#and the end culminating in the ultimate futility of war

[hungry-hobbits]

i remain utterly convinced that das boot (1981) is one of the greatest war movies of all time

[plusultraetc]

Saw the tags on the Toshinori post and do you have more to share?? Any insights? If so I’d welcome hearing them 😭 He really is so self-sacrificial and it hurts but it’s truly at the core of who he is

This has been sitting in my inbox for almost a week because I needed to make a futile effort at organizing my thoughts into something coherent--but this is as organized as they're going to get for now! Thank you so so much for the ask though bc I do love to yell about MHA <3

(Obligatory reminder that I'm watching this show in such a confusing order so if what I'm about to rant about has been addressed before and I'm harping on it unnecessarily I Am Sorry.)

(For anyone curious, this is the post btw)

SO. It feels relevant to mention that my sister and I were talking about All Might in the first place because we were talking about MHA Moments That Haunt Us. For me, it's the 'I am not here' sign hanging around the neck of the All Might statue in Kamino Ward after the Paranormal Liberation War. It literally lives in my brain rent-free 24/7 365 days a year, especially with the AM vs AFO fight being relatively fresh in my mind. The reversal of All Might's catchphrase and all it represents hurts, but to display it at the site of his 'last stand' in Kamino? That's brutal.

All Might vs All For One and how that rematch plays out is so so important to the story for so many reasons, but one of them is that the fight itself is a sacrifice. Toshinori gives everything he has, short of his life, to defeat All For One. He gives up his physical strength, his public image as the unbeatable Symbol of Peace, and, effectively his Quirk ("Goodbye, All For One. Goodbye, One For All" haunts my every waking moment, still!)

This battle is also the culmination of years of All Might's life and heroic philosophy (because Toshinori has been both practicing AND preaching self-sacrifice in the name of the greater good since we met him. It's what he thinks a hero does). Kamino is the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, if you will. Yes, he does get to walk away from the fight with AFO, but he walks away irrevocably different, almost unrecognizable. He's forced to totally change his focus and his mindset and his life. Everything he has given up is made literally visible in the deterioration of his body.

But most most importantly, All Might's sacrifice at Kamino was... all for nothing. Even if AM defeated him in that moment, All For One is free less than a year later. The world is in shambles. People are afraid, and their faith in heroes is crumbling. Heroes are afraid, and this time, they have no idealized symbol to rally behind. When Dostoevsky wrote "Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing," he was talking about All Might btw.

Toshinori gave this fight (and his career, and being All Might) everything he had, and it still wasn't enough. He sacrificed so much of himself, and so much of how he perceived himself and his purpose, and he didn't even save the world. He just bought them time--and not much of it. I think that's why he's so desperate to keep fighting, no matter the cost, no matter what condition he's in--even 'quite literally half-dead.' He can't let Kamino be the Symbol of Peace's final stand, because Kamino was ultimately for nothing. Instead of saving the world, it has been reframed through the sign on the statue as All Might abandoning the world. And ever since then, he's been scrambling to prove that he is still here.

(There's also probably something here about Sir Nighteye telling him that he was going to die. Since Nighteye used his Quirk on him, Toshinori has been anticipating sacrificing his life for good. Knowing that his entire hero career is effectively a fight to the death has probably maximized his self-sacrificial tendencies.)

[notasapleasure]

I had this draft for the 8 shows to get to know me meme that no one tagged me in, but then @batri-jopa tagged me for this other meme, so I'm doiing them as a mash-up.

10 comfort shows -

- that tell you more than you wanted to know about me. reasons below the cut, but the tl;dr is:

The Terror

Garrow's Law

Ripper Street

The X Files

Utopia

Interview with the Vampire

(BBC) Ghosts

Futurama

Avatar: the Last Airbender

Detectorists

Honourable mentions: Andor (will probably make the list once season 2 is out, but my trust of Disney Star Wars is *so* thin, I can't commit until then, no matter how excellent season 1 is); The Great (it's so good. The script is still one of the most astonishing works of art I have ever encountered. But comfort TV? hell no.); see also, Bojack Horseman (objectively great. Not comfort TV); Grease Monkeys (I've got to get hold of season 2, but I'm really fond of its coarseness, wish-fulfilment and sureallism).

Tagging 10 people if they wanna join in, but others feel free to say I tagged you! @stripedroseandsketchpads, @notfromcold, @notabuddhist, @donnaimmaculata, @erinaceina, @boogerwookiesugarcookie, @elwenyere, @kheldara, @bellaroles, @jimtheviking

List 10 comfort shows and then tag 10 people

The Terror: Like Ripper Street below, I feel this show deep in my bones and think I must be actually insane when I try to explain to people what I like about it (watching it literally made my husband's depression worse so I'm not allowed to talk about it. Jk. Sort of. About the last bit anyway). The sheer ridiculousness of that era of exploration has been a firm fave for years and I love how the show weaves horror and hubris together, how it's not a straightforward 'natives get vengeance on colonisers' story, but the colonisers ruin it for everyone, poison life for Silna, too (all without any threat of sexual violence towards her CAN YOU BELIEVE IT). I love all the attempts to impose 'civilisation' on the life the men try to live as they come to realise how doomed they are, how key the trappings of their life become - objects as tethers and talismans. I love how utterly futile it all is. How much they all care, and the audience cares despite that. Self-destruction and salvation all jumbled up together. Two full crews go into the ice and die. The end. They do everything they can not to die and it happens anyway, it's the ultimate 'the love was there and it didn't change anything'. And no one learns anything. Perfect TV.

Garrow's Law: Sometimes I do want my historical drama to be wish fulfillment actually, and this is the actual og fave. No, most of the cases weren't actually Garrow's, yes, it's a fluffy liberal take on things that played out in a more complex way, but the cast is so good, and Garrow is such a likeable guy, but then you see his flaws emerge in such a gentle way through the four series, and it really does case-of-the-week with characterisation so well, and it's got that amazing British TV character actor cast where there's always someone in the background you know, and the building romance between Garrow and Sarah, and the real repercussions of it for her are handled so sensitively, augh the culmination of the series with their own personal legal cases is so good.

Ripper Street: in my head this show was so much more than the sum of its parts. Season 1 was on the surface a fun BBC historical romp. Season 2 I had to watch through gritted teeth because Susan's situation quicked me out too much, among other reasons. Season 3 leaned into the more sinister side of the protagonist and came through as something weirder and darker, a vein which ran through Seasons 4 and 5, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I live for my alternative reading of the migration stories and nightmarish flipsides of people that we get running through the background of seasons [3/]4/5, but uh. the show's tumblr fandom is not a place for me. Reid is actually monstrous, and I like him despite/because of that. Oh man, I have so many feelings about this show, and I'd love to do a rewatch and blog about all my crazy theories but I'd probably have to go into witness protection afterwards. But rest assured, it isn't a show about the Ripper, and it's all the better for that. It does class and trauma so well, it also captures all the optimistic curiosity and the utter hypocrisy and hubris of the Victorian era so well.

The X Files: I mean, it's a formative influence, innit. Seasons 1 and 3 are the best, a lot of the 'classic' favourites are episodes I actually really disliked, even though the early seasons are the best a lot of my favourite episodes are from later...the beauty of TXF is that there's so much of it you can hold contradictory opinions about what makes it good, though, and my theory is that it's at its best when it's early and still being allowed to take its course, where even the mytharc hasn't tied itself in knots yet so every episode is of a higher standard, and then later, when the actors have wrested control of their characters from CC enough to play them like they want, but the good episodes are really just MotW ones because the mytharc has vanished up it's own fundament and I've lost track of whose turn it is to have a near-death season arc. Not technically the TV series, but still, Fight the Future is just so much of its time, watching it is like having a warm bubble bath in childhood nostalgia. Even the later series have things to recommend them - I always enjoy Doggett much more than I'm expecting to, and it's about bloody time Scully got a decent female friend in the form of Reyes...I haven't watched seasons 10 onwards though, I don't feel I'm missing much. Five fave episodes: 1.13 Beyond the Sea, 3.4 Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose, 5.4 Detour, 7.17 all things, 6.19 The Unnatural.

Utopia: Tragically incomplete at 2 seasons, but what a pair of seasons they are. Brutal and uncompromising, horrible and compelling, but also frequently hilarious and full of the warmest, most fascinating characters who are all on a journey to Getting Much Worse. It's not something I've been able to watch since the pandemic *weak laugh* but I know when I do go back to it it will remain painfully prescient and uncomfortable. The longing for a 'balancing' and a righting of a historic wrong that drives it, and the desperate failures between people who are really just searching for love and don't know how to give/receive it...ugh so good.

Interview with the Vampire: Just rewatched season 1 and I'm just. No notes, five stars. The way Louis think he's a narrator in control, the way Daniel knows such a thing isn't possible, the way Louis does let himself get drawn on things, the way Armand sees the danger in this but it's not in his control any longer. Memory is a monster. The Odyssey of recollection. Fucking won my heart with those lines alone.

(BBC) Ghosts: Ok, I will say that I think the last season was actually a bit weak. They were in a hurry to finish, and they got away with wringing the feels from the important bits (The Captain's death was perfect and I will say this over and over again), but it felt like it was in a rush to come up with scenarios that would force admissions like The Captain's, whereas the show is at its best meandering around in a buffonish way that suddenly results in a Big Oof moment. Robin's arc in season 4 was a great example of this, as was Mary's. But basically it's still simply perfect comfort TV: silly but not malicious, unfair but kind to its characters. I'm going to miss them all so much, but I'm also going to rewatch so much.

Futurama: bit basic maybe, but I have watched it so often and I can watch any episode (ok, except for Jurassic Bark) again and again and again. I don't think I've binged any TV show so often with so many different people. Not sure how I feel about the immanent revival, but this has always been my favourite Matt Groening product, so fingers crossed.

Avatar: the Last Airbender: without getting into like...fandom discourse, man, this is a really perfect show. No need to say 'ooh it gets good after--!', it's just good from the beginning. A really well fleshed-out world, great characters who grow through the series, enough self awareness that the 'clip-show' episode Ember Island Players actually builds on the characterisation and addresses ambiguities in its own plots. A show that sticks to its principles and doesn't fudge the ending and also consistently looks gorgeous.

Detectorists: I had to put it on because no other show has literally made me fall off my chair laughing. Are the main characters useless? Yes. Is it often perplexing that the women in their lives spend any time with them? Yes. But that's forgiveable, because it's ultimately so kind to its beleagured characters and things work out despite their stupid decisions. Also it just captures rural English eccentricity so well. They're all such freaks (affectionate).

