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unbridgeabledistances · 4 years ago

Note

ian + mickeys neck (was thinking of the drunk ian fic and wondered if you would be interested in pursuing this idea further?) <3

anon i am CRYING thank u so much for this!!!! i have been feeling like i need to make my contribution to the “mickey’s neck” discourse for a while lmao and this is my opportunity (esp bc ian holding mickey in the 11x12 stills wrecked me)

in the spirit of following up 11x10 i decided to write this based on an amazing post @mickey-millagher made/a prompt that @pombby sent me about ian teaching mickey to swim at a public pool during lockdown at some point early s11- i hope u enjoy<3

(this is the tiniest notch steamier than what i usually write but it isn’t smutty fyi- tw for descriptions of choking😌)

There was no one at the park— the air hung heavy and humid over the empty picnic tables and wooden benches that punctuated the fields of dying grass. As much as people on the Southside were definitely not taking any part of this lockdown shit seriously, it didn’t surprise Ian how silent the public park was— there was still a scarcer number of people out on their stoops or lounging on street corners this summer. Ian guessed that the few people who didn’t think that this was a hoax realized that this COVID shit was serious enough that they couldn’t afford healthcare if they got it, or whatever— but regardless, that meant that this Southside summer was weirdly stagnant somehow, and felt different from the noisy and crowded rhythms of summers past.

It was the late morning, just as the air started heat like a convection oven as the sun rose over the skyline— and Ian had his heart set on teaching Mickey to swim today. The conversation had come up last night at dinnertime, when Debbie was complaining about the heat wave— and they had all started reminiscing about the rickety, tin-sided pool they used to put up in the backyard years ago until Carl had taken a hatchet to it when he was 11 when he was trying to tear it down. Sitting next to Mickey at the kitchen table, thighs pressed where their chairs were scooted close together, Ian had suddenly remembered his words from their road trip to the border, years ago now:

“You could try swimming across the border.”

“I never learned how, man.”

And he’d immediately opened his mouth, not catching the words before they moved from his brain to his mouth, and asked Mickey in the middle of the dinnertime chatter: “Hey Mick, did you ever actually learn to swim?”

It was funny, and arbitrary, and stupid; they were married now, but for some reason this small fact about Mickey, the fact that he used to not know how to swim and by now he might have learned without Ian’s knowledge, made something warm pool in Ian’s stomach. He’d known Mickey, and had been itching to be closer and closer to him, for a full decade—and there were still so many things that he didn’t know. And this was proof, this question that Ian still didn’t have the answer to about some weirdly fundamental aspect of Mickey’s identity— he was always going to want to keep asking things about Mickey. And he was always going to get to.

Mickey had looked him with daggers in his eyes, then flickered a defensive glance at all the smirks growing on Ian’s siblings’ faces. “Fuck you. I was doing plenty of other shit in Mexico, didn’t really get the chance to lounge on the fucking beach.”

Ian had reached under the table and placed a hand on Mickey’s knee—a peace offering, an apology for whatever Mickey-can’t-swim quips Carl and Lip would inevitably think up as a low blow the next time they all butted heads at breakfast time— but as the chatter about backyard pools and heat waves continued at the dinner table, Ian felt an idea stirring.

Which is why the next morning he’d woken his husband up by pressing a tender kiss to his jawbone, both of their skin damp and clammy from the heat in the stuffy bedroom, and whispered into his neck:

“I wanna try something today.”

Mickey’s mind had immediately veered in… other directions, his eyebrows raising in vaguely disappointed disbelief when Ian had explained his idea to go to the public pool and teach Mickey to swim with an exuberant grin on his face; but after some very enticing morning persuasion that had a lot to do with the fact that Mickey was still half asleep while Ian had pressed kisses down his spine and dragged him out of bed and handed him a pair of swim trunks, now they were at the public pool in the nearest park at midday, with Ian leading the way and Mickey dubiously and sleepily straggling behind him.

Ian slid open the lock on the chain-link fence that surrounded the pool, the same pool that was usually crawling with groups of teenagers smoking weed and toddlers in floaties who were sticky with melted ice cream on a summer day like today. And maybe he was just all hopped up on nostalgia, but Ian was feeling cheerful— there was a lightness to the blinding summer sunshine, radiating through him as it pooled on his skin, that made him feel weirdly exhilarated and giddy about teaching Mickey to swim in this grimy Southside pool, just because he could.

“I still can’t believe you never learned how to swim.” Ian said it over his shoulder as he strode through the gate, holding it open for Mickey.

Mickey just flipped him off, following behind him and setting down two towels and the 6-pack of beers he’d grabbed from the fridge as they’d shuffled out the door minutes before. Ian grinned. He knew the beers would be warm and syrupy in minutes—the air was muggy and humid, without any hint of a breeze for relief. Ian could already feel the sweat dripping down the back of his t-shirt; he peeled it off as he walked over the sunwarmed concrete towards the pool’s edge, crumpling the shirt and throwing it on top of the pile with the beers and the towels. Mickey was hesitant, not following Ian to the border of the water just yet.

“Seriously. I can’t count the number of times I was shoved into our bacteria-infested backyard pool when I was a kid. I’m pretty sure that Frank tried to drown me in there at one point.”

Mickey just shrugged noncommittally, his fingers slack around the bottom hem of his shirt and his eyes zeroing in on the pool of water. Ian thought Mickey would say something in reply— but the only sound in the air was the faint shouting of kids playing a basketball game the street over.

Holy shit. Ian had been so buoyant and excited about his nostalgia-fueled idea of going to the public pool on a summer day and teaching his husband to swim, dragging Mickey out of the house without a second thought, that he hadn’t realized it until now— Mickey was scared.

Ian swallowed down the grin that was threatening to overtake his face— one he knew that Mickey would immediately notice and hate, because he it drove him crazy when people gave him shit in vulnerable moments like this, when Mickey couldn’t do something. So instead Ian kept talking, hoping his chatter would loosen some of Mickey’s nerves.

“Didn’t you and your brothers ever go down to the other pool over on Trumbull?”

Mickey met Ian’s eyes then, raising an annoyed eyebrow. “Clearly not.”

And, okay. This was understandably bringing up some childhood shit. Ian tried to snap Mickey out of his head— he strode over to where Mickey was standing, a good six feet from the poolside, and snaked a hand onto the back of his neck, squeezing gently in what he hoped was a grounding and comforting touch that would drain the trepidation from Mickey’s defensive stance.

“One summer Debbie was so afraid of getting drowned at the public pool that she learned how to hold her breath for 4 minutes.” Ian grinned at the memory of Debbie dunking her head in a tub of water in the kitchen, making him and Lip time her. “Honestly, it was probably for the best you never went to the public pool. It was a shit show.”

Mickey scoffed, but the lightness was back in his eyes. “If I knew how to swim back in the day I probably woulda been the one doing the drowning.”

Ian barked out a laugh— and why did he immediately turn back into his 15-year-old self, with a god-awful crush on Mickey Milkovich, whenever Mick said shit like that? He pressed his lips into a smile, squeezing Mickey’s shoulder once more for good measure.

“Yeah, yeah. Okay, king of the Southside. You ready to get in the water?” Ian’s hand trailed down from its grasp on Mickey’s shoulderblades, dropping to encircle Mickey’s wrist and guide him towards the water.

Mickey immediately recoiled, yanking his hand from Ian’s hold and taking a step back, squinting and holding up a hand to block the bright rays of sun out of his eyes now that he wasn’t standing in Ian’s shadow.

“Fuck d’you mean? I’m not just gonna fucking hop in there and drown. You gotta show me what to do.”

Ian grinned again, without being able to hold it back. He knew what Mickey was like when he was afraid of something— defensive and grumbly and avoidant to touch. He rolled his eyes. “Can’t really teach you to swim when we’re not in the water, Mick. C’mon.”

Ian walked over to sit on the edge, then slid his torso down into the pool. The water was lukewarm and tepid, barely providing any relief from the sticky air— but it felt nice. Ian let out a little breath of relief from the heat as he waded over to the shallow end. Mickey was still standing by the mound of the towels the ground, watching him warily. Ian raised his eyebrows.

“You coming?”

Rolling his eyes, Mickey aggravatedly pulled off his shirt, tossing it behind him— sunrays bounced off of Mickey’s pale skin, owing mostly to the fact that Mickey had barely left the house in the last few weeks because of their prolonged “honeymoon.” He slowly walked to the very edge of the pool and, in a movement that made Ian’s heart grow ten sizes, hesitantly dipped a toe into the water like a cat trying to paw at something. A corner of Mickey’s mouth flickered downwards almost imperceptibly, a worry line sprouting on his forehead.

“I don’t know, man.”

Ian breathed out a laugh. Leave it to Mickey Milkovich, shit-talking king of the Southside, to be afraid of the shallow end of a public pool. Ian reached out a hand in what he hoped was a comforting gesture, still smiling like a sappy motherfucker at his painfully endearing husband.

“C’mon Mick, just stand here with me first.” Ian was waist-deep in the shallow end, the water pressing against his upper thighs— he knew that at this height the water would be at Mickey’s waist, right where his swim trunks met his hipbones.

Mickey’s brows furrowed from where he was still perched on the concrete lip of the pool ledge, his two feet firmly rooted. “Explain what I gotta do first. To swim, or whatever.”

Ian blew out a breath, still grinning like an idiot. “It’s not that hard, Mick. You just gotta circle your arms and circle your legs. But you have to get in the water first.”

Ian treaded over, pushing through the water to where he could rest his upper arms on the edge of the pool beside where Mickey was standing, staring up at him with what he hoped was a convincingly pleading face. Mickey’s eyes were still fixated on the water, lapping at the pool’s edge from where Ian had rippled through it. And suddenly Ian had an idea.

With a teasing grin, he reached a wet hand out from the water and encircled it around Mickey’s ankle, splattering the concrete with drops of water. Mickey immediately jerked like an electric shock had jolted through his body.

“You gonna come in, or do I have to make you?”

Mickey tried to shake his ankle out of Ian’s grasp, but Ian had hold of him with an iron fist. Mickey leaned over and tried to swat at Ian’s arm without losing his balance on the pool’s edge.

“Cut that shit out right now, Gallagher.”

Ian just grinned, squeezing Mickey’s ankle like he was about to tug him in. “Come on, Mick.”

Mickey’s eyes widened and, just as Ian had imagined he would— he started to freak the fuck out.

“Ian stop that shit right now, I swear to god I will fucking murder you if you—”

They were at the 6-foot marker in the pool, right where it was deep enough for Mickey to stand on the very tips of his toes; and with this knowledge, Ian tugged at Mickey’s calf— causing him to falter, his arms circling like a cartoon character before he lost his balance and crashed into the water on his side.

Ian immediately placed his hands on Mickey’s hips, standing him upright before his head even fell under the water— but Mickey was still sputtering and splashing, like the drama queen that he was. Once Mickey regained his composure and realized he was easily standing on the bottom of the pool, his head bobbing just above the water, he swiftly splashed healthy burst of water into Ian’s face, the chlorine stinging his eyes and nose.

“Fuck you, Gallagher!”

Ian coughed at the water that had shot up his nose, but immediately splashed Mickey back—and then, because there wasn’t any way this whole pool situation was going to go anyways, he and Mickey were immediately engaged in a life-and-death splash battle, circling each other in the middle section of the pool.

Ian was laughing so hard he felt a stitch in his side— and Mickey was finally grinning again, water dripping down his cheeks and clinging to his hair. After a few minutes Ian threw his hands in the air in surrender, the water cresting at his shoulders.

“Truce!”

Mickey splashed one more surge of water at Ian’s chest for good measure, grinning like a kid in a candy store— then he took a step closer to Ian, eyebrows raised.

“Truce.”

Ian beamed down at him, pressing a quick peck to the top of his damp hair. “Sorry for throwing you in the pool.”

Mickey rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah.”

“But in my defense, it had to happen eventually.”

Mickey shoved him squarely in the chest, taking a step back. “You ruined the fucking truce.”

Ian gave a smug smirk. “Do you wanna learn how to swim, or not?”

Mickey flicked another burst of water at him, just enough to cast a slew of droplets onto Ian’s cheeks. “Alright. Get coaching, Michael Phelps.”

Ian hadn’t really considered how he was actually going to teach Mickey to swim— but it couldn’t be that hard, right? He tried to think back to when Lip had taught him how to tread water, on an equally as sweltering day in the backyard pool, when the yard was packed with lawn chairs and drunk neighbors and smelled of ashy barbeque smoke.

“Okay. So you’ve gotta move your arms in circles, kinda, to stay floating. And your legs too.”

Ian swam over to the deeper end of the pool, just an arm’s length away from where he and Mickey’s feet could touch, and tried to demonstrate how to tread water. “I feel like the easiest way for you to learn is just by doing it. C’mere.”

Mickey looked at him reluctantly, brows furrowed again in an outward display of his bundled nerves. “No fucking way.”

Ian sighed in exasperation. “C’mon, Mick. I’ve got you. I’m not gonna let you drown, you can hold on to me the whole time.”

Mickey raised an eyebrow— but then hesitantly took a step towards Ian, the water reaching up to the bottom of his chin.

“Alright, good. Now step where you can’t reach and try to tread water like I did.”

Mickey stepped forward again, then started to circle his arms under the water— and he was doing great, for a second, before he seemed to get too in his head about the mechanics and started to grit his teeth.

“Little help here, Gallagher?”

Ian grinned and stepped forward. “Here, you can hang onto me.” He stood where Mickey could reach and grab onto his shoulders if he needed to— but Mickey seemed to regain his confidence, and was starting to steadily, if a little bit clumsily, tread water.

He kept it up for a while, until Ian could see that he was overexerting himself— waving his arms under the water with a little too much gusto, brows furrowed and his teeth digging into his lower lip in concentration.

“Mick, you’ve got it. Chill out for a sec.”

Ian reached an arm out, a branch for Mickey to grab on to— because he had been joking before, yes, but he really didn’t want Mickey to fucking drown— and when Mickey grasped onto it, Ian pulled Mickey towards him in the water, kicking backwards so they were suspended in the deeper end of the pool with Mickey clinging to Ian’s neck.

Mickey looked nervous as Ian veered them towards deeper waters, his eyes darting from side to side where they were floating, his fingers digging into the back of Ian’s neck— and Ian smirked at how freaked out he seemed, standing only a few feet from where they could both confidently stand on the tiled pool bottom. But Mickey didn’t resist, or try to propel himself back into the shallower waters— he let himself cling on to Ian, fingers interlaced behind the tops of Ian’s shoulders, as he kept them afloat. Ian laughed softly in a warm, wet gust across Mickey’s cheek. “You okay?”

