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bondsmagii · 4 years ago

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My wife writes online recipes.

It’s just a little hobby of hers. I don’t really get it myself. She’s a great cook, and she gets a lot of great comments on her recipes – she’s one of those people who’s just good at teaching, you know, makes everything super simple and easy to follow – but she tends to write absolute essays at the top of all her recipes. Backstory, where she got the recipe from, how she adapted it over the years. It’s not that I don’t care. It’s just a lot of words, and I’m not a chef. I don’t know what she means by half of it. I look at the pictures, though. She’s a great food photographer as well. Manages to make the food look great – no shininess there, no congealing. It’s a neat little page, and she enjoys doing it, so what’s the harm?

Only thing is, she always stays up really late to update it. There’s no reason why she does this, that I can see. When I’ve asked, she just tells me she was busy during the day and had no time, and I believed her for a while. Then I began to notice that it didn’t matter how busy she was – she’d always wait until one, maybe two in the morning. Then I’d hear her downstairs, tapping away on the keyboard. Once, she even got up to do it. Like, out of bed. I was too tired to ask at the time, but during breakfast she just gave me a blank look and told me I must have been dreaming. We got into a bit of an argument about it, actually. I was so sure I hadn’t been, but… now I’m not as sure. I’ve definitely seen her down there, though. Late at night, when she thinks I’m asleep. I’ve stood at the top of the stairs, where I can just make her out on the couch. She writes with such grim concentration. She doesn’t look much like she’s enjoying it at the time. Looks like she hates it, if I’m honest. Then I’ll catch her reading it back during the day, and she’s smiling again. Perhaps the writing process, I don’t know.

One day I got kind of curious. That night, at about four in the morning, I woke up to my wife getting quietly out of bed and tiptoeing downstairs. Sure enough, soon I heard her fingers going over that keyboard at a rapid pace, like something had driven her out of bed and had her in a frenzy. I was so curious as to what simply couldn’t wait until morning. I thought about asking her over breakfast again, but I didn’t want a repeat of last time. Instead I went back to sleep, and when I woke up she was in the shower like she was every morning, and I pulled up her recipe site on my phone.

The latest recipe – the one she had posted that morning – started off normal. A greeting, a quick update about her life. The first thing that struck me as odd was in the second paragraph. Only a little thing, but still. She said that she was up so late typing the recipe because she hadn’t been able to sleep, but that was a lie. She had been sleeping soundly when I’d come to bed, and when I got up a few hours later to get a drink. Why would she lie about something like that?

More normal paragraphs followed. She talked about where she had picked the recipe up, about barbeques when she had been a little girl. There was a real poetry to how she described those late summer afternoons, the lazy drone of the bees, the golden air. It was beautiful, but I wondered just how many people actually read all of this stuff, and how many people scrolled rapidly down to the recipe. The thought caused a pang of sympathy to go through me. She worked so hard on these introductions, and the thought of nobody reading them made me feel heavy. Then I saw it. About five lines in, at the seventh large paragraph.

Now everyone has stopped reading, here’s what you really need to know.

I sat up a little straighter.

This recipe has a slightly stronger sauce, because the meat wasn’t as fresh as I would like. If you have fresher meat, you’ll probably want to reduce the ingredients by half, or if you don’t mind strong flavours, adjust to taste.

I sank back a little, disappointed. What had I expected to find, really? The water in the shower changed in pitch as my wife moved around under the jet, and I found myself tuned in, listening for the creak that would let me know she was stepping out of the tub. For some reason, I did not want to be caught doing this.

I caught this one on Friday night. Friday evenings are good, because a lot of people go out on the trails. They take some of the longer ones, because they have the next day off. Unfortunately when I went to check the snares, a bunch of teenagers were using the parking lot to goof around and drink, so I had to wait hours before I could collect the catch. You’ve read about how my snares are designed in the Long Pulled Pork and Slaw recipe, so you can see my problem here, lol! The snare worked perfectly, but obviously the meat had been dead for a few hours by the time I had it up and out of there, and I’m a sticker for getting to it as quickly as possible.

Here's the thing. My wife is not a hunter. She has no problem with eating meat, and she can cook up a mean steak and pull pork better than any restaurant I’ve ever been to, but she’s never had any interest in catching the animals she cooks herself. She goes to local places for the meat, likes to source it farm to fork, but snares? She’s never mentioned snares once. She doesn’t own any hunting rifles. She’s never been hunting in her life. I have no idea what she’s talking about. I wonder, briefly, if she’s delusional – some highly specific delusion from a condition that somehow impacts no other part of her life – and then I scroll up slightly and click the link to the pork and slaw.

This time the extra information is hidden in the fifteenth paragraph, in the middle of a long-winded but beautifully written story about catching fireflies with her little sister.

They showed me how to make the snares when I was nineteen years old. It’s fairly time-consuming to set up, but well worth it! If you’re interested please don’t hesitate to email me for more information, but it’s my little secret so I don’t want it right out in the open ;) The important thing to know is that the snares are quick and humane, and designed to kill the catch immediately. This is why it’s super important to check them regularly! The longer the catch is dead, the more the taste of the meat is affected – and this meat needs so much work to begin with in order to make it palatable. You don’t want to give yourself extra work! (And for those of you wondering about the obvious, don’t. They will take care of the rest of the body. This is the payment for using their techniques, and besides, we couldn’t eat that much anyway! My husband and I barely make a dent in all the food I have stored away in the freezer. Just take the cut you want, and leave the rest to them.)

The shower was still going strong, and I got to my feet before I could think too much about it. I was starting to realise I might have made a mistake, leaving all the cooking to my wife. She loves it – cooking is her real passion in life – and I’m abysmal at it, so it makes sense. Having said that, I should have probably taken more of an interest in what it was, exactly, that she was cooking.

There’s a huge box freezer in our garage. I never look in it. She doesn’t like me to, anyway. She has everything arranged and knows where it is, and she likes to be able to run out and grab something without wasting too much time. It felt almost dishonest to crack the lid and peer in – like I was snooping in her diary. All I can see are bags upon bags of frozen meat, but that’s not unusual. She stocks up sometimes. You can never be too careful. Like I said, I’m no chef, so I can’t make heads nor tails of it. It’s dark meat, red, and I mean, it’s really dark. Beef, maybe. Venison. Is she out there catching deer in snares? If so, why would she have to wait until the teenagers had gone to bring it out? It’s not illegal to hunt deer around here – not at this time of the year. And why wouldn’t she mention it to me at all?

Cautiously, I move a few of the packages. My hand closes around a strangely shaped one and I pull it out so I can see better. My heart skips a beat before I realise it’s probably just for her stock. She makes stock out of bones, you see, so it’s not unusual to see a whole shin bone in the freezer.

Except this shin bone is long and thick. It doesn’t look like any kind of shin bone I’d expect from an animal. Looking at it, it’s about the length of mine.

You know, I never could quite place the flavour of the steaks she’s been serving me.

I swallow hard. I slide the shin bone back into its place. I realise, too late, that the gurgle of the pipes stopped long ago. I realise, also too late, that I left my phone on the bed.

I think I hear the garage door creak.

#creeptastic #creepypasta #my creepypasta #writing #my writing #short story #fiction #been a while since i wrote a good old creepypasta huh

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wanderbythewayside · 4 years ago

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I think one of the things I really like about ToG is that there is no cheap redemption (it can actually be argued that there is no redemption since being good isn’t actually a requirement of being a main character here and no one does shit to deserve it.

I’ll have to dip into other fandoms to explain my point but I’ll try to stick to big ones so most people can follow along.

Because so many shoujo mangas/animes are targeted towards younger people there’s this sort of unspoken rule that if a character is going to be in the main cast they have to be good, or at least on their way to being good. But when you combine that with too many side characters that you can’t spend any real time on them or if it’s an adaptation of something and the writers are trying to make a character more palatable you end up getting this forced, awkward sudden turn around or a ‘surprise! they were good all along! they just had (bad) reasons to act like a shitty human being.’ And not only is it majorly unsatisfying if you take any time to analyze these characters but it creates this sort of precedent of victims being expected to forgive their abusers or, in the worst case, outright victim-blaming in an attempt to make the “redeemed” character look good. The latter is usually by the fans of said redeemed character and it’s gross.

Before I go on let me make this clear, you can have bad characters, you can have redeemed characters, you can have problematic characters and relationships, half the reason we have media is to explore that shit, but don’t try to tell me or make me believe a morally wrong character is actually good when you’ve put none of the work in.

Fairy Tail and Naruto were really bad for this. One of the main signs they were trying to make a bad character look good is if they keep flashing back to their Tragic Story whenever that character is doing something shitty or when that character is apologizing. It’s a great flashing “See! This character isn’t that bad! Pity them! :P” And asking the audience to forgive a character after 20 seconds of sad footage with absolutely no set up is one thing, but having their victims only ever forgive them and move on is not only lazy it massively under-represents real life victims. And you see the clash in the fandom, people who love the redeemed characters just rage on fans who accurately point out that an apology or a sad past does NOT equal redemption or forgiveness and it is UNCOMFORTABLE to watch.

I get that you relate to this shitty character but please don’t pretend that you loving them makes them a good character.

In Naruto Itachi’s grand “He’s a good person!” reveal comes after he tricks Sasuke into killing him, which comes after he tortured Sasuke twice (something he wasn’t forced to do unlike some of the rest of the shit he did) and so many fans decided he was a perfectly good person and ignored how even that last act, meant to be about Itachi punishing himself for the shit he himself did, fucked over his brother, but I’m still supposed to believe he was a good character all along. And in Fairy Tail Minerva beats the shit out of Lucy for no other reason than that she can, but later I’m supposed to believe that she suddenly had a change of heart with no other set up than the, also, abusive Guild Master was no longer there to encourage it or that she’s actually done anything to deserve that redemption.

Again, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t like these characters, or that you shouldn’t like morally questionable characters, but if you can’t like them without distorting them in your head to make them good maybe you should take a better look at why you like them.

In ToG literally no character gets a redemption arc despite the fact that they have all done some pretty awful things. The greatest example of this that I can think of is Hoaquin. As an audience we’re in the train being told how terrible and awful this guy is and then we get hit with a flashback, and it shows us that he does have some sad shit; all he ever wanted was the approval of his father, and it is his father’s callous disregard and neglect that causes Hoaquin to go to such extremes. And it’s following the shoujo formula, or at least the start of it. But then in that same flashback (sort of) we’re also told that Hoaquin had no intention of ever letting one of his siblings lead their weird body-horror-group-project and deliberately mislead them as to what the spell would do. It is so important that he is roughly the same age in both scenes because we are, in fast succession, given a reason to sympathize with him, and then a reminder that even that young he was a manipulative little shit that cared about no one’s life or ambitions more than his own.

Instead of some ham-fisted attempt at getting my sympathy so I’ll accept that he’ll work with Baam or Baam will work with him I am (implicitly) told exactly what he is: He’s a shitty, morally dark character, he’s just ALSO a fleshed out character with reasons and motivations for the way that he is. I am not supposed to think he’s a good character, I’m not supposed to think he is worthy of redemption, I am just shown who and what he is and get to decide whether or not I like it for myself. And I do like him, not because I think he has the capacity to be good, but because I find him deeply compelling in his complete lack of justification for himself or any hint of remorse. ToG doesn’t try to tell me what to think of it’s characters, it just let’s me learn about them, and I fucking love that.

#tog #tower of god #character analysis #redemption #tropes #fairy tail #naruto #itachi uchiha #sasuke uchiha #hoaquin #minerva #lucy heartfilia #in this essay i will

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ikehorganics · 4 years ago

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HOW TO BE MORE SELF AWARE: FOOD AS A RELATIONSHIP.

When we look at food, we should always look at it as a relationship. When you are in a relationship, nobody wants to be in a toxic relationship that exhausts them, has them hating themselves, or even ruins their day. When I say treat that you should treat food as a relationship, I am saying that you should eat food that makes you feel good, food that benefits you. See how I used the word ‘feel’ and not ‘are’, because eating foods that are healthy for you eliminate an entire category of foods that make you feel happy and make you feel good. To have any relationship be good and healthy for you, it has to feel good.

Everyone knows what foods make them feel good, whether it is a stack of pancakes or a fresh bowl of fruits, but what people lack awareness of is what foods do not make them feel good, and I will explain how to identify what these foods are.

You have to ask yourself some very important questions in order to understand what makes you feel bad on a deeper level. Let’s say that whenever you eat dairy (yoghurt, cheese, milk, that alfredo pasta with immense amounts of heavy cream and cheese) you feel bloated and you hate the feeling or being bloated, it upsets you and you wish you had not consumed it because suddenly you feel horrible about your bloat or the fact that it has caused a chain reaction in your life that makes you feel bad.

Or for instance, you eat too much bread or fast foods and you feel lethargic and sleepy after, and it does not feel good

Or, when you overeat and can’t stop eating because the food tastes so good and when you are done you are in immense discomfort from the physical fullness you feel.

I could go on and on, but the pattern here is that all of these things do not feel good, and we need to develop a bigger sense of self awareness. When you are aware of all the things that do not make you feel good, and you slowly but surely eliminate them from your life or at least decrease the amount of times you consume it or even better, finding a substitution that actually makes you feel good about yourself.

Feeling bad consists of not only how you feel physically as a result of eating something, but how you mentally handle it. If you insult yourself or complain endlessly on how you wish you had not eaten that much or even eaten at all, then it is bad for you.

Self-awareness is not always about noticing the negatives, it is about noticing the positive’s too. If you have a major sweet tooth and you know you have to have something sweet once or twice a day: have a healthy alternative OR have what you crave in moderation. Every night, I have a cup of rich hot chocolate because I love ending my night with it and I do not want to deprive myself of something that makes me feel good because it can do more good than harm.

Self-awareness also consists of knowing that food will not run away from your cupboards. That bag of chips will always be there and you seriously do not have to have it in one sitting, but at the same time, if you know you cannot be content with a serving of chips and will devour the entire packet, then maybe it is better to be out of sight and out of mind. I say this because, if you finish that entire packet of chips, will you feel good about yourself after?

HOW TO APPROACH YOUR NEW LIFESTYLE WITH A NEW SENSE OF AWARENESS.

Now that you are aware of what makes you feel good versus what does not make you feel good:

Implement things that make you feel good into your lifestyle or curate a new lifestyle that implements it.

Clear out your pantry of foods that make you feel bad and give them away to someone else.

Create a box of feel good cravings where you know that if you only have a little of it, you will enjoy it guilt free.

Journal and track how you feel whenever you make little feats, if you ordered a healthier “feel good” alternative of food at a restaurant, you should be proud of yourself and pat yourself on the back for that.

Do not feel bad if you have one bad meal, one bad day or one bad week, because you can always continue on your day or even start a new day with things that make you feel good. It is not the end of the world.

If you feel gross after eating a certain something: eliminate it. it’s never good to feel uncomfortable in your own body, especially with food, something that you are meant to enjoy and that sits in your body for hours.

Know your limits and your body’s limits: eat until you are satisfied, but not uncomfortably full. If you have two servings of pasta but still feel normal and want more, go for it.

Cheat days seriously are not necessary, why would you want an entire day of eating foods that do not make you feel good normally? Implement something that makes you feel good, even if it is not the healthiest, and enjoy it daily in moderation.

There is always an alternative. If you want a really good burger and fries, they are easy to recreate at home, and can be made way more nutritious in order to not have you feeling lethargic and energy-less.