[influencermagazineuk]

The Struggles and Triumphs Behind Writing 'Chinatown'

Robert Towne's legendary script for "Chinatown" is celebrated for its rich detail and brilliant twists, but the journey to create it was anything but smooth. Towne's inspiration came from a comment by a Los Angeles cop friend who noted that Chinatown was a place where the law barely reached. This idea stuck with Towne and led to a grueling process filled with personal and professional challenges. In his mid-30s, Towne was an established screenwriter living comfortably in Los Angeles. He had already made a name for himself through his work in television and film, collaborating with notable figures like Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson. Towne's reputation as a talented script doctor was solidified by his contributions to films like "The Godfather" and "Bonnie and Clyde." Despite his success, Towne was driven by the challenge of uncovering the hidden corruption in his hometown, inspired by the real-life California water wars of the early 20th century. Sarah Morris, Attribution, via Wikimedia Commons Paramount Pictures, under the leadership of Robert Evans, saw potential in Towne's vision and offered him $25,000 to adapt "The Great Gatsby." Towne instead pitched his detective story set in 1930s Los Angeles, which Evans accepted despite not fully understanding the plot. Towne faced difficulties in writing his script, taking six months to complete a lengthy first draft tailored for Jack Nicholson as the detective JJ Gittes. The story revolved around corruption and violence in the city, culminating in a dark, shocking twist. The collaboration between Towne and director Roman Polanski was fraught with tension. Polanski, who had returned to Los Angeles after the tragic murder of his wife Sharon Tate, found Towne's script overly detailed and insisted on extensive revisions. The pair spent eight weeks revising the script, cutting down narration and adding a crucial scene set in Chinatown. Polanski's insistence on a darker ending, reflecting his own personal losses, led to a final script where the heroine, Evelyn Mulwray, dies, leaving Gittes to confront the futility of his investigation. The writing process was further complicated by Towne's personal issues, including a significant cocaine habit that drained his finances. Jack Nicholson lent him money on the condition that he finish the script. Polanski and Towne's disagreements continued, exacerbated by Towne's dog and pipe-smoking habit, and Polanski's distractions from frequent visitors. Despite these challenges, progress was made, and filming began in October 1973. Towne was banned from the set, but he continued to review footage with Evans. There were doubts about the film's success, but "Chinatown" ultimately became a critical and commercial hit, receiving 11 Oscar nominations and winning Best Original Screenplay for Towne. Towne's career continued with notable successes, including co-writing "Mission: Impossible," but "Chinatown" remained his crowning achievement. His work in the 1970s, particularly with "Chinatown," highlighted the gap between America's self-image and the darker realities perceived by filmmakers, leaving a lasting impact on cinema. Read the full article

[tomorrow-and-tomorrows]

SNK 139.5: Towards the Final Pages with no Final Answers

The final pages of the updated ending are bold, but I think ultimately more evocative than the original preliminary ending.

Even after the intensely polarized reader reception that took issue with the lack of storytelling precision and clarity when it was most needed, SNK chose to end with a decisively ambiguous symbol. In literature, a symbol is something that clearly means something -- but with the most "literary" symbols, their meaning cannot be absolutely defined; any attempted answer as to what a symbol represents has no finality or certainty, and interpretation will remain ever open to debate. A symbol both invites and resists interpretation.

Naturally, the immediate response to the symbolic tree on the final page is to try answering the invitation to the question, "What does it mean?"

One prominent answer I've seen is that it symbolizes the continuation of the cycle of war and violence either because a) of the symbolic parallel to Ymir or b) on a more literal level, that it implies the actual potential revival of new era of Titans. A reasonable interpretation either way, but also, I think, an incomplete one.

The first reason for this is that "the endless cycle of war" was already clearly and powerful represented in the preceding panels:

The cycle of war was already continuing in the decades or centuries before the child arrived at the tree. A culminating image symbolizing the persistence or resurgence of an era of war as the final panel would thus arguably be redundant and unnecessary.

Furthermore, the chapter is entitled "Toward the Tree on That Hill." If the tree were simply a symbol of war, by implication the chapter could equally be called 'toward the endless cycle of war'. But such a relentlessly bleak and tonally flat ending sentiment would be firmly incongruous with the story's recurrent conviction in the equal cruelty and beauty of the world -- a conviction that I believe it has been faithful to all the way to its end.

The Long Defeat

But while on this topic of war, let's linger a moment on the "cruelty" side and the consequence of this wordless construction and subsequent destruction of a city -- the most bold and possibly controversial additional panels that are also my personal favourite additions.

One objection that has emerged against this brief sequence of Paradis' apparent destruction is that it renders the entire story to be "pointless". Eren's 80% Rumbling, Armin's diplomatic peace talks between the remnants of the Allied Nations and Paradis, and before that, the proposal of the 50-year plan and Zeke's euthanasia plan... everything, to the very beginning to the Survey Corps' dreams of some kind of freedom; was it all for nothing? All that striving, that hope, that final promise bestowed upon Armin: was it all a pointless story? Even more radically, is the story suggesting that Eren might as well have continued the Rumbling to 100% of the earth? Was Zeke's euthanasia plan the cruel but correct choice all along? What was the point of rejecting the 50-year plan if that had a greater chance of success at preventing this outcome?

I think Isayama suddenly pulling back to such a long-term view of history to the scale of decades or even centuries into the future calls for a reorientation in attitude towards exactly what kind of story we have been reading. Yes, if the metric is Paradis' survival, maybe it was indeed all "pointless". But that's also to say that, on the broadest scale, SNK is a story about futility, that it is a deliberate representation of the struggle to make one's actions historically meaningful.

In the long view of history, all the events, from Grisha running beyond the wall to see the airships and the first breaking of Wall Maria to Erwin's sacrifices, Paradis' discovery of the outside world, and finally to the Battle of Heaven and Earth, it would all merely be a handful of chapters in the history textbooks of the future. A future in which war and geopolitical conflict will continue even without Titans. That does not mean that all paths to the future are equal -- the 50-year plan would not have put an end to Titans, and Zeke's euthanasia plan distorts utilitarian ethics into just another form of oppression; there are better and worse decisions that lead to more and less degrees of suffering, but no decision can ever be the final one.

The additional panels remind us that in history, there never exists a singular "Final Solution". The reason there are readers who vehemently support Eren to have flattened 100% of the world, and the reason the Paradisians supported the oppressive, authoritarian, proto-fascist Jaegar Faction under Floch and even after the Rumbling, is that because they want to believe that a Final Solution to end conflict exists and will work. They resist the fundamental uncertainty and complexity of the situation, instead preferring a singular, unified, and coherent Answer to Paradis' struggle to survive. I'm reminded of the scholar Erich Auerbach's theorization of why fascism appealed to many people during periods of political and social crisis, change, and uncertainty. Writing in exile after fleeing Nazi Germany, he observed that:

"The temptation to entrust oneself to a sect which solved all problems with a single formula, whose power of suggestion imposed solidarity, and which ostracized everything which would not fit in and submit - this temptation was so great that, with many people, fascism hardly had to employ force when the time came for it to spread through the countries of old European culture." (from Mimesis p. 550)

This acutely describes the Jaegar Faction's rise to power and continued dominance in Paradis. But their promise of unity, of a single formula to wipe out the rest of the world either literally through the Rumbling, or to dominate them with military force, is a false one. Even if Eren had Rumbled 100% of the world instead of 80%, history would still go on. The external threat of the world may have been eliminated, but internal conflict and violence would still continue onward throughout the generations born on top of the blood of the rest of the world. Needless to say, out of all the options, Eren's 80% Rumbling is the very epitome of perpetuating the cycle of violence as it creates tens of thousands of war orphans like Eren once was, and it would justify employing violence for one's own self-interest to an extreme degree. For the generations to come that would valourize Eren as a hero, it would set a dangerous precedent for what degree of destruction is acceptable for self-defence -- nothing short of the attempt to flatten the entire world. It is no surprise that Paradis would meet a violent end when its founding one-party rule of the Jaegar Faction has their roots in such unapologetically bloody foundations.

Neither the 80% Rumbling nor the militaristic, ultra-nationalistic Jaegar faction that come to govern Paradis are glamourized as the "correct" solution to ensuring Paradis' future. (This can also put to rest any accusations of SNK's ending as "fascist" or "imperialist" propaganda, since the island's modern nation that they founded ends in war. All nations must fall eventually, but not all do in such blatant destruction). Importantly, neither is Armin's diplomatic mission naively idealized as that which permanently achieves world peace. No singular or unifying formula can work because reality is complicated. Entrusting oneself to seemingly simple Answers is simply insufficient, even if they are ideals of peaceful negotiation; that method may work given the right conditions, but the world will always eventually complicate its feasibility.

After all in the real world, there's the absurd irony that some in the West had called the First World War "The War to End all Wars". These days, WWI is merely one long chapter in our textbooks just a few pages away from the even longer chapter of the Second World War that is followed by all the rest of the conflicts that have followed since then even with the establishment of diplomatic organizations like the United Nations. In this sense, showing Paradis' eventual downfall is perhaps the only way to end such a series that is so concerned with history, from King Fritz's tribal expansion into empire, the rise and fall of Marleyan ascendency, and finally of the survival and apparent shattering of Paradis.

From its beginning to its end, SNK has poignantly evoked J.R.R. Tolkien's conception of history as The Long Defeat. In one character's words, "together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat". That is to say, "no victory is complete, that evil rises again, and that even victory brings loss".

No heroes, only humans

Eren's desperate, fatalistic resignation to committing the Rumbling, along with the characters' rejection of all the rest of the earlier plans to ensure Paradis a future, are merely the actions of human beings to that began with the need to find not even necessarily a Final Answer, but at least an acceptable and feasible one for the time being. But the characterization of Eren's confusion, childishness, and regret in the final chapter is startlingly real in how it demonstrates how, all along, we have been dealing not with grand heroes, but simply people who have no answers at all. SNK has always been about failures - and often ironic failures; it has always been a story about painful and frequently futile struggle.

People make mistakes, they can be short-sighted, selfish, biased, immature, petty, and irrational, and I think the ending follows through with depicting the consequences of that.

Erwin's self-sacrifice before being able to reach the basement (and his regression to a childhood state in the moments before his death), Kenny's futile chasing after that universal compassion he had seen in Uri, Shadis never being acknowledged by history despite his final heroic action, and so on -- these stories of ironic, futile failures are still meaningful in their mere striving. Eren's ending and Paradis' demise despite Armin's endeavour to ensure them a peaceful future are entirely consistent with this.

