#and i’m just ken looked better than any of the musical numbers in wicked……

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

if we are adapting mediocre musicals for the screen now is it too much to ask for legally blonde the musical the movie. is it too much to ask that this happen and also is not directed by john m chu

[twitchesandstitches]

Red Lantern Alighting

In the dark, there was loss.

In ages so often made dark and grim by the selfishness and vainglory of those who measured personal achievement in mountains of the dead, there were plenty who looked up from the bottom of the heap, and found something there.

Jackboots ground down on their faces, and the warlords who destroyed their lives cared nothing for the suffering they wrought. Tyrants, fascists, conquerors and world-wreckers all simply did their thing, and like incredibly inattentive farmers, did not realize what they were sowing.

The people ground down on the bottom learned well what it meant to suffer. To lose everything. And in the pits, in the slave arenas and at the end of an overseer’s whip, they learned the shape of hate.

And one day, on so many worlds stained with suffering, made into something filthy by despair and torment, a red star bloomed in the sky.

And those who suffered the most, burning on the inside, found a clawed hand extended to them.

And in his claws, there was a ring offered out to them.

“Make them pay.”

-------

It was a common rumor, perhaps to pass the time, but there was enough of an edge to it to suggest some panic that remained in the news, all the same:

Ten thousand worlds are burning.

To many across the places touched by the Eunoianet, the magical web of communications, stories, and media that connected the Fleet worlds and kept their culture alive, there was some mild interest. Plenty took the news literally, and organized fire brigade fleets to put the fires out.

Blaster, an Endowed Autobot with a keen interest in xenosociology particularly as related to culture and music, thought something was off the moment she first heard the specific phrasing, and its connections to conflicts on a chain of interstellar empires.

“Ten thousands worlds,” as she told her team, “Is a kenning.” Her team gave her politely incomprehensible looks. With a look of delight, one of her daughters (a minibot named Rewind) eagerly leaned out of her seat, visor shining bright, faceplate wiggling excitedly.

Wicke, possibly one of Blaster’s closest friends in the theoretical engineering sub-sets, opened her mouth to say that she knew what it meant. Blaster shook her head repeatedly. ‘Let Rewind have her moment!’

Rewind spoke up. Like many minibots, she was human-sized; about seven feet tall, but so incredibly thick that she was almost that wide too (at least at the chest-mounted Energon tanks and her impressively massive hips), her heavily plated exterior indicating her preferred alt mode of a tanky attack drone. As she began to speak, her present siblings (both of them beastformers; a moody red robot rhino named Ramhorn and a yellow leonine tracker called Steeljaw) rolled their optics. “Did you all know? A kenning! Is a common term for a culture-specific metaphor, usually tied to folklore. Typically it is a shorthand for a more complicated concept, you see!”

Wicke, shifting about and balancing her gargantuan breasts onto legs easily thick enough to be bust-supporting shelves, nodded. “And what might this kenning refer to, dear?”

The other two of this particular mission winced at Rewind went into a needlessly and painful convoluted explanation with too much time spent on unnecessary asides on cultural context. Bismuth, rolled her temporary optics and tried to nap. A tricky thing considering that to save on space, she had installed her Gem into a fembot shell that at least matched her amazonian, outrageously curvy true form, but one of the things it couldn’t do was sleep. Smaller even than Rewind was arguably the most famous of them all; Toshinori Yagi, better known by his professional name All Might; once a massive tower of muscle and masculine charm, his self-sacrificing job as a Fleet champion had left him an emaciated wreck, his powers too dangerous to access often. Nonetheless, his experience made him a highly skilled mech pilot to channel his spirit. He was doing his best to pretend to be listening but was clearly suffering.

The gist of the lecture, in any case, was this: ‘a thousand worlds is slang, in this little intersection between a dozen or so little empires, for all known worlds’.

“So,” Toshinori said gravely after some thought. “It’s a great deal more serious than even ten thousand individual worlds!”

Bismuth’s fembot shell shrugged its expansive shoulders. “Honestly, you sure it’s even appropriate for us to get involved? I mean, I’m all for intervening, but the people in this area…” Her shell’s emoticon-displaying face cycled through a number of uncomfortable expressions. “They’re not gonna be welcoming or appreciate us.”