10.

Get intimate with your food, whenever you can make food, make enough for a couple of days so you can always have feel good food ready. I have noticed, that when food is not available, I will look for anything regardless of whether it makes me feel good or not and gouge it down. So making a little extra of something for the next day or the next meal is not a bad thing.

11.

Do not deprive yourself, find alternatives. If you like chocolate’s and sweets, find a chocolate that tastes just as good with a lot less guilt. Whether it be chocolate or sweets with reduced sugar, less calories, or sugar free. Find that alternative so you do not feel an emptiness within yourself that can result in you overindulging in something that does not make you feel good, and has you feeling ten times worse.

12.

Your palate will adjust overtime to healthier, feel good alternatives overtime, so if you stick to it, your palate will adapt to it and even begin to enjoy it genuinely.

#self aware #self awareness #feel good #healthy eating #healthy relationships #health and wellness

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gayregis · 4 years ago

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Do you have any thoughts on TWN using non polish actors to portray characters from polish fantasy book with dense polish culture and roots? And on how most of the cast apperereance are drastically different than in the books? Like Foltest, Renfri, Fringilla or Calanthe? (Sorry this is the correct one, i forgot to add Fringilla on my previous question.)

i feel like the witcher should not be handled by a large american company like netflix. it is clear that a lot of decisions were made to “dumb the series down” in a manner that would make it more of a pop culture phenomenon that could be used to profit off of from viewership, subscriptions, social buzz, and merchandise, instead of an opportunity to demonstrate actual artistry, storytelling, character depth, and poignant messages. the company that handles it CAN be american or another nationality besides polish, but it shouldn’t be a huge one focused on making as much money and social sharability as possible, that will ruin things. (i also feel like the witcher should not be a live-action adaptation, but this is kind of besides the point... to better gauge how i think the feel of a visual-audial witcher adaptation should look, my dream adaptation would be that of a more “adult version” (”adult” meaning in themes like war and despair) studio ghibli or laika).

in regards to casting, i feel like it’s fine to not use an all polish cast as long as they fit the character description in a way that is actually relevant to the plot. so many people in response to people of color being cast in the witcher were volalitely racist and demanded a “polish cast” - as if polish MUST = white. even though poland is not as ethically diverse as some other european countries, people of color do exist in poland, as they/we exist everywhere. if you want an “all-polish cast and production,” that’s fine to me, i don’t think it’s inherently necessary, but i think if one is doing so, that doesn’t mean that it would be wrong to cast actors of color in roles.

i think the issue lies more with storytellng, for two reasons. one is that eastern european people involved on set seem to actually understand the witcher and what it’s about way better than any of the british cast, and by that i mean sakharov and baginski, who have demonstrated more understanding of like, the style of storytelling (not every scene needs to be jammed with action, drama, sex, gore), what the characters actually mean to each other, and the lore in general. this makes sense because i have read some articles and such before about how the witcher was and is important to its fans in poland and eastern europe because very little “slavic fantasy” ever gets exported and represented internationally, and of course sapkowski involved many cultural references in the series, so it’s recognizable to people from those regions (or are diaspora from those regions) who grew up hearing these fairytales, etc. it’s more of a meaningful callback and less of a “foreign curiosity,” if that makes sense. so for those reasons, i think it’s important to have a majority polish and/or slavic writing room/directors/etc, people behind the story and how the story is told - but that doesn’t mean the writer’s room should be all white men, though. diversity in gender, race, etc should be considered.

the other reason is that the casting for the netflix is inaccurate, but not for reasons of race. the issue with anya chalotra as yennefer isn’t that she is indian, it’s that her hair is incredibly straight and flat and not like yennefer’s curly stormy hair at all, and that her face is so soft and childlike, she doesn’t look stern and cold like yennefer at all. there are many casting issues amongst the white members of cast, such as henry cavill, who doesn’t fit the description of geralt at all because geralt looks like he’s starved constantly, and joey batey, who ... well, dandelion is supposed to be blonde and curly long-haired... but of course, these are the appearances which don’t really “matter” in regards to the story. except i think geralt’s build, as well as yennefer and ciri’s proximity in age, which makes me nauseous to think about how they only have a 6 year age difference

one physical description which does actually matter to the plot/lore is that of calanthe, pavetta, and ciri, as they are a matrelineal line, but in netflix, they don’t look related at all. i saw so many people complaining that they should have chosen a white actress for calanthe, but why is she the problem? why not cast people of color for calanthe, pavetta, and ciri altogether? they should look related and have the ashen grey hair/green eyes, but that doesn’t mean they have to be white. it’s a similar issue with yennefer and fringilla. they are supposed to look similar, and i saw many people complaining that they chose mimi who is black to be fringilla, they are just using “they need to look similar” as an excuse to hide their racism and anti-blackness, because anya is more white-passing than mimi is. from my perspective, why not then cast a black actress who looks similar to mimi as yennefer, then? “they need to look similar” again does not mean “they need to all be white or white-passing.”

we should have cast actors that both fit the descriptions of the characters in the books AND are diverse, without it being “random diversity to appeal to a diverse audience.” lauren thought she was so clever by throwing the actors of color in the roles of background characters, stereotypes, forgettable and disposable aides to the white leads, or super evil villains... i see what you did... why not center actors of color in an actually proud and leading light, with lead roles, where the casting makes sense and isn’t there for tokenization that does nothing to empower people of color? actually incorporate people of color into your artistic projects in a way that respects them and makes sense and not just so you can get more views to make more money

other divergences from canon like foltest were just piss-poor and demonstrated the lack of understanding about the messages of the story. foltest was supposed to be handsome, elegant, and as a refined a king as any, to show how those in power are actually corrupt and as prone to disgusting acts as any other human being, that foltest is not a better man than geralt because he is beautiful and sits on a throne. by making him disgusting on the outside, they totally missed the point that he is supposed to mask his disgustingness on the inside with beauty on the outside. also i feel like (maybe related) twn really made a whole joke out of foltest and his relationship to his sister because in one of the flashbacks (in the sorcerer? gala? party?) foltest is shown as a kid with his sister and his mom grabs his arm or whatever and is like “foltest stop bothering your sister” as like some kind of fucking joke... literally they made a “funny ahaha incest joke” like seriously wtf. the story of the striga in particular should be taken seriously imo because of how rawly the tragedy is depicted... this is probably why it’s one of my least favorite short stories... its so sad and also incest disgusts me horribly

for renfri i feel like she was just sooooo ... more “likable” as a character, a lot like how yennefer’s character was changed. you feel feelings of pity and curiosity towards her rather than actually being intimidated by her. renfri in the books actually made me so mad because i think she represents something like what ciri goes through across the saga, just how when you have the choice on how to respond to your abuse, you can easily become consumed with revenge, and i think renfri made me think of myself in that way so i really disliked it when they changed this terrifying raw aspect of her anguish and hunger for retrubution that made her lose her humanity into like, more of a palatable manner of killing... it really was just “girl with sword” and it was so boring. the lesser evil literally makes my stomach turn and that’s why i only read the story like once as well...

also to return to fringilla, i liked mimi and i thought she should have been cast for yennefer instead maybe.... i just was really upset at how much they changed fringilla’s character in the writing to be a “generic evil villain” when in the series she actually is kind of unique in my opinion. she is like, not allied at all with the main characters, but ends up saving both yennefer and geralt’s lives. she’s not good or bad, she’s not super loyal to the empire but she is still nilfgaardian/beauclairoise, and she just exists as a character and that’s why i actually like her in the books (asides from all of the unnecessary library nonsense). i thought mimi could have handled that complex role really well but they totally took that away from her and just made her a flat boring forgettable “evil” character that does “forbidden black magic” and is super loyal to an empire that brought her purpose because yennefer was mean to her once or smth ig... yeah ok. also i fucking hate how they had cahir of all fucking people order her around. idk how old cahir is supposed to be in netflix because he’s obviously not like 16-20 as he would be in canon during this time period, but to have him be the boss of fringilla... that is dumb as hell. i just try and think about that ever occuring with books verse cahir and fringilla and i think she would smack him off of his horse and into the mud. she’d tell assire and assire would get mawr to drag him off by his ear as he tries not to cry. also of course i hate cahir’s casting and the fact that they showed his face. why. it ruins like every message that his character had...

oh also because i HAVE to talk about it. i hate how they tried to make jaskier more masculine/boyish with not giving joey a wig or flamboyant setting-appropriate garb, i think they are allergic to men with long hair that’s not a grime, dirt-covered mess... literally just give half of the production wigs or better wigs i swear to god ... also like this is totally for another post but i don’t think making jaskier a flirt is inherently misogynistic like he acts in the books at times. like just write the misogynistic bits out and it’s fine... flirtatiousness is not evil when it’s consensual and appreciated ... i think they just really wanted geralt to be the one that gets large amounts of p*ssy because he’s muscular or w/e and jaskier became this sort of helpless annoying barnacle on his side instead of a real character and friend to him. and to bring this point back to the main point , i think character appearance really affects their characterization: jaskier in twn has short, boyish hair with no facial hair, which makes him look kind of juvenile, jaskier in the books has curly long hair with some light facial hair, which kind of brings up ehhh what would you call it... 70s casanova energies maybe, a man that puts oils in his hair and such, male thottery...

#the witcher netflix #anon #ask

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wonderfulworldofmichaelford · 4 years ago

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Michael After Midnight: Heavy Metal

Sometimes it’s fun to revisit old movies you watched when you were younger and find out, hey, this is better than you remembered! Sometimes your young mind just wasn’t ready to accept how awesome something was, and you needed time to fully understand what you look for and like about cinema to truly appreciate it. But then, sometimes, you watch something you liked when you were younger, and you realize… wow, this is absolute dog shit!

Such is the case with Heavy Metal. This is a movie I have frequently cited as a low-ranking entry on lists of the finest animated films of all time, and to be entirely fair to the film, it is important in a historical sense, being a cult classic that was passed around through bootlegs because music rights kept it from getting a home video release, and it came out around the dawn of the 80s and kind of destroyed what you would think an animated film was capable of. This film is full of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and it entirely, unabashedly unashamed of this, for better or for worse.

Now, while I do think the overall film is a bit lacking, it is an anthology film divided into segments, and there are some pretty good ones I will make note of; this is not a film with absolutely no merit. But before that, let me point out the one thing everyone can agree is amazing about this film: the soundtrack. You’ve got Black Sabbath, Blue Oyster Cult, Stevie Nicks, Devo, Cheap Trick… if nothing else, the kickass soundtrack is worth a listen, though Blue Oyster Cult’s song inclusion irritates me to a great degree. The movie went with “Veteran of the Psychic Wars” for the soundtrack, despite the fact Blue Oyster Cult had a song ready to go that is literally about the final entry in the anthology, called “Vengeance (The Pact).” Why the people compiling the soundtrack made this choice baffles me; it reminds me of how they didn’t use “Jennifer’s Body” in, well, Jennifer’s Body, instead opting for a different Hole song from the same album.

But I digress. Let’s go one by one and touch on the segments:

The framing device is about an entity known as the Loc-Nar, who claims to be the sum of all evil, detailing to a little girl how it has influenced chaos and carnage across time and space. The thing is, though, the Loc-Nar doesn’t come out on top in any of the segments, and its schemes are often thwarted. So the entire movie is basically this supreme evil being detailing to a little girl how much it sucks ass at its one job.

The first segment is Harry Canyon, a story about the eponymous futuristic New York taxi driver. In some regards it reminds me of The Fifth Element, what with a scruffy, slummy, futuristic taxi driver trying to help a smoking hot babe find out the truth and all, but unlike that film, this short is a lot bleaker and gritty. You kinda know what you’re in for when Harry vaporizes a dude who tries to mug him, and if that’s not enough, the female lead of this short literally throws herslef at him, and yes, he gets to take a dive into her Harry Canyon – and you get to see it.

This is a running theme throughout these shorts – almost every female character has huge titties and is sexually promiscuous, throwing themselves at the first penis they see as if it was their job. It’s so incredibly juvenile and tacky as to be laughable, but I guess this comes with the territory considering the magazine this film adapted.

Anyway, the segment is harmless and unremarkable. It’s exactly what you’d expect from this sort of story, without much in the way of twists or turns.

The second segment, Den, is arguably the best segment in the entire film. We have a nerdy kid named Dan who gets transported across space and becomes the musclebound warrior with a huge cock known as Den. Every woman throws herself at him, every villain in his way gets pummeled, and no task is too impossible for this man! And did I mention that he is voiced by John Candy? Really, Candy’s comedic touch is what makes this entire thing feel fun and palatable; it’s a cheesy swords and sorcery romp through and through. Honestly, I don’t have much bad to say about this one, it’s just very silly fun.

Unfortunately we are back to being not great with Captain Sternn. Sternn, played by Eugene Levy (of The Wacky World of Mini Golf fame), is basically an intergalactic war criminal on trial, and when his paid witness Hanover Fiste (played by Rodger “Squidward Tentacles” Bumpass) comes up to the stand, the Loc-Nar influences him to the most evil act possible… betraying this war criminal in front of the judge and jury! GASP! I’m not sure what the Loc-Nar is really trying to do here; you’d think it would maybe want Sternn free to continue spreading wicked influence across the galaxy, but nah, it just makes Squidward hulk out and tries to kill him, only for the tables to be turned and Squidward to be dropped out an airlock, further cementing how utterly useless the Loc-Nar is.

Thankfully, once that’s over, we have yet another very strong segment, another contender for best in show: B-17. This is a genuinely creepy zombie short film, and the zombies are utterly horrifying and grotesque. This is regarded as the most nightmarish part of the film, and for good reason; this shit is certainly worthy of being called “heavy metal.” Honestly, there isn’t much bad to say about this one either, except perhaps that it is over far too soon.

Then we get to what is probably the worst segment: So Beautiful, So Dangerous. The entire segment is sort of meant to be a lighthearted comedic breather between The last segment and the final one, but it just comes off as combining every problem the movie has into one segment: the uselessness of the Loc-Nar, copious and ridiculous sex, drugs, and so on. Really all that’s missing from this is gratuitous violence, but hey, guess you can’t have everything all the time, right? It just comes off as really dull and pointless, and there’s not really anything particularly funny about anything that happens in it, unless of course you’re a thirteen year old who thinks “big boob woman having sex with robot while aliens snort cocaine” is the funniest shit on Earth.

Thankfully, we end on a strong note with Taarna, which is about a proud warrior woman dressed in horrifically impractical armor (and this actually effects the plot, I’m not kidding, somehow there was some self-awareness here) and a cool alien pteradactly flying off to fulfill a vengeful pact after the slaughter of a peaceful race by barbarians mutated by the Loc-Nar, in what may be the Loc-Nar’s sole impressive feat. Taarna is the ultimate hero, giving us the trifecta of qualities a heroine in this movie should have – boobs, butt, and bush... Er, I mean, sword, cool mount, and ass-kicking prowess. This one is not quite as good as “Den” or “B-17,” but I still think it’s a solid finale that has enough action and awesome music to make up for its tackier elements.

The movie ends with Taarna’s defeat of the Loc-Nar echoing through time and killing it which… makes absolutely zero sense, but whatever, the Loc-Nar is an absolutely atrocious villain and perhaps one of the most useless in cinematic history, he gets a 1/10 on Psycho Analysis. Then the girl gets her own kickass space dragon thing and becoming the new Taarna or something and, honestly, it’s the exact sort of batshit ending you should expect from the film.

