retained all of his memories, including the fact that Tabitha told him they are overwhelmingly likely to lose.

Jughead also mentions as a passing point, almost, that he can hear in heaven. Which means being unable to hear had persistently been upsetting him while alive, even though he did not ever, ever complain about it, to anyone, Tabitha included. After a childhood in which those he loved most barely ever noticed his very serious troubles and pains, he just carries this behavior of being completely silent about his misery into his adult life. He’s a very heartbreaking character, if you ever take a breath to think about it.

Sabrina really does not try, at all, whatsoever. In some ways, she CAN’T because doesn’t KNOW any of these people, and in fact never bothered to ask key questions before she made the leap into the supernatural. She did not bother to ask Tabitha or Betty or Veronica or Cheryl (Jughead’s current VIP, former VIP, and people who’ve known him the longest) what would be motivating factors to bring up to Jughead to get him to leave heaven.

I can only conclude that Sabrina never intended to succeed in bringing Jughead back, and she only pretended to come up with this idea of fucking Jughead’s body at the last minute, even to Jughead.

By the way, getting Riverdale information initially through fandom Tumblrs can be a very confusing experience. I saw the gifs about this episode weeks ago, and you know, anti-Jabithas did some bad faith editing there. Jughead does say about Tabitha, “I do hope to see her soon,” but that’s where the gifset ended. They left out the smirkily joking context of the rest of the scene, because Jughead immediately adds: “NOT TO SOON THOUGH.”

While all that is going on, Kevin is being mind-invaded by Percival. Kevin’s touchstones to sanity are - his childhood friendship with Betty and Veronica in S1 before it fell apart (this is very honest of the show), the brief moment of domestic cohesion with Toni and Fangs in S5 before that fell apart, and the one time he dressed up in a beehive wig with a full face of make-up during the Hedwig episode. He asks to be killed instead.

Anyhoo.

We are back at Thornhill where Sabrina walks out of the portal with the reanimated Jughead corpse. Tabitha is elated to see Jughead, runs into his arms, says how much she missed him.

The fact that Betty has absolutely nothing to say is a little shocking to me, but we’ll let that go. ( No we won’t, actually. I mean! It seems so out of character! Does Betty now hate Jughead? But how is that possible?? It’s only when Nick says “What’s up ladies?” that Betty snarkily comments that it can’t be Jughead - why? Because he talks to women? But Jughead has never been shy or incompetent at wooing women, ever. It’s MEN’s romantic attentions he has a hard time with. What the heck?)

Sabrina Sin 5: Sabrina the asshole smiles with inappropriate glee as she tells Jughead’s girlfriend and buddies that she’s inserted her own boyfriend’s soul into Jughead’s body. Tabitha is both tearful and furious. She says all the right things - You stole his body?? - and the suddenly super articulate Sabrina has all the answers lined up. It’s understandable that Jughead didn’t want to leave heaven! She “borrowed” his body “with Jughead’s consent” because we are not in a Wonder Woman movie!

Sabrina Sin 6: Sabrina does not say she needs Nick there to do what she should have done to begin with - send in people who have an actual emotional connection with the dead to try to get them to come back. This only proves that the entire shenanigans about shoving Nick Scratch into Jughead’s body after deciding Jughead’s corpse is cuter than Archie’s was just a way to get a warm sex toy.

Because Sabrina has this unfair advantage of power and knowledge, none of the new witches dares to question her for wasting ALL THIS TIME in doing this bullshit with the Jughead corpse.

I suppooooose you could say that Sabrina had to do this magic trick bit with reanimating Jughead’s corpse with her boyfriend’s soul so that she could get the buy in from the rest to temporarily die in order to visit the Sweet Hereafter to get their people back, but I still say that’s a post-facto justification and not persuasive. These women were willing to call in a necromancer, and dance to the goddess Hecate and do all this other stuff, so she could’ve probably persuaded them without getting herself this nice bonus. And wasting time (I cannot emphasize this enough).

At this point though, I started to find this entire thing kind of funny. Jughead has officially the most desirable body in Riverdale. Like, literally the most attractive and the most fuckable, even 60 hours after death, chilling in a freezer. Not Archie of the Abs and the Square Jaw. Not Fangs, also of the Abs and Long Lashes. It’s Jughead.

Then the two best people in Riverdale - who are a) Cheryl and b) Veronica - agree to die temporarily so that they can, respectively, retrieve an ex girlfriend who married a man and that man, and an ex boyfriend who cheated on her with her best friend from high school after the two of them flaunted their relationship in her face so much that she had a minor nervous breakdown at someone else’s rehearsal dinner. Oh and Cheryl will go in for Dagwood and her Nana as well. Betty can’t go because she is confirmed by Nick Scratch on sight to be the Whore of Babylon.

Maybe you needed to be a CAOS viewer, but the degree to which Sabrina completely accepts her boyfriend’s conclusion without question struck me as very odd.

So Sabrina is going to summon Charon to do the crossing over. Betty is the one that nudges Veronica into dying for Archie. It’s a form of full circle, I suppose - Veronica once gulped down a goblet of poison for Betty, so she might as well be a full service third wheel.(I hate this place. Please let me out.)

Percival demands that Reggie execute Kevin, in exchange for giving Kevin’s heart to Reggie’s ailing father. Reggie’s reaction - adorably appalled - and his reason (he and Kevin go all the way back to “rugrat” days) were a balm given how much pain I was in about Veronica at this moment.

Then we get to a truly wonderful part of this episode (sincere!). The three best girls of Riverdale (Tabitha, Cheryl and Veronica) are lying on the floor, ready to die. Veronica is worried about it hurting, but Cheryl, truly faithful, is “excited” to be able to say she died and came back. Veronica lets the air out of her sails by saying, not incorrectly, that a lot of people can say that in Riverdale.

Nick Scratch has to use an English language incantation, but so far, out of everyone who has done one of these, he gives it the due weight and seriousness of an actual magic spell. Or maybe this is an innate Jughead ability that Nick Scratch is making the most of. Jughead had such a good time using the formalist portentous language of the G&G game back in the day after all.

Then Sabrina summons Charon with another English language doggerel poem.

AND CHARON APPEARS and we are in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer from the 1990s. Like TOTALLY this is a Buffy episode! I’m so into it now! The red glowing eyes of Charon (no face to minimize special effects costs), the dorkily choreographed way he moves, the magic trick of collecting the coins on the girls’ eyes without touching them, the twinkly music, the very basic fog effect, and the fact that the ‘dead souls’ are expressed as glowing technicolor versions of the girls - just SO BUFFY. It’s so FUN!! Betty and Heather are appropriately creeped out by Charon. I LOVE that little performance detail Betty has where she just does not want to make eye contact with Charon.

When the souls of the three brave girls leave for the beyond, Betty as The Responsible One asks what should happen next, and Sabrina puts her and Heather on guard duty. Then Sabrina and Jughead as occupied by Nick Scratch smirk at each other about ‘going on a date’ and get a TERRIFIC nasty look from Betty. (I love Lili Reinhart so much- she makes really fun decisions about how Betty reacts to any outlandish scenario.)

Veronica, in Archie’s heaven, lives right down the street and comes over only rarely. Archie is living in a version of heaven where he won the war and then died. This seems slightly different from the heaven Jughead was occupying during Sabrina’s visit. Veronica says to a very stubborn Archie, who doesn’t want to leave his heaven, that he’ll “do the right thing,” not least because the Real Betty is still on the mortal plane, needing his help. Dream Betty comes home. Dream Betty cooks and is able to offer to set out an extra plate at her table on a whim. Dream Betty and Archie’s ideal Veronica are most definitely not best friends, definitely not B&V. Dream Betty will look at a clearly rather upset Veronica, smile at her like a robot and blandly say “It’s nice to see you” before breezing off.

I kind of hate Archie.

In Toni and Fang’s dream world, they’ve stayed married for however old this tall muscular curly-haired Baby Anthony is supposed to be. Very straight looking. But! Their son grew up gay (or bi, unclear). The level of unnecessary ambiguity they’ve built into his coming out about who he wants to marry is annoying. He wants to marry Twyla Twyst’s son Timmy. When his parents act overjoyed at this announcement, No-Longer Baby Anthony says, joyfully relieved, that he wasn’t sure how they were going to take the news.

Why? Because they are going to become in-laws with the Ghoulie leader who once cooperated with Percival to kidnap Anthony? Or because he thinks his parents are straight married people who are uncomfortable with gayness? (But how can that be? Toni and Fang’s generation of Serpents could barely scrape together a single straight person.)

Cheryl comes bursting into their domestic bliss with a very loud record scratch sound. She should’ve gotten her slowmo entrance with a hair whip, but I suppose Sabrina wasted too much time up front for that.

Cheryl is a trooper. Or maybe she doesn’t pick up on this but in Toni and Fang’s joint heaven, Cheryl is a vile evil person, permanently left out in the cold as all the straights and bis get straight married and leave her resentful gay ass behind. Fangs says that in his version of heaven, Cheryl was a person who tried to sabotage her brother’s marriage to Polly, and also tried to sabotage Toni’s marriage to Fangs. Cheryl advises Toni to search her “mother’s heart” for the truth, then leaves forthwith.

When Tabitha bursts in on Jughead’s heaven, the sound track plays the song Guardian Angel. Yes OK, we get it.

Jughead’s heaven has grown to include more people than when Sabrina visited earlier in the day. He now has fawning fans, and I must say, rather adorably Jughead fawns right back at them. In particular he is given the proper fan freak out moment by a lanky kid who is obsessed with his works, sounds lonely, and says that not only did Jughead’s work get him through tough times, Jughead’s imaginary characters are really friends to him. To this last part, Jughead says, Yeah, Me Too.

(Is this a wink wink nudge nudge commentary about the fact that Jughead is The Narrator?)

Jughead’s heaven does not have any meaningful intimate relationships, which is very interesting. Is Jughead’s heaven one where he’s asexual? Or is it that he’s less controlling and prone to delusion as Archie - Jughead isn’t going to do anyone the injustice of inventing a false version of themselves to be his personal Barbie. He wants to eventually spend eternity with Tabitha, but will wait for the real Tabitha instead of inventing one (unlike Archie and his Dream Betty).

Tabitha also finds Jughead’s joy in having someone give him positive feedback too adorable to interfere with, so she decides to let him enjoy himself. Immediately after seating herself at the counter, she is greeted by the Angel Raphael from RiverVale, who wants to tell her some things. We don’t get to hear what they are.