He could feel the heat radiating off of Mickey’s body, squeezing up close against him— and Ian couldn’t help it, the wave of fondness that came over him as he looked down at where Mickey was pressed against his chest; trusting Ian to keep them above the water, trusting Ian enough to go along with his stupid plan to teach him to swim in a public pool on a random morning just because Ian wanted to. Ian couldn’t help but feel warmth in his stomach at this simple moment, at the two of them bobbing in the pool— at teaching his husband to swim, something Mickey’d never gotten to do as a kid but something that they had the rest of their lives to do together.

“Maybe we could teach Franny to swim next summer. If we have our own place.”

As he said it, Ian hoped that Mickey could see the flood of hopes that he had for them in his eyes— that he wanted a place with a pool, and a balcony, maybe a backyard, and maybe even a fucking garden—he’d always wanted to grow tomatoes. More than anything he wanted to build something sturdy, that could stand up to whatever ground would inevitably shift beneath them in the years to come— he’d been thinking about that a lot these days, especially with all of the pandemic shit that had pulled a rug out from under this entire neighborhood.

Mickey’s gaze flickered up from where it had been boring a panicky hole in Ian’s sternum, meeting Ian’s eyes at the phrase “our own place”— and Ian instantly knew that he got it, that he could see the dreams that Ian was building for the two of them right in front of their eyes. That after months and years of obstacles and chaos and other voices infiltrating their heads, now it was just them— now it was just Ian and Mickey, clinging to each other and drifting through the calm, chlorinated waters.

And maybe it was their proximity, or the intensity Ian knew he was pouring out in his gaze, but instantly the air between them shifted as Mickey looked up— starting to hang heavy like the press of the humidity in the air. Their faces were centimeters apart— and Mickey’s lips parted slightly, his eyes now cast downward at Ian’s lips. Ian could smell the sweet, warm beer on Mickey’s breath, mingling with his own; he looked at Mickey, whose arms were still wrapped around his neck, water dripping down his face from the hair that was fanning over his forehead—and Ian just had to pull him in, had to place a hand in the damp hair at the nape of Mickey’s neck and tug him closer, backing them against the tiled wall of the pool.

Ian could taste the faintest bitterness of chlorine on Mickey’s lips, from the water droplets lingering there, as he took Mickey’s bottom lip between his teeth. Mickey’s hands were still limply wrapped around Ian’s neck, keeping himself afloat— even though Ian had backed them against a wall in the shallow end of the pool again, and Mickey could probably touch his toes to the ground if he wanted to.

Ian raised his hand from under the water, wanting Mickey closer— he pressed a hand to the side of Mickey’s neck, slick with water, and slid a thumb over Mickey’s collarbone, pressing down with the pad of his fingers.

And Mickey gave a little involuntary noise from the back of his throat, sending a jolt down Ian’s spine.

Ian’s hands circling Mickey’s neck was definitely not a foreign concept while they were kissing— it was something they did a lot these days, especially as their hours in bed had taken a turn from the crazed, I-missed-your-body-so-fucking-much sex they were having in the beginning days of being in prison together and those early months after Mickey had gotten released— but both in prison and during this fucking quarantine, they’d gotten a bit more experimental, and a bit more reckless—especially before Ian had gotten his warehouse job and they were still on their structureless “honeymoon,” spending entire days lounging in bed.

It was those days of lazy, languid kisses, after years and years of already knowing each other, that Ian realized that he was maybe a little bit obsessed with Mickey’s neck. He’d always joked about liking Mickey’s legs, and that was true too (if he was being honest, there wasn’t a part of Mickey’s body that didn’t make his blood run hotter)— but the first time Mickey had grabbed Ian’s hand and put it up to his neck while they were tangled together, pressing down until Ian’s hand covered most of his throat, Ian knew that they’d opened Pandora’s fucking box.

By this point, Ian’s hand was pretty much always on Mickey’s neck at some point while they were fucking or even just making out— if he was being totally honest, Ian’s hand was on Mickey’s neck more often than not in lots of contexts these days, once they realized how much they both loved it. But there was something about this current moment, of Mickey wantonly desiring a point of contact there, right now, while they were very randomly and decidedly making out while floating in a public pool on a lazy weekday afternoon, that made Ian’s blood run hotter than usual, and rush quicker through his veins.

Ian let the pads of his fingers creep up the velvet skin of the side of Mickey’s neck, pressing a little deeper, a prelude— he could feel the vibration of Mickey’s heartbeat starting to flutter from where Mickey was still pressed against his chest, still clinging to his neck in the water.

They’d already extensively discussed limits and everything, Mickey would tap his wrist twice if shit got too intense— but even with that in mind, Ian pulled apart from Mickey for a second, trailing ghosts of kisses up the side of his neck and nipping at the underside of Mickey’s jaw. Mickey stretched his neck back and gave a little involuntary sputter of a moan, bubbling out of his mouth before he could stop it. He fisted a hand in Ian’s hair, at the nape of his neck, and leaned forward again to press their lips together with more fervor.

Ian pulled back again, his upper back resting against the concrete lip of the pool. Mickey looked disheveled and wrecked, half-dry chlorine-crusted hair sticking up from where Ian’s other hand had been cradling the back of his head, his blue eyes gleaming and catching the over-bright summer light. Mickey was still clinging his arms around Ian’s neck, holding on— they were in a fucking pool, and Mickey still couldn’t really fucking swim yet— and even though they were standing in a place where Mickey’s toes could certainly touch the ground, the whole thing felt weirdly insular and intimate, like they had to cling to each other.

Mickey raised his eyebrows at Ian, like he was daring him to keep going.

Ian leaned forward, breathing heavily into Mickey’s mouth, but not pressing their lips together yet—and he reached a hand up again, against Mickey’s tender skin. Mickey’s legs were wrapped around Ian’s hips now, locked like a vice to keep himself upright in the water— and he pressed a little harder, gently pulsing at the sides of Mickey’s neck, in tandem with their lips pressing together over and over again as the warm waters surrounded them—the whole thing, the whole combination, made Ian feel indescribably floaty and weird and warm and blissed out; his skin stinging like ice and fire at every point of contact, electricity zapping his nerve endings wherever his fingertips met Mickey’s skin. Mickey fisted his hand harder at the back of Ian’s hair, nodding slightly—and they were definitely not going to fuck here, in the filth of a Southside public pool, but this insular closeness, the knowing what they both wanted to right now, was equally as thrilling and fulfilling to Ian in the moment. He could almost feel his own heart beating, reverberating as it pressed against Mickey’s chest, vibrating straight through Mickey and back to him as they clung to each other in the water.

Mickey’s body was thrumming, letting out little gasps of breath between kisses and touches—and Ian pulled back and dragged his lips down the side of Mickey’s neck, inhaling the sunwarmed skin. Fuck. He was never, never going to get enough of this.

Later, they’d dragged their water-heavy limbs back through the still summer streets to the Gallagher house, their skin pink and their bodies exhausted from soaking up the sun— and they’d collapsed into bed, feeling the dried chlorine coating their skin.

Ian reached a hand up, rubbing a thumb over Mickey’s cheek, their bodies pliant and fatigued— and pressed a kiss to his forehead.

“Thanks for letting me teach you how to swim.”

Mickey had smirked. “Yup, that was definitely the only highlight of today. Swimming.”

#a fluffy premise AND ian being obsessed with mickey’s neck??#what more could u want #*blows kiss to elias and stella* for u #also yes i did have a word document on my computer titled ‘neck fic’#what about it #ty for the prompt anon this was truly an experience to write #ily<3 #gallavich #gallavich fic #shameless #shameless imagine #ian gallagher #mickey milkovich #ian and mickey #ian x mickey #ixm #gallavich fanfiction #cw choking

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love-sapphirerose · 4 years ago

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Yashahime: Princess Half-Demon Episode 16 Review

https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/review/yashahime-princess-half-demon/episode-16/.168486

I got a bad feeling about "Double-Edged Moroha" from the moment it started. You'd think, given that last week's episode randomly decided to break away from the story to have a flashback story time with Riku, that the show would take even a scant minute or two to establish things like context and pacing: Where the girls are. Why they are there. Some vague idea about how long it has been since that godforsaken misadventure with the Rapey Mountain Arsonist. You know, the simple stuff that helps the audience figure out what the hell is going on. But no, it doesn't even take a couple of seconds for Yashahime to start screwing up the most basic rules of “How to Tell a Coherent Story”, as we're plunged right into the middle of some anonymous mountain valley or something, with Moroha staring down Yawaragi, telling her cousins that there's some major beef going back three whole years that needs settling. If you don't recognize who this woman is, she's one of the Wolf Tribe members who has appeared exactly one time in the series before now, in a single frame from the very end of last-week's episode.

It honestly feels like something got supremely screwed up in the show's pre-production, and the Yashahime staff realized that they needed to cut an episode right out of the middle of the run, so they took the final scenes from the episode that led up to this climactic showdown between Moroha and Yawaragi, cut everything else that came before it, and slapped it on to the beginning of “Double-Edged Moroha”. Maybe that would explain the seemingly arbitrary placement of the Big Reveal episode from last week? The way it was written meant it could have been aired at almost any time and made an equal amount of sense (read: Not a whole lot), and the only information from “Farewell Under the Lunar Eclipse” that ties into “Double-Edged Moroha” at all is that Moroha ended up with Kouga and the wolves when her parents got sucked into the Black Pearl. If we hadn't gotten that single shot of Moroha being left to the wolves by Hachi, then “Double-Edged Moroha” would have come across as completely nonsensical. As it stands, it's now only 95% nonsense, which is technically an improvement. Good job, I guess?

If you couldn't tell, this was yet another episode of Yashahime that made me absolutely furious with how poorly written and executed it was, but in order to fully explain why, I'll need to cover the events of “Double-Edged Moroha” in chronological order, because the flashback-structure of the episode is stupid and pointless. We begin with the very last flashback, which shows us how Yawaragi attempted to train Moroha in the art of mastering her demonic transformations. We later learn that Kagome apparently placed a seal on these powers in some scene that we never got to actually see because the show was too busy failing at Towa and Setsuna's backstories, but Yawaragi decided to give Moroha the power to transform into Beniyasha with the rouge. Yawaragi then spends years yelling at Moroha for relying on the rouge too much and warning her about how too many transformations will result in her becoming a permanently bloodthirsty monster, so, uh, great call there, Yawaragi. Really thought that one through.

Anyways, one of the days Moroha goes berserk with her Beniyasha self and ends up calling down the wrath of a horde of

terribly-animated Birds of Paradise

before passing out. Instead of doing the logical thing and running away, Yawaragi just sort of stands there and decides they're screwed. That's when a weasel man (who is very helpfully named “Weasel Man”) wanders into frame from literally nowhere and offers to sell Yawaragi the Armor of the Iron Rat he's wearing, so that she can blow up the Birds of Paradise and whatnot. Not only is the completely random appearance of this obviously sketchy weasel not draw Yawaragi's suspicions at all, she also doesn't seem to find it odd that the guy can't even remove the armor himself without getting another person to unlock it with a key. Keep in mind that, for the entire duration of this stupid, stupid conversation, Yawaragi could have very easily just run away from all those birds and hid in a cave or something, but no, she casually takes the armor from the weasel, and wouldn't you know it, the darned thing is cursed to eventually crush its wearer to death unless they pay an exorbitant fee to the smithy rats for another key.

This is, to put it mildly, a very silly chain of events that do not paint Yawaragi in the smartest light, but we just have to roll with it, because that set of Iron-Rat Armor is precisely why Moroha has found herself sold into indentured servitude for the last three years. You see, Yawaragi decided that Moroha needed to complete the “crucible of Kodoku”, which has the eleven-year-old fighting a horde of demons in a spooky cave by herself to…get stronger, and master fighting without relying on Beniyasha, somehow? Yawaragi claims that Moroha needs to absorb the powers of the strongest demon in the cave, but she definitely did not do that, and we've never seen any of these so-called disastrous consequences of the Beniyasha transformation so far, which makes the entire venture basically pointless for our little heroine. For Yawaragi's part, the whole thing seems to have been an excuse to do some gambling with Jyubei, because she previously lost a bunch of ryou in the demon gambling house, which one apparently has to travel through in order to even get to the Crucible of Kodoku; also she needs, like, thirteen Ryou in order to buy a key for the armor that is going to eventually kill her. All of this leads to Jyubei offering to buy Moroha as his own little bounty-hunting slave, which Yawaragi accepts instantaneously, and there you have it: The ridiculous, contrived, and ultimately meaningless explanation for why Moroha has been trying to buy her way out of debt for three years.

Then, the second flashback, which is actually the most recent chronologically, shows us how it took Yawaragi three whole years to get to that damned hidden village of rats, only to discover that Konton arrived just beforehand and killed all of them. Whoopsie! We even get a nice shot of a dead rat mother cradling the corpse of her rat child – a weirdly dark moment that Yashahime certainly hasn't earned or anything – just to remind you that these Four Perils are super evil and powerful (despite the fact that they keep getting their asses kicked by a trio of teenagers who can barely be bothered to acknowledge their existence). Konton makes a deal with Yawaragi that he'll hand over the key if she kills Moroha and the others, and she accepts. “But!” Yashahime then asks, “Is she really going to betray her adopted daughter figure? Or is Yawaragi preparing Moroha for the final and most important lesson of her training?”

The answer is clearly supposed to be that second one, but Yashahime is just so goddamn bad at even the simplest character writing that the point doesn't land. Throughout all of these flashbacks, Moroha and Yawaragi have been dueling one-on-one, with Towa and Setsuna being told to sit uselessly on the sidelines, and Yawaragi keeps insisting that Moroha use her “creative imagination” to beat her, instead of relying on the rouge. This kind of falls flat when Moroha's victory just comes from her busting out a new special move, the Crimson Dragon Wave, which is neither a creative or imaginative resolution to the fight. Every Yashahime fight boils down to some combination of the girls' different special attacks, so why is this any different?

Way late in the episode, Konton suddenly teleports into the fight to gloat at Yawaragi. Nobody else really notices or acknowledges Konton's arrival, though you'd think this is the point where Towa and Setsuna would get off their butts and do something, because it isn't like Moroha's honor would be besmirched by kicking Konton's ass again. The show even forgets to include Konton in the next couple of shots of Yawaragi reacting to Moroha's attacks, even though it is absolutely critical that he be standing right behind her, because when Moroha unleashes the Crimson Dragon Wave, she whips behind Konton to hold him down in an act of self-sacrifice.