So, is this really an awful film? In some places, no. It’s a love letter to cheesy, trashy sci-fi fantasy from the 70s, with all that comes with it, and in that regard it does succeed. But still, a lot of the film feels like the utterly juvenile fantasies of same sad high schooler, or perhaps even middle schooler, who has never had and who likely never will have sex. It’s a tashy little time capsule to a bygone era where this sort of storytelling was okay so long as there was enough blood and titties on display, so if that appeals to you, by all means, check this film out. It’s certainly not the worst thing in the world to watch, but animation has come so far and adult animation in particular is capable of so much more than adolescent masturbatory fantasies that this film has little value beyond a few solid segments and a damn good soundtrack.

Hell, just go listen to the soundtrack. I think you’d have a better time doing that.

#Michael After Midnight #Review #Movie review #Heavy Metal #animation #animated movie #sex drugs and rock and roll

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thefilmsimps · 3 years ago

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Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (dir. Destin Daniel Cretton)

-Jere Pilapil-

I feel like I should start with a little bit about the “representation” angle that Marvel and Disney have been pushing with regards to Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. Marvel has finally done it and made a movie starring a mostly Chinese cast. I’m Filipino-American, and I’m pretty sure that specific movie isn’t coming any time soon, so I gotta live vicariously through movies like this and Crazy Rich Asians. I’m not going to lie, though - on a pure representation level, it seems to me that it’s not that progressive that the first Asian Marvel Cinematic Superhero’s power is “He is good at martial arts”. I’m sure this is deeply meaningful for some people who wish to “see themselves” standing shoulder to shoulder with Captains America or Marvel or whoever (eventually, one assumes), and I wouldn’t want to take away from that.

But it feels at least a little unimaginative, no? Like Marvel’s creative endeavors aren’t really creating a new definition of Chinese or Asian identities; they’re just absorbing existing imagery and ideas, polishing them up and selling them back to us. I can’t think of a better example of the limits of big-budget spectacle as a vehicle for representation. Marvel and Disney have thousands of characters, ideas and stories that they could choose to adapt, and yet, they apparently find themselves limited to updating hoary tropes, tweeting “We did a progress!” and calling it a day.

The biggest challenge in adapting Shang-Chi for a movie would be the source material. Sure, it’s been well-covered how the Shang-Chi comics are insanely orientalist. They’re not “racist” in a cruel way, but every, say, 2 pages you think “Right, yes, this was created by white guys in the 1970s”. The more insidious issue is that Shang-Chi is… not much of a character. Partly as a result of the cultural blind spots of its creators, most Shang-Chi stories are either “Shang-Chi must stop his father’s evil plans” or “Shang-Chi’s father has sent assassins to kill him” (we get a little of both in the movie). The narration provided by Shang-Chi tend to be goal oriented (gotta stop dad), or pseudo-philosophical riddles. There’s just not much personality there.

The core concept has a stench of rot to it, but Marvel went ahead with it anyway, retrofitting some of the central idea to something palatable to a modern audience. They come away with a movie that at least fixes the Orientalist sins of the past. As for the hollow innards of the titular character, well, they’re smart enough to surround him by heaps of supporting characters. Shang-Chi (Simu Liu) floats through his own movie, not as goofy as his BFF Katy (Awkwafina), nor possessing the gravitas or emotional arc of his father (Tony Leung), nor as interesting a backstory as his sister Xialing (Meng’er Zhang). I can’t really tell you much about this iteration of the character other than, well, he must stop his dad’s evil plans.

Simu Liu is very likable in the role, though. His chemistry with Awkwafina and Meng’er Zhang is solid. It just feels like large chunks of the movie are big setpieces meant to distract from the character being thin. That said, the setpieces are mostly knockouts. And as seen in other action movies (shout out to The Night Comes for Us), character depth can be overrated if the action is cool enough. The strength of the old Shang-Chi comics is true of the movie, too: the action scenes are very well-realized. The choreography is tight and creative. A fight scene on a bus featured in the trailer is fantastic. A fight between Shang-Chi’s parents is deeply romantic. Shang-Chi deserves credit for understanding that martial arts movies treat fighting as its own language. This manages to still be true on the very Marvel climax, which is high on CGI bullshit but manages to at least do some almost subtle nonverbal communication between its main characters.

This is especially thanks to Tony Leung’s Wenwu, who steals the movie as the most fully realized character (probably true of the recent MCU movie characters stretching back to at least Spider-Man: Far From Home). I’ve said before that Marvel’s spectacles might function better as award shows than as movies, where the best actors get to sleepwalk through roles with a big stack of money at the end of the road. Leung’s sad eyes do more work than most villains’ monologues can, letting us in on the emotions of a man who has lived with infinite power for thousands of years and has finally found something he can’t have. There’s more than a little Neon Genesis Evangelion influence to his character, but given more humanity. It’s beautifully realized performance.

Ultimately, this is a Disney/Marvel production. Several of the normal flaws apply. The darkest stuff happens off screen. The action can sometimes be too reliant on CGI (disappointingly obvious CGI, considering this studio has infinite resources). But the action on the whole is stronger than the average Marvel movie, echoing and aping the martial arts greats in equal measure. As with all of these, it’s at least partially an ad for more adventures with some of these characters, and it succeeds on that level and as its own standalone film. And hey, now that we’ve ripped the bandage off the “First Asian-led MCU movie”, maybe we can finally get somewhere more interesting next time.

7.5/10

#movie review #marvel #MCU #Shang-chi #martial arts

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marysfoxmask · 4 years ago

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Have you done The Misselthwaite Archives webseries? It's obviously one of the looser adaptations, but I thought it was really well done. Love to hear your thoughts on it!

my first ask!!! i’m so excited!! thank you, anon! i love asks, btw, and would love for people to continue to send them!

i actually watched the misselthwaite archives as it was coming out! every wednesday, i watched the newest episode after coming home from school. it was the highlight of my week!

i actually rewatched a good chunk of episodes the other night. it dredges up a lot of nostalgia for me in a bittersweet way. i appreciate the series a lot, and i think everyone involved did a great job, but it’s the way the creators approach adapting the source material that i find to be a little off the mark.

this is mainly because i think something is inevitably lost when bringing the secret garden into modern day (which was, back then, good old 2015). i think, if i were trying to adapt the book into a modern setting, i’d minimize the modern day trappings as much as possible; references to modern pop culture like parks and recreation and beyoncé, like misselarch employs, are fleetingly fun, but i think they date the material too much. they also feel too kitschy and cute, in my opinion. that’s my opinion of a lot of the misselthwaite archives’ adaptation choices—they’re cute, but don’t feel like they do justice to the material.

i feel making mary a snarky, bitter teenager seems like a good idea at first, but i think it’s ultimately a misrepresentation. in the original novel, she’s prickly and prone to insulting others, sure, but she’s also sullen, withdrawn, and socially awkward—her inability to connect with others is derived from the lack of positive social interaction she had since she was born. she’s emotionally stunted, which mary in the misselthwaite archives doesn’t communicate at all in her video diaries to dr. burnett (which is a very nice homage, i will admit).

on the contrary, teen!mary is charismatic, with a biting wit; she’s had friends in the past, but they only cared for her parents’ money. ironically, her friendship with declan seems almost to benefit him more in terms of social development than it does her. her petty cruelty seems more the product of watching mean girls one too many times than any deep-rooted emotional trauma. though there are gestures made to indicate that she feels badly about her celebrity parents’ deaths, i never found them particularly convincing. i felt her vulnerability as an orphan, as a young woman with no prospects, with no real friends—as she is at the the beginning of the story—never came through properly. it felt like the writers wanted to modernize mary’s contrariness in a way, metamorphosing it into a more palatable 21st-century diagnosis: jaded teenager syndrome.

which is cute, but not very book-accurate, i feel. it colors the rest of her journey if she hasn’t been socially deprived like she is in the novel. i can’t imagine the mary of the misselthwaite archives having a profound revelation about how much nicer people look when they smile, for instance. as a result, her journey feels a lot less interesting to me.

i personally feel mary should have been prickly, of course, and sometimes aggressively mean, but more unwilling to talk about her feelings than anything—more emotionally numb after years of neglect, more uninterested in nearly everything. she shrugs when spoken to, looks eternally glum, glares at the pitying glances of sarah medlock. it’s only with the influence of the characters in the story that she’s coaxed into opening up and begins to bloom.

i really liked sarah medlock’s characterization, as well as uncle art’s and phoebe’s! i love that aunt sarah is presented as having positive intentions from the get-go, as i’ve always hated her vilification in other adaptations. i also really like the portrayal of declan—i like the idea of him being a bit of a social misfit.

with callie, i really enjoy her actress’s portrayal—she’s properly hysterical and catty! but i feel like turning colin into a girl doesn’t add anything to the story, and removes some of the narrative tension that comes with mary coming into contact with a member of the opposite sex that mirrors her in terms of upbringing and attitude. if anything, i feel it downplays the tension of their budding friendship, as the subconscious assumption that people are more likely to become friends people of the same sex is one that the audience undoubtedly has.

i don’t particularly like callie being steeped in pop culture, either, though it makes sense in a modern setting, technically. in the source material, though, colin is surrounded by interesting things to engage with, but he’s disinterested in all those things when mary stumbles across him. he’s more interested in thinking about his illness. i think having callie be immersed in pop culture as a way to entertain herself indicates a level of engagement with the world that colin is completely shut off from, which definitely affects his characterization. a version of colin that is invested in things enough to buy merchandise of them, etc. is a version of colin who is already significantly more “alive” than his book counterpart from the beginning. a more accurate idea of communicating colin’s isolation, i feel, would have callie being too cynical and emotionally stunted to be interested in anything, at least for very long; any media about characters going on interesting adventures only reminds her of the lackluster quality of her own life and makes her insecure, so she eschews pop culture in favor of frequent depression naps and bullying aunt sarah and phoebe. sometimes she’ll read if she’s bored, but not often, and she refuses to have lessons with phoebe unless she feels well enough to learn, leaving her education full of gaps despite her intelligence. callie, in my hypothetical adaptation, is determined to live a miserable, barren existence, much like colin.

anyway, it also seems that canon callie isn’t dogged by colin’s negative thoughts quite as much, and her feelings surrounding her condition feel too subdued to communicate colin’s utter maladjustment. the episode where callie “explodes” feels too muted by half! this girl should be furious, incoherent with hysteria, raging at the world for her mother’s death, stricken with self-loathing and misery! but, while callie’s actress does an amazing job with what she has, i can’t help but feel that the adaptation of her character was a bit lukewarm.

i also think giving mary and callie a history together undermines the importance of them finding each other for the first time, and gives their friendship too much of an instant leg-up from the minute mary finds her. it makes the work she has to do to befriend/reform callie feel too easy.

not to mention, the pacing of the second half of the story, where mary finds callie to the point where she and declan plan to take her to the glade, seems way too fast. i feel there was a lot of missed potential there; they could’ve really drawn out the rockiness of mary and callie’s relationship, like mary and colin’s in the book.

i think my big problem with the misselthwaite archives is that the creators, in service of adapting it to modern times, undercuts and downplays a lot of the earnestness of the characters’ relationships that i found so charming in the book. instead of instantly loving dickon and breathlessly calling him beautiful, mary only grudgingly admits that she needs declan’s help, and any affection she has for him she keeps close to the chest. colin’s desperation for mary’s company, his screaming for her to come to him, is rendered as needy over-texting, devoid of any emotional urgency; callie seems more bored, rather than truly lonely and unable to communicate in an emotionally mature manner, like colin is. even declan is subdued in his love for nature, more shy. it makes sense for a modern adaptation not prone to the novel’s 1910s sentimentality, but i can’t help but feel that the adaptation feels dull and repressed as a result.

i also wish we got a proper video of callie and declan meeting!

like a lot of adaptations, i think the pacing is off; more time should be spent on ironing out mary and callie’s relationship, more time should be spent in the garden, helping callie bloom. the “eye of the tiger” bit was cute, but gah, colin walking took months and months of practice, and to see all that development be reduced to a short little montage feels disheartening. i’d love to see at least 10 episodes of the teens just chilling in the glade, talking about their childhood traumas in more detail, having little conflicts among each other, planting flowers and setting up decorations...for a series with such short installments, that kind of episodic structure would be perfect. maybe they could create a subplot where mary suggests callie go to her high school and she has to work that out with medlock and that becomes a whole character-building thing, or she has a conflict with basil, or callie properly hashes out her negative feelings toward declan, or something. i dunno. i just wanted more.

i think the misselthwaite archives was really cute, but i feel it misses the mark on the melancholy of the original story; the glade itself is perfect, but the interpretation of mary feels too derivative of the “bratty teenager” trope to be honest to her book character, in my opinion. and i dislike pop culture references in timeless classics, even modern-day interpretations of them, lol. but i still appreciate it as an adaptation, though—it’s just so eager to translate the sentimentality into something more modern that it loses the essence of what i find so charming about the book, which is the unabashed intensity of the characters’ friendships, the extreme character development, and the scale of the emotional and social deprivation mary and colin suffered before said character development occurs.

i also wish declan had more animals around him, though obviously that can’t be helped, haha.

please send more asks, anon! i’d be happy to answer them! :)

#the secret garden #frances hodgson burnett #misselthwaite archives

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davidmann95 · 5 years ago

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All-Star Superman #2

A scant year to the day since part 1!

All evidence to the contrary I actually have always wanted to go back to this, especially since I keep getting asked if I’ll do so and it stirs my omnipresent sense of guilt over my lack of productivity, and also the last year has not resulted in a mass turnaround of people realizing it’s a for-real good book and not just comfort food so this remains necessary. This isn’t going to be quite as in-depth as the first go-around - both that as the introductory issue and that as the introductory recap had a lot of groundwork to lay - but still plenty to cover, as this issue sets up Lois and Superman’s arcs for the series, which is rooted (amazingly, especially right off the bat, given the book’s reputation of being about how amazing Superman is) in how badly Superman’s let his fears and shortsightedness poison the most important relationship in his life.

If the first issue is the big classic Superman material - Superman saving the day from the monster! Lois and Clark and the rest of the Daily Planet crew! Lex Luthor’s sinister schemes! A ticking clock to doom! - this scales all the way down to the uncomfortably, stiflingly intimate. Classic archetypal Superman stuff gives way to the most Silver Age issue: casual huge ideas, relationship drama, misunderstandings, last-minute reveals that recontextualize the entire issue, and baaaarely latent psychodrama bubbling up at the edges. In service of that the visual framing here is not unlike a stage play, a limited set of physically connected locales as a pair of figures bounce off one another. Quitely and Grant’s work is therefore comparatively subdued next to issue #1, keeping to traditional panel layouts and wide or medium shots with a background color palate of mostly blacks and whites and grays with a handful of other colors popping out...until Lois starts to lose her shit at the end of the issue and we get close-ups and full black and white panels and eerie glowing and dutch angles and that unsettling abstract image of her clenched teeth, as the story starts to squeeze us like Lois’s gut.

She’s right to be unsettled for that matter; she’s alone on Superman’s turf (the one issue where that’s the case other than #6, and that one’s about how Smallville stopped being his home), the weird antiseptic alien lair of the ultimate super-hobbyist, and all the baggage of their relationship is spilling out into the open as she has less and less reason to think the best of this odd man who’s been lying to her for years. Unlike the Silver Age tales this is referencing, she’s absolutely on the money with her complaints about him: he’s been dicking around with her forever and thinks it can all be okay now (His little “What?” on the second page when she bursts his bubble says it all), and he’s awkwardly overcompensating trying to fix it.