Meanwhile, Cheryl walks into someone’s heaven. It has Polly married to Jason, Nana Rose is still alive, and Dagwood is buddies with his father whom he’s never met in real life.

Did Polly Cooper want to be married to Jason and be mistress of Thornhill (with the Parentdale generation of Blossoms long dead and forgotten?)?

Is this Jason’s heaven? It can’t be, because Jason has nothing to say in this heaven either.

Does Dagwood, as a minor, get to choose his heaven? If so, is Dagwood’s heaven one in which he is not a twin and is an only child to boot?

And Nana Blossom - I’m not sure what Nana Blossom’s heaven would be (being courted by smarmy young men armed with red roses a la Reggie, perhaps) - but being the great grandma in this sort of setting hardly fits the Nana Rose we’ve seen to date.

IF this is Jason’s heaven as well then he shares a weird code with Dagwood - because in this world, Cheryl does not live at Thornhill and is also an infrequent visitor, given the way Polly greets Cheryl (“Cheryl! [big pause, then, hesitantly] We weren’t expecting you!”). Why are all these het people so gross and refuse to appreciate Cheryl?

By the way, to the right of this cute /creepy family tableau, there is a decapitated baby doll’s head on a side table next to the blank easel in the living room. Just FYI.

What Polly tells Cheryl makes me wonder if this isn’t somehow Cheryl’s heaven. The maple business is booming, trees are swollen with sap, and Polly is going to have a triplet of Blossoms, so now there will be 5 little Jason progeny running around. Because Cheryl’s heaven is - now that I think of it - to get out of Thornhill but have it prosper and be allowed to visit whenever she wants.

But since Polly is the one doing all of the talking, the most reasonable conclusion is that this is Polly’s heaven. (Jason too, likely wanted to escape Thornhill, not be master of it.). This makes me think very different thoughts about Polly than before.

Polly the Dead invites Cheryl the Living into staying in Polly’s Heaven forever, but even though Cheryl is so pleased by this vision and what it gives her, she doesn’t fall for it.

Then we cut to Jughead the Possessed on a date with Sabrina the Asshole. I am going to assume that this is a post coitus meal.

Sabrina confesses that her taking Jughead’s corpse specifically so she could fuck her dead boyfriend with it was absolutely a deliberate choice made out of pure opportunism, without a single care that this was wasting the time of people who counted on her to help them prevent The Apocalypse. She even suggests that they abscond with Jughead’s corpse to live in a cabin somewhere.

Was the intention of introducing this character supposed to result in my despising her? Is she meant to be a villain? But she’s not being treated like one in the text.

Nick is an asshole just like his girlfriend so they only talk about their own interests. She weeps about whatever situation they are in, and I have no idea what she’s talking about and I frankly don’t care because she’s a dick. I’m glad she doesn’t get what she wants. Who the fuck are you and why are you in my show?

Then Sabrina Spellman kisses Jughead Jones’ corpse on the mouth and I got my first taste of what it might be like to be a diehard Barchie or Bughead watching the other ship’s scenes. I HATE THIS! PUT IT AWAY.

Back at the casino, the Mantle men are having dinner. Reggie gets his father’s absolute approval for the first time ever. Then the worm turns and his father tells Reggie that he knows he’s dying. Reggie, at this point, is completely willing to kill Kevin for his father.

Reggie’s father says that even though he failed at business, marriage and fatherhood, he wants to die with honor.

OK. Three things.

One - I don’t know about the word choice of HONOR here because I just get the heebie jeebies when English language programming give Asian people any line that mentions the word HONOR. (Nobody in contemporary Asia talks like this and in the East Asian self imagination of the past they also do not have people prattle on about HONOR. This is a white stereotype of Asian people all smooshed together and it’s always completely shit. Yes, I am the authority on this. Accept it.)

Two - That said, Jughead sneering at him during his early Serpent membership days that Reggie doesn’t know what “honor” is provoked Reggie into trying to punch Jughead in the face, so nice callback, I guess?

Third, Marty Mantle is selfish to the very last. His personal desire to ‘die with honor’ is so unhelpful to Reggie, and doesn’t ameliorate any of the failures of his life or what he did to Reggie as a child. He just wants this last vanity for himself. I reject this redemption arc attempt for Marty Mantle. Plus this is very gendered of me probably, but I much prefer that men stay alive and live long to do the dishes and change the diapers and wash the windows than ‘die with honor’ in some stupid glorious annihilation. Please stay alive and scrub the toilet bowl.

At the morgue, Sabrina and Nick say solemn farewells to each other while little birds come to watch. Sabrina sexually molests Jughead Jones’s corpse a second time before Nick Scratch eases back into the land of the dead. They play very obtrusive sad piano music over this but I’m repelled and confused. Would it have been impossible to give us a very small short exposition dump about who the hell these people are and what is going on via Heather?

The sourness of this scene is immediately washed away though by the very next scene.

Reggie, in his lonely big luxury bedroom that he stole from Veronica using the help of the devil (I love Riverdale) cries out, ‘What the hell am I supposed to do?’ about his father’s unknowing rejection of the plan to harvest Kevin’s heart for a transplant. He’s immediately answered by his own voice emanating from the Reggie Puppet. Reggie’s conscience is much more intelligent than his normal self but the thing is, I am inclined to think that Reggie’s conscience refuses to cohabit with Reggie in his body. Reggie’s conscience works via Puppet Zoom.

Reggie’s distant relationship with his conscience is shown by his calling it “Bro.” Riverdale is brilliant.

Reggie says that this is Percival testing him, and is advised by his own conscience that the best course of action is to skip town with the whole test - Kevin, his Dad, himself.

Sabrina comes back to Thornhill, where again, nobody is asking about the Cheryl-with-A Fox’s-Head self portrait given absolute pride of place. She asks, not very interested, on how they all made out with the highly dangerous mission to the Sweet Hereafter. (The show also skimps out on telling us how they got back. I wanted to see Charon bring them back.)

Betty, the one who wasn’t Good (™) enough to even get to visit, is the one who loudly blares out that everyone failed. This is very in character for Betty. She’s annoyed at everyone else’s failure. Cheryl adds that ‘some’ of them were hostile (meaning Fangs, mostly).

I want to punch Sabrina in her perfect pretty face for the way she smirks at Tabitha as she asks if Tabitha managed to “pull at Jughead’s heartstrings.” Oh. My God. You bitch. I don’t know what happened to you on your show, but I’m glad your boyfriend is dead and you have Aunties who did whatever it was that made you cry.

Tabitha says she just could not bring herself to ask Jughead to come back, to pull at those heartstrings. Jabitha are fascinating - it’s sort of what happens when two too-good people, used to sacrifice and duty, get together. Tabitha cannot bring herself to insist that her happy boyfriend come back to life, especially because she told him the truth about the overwhelming number of realities in which their mission fails and he dies.

Betty decides that everyone who doesn’t want to do what she needs them to do is crazy, and she’s backed up by Veronica who decides that the best thing to do in the face of resistance against what she thinks is right is to use brute force.

So, Sabrina, playing hide the ball TO THE LAST, finally reveals that Cheryl has the power of the phoenix and can summarily yank people back from the dead.

Cheryl, going from reclining to gesticulating, is delightful. She asks what the hell the Power of the Phoenix is. Even though Heather wasn’t allowed to give us the Sabrina-and-Nick exposition dump, she unhelpfully gives the useless definition of what a phoenix is. (Did Cheryl really not know?).

This is coo-coo bananas. But I’m also kind of feeling it.

You said it Cheryl.

Heather finally lays out what the risks are: Souls might return incomplete! Infected with malignancy! And will (she says MIGHT but actually it’s WILL) resent you for the rest of their (un)natural lives! (Just like Buffy did, when she revealed she’d been in heaven to her necromancer witch friend in the musical episode!)

Betty seems to do a quick calculation of who has died, and she’s very indifferent to most of their potential resentment and further seems to trust that Archie probably won’t resent her. (Whatever Toni, Fangs, Dagwood and Jughead might feel about anything is of no interest to her whatsoever.) Tabitha, the only one armed with real information about the potential futures, says that they really don’t have a lot of choice, because the worst is “yet to come.”

Cheryl is the best person in Riverdale. She really is. She’s told by Sabrina the Asshole that she has to burn all the corpses so that they may HOPEFULLY rise from the ashes. This thesis is untested then. AND she has to do it all alone, and given the hostile presence of people like Betty, take on all the blame if it fails. But she steps up and says she’ll do it in the mines without hesitation.

Reggie’s escape plan does not quite work. Reggie, Kevin and Marty are caught before they even gets to leave the building. Percival is not surprised, but is disappointed by Reginald.

Cheryl is not as good as Jughead’s corpse in reciting an incantation, but the spell works anyway.

To let the audience know that at minimum, Archie will not resent Betty and Toni will not resent Cheryl, we are briefly shown that Archie was willing to come back to “Fight the War” and Toni came to the realization that her reality in heaven was a fabrication. Whoever constructed the Toni-Fangs heaven did a shitty job. They didn’t bother making up any further photos for the photo album!

As their corpses magically burn, the heaven-selves start to heat up. Jughead is not given any chance to have a change of heart about coming back alive. He’s going to be the only one yanked out of a perfect-for-him heaven in which he was perfectly happy to be resurrected in a reality in which he knows he is overwhelmingly likely to suffer a SECOND miserable death in his twenties.

We get a Harry Potter fiery phoenix CGI effect to prove that the spell worked, after which we are shown Jughead, Dagwood, Nana Rose, Toni, Fangs and Archie walking out whole and hale from the blue flames.

Sabrina is walked out of Thornhill by Cheryl looking gorgeous in a red dress. What Sabrina does next puts the final nail in my I Hate Sabrina Spellman casket. Sabrina tells Cheryl to “just be careful” which is a slap-buying offense for being fucking vaguefor something as serious as upsetting Death. Sabrina didn’t give the warning for the potential risks for the spell caster before the spell was cast, and doesn’t give a proper explanation for what the risks are now that she’s taken the risk.

Jughead is silent in his misery as he always is, and this time his pain is about being brought back to corporeal life on the mortal plane. In very gentle, kind tones, Tabitha tearfully explains that he had to come back to the cold miserable reality of actual life in order to fight off the apocalypse. Then, because she’s Jughead-coded Tabitha says secondly that she wanted her boyfriend to not be dead because she loves him.

It turns out Jughead can hear AND read thoughts. He says that this ‘cushions the blow.’ Which means it had REALLY been bothering him but he never spoke of the misery his hearing loss gave him.