“The power structure could use a shake-up,” Steeljaw observed, his voice cultured, deliberately refined. This was the voice of a cat-bot who could somehow hold a cup with his pinky-claw out. It was a strange thing to see from someone who had grown up in a society where setting yourself on fire was considered a good icebreaker. “They’re… well, I shouldn’t SAY they are dreadful tyrants, by and by, but alas…”

“Can we kick their ass?” Ramhorn said hopefully. “Please tell me, we get to do some tyrant toppling!”

They looked at Blaster, to see what her vote might be. She thought about it and shrugged. “Personally I’d rather do what we can if trouble comes to us; I won’t say no to rescue, even if the folks around here yell at us. But actively dismantling their empire, however deserved, is really not a good idea. We’d need to work things out better before we decide if we have the RIGHT to do that or not.”

The ship approached the first world to investigate, and Toshinori’s eyes widened, the modded dark patches around them accentuating his shock. “I… do not believe we will have the opportunity! Look!”

They looked out.

The flames were bright on the windows, even from super-orbit.

They had seen continents, entire landmasses, on fire before.

They hadn’t often seen the landmasses in question rearranged to spell out an extremely crude message.

“...Ah,” Wicke said, wincing. “I suppose the worlds being on fire was not entirely a metaphor, then.”

The ship found stable orbit, relatively safe from most sensors, and with their on-board alchemizers and raw materials, it was a simple matter to build an observation station to live in and wait to come to some kind of a conclusion. If there was a problem with the Fleet’s organization, Blaster mused, it was that waiting for every participating citizen to come to some kind of a consensus took forever, even with cybernetic telepathic stations to work it out. At least with this small group, it was easier to work it out.

Rewind and Blaster were considered the best at stealth to go down and put the fires out; Wicke was undoubtedly the most powerful but her raw power made her inefficient at HIDING her presence, and they weren’t sure if they were ready for confrontation. Bismuth waiting for the all clear (and once she got it, she alchemized terraforming rainfall that put the fires out in days), and Toshinori had many sterling qualities to make him such a paragon, they put his face in the Big Book of How To Hero. Holding back or being stealthy was NOT one of those traits.

Before Bismuth got to work, Rewind gave her report to the others:

“Most strange, so very strange indeed? Did you know, it is very strange for there to be no one left on the planet?”

“The place WAS on fire,” Bismuth had said. Sourly, she had added, “Maybe they were attacking each other… this whole region is a mess of conquerors trying to kill each other. Yeerks looking for better hosts to enslave, elven supremacists, orks that kill everything just to get a better fight out of it…”

Rewind nodded. “Yes, certainly! But, there were NO bodies! Not on the scale that we ought to have seen!” She had paused, looking uncomfortable. “At the very least, those bodies were not killed by the fire.”

Wicke frowned. “What do you mean?”

Rewind was equipped with recording abilities, in her role as a scout. She did warn them first, though, that it would be graphic; Wicke often was employed as a coroner to study the bodies of metanatural encounters, Bismuth was a vetern of many revolutions, and Toshinori had been a hero for a very long time. All of them were acquainted with brutality.

Even so, they were taken aback by the horrors on the screen. “Oh… Arceus’ peg…” Wicke said softly, as they showed them ashen streets and bodies that were by then mostly… pulled apart. Heads were mounted on spikes, and were the only recognizable bit. Everything else had been torn apart, burned so badly and then pulverized into a meaty pulp to coat buildings and streets.

The Fleet was a rough place, and its heroes tended towards extreme fury and ferocity as a rule; nonetheless, this was extreme, even by the standards Wicke knew. “I thought you said fire hadn’t killed them?”

“Analysis indicates that they WERE burned to death, but not by the fires we see. It was a different sort of burning inconsistent with what’s ravaging the planets.

Bismuth had examined several other such photos. She was a ferocious fighter, even by the standards of her Dinobot partners (long since married to them, by this point), but even the greatest savagery of Grimlock or the combined fury of Volcanicus had a point; the shock was intended to terrify the enemy into retreat, or encourage allies to greater morale. This felt more like just randomized lashing out.