Here's the kicker, though: The guy can teleport. Yawaragi just saw him do this, and not thirty seconds earlier! So it shouldn't be surprising to anybody when Konton uses his Rainbow Pearl powers to teleport out of Yawaragi's arms and escapes anyways while the other girls throw some useless attacks at him. So, to recap: The audience learns that Yawaragi created the whole issue of Moroha's Beniyasha transformation in the first place, and she then spent years fruitlessly attempting to undo the problem, including purchasing a deadly set of cursed armor from a random weasel that was traipsing about the forest one day. All of this led to Moroha being sold to Jyubei, which was ultimately pointless because Yawaragi just ended up being coerced into attacking Moroha by Konton, and the one thing that might have made this entire cavalcade of terminally stupid decisions worthwhile – killing Konton – ended up being foiled by random Rainbow Pearl Powers. In other words, absolutely nothing of importance was learned, the girls are not one step closer to any of their goals, and Moroha inadvertently murdered Yawaragi for no reason. It is positively stunning when Yawaragi dies, and the show has the gall to play the moment off like some huge, emotional payoff…except Moroha is more or less fine by the time the credits roll.

Good Lord, this show is continuing to outdo itself in all of the worst ways. I won't damn it with the non-score of Episode 14, because “Double-Edged Moroha” at least has some halfway-decent looking action to try and distract you from how bad everything else is. I did, however, spend far too much time teaching myself how to use image-editing software so I could slap together this dumb meme that perfectly sums up my feelings about Yashahime at the moment. That said, it was probably more time and effort than anybody working on the show spent going over its sorry excuse of a script.

#anti yashahime #anti hanyo no yashahime #anti towa #inuyasha

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littleeyesofpallas · 5 years ago

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Bleach - Snake Name Games

Still mulling over where exactly I want to take this series of posts [1][2] after being asked about interesting zanpakutou names. I was just gonna do a short blurb about Sarugaki Hiyori’s Shikai at first, but there are a lot of weird vaguely adjacent characters, so this one’s going to be kind of aimless...

Her sword is Kubikiri Orochi[馘大蛇], written with the kanji for 馘:“Decapitation,” 大: “Great”/“Big,” and 蛇:“Snake.” Viz translates it as “Head-Slicing Serpent” which is kind of a weird choice, but other than missing a specific reference, it’s not technically that big a mistranslation. But of course there is a reference, because Orochi [大蛇] isn’t just the words “Big Snake” it’s a reference to the mythological creature, Yamato-no-Orochi[八岐大蛇].

The Yamato-no-Orochi sees a lot of exposure in pop media. It’s an enormous snake with 8 tails and 8 heads spanning the length of 8 hills and valleys, red eyes, and moss and cypress trees growing on it enormous back, and a belly that is constantly bleeding and inflamed. The Orochi would annually devour the daughters of a village, until it was defeated by the god, Susanoo. It was tricked into drinking itself to sleep and then beheaded eight times. From its corpse, Susanoo retrieved the legendary sword, Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi.

The fact that the kanji 馘 isn’t commonly used makes it kind of confusing to parse as part of a name at a glance. But I do recognize the more common, Kubikiri[首斬り] which is the noun “Beheading” (as in the act there of, not the verb) or just “Decapitation.” But I’ve also seen it translated (granted with some liberties based on context) as “Executioner.” Alternatively, Kubikiri[首切り] also means “Beheading”/“Decapitation” but apparently can refer to “a small samurai sword used for decapitation.” So, I think the meaning that the name was supposed to convey was,

“Sword-for-Decapitating Giant[8-Headed]Snake”

...and not, “A Serpent that Slices Heads” the way Viz wrote it out. Which makes sense given that the sword itself is a giant serrated cleaver/saw, appropriately sized for cutting off the head of a giant snake. While the mistranslation would suggest her spirit to be the Orochi, this reading makes it sound more like her spirit is Susanoo himself? Which is a curious idea...

But there's a little more going on here... Because at some point or another, there became kind of a recurring trend of the Orochi being depicted as a white snake, which has vague associations with the Lady White Snake myth, from China. In fact Hakujaden[白蛇伝]:“White Snake Story” (Arbitrarily localized in English as, “Panda and the Magic Serpent”) has a particular special place in Japanese pop culture as it was the first ever full color anime film, in 1958. It was a big influence on an early generation of animators, including Miyazaki Hayao.

In it a young boy is accidentally involved with a magic snake being fed immortality granting medicine, which amplifies her existing magic by multiple lifetimes. She is grateful to the boy for it, and after he grows up the two meet again, the snake being in the guise of a woman, and they fall in love. (That’s the real REAL short version anyway...)

And this is just me going out on a bit of a limb, but I feel like the random intersection of these two myths is where a lot of Orochi characters who are also shapeshifting humans comes from, because the actual Orochi never had this association with being a white snake, having magic powers, or taking on human form, yet it seems to be the prevailing role of Orochi characters in pop fiction.

Also, equally unrelated to the actual Orochi myth and the Lady White Snake myth, some renditions of the Orochi make it a fullblown dragon rather than just a monstrous snake. I don’t know that this comes from anything in particular, other than just wanting to amp up the threat factor of the Orochi to make Susanoo look more triumphant as a hero... There’s some possibility that it’s a conflation of the Nine-headed Dragon God, Kuuzuryuushin[九頭龍神]. Funny enough, I’ve seen Kuuzuryuushin drawn as a nine headed snake instead of a dragon as well...

In fact Kubo’s already has one character who seems to be associated with the Lady White Snake myth: Cyan Sung Sun. Her Resurreccion, Anaconda is written with the kanji [白蛇姫]: “White Snake Princess,” which is a conspicuous name for anyone familiar with the very well known myth. But I think we all remember someone else who is associated with White Snake imagery... Ichimaru Gin.

There’s not actually a lot of word play with Gin and snakes. His name is a homonym for “silver” like his white/silver hair, and his “fox-eyed” look is actually leverage to be more snake-like a lot of the time, so those two bits together kind of orbit around the idea of a White Snake theme. And of course he spends most of the series living up to his cold-blooded, treacherous, viper-waiting-to-strike kind of persona. But it’s not like he or his sword have any snake themes in their names.

Whether or not Kubo had plans for Hiyori to have a more substantial confrontation with Gin, we’ll never really know. Sadly the one we got didn’t last long and wasn’t particularly exciting or satisfying. But it was an interesting brief moment during the weekly publications. And if anyone’s in need of some fanfic prompt, I’ve always been kind of fascinated by the idea that there could have been a parallel between Gin’s relationship with Rangiku and the boy and Lady White Snake of myth, with Gin in the role of powerful snake indebted to and in love with the normal mortal who unknowingly helped them gain great powers.

But while we’re on the subject... There’s another white snake loitering around the Bleach franchise: One half of Zabimaru... sort of...

This one is weird, because by all rights it was the anime, not Kubo, that set the precedent of Zabimaru having white fur and a white snake tail. Zabimaru, btw, is a mythical creature called a Nue, which is supposed to have the head of a monkey, the legs of a tiger, body of a dog, and a snake for a tail. Zabimaru doesn’t quite fit that full description, as it’s predominantly just a baboon with a snake tail, and Renji’s tribal tattoo pattern substituted in for tiger stripes.

But the one time Kubo actually colored in Zabimaru himself was part of a joke omake comic (where Renji and Hisagi find out, in the aftermath of Renji’s fight with Byakuya, that Mayuri can apparently perform cosmetic surgery to zanpakutou) and even though they’re only imagining a busty Zabimar as a punchline, Kubo made the fur what I think was supposed to be an olive green/grey, which matches the description of the Olive Baboon’s fur. The anime sort of took that and drifted more green when they adapted the omake, and then drifted it even further when the Zanpakutou Rebellion filler arc brought zabimaru back... In the end her fur looks both nothing like the original color and nothing like the anime’s white furred Zabimaru.

So, hand-in-hand with that, it seems kind of arbitrary that they made snake boy white, apart from the previously mentioned associations of Snakes-in-Human-Form as a trope and Lady White Snake. But I figured if I didn’t mention it someone might ask, and oddly enough it is more of a coincidence than anything else, at least as far as I can tell.

Correction: I totally forgot, when Renji gets his True Name Bankai from Ichibe he appears to have a “mode” where the snake spine that is normally looped around his waist like a belt unfurls to the call, Orochi-ou[オロチ王]: “Orochi King.” So there is a direct reference to the Orochi, although weirdly it’s only in kana and not kanji? But I have no idea for what reason. And in any case, the second bankai came after the anime created snake boy, so it’s entirely possible it was just Kubo riffing off their continuity rather than something he’d had in mind when he made Zabimaru the first time.

Funny thing: Hiyori’s surname, Sarugaki[猿柿] is written with the kanji for monkey[猿], something she points out herself when she’s first introduced. (I did a whole rambling thing on the Visored’s names too, naturally...) So she and Renji both have associations with monkey and orochi imagery. It’s kind of a shame Hiyori and Renji never even got to be in the same room for their wild type routines to interact.

#Bleach #Hiyori Sarugaki #Kubikiri Orochi #yamata no orochi #orochi #zabimaru

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erictmason · 4 years ago

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The Road To “Godzilla VS. Kong”, Day One

KING KONG VS. GODZILLA (AMERICAN VERSION)

Originally Released: June 26th, 1963

Director: Ishiro Honda

Writers: Shinichi Sekizawa, Paul Mason and Bruce Howard

Starring: Tadao Takashima, Kenji Sahara, Ichiro Arashima, Mie Hama, Michael Keith, Harry Halcomb

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“King Kong VS. Godzilla” is a movie whose reputation often precedes it amongst certain circles of Genre Film fans. Even if one is unaware of the convoluted, more than slightly seedy story behind its creation (short version: the original “King Kong”’s special-effects artist, Willis O’Brien, was interested in creating a sequel that would have pitted Kong against a giant animalistic version of the Frakenstein Monster, but shady producer John Beck wound up stealing the idea and, when American studios balked at the project for fear that the use of stop-motion animation to realize the effects work would be too expensive, wound up shopping it to the more cost-effective Toho Studios in Japan, who reconceived it as a new “Godzilla” project in hopes of revitalizing interest in the character), it is still one of the most singularly important Giant Monster Movies ever made. For one thing, it basically defined The Kaiju Movie as we know it today; sure, the original “Gojira” from 1954 (and by extension its Americanized adaptation, “Godzilla: King of the Monsters” in 1956) may have effectively created the genre, but you’ll notice the majority of such movies that exist today are more about Fanciful Title Bouts between two Clashing Monsters rather than somber moody Allegories about the horrors of Nuclear Weapons. For another, it’s the movie that really put Godzilla himself on the map as a Big Star in his own right; at the time, he only had two prior films to his name, and while one of them was the aforementioned genre-creating watershed “Gojira”, the other was “Godzilla’s Counterattack” from 1956, which proved such a box-office disappointment that it put the character into retirement for the better part of a decade (and to give you a sense of just how much less weight the name “Godzilla” carried back then, when that movie was released in America in 1959, it was initially re-titled “Gigantis The Fire Monster”). With “King Kong VS. Godzilla”, however, he would begin to star in more and more movies, building a film franchise that continues to this day.

So it’s a bit of a shame that I’ve never liked it all that much.

To be clear, the “it” in question here is specifically the American version of the movie, which is the one most Western audiences would be familiar with since, until recently, it was the only one readily available to us (though Criterion finally corrected that back in 2019, when they included the original Japanese version of the movie as a bonus feature in their “Showa Era” collector’s set). Certainly, it’s the one that I grew up watching as a kid, when my mom, ever so protective and knowing how easily upset I could be when Fictional Characters I Loved got hurt, made sure to watch ahead to see who exactly won the title match-up (and since it was Kong, I wouldn’t actually get around to finishing my viewing of the movie for a good long while). Back then, of course, I viewed it very much through that childish prism of who I thought should win, and it was exactly the kind of Schoolyard Logic you’d expect: Kong was supposed to be a great deal smaller than Godzilla, and where Godzilla had his iconic fire breath, Kong had no extraordinary powers; Kid Me understandably concluded that this match-up really ought to be a shoe-in for Godzilla, which worked out well since Godzilla just so happened to be the one Kid Me actually cared about. Kid Me was thus quite irritated to discover that, for the sake of this movie, Kong had in fact been significantly sized up and given random electricity-absorbing powers. It felt like cheating to Kid Me, and it left me less than positively disposed towards the film proper.

These days, of course, I’m able to give the film a somewhat fairer shake, though I would be lying if I said that My Inner Childish Fan-Boy is completely quiet on the matter (in particular, it always bothers me that, to emphasize the advantage Kong’s electrical powers give him in their fight, the movie explicitly cites Godzilla’s “vulnerability” to electricity, despite one of the most singularly iconic images of the original “Gojira” being his ability to walk straight through a power-line barricade). Indeed, my most recent re-watch for this very review honestly left me feeling fonder toward it than I was even on my last most recent re-watch (back in 2014, in preparation for the then-upcoming Gareth Edwards “Godzillla”, which we’ll also be getting to in this re-watch soon). The portrayal of the title monsters themselves in particular left me much happier this time around than it has in the past; the design for Godzilla himself- thick around the center with big heavy-browed eyes and what appears to be a constantly self-amused grin, huge sharp claws that dominate the fingers and a tail that moves with a real sense of weight and purpose-took me a long time to warm up to, for example, but these days I would happily cite it as one of the very best of the original series. Kong gets it a bit worse, sadly; the suit they design for him here (a fact that original “Kong” director Merian C. Cooper openly despised, incidentally; the idea of portraying Kong as just some guy in a gorilla costume was one of the things he explicitly set out to avoid in the original movie) has a distinctive enough face if not an especially memorable one, but the costume always looks and feels a bit raggedy, with the sagging pecs and ill-fitted arms (throughout the movie the suit switches between “regular” arms designed to allow the actor mobility, and extended arms to help give it a more ape-like gait; the result is that both versions feel weirdly out of place on the costume a lot of the time) looking especially awkward. However, even beyond how they look, the way the monsters act is genuinely enjoyable, with Haruo Nakajima as Godzilla and Shoichi Hirose as Kong both putting in fantastic performances that imbue them with a great sense of personality that is just consistently delightful all movie long. Whether it’s Godzilla hopping around, arms flailing in triumph whenever he manages to pull off another victory, or Kong drunkenly swallowing up giant pots’ worth of a narcotic usd to keep him docile, the movie very visibly delights in imbuing these creatures with fun foibles, and It’s no coincidence that the it’s at its strongest, not so much when the monsters are fighting, but when they are simply interacting as actual Characters: Godzilla here feels often like a particularly arrogant, boundlessly-energized child, while Kong is a bit more confused and subdued but quick to anger when irritated; their first meeting, when both these strong visible personalities most openly bounce off each other, is unquestionably my favorite moment of the movie.