I’m worried that Jabitha are going to self-abnegate into oblivion. And maybe this has to do with fitting into camera angles, but Tabitha is developing the same terrible hunched posture as Jughead.

At Thornhill, Heather asks Cheryl how things really were in the Sweet Hereafter. This suddenly made me a huge fan of Heather. Heather understands that there is a public and private Cheryl, and also that access to the private Cheryl requires a soft touch, to be made in utmost confidence and discretion.

Cheryl admits that she was pained to see her family happy without her, but that she took matters into her own hands. Cheryl resurrected Polly, Jason and Dagwood! As Heather looks very freaked out, Polly and Cheryl smile creepily at each other. Polly came back wrong, right? Right?

Betty and Archie are cuddling, because Archie is given lead boy cushioning and went from being with Dream Betty to Actual Betty. Betty is a smartie and laughs at the very dumb choices that Archie made in heaven to name their kids Polly and Fred. The show is not as vicious to Archie as it is to Jughead, but it is unkind. Archie is not very talented at music from the point of view of a teacher who doesn’t want to molest him and he didn’t have very good boxing skills from the point of view of a coach who knows the sport, and in his heaven he picked names for his dream children that his living actual girlfriend thinks are uncreative, because he’s just not smart.

Tabitha checks in on Veronica. Veronica is given not great news that she could be Endgame with Archie in the same percentage as Barchie being endgame. Um. Tabitha says as a conclusion that Veronica’s future is ‘up for grabs.’ Which could mean I dunno JERONICA endgame or VEGGIE endgame just as well but oh man.

Why is Veronica not more upset about what has happened with the casino?

In the vault of the casino Kevin Keller’s father has abandoned Kevin to be executed by Percival in the morning. I mean, the Mantles are in there too but wow that is COLD. Reggie turns out to have a magic knife in his possession. He’s determined to kill Percival.

Tabitha is doing the rounds. She checks in on Toni and Fangs. My general impression of that apartment is it being dank and dark, but with Tabitha there it’s revealed to be a bright yellow interior, with flowering hanging plants. Is this the magic of Tabitha?

Fangs, by the way, still has not touched Baby Anthony. He and Toni are seated next to the crib staring at the baby, but he doesn’t touch him. At all. What gives??

Tabitha tells them that Baby Anthony is immortal. Then she announces that she is Riverdale’s guardian angel. She is lit like the Virgin Mary in Renaissance paintings as she says this.

11 notes · View notes

you-cant-spell-subtext-without · 4 years ago

Text

so get this. I was gonna roll around in Tombstone related fluff today - but no, no - this post came across my dash so Now We Are Gonna Discuss the Carnal Consumption of Meat as it appears on That Show Supernatural. YEAH BUDDIES!

(also my sincere apologies to OP of the inspiration post who innocently tagged it with “lunch date!” because I am about to go Elsewhere, cursedly).

Let’s all go meat man, after the cut!

This analysis centers primarily on 5x14 Bloody Valentine. The title of course is a semi-homage to a 3D Slasher Film Jensen starred in circa 2009.

Which I will be renting soon I guess. ,[<- parasocial panda GET BACK IN YOUR ENCLOSURE]

Also Its Really Fun that the trailer for Said Cinema ends with “nothing says date movie like a 3-D ride to hell” [are you also thinking of Cas pulling Dean out of hell, or are you normal?] ***unironically the teaser for 5x14 is -

EXT. SIDEWALK - IN FRONT OF ALICE'S APARTMENT BUILDING

RUSSEL

First date.

They then eat each other. Literally they eat each others flesh. They also do it while dirty talking about it. SPN IS A SHOW

ALICE Ugh! I've been so alone. So empty...

RUSSEL I know. Me too.

ALICE I want you, Russel---All of you... inside me...

[they both take bites out of each other, Alice chewing on a piece of Russel's flesh]

****Remember this detail, as it is important.

ANYWAY, it’s truly Cursed that not only are we doing an homage to this 3-D Jensen Horror Date Flick but also this episode is specifically centered on Valentine’s Day. The day honoring romance and love Now Coopted by Hallmark, everyone, that is the day spn writers chose to introduce us to

Sir Horseman of THE Biblical Apocalypse Famine.

Canonically, we are aware that the show is drawing from the book of Revelations in its depiction of the Four Horsemen. Here’s what it says about Famine -

"When He broke the third seal, I heard the third living creature saying, "Come." I looked, and behold, a black horse; and he who sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand.”

-Revelations 6:5

Famine holds scales (used to weigh out grain in times of food scarcity). Spn’s depiction is represented as hunger, a bottomless pit of need. It consumes souls (demon and human alike).

Cas describes Famine a little more poetically:

CASTIEL

"And then will come Famine riding on a black steed. He will ride into the land of plenty... "

"... and great will be the Horseman's hunger, for he is hunger. "

"His hunger will seep out and poison the air. "

***Consider a prior season in which we are introduced to the Seven Deadly Sins. Which are the sins associated with hunger?

Gluttony

and Lust.

***this is also important

Back to the episode. Case cold open, and we find out that Alice was a Nice Girl. In that she didnt drink, smoke or

have premarital sex.

***So Alice’s hunger for the sin of Lust caused her to succumb to it; and her demise was presented as Gluttony (literally eating her partner’s flesh). HMM

Famine’s presence is affecting the town, and Cas is not immune.

DEAN

And when did you start eating?

CASTIEL

Exactly. My hunger-- it's a clue, actually.

***They lay it out a little more in case you missed it ->

SAM

I thought famine meant starvation, like as in, you know, food.

CASTIEL

Yes. Absolutely. But not just food. I mean, everyone seems to be starving for something--Sex, attention, drugs, love...

***this is so important. but of course because its spn and our textual narrators are generally unreliable (even in a Ben Edlund episode, yes I know)

we get a red herring

CASTIEL

Right. The cherub made them crave love, and then Famine came, and made them rabid for it.

***but that’s not accurate. they didn’t get married or become obsessed with each other (remember the cursed coin in 4x08 Wishful Thinking and the unconditional love wish? not what happened here). they had premarital sex. they did the thing Alice considers wrong, and dark, and sinful. and then they ate each others’ flesh.

DEAN

Okay, but what about you? I mean, since when do angels secretly hunger for White Castle?

CASTIEL

It's my vessel-- Jimmy. His, uh, appetite for red meat has been touched by Famine's effect

***mad lad Jimmy Novak’s hunger is for...red meat? He is starving for red meat? You are telling me that the Novaks, red blooded conservative religious midwestern Novaks, ate RED MEAT SO SPARINGLY that Jimmy Novak was LITERALLY starving for it?!?! No way. Absolutely no way. This is a man who was such a religious zealot he STUCK HIS HAND IN BOILING WATER and accepted an angel of the lord into his own body but his secret hunger was for fucking ground beef?

give me a damn break.

to me this is an absolute coverup. Because Cas’s burger consumption is not related one iota to his vessel Jimmy Novak.

it is a representation of Cas falling. Cas’s cravings for meat represent his growing (and very much prohibited) feelings for...humanity (Dean Winchester), and they are presenting as Gluttony in the form of his downing more and more copious amounts of red meat.

SERIOUSLY, consider this - at one point the depiction is so desperately carnal that he is eating raw ground beef with his bare hands. It is fucking uncomfortable. and it is SUPPOSED to be. Famine stirs up hunger for the prohibited. For the sinful. That which we are starving for but do not believe we can ever have, so we lust and we lust and we LUST after it, but should we allow ourselves even just a taste of what we have been ravenously craving, we binge it until we ourselves disappear into the oblivion of our own sinful, dark desires.

Since You Want More Examples of why this cant possibly be hunger for Cheeseburgers and Cheeseburgers alone, Consider Famine’s effect on Dean. Remember his doctor kink?

**when its revealed that Doctor Corman has succumbed to Famine’s poison by drinking himself to death, Dean - very uncharacteristically by the way - reacts by saying out loud

DEAN Thanks. Crap! I really kind of liked this guy.

***please note that Doctor Corman says the following to Dean in the prior scene they have together -

DR. CORMAN [to Dean]

Agent Marley, you just can't stay away.

****was that a flirtation?

***Also, Dean doesn’t want to go out and chase tail for Valentines Day.

SAM

I mean, what do you always call it-- Uh, unattached drifter Christmas?

DEAN

Oh, yeah. Well... be that as it may...I don't know. Guess I'm not feeling it this year.

SAM

So you're not into bars full of lonely women?

DEAN

Nah, I guess not. [takes a sip of his beer] Ahh. What?

SAM

That's when a dog doesn't eat-- That's when you know something's really wrong.

***oh look we are relating things to eating again. sex/lust to gluttony. hmmm hmmm hmmm

ANYHOW - *takes deep breath*

this is also the Episode Where This Scene Lives

****JACKTING JOICES

oh and speaking of jacting joices, this is also the Dean Notices Cupids Crotch Episode.

frAckles, I am once again asking why you only permit celestial beings to hug you from behi-[gunshots]

but Dean isn’t hungry. Why? Famine has the explanation, and we get it after Dean immediately runs inside after Cas heads in to complete his portion of their plan barely giving him any time to do so because he misses him that much.

FAMINE

I disagree. [Famine moves closer to Dean and touches him] Yes. I see. That's one deep, dark nothing you got there, Dean. Can't fill it, can you? Not with food or drink. Not even with sex.

DEAN

Oh, you're so full of crap.

FAMINE

Oh, you can smirk and joke and lie to your brother, lie to yourself, but not to me!

***not Dean making all of those homophobic/homoerotic jokes every time he’s in danger or feeing uncomfortable; not that, that can’t possibly be what Famine is referencing, right?

I can see inside you, Dean. I can see how broken you are, how defeated.

***not THIS parallel:

AMARA:

You're a mystery. I can see inside your heart. Feel the love you feel, except… It's cloaked in shame

You can't win, and you know it. But you just keep fighting. Just... keep going through the motions.

***not the motions of performative heterosexuality!!

***Dean’s not hungry because in his heart he truly believes that he can’t actually have what he hungers for. That Thing Which This Episode Overtly but Also Very Clearly Made Obvious. It’s an angel riding shotgun [I did Do That and I am Not Sorry], eating a burger in the front seat of the impala. But, I’ve deviated from the meat of this essay [gunshots] [this time just for the bad joke].

BONUS

there’s Exists another episode in which a man ravenously consumes red meat; eventually succumbing to eating raw beef with his bare hands in the season prior to this one.

Yes Supernatural the Show That Brought Us Not One But Two Scenes of Persons Carnally Consuming Red Meat With Their Bare Hands.