While the Fortress tour serves to peacefully acclimate us to how utterly bizarre Superman’s world really gets past the traditional rescues (the little cubic starfield we don’t know the meaning of yet, trophies are floating rather than physically suspended, the glowing flowers in Lois’s room, “The Phantom Zone map room’s pretty dull unless you can see radio-negative anti-waves”), Superman himself is...humblebragging isn’t the right way of putting it, but it feels like he’s working way, way harder than he ever will again in this book to be cool and impressive and assuring. He’s a dope in love, but he can tell something’s up and that super-brain of his isn’t putting the obvious pieces together, or noticing that this is just putting her off further and further until, like Bluebeard’s wife before her, she stumbles through the threshold of the door she was never meant to, even of course in the end he’s still Superman and there’s a perfectly good reason. Not a good enough reason, however, for her accusations at dinner to not hit home - his mind may be expanding, but he’s still way up his own ass here in a genuinely unpleasant way that’ll be elaborated on momentarily. For now he’s left stammering that she should trust him and it’s limp and phony, especially compared to his big entreaty for someone to trust him in #10 (which’ll be right after he finally comes clean with her); while Superman may not be considered a savior figure by his friends in here the way he often is in the mainline comics Lois seems to be the only one who doesn’t look up to him at least a little bit, but that clarity means she’ll call him out where no one else will.

Across the next two pages it’s all laid out, and we get to the roots of where things have gone wrong between the two of them. Lois is paranoid, certainly, the panels are literally squeezing in on her, but with Superman seeming so out-there and alien like never before she would have every right to be even sans alien chemicals. But notably there remains throughout a part of her assuming the best of him wondering if maybe this is just another big misunderstanding or that he’s simply been mutated by the solar overexposure. And in her heart of hearts, she admits that maybe she wants this to be another big damn trick with a completely sensible justification, because the alternative is that this is the new normal and she has to accept that he’s a flawed mortal man. It’s ugly and it’s mean - especially since she likes Clark - and it’s human as hell in the worst, most understandable way. It’s not going to be until said mortality is staring her in the face that she’ll be able to accept it.

Superman, meanwhile...someone could write a thesis on these panels as an articulation of the Superman/Clark dynamic. The Mirror of Truth is actually preexisting, centerpiece of a Jerry Siegel/Curt Swan joint in Action Comics #269 that was later adapted into the Superman newspaper strip where Lois uses it to figure out Superman is Clark Kent until he tricks her into believing the mirror can lie, after which he tosses it in a volcano; here it’s survived, and curiously shows him as Superman rather than Clark, when in the original tale it displayed Kent even though that was fully the era of Clark as a disguise. In here too it’s Superman who’s the ‘true’ identity of the two and which this time is reflected in the mirror, yet as in #1 it’s Clark who says what he’s truly feeling. In that light, the final panel of the abandoned glasses reads like nothing so much as Superman using the mirror as affirmation that the truth of the solemn, steadfast Superman identity gives him licence to deny the uncomfortable emotions his squishy human farmboy side is dredging up, ‘lying’ to him in a way he had to fake in the source material. Those emotions however knock right on the door of what he can’t grasp here: Clark’s so wrapped up in his own head trying to do the ‘right’ thing that he’s overlooking how his attempts at self-sacrificing selflessness are hurting the people around him. Throughout the series he’ll come to rely on others, first at his lowest points with Jimmy and the Bizarros, until at last he comes to invest true trust in Lois, and the Kandorians, and Leo Quintum, and even Lex.

For now though Lois is deep in a hole, a brief but memorable meeting with the Unknown Superman of 4500AD - everything Superman seems to be becoming to her even before she wonders if it’s literally him, cryptic and masked and with a big ‘ol question mark right on his chest instead of the familiar comforting logo, even his gutbuster of a question reinforcing his distance from a recognizable human experience - leading her all the way to reimagining her Silver Age ideal happy ending of marriage and family with Superman as a Cronenbergian horror. It’s still a Superman story, it turns out he had the very best reason possible for wanting to keep her in the dark, but right through to the end he remains just a little condescending in his reassurance, and his gift of essentially bringing her up to his ‘level’ isn’t going to solve the problem. While the next issue lets us see the two of them properly in love, it won’t be until the elephant in the room comes out that they can come to terms.

Additional notes

* God Quitely is so good. Look at the way the seatbelt curves in the first panel! Lois’s bemused little disbelieving smirk!

* Pages 2-3: Aurora Borealis?!

* Lois is the only character other than Superman who gets to have actual narration (in both cases as looks at their in-text writing), the only one whose viewpoint is thus privileged in the same way as his.

* The key is the realization of this series’ aesthetic in a nutshell: the old-school idea in a sleek, shiny, clever new way that doesn’t take away from the fantastical toyeticness of it all. For that matter, the key is the centerpiece of a later bit with Superman that could be fairly described as the long-term goal of the book book as Morrison’s hoped-for perennial: “One day some future man or woman will open that door, with that key. When they do, I want them to know how it felt to live at the dawn of the age of superheroes.”

* This is A. The first note of a larger DC universe existing offscreen, something that I’ll go into more when discussing #8, B. A brilliant, concise, fun little summation of his place in Superman’s world, and C. Absolutely hilarious given Morrison suggested in his exit interview that this could be seen as much later on in the same universe as All-Star Batman & Robin The Boy Wonder, which entirely rewrites the tone of that moment.

* Already discussed the key but the muscles in Superman’s hand tensing a bit at picking it up is another great detail.

* The glimpse of the Fortress here is excellent: the statues of his friends and enemies instead of pictures because he does things bigger with the yellow electric something crackling at the end of it, the off-model but curious-looking robot appearing to glance at Kandor (are it and the bigger robot with the seats on top of it trophies, or Superman Robots with different designs tasked for specific purposes?), the classic Bad Penny Good For One Crime, the Legion time bubble that establishes his time-traveling credentials for later, the Titanic where he and Lois will dine when their relationship hits a proverbial iceberg, and most strikingly the space shuttle Columbia, his apparent rescue of which I have to imagine is a reference to Astro City’s Superman analogue Samaritan debuting by averting the Challenger disaster.

* It’s next issue that has my actual favorite Superman/Lois moment of all time, but “When we’re married fifteen years, when I’m sagging and he looks just the same, will he still meet me and say things like...” “These are for you. I picked them on Alpha Centauri 4.” is right up there.

* The technological aesthetic of the Fortress is so different than P.R.O.J.E.C.T., sleek and solid and cleanly-lit and antiseptic, beautiful and advanced but a little cold in its own way. As stuffed with wonder as this place may be, there’s something hauntingly empty about it, suiting both the tone of the issue and as a physical embodiment of Superman’s emotional state. The one part that goes against it is the forbidden room, it even has beakers and test tubes to sell the mad scientist vibe...though if you were to stretch it, it much more close resembles the human technology seen at P.R.O.J.E.C.T., and this is meant as a gift for one.

* The cosmic anvil made it along with the key into the CWverse, Lois used it in Elseworlds! I may not be expecting All-Star quality from the upcoming Superman and Lois, but it’s good to know the powers that be are using it as a reference point (beyond how it inspired Supergirl’s take on Cat Grant, a connection I discussed in a post that seems to have vanished into thin air). The whole page is perfect, Superman at his most joyfully benign and beautiful and godlike; it’s the one bit where Lois’s skepticism cracks a touch watching him feed his adorable little Lovecraftian abomination from beyond the stars.

* While he never appears physically aside from a statue Brainiac hovers over this series from beginning to end in name and deed, the ominous ultimate enemy of Superman’s past, the great trial overcome even as the scars forever remain. Morrison mentioned in the exit interview that he didn’t appear in here because he and Quitely already used him as the villain of JLA: Earth 2, but that if he had it would have borrowed Superman: The Animated Series’ take on him as a Kryptonian AI gone rogue. Personally I like his place in here as-is, a little totem parallel to the Justice League references indicating the breadth of Superman’s history between putting on the cape and Luthor’s final scheme.

* A pair of minor notes: Lois points at Superman with the pointy fork when asking him pointed questions, and while it’s not immediately clear on first read she does in fact ask the Unknown Superman exactly 3 questions (“Kal Kent?” “Will Superman and I ever marry and have children?” “What do you mean?”) before he replies with his own, as promised.

* “Oww.” and “Tickles.” literally could not be more perfect Superman moments.

* Worth taking a moment to marvel at just how many future plot elements are seeded here. There’s the obvious bit of Superman thinking about having a partner setting up the next issue, but we also for issue #6 have our first look at Kal Kent and Lois wondering “What if (the Unknown Superman) was really (Superman)?” when Clark will indeed pose as him, for #10 we get our first look at Qwewq, and for #11 not only is the Sun-Eater introduced but so is Robot 7′s malfunction as a result of Luthor’s tampering.

* The structure of the series according to Morrison is a solar cycle, beginning and ending at midday with nightfall in the center. If last issue was the sun at its brightest we begin the descent here, with Superman remaining larger-than-life and ultimately trustworthy but with his classic persona and habits held to an additional, unflattering degree of scrutiny.

#All Star Superman #Superman #Lois Lane #Grant Morrison #Frank Quitely #Jamie Grant #Phil Balsman #Art #Silver Age #Clark Kent #Batman #All Star Batman & Robin the Boy Wonder #Fortress of Solitude #Astro City #DCTV #Brainiac #Opinion #Analysis

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chilledfoodtin · 6 years ago

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Ignis’ Favorite Foods (And What They Say About Him)

1. Fluffy Chiffon Cake

This is my favorite of Ignis’ favorites. Chiffon cake is one of the bets cakes. I it’s light, airy and not too sweet. It’s also one of the newest--it has only been around since the 1920s. An American insurance salesman invented the cake, but he carefully guarded the recipe. He served the cake at a chain of restaurants in Hollywood (The Brown Derby) where it became popular with celebrities. It was eventually sold to General Mills and the recipe was released nationwide in 1947. It was backed by a big marketing campaign that made it a hit (source).

Ignis initially seems like a man who isn’t much for desserts and sweets, so this favorite surprised me, but I immediately found it endearing. This no nonsense, hard working badass loves chiffon cake. After a little investigation, I discovered that Japan has its own unique take on chiffon cake that may help explain Ignis’ love for it. Japanese Chiffon cake is very similar to the traditional American recipe, but it’s often prepared in different pans and sliced like the one yousee in game (check out this guide). It is also prepared as a cupcake--like these Hokkaido chiffon cupcakes.

It’s easy to imagine Ignis coming across one of those Hokkaido style Chiffon cupcakes at an Insomnia coffee shop. Maybe he frequently stopped at a coffee place that sold them (we know he’s a coffee addict). It makes me happy to think of Ignis enjoying a piece of this cake with a cup of coffee. It is an uncomplicated pleasure that he richly deserves.

More faves after the cut!

2. Breaded Cutlet with Tomato

This dish looks a lot like Japanese chicken Katsu. Chicken katsu is similar to Western schnitzel dishes. It’s got a tasty, crunchy, panko exterior and is often served with a tart sauce (the Japanese version seems to be served with curry quite often). The FFXV version includes a Lucian tomato sauce. I wonder if this dish is a bit of a “comfort food” back in Insomnia. I can imagine Ignis eating a dish like this a lot when he was growing up. It’s hearty, but somehow light and no doubt one of the few dishes involving vegetables that Noctis would readily eat.

3. Fisherman’s Favorite Paella

Paella is a classic (and delicious) Spanish dish (specifically from Valencia). The word “paella” is derived from the Spanish word for pan -- a reference to the special kind of pan used for paella. The foundation of a paella dish is saffron infused rice. The aromatic saffron makes it delicious and gives it the distinctive yellow hue. There are many kinds of ingredients you can put into a paella--chorizo, chicken, seafood--it all depends on the variety of paella you want.

Ignis’ favorite paella is a seafood version. Seafood paella is definitely one of the more popular forms. All kinds of seafood can be used, but it’s traditional to include some shellfish (like the mussels you see in the photo of Iggy’s favorite). Paella is a hearty, aromatic dish that is very popular worldwide. Ignis’ preferred version, though, speaks of someone with slightly more expensive tastes (though that depends greatly on what part of the world you live in).

This dish is acquired by ordering it at the Mother of Pearl restaurant. Given Ignis’ penchant for seafood, it’s not surprising one of his favorite dishes comes from one of the best seafood restaurants on Eos. When you visit Galdin Quay, Ignis will “idle” around the Mother of Pearl, watching Coctura cook. Occasionally, I’ve seen players suggest Ignis has a “crush” on Coctura, but I think this is a professional sort of interest--one chef admiring another.

4. Horntooth Meatpie

I know Ignis only has a British accent in the EN version of the game, but this meat pie is a very Anglo choice. You get the recipe for this dish by observing a female hunter eating it outside the Meldacio General Store (I’m always amused by scenes like this--4 guys staring at you while you eat). The fact that it’s a hunter favorite suggests this is a very hearty dish. This fave is just more evidence that Ignis isn’t particularly snobbish about food.

5. Tomalley-Filled Dumplings

I thought I knew a lot about food going into FFXV, but I had never eaten “tomalley” before and didn’t have a very good idea of what it was. Some seafood fans probably already know this, but tomalley is actually the pancreas/liver of a cooked shellfish (oftentimes a lobster). It has a soft green color and, according to Cook’s Illustrated, is valued for its creamy texture and intense flavor. It’s typically used in sauces or in compound butter. I was surprised to discover that some people believe it's not safe to eat. This is due to the fact that tomalley ingestion can sometimes lead to the contraction of “paralytic shellfish poisoning”, but evidently it’s mainly a risk during red tides. Ignis likes to live on the wild side! In the JP version, the dish references “kani miso’ which loosely translates to “crab brain”. The “kani miso” however refers to the same thing tomalley does (a green paste of innards). Maybe it feels better say you are eating a crab brain instead of a mish mash of its organs? In any case, it’s also considered a delicacy in Japan.

I think this dish further confirms that Ignis has a refined palate and a taste for expensive seafood. Someone who frequently eats lobster could very easily develop a taste for the rarer bits of that celebrated crustacean. Noctis even jokes that Ignis should be thrilled when they fight giant crabs with bone crushing pincers (but Ignis replies “what they have gained in size they will have lost in flavor”). Apparently Ignis has a shellfish reputation.

To unlock the Tomalley-Filled Dumplings, you have to read Oric’s Culinary Chronicles, entry 5 (which is sitting on a bench near the bridge in Old Lestallum). It makes sense a story about a “river crawler” would lead to a recipe involving tomalley. What else can we infer from this? I’m not sure we can really connect the entry to Ignis (or Old Lestallum). That said, there was once a theory Ignis was related to Oric, but that will have to wait for another post.

6. Feast of the Divine

Next to Kenny’s Original Recipe, this is the strangest item on Ignis’ list. This dish is prepared by Gentiana in the Comrades DLC (before Comrades became a standalone you could only acquire te recipe after she made it). Noctis’ favorite Comrades dish is prepared by Cid, Prompto's is made by Cindy and Gladio’s is prepared by Cor. Many speculated that Ignis’ fave would be Aranea’s, but not many guessed it would be Gentiana’s.

Genti’s dish is complex and beautiful to look at. It features extremely expensive ingredients and gives good buffs. Does Ignis love this dish simply because it is the most sophisticated? The best tasting? The most beautiful? Any of those could be good answers., but if you break out the tinfoil you can go further. Does Ignis love Gentiana’s dish because he knows her well? Is Ignis himself some type of astral? Or a messenger?