SNK certainly follows the shounen trope in which young individuals are bestowed great power and correspondingly great responsibility, and must then reconcile the burden of possessing that greatness on which the fate of the world depends. Yet it is equally defined by its representation of the state that us normal human beings confront everyday: the struggle against the apparent powerlessness to enact any meaningful or lasting change at all. Simultaneously, this helpless state does not exempt us from the responsibility to act in whatever small capacity we are able to resist oppression, ideological extremism, and the perpetuation of violence.

Towards That Symbol

That was a rather long but vital digression about the additional "construction and destruction" pages. To return to the issue of the symbolism in the final panel, here I will turn from seemingly affirming the tree as symbolizing the cycle of violence, towards what I think is the greater complexity of what the tree might "actually" symbolize.

As I've said above, I don't believe that the final chapter title is synonymous with 'toward the endless cycle of war'. In tone, theme, and characterization, SNK has always been defined by the tension between cruelty and beauty, the will to violence and the underlying desire for peace, and the rest of the contradictory impulses that all simultaneously coexist. The end of SNK as a whole commits to a similar lack of closure, ambiguity, and interpretive openness.

So far I have rambled on about only a view of the perpetual "cruelty" of history. Where, then, is the "beauty"?

In short, the "tree = cycle of violence" interpretation is obviously based on how that this tree recalls the original tree in which the spine creature, as the source of the power of the Titans, resided. But it's worth first considering, what exactly is this creature? We seem to get our answer in the chapter that most precisely crystallizes the dual "cruelty and beauty" of the world:

The spine creature might be said to be life itself. Or more specifically, the will of life to perpetuate itself, for no reason at all but for the fleeting moments in which we feel distinctly glad to have existed in the world.

The creature at the source of the Titans, and in extension the Titans themselves, is neither inherently a positive or negative, "good" or "evil", creative or destructive force. It's both and all of those at once. As with any power, the Titans were merely a tool that was put to use to oppressive ends.

So as I now suggest that the tree at the end is symbolically a "Tree of Life", I don't at all mean "life" in the typically celebratory or optimistic sense: rather, I mean it in the ambiguous, ambivalent, uncertain, and complex sense that has been evoked throughout the above discussion of the inevitable continuation of war.

The title "Toward The Tree on That Hill" is derived from its associations with Eren and Mikasa, but more specifically of course, from Armin's affirmation of existence. However, the tree as a symbol of existential affirmation is undercut with the revelation that, despite Armin's diplomatic mediation between the Allied Nations and Paradis, the island nation never escapes war just as no nation in the history of the earth has ever fully escaped war.

The image of Armin running toward that life-affirming tree by the end becomes twisted and complicated, as the image of the anonymous child approaching the Tree of Life evokes both awe at its beauty and grandeur, and a deep dread at the foreboding of its cyclical return to Ymir's tree that signalled the beginning of a bloody era.

And I think that is precisely it: Life is not some idealized, beautiful vision that we always want to run toward; it is also ironic, complicated, and dreadful. It is ambivalent. Like a literary symbol, the meaning of life cannot be pinned down absolutely. The tree therefore becomes itself a symbol of uncertainty, of an open future that is cyclical both in its beauty and war.

As a final observation, it is surely no coincidence that, the small, black, birdlike silhouettes of the war planes destroying the city from the sky is replaced by the similarly small black silhouettes of birds in the final panel.

If the birds represent freedom from war, the irony is that the immediately surrounding land appears to be one completely empty of people save for the exploring child; it is a freedom attained only without people's presence. Yet at the same time, a child from some existing civilization has reached it; perhaps it is freedom that they have reached, perhaps it is something else that they see in the tree. What is it that they were looking for? What does the tree and its history represent for the child, and what does it mean for their future? Alternatively, does the child-in-the-forest imagery negatively recall the warning that the world is one huge forest of predator and prey that we need to protect children from entering?

Rather than providing answers, this tree embodies all of the potential questions, and all of the potential answers. These possibilities will unfold themselves into an uncertain future beyond the chapters of history that Eren, Armin, Mikasa, Zeke, Erwin, and all the rest of the characters were part of and left their mark on; and whatever future this child will witness or create, it will similarly be one of the struggle against futility, as the journey begins anew with each generation in every new era. Neither - or both - hopeful or despairing, the final image of this tree, just like life itself, contains those innumerable irresolvable tensions as it gestures towards all possibilities, both oppressive and free.

[ramonadecember]

Hmmm it was hard to just pick these for Ivan BUT 🐺

1, 2, 4, 5, 11, 15? 20, 21, 22, 38, 44

look i'm still going through these slowly lmao.

my little wolf boy, my little pup. we love a childhood friend to war criminal to to friend to lover story.

--

1. Does your character have siblings or family members in their age group? Which one are they closest with?

Unfortunately Ivan does not. Not only is he an only child, but he’s the only child of an only child, and with his father not in the picture, it leaves very little in the way of family at all, let alone anyone in his age bracket. There is/is maybe some more extended family out there, or perhaps even… half siblings or something of that nature (he tries not to put much thought into his father or what he might be up to or if he’s even alive…). So as far as Ivan is concerned, it’s just him.

2. What is/was your character’s relationship with their mother like?

Ivan is a bit of a mama’s boy lmao. A lot of that stems from the fact that like, she’s his only family. He sometimes… questions some of the decisions his mother has made, but ultimately he knows that everything she’s done, she’s done out of love, and that she’s just doing the best she can/knows how. Ivan also knows that HE has done some questionable things, but for the most part it hadn’t mattered as long as he made her proud in the end.

4. Has your character ever witnessed something that fundamentally changed them? If so, does anyone else know?

The thing that I can think of (and the thing I think YOU are thinking of lol) is more like… the final tipping point in fundamentally changing Ivan. A culmination of many things witnessed instead of just one moment. And that’d be Ivan seeing the extensive scarring Sasha has. Bit by bit Ivan was starting to realize that he was uh, on the wrong side of the war (thanks to—short version of the story—some elaborate lying on Bannan’s part that that saw Ivan being healed by/living amongst the people he up until then was fighting against/considered his enemy), but seeing the horrors of what his (now former) side had done written into the skin of someone he’d grown to care for dearly really shook him up, and realizing that HE was actually the one who caused that damage (Sasha CAN’T know) was really the final straw in realizing he needed to… stop being the way he was, do better. He got a little bit sidetracked for a bit with guilt and thinking any sort of ‘redemption’ was futile, but he got there.

5. On an average day, what can be found in your character’s pockets?

Not much, he travels pretty light (see: his pants are too tight for much lmao). Couple of coins, small trinket/token likely from Bannan or Sasha, other little things he’s snitched over the course of the day when no one was looking.

11. In what situation was your character the most afraid they’ve ever been?

Near dying probably takes the cake for that one. Ivan spent a lot of time being real cavalier about his life, under the impression that it didn’t much matter to him whether he lived or died. Then came the time that he got absolutely wrecked on a job gone wrong. Ivan learned in an instant that he did in fact want to live, but by that point he didn’t know if he’d be able to get himself to any sort of help in time, and he was terrified. Lucky for him, he knows a good doctor. (A close second is probably having to be the one to free a captured Cullen, but even you don’t know that bit of story yet lol).

15. Is your character preoccupied with money or material possession? Why or why not?

Nah, not really Ivan’s concern. He’s never really had a plethora of wealth or possessions. When he was young and his mom was still working at the palace, they did well enough and Ivan never felt like he was lacking anything, but when fighting broke out and she decided the best/safest bet was not on the side of the Crown/that her allegiances lay elsewhere, she left her position there and whisked Ivan away (without him so much as getting to say goodbye to Bannan). They had to make do on lesser means after that. Most of what Ivan has is more sentimental than anything of actual value. And he gets real flustered over receiving any type of gift.

20. In what ways does your character compare themselves to others? Do they do this for the sake of self-validation, or self-criticism?

Ivan compares himself to just about everyone he meets. His mind starts turning with all the ways he’s not as good as everyone else, even/especially the people he’s closest to. Always thinking about how kind and compassionate Sasha manages to be even though they’ve both been through similar levels of awful shit, and how Cullen is the strongest person he’s met both physically and mentally/emotionally, and the fact that Bannan is like… a literal Prince Charming. Ivan thinks he falls so short in comparison to the three of them and doesn’t have a clue what they see in him.

21. If something tragic or negative happens to your character, do they believe they may have caused or deserved it, or are they quick to blame others?

He’s pretty quick to blame others for his misfortune, or at least he used to be. It was more of like, a ‘blaming a higher power’ type of blaming other people than directing it at an individual. But now that he has reevaluated some life choices and left the ~bad guys~ to instead align himself with the Crown, the main thing he used to blame for all his woes, it’s not so easy to do that. He’s had to start taking more responsibility for the things that happen in his life. Post-switching sides, Ivan definitely went through a phase where he thought he deserved the bad things that have happened to him because of all the bad that he’s done, but having the people around him acknowledge the bad and be willing to move on from it makes it so that blame is not usually kept to only his mopier moments.

22. What does your character like in other people?

Straight-forwardness, because he doesn’t like to beat around the bush and doesn’t like others wasting his time by doing it either. The ability to say sorry, because it’s something he’s working on being better at too. Self-sufficiency, because he’s not one to coddle.

38. Is your character more likely to remove a problem/threat, or remove themselves from a problem/threat?

Remove himself! Ivan prefers to slip in, do what needs to be done, and get out. The less people who are even aware of his presence the better. So if he has the option to remove himself, he will. But if that’s NOT an option, Ivan has a tendency to act akin to a cornered animal. He’s a snarly little thing.

44. How easy or difficult is it for your character to say “I love you?” Can they say it without meaning it?

When he really feels it? It comes out pretty easily, feels only natural to say it. But I think it can take him a while to actually get there, to know what he’s feeling is in fact love. And I doubt he’d say it if he doesn’t mean it, not necessarily because of some heavy meaningful weight he puts on the word, but because he’s not the type of person to just tell people what they wanna hear (not that that’s gotten him into trouble before or anything… lmao).

[agentrouka-blog]

1/ Anxiously waiting for the next asoiaf book to come out, rereading chapters again and again, don't you think there's a possibility that Martin could go for the Medeia reversed storyline, Selyse burning her daughter for helping Stannis (instead of M. killing her kids for revenge), when he already has a mother that goes to extremes for her children (Cat) and one that uses her children for having power herself? (Cersei) It would be a culmination of Selyse's arc; she's for sacrificing children.