This episode is a MOTW - the man in question is a rougaru - a monster that starts out as human but due to some specific genetic disorder (hmmm hmmm hmm crack in THE chassis hmmm hmmm) soon begins to be extremely hungry - “for everything, but eventually long pig.” AKA human flesh.

Wanna know the kicker?

Episode’s called Metamorphosis.

(GIF by jackttwist)

I’ll see myself out.

[DOUBLE BONUS for extra credit:

if you really wanna wild out, go watch the scene of Jack the rougaru looking at himself in the mirror in 4x04 - and then meander on over to 7x01 and check out God!stiel looking in the mirror as the leviathans writhe inside him over there. It’s worth the walk.]

***oh and @lilac-void im tagging you in this one because in exchange for your KIND creator content nomination I guess I will respond by cursing you with an Honorary tag in this, a Meat Meta. you’re welcome slash I'm sorry XO [but seriously thank you again for your kindness and appreciation; it really motivated me to sit down and get moving on making more content <3]

#yes I did do a meat meta #and what of it #destiel #spn #spn fandom #supernatural #spn family #myspnmeta #my spn meta #hellerism #deancas #longpost #spn analysis #spn 5x14 #spn bloody valentine #meat meta #<- I do not even want to know or see what else that tag would lead to

350 notes · View notes

inkskxtch · 4 years ago

Text

Okay okay okay!! So I have a LOONG batim theory/idea I just wanna talk about for a bit since I’ve finally managed to organise my thoughts - I’ve seen it being discussed briefly by a few other people, but there’s one BIG detail people have been missing out that almost definitely connects and confirms the entire thing.

Spoilers for The Illusion Of Living!

So I’ll start from the start, where I first began thinking something was a little odd. In TIOL, Joey talks a bit about where he first met Sammy and Jack, when they were performing at an opening night party for a musical called Girl Crazy. Joey says he met them the night before his 30th birthday, which would mean the opening night was held in 1931 (since Joey was born in 1901).

WRONG! When I first read this part of the book I was curious to see if the musical was a real one, and it is! The thing that I didn’t understand though was that the musical was actually released in 1930, not 1931 like Joey says it was. I thought surely that was an error, right? NO IT WASNT!!! LET ME EXPLAIN!!!!!!!!!

(It also means that supposedly, Joey’s canon birthday is October 15th, because opening night for Girl Crazy was October 14th! But that’s not too important, and not a big part of the theory.)

The same night Joey meets Sammy & Jack, Sammy insists Joey takes them to see the studio and show them one of JDS’s short films. When he does, Sammy tells Joey he needs more female characters since at this point it’s only really Bendy, Boris, perhaps the Butcher Gang (though it might’ve been a bit early for them still), and random male one-time side characters.

Later in the autobiography, Joey talks more about how what Sammy said inspired him to create Alice Angel, after Henry had left so he had no input on the character and we can only really credit him for the creation of Bendy & Boris, despite what Joey says.

Now here’s where it gets fun!!! Sammy and Jack being hired in 1931 means they likely never met Henry, so Sammy’s whole “you look familiar to me!” line from Chapter 2’s ritual can only really be chalked up to Sammy being the one moving the cutouts and disappearing through the walls as usual throughout Chapter 1.

BUT!!!!!! BUT BUT BUT!!!!!!!!

A common theme throughout TIOL is that Joey is both an unreliable narrator AND a huge liar, so there’s a lot of information throughout the story that can be proven false pretty easily, like Henry not being the one behind Bendy etc. Since we know for sure that Sammy and Jack were hired in 1930 and not a year later, there’s a much higher chance they did have an opportunity to meet with Henry, and while I doubt Henry attended the opening night party, being the co-founder of the studio he definitely would’ve met them if they were employed while he was still working.

No doubt that upon meeting Henry, Sammy would’ve relayed his whole “not enough women” piece to him as the lead cartoonist. Henry definitely would’ve taken that criticism, and the two probably shared ideas around since she was going to be a very musical character, singing and whatnot.

BUT...there’s still more! What about Susie, you ask? I WILL EXPLAIN!!

When I tell y’all this franchise is ALL I think about im not kidding 😭

If we listen to Susie’s BATDR reveal tape, she says her and Sammy had been talking about a new character they were working on upstairs that she was most likely going to be given the role of. It’s pretty clear she’s talking about Alice Angel, since we know Susie was working as a voice actress for all kinds of random background characters before she got lucky with the role of Alice.

But wasn’t that audio log from Susie dated 1932, though? Wasn’t the original concept for Alice created around 1930? Yes and yes, sort of. Now this part is partially just a headcanon, but I do have something pretty definite to back me up here that I’ll get to soon. I reckon Henry designed Alice pretty early on in 1930 and Joey didn’t actually put the character to use until Henry was long gone, and Joey could take the character and make her more into what he would’ve wanted (and when he would’ve had a voice actress readily available).

Now here’s what I’m using to back myself up on that! In Dreams Come To Life, Norman says this and I’ll quote from the book:

Buddy: “He [Henry] created the big three, didn’t he?”

Norman: “Bendy and Boris. Even Alice, though they didn’t start featuring her until after Henry left.”

So my idea is pretty much correct, that while Alice was designed and given a basic character concept pretty early on while Henry still worked at the studio, she wasn’t shown in comics or cartoons until after Henry had left. I also hold the firm belief that in Henry’s hidden tape in Chapter 3, where he talks about how he’s working on a new character he thinks people are going to love, I definitely think he’s talking about Alice. Otherwise, why would it be found in the chapter focused around introducing her as a villain?

There’s not really a big end to this theory, but I just thought it’d be worth bringing it up to tie up any loose ends and conclude that Henry is almost definitely responsible for all 3 of the original characters, including Alice.

Joey is a big liar and so so dumb but by god did I enjoy how he was written, and TIOL as a whole

#the illusion of living #dreams come to life #joey drew #henry stein #sammy lawrence #susie campbell #alice angel #joey drew studios #bendy and the ink machine #batim #batim theories

71 notes · View notes

james-joyces-right-eyeball · 3 years ago

Text

Absolute Favorite Books I’d Recommend to Anyone

This is a list of my top-tier favorite books that I would recommend/talk about endlessly to pretty much anyone (in no particular order). I know people probably don’t care but I just like talking about books I love so here we are.

Beloved - Toni Morrison

~ Based off the real story of Margaret Garner, a slave woman who escaped slavery and when captured killed her child in order to prevent them from ever being enslaved again, Beloved tells the story of a mother named Sethe, born in slavery who eventually escaped and is haunted by the figurative demons of her trauma and the literal (arguably) ghost of her dead daughter, who she herself killed. It is an excellent exploration of the horrors of slavery and of the haunting legacy of the institution for those who were subjected to it.

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

~ If you’ve been on Tumblr for a while, you probably know what Lolita is. The story of the predatory Humbert Humbert who lusts after, rapes, and kidnaps the “nymphet” Dolores Haze. An excellent construction of how predators, unreliable narrators in their own right, hide behind fabrications, almost-believable excuses, and pretty words to make their actions seem maybe not so bad. In the words of the book itself, “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”

Ulysses - James Joyce

~ Notoriously one of the most difficult books in the English language, Ulysses lifts its structure from Homer’s Odyssey to tell the story of a common man, Leopold Bloom, as he goes about his day. Yes, this book takes place over the course of only one day. We follow Bloom as well as Joyce’s literary counterpart Stephen Daedalus through their thoughts and actions, gathering details of their lives previous throughout. It’s a book that, in my own words, “is life”. It is sad, funny, strange, vulgar, disgusting, beautiful, revelatory, sensual, and nonsensical all at once. Joyce aimed to create a reflection of life through his stream-of-consciousness style which some people might find confusing, but I personally find absolutely beautiful and honest and realistic. The prose is also gorgeous, but that could be applied to everything Joyce wrote.

Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

~ The classic gothic book that tells the tale of Heathcliff and his ultimately destructive love of Catherine Earnshaw, whose eventual marriage to someone else and the general mistreatment of him by her family drives Heathcliff insane and he spends the rest of his life trying to take revenge by abusing and torturing the next Earnshaw and Linton (the family into which Catherine marries) generations. If I’m being honest, I like this book mostly because of how wild and dark it is, but the writing is also genius and beautiful. I think the book also carries an interesting view of the destructive nature of revenge, overzealous love, and othering.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith

~ A coming-of-age story at the turn of the century that tells the story of Francie Nolan, a young bookish girl growing up in a lower class family in New York City. It tells about her father’s struggles with alcoholism as well as her mother’s struggles to deal with that and at the same time raise Francie and her brother. Francie is confronted with a strange, uncertain world as a young girl, but tries to face it with bravery throughout childhood

Little Women - Louisa May Alcott

~ Another coming-of-age story, this time about four young sisters: Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy March. You are probably familiar with this book already; it’s had more movie adaptations then I can possibly remember off the top of my head. It’s the story of four sisters as they try to navigate growing up, love, and loss during the mid to late 1800s.

The Color Purple - Alice Walker

~ A novel that tells the story of Celie, a young black woman who is raped and then married young to a man who will go on to use and abuse her, through her letters to God. Throughout the novel she meets Shug Avery, a woman with whom she eventually falls in love and begins a relationship with. Through this and her eventual freedom from her abusive husband, she is able to gain at last her own sense of self and take back control over her life, a life no longer ruled by the abusive men around her.

The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison

~ The tragic story of young black girl Pecola Breedlove, who wants nothing more than to have blonde hair and blue eyes just like the women she sees in the movies. Both a deconstruction of the whiteness of beauty standards as well as how these standards can utterly destroy vulnerable young girls, it is also an exploration of the people who allow these sorts of things to happen, including Pecola’s mother and father. The Bluest Eye, I think, showcases one of the aspects of Toni Morrison that I like the most, that I aspire to the most: her ability to enter the minds of all people, even people who you might despise at first. Her characters, especially Cholly in The Bluest Eye, are ones you might not entirely sympathize with, but they will always be ones you understand.

The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

~ Based off of the author’s own experiences as a young college student, The Bell Jar tells the story of Esther Greenwood, whose depression over her place as a woman in a patriarchal society as well as her inability to choose a life path for herself leads to a suicide attempt and a subsequent stay in a mental hospital. A very nuanced portrayal of mental illness, especially anxiety and depression, The Bell Jar is an extremely moving and relatable story for me and clearly is as well for others. It is a classic for a reason.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou

~ A memoir of Angelou’s childhood, this book tells the story of her experiences living as a black girl in the south with her grandmother and brother as well as her later years living with her mother. It also tells of how she was raped by her mother’s boyfriend when she was around eight or nine, and how she struggled to live with that and find her voice, both literally and figuratively. A wonderful book about overcoming struggles and the power of words and literature in such times.

Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison

~ Ellison’s novel tells the story of a young black man, never getting a name in the text, and his feelings of invisibility and his struggles to find a place in society to belong. His struggles only lead him further into despair, until he decides to “become invisible” as people seem not to see him as a person anyway. Invisible Man is an exploration of American mid-century racism and the isolation it causes to those subjected to it. Not only that, but it is surprisingly relevant to our times now, especially on the subject of police violence. (Personal anecdote: When I first read this book, when I got to the aforementioned police violence part it was right in the middle of the BLM resurgence last summer and I cried for a good twenty minutes while reading that chapter over how nothing had changed and it still hurts me to think about it. Embarrassingly, my dad walked in on me while I was crying, and I had to quickly explain it away.)

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - James Joyce

~ The title basically says it all lol. This book tells of the coming-of-age of Stephen Daedalus (the same one from the later-written Ulysses). His sensitive childhood, his awkward and lustful adolescence, his feelings of Irish nationality and Catholic guilt, and his struggles to fully realize himself, both as an artist and a human being. It is a very hopeful story, and one that I love mostly because I relate so much to Stephen Daedalus as an artist and as a person.

One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

~ A magical-realist intergenerational family drama, Marquez’s book traces the various lives and loves of the Buendia family over the course of (you guessed it!) one hundred years. A beautifully written, at times extremely emotionally moving and chilling masterpiece, Marquez in a way retells the history of Colombia, of its colonization and exploitation.

Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

~ A classic Russian novel of society and love, Tolstoy tells the story of Anna Karenina, married, wealthy woman with a child she adores. However, she falls in love with another man, Count Vronsky, and comes to a tragic end for her love. The parallel story of the novel is that of Konstantin Levin, a wealthy landowner who also struggles to find fulfillment in his life and understand his place in society.

The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner

~ A novel that features an entire family of unreliable narrators, The Sound and the Fury details the fall of a once-prominent southern Compson family and always-present place of the past. There are four different narratives: Benjy Compson, a mentally disabled man who is unsure of his surroundings and of time and only knows that he misses his older sister Caddy; Quintin Compson, the eldest son and a Harvard man both obsessed with his sister retaining her “purity” and the fact that she failed to do so and had a baby out of wedlock, going as far to claim it is his baby in an attempt to preserve something of the family reputation; Jason Compson, who is the caretaker of Caddy’s daughter and believes her to be going down her mother’s “sinful” path; and Dilsey, the black maid of the Compson’s who unlike the people she cares for is not weighed down by their history. The narratives take place in different time periods and is in a stream-of-consciousness style. It’s a deeply dark and disturbing novel about the haunting nature of the past, a common theme in Faulkner’s work (see Absalom, Absalom! for more of this).

Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison

~ It is the story of Milkman Dead, a young black man growing up in the south and his relationship with his very complicated family. To say anymore would be to spoil the novel, but I will say that it is an excellent book about family, self-fulfillment in a world that tries to deny you that, and, like The Bluest Eye, exhibits Morrison’s excellent character work.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - Tennessee Williams

~ A play which takes place on the patriarch of a family’s birthday in the oppressive heat of the midsummer south, Williams’ play explores lies, secrets, and how repression only results in anger, frustration, and sadness. It’s a tragic but brilliant play that I think was very ahead of its time. If you’ve read it (or do read it) then you know what I mean.

Giovanni’s Room - James Baldwin

~ This book tells the story of a young man and his love of another man named Giovanni while he is in Paris. It is a book about love, queer guilt, and has what I would call an ambiguous ending. There is uncertainty at the end, but there does seem to be some kind of acceptance. It is a bit of a coming-out story, but more than that it is a story of personal acceptance and at the same time a sad, tragic love story.

HERmione - H.D.

~ An underrated modernist masterpiece, HERmione is a somewhat fictionalized account of the author, Hilda Doolittle’s, experience as a young aspiring poet dating another poet (in real life Ezra Pound in this book named George Lowndes) who is a threat to her both physically and emotionally. It explores her own mental state, as she considers herself a failure and falls in love with a woman for the first time (Fayne Rabb in the book, Frances Gregg in real life).

To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

~ People think about going to a lighthouse. They do not. A couple years and a war passes then they do. That may seem like a boring plot, and you may be right. However, To the Lighthouse is not much about plot. It is more about the inner lives of its characters, a family and their friends, on two different occasions of their lives: one before WWI and one after WWI. Woolf explores in this novel the trauma that results from such a massive loss of life and security. Not only that, she also explores the nature of art (especially in female artists) in the character of Lily Briscoe and her struggles to complete a painting. It’s a short novel, but it contains so much about life, love, and loss within these few pages.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers

~ A southern gothic novel about isolation and loneliness in a small town. Every character has something to separate them from wider society, and often find solace and companionship in a deaf man, John Singer, who himself experiences a loneliness that they cannot understand. There are various forms of social isolation explored in this novel: by race, disability, age, gender, etc. A wonderful, heart-wrenching book about loneliness and the depths it can potentially drag people to.

The Waste Land - T.S. Eliot

~ A modernist masterpiece of a poem, Eliot describes feeling emptiness and isolation. The brilliance of it can only be shown by an excerpt:

“Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, Looking into the heart of light, the silence.”

“The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed. Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. And their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; Departed, have left no addresses. By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept . . . Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long. But at my back in a cold blast I hear The rattle of the bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear. “

(My personal favorite line from this poem is, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”)

The Trial - Franz Kafka

~ The protagonist of the novel, Josef K., wakes up one morning to find that he has been placed under arrest for reasons that are kept from him. Kafka creates throughout the novel a scathing satire of bureaucracy, as K. tries to find out more about his case, more about his trial, but only becomes more confused as he digs deeper. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to the world he lives in, and the more tries to explain it the further the more that proves to be the case. An excellently constructed novel and a great one to read if you would like to be depressed about the state of the world because, though Kafka’s work is a satire, like a lot of his other work, it manages to strike a strangely real note.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead - Tom Stoppard

~ An absurdist play that is a retelling of Shakespeare’s Hamlet from the perspective of minor characters, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who in the broad overview of the original play, do not matter. Throughout the play, they question their existence and the purpose of it and through that Stoppard dissects not only the absurdity of life, but how fiction and theater reflect that absurdity inadvertently.

As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner

~ The novel details the journey the Bundren family makes after the death of the family matriarch, Addie, to bury her. Each chapter offers a different narrative from the family members and those who surround them, revealing some ulterior motives to them “going to town” to bury Addie. The patriarch Anse desires a pair of false teeth, and the daughter Dewey Dell is pregnant and needs an abortion, as there is no way for her or her family to support it. It’s about the powerlessness of people in the impoverished south. The Bundrens are constantly subject to forces beyond their control, struggles which would be easily solved if they had the money to spare for it. There is more to the book, but that is my favorite reading of it, that of class. Faulkner’s ability to create distinct voices for every one of his characters shines through here.

And, last but not least:

The Collected Poems - Sylvia Plath

~ All the poems Plath wrote during her tragically short lifetime. The best way to demonstrate or summarize the book’s brilliance is just to show you. This is her poem “Edge”, which appears in the book:

“The woman is perfected. Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment, The illusion of a Greek necessity Flows in the scrolls of her toga, Her bare Feet seem to be saying: We have come so far, it is over. Each dead child coiled, a white serpent, One at each little Pitcher of milk, now empty. She has folded Them back into her body as petals Of a rose close when the garden Stiffens and odors bleed From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower. The moon has nothing to be sad about, Staring from her hood of bone. She is used to this sort of thing. Her blacks crackle and drag.”

HOPE YOU ENJOYED! HAPPY READING TO ALL!

#dark academia #books and literature #toni morrison #james joyce #tennessee williams #virginia woolf #william faulkner #sylvia plath #plays #poetry #can you tell i like southern and modernist lit lol?

36 notes · View notes

just-a-cup-of-anxietea · 3 years ago

Text

Tag 9 people to learn about their interests!

Tagged by @daydreaming-optimist 💖Thanks twin!

MUSIC

Fave genre? depends on: the weather, the time of year, the most recent artist(s) I have listened to, and the vibe of the book I last picked up. (But movie scores are always great)

Fave artist? Tay Swift or Cristophe Beck

Fave song? Depends on the vibe I'm seeking in a particular moment. Thomas Newman's Nemo Egg is probably one of my all-time favs. Moonlight Sonata too tho. AHH THERE ARE SO MANY GOOD SONGS.

Most listened song recently? One by Sleeping At Last

Song currently stuck in your head? Say Goodbye by Katrina Rose Dideriksen and Rob Rokicki

5 fave lyrics?

“Grace requires nothing of me." -One by Sleeping at Last

“Write what you know so they say; all I know is I don't know how to write or the right way to write it." -Watch What Happens by Kara Lindsay

"I wanna break every rule and cross every line. I wanna show all the stars how stars oughta shine. I wanna do as I please and knock the world to its knees, and go wherever the breeze is going" -Next Stop Anywhere by Alan Menken and Glenn Slater (+ Mandy Moore, Eden Espinosa, and Zachary Levi)

"I may fail but it doesn't mean that I won't try" - Try by Rob Rokicki (+ Jorrel Javier, Chris McCarrell & Kristin Stokes)

"Take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die; I don't belong, and my beloved, neither do you. Those Windermere peaks look like a perfect place to cry. I'm setting off, but not without my muse" -the lakes by Taylor Swift

BOOKS

Fav book genre? travelogue or sci-fi probably?

Fav writer? Rick Riordan, Andy Weir, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, or Rachel Carson

Fav book? This is going to change in seven seconds. Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Fav book series? The Lunar Chronicles, PJO, Gaia Girls (going wayyy back to childhood)

Comfort book? Jessica Day George books (specifically the Princesses of Westfalin Trilogy), PJO, The Kane Chronicles, A Wrinkle in Time

Perfect book to read on a rainy day? Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell

Fave characters? how much time you got? Annabeth Chase, Rachel Dare, Mark Watney, Hermione Granger, Cress Darnel (I swear I'm not copying your answers @daydreaming-optimist we just have so much in common it's ridiculous), Lazlo Strange, Dr. Ellie Sattler (it took me forever to type that bc my L key glitched)... I'm gonna leave it at seven. Seven seems a good number.

5 quotes from your fave book(s)** that you know by heart?