Toshinori didn’t much like what he was looking at. “Infighting, perhaps? This is just so… excessive, though. Why would they kill each other so brutally?”

“Rivalries? Combat doctrine?” Ramhorn suggested.

“Or maybe whoever killed them was really angry,” Bismuth suggested. “I’ve done stuff that… okay, not as bad as THIS but… when you’ve been ground done long enough, you’d be surprised what happens when you let that monster off its leash.”

Toshinori considered this. His eyes widened. “Oh…! Rewind, Blaster! You said there were no bodies found, yes?”

“Indeed, sir!” Rewind said. “No bodies besides these!”

“No ashes, then?”

“None that would fit the profile of the bodies, or any traces of incinerated corpses on the scale of an entire population.”

Toshinori looked thoughtful. “Perhaps there are no survivors because they have already been evacuated from the world.”

Bismuth brightened up. “Oh! That’d be a relief.” Perhaps thinking along the same lines as whatever was prompting Toshinori, she compared the visible mounted heads, stabbed on display by whoever had been angry enough to burn the whole planet down, and compared them with all Fleet records of multiversally-wanted villains.

Most of them matched someone on the lists, with the ones who weren’t at least suspected of awful crimes. Bismuth did not much dwell on the evil deeds attached to them; it was sickening to behold, but it was enough to know that very evil men and women had died this day. “Check this out. I compared the skulls to records of some serious bad guys, and they’re all… yeah, the multiverse is better off without them.”

Toshinori nodded. “As I suspected.”

Steeljaw was several times the size of Toshinori (who was tall for a human, but puny by Fleet women standards), but he gave him an adoring look nonetheless. “Sir, do you perhaps have an idea?”

Toshinori looked thoughtful. “Let us at least consider the idea that the downtrodden of this world may have had their opportunity to rise up, at least.”

“You think so?” Wicke said, raising an eyebrow. “This much destruction is rather excessive.”

“People who have suffered terribly, all their lives, often do not have much reason to hold back once they have the opportunity to strike!”

“True enough.” Wicke had turned, and other matters called their attention.

Bismuth’s terraformers conjured forth enough rain, with a mild connection to the Elemental Plane of Water, to put out the fires and render the planet suitable for all of them to at least walk on. Several days onwards, they landed to investigate properly.

As they suspected, there was no life on the planet anywhere. Blaster had flown across the planet in her preferred aerial form with a massive armory of sensory drones, and there was no signs of life; no organic presence, no living movement, no hints of the electromagnetic activity that marked the presence of synthetic life forms. And the ashes of burned things did not account for all the inhabitants being dead, either.

Several days, the mystery continued to deepen as they continued the search on other worlds, and the pattern on the first repeated itself. Uncannily the same, at that.

And it WAS a pattern; Wicke was certain.

Above them, far in the sky, a red star seemed to appear; the figure within watched them dispassionately, weighing their hearts.

They shone bright and good. But, he judged, they did not have the burning anger he sought out.

He contemplated the Gem, however. There was the spark of fury there…. Perhaps later, then.

The red light flew away, leaving the battleground behind.

And in the meantime, unaware of this, Blaster’s team continued to search. Unexpectedly, they found something interesting on one of the cities that hadn’t quite been exploded.

Blaster was over sixty feet tall, her minibot offspring incorporated into her body in cassette forms and channeling their power to her, so she could achieve a far greater size and curve level than normal, and she had to be careful not to let her waist-level bustline demolish things worse. Slowly she leaned forward, studying something on the wall. “I found something!”

Bismuth was in her true form now that she had room to grow, and she stood over a hundred and twenty feet, not even a trickle of her full power being used. SHe wasn’t just an amazon, she was a gigantic gray-blue beauty, her multi-colored dreadlocks shining bright, her gem core just barely visible in the cleavage of two massive breasts with lower slopes extending past her mighty thighs. Power crackled in her hard light body, and she was cheerfully refusing to reign it in. (“This much awesome DESERVES to be on display!” she had boasted, and kissed her biceps.) “Whatcha got there, Blast?”