The rest of it isn’t exactly bad, per se, but it is a lot less entertaining. Some of that is simply what the American version inherited from the Japanese original, not least of all the noxiously racist portrayal of the Natives living on a remote pacific island with Kong (here named “Faro Island” for some reason instead of the usual “Skull Island”). On top of the sins it recreates from the original “King Kong” (a fairly ooga-booga understanding of What Islanders Are Like, all of whom are portrayed by non-Native actors slathered in brownface make-up), it also includes a decently insulting bit wherein the initially-hostile islanders are pacified by the introduction of “magic” in the form of a hand-held radio and cartons of cigarettes. There’s also the fact that the plot is driven almost entirely by Random Contrivance rather than anything that flows naturally from either the characters or the premise; Godzilla and Kong have no real compelling reason to meet, let alone fight, other than the pure coincidence of their both happening to be active at around the same time in the same part of the world (the American version attempts to ameliorate this somewhat by stating that the two are “instinctive rivals” who will be “naturally driven to destroy one another”, but that flimsy lip-service to Motivation just winds up making the otherwise-arbitrary plotting feel all the worse), and we are constantly bombarded by Total Coincidences as a way of shuffling the characters around from place to place with dizzying frequency. But some of those troubles are only exacerbated by the approach the American version has taken to the material. We’ll talk about this more tomorrow, but the Japanese “King Kong VS. Godzilla” is, at heart, a Satirical Comedy; this, unsurprisingly, was not an idea that went over well with Universal Studios in America, who chose to try and reshape that comedy into a more traditional Monster Movie. An understandable objective, but not one the Japanese cut of the film made easy to achieve; to avoid the most overt Comic bits meant cutting almost all of the human characters in the film (most notably the eccentric executive Mr. Tako, played by Ichiro Arishima) down to only their most essential appearances, which in turn means that they all wind up feeling vaguely undefined and out of place in their own story (this feels especially true of our ostensible main character, Tadao Takashima‘s Sakurai, who is present enough to FEEL like a main character but has little left to do in this cut of the film). To make up the weight of all that cut footage, meanwhile, we get gobs of new footage consisting mostly of Michael Keith as a United Nations reporter talking at us in the most stultifying way possible, often joined by Harry Holcombe as an equally stultifying scientist (who apparently gets his knowledge of dinosaurs primarily from children’s picture books, which in fairness would explain a lot of the nonsense he ends up saying), though he also frequently talks with a fellow reporter played by James Yagi. These scenes are not, perhaps, without their charms, but they also deaden the movie’s pacing, especially since nine times out of ten they exist mostly to reiterate stuff we already know because it literally just happened. Given how much a faster pace seems to be one of the American cut’s top priorities (a sub-plot from the Japanese version about a submarine inadvertently encountering Godzilla is reduced to a single sequence for this version), that choice proves a counterintuitive one.

Because the other major problem with the American approach to this movie is that, to be frank, the Monster Action is nowhere near Epic enough to bear the weight this new cut puts on it. Again, it’s not without its merits; Godzilla and Kong’s outsized personalities do a lot to lend even the less effective sequences a certain fun spirit, and there is still an unmistakably strong sense of craftsmanship to the miniatures used throughout the movie to create the appropriate sense of scale for our Monsters to play around in (the demolition of a recreation of Atami Castle shines a spotlight on that very fact). But in terms of both their scope and their choreography, there’s just not enough There there; far too often, “King Kong VS. Godzilla”’s Big Marquee Action Scenes amount to the monsters just sort of lazily throwing rocks at each other, or else engaging in less-interesting recreations of their previous Iconic Moments (Kong especially goes through a truncated version of his original appearance’s third act, though here he ends up on top of the National Diet Building rather than the Empire State Building). That’s slightly less of a problem in the Japanese version; again, there, the main thrust of the film lies in its comedy, and thus the Monster Action being relatively lightweight is less of a hinderance and more a spicy Flavoring to the main story. But here, it is the main story, and while it’s pretty clear some real love went into the Effects Work (the puppetry especially is very solid; there are a few instances where the switch from Suit Actor to Puppet for Godzilla is borderline seamless, and I also enjoy the decently-animated feel of Kong’s facial puppet as well) it ultimately doesn’t have nearly enough substance to fill that role. This comes through especially clearly in the Final Showdown between the monsters; again, there is some deservedly iconic stuff here (Kong trying to shove a tree down Godzilla’s throat only to have it rebuffed in a puff of flames has become an impressively-enduring Meme for a reason) but, much like most of the story, winds up being driven far more by Contrivance than anything clever or satisfying (a bit where Kong knocks himself over feels especially annoying for how unmotivated it seems to be). It was always going to be a tall order to make a match-up with as much implicit weight to it (both metaphorical and literal) live up to the heightened expectations placed on it, maybe. But even taking that into account, it’s hard not to feel like “King Kong VS. Godzilla” could have put a little more effort into things.

Still, I was saying, at the start, that I walked away from “King Kong VS. Godzilla” happier this time than in many of my past viewings. And that is ultimately true: for as much as I find myself often wishing it could be a different movie, the movie it actually is already does manage to work decently well on its own terms. The dub-work here in particular honestly deserves notice; in contrast to the standardized casts Toho would start using for most of its “Godzilla” movies moving forward, here we get a more distinctive sounding voice-cast who manage to put some real Life into their performances (the voice they give to Kenji Sahara’s Fujita stands out especially to me, nasally and over-earnest but capable of some real Fire when the moment calls for it, as befits the character). And, again, whatever my beef with the Action Scenes, the actual portrayal of the Monsters really is uniquely fun (indeed, given how many other elements Toho would consistently crib from it, I’m often surprised that Godzilla’s distinctive body language throughout isn’t one of them), which winds up giving the movie enough Real Heart in the end to make it a positive Experience overall, even against the stuff that even now stands out to me as Not Up To Snuff. At the very least, it’s a lot easier for me to recognize how and why this movie created the Legacy it did, even if the American Version makes a bit more of a mess out of it.

#godzilla #king kong #godzilla vs. kong #kaiju #theroadtogvk #movies #review #ericthemason #my writing #king kong vs. godzilla

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elfautumn · 4 years ago

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Teen Wolf is unbelievably unrealistic which is maddening because its a show about WEREWOLVES

I’ve watched up to season 3 episode 6 of teen wolf, not necessarily expecting it to be amazing because yanno, 2000s tv wasn’t generally amazing, but oh my god it’s worse than I thought it would be

The only real qualm I have with the first season is just that it’s weirdly sexual. Like all the time. The title cards are literally what are supposed to be sophomores in high school shirtless, which doesn’t sit right with me. Aside from that, it’s a teen drama werewolf show, and teen dramas involving supernatural beings aren’t really the best in cinema. I will say throughout the whole first season the only person I ever really cared about was Stiles, probably because I have a soft spot for “left behind sidekick friend,” but also because he’s genuinely funny sometimes. Jackson was a close second only because I have a sneaking suspicion that he’s bi, and also jerks are fun characters. All in all super weird but what drama isn’t.

Season 2 is where I lose my mind just a little bit. There were some fun plotlines, and the teasing of Lydia possibly being the Kanima was actually off-putting, because I was really set on it being her. It is weird how everyone interacts in this season given that they’re still, oh I don’t know, SOPHOMORES IN HIGH SCHOOL WHO SHOULD NOT BE HAVING THIS MUCH SEX. I mean seriously, it’s like this show was made for 20 year olds who’ve never seen a tv in their life. They’re like “Oh yeah they’re in high school haha the good ole days” and simultaneously “Look at these literal children having sex isn’t that so fun.” It made me very uncomfortable. My likeable characters increased by 1 because I also have a soft spot for trauma boys, and Isaac just gets it piled on. Regardless, this is not the season I have the main issue with.

And now we get to where I currently am, and the reason I even made this, because I’M SORRY, AN ALPHA PACK????? WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE??? They made these arbitrary rules about werewolf packs, showed off the abilities of the levels, showed the transfer of power, and then had the auDACITY to end season 2 with the words “An Alpha pack.” *insert the extreme mental break I had over hearing those two stupid, stupid words together*. I feel like how Cameron from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off probably felt before going into Ferris’ house, because I can’t deal with this crap. Not only did the show runners decide an alpha pack, which given the previous descriptions of packs from the resident expert Derek Hale shouldn’t even exist, was a good idea, they spat in my face with the words Demon Wolf. I’ve never felt more insulted in my life. The delivery wasn’t even clever, it was an old guy yelling “I AM THE DEMON WOOOOLF” I N T O T H E S K Y. Another thing about the alpha pack that bugs me is that weird twin dynamic they have where they both turn into one big werewolf, which I guess is creative, but also objectively bad and weird, although I’ll give them props for making one of them gay so Danny can have a love interest, which even supernatural couldn’t do until the last season.

Above all, the biggest, definitely not most important, but most mind-rotting thing watched in season 3, was this exchange:

Lydia is admiring all the freshmen or “fresh men” as she says it. Allison points out that they are “fresh boys” and are age 14. Lydia dismisses this saying some are more mature than others. Allison points out that they can be single and take the time to focus on themselves. Lydia says she doesn’t want a boyfriend she wants a distraction.

Let me remind you that the main cast are juniors in high school at this point in the show, and if you still see nothing incredibly weird about this exchange, let me also remind you that those “fresh men” are coming from middle school. They were just in 8th grade, and Lydia, who is at least 16 or 17 at this point, thinks they are worthy of a distraction. I’m not sure about anyone else, but when I was junior, you couldn’t PAY me to admire, nonetheless date a freshman. This entire exchange is the exact reason why I really can’t stand this show most of the time. It expects you to put aside all belief that this isn’t a normal high school, while also throwing weird perverted shit into their dialogue. And these are only the major things I remember.

Anyways, I might keep doing this, I might not, but I do know it’ll be a cold day in hell when I attempt to keep watching Teen Wolf. Sorry Stiles and Isaac, but I need to maintain my sanity.

#teen wolf #critique #rant

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aranea-mechanica · 4 years ago

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(( BREAKING NEWS: here’s the 4k unfinished rp log from after this post, in which tarantulas temporarily adopted @medicalmurdersaurus, @kingasaurusrex, @surly-saurus, @tomatofaceasaurus, @elite-tracker, and @slvdge, and they wreaked absolute havoc on the Tor.

TAKE CHANCES, MAKE MISTAKES, GET MESSY!

Tarantulas

One thing led to another led to another led to another. Scooping Swoop up somehow got leaked to Grimlock, then Grimlock threatening him via comm inspired Tarantulas to adopt him too, which got leaked to Slag as well, who joined the party and essentially dragged Snarl and Sludge and Slash along for the ride. Tarantulas hopped through one portal after another herding them into the Tor, and mysteriously enough, they all seemed completely fine with the impromptu field trip. It was surreal how quickly and painlessly it came to pass - and all the more foreboding for what would probably follow.

The room the Dinobots were plopped into was mainly clear of equipment, although it had a decent serving of webbing slung around here and there. One might mistake it for a foyer of sorts, given the paths branching off toward more dim destinations. Strange sounds and smells emanated from far too many directions.

…In hindsight, Tarantulas would probably find that this hadn’t been the wisest of places to drop the Dinobots into the Tor for the first time. Popping back into the foyer at last, he’d just have to see the results of his poor decision for himself, now wouldn’t he?

Swoop

On the plus side, getting kidnapped gives Swoop a chance to look around while his siblings are herded up. On the down side, getting kidnapped gives Swoop a chance to look around while his siblings are herded up.

The high ceilings are far too tempting. He has to know what is up there. Up where? Up there.

Tarantulas

Swoop's first guess is probably right - webs. More webs, loosely spun. Probably a pretty fantastic jungle gym, a thought that's definitely occurred to Tarantulas as well.

Grimlock

Grimlock had only been outside his own verse a handful of times. Notably only to see the Prime that wasn't Prime, but regardless, this place is new. With new smells. And new sounds. And several new sights. He squints through his visor, deciding quickly he doesn't like it.

Which is only a half lie to himself.

He's curious as hell. Enough so that he reaches out to start poking at the various webbing strands littering the area-

And immediately decided it was interesting enough to start pulling at. Weird how it looked like string but felt nothing like it. Should probably take some home. It'd look cool in Kraken's cage.

Swoop

Swoop circles the room once, twice, a third time for good measure. In the last pass, he dips down past Grimlock and pulls up sharply so he can get enough momentum to fling himself up to the highest webs while transforming. He shrieks all the way up to his new perch.

Sludge

Swoop chose to go up, but Sludge? Sludge chose to go left, and investigate this entirely new place from the ground level. There's weird smells coming from that way, he has to know what they are, immediately. And possibly touch whatever's making those weird smells.

Absolutely touch whatever makes the weird smells.

Snarl

Snarl is just kinda staying put exactly where he ended up.

Tarantulas

The threads aren't really sticky - most of them, anyhow - but they do pull and pull and pull, and never seem to actually snap. The ones on the ceiling are thicker and have less give, which probably benefits Swoop (though if he chooses wisely he could certainly have a bungee-jumping adventure). Grimlock, however, probably won't be able to snag a sample of silk unless he slices instead of pulls.

If Sludge wanders far enough down the hall to the left, he'll reach a room with massive vats of various organic and inorganic fluids. Science lab or buffet? Who can tell.

What does it really matter what the original intent was, honestly.

Snarl

This wasn't part of his plan for the day. Not that he ever had much of a plan, but he definitely hadn't been ready for getting dragged along to be a part of the Tor.

Kinda looked like they just traded one dark rocky space, for another dark-ish space.

Swoop

There is some WWE off the ropes flinging going on towards the ceiling. This is a great time and Swoop is here for it, except... since when do his brothers come on his weird outings? That's new. Swoop springs towards the machinery nearest Snarl, landing with a CLANG.

Snarl

A lesser bot who DIDN'T LIVE WITH SWOOP 24-7 would probably be startled.

Grimlock

He's coming to that conclusion himself, though his considerable strength had managed to pull the elastic-like strands a decent way out of their original positioning. Now he wants this even more. Wheeljack could probably make some awesome weapon or maybe just something all around cool for the Dinocave.

He's thinking punching bags.

A hammock would be kinda cool too. He's seen those on tv and they at least look like a good time. It's never going to happen, however, unless he manages to get some of this stuff back home.

So without further ado, he reaches to his back to disconnect the base of his sword and activate it. When in doubt-slice it.

Swoop

"SNARL!" the pterosaur giggles. "You go a place. An INSIDE place!" It's difficult for someone as cartoonish as Swoop to come across over the top enough for the sarcasm to be clear. But, by god, he's trying.

Tarantulas

Thus begins the damage that Tarantulas will eventually have to repair and/or clean up later. Swoop's definitely leaving claw marks on that machinery.

Snarl

Snarl levels him with a look as flat as stale water. "What inside place?"

You have a chance to sell it, Swoop.

Swoop

Swoop throws his arms out Robert Downey Jr style to illustrate the Tor. "Dunno!"

Sludge

Vats! Full of stuff!

None of which he recognizes, but they're interesting colors and he's pretty sure that red flavor is the best flavor for anything. Spike had said that once. Sludge peered between the vats for a moment, trying to locate one that was red. And once he finds one, he carefully sets his cat down on the floor out of the way, and promptly shoves his face into said vat.