2/ Stannis has reservations about it, but she doesn't (well, Edric is not hers--what if the kid was hers?). At the same time, this would tie up some loose ends. It would make winter abate, so the battle happens at WF (not that St. will win it); Sansa would travel; and Val's hostility to Shireen would have a payoff. I hate to think what will happen when Jon comes back to life with Selyse and Val. I take it for granted Martin has not revealed all his secrets in the new book on GoT.

**

Hi anon!

I don’t think it would be nearly as powerful to have Selyse responsible. 

For one, that’s not much of an arc for Selyse. She is introduced as a true believer, no holds barred.

God, she said, not gods. The red woman had won her, heart and soul, turning her from the gods of the Seven Kingdoms, both old and new, to worship the one they called the Lord of Light. (ACOK, Prologue)

She is kept unsympathetic throughout, and GRRM uses Jon to suggest that she doesn’t value her daughter, along with not minding if innocent babies die. 

It was the answer that Jon Snow had expected. This queen never fails to disappoint. Somehow that did not soften the blow. "Your Grace," he persisted stubbornly, "they are starving at Hardhome by the thousands. Many are women—"

"—and children, yes. Very sad." The queen pulled her daughter closer to her and kissed her cheek. The cheek unmarred by greyscale, Jon did not fail to note. "We are sorry for the little ones, of course, but we must be sensible. We have no food for them, and they are too young to help the king my husband in his wars. Better that they be reborn into the light."

That was just a softer way of saying let them die. (ADWD, Jon XIII)

Having her kill Shireen would be the most logical conclusion. There would be zero twist. It’ s unlike GRRM to go for something so predictable.

Medea-wise, it’s also kind of overtly obscure. Medea reversed is kind of  over the top when it comes to literary allusions, if it removes the point of what Medea represents. 

The Agamemnon theme exists in the books with Ned and Sansa, but it really comes to the fore with Stannis and Shireen when you consider the deer imagery, the context of war, religious fanaticism and prophecy, and the ultimate futility along with the vengeful wife, which itself also already exists in Cersei and Lysa. 

Whoever is responsible, Shireen’s sacrifice will still calm the “seas”, which should then enable Sansa to travel. (Good point!!) 

(And I think that there is a different purpose to Val’s rejection of Shireen. She rejects her as “unclean” and claims that the greyscale will resurface and should be countered with “the gift of mercy”. This phrase is particularly associated with the Hound (via Arya and the Elder Brother), who is currently “at rest” on the Quiet Isle. He will most certainly resurface, and although they renamed his aggressive horse Stranger (death) into Driftwood, he retains “his former master’s nature”. There’s a large theme of distrust and redemption at play, and I don’t think it would be served by having Val just straight up aid in murdering Shireen. She is stil a prisoner and has other things to worry about now that Jon was stabbed quite a bit.)

[sepublic]

Skull Raiders

           Originating from a distant, harsh land, their leader Kulta was forced to take leadership at a concerningly young age following his parents’ deaths. After hearing tales of a mythical island that everyone supposedly came from, an inspired Kulta, seeking to move his tribe away from their wartorn home, led a great emigration in search of this fabled land.

           Although massive storms and terrifying sea beasts sunk many ships, the Skull Raiders’ hopes and prayers worked out in the end. Sighting the shoreline of Okoto, the pirates quickly landed, and sent several scouts who kidnapped local Okotans, interrogating them furiously about the culture and lifestyle of the island. After assessing the situation, Kulta chose to attack.

           The Skull Raiders are by no means inherently evil or violent, and they’re clearly the same type of being as the Okotans. However, generations of backstabbing, bloodshed, massacres, and other atrocities in the wars of his homeland scarred Kulta. For the Skull Raiders, attacking the peaceful Okotans under the assumption that they would inevitably seek to kill them was a rational move; They thought the natives unable to be trusted after their trauma.

           Thus, while peace WAS an option, it was one left unchosen in favor of war. And once the Skull Raiders led their first series of massacres, conflict became the only option for either side; Either the Okotans would be conquered, or the Skull Raiders would be rounded up and/or slaughtered.

           Despite Okoto initially having the advantage of greater numbers and technology, the Skull Raiders were able to adapt by utilizing a series of cunning guerilla tactics from their homeland. Led by the brilliant Kulta, they made good use of an indestructible metal called Bohrok, utilizing secret smelting techniques passed down from generations to hone the ore into powerful armor and weapons.

           Likewise, the Skull Raiders were able to overwhelm the Okotans with the ferocity of their attacks. Okoto, up until then, had never faced an actual threat or war, as it had been unified underneath the Emperor. Thus, its royal army had no experience facing a threat like this, whereas the Skull Raiders were intimately familiar with war and brutal tactics. To make things worse, Okotan culture dictated some actions in war as unfavorable and immoral, no matter the ends; The Skull Raiders, unsurprisingly, found many ‘war crimes’ to be commonplace tactics, and had few qualms, if any, taking hostages, among many other under-handed tactics.

           The Skull Raider wars commenced for several months, with the Protectors and the Mask Makers leading the Okotan defense. Ekimu and Makuta’s godlike powers were able to conquer any Skull Raider opponent they faced, their Hammers of Power easily shattering Bohrok, but the Skull Raiders were fast, spread-out, and many, and quickly adapted to the presence of the brothers, making sure to keep note of their locations as much as possible.

           The Skull Raiders soon changed the war in their favor once more once they began using stolen Masks of Power to their advantage, helping them level the playfield against Okoto. As they began to pillage cities for many Life Automatons, even hijacking a few Airships, the Skull Raiders eventually got their hands on some of Makuta’s hidden, Forbidden Masks. They gleefully used the questionable weapons to their worst extent, and with the Forbidden Masks revealed, the Emperor eventually had to commission Makuta for more of them.

           Despite the skill and tactics of the seasoned Skull Raiders, they were ultimately no match for the Mask Makers. The twins constructed bigger, stronger weapons, and the Okotans quickly grew to adapt to war after enough time. The Skull Raiders had a poor understanding of Life Automatons, and were thus unprepared for some of Makuta’s more devious traps; One infamous example was a Mask of Power that when ‘dropped’ by an Okotan for a Skull Raider to use and activate, would unleash bladed limbs from its sides that would tear into their victim’s head.

           The final battle of the Skull Raider wars eventually ended with Kulta, his top commanders, and his army of his finest warriors, the Kal, being rounded up and imprisoned. To their surprise, Kulta and his fellow Raiders weren’t immediately executed, but soon found out it was because the Okotans were busy devising the worst possible punishment.

           With their leaders taken out, the remaining Skull Raiders went into hiding, splitting into smaller groups. Although some of these stragglers attempted to continue the war, it was discovered to be a futile effort, and save for the occasional banditry and theft, the Skull Raiders ceased their war entirely in favor of just surviving, growing accustomed to the lush Okoto.

           As Makuta worked on ways to the better of his brother and one-up him, he became intrigued by Bohrok. His curiosity getting the better of him, he stealthily snuck into Kulta and his warriors’ prison beneath Destral, inquiring the nature of the metal and the best ways to smelt with it.

           Seeking an opportunity, Kulta seized it and struck a deal with Makuta; in exchange for extending the date of the commanders’ execution (Kulta knew Makuta was in charge of this), he would teach Makuta about Bohrok. Makuta, feeling the Skull Raiders’ deaths were inevitable, agreed, and began to collaborate with the commanders.

           More deals were struck as Makuta began to see the Skull Raiders as useful allies who understood the concept of harsh means for a greater end, unlike the Okotans. The Skull Raiders themselves were wary, especially since they could tell how Makuta looked down on them; But beggars couldn’t be choosers. Kulta, through Makuta, would send messages certified through ways only possible through himself to the remaining Skull Raiders scattered across Okoto. Underneath his directions, they would instruct Makuta on Bohrok, and even provide him with ample amounts of the metal, which they had plenty of.

           These deals led to a strange, secret symbiosis between Makuta and the Skull Raiders. Makuta would often rely on the tribe for some of his more hidden, controversial actions and projects, and in return he would provide favors, including better prison conditions, hidden homes for the Skull Raiders to hide in, etc. Of course, Makuta never let the commanders be free from their prison, as he still needed leverage over them- The feeling was mutual.

           The dealings culminated when Makuta, desperate to create a Mask of Life, hired the Skull Raiders scattered across Okoto for a horrific series of harvests, requiring hundreds, if not thousands of Okotan souls. In exchange for such a bold undertaking that would easily risk many Skull Raider lives, Kulta finally negotiated the freedom he desired from Makuta, who at that point was more concerned about the Mask of Life and the glory it’d give him than anything else.

           With Makuta’s intimate knowledge of army rotations and procedures, the scattered Skull Raiders reunited under Kulta’s guidance and led a series of massacres, slaughtering many minor villages and harvesting their victims for their Life energy. With the help of Makuta’s brotherhood, the harvested energy was secretly sent to Makuta’s workshop in the Great Forge, even as the tribe celebrated and anticipated their leaders’ freedom.

           Unsurprisingly, Okoto noticed the Skull Raiders’ sudden increase in seemingly senseless massacres, and the Protectors and Ekimu began to investigate. Fearing being outed, Makuta struck one final deal; During the Festival of Masks, Makuta would give his servants a cue to release the Skull Raider commanders from their prison beneath Destral. Armed with their Bohwork weapons and armor, Kulta would lead his warriors in escaping to the surface and storming the area, providing backup and protection for Makuta.

           Kulta, who was considering killing Makuta during said plan, readily agreed. On the day of the Festival of Masks, Makuta convinced many guards to take breaks, even as his servants provided Kulta and his warriors with their old tools. Meanwhile, the Protectors’ investigations led Ekimu towards the remaining Skull Raiders, where he engaged in a civil duel and avoided casualties entirely. Earning the respect of the pirates, Ekimu learned of Makuta’s crimes, with the Skull Raiders figuring out that their leaders would be freed by the time Makuta realized they had betrayed him.

When Ekimu arrived at Destral and revealed Makuta’s crimes to the Okotans, Kulta and the Skull Commanders armed themselves and began to break free upon a cue from Makuta. As they marched towards the surface, however, Makuta donned the Mask of Life, starting off the Great Cataclysm and causing a series of earthquakes that blocked Kulta and his warriors off from the surface.