“The planet has survived everything in its time. It will certainly survive us.” (Jurassic Park, Micheal Crichton)

“Dream up something wild and improbable" (Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor)

“The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the earth.” (The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson)

"It's no use going back to yesterday because I was a different person then." (Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll)

"Borders? I have never seen one. But I have heard they exist in the minds of some people." and "Otherwise he was glad we had missed our landing, for he still had three books to read." (Kon Tiki, Thor Heyerdahl)

**I added the (s) there. That wasn't in the original question but I wrote all these quotes and THEN realized my mistake. But I liked the quotes too much to change it to book singular.

*depends on the book

TV AND MOVIES

Fave tv/movie genre? fantasy, documentary, sitcom

Fave movie? Like favorite book, this also fluctuates every seven seconds. Rn tho? Jumanji: The Next Level

Comfort movie? Ratatouille, Finding Nemo (p much anything Disney) , The Princess Bride, old Barbie movies, The Sound of Music

Movie you watch every year? Tangled

Fave tv show? Uhhhhh rn? The Good Place

Comfort tv show? Friends, The Good Place, and The Office (I know I know. very standard answers)

Most rewatched tv show? Friends (I'm seeing some overlap in these answers hmm)

5 fave characters? This is simply impossible. I love too many. Mary Margaret-Blanchard, Belle (from Beauty and the Beast), Marinette Dupain-Cheng, Chidi Anagonye, Woody Boyd, Katniss Everdeen (that's SIX i know but god I want to say SO MANY MORE SSKJGKJH)

tagging (no pressure): @the---hermit @kakooii @oh-toasty @c-avenged @of-the-elves @jellyfishwaters @unashamedly-enthusiastic @sous-la-mousse @alienlamp

#baking buddy #daydreaming-optimist #tag game #get to know me

11 notes · View notes

bellaslilpapercut · 4 years ago

Text

Eclipse reread part 2! This is gonna cover a lot of chapters because I forgot to include stuff from chapters 4, 5, and 6 in part 1 (in my defense your honor, this book is very grating to read). Awayyy we go:

1. so chapters 4-6 really could have been one chapter tbh since the plot is: Bella ditches work at Newton’s Outfitters to hang with Jake and then writes some graduation invites with Angela. She pushes her rusty old behemoth as fast as it can go through driving rain but then hangs outside with Jake the whole time so I don’t really know where the rain went. She also manages to hear Jake gasp through her closed car door! Super sonic! Anyway, Bella insists that Edward is a good guy, Jake makes Bella hold his hand, Jake explains imprinting (yuck we can skip that), and then Edward drives threateningly past Bella while she’s on her way to Angela’s house. Angela reminds Bella that, at his core, Edward is a teen boy who is Totally Jealous of how Ripped and Sexy her 16 year old best friend is. Then Alice kidnaps Bella. Fun times!

2. During the imprinting convo it becomes very apparent that Meyer thinks the worst thing that can happen to a girl is getting broken up with. Somehow Leah got the “worst end” of the Sam/Emily/Leah fiasco despite Sam turning into a “monster” and Emily getting literally mauled in the face. What’s worse is later in the book, during the “Legends” chapter, when Bella wonders if Leah thinks Emily’s scars are a form of “justice.” Yea, Bella, that’s justice.

3. I love this Rosalie quote but hate the entirety of they way meyer writes her story. Others have mentioned it before but Meyer writes Rose's dialogue there as if Rose is an author and not like...a person telling a story. An easy fix would be to format Rosalie's story "flash back" style rather than have her narrate all the way through. Then you can include all the superfluous details of exactly what everyone's voice sounded like and all the excessive dialogue tags you want.

I also Violently Abhor this quote here:

Yea, meyer, the Hot Girl hates your self-insert because her stupid ass brother didn't have the hots for her. It just reads like weird middle school revenge fantasy "I only hated you because you were so Special!!!" Sure, sure. Also "all those females!" People don't talk like that @stephanie

4. I do love the scene when Bella “escapes” from Alice with Jake (I don’t know why i put escape in quotes, Alice could definitely murk Bella) but then that whole adventure ends with Jake telling Bella he’d rather she die than turn into a vampire. And yeah, fair buddy, but also you’ve known Bella for a long time. This should not be a surprise to you at all even a little bit. a) she mentioned it before, b) you knew she would never get over Edward even if your plan in NM had worked, and c) you’ve known that she’s fully obsessed with the Cullen’s since you started hanging out with her again. The last time you guys hung out she went on an impassioned rampage about how lovely and good and fantastic Edward is (footage not found) I really don’t know why you’re surprised that this hard-headed girl is prepared to commit to vampirism for him. She is not normal lmfao.

5. The legends chapter. Oh boy. Stephanie, Meyer, Smeyer. Honestly it might have been less offensive if she had just made up a whole new tribe to give these backstories to, for all that they have in common with real Quileute legends but actually that would still be offensive and terrible anyway. I don’t know how to describe this adequately but if you’ve ever seen G.I. Joe’s portrayal of indigenous people that’s exactly what meyer made Old Quil and Billy’s dialogue sound like. Just absolutely dripping with Mystical Native/ Magical Native trope from the content to the tone. https://mthg.org/ Because it can’t be plugged enough.

6. The legends chapter ends with this Wuthering Heights quote:

I have no qualms with it's inclusion, if you really want to push the Edward is Heathcliff and Bella is Cathy agenda, I don't believe it but fine, whatever. But those last two paragraphs are such a dumb way to end a chapter. Every chapter ending should make the reader want to turn the page: this makes me want to shut the book (actually I did take a long break after this lmfao). Anyway, just end the quote on "drank his blood," bold those three words, and end the chapter there. Don't go back and say "the three words that stood out were... Anyway it could have fallen to any page I believe in coincidence teehee!!" That's just annoying.

7. Okay guys I hate to say it but Edward does get a lil bit of ~character growth after the first few chapters. He comes home after having Bella kidnapped (she decides not to be angry, surprise surprise) and is all "so I've been thinking about it and you're right my Beloved Angel Face or whatever, please hang out with Jacob but also wear a helmet on your motorcycle my Beloved Dumb Idiot or whatever" (paraphrase). And he also says this in chapter 12:

Which is like, man I hate when I agree with Edward but I agree with Edward here. Now I know from MS that he only wants Bella to stay human because he's creating an Unfolding Drama in his head but this bit of dialogue is really sweet. And it's funny that he thought Bella didn't want to marry him because she just wanted to use him for immortality but it's also a Dark Reminder that he's literally only romantic with her because he can't read her mind and can't tell that she's just as obsessed with his looks as the other Teen Girls TM.

8. uuuh Jasper’s Backstory Time. This is so infuriating to read for so many reasons. So we know that smeyer got Jasper’s name from a confederate memorial/ listing (from a New Moon Q&A but the link isn’t secure so I can’t share) so I know that his backstory was always meant to be Confederate Soldier which makes everything else about his characterization just baffling. Again, he was the only Cullen that was genuinely kind to Bella besides Carlisle for the entire first book and he’s still incredibly kind during Eclipse (which is another issue I have though because no one mentions again that Jasper tried to eat Bella and they stand close to each other and hang out and Bella’s never like “this is scary, this dude tried to kill me” but i digress). The point is: smeyer knew he was going to be a confederate from book 1. She never addresses that this was bad, she never has Jasper mention that he regrets his role in the war, he is the only Cullen that’s actually capable of empathizing with humans anymore (Carlisle cares but I would not categorize him as empathetic), it just... None of these pieces fit together. This is a fraught and bloody history that smeyer throws in with no thought to how it might alienate black readers (though tbh she constantly emphasizes “white beauty” throughout the series so I doubt she cares) and the editors don’t question it either. No one, at any point in time, said “Hey, steph, you know confederates fought for slavery, right?” Every black american deserves reparations. White women and men who glorify the civil war should be the first to pay up.

9. I’m gonna jump back to chapters 9 & 10 here (target & scent, respectively) to say: no tension is being effectively built. I get it, someone stole your clothes. You’re annoyed because you have nothing to wear and Victoria is scary. But where is she? Where is the volturi? Move it along, please! This is one of the challenges of 1st person narrative because the author is stuck in the eyes of, usually, the person who knows the least. Meyer is not a talented enough author to make this interesting. Not to bring up THG again but Suzanne Collins really knew how to work 1st person. Everything that Katniss asserts with certainty throughout the series gets either confirmed or denied by the narrative, keeping it interesting. She assumes the worst of the people around her so we’re pleasantly surprised when people violate those assumptions. We’re kept on edge by how little Katniss knows and SC never gifts Katniss with more knowledge than she could be expected to have. Bella is constantly gifted with knowledge and her assumptions are rarely proven wrong. You can dig into the canon a little bit more, read the lexicon and the guide, and find all the examples of Bella being unreliable or making wrong assumptions. But within the narrative she is rarely incorrect. She doesn’t get opportunities to grow out of her false assumptions (while Edward does, at least in Eclipse). So to keep the Victoria debacle interesting, smeyer has to plant seeds like- during these two chapters- Bella thinking of Laurent and Victoria while the cullens discuss who could have been in Bella’s room. That just doesn’t cut it for me.

This is hella long and I’m only halfway through the book. I probably should split the second half into two parts as well but based on how talented smeyer is at stretching out the mundane, especially just before the climax, I probably wont need to.