It's time... to lick the red flavor.

Snarl

Well. That meant his options were play statue exactly where he was which was tempting or go along with Swoop.... who might screech and pick at his armor until he does anyway.

Path of least resistance it is. Massive shoulders rise and fall in a shrug. "Kay. We go."

Tarantulas

Red flavor = probably synthetic blood, maybe, sort of. Does Sludge know what hemoglobin and plasma taste like? If so, it'll definitely be familiar, and nothing that'll affect his systems. His cat might find the vat strange, though.

And Grimlock can certainly have at, and with moderate success. Expect much chastising from Tarantulas once he does arrive and finds missing chunks of webbing, though.

Swoop

Nice. Another victory for Swoop.

"Us goooooooo-" He spun in a circle and then pointed in an arbitrary direction. "-thata way!"

Snarl

Good of a place as any. "Kay." Off they go then.

Tarantulas

Lots of static coming from "thata way." They'll have to open a few very-locked doors before they get to the source of it all.

Snarl

Hm. A door.

Fire time.

Sludge

Blegh. Spike was wrong, red flavor is worst flavor. Sludge is going to try the ominously glowing purple flavor instead. Maybe that one tastes better? Hopefully Tarantulas won't mind that he knocked over the blue vat on his way there.

Snarl

...This door is being very stubborn for fire time. Clearly that means there needs to be MORE FIRE TIME.

Swoop

Swoop is pro fire. He is always pro fire. But he's also pro comedy...

.... so he's going to go over and poke buttons to see if he can get the door open despite his brother.

Tarantulas

Blue vat leaves a sticky mess on the floor that Sludge won't enjoy stepping in, mostly because he'd get, well, stuck. Glowing purple flavor is mysteriously void of scent and taste, but leaves a mild tingle wherever it touches.

Snarl

At least the door is a little more pliable than before. So while Swoop is off CLEARLY not helping, Snarl decides to take matters into his own hands.

Literally into his hands. He starts beating on the door with his fists.

Sludge

The tingle is kind of cool. Let's try some more of that and see if he can make his insides tingle.

Tarantulas

The door, meanwhile, holds against the fire, but the buttons nearby start to malfunction under the combo of radiant heat & ridiculous mashing. They're doing Tarantulas a favor by finding out the flaws in his security, right? In the end the fists are what does the door in first, and they're on to the next one.

And yes, Sludge, your insides are definitely tingling now. That might be an unfortunate distraction from the fact that the other parts that WERE tingling are no longer feeling ANYTHING now.

Snarl

One last hit, and the poor door finally gives, getting essentially blown off its frame.

Snarl

"Open."

Swoop

"You Snarl DID IT!" : >

Snarl

"You Swoop and Me Snarl go to 'that way' now."

Swoop

Swoop dashes through the door and immediately looks up to see if there's more stuff to play with.

Swoop

Snarl follows along at a more leisurely, lumbering pace.

Tarantulas

Nope, just another hallway leading six possible directions. The static's coming from behind another door. Suuuuuper tempting, right?

Sludge

Well, his insides feel really tingly and it's super cool. But he feels weirdly off balance with half his face no longer feeling anything. Maybe he should leave the rest of the vats alone now. He'll come check them out again later. Aaaaafter he's checked what other rooms are in this hallway.

Snarl

"...Me hear noise."

"Swoop, that you?"

"You Swoop weird noise allllll the time."

Swoop

Swoop runs a circle, going past each possible option before sliding Tom Cruise style into Snarl's side.

"Nope! It not Swoop."

Tarantulas

Meanwhile, guess who's busy conjuring another bridge back to the Tor, finally. Oh dear.

Snarl

Snarl, squints and scrutinizes Swoop. Not that staring at him suspiciously does much for figuring out SOUND.

Slash

Slash finally makes it to the party, she looks around at what is going on so far, seems all her brothers have wondered off to do their own thing. She probably should be a good dino and wait for her leader Slag, but all the new scent and surroundings where to tempting to stay still for too long!

Slash was soon sniffing around and collecting as many new scents as she can, it was time to explore!

Grimlock

Grimlock has a large, triumphant handful of the strange white stringy stuff. After much hacking has been had to get it that far. He's, for the moment, content and immediately wraps it around his arm for safe keeping. Besides, it makes his arm thicker by just that much that clotheslining Slag is going to be hilarious later.

That done, he notices his brothers have, as they're wont to do, wandered off. Well shit. Whose scent does he follow- or does he follow the odd chemical smell that burns at his ol factory sensors in a way that's not entirely unpleasant....

His brothers would be fine. Odd smells it is then.

Swoop

For a genuine moment, Swoop lets Snarl listen. That is his thinking face after all. But Swoop can only stand it so long before he just.... chirp!

Snarl

Oh, hey, the weird noise is getting louder. Kinda sounds like the TV when the channels don't feel like working. Or something like that.

Nope. Was probably Swoop.

Tarantulas

Sludge's exploration supplies him with various rewards - rooms full of more organic smells and sights, something that looks like an operating theater, then a dissection lab that definitely has specimens still displayed. Ick.

Swoop

"This Spiderbot, uh, house."

Sludge

The poor dinobot has no idea what an operating theater is, but it's got sharp pointy things and shiny things so that's where he's gonna play now. Some of these look like things Ratchet uses. Where's Swoop? He'd know what they were.

"SWOOP!"

Tarantulas

Sludge's yell makes things shake and clatter a little. Nothing's damaged.... yet.

Also, 'house' is a generous term.

Slash

Slash decided to follow the scent to the vats she can smell Sludge has been here also, she wondered over to the vats to get a closer look and sniff only to step into the blue sticky mess and tumble forward into it.

Tarantulas

Grimlock's sense of smell leads him in a similar direction to Sludge, but down a different hall. It'll take him a long time to get to the source of the smell, but there's a straight path, and a green glow far, far off at the end.

Snarl

"Spiderbot have loud house."

"...."

"Wait that sound like him Sludge."

Slash

Slash is stuck! The blue goop clings to her if she tries to pull away.

Snarl

Hmmm. Sludge or the door. Decisions.

He looks to Swoop. ????

Slash

Slash is pulling! SHE WANTS OUT!! "ME SLASH STUCK!"

Swoop

Swoop looks back where Sludge's bellowing came from, then up at Snarl.

"Him dead."

Snarl

Well that settles that.

"Kay. We open door thing now."

Grimlock

Ugh. The smell was no longer as pleasant the closer he got to it. It stung, actually. Grimlock's face was set in a grimace under his mask and for half a second he almost turns back around. Then his optics narrowed and he growled. Giving up was for LOSERS. And Grimlock was no loser.

The green glow was more of a pinprick in the distance at the moment and Grimlock took off at a run, lumbering steps echoing down the narrow space.

Swoop

Swoop bobbled his head in agreement. Later, losers.

Snarl

There are more doors to break down. Like this one. Fire Time part 2.

Swoop

Swoop transforms into pterosaur mode and joins in the melting.

Tarantulas

The fire changes color when it hits the door, but it's slowly successful in melting it.

Swoop

He gaaaaaaaaaaasssps! <3

Snarl

Snarl stops immediately because did you see that?

Swoop

"AWESOME!!"

Sludge

Hmm. Swoop isn't coming. Shame. Now he has to go looking for his little brother. He gets to his feet and makes his way back to where he'd started, to pick a new hallway. Is he down this way?

Snarl

He's looking between Swoop and the door in quick succession.

Slash

Slash struggles to pull herself free of the blue mess on the floor, her claws start to heat up for more SLICING MELTING ACTION! "GRRR! ME SLASH WANT OUT!"

Snarl

Then he levels his brother with the most serious look that's ever graced his face. "Us burn ALL things. Find more colors."

Slag

Slag, for his part, waited to see where all his various brothers were going... and then went in whatever direction they weren't, plodding along leisurely with his drone pet/toy jingling about beside and somewhat under him when he pauses to scoot Gong Fat back between his front legs.

Gotta keep his toy from getting squashed or burned or otherwise Dino'd.

Swoop

Swoop lets out a victory shriek and flaps hard enough to get himself a ways off the ground. "YAAAAHHH!"

Tarantulas

Heated claws are super effective on the blue goop - it seems to melt as Slash slices, although it does leave a lot of residue on her as well.

Slag's adventuring leads to a far less interesting path than the others - it's mostly consoles, servers, and computer hardware in the rooms down his route.

Grimlock

Aaaagh even RUNNING was taking too much time! Grimlock growled, getting quite irritated. It was time to find a shortcut. He eyes the wall next to him, tapping on it.

The rearing his fist back to slam it into the surface with as much power as he can.

Slash

Slash was finally free and quickly gained as much distance from the blue goop as she can, her movement a little slow due to the residue left on her. She was totally leaving claw marks in the floor as she ran in a random direction.

ALSO SLASH SAW YOU SLUDGE JUST IGNORE HER >:C

Tarantulas

Also, tip to Swoop and Snarl: although all the doors in THIS hallway burn the same color, OTHER hallways might not. Have at it.

Grimlock immediately succeeds in denting the wall next to him, and there's a groaning rumble a few seconds afterward.

Grimlock

.........

Well, it did SOMETHING.

Time to hit it again.

Snarl

Snarl proceeds to be flamethrower, and immediately forgets to actually go through the door they demolished

Slag

Oh. Buttons.

Slag doesn't really read much to know what the buttons do but, they're colorful. And some of them glow. And they have TVs on them. He supposes he can find something to watch.

Maybe spider has movies. Maybe spider has Netflix.

One stumpy triceratops foot plops gracelessly on the console, sort of pawing at the keyboard to try to make something happen.

Slash

Slash now wishes she can flamethrower breath to get all this blue goop off of her, it was slowing her down! She doesn't like this place anymore it's dumb!

Slash finally stopped running to look around, just where was she now? She'll sniff the air to see where her brothers had run off to.

Tarantulas

Grimlock manages to rend the metal of the wall a bit, but only enough to see through. It's inky black, wherever that is, and smells like... nothing?

......

Sludge

Swoop is decidedly not down this new hallway, Sludge decides eventually. But there's more places to see, so he'll keep walking. If the other hallway had interesting things, this one should too.

Snarl

Follow the burning, Sludge.

Sludge

Why follow the burning, when he can make his own burning?

Snarl

Follow the scent of scorched metal and mania.

Snarl

ALSO A GOOD OPTION.

Tarantulas

Spider does not have Netflix. Spider has a security system on his console that requires eight levels of clearance before anything actually happens. Want to give it a shot, Slag? It'll make tons of interesting colors and sounds.

Grimlock

How does something smell like nothing? Grimlock's vents huff as he tries to peer through the hole. His curiosity is torn now between this seemingly empty space that smells like nothing and the challenge that was the green glow in the distance.

Slag

Huh. Colors are happening. Maybe it's a game?

Slash

Slash will follow the burning.

Slag

He can probably figure out the button combo to make it do the thing. Keysmashing usually works back home. This is probably the same.

Sludge

He can sort of hear Swoop and Snarl burning things, though. Somewhere to the right. Does he want to backtrack? Not really. So he's going to go the Quicker Route and start spitting fire at the wall.

It'll have to give way eventually.

Snarl

Some of the doors are just opening and closing now. Weird.

Swoop

The problem with a hallway is that he can't full on circle and swoop in the air. He'll have to make do with brief strafing runs. Snarl gets well and truly covered in fire, which is probably a nice bonus to all the activity. Toasty!

Snarl

Snarl, wreathed in flames, and fueled by destructive impulses is a fearsome thing to behold.

Actually that's a lie. He's looks confused

Why are the doors just opening like that now? Are they trying to get away from the burning?

'Cause, Ha. Like that'll happen.

More fire.

Tarantulas

Definitely not the same, Slag. This one eventually blacks out completely after too much keysmashing, since the chances of one Dinofoot following the pattern of eight Spiderpaws is slim to none.

Grimlock

Curiosity has given way to frustration. Guess what?

That wall's coming down if he has to break his knuckles doing it.

Swoop

Swoop thoughtlessly clips his own wing on a wall and eats quite a bit of floor before sliding to a stop. "KEHEHE!"

Snarl

Hmmmm.

Slash

OK one the doors almost closed on Slash's tail! NOT COOL!

Slash will just... Well slash at the controls of the door, maybe that will stop it from acting weird!

Slag

Oh. Broke it.

............

WHELP. Time to leave the scene of the crime. Last time he broke a console full of buttons he got buried alive so maybe he'll just wander off and have no idea who broke the thing.

Snarl

Snarl is gonna pick Swoop up, and toss him through one of the doors when they open.

He's aerodynamic. He'll make it.

Probably.

Swoop

Wheee! Off he goes! "KAHAH!"

Slag

C'mon Gong Fat let's find something to chew on.

Tarantulas

Knuckles needn't be broken - the wall comes down eventually, and Grimlock gets the opportunity to venture into a space that's completely open, aside from long metal supports stretching seemingly-randomly through the darkness. He can certainly hop onto one or another from the hole he's ripped in the wall.

Slash gets a small explosion for her efforts, but the door doesn't reopen.

Sludge

This was is taking too long to melt for Sludge's liking. Time to bash it headfirst. Good thing he still can't feel his face.

Grimlock

He does just that, pulling his blade out again to set it on fire. So he can see, you understand.

Slash

Good that will teach the door one!

Slash will then continue to follow the burning scent until she spots Snarl, "You Snarl set me Slash on fire. Get dumb blue goop off."

Tarantulas

Sludge succeeds! This wall is REALLY thick though, so it might take quite a bit of headbashing to make it through.

Sludge

He has more than enough headbashing to go around for this wall.

Tarantulas

The first thing Slag and Gong Fat chew on shocks their respective mouths hard enough to (hopefully) be a deterrent to chewing more.

Swoop

Swoop is either meeting more floor or going for an impromptu flight. Either way, he is down.

Slash

Ok new plan, start scratching all the blue goop off!

Slag

Ouch. Well it's definitely not a cabbage for shredding which is deterrent enough for Gong Fat.

Slag, however, is a bit miffed at the shocky stingy ouch in his mouth, and retaliates with a bolt of laser from the tips of his horns. SCREW YOU, SHOCKY THING.

Grimlock

So Grimlock can only remember having to do so much jumping one other time in his life. Somewhere in the Rockies. It sucked. This isn't much better.

But hey, everything echoes here and everyone always accused him of loving to hear his own voice. It's gonna roar into that void right now.

Snarl

Did it work though?

"You Swoop see things?"

Sludge

Persistent headbashing has led to a lot of ringing in his head, but if it opened the wall, then he will consider it worth it.

Tarantulas

Finally - finally. Tarantulas is ready to round up the Dinokids and show them around their new home. He can't wait. It's going to be fantastic.