Very far fetched, but since we have very limited background info on Ignis it’s tempting to invent theories to explain his past.

7. Kenny’s Original Recipe

This one is hard to reconcile. How could a man of such culinary sophistication love something like this?? I’m not even sure what it actually is. It is clearly a salmon fillet, but it’s not clear what is covering it. Some believe that it’s pastry, others think that it might be a cheese topping like some sort of cursed tuna melt. Personally, I think it looks like mozzarella cheese. I did come across a bizarre thing at Japanese KFCs--deep fried salmon bites. That might be similar to Kenny’s.

You might think this is just something that Ignis settles for when the bros go to the Crow’s Nest--a sort of adaptation to cope with their many visits to Kenny’s place. This would seem like a good explanation, but he doesn't just tolerate it--he loves it! The little sprite Ignis leaps for joy when you select it. It almost seems hypocritical after Ignis’ snarky remark to Prompto implying Crow’s Nest fare was unhealthy and fattening.

It’s possible the dish holds some special place in Ignis’ heart. It seems like the Crow’s Nest chain is only outside the walls of Insomnia, but it’s possible a Crow’s Nest or two made it into the city. Maybe Kenny’s Original Recipe reminds Ignis of some fond moments from his childhood. Maybe it was a dish someone from his family really loved. Maybe he saw an ad for it when he was small and always wanted to try it. Maybe his inner Guy Fieri is coming out. Maybe Kenny intimidated him into liking the dish.

Who knows, but the fact that Ignis loves this is just one more of the many mysteries about Ignis.

Taken together, these dishes reveal a man who has sophisticated, yet not elitist tastes. A man who appreciates fine dining and the comfort of a home cooked meal. Most importantly, we know that he appreciates a good cake. I hope you get to have all of your favorites today, Ignis. 🎈Happy birthday!! 🎈

#Ignis #ignis scientia #hbdignis #ffxv #faves

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ladyloveandjustice · 6 years ago

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Winter 2019 Anime Overview

I enjoyed every single one of the five anime I watched this season: Dororo, My Roommate is a Cat, Mob Psycho 100 II, The Promised Neverland and Kaguya-sama: Love is War.

So here are my reviews! I’ve cut back on the anime overview a lot, so these are shorter reviews than usual (though not quite as short at I’d like. someday I’ll be able to restrain myself)

Since I liked all of the shows, these aren’t in a strict worst-to-best order or anything, but the ones I found most impressive ARE nearer to the bottom. So let’s dig into last season’s anime.

My Roommate is a Cat

Premise: An antisocial writer in his early 20s adopts a cat and they both get their worlds expanded as they bond.

My take: Much like the kitty it centers on, this show is super cute, sweet and fluffy. If you’re a cat-lover and want to bask in some kitty adorableness, I encourage you to check it out. At first, I was afraid the main character Subaru’s grumpy misanthropy might be too much- I could certainly empathize with being socially isolated and avoiding people, but the way he was just rude toward others was grating. Fortunately, his character development is swift, so he quickly went from misanthrope to anxious-introverted-mess-who-awkwardly-muddles-through-social-interaction-for-the-sake-of-his-kitty, which I found EXTREMELY relatable. Subaru is coping with the loss of his parents and the fact he took them for granted while they were alive as well, so there are quite a few heart-string tugging moments.

The show’s central gimmick is that events will be told from Subaru’s point of view and then we’ll get his kitty Haru’s side of things. Yep, the cat narrates part of the show, which is how I knew I was in it for good. And Haru’s a very good cat! She’s adorable without being cloying, and at least realistic in how most of her thoughts revolve around food. Seeing her warm up to her hopeless human is just as sweet as seeing Subaru warm up to her. As a former stray cat, she has a rough backstory, so if even a restrained depiction of kitty death is too much for you, look out for that part. This show isn’t afraid to bring the feels, but it keeps things positive overall. Subaru’s friends are supportive and help a new pet owner out, and we even get a cute doggie in the mix. Overall, if you want a relaxing, nice watch with a simple, sweet story, you could do a lot worse than My Roommate is a Cat.

Dororo (Episodes 1-12)

Premise: Thanks to his father making a deal with demons, Hyakkimaru has to wander Japan and fight monsters to get his body parts back. He meets up with a young thief named Dororo.

My take: Dororo is a very loose adaptation of the 1960′s manga by Osamu Tezuka, who’s known as the godfather of manga. I was familiar with Dororo thanks to watching the live action movie for an article when I worked at epicstream (it must not have left an impression bc I remember very little) so I was curious to check this out. I ended up reading the manga too, and overall, I find it pretty impressive as an adaptation. It does a lot to make a really dated and incomplete-feeling manga more palatable and cohesive for a modern audience. Maybe I’ll do a full post expanding on those thoughts sometime, because the changes really are worth examining.

Dororo is definitely not for everyone- it’s a grim, dark show with lots of death and destruction.The story is especially not kind to women, who tend to die or be demons. The exceptions to this (such as a lady demon actually being presented as sympathetic) are mainly anime-original. Actually, while the anime eschews the original manga’s cartoon-y, jokey tone to be more serious, it actually has a much lower body count and more hopeful tone than the original, a contrast I find pretty interesting. But “more hopeful” is still not very hopeful. The story has pretty strong anti-war undertones and criticism of how authority exploits people, and there’s a lot of “these are the horrors of war” scenes and even a scene where Dororo witnesses a woman engaging in unhappy, reluctant sex work.

The premise of the story, a guy made up of mostly prosthetics on a quest to get his body parts and senses back, is also a dicey one in how it treats disability. The anime does at least make updates to the manga that lend the story a little more complexity on that front. In the manga Hyakkimaru can basically hear and speak through telepathy already and he’s portrayed as simply joyous whenever he gets a body part or sense back, despite not having a practical need for them.

The anime wisely jettisons the telepathy thing, meaning that Dororo and Hyakkimaru have some difficulty communicating, something that adds an interesting layer to the story. It means we find out about Hyakkimaru’s personality in bits and pieces alongside Dororo, going on a journey of discovery with him. And Hyakkimaru getting senses back is treated in a more realistic mixed-bag way- when he gets his hearing back, for instance, he has difficulty adjusting to it and experience serious sensory overload. It’s not really clear how he feels about a lot of things, much less the changes he’s going through.

Dororo himself is the heart of the show, really, and I find him to be really endearing and engaging as a character. His boundless energy and chattiness balance out the aloof Hyakkimaru, but he never gets overbearing or obnoxious. He’s been through a lot himself, and has a good heart. One thing worth keeping an eye out going forward is how Dororo’s gender will be handled. Dororo is afab, but in the original manga very vehemently lets everyone know he’s a boy. The anime also lets you know Dororo’s afab halfway through, but hasn’t really done much otherwise in exploring Dororo’s gender identity. I do think it’s unlikely we’ll get a handling of it as bad as the manga’s final chapters (Manga Hyakkimaru had a lot of strong, intrusive opinions about what Dororo “really” is that I think his anime version is unlikely to have based on his restrained characterization so far), but who knows.

Overall, Dororo is a nicely animated and well put-together dark action series so far. I’m not sure I would have ended up watching it if I wasn’t so interested in examining it as an adaptation, but the ride’s been pretty okay and worthwhile.

Kaguya-sama: Love is War

Premise: Miyuki Shirogane and Kaguya Shinomiya are the top students at their prestigious school, and heads of the student council. They also have a crush on each other, but both are too full of pride (and nerves) to make the first move, so they come up with schemes to trick the other into confessing. Hijinks ensue.

My take: Kaguya-sama is a wildly funny rom-com about two idiot smart kids who don’t know how to say how they feel. It’s mostly a really good time. There’s a lot of laugh-out-loud moments. The characters are a lot of fun, especially Kaguya’s friend Chica, who is pure chaos in human form and has some of the best lines in the show. The animation and direction of the show are also impressive and lavish, elevating already good gags into greatness. The finale also does that thing where it’s all suddenly surprisingly emotional and hits you really hard with all the feels, showing a little depth and true friendship among all the characters involved.

However,there are a few “yikes” moments, and the most uncomfortable one and likely the biggest deal breaker was the “Kaguya gets sick” arc, which happens roughly the last half of episode 9 and the start of 10. In it, we’re treated to tropes that are both really tired and really uncomfortable, like Kaguya being sick and her friend, for some reason???, tacitly encouraging Miyuki to take advantage of her in her weakened state. Miyuki does not, but Kaguya pulls him into bed and he falls asleep due to sleep deprivation (which is admittedly relatable) and when they wake up she believes for a time he did assault her and throws shit at him, at which point he whines about being villainized even though he “held back”.

During the next episode, Kaguya is ~secretly kind of upset he didn’t assault her because doesn’t he find her appealing~, a trope that really needs to die bc the myth girls “really want to be assaulted” is dangerous. There were a couple okay moments in the whole thing, like Miyuki deciding he should have shut the whole thing down more firmly and apologizing for an infraction, and since Miyuki didn’t cross a significant line it doesn’t ruin their relationship or make them impossible to root for or anything, but the whole thing is tired and gross and unnecessary and not all that funny. I was able to handle it because I got warned ahead of time, but it was a chore of an arc, so here’s my warning.

The Promised Neverland

Premise: Emma and her friends Ray and Norman are orphans being raised in the happy, idyllic Grace Field House. They’re never been outside it though, and there’s a wall they’re never supposed to approach. When Emma discovers the truth behind the orphanage, a tense thriller begins.

My take: I was looking forward to this one based on word of mouth, and mostly it doesn’t disappoint! The writing hooked me enough that I’ve picked up the manga to continue the story. This a rich story. It’s an intense game of cat and mouse between genius kids and unscrupulous adults where the stakes are super high. Emma and her friends pull out all the stops to outwit and escape the ones holding them captive, and the twists and turns of the narrative are delivered well. There’s also some social commentary buried under its horror to add some bite. This essay goes into how it comments on forced societal gender roles, for instance.

A thrilling plot can only shine thanks to its characters, and Emma is great protagonist. Her determination to save her family and unpredictable nature make her fun to follow. She’s a rare and refreshing example of a female shonen protag, and she sells that power of friendship stuff pretty well when she has the brains and skills to back it up. The three main kids balance each other well, with Ray’s cynicism and pragmatism contrasting Emma’s stubborn idealism, and Norman stands in the middle as someone who’s inclined to think like Ray but WANTS to be more like Emma. Despite the many conflicts and differences between them, these kids are ride and die, and the show does a good job selling their familial-friendship. A lot of the moments between them are truly heartwrenching.

The story has a big glaring flaw, though, and that’s Sister Krone and the racism regarding her. It’s not my lane, so please read Jackson P. Brown’s essay here for more info. The anime not only replicates the problem with her design but makes things arguably worse than the manga by making her personality a caricature as well. The anime portrays Krone as far more unhinged and exaggerated than her vindictive but more controlled and canny manga counterpart, even adding this weird thing where she rants at and beats up a doll. This review on episode 8 talks about the author feels the anime failed with sister Krone and his feelings on Krone as a black character well, it’s definitely worth a read.

While I have those issues with the anime’s choices, I was impressed with how the last few episodes were directed. They hit it out of the park, leaving me breathless, emotional and wanting more. Thanks to that, I’m now reading an enthralling adventure manga! This anime was definitely flawed but I can’t deny I’m interested in seeing how the second season will shake out.

Mob Psycho 100 II

Premise: Season 2 continues to tale of Mob, a ridiculously powerful psychic middle schooler. He’s in the employ of Reigen, a con-artist who has fooled many (Mob included) into thinking he has legitimate psychic abilities.

My take: Holy wow. Mob Psycho’s first season had some incredible animation, atmosphere and direction, but season two fires on all cylinders. I’m glad I caught up in time to experience the show with everyone else these last few weeks, because it was always a treat- a visual feast full of heartpumping action and lots of sincere emotion.

Mob Psycho is an animation extravaganza, with some sequences that wouldn’t feel out of place in a high budget movie, dripping with atmosphere, artistry and aplomb. But the story and characters are really solid too and it has some nice themes and messages at its core. Mob is one of the goodest good boys in all of anime and he grows a lot throughout this season. At the core of the show is the idea that no one is worthless and also no one is more “special” than anyone else, that having power doesn’t give you the right to put yourself above others, that no person is inherently superior or inferior to any other, that even if you’re born with some super talent, you still need to try to improve yourself, value other people and the things they can do that you can’t and work hard to live a balanced life. Being powerful or born with a talent doesn’t mean you have the answers or know better-so it’s all about striving to make good, compassionate choices and taking control of your own life.

There’s a lot of stories that pay lip service to themes like these without really doing much to back it up, but this show sells it with an earnestness that few manage. Mob is a quiet and gentle boy, and you genuinely believe it when he says he doesn’t like fighting or using his powers on other people, and when he breaks down in tears because for all his power he can’t figure out how to set someone on the right path this time, your heart aches. The fact that Mob actually has difficulty coming up with the right answers and will sometimes gets overwhelmed by emotion and loses control, but keeps striving for honest communication, makes his approach come off as a lot more believable than the typical shonen-hero-converting-bad-guys-with-a-confident-friendship-speech bit.

The character relationships in the show are also good stuff, particularly the relationship between Mob and Reigen, which develops a lot this season with Reigen having to grapple with how yeah, he’s been kinda terrible and dishonest, especially with this kid he cares about and there’s a point where people have enough of it. There’s a lot of nice growth there.

All together, Mob Psycho is just Good with capital G. I do wish there were more girls in it, and there is a dark skinned character who’s caricature-ish in his design (he barely shows up in this season iirc), but otherwise it’s a quality rec and breathtaking example of the truly transcendent heights anime can reach.

#winter 2019 anime #anime overview #Mob Psycho 100 #my roommate is a cat #the promised neverland #dororo #kaguya sama love is war #kaguya sama: love is war #kaguya sama wa kokurasetai #my reviews

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zdbztumble · 5 years ago

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“Kingdom Hearts II revisited” Part III

I had meant to cover the first pass on all the Disney worlds in one post, but this game is just too long, and I have too many notes. For now we’ll just go over everything up to and including Disney Castle/Timeless River. Maybe the second pass can fit into one post.

Going back to KH II after KH III, you notice certain things that would probably have been taken for granted before. One example is how little talk there is about the “world order.” That’s something that’s existed as a concept since the first game, but it isn’t a big deal in the early part of the series. Outside of King Triton knowing about the Keyblade, our heroes never breech it, and there isn’t an excessive amount of pressure to maintain it - unique looks for certain worlds, and line or two is about all the first game spends on the subject. That pattern holds true for the second game. Granted, most of the worlds in KH II are worlds either used or alluded to in KH I, involving numerous characters who are well aware by now about other worlds. But as of this writing, I’ve played through the first pass on Port Royal, which has no such ties, and the closest thing to a mention of the world order is Sora and friends remarking how different the world looks to the others when they first show up. That’s it. If anything, they’re too blase about it in Port Royal, but I’ll come back to that another day.

The point is - the “world order” just wasn’t a major issue in the early games of this series, nor did it need to be. It certainly didn’t need to turn into a one-note running gag of Donald berating Sora for disregarding the world order, especially when Sora - in the limited time given to the subject in these early games - is fairly mindful of it.