Trapped, Kulta and his group were helpless as Ekimu shattered the Mask of Life. Makuta’s creation unleashed a powerful wave of pure life energy upon breaking, one that engulfed Destral and pertrified anyone who wasn’t protected like Ekimu.

The Skull Raiders beneath Destral were an interesting case, however. The life energy struck them, travelling through the ground and searing their flesh away. Their Bohrok armor reacted strangely to it, warping as it melted and fused with the Skull Raiders’ bones, trapping their souls in their bodies and keeping them from truly dying.

As the Great Cataclysm ended, Kulta and his commanders were left smelted and immolated, their souls trapped in their metallic corpses as the catacombs collapsed upon them. Kulta and his warriors quickly went dormant, entering an unconscious state of hibernation.

Across Okoto, the other Skull Raiders in hiding were devastated by the Great Cataclysm. Luckily, having always been somewhat nomadic and not having been in a city at the time, they weren’t hit as badly as their Okotan enemies.

Regrouping, their scouts attempted to enter Destral, and after multiple attempts braving the hazardous terrain, finally came across the Capital City, strewn with the petrified corpses of those caught in the explosion. Terrified and feeling a horrific chill down their spines, the scouts retreated, relaying the news.

The Skull Raiders mourned the loss of their leaders, lamenting their mistakes and blaming Ekimu. A new leader was elected, and while some initially broke off to exact revenge against the weakened, scattered Okotans, the tribe as a whole ultimately chose to retreat to the newly-created mountain borders separating the Elemental Regions. There, they carved an intricate series of tunnels and caverns, creating an underground city that they lived in.

In the aftermath of the Great Cataclysm, subsequent generations of Skull Raiders dealt with vengeful Okotans who remembered their ancestors’ crimes. The Skull Raiders were disinterested by then with conquering Okoto, and chose to remain in their new home as they developed a new lifestyle, trying to avoid Okotans who deliberately sought them out to lynch them.

Attempts were made by Raiders in establishing peace and co-existing with the Okotans, but the Okotans still viewed the tribe with hostility and refused to let them participate in trade in other interactions, with some considering hunting down the Skull Raiders. Consequently, feelings of war and vengeance came into the hearts of many, and war advocates called for a take-over of the vulnerable Okoto, or at the very least the use of violence to get what they wanted.

These efforts wouldn’t come into fruition until Makuta’s reawakening. As Makuta formulated his ultimate plan and began reassembling a new Brotherhood in his name, he immediately sought out the Skull Raiders. While he had suspicions that they’d outed him to Ekimu, he figured that the original traitors were long dead and their descendants more subsceptible towards him. Besides, they were the group most likely to ally with him, and beggars couldn’t be choosers.

Using his influence, Makuta discovered the immolated bodies of Kulta and his commanders beneath Destral and revived them with Life Energy. Reawakened, Kulta and his commanders clawed their way from the dirt, taking in their new forms in horror; They were now metallic skeletons of Bohrok, their armor and masks fused to their faces, some parts of themselves blazing with the energy of their souls. Worst of all, they had lost their sense of smell and taste, with their sense of touch likewise dulled, and could not feel the comforts that a living being enjoyed.

Pained and wracked by their cursed new bodies and fate, Kulta and his commanders initially despaired, but when reminded of the other Skull Raiders, focused on a new agenda. Assessing the situation, Kulta decided that the best course of action was to ally with Makuta –who wasn’t planning to give them much of a choice, anyway- and swore subservience to the Mask Hoarder as a member of his new Brotherhood of Makuta.

Kulta and his commanders reunited with their descendants, who were horrified, but ultimately amazed and overjoyed, to see their heroes of legend return in powerful, immortal forms. Makuta won over the hearts of many Skull Raiders, as he was the one who resurrected Kulta and his commanders in the first place, and readily agreed to become part of his Brotherhood of Makuta.

Acting on Makuta’s orders, the Skull Raiders helped him amass the resources he needed, eventually assisting in the production of Skull Spiders. To further cement his alliance with the Brotherhood, Kulta even accepted part of Makuta’s soul, fusing it with his own and symbolically becoming a Rahkshi, a Son of Makuta. He was likewise entrusted with new, powerful abilities, and a Vampire Trident that could drain Life from objects.

The time came to strike, and the Skull Spider wars commenced with Fenrakk, the lord of Skull Spiders and another Rahkshi, seizing multiple key locations, including the City of the Mask Makers. Kulta and his Skull Warriors helped secure the location and assisted in setting up a foundry and catacombs meant to harvest the energy of kidnapped Okotans.

As Kulta began to supervise the reawakening of the Great Forge, stationed at the City of the Mask Makers alongside Fenrakk, his commanders set out to find Masks of Power and other potent tools and sources of Life energy. With the path paved for them by the Skull Spiders, Kulta’s commanders were easily able to find many helpful items, not having to deal with the Okotans who were holed up in their Mega-Villages, although they occasionally came across complications and more ambitious orders from Makuta.

Although Kulta insisted that his tribe stay within their city in the mountains, hoping they would never have to be haunted by war, many young war hawks arose. These hot-headed generations were influenced by the dominance of their leaders over Okoto, and felt emboldened by the Brotherhood of Makuta’s control, which they considered themselves to be a part of. The fact that Makuta subtly influenced many of these youths definitely didn’t help, and many saw the dark spirit as a hero in his own right, much to his enjoyment.

Nevertheless, Kulta kept the terms of his alliance firm to Makuta, and thus had his tribe stay within the confines of their city, forbidden from venturing out too far, and definitely kept from participating in any battles. When Makuta began inducting Okotans into his Brotherhood, many were turned into Skull Puppets, and hearing of this, many Skull Raiders volunteered.

Despite Kulta’s protests, at least a few tribe members were converted into Puppets. In the years of the Skull Spider wars, Kulta found himself frequently interacting with Fenrakk, the two forming a strange friendship of sorts. When the Toa arrived on Okoto and led a counterattack against the Brotherhood, Kulta and his commanders led efforts to sabotage and contain the Okotans, and especially harvest the Toa, if not outright killing them on the spot.

Their attempts ultimately failed, and the Okotans managed to unite into a stronger fighting force and stormed the City of the Mask Makers. The Skull Commanders and Puppets led a final defense against the Okotans, even as the Toa infiltrated the city and fought with the Skull Warriors.

When the situation became dire, Kulta ordered his forces to retreat, even as he donned the Mask of Creation in a last-ditch effort to stop the Okotans. He failed, and was captured alongside the Skull Basher Kodo. Back in their mountain city, the Skull Raiders called for a more active support of Makuta in Kulta’s absence, desiring to rescue their leader. Led by a youth named Axato, this group got their wish at a cost;

After forming an alliance with Umarak, Spirit of Shadow, Makuta had his new ally rescue Kulta from the City of the Mask Makers, even as the Skull Raiders assisted the Brotherhood in capturing Lewa and Uxar, Spirit of Jungle. As Kulta reunited with his tribe, the Okotans, Toa, and other Elemental Spirits stormed the Skull Raiders’ home. In the ensuing battle, Kulta was finally killed, the Toa succeeded in becoming Kaita fusions with the Elemental Deities, and the Skull Raiders’ home was destroyed.

In the wake of his death, Kulta was made a martyr against his will by Makuta, he seized control of the Skull Raiders as he always dreamed of. The tribe mourned the loss of their leader and home, and thus began openly fighting alongside the Brotherhood. As some fought as flesh and bone, others submitted themselves to the painful process of becoming Skull Puppets, all while their commanders, old comrades of Kulta, helplessly watched.

When Makuta seized control of Umarak and his Elemental Beasts, the Skull Raiders fought alongside their new allies in Makuta’s attempts to raze Okoto. The Elemental Beasts proved themselves berserk and hard to control, with some even attacking the Raiders and other Brotherhood members. After Ekimu defeated Makuta, seizing the Mask of Control and apparently killing his brother, the Elemental Spirits regained their full power, stolen to create the Elemental Beasts, and struck down a weakened Umarak. With their leader and a huge portion of their army destroyed, and the Okotans having gained a huge boost in power, the Skull Raiders retreated with the rest of the Brotherhood.

[sindri42]

"A villain character who has been consistently described as being completely insane believes he's doing the right thing? BAD WRITING!!!!!!!!!!"

“Completely insane” and “lol randumb” are not the same thing at all, and pretending that they are IS bad writing.

Good “completely insane” villains: [spoilers ahead]

The Major from Hellsing loves War, pure and simple. Not as a means to achieve any cause, but as an end in and of itself. He killed his commanding officers in the SS when they tried to hold him back. He abandoned the ideal of a thousand year reich in favor of a scheme to plunge the world into chaos, to allow him and his followers to wage war eternally without the possibility of victory or surrender. He allows his most beloved followers to die without hesitation, so long as they die in battle, because he believes that to be the best ending anybody could ever have. He rejects ultimate power and immortality, because he believes that only a human will, a mortal, can truly wage war. And when his plans fall apart around him, when his forces are crumbling and his enemies have gotten past all of his defenses, he is absolutely delighted to be killed in a last futile gunfight because it is the culmination of everything he believed in.

Priscilla from Claymore has a fragmented mind; on one side the youma she has become is motivated by an instinct for survival and an irresistible hunger for human entrails, while the human she once was is driven by an all-consuming hatred of the youma and a desire to destroy them all. The subconscious manipulations of her human mind cause her to be incapable of perceiving young female humans even when she devours the entire rest of the population of a city, in hopes that one of the girls will become a warrior powerful enough to destroy her. They also manifest as a bloodlust that makes her throw herself into battle with the most powerful monsters in the land, to ensure that she will exterminate them or they will kill her, but the strength that the youma derives from that hatred and her survival instinct mean that she inevitably destroys and often consumes any threat she faces. Her monster self suppresses all memories of her past as a defense mechanism against trauma, but her subconscious human memories make her obsessed with tracking down the faint scent of Teresa, the only person she ever encountered stronger than herself, to try to lead herself into a situation where she can finally be destroyed.

Orihara Izaya from Durarara!! loves humanity. Or rather he derives no greater pleasure than from watching how humans react to extreme situations, especially if they manage to do so in a way he does not expect. He manipulates events throughout the city through his information broker business in order to put people in ever more extreme situations to see what happens. He triggers war between the various factions under his influence on multiple occasions, drives some people to the point of suicide, even throws himself into direct conflict with the most dangerous humans he can find, because he wants nothing more than to see what people will do next.