...But they're not here in the foyer. And there are at least three paths of destruction in different directions, all of which sound like no one is up to any good. What in the WORLD is he going to do with these dangerous toddlers?

He's never had much reason to use it before, but he's ridiculously glad he installed the PA system now. Tarantulas's voice is unbelievably cheery as it echoes in every room of the Tor.

"I trust you're making yourselves at home!"

Snarl

!!!!

Sludge

!!!! Voices from the ceiling!

Snarl

LOUD YELLING AND IT'S NOT THEM, WHAT?

Slag

Head voices.

Head voices everywhere.

It's echoing.

His head isn't that empty. Shit's not supposed to echo.

Slash

Ok the halls are talking!

Slag

Where is that coming from???

Swoop

Swoop pushes himself up from the floor and looks at the PA. "SPIDERBOT!"

He cackles. ::Hi, Spiderbot.::

Snarl

Snarl yells to the void, "This not Dinocave. You dumb?"

Grimlock

Now the place is echoing back at him ! And it sounded like Spiderbot! Grimlock isn't a fan of hide and seek on the best days.

"WHERE YOU SPIDERBOT HIDING! COME FACE ME GRIMLOCK!"

Slag

Slag is just gonna skeedaddle further away from the scene of his crime. He didn't do it. You can't prove shit, echoing head voice. "Me Slag not at home. Me Slag here "

Snarl

It's a complete accident how correct his sentence is "This is a TOR."

Sludge

Sludge looks up, trying to find the source of the new voice. Spiderbot?

Slash

"THIS PLACE DUMB!!" Slash snarls. Ok she’s going to do some Climbing now.

It’s time to find a way out of this dumb place.

---

(tl;dr - the Dinobots tear up the Tor and Tarantulas adores them during every second of it, until he’s somehow forced to give the destructive children back to their proper guardians.)

#medicalmurdersaurus #kingasaurusrex #surlysaurus #slvdge #tomatofaceasaurus #elitetracker #(( spongebob meme TWO YEARS LATER

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mst3kproject · 5 years ago

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The Incredible Petrified World

When choosing episodes that never were, it is always tempting to just pick crap movies I enjoy watching, like Lady Frankenstein or The Giant Claw, and ignore the unwatchable bilge – but this blog is about films that were or should have been on MST3K, and they riffed their way through quite a bit of unwatchable bilge over the years, from The Robot vs the Aztec Mummy to dreary dubbed Hamlet. I would therefore be sadly remiss if I neglected truly wretched movies entirely, and so we come to The Incredible Petrified World. It’s a Jerry Warren movie that serves very well to emphasize that Teenage Zombies might be his best work, and it stars John Carradine from The Unearthly and Phyllis Coates from Invasion USA. It’s also one of the most difficult movies I’ve ever had to sit through, right up there with Invasion of the Neptune Men, so brace yourselves because this is gonna hurt.

A Dr. Wyman (evidently this is before the Blood Beast ate his brain) has invented a special deep-diving bell, and it’s time for its first test in the Caribbean. The expedition consists of three scientists and a reporter – the former are two identical-faced men and a brunette, and the latter is a blonde. Don’t expect me to remember their names. Halfway down, the cable snaps and they plummet to the seafloor… but when they come to, they realize there’s light in the windows. They’ve somehow entered a series of underwater caverns, which are inexplicably full of air and light! After wandering around eating up time I could have spent watching a better movie, they encounter a man in a fake beard who says he’s been down there for fourteen years. For some reason this guy decides to kill them all, but at the last minute a volcano erupts, squashing him so everybody else can be rescued.

Interspersed with all this are scenes of Wyman’s brother and his collaborators, helping in the search for the missing scientists and building their own diving bell for a follow-up mission. These parts seemed weirdly disconnected from the rest of the movie, and I wondered if they were shot and added later because somebody thought the movie was going to be too short. But then at the end, all these characters appear together on the rescue boat. I guess the writing just sucked.

Oh, man, fuck this movie. It really is the dumbest, dullest thing imaginable. The whole thing is just a bunch of scenes that wander across the screen but never amount to much, so in that spirit I’m going to make a bunch of observations and not worry about whether they add up to a review. Here goes.

The actual beginning of the movie is some footage of an octopus fighting a shark, while a narrator tells us that the sea is the wildest and most hostile place on earth… although his words aren’t nearly so poetic. In fact, the narrator sounds like he’s reading the script aloud for the first time, while wondering if he remembered to lock his car. He drones on and on about the things that lurk in the depths while we see dull footage of fish swimming around for nearly four minutes. I already want to turn this off and go do something fun, like sweep the floor. Even worse, none of this has a crumb to do with the rest of the movie, which is set not at the seafloor, but in a cave, where there are no sharks or octopodes.

The diving bell looks about as solid as a beach ball and is significantly bigger on the inside than the outside. Everything in it is controlled by two switches on the wall and an oscilloscope. The dialogue is at pains to note that the second bell, the one built by Wyman’s brother, is identical to the first. This means they can use the same set.

All these undersea caverns have nice level floors for the characters to walk on, which is good because the women wore heels for their descent into the murky abyss. At one point they encounter an Australian perentie lizard, which is only seen in a cutaway because it’s stock footage from the other side of the world. I don’t know how long they’re supposed to have spent wandering around in the caves but since the search was eventually called off it must have been a couple of weeks at least. Despite this, nobody’s clothes get dirty. The women’s hair and makeup always look perfect, and the men never need to shave. Come to think of it, how does Beard Guy know he’s been down there for fourteen years? He’s in a fucking cave. There’s no day or night to pass the time, and he doesn’t wear a watch.

Beard Guy apparently tells the characters that he and Mysterious Skeleton were sailors on a ship that sank, and that’s how they ended up in here. The two men suspect that he isn’t telling the truth. It turns out Beard Guy is the one who killed Mysterious Skeleton, although it never tells us why – maybe he’s just crazy, or maybe he got really hungry one day. If there’s a dark truth to how he ended up in this place, however, the audience never learns what it is.

Much of what we see is just filling time. One of the guys says they can make fishing spears out of some of the equipment they had in the diving bell, and then we have to watch them do it. There’s a bit where a guy back on land is driving somewhere, and we hear a news broadcast on the search, which is fine, but then we also have to listen to the weather report as well. Characters wander through rocks, and then wander back through the same rocks shot from a slightly different angle.

There is an attempt at subplots. The blonde woman is the bitchy one and the brunette is the nice one. The former has just broken up with her boyfriend and threw his engagement ring into the ocean. One of the men confesses his love to the latter. Both of these ideas come out of nowhere, are given three or four lines, and vanish into the mist, never to be heard from again. Beard Guy, whose ‘beard’ looks more like a stuffed animal glued to his face, tries to rape the blonde while the men are gone. Since the movie was made in the fifties he doesn’t get very far before he is buried by falling rocks. If this had happened so the men could heroically save her, it would have annoyed me, but the utter pointlessness of the scene we did get is worse.

The erupting volcano is exactly like the erupting volcano in The Land that Time Forgot, in that the volcano only exists to end the movie at an arbitrary point. At least it’s not here to steal the happy ending this time. Footage of the actual eruption is upside-down for some reason, maybe because we’re under the ground. What sense does that make? Did the writer think the earth is hollow and volcanoes on its inner surface point down instead?

The dialogue is unsalvageable. There’s an entire conversation between John Carradine and some other guy about why the cable broke on the first diving bell, and not only is everything they say nonsense, they can’t even make it sound like anything but. Characters on Star Trek talk complete bullshit all the time, but at least they mostly sound like they believe in it. John Carradine and his co-star have absolutely no idea what they’re saying, and don’t care enough to try. Something about making the diving bell too strong.

It pretty much goes without saying that The Incredible Petrified World doesn’t have anything to say. The entire story, insofar as it goes, is completely without point or plot. It barely even has a premise. Various characters take turns moaning and wailing about how they’re gonna be down here for the rest of their lives, but then they recover and get on with things after all. The men discuss survival strategies and the women complain. Nothing develops. The blonde supposedly has an arc, in that at the end she says “my life will be changed from here on out”, but this is the most told and least shown character development of any movie ever.

It’s a complete mystery to me why anyone bothered making this movie. Most movies have something going on: they want to tell a story, to examine an idea, to showcase an actor, to sell soundtrack albums, to leech money from nostalgic fans of an old cartoon… sometimes these ambitions are cynical but they’re still there. Even really, really, legendarily bad movies have goals. Foodfight wants you to buy name-brand instead of generic. Manos: the Hands of Fate wants to prove it’s not as difficult or expensive to make a movie as Hollywood would have you believe. The Hottie and the Nottie wants to convince you that Paris Hilton can act. All these movies are miserable fucking failures but you can tell what they were going for.

The Incredible Petrified World isn’t even going for anything. It just takes some bad actors, stands them in front of the camera for a few minutes, and then lets them go home. There is literally nothing beneath the surface, and the surface is so insubstantial it barely counts. It’s movie dark matter, adding to the mass of the universe but otherwise completely fucking inert.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #the incredible petrified world #poor john carradine #fuck this movie #60s #non hamlet reviews that mention hamlet

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tumblunni · 6 years ago

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Stuff to appreciate:

* the pokemon theme remix sounding like football/rugby/otehr sports tourney music! we’ve seen it confirmed that there’s poke-football here so i hope they do reference rugby too and maybe some hockey? we’re honestly a really sports mad nation, tho not as much as america perhaps

* All the lil touches of random normal british stuff that i just TOTALLY MISSED the first time watching cos well its fuckin normal for me lol! im just realizing this is the first time ive seen a house have a wheelbarrow out front in a pokemon game. do other countries just not have as many wheelbarrows or do you like to hide them or somethin?? HOW DO YOU GARDEN! we like wheelbarrows so much there’s several characters in old kids shows thatre just a wheelbarrow, and lots of grandmas like to keep broken wheelbarrows and turn them into plantpots just for the aesthetic of wheelbarrows. Also welly boots!! what do people even call them in other countries cos wellingtons is a very british thing right?

* other nice touches: route signs being like our traffic signs LOL IM CONSTANTLY GONNA MISTAKE THEM FOR A SPEED LIMIT, a lot of those nice pastry crust lookin turf-roof cottages even tho sadly they arent super common anymore nowadays, generally showing a LOT of different british housing architecture like even got the old london double chimney stack things!

* oh man they even got those ground staircase things what is even the name of those actually? i always like the aesthetic of country villages that are more in harmony with nature and it sucks that so much of britain is more industrialized instead nowadays

* BIG BAGS like lol i was going OMG IM SO GLAD THE PROTAGONIST FINALLY HAS A BIG BAG even before i realized it was britain like wow is that a stereotype about us that we carry giant bags everywhere cos thats fuckin true. ‘tardis purses’ are really common amoung anyone who doesnt use backpacks, like everything has to be hybridized with a backpack somehow or else u wear a cardigan just cos stupid modern clothes aint got good pockets FUCKIN HELL I COULD FIT A WHOLE HOUSE IN A CARDIGAN i still remember how in high school i cut a hole in the bottom of my pockets so i could stuff things into the entire lining of the jacket and basically wear a bag like OH i just realized this stereotype must be really old and maybe thats legit where the tardis/mary poppins/d&d’s bag of holding actually came from? you ask for literally goddamn anything on a train in britain and someone’s gonna pull it out of apparantly nowhere, being prepared is just a Thing here

* lol they cant really show how much Pub Culture we have over here in a kids game probably? like we’re one of the world’s biggest consumers of alcohol and HOO BOY, drunken riots are a frequent occurance along with the sports obsession. also over here we straight up dont have non alcoholic cider and i was REALLY CONFUSED that america ONLY has non alcoholic version like i DIDNT KNOW IT EXISTED so i just thought they gave their kids beer?? cider festivals over here are real fun, its part of how ‘pub culture’ is kinda an all ages thing even if the kids cant drink the stuff. like there’s all fun farm events and kids rides and bbq and stuff at a cider or ale brewing town festival thing. and basically the difference between pubs and more american style bars is that pubs are..like.. homey? they really are just the ‘jrpg tavern’ thats a thing of old history in america. its more of a hangout spot thats open all day and is more spacious with comfy seating and they do food and gardens and stuff. its common to bring kids to a pub during the day and its only in the evening that its adults only, which is kinda arbitrary cos i mean they still sell booze in the mornings its just that its ONLY booze in the evenings and the family meal kitchens close. also in the mornings they still have all the gambling machines turned on and lol as a kid my dad used to plonk me down on them so i could ‘play games’ while he talked with his friends. it was extra funny how the european gambling laws made them take the game corner out of pokemon cos i knew what a slot machine was even before i played pokemon and i was like 4 when it came out XD

* yay for big fancy libraries and museums!! i hope maybe they also show buses and trains? its generally a thing that we have more extensive and well funded public transport and buildings than america. like no offense but i was fuckin FLOORED when i learned that there’s whole states that have no trains! like over here buses and trains are used even more than cars! having even one single place unreachable by bus is enough to cause protests! also maybe have some hospital themed gym leader to symbolise good healthcare but honestly they could have put that in ANY of the regions so far except for unova. srsly im always so scared for my american friends cos of that...

* IS THAT A FUCKIN REUSEABLE CARRIER BAG?? like what a weirdly specific thing to reference! do other countries have the carrier bag tax too?

* also LOL putting stickers on the back of the wardrobe!! thats such a brit kid thing, whenever u move to a new place and it has furniture included you’ll always turn something around and see a bunch of stickers someone left from years ago. it was alwyas funny as a kid to see which ones got wrecked in the move, i dunno why a headless bugs bunny was the height of my afternoon at age 9

* Weird notice: this house looks a lot like the Old Chateau from sinnoh? except obviously its more modern and not abandoned and all. makes me think that the dub kinda hecked up by calling the place french and it might have been intentionally meant to be british? its just called a ‘foreign style house’ in japanese, not a chateau.

* ALSO SINNOH FEELS! please bring the minigame back! i always felt an odd kinship with oreburgh town as a kid cos the town i grew up in was also a former mining town that turned from a capitol city port into absolute disrepair after the industrial boom ended. struggling to find a new identity and mostly getting by on tourism value of the mines and all. so makes me think this is actually legit a wales town and maybe even cardiff in particular? or other former mining towns of britain. cos having an extensive cave network thats completely unused and youre just allowed to walk around in it like its no big deal = honestly 100% accurate, the underground minigame would completely fit us. i wonder if japan really does have a similar case of the mines all being 100% abandoned and only repurposed into history museums and travel routes?