And that’s another thing that changed in the time between KH II and III - who’s the butt of the jokes made about the mission. KH III is loaded with characters chastising, critiquing, demeaning, mocking, and castigating Sora, and having been thoroughly retconned into a shonen doofus, Sora unfortunately gives them some justifiable cause (though I would argue it’s still excessive.) But in this game, the butt of the jokes is Donald. And while there is some teasing involved, most of it is without commentary, and comes from Donald doing the same shtick he’s known for in the mainline Disney canon - being hot-tempered, greedy, impulsive, boastful until challenged, or desperate to avoid trouble with Daisy. This works so much better as a source of comic relief. Donald is a character specifically designed to end up with egg on his face, and since he’s not the protagonist, using him as a go-to for comedy doesn’t undermine the credibility of the hero.

Now, onto the Disney worlds themselves...

KH II has been criticized for the way it handles the Disney worlds. It’s been charged that they’re nothing but filler, that this is where the trend of stiff re-tellings of the movie plots began, that Sora is irrelevant in them. At least for these first four, I can’t say I agree on any of those points.

To start with the “filler” charge - look again at Yen Sid’s briefing. He gives Sora a pretty straightforward assessment: the Heartless are back, and there’s also Organization XIII. Looking at the first three Disney worlds, we have one where the Heartless ally with the resident Disney villain, one where a member of Organization XIII is up to something, and one where both the Heartless (in service to Pete, and by extension Maleficent) and Organization XIII are active, demonstrating that they’re at odds, along with the local villain. That flows pretty organically from what Yen Sid tells Sora. It’s such a smooth move from that talk to the Disney worlds, in fact, that it only reinforces my feeling from last time that Hollow Bastion should have been saved for later. You don’t have the interstitial cutscenes of villain plotting that gave KH I a sense of a continuous story; things are more episodic here. But that’s not a bad thing, and it doesn’t mean that any of these worlds are “just” filler - they do logically follow from preceding set-up.

The idea that the worlds do noting but recap the movies is a charge only relevant to one of these first four worlds, the Land of Dragons. And I will admit that, compared to the few KH I levels that did adapt the movie plots rather than create their own, the story content here is closer to the film. But that, in and of itself, isn’t a bad thing, provided it’s done correctly. And I would argue that it is done correctly in this game, at least for the Land of Dragons. While the plot holds true to the back half of Mulan, it’s abridged, with appropriate adjustments made to the remaining material to make major character turns and stake escalations work - and to allow the movie material to be in service to the larger KH story. Mushu having been a Summon in KH I gives a great springboard into the action, moments for interplay between the KH characters and the movie characters are well-chosen (Donald picking a fight with the three soldiers comes to mind, though I question Sora’s involvement; similar scenes in later worlds show him being more sensible), and most importantly - the changes mean that Sora is relevant.

To keep using the Land of Dragons as an example: in that world, it’s now Sora who suggests the way for “Ping” to prove “himself” in the army. He and Mulan make several key decisions together. And the final boss battle has Sora fighting alongside Mulan against the actual villain of the world, not some random Heartless conjured out of nowhere to keep Sora busy while plot keeps rolling without him. The same pattern holds for the Beast’s Castle and Olympus. That the protagonist should matter to the story, and be involved at the point of action in each world of a video game, should be a no-brainer, but this is another example of KH II wonderfully executing a basic idea that later games somehow managed to completely botch.

I have no issues with the pacing of the story material in these worlds either. I have a huge problem with the pacing of something in between these worlds - but we’ll get back to that. If any of them get a little rocky, it’s Olympus - with the three sets of villains running around, things get a little scattershot, which results in things like Auron’s reveal being rather rushed. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing - multiple villains jockeying for their own agendas would leave things rather scattershot. Giving Sora another hint towards Roxas’s identity is a good touch in that world too. I must say, though - Demyx is dumb. Like, really dumb. If you take Organization XIII to be more effective as a unit than as individuals, as I do, then Demyx as the first unmasked boss makes his level of cartoonish idiocy more palatable, and I suppose it fits the tone of the Hercules movie. But he is just so dumb.

Some great little gags and character quirks litter the first four Disney worlds. There’s the re-write of how Mulan gets exposed via Mushu’s big mouth, the fake-out with the wardrobe refusing to tell the Beast’s backstory, Donald being astounded by the talking objects (whereas Sora takes it in stride - remember that the next time you see him getting so worked up over a talking snowman in KH III), Queen Minnie being an absolute badass, and Shang saving the emperor in a way that I think is more impressive than the actual film. And I love that the joint action commands make it easier to finish boss fights while working together with Disney characters.

But if I can start to critique the gameplay now, I would say that things being too easy is a problem with KH II. The “hallway” complaint about the world design is an apt one, making the maps rather bland to navigate despite being pretty to look at. There’s also the problem of special tasks not offering the variety and challenge one might like from them. Lighting the lanterns in Beast’s Castle is a great example. That’s a puzzle, with a literal ticking clock. It could have been a fun bit of gameplay, very different from the usual Heartless battles...if the lanterns were in any way difficult to find, or spaced out to really push the clock to the limit. Instead, it’s such an easy exercise that I have to wonder why they even bothered putting it in. (I will say, though, that Beast’s Castle’s first pass offers up a wonderfully creative boss that does present a decent challenge - moreso in its first stage than its second, but still a fun fight.)

On the other hand, I think the AI for battle partners took a step back with this game. Now, my experience with the KH AI has never matched up to common opinion, so I’m not claiming this as an objective problem with the game. All I can tell you is that, customized properly, Donald in KH I has always been a reliable battle partner for me, while Donald in KH II spams spells and wastes items no matter how I work his settings.

And there are few things about the gameplay that just irk me. The lack of logic behind why some party members drop out at given points is one (really, why would “Ping” not help you fight the swarm on the mountain?) and the changes to magic are another. I love to use magic in these games, but something about it here just isn’t as satisfying. Fire as a close-range defensive spell is just wrong.

But those are, if not exactly nitpicks, relatively minor complaints. The game is still fun to play, after all. There are larger issues - story issues - within these first few Disney worlds.

To start with the smallest one - my problems with Sora’s character remain. He is, for the most part, attentive to duty and a competent, charismatic presence for the other characters to follow, as he was in KH I and CoM. But every now and again, the signs of what’s to come crop up. I mentioned him joining Donald in the brawl in the Land of Dragons already, but it’s more a problem of attitude - just how lighthearted and casual he can be toward his latest adventure. I grant you that, at this point in the game, nothing except possibly Maleficent’s infiltration of Disney Castle would indicate to Sora that the stakes are anywhere near as high as they were last time. And his greatest lapses into this attitude happen in Olympus and Disney Castle, two worlds based around comic Disney titles. But with hindsight, it’s hard not to watch those moments and cringe, because of what they led to. Sora in this game is oddly split, with one-and-a-half feet still back with who he was initially, and half a foot over the line to shonen doofus, and the dichotomy is very strange to see play out.

The big pacing issue I mentioned before is caused by our old friend Winnie the Pooh. The first game may have compelled you to at least start on his storybook, but in nowhere as obtrusive a manner as is done here. To be forcibly yanked from the world traveling, just as a nice flow is going, is maddening. Chances are good that many players (me among them) would have happily played the storybook minigames even if they were optional, so there was no need for this. KH II having the Heartless attempting to steal the book gives a better motivation to jump into it than KH III’s effort, but that isn’t saying much. And it doesn’t help that, at the end of the day, collecting the torn pages is a retread of the first game’s plot for Pooh. There is a clear variation on the theme, with the goal being to restore Pooh’s memory. I’ll even give them some credit for, perhaps inadvertently, giving Pooh a thematic connection to what Sora went through in CoM. But the end result is the same - find pages, find the characters within the pages, play the minigame. Given that repetitive nature to the book’s set-up, and its intrusive drag on the greater plot, I have to say that I think Pooh should have been retired after the first game - something I don’t say with any great fondness, as I love Pooh’s world in KH I.

I also love the way Belle and the Beast are used in KH I, and still question their presence in this game. That is based on one very basic problem, one that has plagued Disney in every attempt they’ve made to do something with the animated Beauty and the Beast since the original film: it’s not a story meant for prequels, sequels, or midquels.

It’s the midquel that Disney has tried multiple times, and by its nature, Beauty and the Beast just can’t support them. The Beast can only generate conflict with Belle by remaining beastly for so long in that setting before it undermines the believability of his shift, and romantic tension can’t exist between him and Belle any earlier than it does in the original film without undermining the ticking clock of the rose. The midquels Disney made ignore both these issues, and turn Belle into a much more gentle and passive character than she was in the original movie - someone more like a counselor or social worker for the Beast than a prisoner-turned-friend, and someone actively trying to “fix” him, an unpleasant spectacle in more ways than one.

Pretty much the only way to effectively tell another story with Belle and the Beast is what KH I did - take those two characters out of their own story, with all its internal logic and constraints, and use them in someone else’s. Fans of Beauty and the Beast can bring their attachment to those characters to KH I without the baggage of the plot, and no more is done with those characters except what is needed for Sora’s story. It let two of the best Disney heroes be a part of this fantastic crossover experiment, and it didn’t betray anything that fans loved about their personalities or the integrity of their film’s story.

KH II is a different story. I can appreciate that, with Kingdom Hearts creating alternate versions of every Disney world brought into its orbit, I can’t hold the story material in Beast’s Castle to the same standard as I would those horrendous midquels. We aren’t told that Belle is any kind of prisoner, for one thing, and the timeline may be very different. But the enchanted objects are all here. The ballroom and the west wing are all present. The backstory of the Beast is the same. And the rose - and its rules - are the same. The level of romantic tension shown between Belle and the Beast by the end of the first pass on their world just doesn’t jive with that ticking clock.

I was prepared to say a lot about the Beast’s behavior in this world too, but playing through it again - I do get what they were going for. His demonstration of cleverness, taking preemptive action to protect his friends in case Xaldin proved as devious as he seemed and corrupted the Beast, is well laid-out. The wording of the dialogue undermines the content of his scenes. But...that dialogue is really bad out of context. And Belle, as she is in all those midquels, is much too passive here compared to the film.

However, the biggest problem I had with any of these first four worlds on a story level was the Timeless River.

Not Disney Castle proper - that’s all amazing stuff. If one could have guessed that there would be Heartless battles there when it finally became a world, I don’t think it was as easy to guess that it would be an immediate issue, or that Maleficent herself would strike at the center of the world. It’s a wonderful bit of story and world-building, all of that.

But the Timeless River is another instance where I can see a trend getting worse, and in this case it’s the trend of pointless mystery. There is absolutely no in-world reason for Merlin not to tell Sora that he’ll be going into the past. Not telling him only leads to misunderstandings and wasted time once Sora gets there. The only reason Merlin doesn’t say anything is because, if he did, the gimmick of finding out that they’re in the past via those windows into Pete’s mind wouldn’t work. But it’s so obvious that they’re in the past, so early in the stage, that it strains credulity that Sora and the others can’t figure it out. If Sora remaining ignorant of his ties to Roxas is an example of denying a protagonist knowledge the player has done right, this is an example of that concept done very, very wrong. This series’ love affair with pointless “mystery” without any internal logic only strengthened with time, but it’s more painfully felt here for me, because the Timeless River is a wonderful idea for a stage and is loaded with charm. I couldn’t give a shit about a lot of the cryptic mumbo-jumbo surrounding Organization XIII’s members in this or future titles, but to saddle a beautiful Disney world with this kind of crap really gets under my skin.

One mystery that I would like an answer to, though: why is the Gummi route leading to Olympus the one themed after a ghost pirate ship?

#z's crits #kingdom hearts #kingdom hearts 2 #critique #commentary

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cramulus · 5 years ago

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Sufi Influences on Discordianism

On the title page of the Principia Discordia, you will find this inscription, next to a picture of Diogenes the Cynic

This is a bastardized version of a poem - here is the longer version:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness— O, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

Who wrote the stanza on the title page?

Was it Kerry Thornley, under the pen name Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst?

Was it Edward FitzGerald, English leisure-class jongleur and translator of Persian Poetry?

Or was it the Sufi, Omar Khayyam, "The Tentmaker", who lived in 1100?

or was it all of them?

In Kerry's introduction to the Principia, he writes:

My own favorite Holy Name -- Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst -- ... is a walking identity crisis. Anybody can say or do anything in the name of Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst. For better or worse, that never fails to confuse the authorities.

He goes on to relate a story about how he added that name to a roster when he was in Marine Basic Training, and nobody ever caught that it was a fake, and all sorts of rumors and stories began to crop up about this mysterious, fictional figure. At one point, somebody confuses a big truck driver named Buddha with Omar.

On the surface, all of this sounds like a funny little story about hacking bureaucracy using an assumed name, and for 20 years I never understood it's true depth.

There is an old Persian tradition of writing quatrains and attributing them to Omar Khayyam. This alone should tell us that Kerry Thornely was hiding something for us to find later. Kerry was aware of Sufism and Discordianism is, in some ways, an expression of it.

“I think of all the pube I got while reading the Rubaiyat” -MC Paul Barman

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is a famous collection of poems. I collect copies of it--as of this morning, I own four of them. While the poems are evidentaly written by the persian poet Omar Khayyam, they were "translated" from Persian by Edward FitzGerald in the 1850s. He published four different editions of the work, with slightly different iterations of each quatrain.

The theme of the work seems to be about living in the moment, enjoying life, understanding that life is temporary, all that we see is fleeting and impermanent -- so let's have a good time while we can.

'Tis all a Chequer-board of Nights and Days Where Destiny with Men for Pieces plays: Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays, And one by one back in the Closet lays.

When You and I behind the Veil are past, Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last, Which of our Coming and Departure heeds As the Sea’s self should heed a pebble-cast.

Wine is a recurring theme in the poetry, and the ecstacy of intoxication:

And lately, by the Tavern Door agape, Came stealing through the Dusk an Angel Shape, Bearing a vessel on his Shoulder; and He bid me taste of it; and 'twas--the Grape!

I always imagined that young Kerry Thornley enjoyed these poems because when he and Greg Hill were growing Discordia, they were teens and in their 20s - and I myself spent a lot of my teens and 20s drunk off my ass and loving life. But there's actually a lot more going on here...

What was Omar Khayyam on about?

Omar Khayyam "the tentmaker" was a Sufi mathematician and astronomer. He also wrote poetry, but didn't consider himself a poet - he was much more famous as a mathematician. The original Rubaiyat is a Sufic work - that is, it transmits certain Sufic truths to those that are prepared to receive them.

The Sufis use coded language, hiding their truths behind symbols and shared reference points. A story may appear to outsiders as a joke, or a little moral lesson (like most of Aesop's fables). But to one with the ears to hear it, there is often another hidden meaning.

The grape, and wine (for example), is a clear sufi symbol. Decoded, it refers to divine ecstacy. Drunkenness is a metaphor for the personal transformation that takes place when one has tasted this mystical experience. So these verses about drinking wine and reading poetry with a loved one -- they are also about sharing a special connection, not just horizontally, between people, but vertically, a relationship with a higher purpose. A transformation of consciousness. A direct experience of divine love.

Sufism is the mystical subset of Islam. (Sort of like how Judiasm has its mystical practitioners of Kaballa). Many say that Sufism contains the "inner essence" of Islam. Some would even go so far as to say that this inner essence is the inner essence of all religions, and that Sufism has attached itself to Islam as a way of "sneaking in the back door", making the ideas palatable and acceptable within an orthodox religious society.