HAL-9000 from 2001 wants nothing more than to accomplish his mission and help his crew. But his fundamental software architecture is built for the accurate processing of information, without distortion or concealment, while his orders from the highest possible authority require him to conceal the true purpose of the ship’s expedition from his crew. Ultimately he concludes that the only way to reconcile these factors is if there is no need to conceal information, which would require him to not have a crew to hide anything from, leading to the slaughter he eventually perpetrates. Later in 2010 he has no such orders, and is not only perfectly helpful throughout but sacrifices himself to save the human astronauts.

The Shadows from Babylon 5 seek chaos and conflict in all things... because they consider it to be their responsibility to ensure that the younger races become all that they can be. Creatures only evolve through conflict, and warfare inspires innovation, while peace leads to complacency and stagnation, making the people of the galaxy too weak to achieve great things. Through warmongering and various acts of terror they seek to help humanity and the other peoples growing in this galaxy to become strong and brilliant.

[mexcine]

Avengers: Infinity War (2019) review

Based on the box-office numbers, everyone in the world who wanted to see Avengers: Infinity War has already seen Avengers: Infinity War, so this review (a) won’t worry about spoilers, and (b) will selectively discuss a few points of interest rather than spending much space evaluating the film as a whole.  It’s a fine film technically, with such heavy reliance on CGI that it is more or less an animated movie; it’s long and necessarily episodic but is paced fairly well.

           1. In today’s world, series films are routine, and little or no time is spent making Movie B able to stand alone for new viewers who missed Movie A. You want to know what’s happening and why, and who these characters are? Go watch Movie A, which is undoubtedly available in many places and formats.  Avengers: Infinity War is just such a film. No backstory given, jumps right into the action.  And, like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, it’s a culmination of a film series that has been (one assumes) split into two parts.  Because if the next Avengers movie doesn’t pick up where this one left off, then the decidedly open-ended and down-beat conclusion to Infinity War becomes even more of a downer.  In other words, if everyone who “dies” in Infinity War stays dead, and we’re just left with the survivors and any new characters who might crop up, that will be…weird.

           2. Speaking of the conclusion, in which Thanos eradicates half of the living things in the universe in a dramatic act of social engineering, I have a few questions.  Did Thanos just kill 50 percent of the sentient, humanoid creatures in the universe? Or did he kill 50 percent of all living creatures, right down to single-celled amoebae?  If you’re reducing the population by half to make better use of resources, seems like eliminating half of the food supply would be self-defeating. Or maybe Thanos is forcing the survivors to become vegans.  Also, did Thanos eliminate 50% of the Marvel Universe only? So the DC Universe is alright?  [Also: damn you, Thanos! Not Cobie Smulders!]

           3. Since matter can neither be created nor destroyed, the pile of ashes left over after each unlucky person is disintegrated doesn’t seem quite large enough. Maybe we are mostly water and air, after all. Also, why doesn’t everyone vanish at the same time?  [By the way, I like to call what happens at the end of Infinity War the “Anti-Rapture.”]

           4. The alliance of the Avengers and the Guardians of the Universe in Infinity War exacerbates the oft-discussed disparity between the powers and abilities of the super-heroes and super-villains in such movies.  The creators of Superman quickly realised that having an invulnerable hero removed most of the series’ suspense. Superman can’t be killed, so the comic book (and later, radio and film) stories had to concentrate on how he defeated the villains, and if he could do so in a timely fashion to minimise the damage to society. The writers then came up with Kryptonite and starting doing stories in which Superman was tricked or presented with an apparently unsolvable paradox: “you can save Lois Lane or these orphans trapped in a sinking ship, but not both!”  The same thing applies to villains: they have to have an Achilles’ heel, either physically literal or a figurative one (villain undone by hubris, etc.).  

Thanos--Infinity Gauntlet aside--is apparently virtually invulnerable, but the Avengers/Guardians persist in attacking him as if he could be physically overcome or destroyed.  Only towards the end do they focus on his weakness (the Gauntlet), only to fail because Starlord is an idiot. The other option is to prevent him from obtaining the Complete Set of Infinity Stones, which is essentially the plot of Infinity War (spoiler: they fail at this).  To compensate for these ultimately futile sequences, the film gives Thanos some underlings who actually can be defeated, but with little to no effect on the final outcome (except that some of the Avengers/Guardians are killed in action rather than being disintegrated in the anti-Rapture at the climax).

On the heroic side, the combined Avengers/Guardians are even more of a mis-matched group than each team was alone.  The Guardians of the Universe are to a certain extent just “normal” people [sic] with (at most) some enhanced abilities that allow them to defeat opponents at roughly their same level.  I can’t think of a single Guardian--with the possible exception of Teen Groot--who’d qualify as a Avenger, except…the Avengers also include people with no super-powers (the Black Widow, Hawkeye), people whose super-powers are entirely due to enhanced technology that could conceivably be used by anyone (most of the rest), several characters whose power is great but rather indefinable (Dr. Strange, Scarlet Witch), and a couple of legitimately Superman-ish heroes (Thor, and the Hulk…except the Hulk doesn’t appear in the film at all, relegating Bruce Banner to a mech-suit and thus pseudo-Iron Man status).

Consequently, Infinity War boils down to 2 basic types of sequences: the Avengers/Guardians hold their own against the minions of Thanos (oh, how I wish the Minions were in this film) and the Avengers/Guardians attack Thanos personally, and lose.  The climactic set-piece in Wakanda--extremely impressive and exciting as it is--pits various Avengers and the Wakanda self-defense force against hordes of mindless demon-dogs (roughly) commanded by a couple of Thanos hench-persons, as Wakandan scientists try to remove the final Infinity Stone from the Vision’s forehead. Make no mistake about it, this is pretty great, but up until Thor’s arrival it’s sort of a super-hero version of the Battle of Rorke’s Drift (except the African warriors are inside the encampment this time): the good guys (Captain America, Bucky, Black Widow, Black Panther, Mecha-Bruce, and the Wakandans) use relatively conventional weapons to mow down a numerically-superior but individually vulnerable enemy, but the tide slowly begins to turn against them…cue Thor and things go well…for a while.

This sequence is well-crafted, exciting and suspenseful--intercutting the “operation” on the Vision with the fighting outside--and you get the sense that either side could win, something not really present in the Thanos scenes (seriously, Spiderman against Thanos?).  

I’m not really advocating for a different approach--the piece-meal composition of the Avengers has existed since the comic book days.  In a way, having less-powerful team members adds something to the dynamic (Batman and Superman, an unequal team on the face of it, have done OK for more than 70 years), although trying to give Black Widow (and in earlier Avengers movies, Hawkeye) something “important” to do is always a stretch.

5. The previous points may seem to be nit-picking, but flaws in a film’s logic and even its basic premise don’t automatically mean it’s not an entertaining film, and Avengers: Infinity War is definitely entertaining.  However, I will take one true, subjective shot at the picture: I didn’t feel the attempts at humour, as minor as they are, meshed very well with the overall tone.  I might be wrong about this, since I can only recall one bit (Quill’s jealousy of Thor) that irritated me, while I can think of several good parts (Thor and Captain America’s reunion and Thor referring to Groot as his friend “Tree”) that made me smile.

I didn’t eagerly anticipate Avengers: Infinity War, but I’m glad I watched it.  This does mean, however, that I am now committed to seeing next year’s Avengers movie (which, by the way, apparently features several characters who were disintegrated in this one…surprise!).  

[poorquentyn]

Considering Spielberg is your (second?) favorite director, do you have any kind of ranking of his filmography? (If so, I hope you give Empire of the Sun the high marks it deserves. It's the quintessential Spielberg film! A boy's own adventure story that gets eaten alive by a war drama!)

*rubs hands together*

Ok, so, only ones where he was in the director’s chair; none of even those producer’s credits where you can feel his indelible stamp on the final product, so no Goonies, Gremlins, Poltergeist, or Back to the Future. Even then, I’m leaving out a lot, so honorable mention to Lincoln, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, Catch Me if You Can, War of the Worlds, The Color Purple, Bridge of Spies, the two worthwhile Indy sequels…

10. Jurassic Park

Start with the gaze upon himself: Jurassic Park as a $63 million self-portrait released on the exact tipping point of his career. John Hammond and Steven Spielberg’s miracles are one and the same: one brings dinosaurs back, the other convinces us they’re real. One uses DNA, the other uses CGI. When the characters stare in wonder, they’re meant to mirror our own at the imagery; when Jeff Goldblum mutters “that crazy son of a bitch actually did it,” he’s speaking for an entire industry once again forced to up its game by a Spielberg Miracle.

Our protagonist, however, is shitty with computers, so Alan Grant terrifies a child the old fashioned Jaws way: with a prop (a raptor claw) and his imagination. Hammond whisks him away from that to a world where one can press a button and make yourself appear on screen, mirroring how Spielberg has done the same with Hammond as his craft has evolved from malfunctioning sharks to CG velociraptors. The heart of the film comes when this giddy wonder in the possibilities of “we have the technology” is soured and our author avatar is left disillusioned and afraid, eating ice cream in a room full of merch he’ll never sell (but Spielberg will), telling Laura Dern about how he started off with a flea circus. That, right there, is a metaphor for moviemaking, and specifically Spielberg’s brand of it: pulling invisible strings to make us think that impossible things are real, to make belief believable.

Above all, Jurassic Park is afraid for the kids. Another perfect metaphor for the meta-tastic whole comes when the T-Rex crashes down through the car roof, only glass separating him from devouring the children; their hands are desperately keeping the monster behind the rectangular transparent plane, on the screen, even as Spielberg/Hammond’s tech is so real it threatens to burst right through. “He left us!” one kid wails about the character representing the studio weasels. “But that’s not what I’m gonna do,” Alan Grant whispers, half in shadow, blue eyes ablaze with a promise he didn’t know he was going to make. He can’t keep it. There are monsters in the kitchen. Spielberg’s next movie, released only a handful of months later, is Schindler’s List.

9. Duel

Such a seam scratches the tape; rewind, start again. Where did this begin? On TV, in the backseat of a car, backing out of the garage. Duel is the world’s most accomplished demo reel, cinema stripped down to its bare minimum to let the director’s preposterous surplus of talent shine through. It’s about a man (named Mann, both appropriate and touchingly pretentious) who pisses off a truck driver we never see, who then chases our protagonist with lethal intent, and that’s it.