* this npc is cute and also i appreciate the accuracy to school uniforms over here! this is usually what its like for primary school (i think thats elementary in america?) and itd be in different colours for different schools and have the school badge on the left side there. and summer uniform is often just taking the jumper off and then the shirt underneath also has the same logo on it. but in my school as a kid they annoyingly made us buy a whole separate set of identical shirts but in a different colour to indicate summer uniform like GEEZ DUDE its already expensive enough! made more sense in high school where winter shirts are button up blouses like suit jackets and its only summer that gets a regular cotton shirt. but there you also wear blazers (kids’s suit jacket) instead of jumpers, and jumpers are optional if it gets extra cold but its more of a light cardigan style instead. also boringly every damn school’s colours are black blazers except like one or two rare exceptions. i got extra unlucky and the two high schools i went to also had red shirts so i kept getting them mixed up until i noticed the wrong logo halfway thru the day

* hey lol literally the park behind my house. we get real shitty weather here and i actually kinda hope maybe umbrellas are something we could pick in character customization?

#pokemon spoilers

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archer3-13 · 2 years ago

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As someone whom has played WoW and used to follow the lore, I think a major part of the problem isn't female characters going crazy, but Horde characters and indeed the entire faction going crazy to suit the writer's incessant need to have faction conflict.

You remember how in Fates, everything Hoshido had to be justified, no matter how stupid it was, and Nohr constantly had to make stupid/evil decisions, yet the writing insisted it was morally grey?

Thats WoW with the Alliance (Hoshido) and Horde (Nohr), even when an Alliance character (Turlayon for reference) tortures a woman in front of her child, the writers go out of their way to justify it and vilify the woman. Mists of Pandaria depicted a colonist asshole, whom murdered an entire tribe of native people as an innocent victim!

Anyhow just as it sucks in Fates, it sucks even more in WoW, because the Horde is blatantly PoC Coded, as in minotaurs that live in tepees and say "How!"

Again even if I can't claim expertise on this matter have to disagree, as everything ive seen on wow lore and story writing indicates to me that it suffers both from casual racism and from benevolent sexism. It's one thing for instance to have an alliance character torturing a horde character and then frame it as the horde character being in the wrong, that falls into the casual racism aspect. But its also another thing to have the character being tortured in question be a female character being tortured in front of her child for shock value, that ties more so into the benevolent sexism angle because the fact that its a woman tied to motherhood with her child nearby implies an inherent aspect of purity and innocence.

this creates what you might casually call, intersectionality where its both casually racist and benevolently sexist as turlayon tortures a mother in front of her child to show off how hes an extremist [which i believe hes suppose to be in part from my understanding] to demonstrate how he did a bad thing by torturing a mother in front of her kid, but also because the narrative doesn't want you to think to badly about turlayon and still sympathize with him in some part the torture victim also has to be presented as deserving of her treatment in some part.

and this is honestly me assuming best case scenario, worst case scenario its turlayon torturing a wicked no good older woman character whos unpure and raised a child wrong [benevolent sexism] because of inherent flaws in horde culture and ideology [casual racism] by the arbitrary moral standards of the story and were suppose to regard turlayon as an upstanding moral figure because of this. again, worse case scenario, as i sure as shit hope that wasn't the wow writers intent.

which is all to say, casual racism and benevolent sexism dont have to be mutually exclusive issues. in fact they very often go hand in hand.

as for fates, well ive ragged on it a bit myself id say thats not a fair or equivocal comparison to make. They're are certainly jingoistic aspects of fates story leaned towards hoshidos favor, aspects weirdly enhanced by the english translations fumbling i might add, but what fates is as a story at its core is one about questioning binary narratives in relation to ones own morality. birthright is the stock beating up the bad guys story so its the most uncritical of things in its setting, conquest provides a direct contrast to that simplicity because your siding with the bad guys and hey turns out they're also humans with complicated facets, and the good guys are also complicated people who arent as squeaky clean as they appear and the reality of the situation is more messy then was first assumed and so you do messy complicated things on that route. and then revelations is there to mediate these two things into a single unified story and ending.

even if it fumbles to get there or express its points, fates is ultimately a story built on a foundation of questioning jingoistic narratives, not reinforcing them.

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myfriendpokey · 7 years ago

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promissory notes

Complete satisfaction OR your money back!!! - is something I don't think anyone in videogames has ever willingly said,so maybe it doesn't make sense to talk of anything as stable as a "guarantee". Maybe it's more like a system of overlapping promises, designed to contain the idea that a videogame exists in at least some kind of provisional relationship to human happiness, even if the rate at which the two could be converted is never quite nailed down. We have the promise the game will work on a given system or set of minimum requirements, the hazier assurance it might at least resemble the screenshots on the box, the genre assurance that it formally and hence experientially resembles some other game you like. The assurance, in press leading up to release, of passion and artistic intent rattling around in there somewhere as well, the assurance that the game will have x y and z new features and scope. Press and external reviewers can so to speak cosign a guarantee or write their own more ambivalent one on the basis of their reputation. Storefronts as well can tacitly endorse some promise - that this thing exists, functions, falls into the category of "entertainment" - when they put it on their shelves, virtual or otherwise. There's the promise of personal reputation, that the people involved wouldn't want to associate themselves with a bogus product, and the promise of monetary interest - this game obviously had a fair bit of money put into it, they're expecting to make that back, therefore we can expect some moderate fidelity to customer expectation and the sort of general polished feel that comes with being able to hire lots of people to create bark textures.

Most of these institutions aren't specific to videogames, but I do think they have a greater prominence there, owing both to the higher amount of fussy technical variation in the format (it's hard to imagine a book, say, refusing to boot or secretly installing a bitcoin miner in your head) and also to its historical novelty. The idea that something called a "videogame" exists, is an entertainment format, is linked to some kind of prospective emotional value - all these have to be rhetorically insisted upon, particularly as the format moved from spaces with immediately visible analogues (pinball tables, mechanical amusements) to a more diffuse place alongside the family television or home computer. They had to insinuate, and to an extent still have to insinuate, the exact role they played in everyday life. And the shift from being a sort of weird, garish, once-off toy into an ongoing home-improvement project, with new games and consoles to choose between and new add-ins to improve your machine, had to be accompanied by the emergence of institutions that could offer some reassurance this ongoing investment wouldn't be a waste.

So you can maybe glibly think of videogames as a form of currency, built on the premise that they can be "exchanged" at any time for some measure of enjoyment, where this exchange rate is underwritten and co-signed by various institutions. And as having something of the abstraction of currency, as well. If one videogame is a moment of enjoyment then 6000 videogames are in principle 6000 moments of enjoyment - never mind that you may never have a chance to play all those discounted games in your Steam library within one lifetime. Think of it as saving them up for a rainy day. And I suspect that as this relationship between possession and affect grows more abstracted and tenuous, institutions take on a correspondingly more important role in confirming that the central exchange relationship still holds true. A bit like debt rating agencies - it's not so much about actually untangling the complicated sale of good, bad and nonexistent debt packages from one financial institution to another, it's more the promise that at some point this untangling COULD occur, that all this imaginary money still bears some kind of distant relationship to actual human needs.

I wonder if the paranoid style in videogames culture stems partly from this sense of underlying contingency. It's not that games are just experiences, which can't be taken away - they're more like deposits on hypothetical experience, and those deposits can indeed depreciate in value if not turn out to be worthless from the start. Bad reviews, spoilers, the general reputation of a game can all cause it to drop in expected value. The fuss that happens every time a new GTA game gets below 9.5 on IGN or wherever is not so much that the game might really have problems so much that having those problems flagged from the start can marr the sense of occasion, the I-was-there-ness and anticipated retrospective value that's part of the package being sold. And of course the consistent anxiety around corrupt reviewers, incorrect press releases, "fake games", all those other things that could adulterate the currency...

And maybe we could consider the current anxiety around "asset flips" on Steam in the same light. After all, who's really playing these things - besides Youtubers doing so ironically? They're easy to spot and easily refunded and even if some kid really does buy "Cuphat" or "Battleglounds" by accident, well, the worst that could happen is that they develop the same misplaced affection for exploitative consumer garbage as everybody else who grew up playing videogames. And indeed the fact that nobody really buys them is part of the critique - what's unsettling is the fact that they seem more connected to the shadow economies of cheap bundles and trading-card-store manipulation (which is so easy and widespread that PC Gamer could publish a how-to guide with no apparent pushback from anyone). You can easily unpick the specific arguments about what constitutes an asset flip versus a game that just uses premade assets, or how to tell a "scam" from just a regular bad videogame - demonstrative sincerity?? Producing cynical knockoffs with premade asset packs is not necessarily the act of poorly-funded fly-by-nights, as witness the recent news about Voodoo recieving $200 million from Goldman Sachs. But of course they're the chief source of anxiety around the issue, and the ways in which that anxiety manifests is often weirdly racialised - the automatic bad faith extended to the Global South, the fear of nameless hordes overrunning our valuable, exclusive institutions, even a sort of weird variant on the “welfare mother” imagery - the asset flipper with 100 interchangeable games, driving a cadillac... Leaching off the accumulated value stockpiled by the Steam brand, devaluing our libraries and the institutions that have been telling us they're worth something...

I don't really have a lot of sympathy with the asset-flip discourse, both because exactly the same anxiety has been rolled out in the past to Unity, walking simulators, visual novels, Game Maker, Twine, and basically anything else that lowers the barriers to entry around making videogames; and also because I love many games I think those anxieties would try to exclude ("The Zoo Race", GoreBagg games, the Johnny series, even Limbo Of The Lost is as close as Oblivion ever came to being creatively exciting), and I think the calls for hard work and sincerity and so forth function as just so much evasive kitsch. We already HAVE a ton of games like that; and that's maybe the real problem. Why is there so much anxiety about discovering good games when, say, people are complaining about having to choose between the two different, polished, labour-of-love, years-in -the-making narrative platform games being released the same week? Doesn't this just mean the "enjoyment standard" of the videogame promissory note is just by now so abstract and intangible that it's basically just an empty convention, useful for nothing but perpetuating itself - perpetuating the idea of an unadulterated good-game-ness, stretching aimlessly into space like a 1950s radio broadcast. It's a convention which is basically exclusive, which works by trying to put a cordon around the vast swathes of human culture it thinks it's safe to ignore.

Which is maybe fine - nobody can pay attention to anything, and some "rating institutions" are presumably less pernicious than others (the advice of a friend? a critic you enjoy? your own intuition?). There are obviously a lot of critiques that can be levelled at the existing one for videogames, including in particular the assumption that anything that cost a lot of money is worth at least checking out. But there's also something more generally sad about this kind of enforced, perpetual scarcity in a time of abundance, about a model that just pines for less shit so that it can start to feel relevant again, about one that can think of nothing to do with the sheer volume of things being made and rabbit holes being burrowed than wish they didn't exist and try to shut them out entirely.

More people being able to make things is good, and hard to get to; it can also be unnerving and disorienting and also push against some of the happier ideas we might have had about the democratization of art-production (for example, that this wouldn't co-exist with monopolies of arbitrary unaccountable control of the kind exercised by Youtube, Steam, the App store, Google, etc...), it can be a space to view some of the weirder machinations of capital as they leave traces through the culture (money-laundering $9000 books on Amazon and viral Pregnant Spiderman youtube vids). I don't think continuing to defend the value of the medium will help think about these, or become anything but more and more paranoid and quixotic over time.

#lou #vgames #money

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tortoisesshells · 3 years ago

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i’ve had this kicking around in my head and versions rattling in my drafts and it’s not going to get any more finished but whoops oh well I finally finished Murdered: Soul Suspect (about a month ago. whoops again.) and despite a lot of it being My Brand (dead guy investigating his own murder and others, Scrappy Medium refusing the call but the Call Knows Where You Live, Creepy New England Coastal Town Haunted By Its Past) it’s just left me feeling ... irritated. And scurrying off to replay the Blackwell quintet, which, while unforgivably set in New York City, at least does the other two tropes well.

though, tbh, the biggest crime this game committed is giving me this:

and NOT letting me drop the murder investigation to go stare at some oldtimey boatstuff in the totally-not-the-Peabody-Essex-Museum

Pros: setting feels genuinely unsettling! ghost-rules are fundamentally arbitrary as a concept, but I’m satisfied by the sort of hand-wavey “structures accrue history and become more fixed the older they are” thing Soul Suspect settled on - I can’t go through exterior walls of old buildings (not shocking, in a town like Salem, MA) but I CAN move through interior walls because the buildings have been reconfigured so many times in most places. (this falls apart in Judgement House HARD but the game’s already off the rails by then). The cool inverse of this is that buildings and things which DID exist in certain places but have been knocked down or moved since still exist to you, and can’t be easily traversed. Neat concept - at least I thought so?

I can’t cross water. I appreciate the dedication to that bit of ghost lore.

I can possess cats, and meow for pets. Nice.

side quests! While sort of formulaic, find x number of hidden objects to solve unsolved cases or to hear a ghost story, I am a simple soul (eh? eh?) and can be entertained by completionist-crawling all over a map to find ghostly gas-cans and hair-wreaths and straight-jackets. I didn’t find the search for all known information about my killer that compelling, but the ghost stories (like The Man in the Box) have proved somewhat more haunting. fuck that achievement for finding all the hidden doodles from the not-helpful dead Puritan kid though, for real.

you can die even after being dead, or at least that’s apparently what happens after being hit by a ghost train.

Cons: You are a dead cop with the world least-sensical backstory; you are nothing but a reanimated Aesthetic of Career Criminal Makes “Good” For Lost Love; it was incredibly tempting for me to nope out at the sadmanmcdeadwife revelation alone. we as a society have moved passed the need for sadmanmcdeadwife protagonists.

this is just ... Hollywood New England. without the witch trial connection, which is badly done anyway, there’s nothing tying the main plot of the game to Salem.

There’s not much challenge to the game - solving things is less about puzzling through it for yourself and more about just ... finding clues. You have to physically locate so many things in this game holy shit please give me more challenges like having to poltergeist my environment in order to achieve my ghostly ends. I don’t actually care that the last encounter isn’t all that climatic; it’s that there was precious little but spending hours groundpounding to get there in the first place.

if you know ANYTHING about the Salem Witch Trials, the mystery isn’t really much of a mystery. If you care about the Trials, on top of knowing anything about them, the revelation of what’s afoot is probably going to spike your blood pressure. and the game ... wavers? I still don’t understand if Abigail Williams was Communing With Dark Forces before being hanged or just decided to do so to seek revenge after death? At any road, the revelation that Williams has been murdering witches and psychics for centuries because she’s that mad about being executed feels ... weirdly underdeveloped. I don’t dislike it conceptually - but I want more work in the game to make that feel thematically resonant. Williams is doing what ghosts are supposed to do, I guess? Being stuck in that one last moment of fear and rage? And there’s other stuck ghosts - you could even argue that you, Officer Sad Man McDeadwife, are stuck in your last moments of pain and regret and relying on the base impulse to figure things out as your reason for continuing to exist even after death - but the game doesn’t COMMIT to anything beyond scary ghosts real. If you’re going to make me play as a cop AND use the Salem Witch Trials, I’d like to see some commitment to social commentary, dammit.

and finally:

being run over by a ghost train was only funny the first time. the other six were just aggravating.