Toshinori approached. While he did have his own powers, they were so strong as to be a serious threat to his emaciated body, and he preferred to channel them through powered exoskeleton frames; in this case, he operated a mech slightly too large to be considered power armor, but small enough to operate on a human scale, which seemed to be the standard size on this world. It looked like a brightly colored egg, with powerful limbs to channel his energies through and punch things, and a colorful aura of energy created a luminous V-shape above him from the back.

Its sensors relayed it to him. Toshinori studied it. “Graffiti, or perhaps a calling card.”

Wicke, standing at a very far distance from everyone else in case she suddenly needed to grow to fight (and would thus need a LOT of space; she could exceed planetary size without even putting in effort), linked up to Toshinori’s mech to see it for herself. “It IS more recent. I think this was left as a message.”

It was all red against the slag; a bright cherry-red color that would have been friendly if not for it being carved into the collected skulls of, apparently, the most cruel and hateful tyrants in the entire system. It had been burned into them, in fact, possibly by whatever had set the planets on fire, and then painted over.

It looked a little bit, then, like a round circle. Two vertical lines were set on either side, with additional zags moving outwards over that. There was a short message, written in an unfamiliar script similar to the Daedric alphabet. “A curious sign,” Rewind communed to Blaster. “It resembles that of the Green Lantern Order.”

“Green Lanterns?” Blaster said aloud.

Toshinori shifted. “Green Lanterns, did you say?” He looked at the sign. Bismuth and Wicke were running a translation cipher, comparing the letters to the most likely solutions. “They were an ancient order of heroes! They predated the Cataclysm by many eons; I suspect the last of them perished trying to fight that disaster, though they left behind relics and lore.” He patted his chest proudly. “My heroic predecessor, One For All, supposedly refined the power I carry with Green Lantern secrets!”

“So perhaps whoever did this was evoking their legacy?” Blaster said. Well, Ramhorn asked, and she relayed it.

Toshinori considered it. “I think that is possible, but it would be an odd thing. The symbol is different; the Green Lantern sigil was a, well, a lantern, with horizontal lines above and below.” He pointed out another thing: two circles inside the sign, at angles. “Nothing like that there. And it was green, of course. Not… well, red.”

Bismuth glanced aside. “It does look like a lantern, though.”

“Yes,” Blaster said thoughtfully, surrounded by charred landscape, burned by the rage of those suffering for so long. “A red lantern.”

“Got it!” Wicke said triumphantly. “The script originates from Beforus! A curious thing; It hasn’t been spoken since Beforus.was lost; it is similar to various forms that have derived from it since then, but… oh, just a digression, not that important.”

Rewind perked up, eager to hear more, but Blaster was in a hurry. “So why Beforus? It’s not anywhere near here, and these worlds didn’t have a significant troll population.”

“Yes. That is the difficult part. And the language is fairly obscure; there are a few figures who survived Beforus and gained the ability to avoid aging who would still speak it, but I can’t imagine what they would be doing here.”

The Condesce, Blaster thought. The Dolorosa, mother of vampires. The Grand Highblood. The Blue Arrow and executioner of the degenerate. The Psiionic, sailor of the stars. And the others, the founders of modern troll-kind and preservationists of their culture; most were within the Fleet, and all of them had at least spent some time with it, in the past. Most were accounted for.

But not at all.

Bismuth frowned as the translation software ran. “The symbol thing is a bit wonky; someone chipped away a few bits here and there. See?”

“Yes,” Toshinori said. “It looks a bit like like an incomplete circle, then. I wonder if it was sending a message?”

Blaster leaned in. “And with those little circles inside, it kind of looks like the astrological sign for Cancer, doesn’t it?”

“Ah, it does!”

Blaster chuckled. “Now that’s obscure, what does that even-”

Oh. OH.

Bright red colored. Mutant red.

A sign that looked like what trolls called the Iron Manacles, the Crab Claws.

And Beforan script, as would be remembered by someone who had actually lived through the fall of Beforus.

And now, she realized, she had seen this level of brutal destructiveness, this unfettered and passionate rage.

She kept it to herself for now. “Is that translation ready?”

“Yes,” said Wicke. She cleared her throat, and spoke aloud. “Bear in mind, this is quite a rough translation, and the software likes poetic meter, but nonetheless, this should get the spirit across.”