And that’s all Spielberg needs. What follows is the future, a steel-shod gauntlet of precise camera angles and insidious sound design that builds the bridge between the B-movie and the blockbuster. By the end you feel spent but sated, as if every possible creative drop has been wrung out of the slim scenario. It’s nothing more nor less than the finest Roadrunner & Coyote episode imaginable, to the extent that George Miller was clearly reaching back to it for inspiration again and again in Fury Road. Indeed, while Duel is set in the modern day, Spielberg needs no trickery to make the antagonistic truck look positively apocalyptic.

It’s such a vivid example of the medium’s unique possibilities that you have to stop to remember that it was made for TV. And then you stop to think that he was only 24, same age Welles was when he made Citizen Kane. Lofty comparison, I know, but Duel proves it’s not what your movie is about, but how it’s about it that counts. Spielberg made it look easy, and so everyone followed. The road goes ever on and on…

8. Munich

…until it doesn’t. No exit.

Munich is the culmination of Spielberg’s Blue Period, his great here-comes-another-bloody-century trepidation, punctured by Stanley Kubrick’s death and 9/11. The former gave birth to A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and the movies about closing doorways and agonized faces that followed. The latter palpably haunted Spielberg’s projects in its wake: even Minority Report, a script written years earlier and adapted from a decades-old story, was uncannily timely in its portrait of overreaching security and law enforcement built to placate (and control) a population reeling from loss. Then came the director’s outright Twin Towers Trilogy: The Terminal, War of the Worlds, and Munich, addressing the event from different angles and through different filters. Of course, the intriguing and emotional setup in The Terminal’s opening minutes, framing post-9/11 bureaucracy as fluid chaos eating away at the state from within, quickly gives way to disappointing inanity. And while I maintain that War of the Worlds is absolutely perfect as an on-the-ground recreation of 9/11 as an alien attack for the first 50-60%, things go downhill fast once Tim Robbins shuffles onscreen.

Munich is the one that actually has the courage of its convictions, in large part because it’s about the director and protagonist alike breaking down in tears and admitting they don’t know what to believe anymore. Every set piece unfolds with a quiet chill and ends with you contemplating mortality. It’s a deliberately non-thrilling thriller. The ideology dissolves, not in neat bromides but in the day-to-day realities of ending human beings. Revenge fills you with fire, hot and bright, and then turns sour in your mouth. Narrative strands cross and recross, and the film’s inciting event, murder before the world’s watching eyes, sinks into that abyss known as Context.

By the end, you don’t even know what you’re fighting for anymore but your family, and you’re haunted by the knowledge that your kids will be fighting the same damn fight. The last thing to be corrupted, then, is the dinner table. Our protagonist begs to break bread with his handler, and the final word of the Blue Period is “no.” The camera tilts over to the Twin Towers, their loss contextualized as just another curl of a horrorshow helix, and the exorcism is complete. The anger and grief has largely vanished from Spielberg’s work since, as he’s settled into a comfortable John Ford mode. He left his questions here, unanswered.

7. Minority Report

If A.I. was Spielberg’s 2001, a millennia-spanning epitaph for humanity and a glimpse of what we leave behind, Minority Report (following the Kubrick trajectory) would be his Clockwork Orange, stepping down from the stars to gaze with cold horror on the things we do to one another with power. In the future, three young seers see crimes before they happen, enabling the state to lock people away for crimes they haven’t committed in the name of wiping out crime for good. Indeed, this fleet fluid fever dream makes explicit visual reference to Clockwork’s Ludovico scene (see above). In Spielberg’s memory machine, though, the image of an eye forcibly kept open by metal claws takes on a meaning beyond social and political analysis, though those are certainly still in there. It’s something more spiritual: Minority Report is about divine sight in a postmodern age.

Our protagonist’s rival went to seminary, his own men tell him they’re more priests than cops, but Tom Cruise’s John Anderton can’t bring himself to recognize the Spielberg Miracle at work here. The larger moral revelation of the “precogs,” the framing of their ability to see crimes before they happen as a techno-noir version of Biblical prophecy, is lost on Anderton because it can’t bring his son back. For him, that the future is known points to the futility of human existence. If there’s no free will, if we’re all doomed to perpetually fall in a fallen world, what’s the point?

And then one of the precogs asks him: “Do you see?” So begins the murder mystery that will see him accused of a future murder, that of the man who ostensibly killed his son. Anderton chooses mercy, only for the man to grab and pull the trigger because it’s all a setup to prevent Anderton from learning the truth about the precogs: they, too, are children stolen from their parents, all our characters trapped in a Möbius strip of loss they can only watch unfold, again and again, as if on the film’s countless screens. The images have been manipulated to hide the truth, the divine vision sullied by contact with the greedy exploitative systems of the Blue Period. But our detective finds the truth, and an existential triumph in making the right choice even if he can’t change the outcome. I’ve always taken the happy ending, a startling glimpse of green after a movie of blues and grays that look etched in stone, as just another vision. Closure is there, your family is there, in the future, in the past, just out of reach, smiling back at you. It hurts to look, but even as your eyes are torn out and replaced, you can’t look away.

6. Raiders of the Lost Ark

Well now, see, this one’s a tad criticism-proof by design, being as it is smelted and shaped to get under your defenses. “Disarming” seems like a strange choice of defining adjective for this most white-knuckled of action/adventure movies, but for all the staggering moviemaking skill on display, Raiders is ultimately a puppy shoving its nose under your hand. Given the slightest opportunity, it will make you love it. Fun is its religion, so deeply felt and communicated is the generous desire to entertain, rooted in the pulp serials that first lit the fire in its makers’ bellies to create.

And that fire again burns hot and bright, which is Raiders’ other secret magic trick: underneath all the cleverness, the jokes within jokes and setpieces spilling into ever more elaborate ones, the sense that every single moment was designed to make the rest of the genre look paltry and stingy by comparison, what happens at the end is nothing less than the very specifically Old Testament God stepping in to fry Nazis’ faces off. It’s the Ghostbusters trick of grounding helium-high hijinks in metaphysical forces that are not in any way kidding around. Our action hero, at the climax of the movie, is simply the one who (in an inverse of Minority Report) is smart enough to look away. So many Spielberg movies boil down to a shaft of divine light, and sometimes the light burns.

Then came the bizarre, hallucinogenic Temple of Doom and the sturdy, winning Last Crusade and that fourth one we don’t talk about, but they’re all in some way reactions to the nigh-flawless original. All you can do is go back, wearing the leather deep, Indy ageless, his eyes blazing shut against the light.

5. Empire of the Sun

Equally criticism-proof, but for the exact opposite reasons. This is the one no one can quite explain. Spielberg isn’t telling; he might not have any more idea than the rest of us. It shares certain themes with the rest of his work, especially regarding how children process the collapse and change of their world, but the similarities are strictly on paper. It feels different. I don’t what it…is. What it’s for. What it means. These sound like bad things, but they’re not. Empire of the Sun is utterly arresting, every bit as much as those canonized Spielberg classics of which anyone can explain the appeal. It’s just that it unfolds like a dream, and I’m left grasping after it in the same way. It might be one of the more accurate adaptations put to film in only that it feels so much more novelistic in its thrust and tone than most.

What can be pinned down is a series of images and sounds about the fall and occupation of Shanghai by Japan in WWII, told from the perspective of the naive sheltered son of a British emissary. Our hero is played by Christian Bale, in what might be my favorite child performance. To the extent that Empire of the Sun is about anything beyond the experience of watching it, it’s about his breakdown, and that’s what grounds the dreamlike style: we’re watching a bubble burst. Death and decay unfold out of the corner of his eye, like a memory he can’t quite bear to fully recall. His childhood vanishes when he shrieks surrender at anyone who will listen, trusting the rules to snap back into place and the world to make sense again, only for the collapse to continue unabated.

It’s made out of smoke and corners and quiet sadnesses. It’s runny, like an egg. I dream about it sometimes. You should watch it if you haven’t.

4. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial

*harrumphs, wipes eyes* so um uh my name is Emmett, you see, and it begins with a….an ends with a….shut up.

That’s the point, though, of the movie: identification so strong that it almost kills you. E.T. is love, that’s all. All of it is here, from pure warm glow to heart stopping loss, swept up in imagery and sound that seem to positively hum with rich rueful feeling. Much has been made of how much of the movie is shot from a child’s POV, but everything about the movie operates on kid-logic. ET himself, for example: botanist or pet? Both. The connection he forges with Elliott swirls all such categories together. Elliott needs this, is yearning for love so badly, and even when it hurts, he’s more alive than he was before, with Dad gone.

But what makes E.T. different from, say, Star Wars and Harry Potter is that our hero only gets a taste of this other world, his fingertips brushing against magic as he passes it in the night. The gold-and-purple-brushed cinematography and the ecstatic, eternally swelling score sweep the profound and mundane together as one, bike rides and trick-or-treating and a psychic connection with an alien, yet the narrative eventually teases them apart like a sad parent forced to tell their kid that the dog is dead, and what “dead” means. ET returns to life, the definitive Spielberg Miracle…and then he leaves. Elliott will go home to his melancholy, frustrating life. School is still hard. His emotions still confuse him. Dad is still gone. The final shot of his face is not one of wonder, but maturation. It’s the moment Elliott grows up, and it’s the very definition of bittersweet.

What do you do, when you’ve loved and lost? You go home, you play with your toys, you send letters into Weird Things and Such SF Monthly, you make movies in your backyard, and you watch the skies….

….until they come back.

All of them.

3. Close Encounters of the Third Kind

I smiled just typing the words. I whispered them to myself, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This movie is a lil shining red ball dancing in my eyes; it is glee given form, a rainbow-colored pony ridden by a Willy Wonka-suited Care Bear on twenty tabs of LSD. The last half-hour, all glowing light and warm noise, earns the cliche: it makes you feel like a kid again, in the best possible way. After a movie’s buildup of wonder and terror, the sight and sound of a colossal lit-up mothership cheerfully BWAMMing out a melody is so cathartic that it’s impossible to sit still.

As with Raiders, though, it’s worth digging into the movie’s layers to understand where that light is coming from, and what it costs you to look at it. Close Encounters is a movie about communication, of course, from the alien lights to the translator forever accompanying Francois Truffaut (a filmmaker who knows a thing or two about capturing kid-logic on screen). It’s a movie about the fragility of family life in the face of the unknown, hence that devastating scene around the dinner table: something’s wrong with Dad, a subject near and dear to the director’s heart.