#polkaknox talks #joey malone and rosa blackwell and lauren blackwell would never have done any of this to me #games and such

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unproduciblesmackdown · 7 years ago

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also re ppl talking abt things in the concepts of Careers.....just like when it annoys me when ppl start “resume / interview tips” with a tone of “You Fucking Fools” instead of say “this is all a goddamn game and the whole hiring process is a halfassed attempt to weed out the less exploitable at the min wage level and reward the privileged at upper levels and decisions will largely be arbitrary and this is all just about trying to adjust your odds”......it also annoys me when ppl (artists on twitter........) talk abt the necessity of Networking (being considered amicable by ppl you may potentially work with) with a context of “you fucking fools” instead of “again although capitalism pretends its a meritocracy its really not and unfortunately its not necessarily realistic to assume the quality of your work will serve you nearly as well as not just making friends but trying to establish personal connections as a means of making professional inroads”

i mean again even at the minimum wage level, someone whose friend already works at a place and recommends them is way more likely to be hired than anyone else who hands in an application. because beyond hoping for someone who can be scheduled at any and all hours and never say “i cant work then,” they dont really care who gets hired and its kinda just eh fuck it lets call this one. and interview them as if their job here has anything to do w interpersonal skills and the ability to deftly maneuver their way thru interrogation abt how much they might value their family and own personal existence over the company that pays them about ten cents a minute.

anyways its not like i dont think “networking” (seems weirdly euphemistic to me also) or finessing details on your application ISN’T helpful, just that its kind of demeaning if not insulting to talk about it like its all obvious and anyone who doesnt strategize the way you do is incompetent and doesnt deserve to succeed and its their own fault for not thriving. coz thats accepting the whole “this is a meritocracy” lie—that is definitely an assumption found in basically all discussions of anything—that necessitates these ridiculous secret maneuverings to get a foot in the door at places that treat you terribly to allow you to maybe barely survive off your work

anyways like of course i dont think that artists should have to seem friendlier than other artists to succeed & even if thats how it works i’m not gonna accept/endorse that premise yknow......like damn. its an element everywhere that yeah your Social Skills impact how ppl treat you professionally but im not about to pretend the Real Solution is just that those ppl who get fucked over by that fact just need to learn how to Be Different

like to a degree its sort of nice that just being in the same general professional sphere can make artists known to each other......but also like. if ppl around you dont personally consider you likeable, it then might close doors to your career. like damn nobody likes me, i’m glad i dont have to talk to ppl to draw

funny story actually once i was in a situation where im pretty sure nearly everyone was assuming i was a serious artist with a serious project. it wasnt at all a formal setting or even relevant what everyone did like just ppl hanging out / chillin but i still like, got automatically accepted by random nearby ppl in a way i was like oh god no i dont do anything lmfaoo...i got drunk followed on twitter by an artist i actually vaguely knew of & i think it took them a couple weeks to realize their mistake......i had a guy who wasnt an artist but was still involved in working w/ them talk to me a few times, increasingly somewhat drunk which is probably why he was talking to me (not in a nightmarish oh no a drunk guy is talking to me way, luckily, it was fine actually) & at one point he mentioned some artists who were there who i definitely knew of & how he never knew them to hang out w ppl after events or whatever & he was like idk are they too good for us or w/e & i was like lol nah i kinda know of them & i think theyre both just pretty shy (which was true lol in my head im like ive seen their diary comics abt being a bit socially timid.) and also i was thinking abt how ppl will and have assumed i think im too good to hang out / talk to them or are generally snobby, when actually i’m just anxious, and then doubly uncomfortable when i find out abt the stuff ppl have said abt me (like an unrelated family friend talking abt me when i was like, 11 or something lol; ppl talking abt how i wouldnt take up their invitation to join a group chat, since they make me nervous and if i do show up i cant say anything and probably feel worse; ppl talking abt how i accepted hanging out w a group i mostly didnt know but like brought stuff to do quietly in the corner like draw and write and stuff & had just kind of been making fun of me in the bg for the subsequent months i continued to hang out w them w increasing misguided confidence lol)

its funny (no it isnt) that ppl will think their specific brand of social language is the one that gives them the only accurate reading of other ppls social cues, & that everyone else has to learn to accommodate that, instead of ever considering the fact that its actually not a flat universal constant & maybe THEY need to learn more that some kind of subtle facial cue doesnt mean the same thing for everyone, that everyone doesnt verbally communicate in the same way, that there are cultural differences in various forms of communication, that avoiding eye contact doesnt always mean someone is full of contempt or lies, that people dont express affection in the same ways, that ones immediate impression of someone isnt always equivalent to their truest essence laid bare, etc etc

like everyone has their own language really & there can be mistranslations & nuances that are lost b/w ppl & you can’t always blame the other person for your own misinterpretation unless you consider yourself constantly superior mm

like its definitely all a lot of personal connections everywhere but that doesnt mean it should be

and the personal appeal of someone to strangers l o l . . . which can be a largely harmless advantage to a huge one. smdh. well it all stretches into a larger topic and many things annoy me

#this all brings me to remembering a podcast i listened to about triage #how when supplies like oxygen were strictly rationed in this one situation but when a particular patient who was known for being friendly #and thus largely beloved was struggling to breathe the decision was made to allow her some of the oxygen supply #and though it all turned out fine some doctors afterwards were thinking abt the decision in terms of that if she’d had a reputation for #being unfriendly and hadnt had this positive reputation she mightve been allowed to die in accordance w the procedures in place #so thats how i go from tweets abt artist networking to who is allowed to die in triage #but theres not exactly any borders in the issues of social hierarchy #in both personal and institutional discretion; the same biases and discriminations will permeate #relatedly ive embraced my hatred for group chats and never join or feel bad for it #i also embrace not hanging out w ppl i dont want to hang out with #im just out here ignoring people left and right. if it costs me my life its only another benefit for me

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lacquerware · 7 years ago

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Hellblade's Language Problem

::WARNING: MANY HELLBLADE SPOILERS WITHIN::

I think I went into Hellblade with particularly well-balanced expectations. On the one hand, I had a vested interest in Ninja Theory’s success, having devoted several (rather grueling) years of my life to promoting their controversial last two titles, DmC Devil May Cry and its rerelease, DmC Devil May Cry: Definitive Edition as a community manager at Capcom. In my view, Ninja Theory greatly exceeded Capcom's and my own expectations for DmC, but they walked away from the experience dripping with rotten tomatoes from irate fans who wouldn't have been happy with any reboot of their beloved series, no matter what it did. With Hellblade, I'd wanted to see Ninja Theory get the credit I knew they'd long deserved.

On the other hand, I was also quite disappointed when NT revealed Hellblade to be a more narrative-driven piece, and I was downright worried when they still hadn’t highlighted the combat system after three or four PR beats. They were selling this game on its fancy performance capture technology and its treatment of mental psychosis, not its Smokin’ Slick Style and Just Guard mechanics. I’m fine with narrative-driven games, but there are tons of them nowadays, and NT is essentially the only Western developer to have sipped from Capcom's forbidden font of combat wisdom. NT walked away from DmC with a world-class mastery of combat design, honed under the direct tutelage of Capcom’s own Hideaki Itsuno (DMC series director and veteran fighting game dev) and his team of designers. It seemed a shame to let that mastery go underutilized.

I eventually concluded that Hellblade probably wouldn’t be the DmC-without-the-baggage follow-up I’d dreamed of, but it’d probably still excel on its own merits. In other words, I went in expecting a good game, but not expecting it to top DmC.

It pains me, then, to conclude that my experience with Hellblade was mostly just bad.

Early on in my time with Hellblade, I asked myself, “So is it ‘SEH-noo-ah’ or ‘SEN-yoo-ah’?” referring to the protagonist's name. Then one of the voices in Senua’s head called her “SEH-noo-ah.” A little later, one of the other characters calls her “SEN-yoo-ah.” Later still, Senua says her own name, pronouncing it "SEH-noo-ah." Much later, Senua’s own mother calls her “SEN-yoo-ah.” Is this inconsistent pronunciation a symptom of Senua's psychosis, or merely an oversight in the game’s voice direction? I don’t know, but I see it as symbolic of the overarching issue with Hellblade: it has a language problem.

When I say language, I’m talking about the visual, auditory, and tactile language that the game uses to guide its player. Ninja Theory took on a lofty challenge with Hellblade: to convey the experience of mental psychosis, using a video game. To be clear, psychosis is a severe mental disorder which presents the mind with vivid delusions—false sensory inputs. Video games, by definition, use sensory feedback—namely, graphics and sound—to communicate a consistent, predictable set of rules and parameters to a player. How do you simulate psychosis and make a functional game at the same time? How do you present meaningful feedback to the player while also inundating them with erroneous imagery and sound?

Ninja Theory actually found a variety of ways to do this. As they explain in the documentary included with the game, many sufferers of mental psychosis display a tendency to draw patterns and connections where none are apparent (to normoids). So essentially, they're ascribing their own rules and logic to the world. Arguably, this is what all game designers do anyway, so in that regard this premise might be surprisingly fertile ground. Indeed, we mostly see Senua’s hallucinations take recurring, systematic forms: glyphs which she must overlay with seemingly arbitrary sights in the environment; “portals” which, once passed through, reveal new avenues; and horrible humanoid demons, with whom Senua must do battle. Theoretically, these elements successfully convey Senua’s mental condition while still offering the player a “game” rather than just a series of crazy, unpredictable occurrences.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is a simple matter of execution; the game is technically flawed. Tutorial-less and HUD-less, it relies solely on subtle, in-world feedback to communicate its rules of engagement to the player, but then breaks those rules either through technical failure or conscious design choices. In a different game, I might have picked up on each bug or design issue much quicker, but because of the psychosis premise and the subtlety of the issues I faced, I found it abnormally difficult to distinguish between intended weirdness and simple video game flaws. In other words, the game isn’t just about being crazy—it is crazy.

Here are some examples:

-Early on, the game establishes that you can use the R2 button to “Focus” on certain objects in the environment to activate puzzles or audio logs. A little later, the game introduces a new type of "Focusable" object--an icon of a flame--but for some reason these objects don't respond to your Focus until you're much closer. The game betrays its established rule for how Focus works, without clearly reestablishing the new rule. I probably passed by that first flame icon five times, attempting to Focus each time but receiving no feedback. By the time I realized it was a distance issue, I’d wasted maybe thirty minutes searching for a way to progress.

-Focusing on each flame icon activates a sequence in which the environment is engulfed in an inferno, leaving you with mere seconds to run away before dying horribly. When I activated the first one, I instinctively started running in one direction, only to have the voices in Senua’s head started frantically crying, “No, not that way!” So I stopped and frantically searched for another path. Before I could find one, I died horribly. It seemed so unavoidable that for a moment I thought the death was scripted. When I realized it wasn’t and I respawned, I examined the surrounding area at my leisure and determined that, actually, there was no other path and I was running the right way. Was this a bug? Or was I now to understand that sometimes the voices in Senua’s head actively try to get her killed? I’ve since cleared the game and still don’t know….

-I encountered a bug which prevented one of the first puzzle-locked doors in the game from opening. It wasn’t totally clear that solving the puzzle was supposed to unlock that specific door, so I found myself wandering back and forth across the vast section of the map available to me at the time. Additionally, there were music cues which played upbeat, intense music within a specific radius (which didn’t even contain the door in question), and cut off abruptly the instant I stepped outside that radius. I scoured every inch again and again. After close to an hour of wandering and scouring, I googled it in exasperation and discovered it was simply a door bug. The music was just completely arbitrary. Unforgivable in a game that demands you take unexplainable sights and sounds at face value.

-One section of the game introduces a light/darkness mechanic. You must stand in the light at all times—either by carrying a torch or standing in designated illuminated areas—or you will die horribly within seconds. In one such instance, a fight sequence breaks out while you're carrying a torch. Senua subtly drops the torch on the ground as the fight begins, and a grueling battle ensues. When it ends, darkness floods your surroundings, and if you don’t think to retrieve the dropped torch, you die horribly within seconds. But what was illuminating us during the fight sequence, and why did it stop after I won? When the darkness came, my instinct was to run, which of course got me killed. I had to repeat the entire fight.

-The boss which follows the darkness segments has the ability to spew darkness (shoutout to DmC’s Hunter). Visually, this darkness looks just like the darkness which causes you to die horribly within seconds elsewhere, so the natural assumption is that you must scramble to find the light. This proved not to be true; rather, the darkness simply makes it dark, which sucks because it’s hard to see. Lol.

-The glyph puzzles, which I felt the game leaned on way too much, were extremely finicky. I often found myself desperately trying to line up the overlay with its apparent environmental counterpart, only to be denied feedback. “Guess I’m barking up the wrong tree,” I’d say, and search elsewhere. Eventually I’d circle back and retry for lack of any better ideas, and finally I would land upon the precise footing that triggered the game’s acknowledgement of my solution. Because of this finicky detection, it frequently took me upwards of thirty minutes to execute a solution I’d figured out in five. These moments deeply hurt the game’s immersion—it’s hard to believe someone tormented by voices and haunted by hellspawn would spend this long lining up glyphs with such surgical precision. I felt neither crazy nor like a warrior; I felt like a child with a defective issue of Highlights Magazine.

Weirdly, in other cases the game would give me credit just for glancing in the general direction of a solution I hadn’t actually noticed yet.

By the time the credits rolled, I’d experienced so many baffling inconsistencies in the game’s communication that the whole thing just felt like a misfire.

Now look--I’ve been known to both overthink things and not be very smart, so I don’t imagine everyone will have the experience I had. In fact, I googled “hellblade frustrating” just to see, and was shocked to find that all of the results were about how frustrating the combat was. I actually found the combat to be Hellblade’s saving grace—satisfying, consistent, and almost perfectly balanced thanks to a God Hand-style difficulty auto-balancing feature. The camera worked against me in a few situations, but most fights left me feeling like I’d beaten dire odds, and certainly made me sympathize more with Senua’s plight than the mundane action of lining up Viking runes with wooden scaffolding.

The moral of Hellblade’s tale seems to be that Senua won’t “cure” her psychosis, but that she can heal by learning to accept it as a part of who she is and coexisting with it. After finishing the game, it occurred to me that I would almost certainly have a better time with Hellblade on a second playthrough. Those bugs and flaws would still be there, but I’d know about them and be able to anticipate them. There’s an obvious parallel here. I don’t think it’s intentional (though the idea of “bad design by design” does intrigue me), but I think there’s some poetry in the notion that we can apply Hellblade’s lessons to itself.

All that aside, I appreciate what Ninja Theory has done to advance the conversation on mental health and develop a template for their "AAA indie" model. Hats off.

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