Wicke translated thusly:

“With blood and rage of crimson red,

“Passed on by those long dead.

“Together with our righteous hate,

“We will burn them all.

“No one else will share our fate.”

Wicke finished. “And it is signed… I think it translates as the Anointed.  Of… the Red Lantern Corps? I don’t suppose you know anyone by that term.”

“None that fit the situation,” Toshinori said. Bismuth said much the same.

“Kankri Vantas the first.”

Blaster said this heavily, with mounting shock.

The name called to mind a fussy and passive-aggressively angry young troll, a bit older than the likes of Terezi and her generation. “Uh, are you sure you have the right guy?” Bismuth said. “Kankri, you said? Chubby, really pretty? Has a really bad case of pent-up anger he needs to deal with?”

“Not him,” Bismuth said. “The other one.”

“What other one, I don’t- oh.” Bismuth’s eyes widened. “Oh.”

“The Sufferer.” Toshinori said, horrified. “He’s here!?”

“Or he was. It fits his… preference for rising up. But on a bigger scale. And of course, the Anointed is what Beforan religious practices named him. He’s never liked being called the Sufferer or the Signless.”

There was silence, then, for a time.

It was not bad news, exactly. But it was certainly concerning.

The Signless, the Suffferer or whatever you might call him, had come here. He had… slaughtered the worst of these worlds, and had done something with everyone else. The wording indicated numbers; the ‘we’ and all’. Perhaps… he had been recruiting?

For what?

They stared at the sign of a red lantern, shaped to be like the sign of suffering among trolls; an icon of enduring the unspeakable, a sign for those fighting to make a kinder world even if you did it on a tide of blood.

Kankri Vantas of Beforus was the kindest of his people. A living prophet to some, handing down law and covenant to mortals, fulfilling ancient prophecies and setting people free. He was a just man, a good man.

And he was also someone who had waged wars so bloody that even the Condesce, a woman no stranger to cruelty and ferocity, had been afraid of his savagery.

“Let’s get back up and upload our findings to the Eunoianet,” Blaster suggested. “We need to figure out what to do from here. And someone give the word to Karkat Vantas that I need to have a talk with him,” she said wearily.

“We’ve found his ancestor.”

-----

(It should be noted that some elements of this fic aren’t exactly in chronlogical order.

Yes, the Signless is the leader of the Red Lanterns here, rather than Atrocitus. As it is, they are the only extant Lanterns, but the others will soon arise, more likely than not. This much is certain!

However, I’ve planned for Signless’ Red Lanterns to predate the Fleet, at least as a fully functional organization. He may either have been making it during his initial time with the Fleet, or at some point, the proto-Fleet’s founding families discovered relics that the Signless was inspired to create the first Red Power Battery and rings from; it could be that he’s only recently made them fully practical and is expanding his Corps’ reach.

They are intended as heroes; merciless, angry and destructive, but they are good guys all the same. Their job is to make the monsters fuckin’ BURN. They are not antagonists, but the Fleet does not yet know what to make of them!)

[lucasflanagan-blog]

2006's Best Movies (adjusted for time)