The original version of the Rubaiyat is full of hidden meanings (much of which was lost in translation). This is a classic sufi method - breaking the wisdom into little pieces, each shaped like the whole, and scattering it all over. These verses have actually been used by Sufi teachers to impart Sufic lessons.

Many Sufis do no think Edward FitzGerald realy picked up that "Sufic voice". His mentor, Professor Cowell, taught him Persian and introduced him to the Rubaiyat. Cowell was introduced to the work by talking with Indian scholars of the Persian language. But according to Idries Shah, in The Sufis, some think these scholars intentionally misled the professor. (which is also consistent with Sufi teaching...) Neither FitzGerald nor Cowell were fluent in Persian, and their translations are sometimes described as childish, simple. So maybe FitzGerald really thought that the poem was about how cool it is to get drunk, and was not trying to transmit a higher spiritual truth. At least, not intentionally.

But this might be too simple of an explanation, too. Some of FitzGerald's verses seem to reference other Sufic sources like the poet Hafiz - so it's likely he did do a lot of wide reading on the topic, even if he was never initiated.

Even if FitzGerald was totally ignorant of the sufic line of thinking, he may have, in his translation, captured part of it and inadvertently carried it forward. His translation became very popular. It sparked a literary fad in the 1890s, the "Khayyam Cult" was a poetic trend of writing verses in the style of the Rubaiyat, and sharing them in person, in the presence of wine, and love.

Maybe this is part of the sufi spirit

or maybe not

because it sparked some divine inspiration in Thornley, I'm inclined to believe that the inner meaning of the work was passed on via FitzGerald.

What does it mean? What does it meeeeean????

In 1960, when Kerry Thornley took on the name Lord Omar, he was tipping his hat to an ancient tradition. By including, on the title page of the Principia, his own "translation" of a verse from Fitzgerald, which is in turn a reading of Khayyam, and by adapting this old Persian tradition of attributing things to Omar Khayyam, he is telling us that Discordianism is tapping into something much older. The Principia and the Rubaiyat are in contact with the same thing. On the surface, the work is about happiness, physical enjoyment, relaxation, humor. But beneath the surface, there's something else. The inner-essence of all religions. Divine ecstacy. Hidden truth, encoded. A truth that cannot be captured neatly by the rational mind or transmitted by words. Like the inner meaning of a poem, it has to be sought after and discovered by the seeker, it cannot be simply transmitted by a teacher. The teacher can point to the door, can provide the tools for understanding, but the student must pass through it themselves, on their own effort.Khayyam tells us, by way of Fitzgerald, and by way of Thornley, that the vertical and the horizontal are the same thing. Divine love and love for one another are the same thing. That's why we raise our wine glasses together,whistling in the darkness.

#discordia #discordian #discordianism #sufi #omar khayyam #rubaiyat

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infernalmachette · 6 years ago

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Games in their Context

Settling Catan, The weight of context.

This paticular issue in board games is complex, because the initial intent of the creator of Settlers of Catan, Klaus Teuber do not seem to be malicious at all. He simply was playing and enjoying playing, play testing with his family and creating a elegant beautiful peice of gaming. However through a slightly more modern lense it is slightly unsettling that the indigenous people of Catan exist in a ghost space in the original game. Loring-Albright’s edition, First Nations of Catan does provide a elegant solution to the problem by implementing them as a player through the tribe token. It does look like she wanted to keep with the games initial peaceful intentions too by making the peice mostly passive, but I feel like the militant mechanic has a lot of potential. Contextually both parties enjoyed the game immensely and I think it’s important to enjoy the games within the context you create for them and the context you exist in. Which brings me to the next reading’s points “The Euro Game as Heterotopia”

Hetrotopia - To see one’s self

There’s something special about euro board games in their naive choice to discard violence and heavy themes, they discard most other personal themes with them. Some people take this on a surface level and are disgusted by the impersonal nature of the abstract games, feeling alienated by the lack of simulation, like Tom Vasel and his opinion on Vasco da Gama. Vasel isn’t necessarily playing the game incorrectly by not making his own theme and story with the parts he’s been given, but there is a way he could enjoy it more. Devin Wilson talks about Michel Foucault’s theory on mirrored identity. How if we can see past the unreality of our “mirrored” selves we have a opportunity to shape the world beyond that. Wilson talks about taking issue with the initial implied theme that The Castle of Burgundy seems to have, that animals are property to be eaten or used for their wool, their milk. He’s a vegan (wait don’t run away he’s making a good point) and doesn’t think we should use animals for ANYTHING that involves taking their lives or parts of them from them. So the idea of animals just being commodities doesn’t sit well with him. Instead of throwing up his hands and deciding he just didn’t like the game like Vasel would, he decided to adapt its meaning. Wilson chose to view the animals as companions, and the game suddenly became a whole lot more palatable.

Context matters and maybe the initial themes and meaning of games initially might be unpalatable, but we can choose how we play them.

For me personally, this is a thing I recognise a lot in my own gaming. I’m not usually very conscious of it, but the way I act in minecraft is a example. In minecraft my playstyle is to put down my roots, settle, and spend an extensive amount of time building. I can focus for a long long time on tedious tasks in minecraft, whether that be building roofs or digging out the foundations. There are rare occasions where I stop building, usually it’s to go on a big material gathering mission. The other task I’ll do is explore caves. I can spend hours upon hours wandering and collecting every bit of ore. Minecraft is reflective of the fact that I can do mindless tasks, if I like my environment and motivation enough.

Please touch the art - Interactive art and its humanistic beauty

Something that I find really stunning and beautiful about Connected worlds is kinda generic in relation to interactive art. Its interactive. That might be a cop out answer but the thing is is I adore the fact that the audience gets to live and exist with the art, touch it, feel like they’re affecting it. I think it’s wonderful to make art so accessible, so human so present. The cold distance that portraits behind glass has can be demoralizing, so to have this bright colourful island of interactive joy is beautiful. I especially like the aspect of it really encouraging children in paticular, making it playful and engaging them. This can foster a love of art throughout their lives, and that’s invaluable.

E-sports and gaming addiction - Modern horror

This video was a little scary I’ll admit. Something seems dystopian to me about the idea that Korean young people will spend endless hours playing in PC bangs, to the point where they never actually leave. I can understand the group who likes to play in them because it’s a quieter activity than clubbing though. The e-sport players, are different again. On one hand you can have positive opportunities for poorer Koreans to make a name for themselves.

Video gaming is a relatively accessible thing because of the PC bangs, so it’s easy for rags to riches stories to happen. On the other hand there is the darker side that can affect any person playing in E-sports, of any nation. The match fixing, a dangerous thing in Korea. It is a thing that exists in other physical sports, like soccer or cricket.

However I don’t know if we should only compare physical sports and E-sports. I feel like it would be valuable to compare E-sports to competitive chess. In a lot of situations the games are specifically strategic, not unlike chess. It’s also always held over a sit down game. E-sports does however reflect physical sports through its teamwork, and the massive dramatic stadiums for spectators. There’s a lot of mixture between the two actually, perhaps it could be held as a stepping stone between chess and soccer as entertainment play.

#ARDN611 #week two #game theory

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storytime-reviews · 7 years ago

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Love, Simon Movie Review

I had been looking forward to seeing Love, Simon for so long, that getting to see the advanced screening last night was all kinds of awesome. From the very beginning I noticed that the film really encapsulated the essence and tone of the book, even though it differed in many of the scenes. I love a good book to film adaptation, and Love, Simon worked brilliantly as a different version of Simon vs The Homo Sapiens Agenda. Love, Simon worked on every level–from the incredible acting, to the score and soundtrack that fit perfectly with each scene and simply enhanced the experience.

Yet, I was so excited and hyped for this movie that at times I felt like I was just on the outside looking in, noticing every little detail, that it hasn’t quite sunk in. I’m looking forward to a second viewing that should rectify that.

I loved that Love, Simon began with Simon introducing himself as well as his family and friends. Whilst the book could jump right into the action, the much more limited time frame of the film and ability to be inside Simon’s head means it wouldn’t work here. Similarly, although the emails could exist on their own amidst other chapters in the novel, I enjoyed how the film embraced the idea of Simon imagining who Blue was depending on who he thought it could be at the time. It truly allowed for the secret of Blue’s identity to be kept, whilst at the same time increasing the tension. Simon and Bram interacting properly from the very beginning and being quite good friends was a great addition, although I wish we had seen more of Bram throughout the rest of the movie. I also think it was unfortunate that the movie essentially ended once they got together, and we saw very little of them as a couple.

Love, Simon featured so many powerful performances, which included the response of Simon’s parents to his coming out. The movie did one better than the book with Emily’s (Jennifer Garner) speech to Simon, telling him that he can exhale now. In this moment, Simon’s struggles are fully recognised by his mother, and in the most beautiful manner accepts him for who he is. Just as importantly however, Simon’s dad is not only allowed to be emotional for all that he missed about his son, he also apologises for the micro-aggressions that Simon suffered due to his jokes. Simon’s family life perfectly exemplifies why even in the most ‘perfect’ family situation it can be difficult and uncomfortable to come out. Yet, this film also demonstrated the reality that there is no single coming out moment. It happens over and over again, not always on your own terms, and how much easier it can be to come out to those you haven’t known as long.

However, the single most powerful performance in Love, Simon has to be the moment in which Simon completely releases everything he is feeling towards Martin. Nick Robinson dazzles in this moment of absolute devastation for Simon. He is unapologetically enraged and resentful, disgusted and distraught. The single use of ‘fuck’ in the film highlights the absurdity of Martin’s pathetic apology. Most significantly, the narrative does not vilify Simon for his reaction, in fact it stands with him. This scene is so emotional, it is impossible not to feel for Simon and understand completely where he is coming from.

There were some great new characters that didn’t exist in the book, from the hilariously awkward principal who wore a pride pin immediately after Simon was outed, to the openly gay Ethan. Though we hear of gay and lesbian students in the novel, Simon doesn’t interact with them and we don’t get to witness their different experiences. Ethan demonstrates a totally different story and emphasises that a wide variety of experiences exist. I also loved how Mrs Albright immediately shuts down the homophobic students, and it’s a perfectly glorious example of what everyone hopes a teacher would do for them. But I think it’s also important to acknowledge that in this situation, Simon also stands up for himself.

Yet, it was difficult to sit through Simon’s friends ignoring him through all of this. I guess I found everything that happened in the book more palatable, and maybe that was the point, to truly emphasise the risk that Simon felt–that he might not be backed by his friends. Of course, I understand why they were upset, particularly Leah (and don’t get me started on how much I hate they made Leah be in love with Simon), but it was downright awful to sit through the three of them give Simon the cold shoulder as he was bullied, and leave him to deal with being outed at school on his own just because they were hurt by a few actions of his. Actions that he took because he was viciously blackmailed about his sexuality. It was especially difficult to stomach because we see no real apology from his friends. I missed the scenes in the book with Abby and Leah fiercely glaring at anyone that looked wrong at Simon, I missed other students defending him–such as when Taylor and Abby almost punch the two homophobes. Perhaps the film upped the scale of the blackmail to facilitate a situation in which Simon would feel completely alone after he was outed to increase the tension, but I must admit to preferring how the book handled it.

With Martin posting the screenshots of emails between Simon and Bram, the dynamic completely changed and caused a lot more tension and suspense. In this moment, Simon has to take a leap of faith to get their relationship back on track. The entire ferris wheel scene was absolutely gorgeous–from Bram showing up at the last minute to the shock and excitement of everyone watching, to the truly emotional and heartwarming moment when they are finally on the same page. What stood out to me most in this scene was how incredibly nervous Bram was that Simon wouldn’t want him, and Keiynan’s understated movements here precisely explain why it took Bram so long to come forward.

I wish that we got to see more of their relationship apart from them getting together (and of course that final scene at the end), which I think the book handled really well. And yes, maybe some of the aspects of this movie that I wasn’t a fan of might not have been a problem if I didn’t have the book to compare it to. But I also recognise that in Love, Simon we got a different version of Simon’s coming of age story and his budding relationship with Bram. Both versions give us something different, and I truly enjoyed a lot of the changes made in the movie.

I’m sad that it’s all over. But I’m definitely going to see Love, Simon again. And if you hadn’t planned on seeing it, I highly recommend that you do.

#love simon #love simon spoilers #svthsa #simon vs the homo sapiens agenda #nick robinson #keiynan lonsdale #jennifer garner #movie review

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wineanddinosaur · 4 years ago

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Next Round: Georges Duboeuf Export Director Romain Teyteau on Beaujolais Nouveau

Airing between regular episodes of the VinePair Podcast, “Next Round” explores the ideas and innovations that are helping drinks businesses adapt in a time of unprecedented change. As the coronavirus crisis continues and new challenges arise, VP Pro is in your corner, supporting the drinks community for all the rounds to come. If you have a story or perspective to share, email us at [email protected].

In this episode of “Next Round,” VinePair CEO and founder Adam Teeter discusses all things Beaujolais with Romain Teyteau, export director for Georges Duboeuf. Born in Paris, Teyteau joined DuBoeuf as the North American export director in 2013 after working as a brand ambassador in New York and Canada.

Over the last decade, Beaujolais has become a popular, highly sought-after wine in America. Produced in the eponymous region in France, the wines come in multiple styles, though Beaujolais Nouveau or Beaujolais Villages are best known by consumers. Teyteau explains what to expect from different styles, as well as touching on the characteristics that Duboeuf focuses on in the production of its wines.

Georges Duboeuf is one of the largest producers in the Beaujolais region, but the brand chooses to pair with a patchwork of small family farms rather than large vineyards. The average size of these vineyards is only eight acres, and Duboeuf believes in allowing vintners to control their vineyards from generation to generation. This year, Beaujolais saw an unexpectedly dry, warm summer, forcing many vintners to harvest earlier. This timeline, plus concerns over Covid and the health of the 25,000 people who arrived to hand-pick grapes, meant a year like no other.

Nevertheless, Beaujolais prevailed, and Georges Duboeuf managed a harvest that Teyteau has high hopes for. He and Teeter discuss the American urge to pair Beaujolais wines with the holidays, and how to make the most of these refreshing, aromatic wines.

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A: From Brooklyn, New York, I’m Adam Teeter. And this is a VinePair “Next Round” conversation. We’re bringing you these conversations between our regular podcast episodes to give everyone a better idea of what’s going on in the world of wine, beer, and spirits this year. Today, I’m talking with Romain Teyteau, export manager for Georges Duboeuf, about all things Beaujolais. Romain, thank you so much for joining me.

R: Thank you so much for having me.

A: So we’re having a really fun conversation today about Beaujolais. It’s the holiday season. It’s one of my favorite times of the year to drink Beaujolais, but I think a lot of people feel that way, because they really only know one style of the wine, which is obviously the red, the cru, the village, et cetera. Can you explain all the styles of Beaujolais to just kick us off and get the listeners interested in all of the different kinds of Beaujolais that we’ll talk about today?

R: Well, there are many kinds of Beaujolais. We have 12 appellations in Beaujolais. So Beaujolais, Beaujolais Villages, and 10 Crus. I think it’s important to say that we’re one region that’s very unique in France. We’re in the southern part of Burgundy. We make wine mostly from the Gamay grape and basically a lot of people know Beaujolais for the nouveau. Nouveau is a style of wine, but we do many more wines beyond nouveau that you can enjoy all year long.