#eclipse reread #saga reread #the twilight saga #twilight meta #twilight renaissance #long post

14 notes · View notes

parrishh · 3 years ago

Text

tagged by: @danielsousa (thank you elke!!!) to answer the following questions about music, books, films, & tv, then tag nine people!

tagging: @ginnypcttcr @vivihollow @jamesbvck @parrished @brucegf @jostenminyrd if you want to. literally no pressure

(answers under the cut because this is looooong)

MUSIC

favorite genres? uhhhh i'm really all over the place genre-wise but my stats say my top two genres are modern rock and pop punk

favorite artists? the maine, catfish and the bottlemen, beach weather, abba, rina sawayama, waterparks, coin, state champs

favorite songs? I HAVE SO MANY. naive by the kooks, (un)lost by the maine, tyrants by catfish and the bottlemen, if it means a lot to you by a day to remember, bubbletea by quebonafide, scene five by sleeping with sirens, fashion forward by the home team, alrighty aphrodite by peach pit, etc etc etc

most listened song recently? right now it's dirty, pretty, beautiful by the maine

song currently stuck in your head? nothing because i'm listening to music right now. currently playing covet by basement

favorite lyrics? i could give a million different answers but i have the lyric "how lucky you are to have yourself" from (un)lost by the maine tattooed on me. so we'll go with that

BOOKS

favorite book genre? fantasy

favorite writers? maggie stiefvater is amazing at what she does. love alice oseman. i don't often read multiple books by the same author but just based on the one book i've read by each of them i think morgan rogers, samantha shannon, madeline miller, m. l. rio, tasha suri and aiden thomas are fantastic, also

favorite book? ella enchanted by gail carson levine

favorite book series? the raven cycle by maggie stiefvater, of course

comfort book? ....also ella enchanted

perfect book to read on a rainy day? heartstopper by alice oseman. any of the volumes

favorite characters? adam parrish, jordan hennessy, julian diaz, jesper fahey, nina zenik, ead duryan, aled last, tara jones, alex claremont-diaz, oliver marks. sirius black, but we don't need to talk about that

TV AND FILMS

favorite tv/film genre? i guess drama for tv? and comedy for film, probably

favorite film? school of rock (2003)

comfort film? either the above or clueless (1995) or ever after (1998) or scooby-doo (2002)

film you watch every year? i watch mean girls (2004) like, once a month

favorite tv show? lost

comfort tv show? avatar: the last airbender

most rewatched tv show? i have only ever rewatched one show ever and it was julie and the phantoms

ultimate otp? from a tv show? OH GOD. uh. a few years ago i would have said captain swan. dani + jamie, the haunting of bly manor? nathan + haley, one tree hill? isak + even, skam?

five favorite characters? brooke davis, regina mills, spencer reid, sokka, willie jatp (why does he not have a last name?)

#THIS TOOK ME FOREVER BUT IT WAS SO FUN THANKS ELKE #tag games #also if you saw me accidentally post this not once but TWICE before i was done. no you didn't

6 notes · View notes

muffinsandpages · 3 years ago

Text

Solitaire by Alice Oseman

Disclaimer: I try never to photoshop the covers of the books, but in this case I had to, because the Italian edition I had looked so so bad and was unrecognizable! Sorry if it looks ugly, I swear that the original cover was much worse

I’ve felt pretty burnt out in the last few days, so today I decided to stop doing my uni work half an hour early than I usually do, and make some tea and cake for me and my sister. While I drink my tea and take some time for myself I might as well share my review of Solitaire, which has been sitting in my drafts for three weeks now!

Before we start, here’s a list of the books triggers warning. In my review I mention mental health issues

So... I have a LOT of thoughts First thing I know is that it kept me hooked: I read it in like 26 hours, I could not put it down. I am not a slow reader, but this is probably a new record for me. First of all, the pros. It is funny that it is Alice's debut novel, because I found it by far her most mature work. Not that Heartstopper and Loveless are shallow, but Solitaire is really next level. It is rare to find an unreliable narrator in a YA book, where authors usually just want their audience to identify 100% with the main character. I think that this is to be kept in mind while reading this book. I had mental health issues similar to Tori's when I was in High School, and although I am now doing better sometimes I had to force myself to remember that I wasn't supposed to identify too much with her.

The book is written very well, and it represents and shows in a very realistic way the distorted point of view of someone with these kinds of issues. From her "I'm not like other girls" prespective, to the way she mentions that she sleeps so much and she brushes it off like it's nothing to worry about. Now onto the cons, which I think are mostly due to the fact that, after all, it's a debut novel that Alice published at 19, and like many firsts can't be perfect in every way. The first half of the book was very good; towards the end, however, things got more confused. I know that this is partially because of the unreliable narrator thing, but the plot itself felt more and more weird.

Spoilers to follow!

More than anything I found the entire Solitaire thing, the school burning and everything very... excessive. Like, it got from her being invisible to the whole school burning down because a guy had a crush on her but actually no (?). And what's the deal with the fact that they all forgave Lucas like nothing happened? Not to talk about Tori's mental health issues, which get brushed off at the end as soon as she makes a friend. Hm.

I would have loved for some characters to be more three dimensional and developed (and yes, I'm talking about Michael), but it actually makes sense, given the unreliable narrator thing. Anyway, overall it's a very interesting book. I wouldn't say I recommend it because it mentally destroyed me, and I would explicitly advise people who struggle with major mental health issues to avoid it at the moment (when they said it was nothing like Heartstopper they weren't lying). But if you feel comfortable with it, I'd say to give it a go while keeping an open mind.

Also? I can’t wait for Heartstopper on Netflix to come out in April?? It’s so close and I can’t wait, it looks so well done

#solitaire #alice oseman #tori spring #michael holden #heartstopper #charlie spring #nick nelson #ben hope #ya #book #coming of age #bookblr #book review #book aesthetic

1 note · View note

vimesbootstheory · 4 years ago

Text

Another bunch of books, this time for episodes 81-90 of Overdue (the podcast about the books you’ve been meaning to read). Beware book spoilers.

Today is all about documentation of reading, I am also putting up all my book reviews on StoryGraph, it’s fun so far.

1. The Color Purple by Alice Walker 2. Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne 3. The Passage by Justin Cronin 4. Orange is the New Black by Piper Kerman 5. You Shall Know Our Velocity! by Dave Eggers 6. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

7. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn -- This book had an uphill slope to climb, but it still managed to impress me. Gone Girl has received a lot of hype and praise, for one, and I’ll admit that sometimes I get resentful of writers who get a lot of praise because I compare myself against them, to absolutely zero effect. I was also pretty spoiled for this book, though less spoiled than I feared. I knew (MAJOR SPOILERS INCOMING) that Amy was not dead, and had been framing Nick. This was, at first, a source of bitterness, because I did not know going in that this was a spoiler at all. Everyone had been so free about making comments like “Oh man, fuck that guy, you should Gone Girl him” that I assumed it must be baked into the premise. It isn’t, but it’s revealed half-way in, so the book is not as spoiled as I feared it might be. The format really worked for me, the idea that the first half of Amy’s perspective was intentionally unreliable narrator followed by a peak at a sociopath’s psyche. I liked that they didn’t make Nick completely unlikeable, though as the author and Nick himself anticipates, the adultery did lose him a lot of points. I was dazzled by how unexpected the ultimate resolution was. I guess it could have been unsatisfying for some, but I loved it. I loved even though I had been actively, vocally rooting for the much more obvious, action packed, emotional-closure-infused ending. I think it says a lot that Flynn changed my mind so thoroughly. Her prose really worked for me, too. I’d read more work of hers.

8. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury 9. The Crucible by Arthur Miller 10. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque 11. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens 12. Winter's Bone by Daniel Woodrell 13. Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons 14. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie 15. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides 16. Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

17. Animal Farm by George Orwell -- I can’t claim to know a lot about the historical events which inspired Animal Farm. I’ve seen the historical figure analogues all written out, but they don’t mean much to me. Nevertheless, I found this fascinating. Would it have worked better or worse if it hadn’t been such a direct adaptation of historical events? I’m not sure. I do know, however, that it keyed into very specific, dark-childhood-noir nostalgia, such a formative fiction aesthetic that I don’t know how to discuss it without revealing too much of 8yo me. No, you know what, I’m going to say definitively, I think it’s stronger for having been such a close adaptation. I found it really fun imagining the nature of the analogies, mostly because I didn’t know enough to fill in the blanks myself. I enjoyed paralleling current events to these imagined historical ones. It was really fun.

18. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

19. The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned by Anne Rice -- I almost feel like I should apologize to this book, because when I started reading this I thought it was going to be more in the vein of Rice’s erotica (which I have flipped through but never read any cover-to-cover) and was expecting paranormal smut. I bragged about the wackiness of my reading material choices to coworkers, haha I’m still reading the mummy romance lol. But this ended up being pretty fun, not gonna lie? It wasn’t really anything to write home about, I’ll give you, but the conquering of my expectations was exciting to experience. I will say, right off the bat, Rice is a coward for writing a mummy romance where the mummy never really looks like an actual mummy once he’s woken up, he’s just some sexy guy. The monsterfuckers out there are howling in outrage. But of course, the intended plotline would not have been possible with him wrapped in bandages the whole time. I am always down for a fish-out-of-water story, even if Ramses does learn a little bit too fast to be a satisfying iteration of that trope. Where this story really gets fun is when (SPOILERS) Ramses discovers Cleopatra’s bog mummy and wakes her up, and she turns out to be far and away the most fun character. She’s evil, but oh it’s because she didn’t come back right, but is she or isn’t she Really Cleopatra or just a ghoulish imitation, and oh can she feel love or not? Her end was simultaneously very Hollywood yet anticlimactic, at least on an emotional level. Anyway, I was expecting unintentionally hilarious Egyptian mummy smut and I got a paranormal action adventure that felt a little Agatha Christie in parts? To be honest, very fun, might read the sequel if my internet connection went down over a weekend.

20. Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier 21. Life of Pi by Yann Martel 22. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes 23. Replay by Ken Grimwood 24. The Lorax by Dr. Seuss

25. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood -- I know, I’m a disgrace to my country for not having read this already… worse, this is my first Atwood novel. I’m an embarrassment, I know. I don’t know that after this one I’m necessarily in a huge hurry to read the rest of her books, but it wasn’t bad. I think, to zero in on my primary impressions of this book, I’ll point to this one unintentionally funny passage in the last couple chapters where Offred apologizes to the reader that her story is not more story-shaped, that she doesn’t take much of an active role and does not make satisfying character choices, but that she can’t help that that’s how it all went down. And here I am like… but it didn’t? Margaret, you WROTE this. You mean to say you knew that the plot of this was not narratively satisfying but you left it like that anyway? And that’s my main problem with the book, that it is not story-shaped at all, it has no real plot. It is almost 100% world-building. And don’t get me wrong, it’s top-tier world-building. That’s the hook of this book, to get to the meat of the world building and find out why and how this all went down. That’s another thing, though -- the backstory is so much more interesting than the present day. Here’s my question: why didn’t Atwood just set the story back when the US fell apart and Gilead rose? I think that would have been much more interesting. Instead, we got Offred navigating a weird quasi-romantic affair with her oppressor and side-stepping an ostensibly gripping spy ring plot in favour of a lot of silent seething and growing complacency in a bad situation. And the thing is, I’m pretty sure Atwood knows that that’s what she wrote. That’s fine for her, I just found it a little frustrating. I did like Moira a lot, I was really hoping we would spend more time with her, and I am hoping against hope that maybe she’s back in the sequel, even though THM does explicitly say that Offred never saw Moira again. I also really enjoyed the epilogue at the Nunavut academic conference. First, just the concept of Nunavut becoming a major academic destination, that’s awesome. The send-ups of academic attempts at moral neutrality, those were too delicious. And the hope inherent in knowing that eventually, Gilead falls -- what a great note to end on.

26. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde 27. A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J Gaines 28. The Turn of the Screw by Henry James 29. The Giver by Lois Lowry 30. Dracula by Bram Stoker 31. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway 32. Oh the Places You'll Go by Dr. Seuss 33. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 34. A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan 35. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez 36. World War Z by Max Brooks

37. Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin -- This book was pretty what-you-see-is-what-you-get, as long as you’ve ever been exposed to Hollywood cinema and knows literally anything at all about the movie. Still, it was compelling. It’s moderately self-aware that the spookiest thing about it is the claustrophobic controlling attitudes of the people in Rosemary’s life, and the hardcore gaslighting she goes through. Funny how a book with such a supernatural element is defined so much more by the realistic evils of regular humans. (For a given value of ‘regular’.) The reader always, always, always knows much more than what Rosemary is aware of, and in a way that made me feel complicit in Rosemary’s abuse. I found it inspired that Levin allows the book so many moments of real levity, such that it’s a pretty breezy read. Rosemary was easy to root for, likeable, as was Hutch for as long as he was around. Roman and Minnie were solid antagonists. This was nothing groundbreaking but it was a compelling read.

38. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen 39. Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt 40. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut 41. Eddie and the Cruisers by P.F. Kluge 42. The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr & E.B. White 43. The Hairy Ape by Eugene O’Neill 44. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman 45. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson 46. The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County by Mark Twain

47. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry -- I think one of the best things I can say about this book is that it didn’t make me completely resent its considerable length. This 900+ page book is a monster, and there’s definitely some dropped plot threads that could have been easily trimmed out to make this a little more streamlined, but when you look at the fact that this is about a cattle drive from Texas to Montana… yeah, OK, granted, that’s gonna be a long story. This is a book with a lot of death, and I feel like a big theme of this book is how death is often sudden and lacking in dignity and doesn’t neatly wait until your character arc is tied up before you’re whisked off to the afterlife. And that’s very true of real life, but to be honest it’s not something I’m keen on in stories. I like my stories to be shaped like stories, because if they’re not, they’re unsatisfying. You’re not special just because you didn’t bow to the expectation that stories be satisfying to their readers, McMurtry. My least favourite part of this book was the character deaths. They often made me feel bitter to the author, either because it was unnecessarily brutal just for the shock value, or because the death made a subplot completely pointless, or because the death seemed socially targeted, like a black character dying early on in a horror movie. But another thing is, I rarely felt a full and untainted grief or empathy for any of the protagonist characters, because almost all of the characters were complicit in the continuing genocide of the Native American populations, to varying extent. Hell, one of the main reasons they leave Texas is because they’ve killed too many Native Americans there and now it’s boring. I’ve heard it said that this book is more sympathetic than the default to the Native American antagonists, but I completely disagree. In all the conflicts with the protagonists, they are ALWAYS the aggressor, and many are portrayed as complete monsters. That taints a lot of the content of this book, ‘cause how does one sympathize with genocidal fuckheads? If you’re even halfway decent, you can’t.

48. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre 49. In The Woods by Tana French 50. Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw 51. Battle Royale by Koushun Takami 52. The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe 53. Big Blonde by Dorothy Parker

54. Summerland by Michael Chabon -- I wouldn’t necessarily swear off Chabon’s other works after reading this, because I think that it’s best summed up as a writer writing outside of his wheelhouse and not having his hands smacked away. Chabon is trying to write a children’s novel here, and it’s not working. Let’s take an actually good children’s book, let’s say Percy Jackson -- it succeeds because it has prose aimed at kids, but has emotional depth. Summerland is the inverse of that, it has adult-geared prose but an emotional kiddie pool. A lot of this is down to the cast and the pacing. The pacing is too fast, and the cast is too large, and we don’t get any time to settle into any plot or any idea or any character before that character is yanked away and replaced by something else. Chabon just needed to fill out the size of a baseball team, but he did that by trying to provide equal characterization for nine different characters, some of which are introduced VERY late in the story, and he trips over his feet. I will say, I still don’t give a fuck about baseball, but I also very much DID read that whole-ass book about baseball statistics and, by the virtue of the writer’s skill, found it compelling and gained my investment in aspects of the sport. This book, on the other hand, made me resent baseball. Baseball only ever slows down the plot, only ever makes the world-building flakier and harder to swallow. Seriously, they resolve almost every major conflict through a climactic baseball game, it’s too much. Speaking of world-building, it starts off very poorly and never really recovers. At one point the book lampshades that part of any portal fantasy where the protagonist has to boggle at the weirdness and ask a lot of questions and adjust, and seems to take pride in brushing right past that. Here’s the thing: the world-building is VERY weird, and the readership needs that adjustment period. Instead, the fantastical characters just glare at the MC and the reader like “you dumb fuck, why don’t you know this, keep up” and it’s not nearly as charming as Chabon thinks it is. Positives? I liked seeing some indigenous mythology incorporated, even though I can’t pretend I knew the foundational myths well enough to know whether they’d been gracefully handled. I liked that Jennifer T had an indigenous background, that was cool, though with the too-large cast she was inevitably snubbed her due time to develop her feelings on her native identity. Uhhh the story about the baby boy turning back into a doll, and the fairy princess continuing to carry him around, that was emotionally compelling. Also Taffy was the best character, doesn’t say much but there you go. Oh, also I read the new author introduction and he??? spoils Mr. Feld’s character arc??? Why would you do that? Baffling.

55. At the Mountains of Madness by HP Lovecraft -- I was steeled for a lot with this one. I knew this reading experience could go very wrong, since I know what a huge racist Lovecraft was, I know he was a homophobe, yadda. I was semi-prepared for that, and there’s a little racism in this for sure, though it doesn’t hang over everything. I was also prepared to have to filter my enjoyment through Lovecraft being Problematic, as I think overall I did expect to like this despite its flaws. What I was definitely NOT prepared for… was for this story to be unforgivably boring. It is so, so dull, and I can’t even explain how unfathomable I find this. Lovecraft seems to be working hard against the story’s own potential, in places. For one, he seems to LOVE hyping up a particularly scary (or so he says) moment, a lot of the narrator apologizing and hemming and hawwing over the incoming horrors he is about to describe… and then it’s something pretty mundane. He keeps going THE NEXT PART IS HORRIFYING HOLD ONTO YOUR BUTTS and then the next part is like, “and there were some very old statues and ooooh they were old as balls”. The story peaks very early when the campsite with all the slaughtered people and dogs is discovered, and I was so hoping that was a tease for even freakier stuff to come. Nope, that’s as freaky as it gets. I think the only part that had the potential, even, to grab me was the whole thing surrounding the missing human and the missing dog. That resolves in the most passive, boring way I could have predicted. The only real source of amusement reading this was seeing the influence of this story on parts of the wonderful video game The Darkest Dungeon, which is so much better than this story. It does Lovecraftian prose better, it’s better at being scary, it just more successfully actualizes the genre of Lovecraftian horror. This was very frustrating. I was promised iconic horror and I got an archeological dig.

56. Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers 57. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard Feynman 58. Dune by Frank Herbert 59. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L Frank Baum 60. Tiny Alice by Edward Albee 61. Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin 62. The Reader by Bernard Schlink 63. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck 64. King Lear by William Shakespeare 65. Medea by Euripides 66. Antony and Cleopatra by William Shakespeare 67. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley 68. The War of The Worlds by HG Wells

69. You Are A Monster (Choose Your Own Adventure) by Edward Packard -- This was better than the first CYOA book I read for the project, but it still hardly feels like a fair contribution. It was better because all the possible endings felt like genuine possibilities as part of the same story, rather than random disconnected happenstances. I liked how you could take a detour via one choice and end up back on another sequence of scenes & choices that you could have arrived at earlier if you had made another choice. I liked the ending where he (I?) becomes a famous writer (and full-time monster) best.

70. Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan 71. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides 72. Don't Go Back to School by Kio Stark 73. The Awakening by Kate Chopin 74. This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Díaz 75. The Lottery by Shirley Jackson 76. Extra Innings by Baseball Prospectus

77. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami -- This was so maddening. I did not go into this with high hopes, since a coworker of mine read 1Q84 not too long ago and hated it (meanwhile I started it and quickly DNF’d), and specifically alerted me that she was curious about where it was all heading and then everything came to nothing in the end. I was so hoping that Colorless would be a departure from that, since I WAS curious about where it was all leading, but uh. Nope. Doesn’t go anywhere. The end of this book reads more like end of any other scene in the book, the difference in experience only being that I was shrieking in rage because I knew I was reading the last page. There are SO many dropped plot threads. What happened to Haida? Why no exploration of Tsukuru’s possible queerness? Who murdered Yuzu? Those are the big ones but there were many more. Murakami’s writing of women is amongst the worst I’ve ever read. All the women are just boobs (there are some unintentionally hilarious lines about the cosmic significance of Eri’s breasts) and emotional support for Tsukuru’s character arc, and their lives revolve 100% around whatever Tsukuru has going on. Seriously, those conversations between Tsukuru and Sara where all they talk about is his old high school friends -- don’t you have anything going on in your own life, girl? All you have to think about is your not-boyfriend’s mildly tragic backstory. The prose was pretty easy to read, with some decent moments of introspection that sometimes overplayed the book’s hand, e.g. made it very obvious what the reason for Tsukuru’s ejection from the group was going to turn out to be. Very expository, lot of telling with no showing. Conversations with the secondary characters reminded me of post-mission conversations with squadmates in Mass Effect, you just walk up to them and they exposit all their life story and job requirements at you. At least Mass Effect didn’t try to get away with all this product placement. I get it, Murakami, you want me to buy a Lexus.

78. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger 79. Here We Are by Dorothy Parker 80. The Misanthrope by Moliere 81. The Mystery of Chimney Rock (Choose Your Own Adventure) by Edward Packard 82. Bossypants by Tina Fey 83. The Homecoming by Harold Pinter 84. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving 85. The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett 86. The Stand by Stephen King 87. Grendel by John Gardner 88. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut 89. Persuasion by Jane Austen 90. Beowulf by Unknown 91. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown 92. Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James 93. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth

#gone girl #animal farm #anne rice #the handmaid's tale #rosemary's baby #erin reads overdue books #lonesome dove #michael chabon #hp lovecraft #choose your own adventure #haruki murakami #gillian flynn #george orwell #margaret atwood #at the mountains of madness

5 notes · View notes