And here we are at the end of my trilogy. The deck is stacked against me because we all know the third part of a trilogy is rarely worth the trip. So, folks, listen closely and I'll make you this promise: This is probably not going to be worth it. Carrying on. We're going to take a look back ten years to see how the movies of 2006 have fared. Time is the only real test of quality for movies and every time I do this exercise, I'm surprised to find how my feelings have changed. With that said, these were my top ten movies from 2006: 10 - After The Wedding 9 - Blood Diamond 8 - The Fountain 7 - The Lives Of Others 6 - Brick 5 - The Departed 4 - Letters From Iwo Jima 3 - Exiled 2 - Pan's Labyrinth 1 - Children Of Men First things first, when I took a look back I was stunned by how many great comedies came out in 2006. Obviously many of these movies didn't make my top ten list but they all have grown exponentially in my mind over the past ten years. Grandma's Boy is a dumbass movie but it's also one helluva hilarious dumbass movie. Little Miss Sunshine was a movie originally in consideration for my top ten list in 2006 but I cooled on it quickly. In the years since, I've come to a greater appreciation for this movie. Beerfest is ridiculously quotable and still gets watched on the regular. Borat is not necessarily a movie I look to watch anymore but it's been undeniably influential on comedy as a whole. Also, Mike Judge's Idiocracy is a bit of a mess and more of an interesting curiosity than a great movie but it can also now be called unfortunately prophetic. That leaves one, and it's a big one but we'll hold it for now because it's jumped into my top ten list. On the drama front, I loved Ken Loach's, The Wind That Shakes The Barley. Handsome production with a great performance from Cillian Murphy. Running Scared was a crazy little movie from Wayne Kramer, boasting a frenetic performance from Paul Walker. I'm a sucker for "It happened all in one night" movies and this movie was one of the better attempts I've seen. Lastly, we come to Richard Kelly's, Southland Tales. It's a mess of a movie but also one with some true brilliance hiding underneath. It's a movie crying to be seen at home where it can be more properly digested and deserves a new audience. Now we can move on to my brand new top ten list -- the one time has decreed is the better list. The top three movies have stayed the same while four others have shifted and three have fallen off the list completely. Letters From Iwo Jima, Blood Diamond, and The Fountain are gone -- I just don't care about these movies. They all have great qualities but I can't remember the last time I thought about them, let alone watched them. Here we go. 10 - Talladega Nights: The Ballad Of Ricky Bobby This is the most underrated of the Ferrell/McKay movies. I remember thinking it was funny but I'm not into NASCAR at all and thus allowed myself to shutdown to a certain degree -- big mistake. It's easily Ferrell's second best character to date (nobody beats Ron Burgundy) and the rest of the cast is insanely hilarious -- especially Gary Cole as Ricky's long lost father. Classic comedy. 9 - The Departed I'm glad Scorsese finally won his Oscar but he should have won one earlier for any number of better movies. I could talk all day long about Goodfellas vs Dances With Wolves but I'll spare you all the vitriol. In the end, The Departed is awesome and cool but wasn't really close to the legend's best work. 8 - Dave Chappelle's Block Party I've loved this movie for a long time and have no idea how this missed my list ten years ago. This was the first change I made and it was an easy one. The comedy, the music, the social commentary -- it's all amazing. 7 - Casino Royale The second best Bond movie I've ever seen after Skyfall. I was never a big Bond fan but this movie kicked and still kicks all kinds of ass. Anyone who had seen Layer Cake knew Craig was made for the role of Bond and he's never disappointed us. 6 - After The Wedding A small movie with heart to spare. The second movie in a row starring Mads Mikkelsen. This guy is one of the finest actors alive right now and has been for some time now. See this movie if you haven't yet done so. 5 - The Lives Of Others This won the Oscar for best foreign language film and while I still think Pan's Labyrinth is the better movie, there's no denying the power on display here. This is a movie which looked into a dark period of Germany's past and may be more relevant than ever for Americans. 4 - Brick The movie that gave Rian Johnson to the world. This guy is about to unleash Episode VIII on us so let's not forget his earlier movies. This was film noir set in a high school and JGL killed in the lead. I still love this one as much as I did ten years ago. 3 - Exiled Anthony Wong is the shit. Johnnie To is a fucking legend. Hollywood wishes it made action/crime/gangster movies as good as Hong Kong (and Korea and Japan and actually anywhere in Asia). This movie is brilliant. 2 - Pan's Labyrinth Guillermo Del Toro is a genius. I whole-heartedly believe this to be the truth. Everything he does is so specific and unlike anything he's ever done prior and also unlike anything we've ever seen before. He's the most unique filmmaker in the world today and this is his masterwork. 1 - Children Of Men Did I just call GDT a genius? Well, the same goes for his compatriot, Alfonso Cuaron. I watch this movie multiple times every year and it still stuns me. There's not a wasted moment in the entire movie. It's as close to perfect as I've seen in as long as I can remember. I don't think there's been a better movie since. I could be wrong. I'm probably wrong. That's it. Time, right? It certainly changes things. I'll be back some time this week with my thoughts on Logan or maybe John Wick: Chapter 2. One or the other. I'll decide later. Until then, love each other.