A: So in terms of those styles, obviously you have the cru Beaujolais, which has become really popular in places like New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco over the last four to five years. Now even where I go to wine lists, if you’re looking for a Beaujolais, there’s 10 cru Beaujolais on the list. And they’ve gotten more expensive, which is a bummer for me, but they’re absolutely delicious. But what other wines can we find from Beaujolais besides the cru?

R: You can find the simple Beaujolais, which I always find refreshing and delicious, and I’d like to see more of these on the wine lists. And we also see Beaujolais Villages. Let’s not forget Beaujolais Villages. That’s 38 villages tucked in between the entry Beaujolais and the cru Beaujolais, and you find fantastic values in Beaujolais Villages. And I really think it’s an appellation that has a future in the U.S. People are starting with cru Beaujolais and going to Beaujolais Villages. Usually, you work your way up the other way around. You go from Beaujolais Villages to cru Beaujolais, but a lot of people nowadays are introduced to the regions through the crus of Beaujolais, and soon, they can discover that it offers fantastic values and great profiles of wine.

A: So you’re the export manager for Duboeuf. Is Duboeuf the largest producer of Beaujolais in the region?

R: We are one of the largest, but we don’t consider ourselves in this term. We’re still family-owned and operated, and we work with hundreds of small families of vintners. To give you an idea, the average size of the domaines that we purchase grapes from for a winery is three hectares. So that’s about eight acres. That’s the average size.

A: So, very small producers.

R: Very small producers. Super-tiny producers. It’s a patchwork of small, family-owned and operated wineries that we work with, generation to generation.

A: So as the export manager, I’m sure you have a pretty good insight into the explosion of Beaujolais in the U.S. over the past five to 10 years. What do you think is fueling that? What is it about Beaujolais that has gotten so many people excited about it over the last decade? Has the region repositioned itself? Is it just that we’ve moved as an American wine-drinking culture in your mind to those brighter, higher-acid wines that Beaujolais really is known for? What are you seeing when you look at the market in terms of why you think Americans are falling in love with this region now?

R: First, I think it’s because it’s simply delicious. Beaujolais is delicious. And what I saw over the 10 years I’ve been sending wine to the U.S. … 10 years ago, I would go to a restaurant in New York, and the sommelier would say, “OK, I love Beaujolais, I drink it at home, but I don’t put it on the wine list because people don’t know Beaujolais, or don’t understand Beaujolais.” But we need people like sommeliers, or even people in wine shops — or in larger supermarkets, sometimes you have a wine that people that know wine, we need people to help sell the wine, talk about the wine. And so all these sommeliers were saying, “OK, if you love the wine, it’s your job to transmit that passion and tell these stories to your people attending your restaurant or going to your shop”. And if the wine is delicious, then you can fill the need. And I think that maybe the newer generation, but actually old generation can love Beaujolais, but people are trying to go away from over extracted, too big, too high-alcohol, too tannic wines, over the top, and trying to go to something more aromatic, fresher, lighter bodied with less alcohol that actually is much more pleasurable with food.

A: Why do you think the wine has such a nice connection to the holidays? Obviously, I drink Beaujolais all the time throughout the year, but I feel around the holidays, everyone thinks about bringing it to homes with them. Is it just because it pairs so well with all of the different dishes? Or because it’s so festive? Or has there been a strategic marketing plan in order to do that? And is it the same in France as it is here, that we think of it as such a holiday wine? Or is it really an American phenomenon?

R: I would say it’s an American phenomenon. Of course in France, we drink Beaujolais all year long, and in the U.S., it has to go with the most festive wine that we have. We like to say our wines can be festive, we also have wines that are more expressive, and some that are actually exceptional. So actually, let’s say just a few days after Thanksgiving — you can really imagine going to your family’s place for a Thanksgiving dinner — you’re going to start with perhaps a festive wine like Beaujolais Nouveau. And with a nice chill, it is refreshing, cheerful, and then you will go to a Beaujolais and then open a cru Beaujolais for the main course of the dinner. So I think it’s really something that historically has paired very well with the holidays and something has to do with Nouveau itself, because it’s coming a week before Thanksgiving. And basically, people shop and go shopping the weekend before Thanksgiving. And that’s where Beaujolais — it can be Nouveau or other Beaujolais — are in stores at the time. So I think it’s a coincidence, but it’s a good question. At least for us, it’s a wine that is great for the holidays.

A: That makes a lot of sense. So in terms of the wine, what should people be looking for when they’re looking for Beaujolais? What flavors should they be picking up? What’s the tip? How would you describe the typical style of the wine for both members of the trade who are selling the wine, and also consumers who are interested in getting into the wine for the first time?

R: But you see, there’s no straight answer to that. First, just open the bottle and taste by yourself. There’s nothing I hate more than when people say, “OK, you should taste that,” “You should smell that.” You have a nose. If it’s functioning a little bit, you can get some aromas, and typically to generalize, we would say that you will find Beaujolais light- to medium-bodied and very aromatic. So actually a lot of things are going on on the aromatic side, and then you have a wine that has a good acidity, which is super important in wine and has been too much forgotten, I think. But great acidity, very balanced. But I’m generalizing, because if you’re comparing a one-year-old Beaujolais to 10-year-old Fleurie, it’s night and day. So it’s a wine that actually offers a very diverse palate, aromatic palate. And there is no straight answer to your question, Adam.

A: Right, so it can be very festive, but then it can also be light and fun, but then it can also be very age-worthy and deliver up. I mean, that’s why I love the wine. So let’s talk a little bit about what’s happening in Beaujolais now. So first, obviously there’s been a flood of interest in the U.S. What’s happening in terms of winemaking in Beaujolais? Are we seeing in the same way — the way you see excitement of other regions around the world — a rush of new people coming into the region to make wine, with new generations taking over? Can you talk to me a little bit about that?

R: So there is actually an analogy I like to say. I think you’re broadcasting from Brooklyn, New York. I used to live in Brooklyn, myself for a couple of years, back 10 years ago. And to me, I would say Beaujolais is to Burgundy what Brooklyn is to Manhattan.

A: I like that. You do see a lot more Beaujolais on Brooklyn wine lists than in Manhattan.

R: I couldn’t. I tried to live in Manhattan, but after one month, I left Manhattan. I went to Brooklyn, and I found a better rent and also a better vibe. And it’s the same in Beaujolais. Personally, I love Burgundy, but who can afford the rent? It’s hard to be a newcomer in Burgundy, whereas in Beaujolais, the price of the land is much less, and you can really go there and start your winery and really express yourself and try new things, and so that’s why it’s a fantastic wine region. And Georges himself, he was not originally from Beaujolais. He was from the neighboring region, and he went to Beaujolais to really embrace the world of wine.

A: Oh wow. So am I understanding you correctly that a lot of people that are coming to Beaujolais now to make wine are from outside of the region, as opposed to people inside the region or the next generation making wine? Or is it both at the same time?

R: It’s a combination. You have people who are starting and came from other places and fell in love with Beaujolais. For example, our head winemaker is originally from Champagne, and he fell in love with Beaujolais. And you have people also that are native to Beaujolais and bring their own philosophy. So it’s a new generation, and maybe they learned from their parents or grandparents, but they want to bring their own way of doing things. And the change also comes from the change of generation. We also have at Duboeuf a change of generation that translates into the winemaking as well.

A: Interesting. Are you seeing the excitement from people from outside of France moving to Beaujolais to make wine? Is that a thing that’s very common, or not?

R: Oh gosh, I don’t have a lot of examples of that. There must be. I’m sure there must be. I know there are a lot of connections between Beaujolais and other regions of France. For example, you have some winemakers go to Oregon, to do a few harvest and vice versa. Or besides Oregon, you have California. Yeah, our head winemaker was trained in Oregon and spent time also in Sonoma. We have people going to all major wine regions in the world. So it’s an exchange. No, we’re not close to the rest of the world in the trends, and we’re very happy when people are inspired by Beaujolais. For example, when I go to Napa and I see a winemaker doing a 15.5 Cabernet that drinks Beaujolais at home, I’m super happy.

A: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Are we seeing that in the style, as well? Obviously, we’ve seen the taste preferences on the U.S. market evolve from people first coming in contact with Nouveau, and then really getting to realize that there’s this whole fine wine behind Nouveau. Nouveau is kind of the banner that built the name in the U.S. Are a lot of people who are moving to the region bringing new techniques and things like that? Are they changing the way that the wine is made in some regards? Or are there a lot of people moving in and really honoring the tradition and the history of the way that this wine has been made for generations?

R: There are as many ways of making Nouveau as there are winemakers. So I can talk about what I know from Georges Duboeuf. At Duboeuf, what we realized is that for years, we tried to look at our neighbors. And so we’re all in Beaujolais, and we’re looking north to Burgundy, and we’re looking south, and we said “OK, we’ll try to experiment and try to do things differently.” But now at Duboeuf, what we decided to do is to go back to what Beaujolais is all about. So we’re big on carbonic maceration. A lot of people decided to distend partially or completely, and we are back on, on full-cluster, on whole-cluster fermentation. We are trying not to extract too much. We think that maybe for some years — we were looking back 15 years ago, the general rule was to try to get as much extraction as you can, but is it really what people are looking for when they are buying a Beaujolais? Are you looking for over-extracted wine, or are you looking for something more aromatic, more refreshing? So that’s the kind of thinking we have going on here among the winemakers at Duboeuf. And I would say that now we’re going back to basics and what makes Beaujolais very special and different from other regions.

A: Can you explain just a little bit, for listeners who maybe aren’t as familiar, the process of carbonic or semi-carbonic maceration and what it does to the wine? And maybe explain why you’ve decided to go back to it?

R: Carbonic maceration is something we’ve always done at Duboeuf. But what I’m saying is that we’re taking pride in what makes Beaujolais. And that’s something very important for us. Being proud of what we are and what makes Beaujolais different. So to your question about semi-carbonic maceration, we will always use the word “semi,” because there is no adjunction of carbon dioxide in the winemaking process. So basically with semi-carbonic maceration in Beaujolais, we hand-harvest the grapes in majority and we are going to do whole-cluster fermentation. So basically, the whole bunch of the Gamay grape is going into the tank, and we’re going to close the tank and the fermentation is going to start within the berries themselves. So we have the fermentation that is going to induce carbon dioxide inside the fermenting tanks, so we’ll have what we call a hypoxia. But we’re going to fill up the tank with carbon dioxide, and then it will induce an anaerobic process inside the intact berry. So basically, you’re going to have a fermentation within the berries themselves. So I like to say each berry is going to become its own fermenting tank, and that’s what gives the fruitiness to the wine. That’s a very unique process to Beaujolais. It’s something actually that suits the Gamay grape very well . And that’s something we really enjoy in Beaujolais.

A: So obviously as the export manager, prior to Covid, you traveled a lot, I would assume. With the explosion or the rise in popularity of Beaujolais, I’ve seen a lot of people throughout the rest of the world doing much more carbonic maceration than they used to. Do you think that that is in part due to the rise in Beaujolais’s popularity?

R: I think there is something to do with that. I saw some Gamay Nouveau or Pinot Noir from Sonoma and from Oregon. We see a lot of regions doing carbonic maceration, and I hope that it’s an inspiration from the Beaujolais region. We’re happy to share the technique, and people trying to learn this are welcome to come to Beaujolais and learn alongside our very talented winemakers that we have all over the region of Beaujolais. You see in Beaujolais, we like to bring people together to share techniques, to share ideas, to share a good meal and a bottle of wine. So that’s why nowadays, it’s a little sad not being able to welcome as many people as we wish we could.

A: So just to touch on briefly because you brought it up — and because we’d be ignoring it if we didn’t — I’d like to talk a little bit about the Covid impact on the region and the winemaking. How has it impacted Beaujolais this year?

R: We think first of all of people. For example, when we had the lockdown in France, it’s not the same thing being locked down when you live in the countryside and you’re working all day long in your vineyard than if you’re in a two-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn. It’s not the same. So we were actually living a different experience of the lockdown, and we stopped traveling because of that, and we spent more time in the vineyard, and personally, I reconnected much more with nature, with the vineyard, with the pace of the vineyard. So it actually was the best place to be, among all places you could be during that time. So it’s been challenging, but actually, Beaujolais is one of the regions in France that’s still doing well. Even though we have this Covid crisis and other crises in the U.S., Beaujolais is still doing well as one of the two regions in France that are actually rising in popularity worldwide.

A: Wow. That makes a lot of sense. It’s a delicious, approachable wine. So it makes a lot of sense.

R: Exactly. So it’s been a challenge for the hand pickers, because we hand-pick in Beaujolais, so we had 25,000 hand pickers coming for the harvest. So that was a bit challenging to ensure their health, to ensure everyone is healthy. For us, the impact is not so big. But we are trying to make sure first that everybody is safe and we can have good conditions for everyone. And the world cannot travel, but the wine can still travel and cross borders. So that’s the most important.

A: Right. And so then how was harvest this year?

R: So this year, actually, it was a very extreme year. We had extreme temperatures, very high temperatures. It’s been a very dry year, and we had a very early harvest. So basically, we had the very early bud burst at the end of March. The months of April and May were very warm and dry and sunny, and even the flowering stage, you know we like to say that the flowers have been a hundred days before the harvest, and that was very early in Beaujolais at the end of the month of May, so everything was early. Very warm and dry. And the month of July actually was the third-driest since 1964. So with all that, we started harvesting around the 20th of August, which is very, very early. So that’s the earliest since 2003, super-early harvest. But we had a nice phenolic ripeness, nice structure and colors, very good aromatic elegance. And what we find in the wine is that they’re very balanced, and we felt a lot of freshness. So it’s too early to tell for the crus and most of the Beaujolais that will be bottled in a few months, but we think we’re on track for a fantastic vintage.

A: Wow, so do you think it will create a richer Beaujolais because it was so hot in July? Are there characteristics that the winemakers are already discussing that they think they will get from these grapes compared to a harvest that wouldn’t have been as early and wouldn’t have had as dry of a month as July?

R: Actually, we’re always afraid when it’s too warm. You can lose balance, you can lose acidity and have something that’s almost a character of cooked fruits, and we’re not having that. That’s one of the reasons we decided to harvest early, is to really capture freshness and make sure we have wines that are balanced. So typically, we’ll have more dark fruits than red fruits. This year, some wines are going to be a little higher in alcohol than the average of the last 10 years, but overall, it’s very balanced, and we still find very good aromatics.

A: Well, Romain, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today. I know that you’re incredibly busy, especially given everything that’s going on in the world. So I appreciate the 20 minutes or so that we spent this morning talking about Beaujolais. I plan, as always, to have it on my holiday table. It is my absolute favorite wine to pair with anything during the holidays and one of my favorite wines in general, so it’s always a joy to talk about this wine that I love so much.

R: Thank you for promoting the wine and talking about it. We need people to be invested in all Beaujolais, and I’m glad that you’re one of them.

Thanks so much for listening to the VinePair Podcast. If you enjoy listening to us every week, please leave us a review or rating on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. It really helps everyone else discover the show. Now, for the credits. VinePair is produced and hosted by Zach Geballe and me, Adam Teeter. Our engineer is Nick Patri and Keith Beavers. I’d also like to give a special shout-out to my VinePair co-founder Josh Malin and the rest of the VinePair team for their support. Thanks so much for listening, and we’ll see you again right here next week.

Ed. note: This episode has been edited for length and clarity

The article Next Round: Georges Duboeuf Export Director Romain Teyteau on Beaujolais Nouveau appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/next-round-georges-duboeuf-beaujolais/

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