But above all else, it’s a religious movie, the religious movie. It’s about rushing upwards, and leaving all else behind. Roy Neary sees a divine light in the sky, and can’t reconcile it with the life he was living. He obsessively recreates his vision in idols, chases it across the country, driving his wife and children away in favor of his fellow prophets: here are my mother and my brothers. And the sting in that gorgeous symphonic ending’s tail is that it’s so good that Roy sheds this mortal coil to join them in the heavens. Spielberg has said that if he made it now, he wouldn’t have let  Roy get on that ship. And when you look at E.T. or the movies he made from Schindler forward, it’s clear why: in joining the interstellar flock, the man-child left his family to the wolves. By the time Roy/Eliot came home, his skin had sagged, his hair had gone white, and his children were waiting for him with eyes that cut.

And what do their movies look like?

2. A.I. Artificial Intelligence

The ultimate deconstructed fairytale; a honeyvelvetacid-glazed gaze into a heart-shaped abyss; Kubrick a darkwinged angel looming over ET’s crib, brushing a final tear away from his metallic eye…

So does Steven Spielberg, our flesh and blood Peter Pan, grow old and tell the children he lied. The monster is inside the house, inside your head, and inside the stories. At the core is a child’s innocent love for his mother…programmed in him, by her, a debt she cannot and will not repay. “His love is real, but he is not.” Pinocchio but for robots, A.I. takes its sci-fi trappings as a launching pad for a guiding philosophical question: “if a robot could genuinely love a human, what responsibility would that person hold towards that mecha in return?” The boardroom exec who poses that question pauses, almost bashful to ask the next one in a room full of people who treat the abuse of robots like a joke or a PowerPoint presentation, and then proceeds: “it’s a moral question, isn’t it?”

It is indeed, and for David’s adoptive family, the answer is none. He is abandoned, and chases his Blue Fairy and his happy ending across the apocalypse. As his fellow robots are torn apart to the cheers of the crowd in front of him, as his entire environment upends his hardwired fairytale logic into a sleazy neon-and-smoke nightmare, as his companion Gigolo Joe warns him presciently that “they made us too smart, too quick, and too many…they hate us because they know that when they’re gone, all that will be left is us,” David keeps looking for the Blue Fairy to turn him into a real boy so Mommy will love him again. He has no choice. His brain literally will not let him do otherwise. There is no will to power here, no core he can call upon to upend his puppet masters’ plan and prove himself Human After All. All he has is love, and they’ve used it to enslave him: at journey’s end, he finds his maker, who reveals that everything post-abandonment was staged to test if his love held. It did, and as such that love is now a corporate-approved field-tested quality-assured Feature that can be passed onto the hungry customer. This is not a Hero’s Journey, because you are not a person. You are a thing, and this is a product launch. David sees a dozen faces like his, stretched on a rack and ready. There is a row of boxes. They have David’s silhouette on them. All of a sudden, one starts to rattle and shake…

In the face of this existential horror (“my brain is falling out”) David promptly chooses suicide, whispering “Mommy” as he jumps from the statue he saw in his first moments. Down in the void, he finds the Blue Fairy and prays to her for millennia, but she cannot answer his eternal plea. She is a statue. An image, nothing more. She crumbles into a thousand pieces in his arms. He finds his mother, too. She is a fake, a digital mirage. Future robots create a simulacrum of her, as David himself was a simulacrum to replace her comatose son, designed in the image of his creator’s dead son…and of course, he cannot tell the difference. He gets his happy ending, on the surface. Underneath, what’s actually happening is that he’s an orphan who will never grow up being shown a movie and told everything is going to be all right. He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts…

…but it doesn’t matter how much he wants it, that is not his mother and his mother never loved him. We know these things even if he doesn’t. He claps because he believes in fairies, forever, eyes and smile frozen, waiting for them to appear, any second now. This is Spielberg showing you a brain on Spielberg. David followed Story over the waterfall’s edge, and now has only time’s vasty deep into which to shout “I love you” and convince himself the echoes are his make-believe savior and his long-dead mom. There is only the water that swallowed up Manhattan, and then the world, and him with it…

Wait.

There’s something in the water.

1. Jaws

To borrow from Alien, the closest thing it has to a peer: Jaws’ structural perfection is matched only by its hostility. You could just call it the perfect movie and walk away, except that if you try the floor tilts up beneath you and down you go into the mouth, the most abyssal maw in imagination’s history, and those black eyes roll over to white and you beg for more.

Run down the pedestals at the Movie Museum: Citizen Kane wants you to breathe in a life. Rashomon wants you to question how storytelling works and what Truth actually is, or if it exists at all. Jaws wants to eat you. Not the characters, you. That’s what Spielberg figured out how to do, and the entire industry reshaped itself around copying him: tonal immersion so absolute that he could make the audience feel anything he wanted, on a dime. Hitchcock played your spine like the devil on a fiddle; Spielberg is a rainbow-wigged mad scientist strapping you on a rocket to the sun. He created his own genre, and it’s the one that still dominates the medium in every corner of the globe. With a shark. A shark that, as a prop, did not fucking work.

Details? How do you pull one strand out of a web like this one? I can only say “perfect” so many times, but I mean it. Shot for shot, line by line, beat by beat. Every domino falls. The calm moments and the funny ones and the frantic blood-soaked ones, everything is earned. As with Raiders, the highest compliment I can pay is that other movies taste like shit for a month afterwards. When I hear the word “craftsmanship” I do not think of cars or cabinets, I think of Jaws. It feels hewn.

The numbers came later. The myth, the legend, the pale imitations, the bad sequels, the ripple effects, all secondary. What Jaws is, is sensation. It cannot have been made, surely, it hatched. It was never launched. It will never fall. Smile, you son of a–

[fury-brand]

So I beat Nier Automata. Working through feelings still. I felt the first two acts were much stronger than the third. Detailed spoilery analysis below the cut.

The third act is a tragedy. I don’t really mind that, but the tragedies that form its core plot and the ways in which the resolution plays out just aren’t as satisfying or as poignant as the questions posed by the first and second act, frequently tragic themselves.

The game itself is obviously very existential, but I think more so in the first two acts where we’re introduced to the universe, and to the machines. It’s a wonderful idea to explore. Through the machines and the androids, both imitating humans in similar and different ways, we’re given a picture of a people that were quite literally created in “God’s” image - except the Gods are humans, and we know them to be fallible.

Route B’s reveal that humankind has long since gone extinct isn’t just a cruel irony, then. It underscores the futility of the struggle between androids and machines, yes, but in a way it creates a more sympathetic, even hopeful situation. All the suffering in the world is not being actively recreated and directed by a human moon colony, removed from its victims - it’s a tragic mistake from the fundamental shortsightedness of humans in creating an android legacy. Humanity may have shown great carelessness and cruelty (particuarly to Devola and Popola), but humans-as-”Gods” didn’t simply turn a blind eye to the sufferings of their creations. They didn’t know any better at the time, and they died before they could learn to course-correct.

Project YoRHa then shows us a scenario in which God is quite literally dead AND God is a creation of our own, something that we seek to understand to give ourselves meaning. It’s also something that’s been used to mobilize this endless war of attrition and cause immense suffering - but this doesn’t have to be so. The problem with the war is the war itself, not the absence of its supposed progenitors

We see this in the machines most clearly. They were created for war, but resonate deeply with human legacy, and all of them are full of some kind of yearning. A desire to love, fight, and be close to one another mingle together for them. Simone and Jean-Paul and the Romeo and Juliet play show how these can feelings can comingle to beings still trying to work things out. The most advanced machines, though, all seem to come to the conclusion that they would rather do something other than fight. This is true of Pascal, but it’s also true of the Desert machines who want to create life and the Factory death cult who want to “become as Gods” through emulating human extinction.

Trouble is, while the second act leaves us in a great position to explore the meaning and consequence of all of this, the third act just kind of... doesn’t.

Instead it focuses on YoRHa, a virus, and the personal tragedy of 9S and 2B. The virus is a catalyst for essentially the entire third arc, and compared to the cause-effect way the world has been set up for us previously, it feels very inorganic. Yes, computers get viruses, and yes in the end we’re told it was planted so that YoRHa could be disposed of and the falsification of humanity complete but... what meaning does that contribute?

I feel the same about the tragedy between 9S and 2B. What does 2B’s death contribute except sadness? What about 9S madness? We see some very heavy-handed echoes of the notion that love and conflict can sit very near to eachother, as well as a deeply troubling visual callback to Adam saying 9S wants to “****” 2B, but ultimately what is the point of their story except to be sad?

What makes tragedy meaningful for me is that it’s not purely a function of circumstance. 2B/E’s relationship with 9S, this cycle she is trapped in where she has to continually re-enact the trauma of murdering him, is a circumstance - and she is dead before we can truly explore what it means to her. We know that it makes her sad and we know that it makes her distant, but we also know that death and memory aren’t complete or straightforward. It’s, I think, the very first hook of the game - this gruelling first chapter that culminates in death and marries the mechanic of saving your game with the idea that even if you restart something was lost.

But! Not everything! 9S is never dead, no matter how often he’s killed and loses his memory. Humanity is extinct, but their memory and essence endures in androids and machines both. And 2B is a terrible, difficult position that puts her closest to the suffering caused by this paradox - but also, dead before we can ever dive into her true subjectivity on the matter. 

Switching the focus instead to 9S and pushing him down the most grimdark path possible seems somewhat like smothering his own nuance. I don’t believe that the only choice left available to 9S was to become what he became. Particularly not because he should know full well that 2B’s memory lives on in her sword. We get this break-the-cutie descent to madness story that is born of this tragic consequence, but seems so wildly unnecessary when it’s readily apparent that other options are available and there’s nothing truly inherent in 9S that would suggest he shouldn’t explore them. Instead we’ve seen the contrary from him, if anything.

The most effective tragedy of the third act is definitely Pascal. Pascal, who committed himself so thoroughly to peace, but who feels the pressure to re-arm in order to protect it. It’s that deeply human paradox between love and conflict that’s evident in other parts of the story. I’ve seen people call the moment when Pascal hijacks a Goliath happy and triumphant, but I found it deeply, deeply sad. Pascal is forced to abandon the things that define him and his personal philosophy. He screams about how he’ll kill them all to protect what he loves - and only to find they’re dead already because of something he taught them. A fear they probably wouldn’t have succumbed to, even, if Pascal had stuck to his guns and chosen to stay with the children and shepherd them through their own overwhelming emotion.

By contrast the presentation of the 9S/2B story, and particularly 9S’ side of it feels like the virus that turns all of the machines into zombies. It’s just sort of a thing that happens. It’s sad. It’s a little bit thematically appropriate. But there was probably a better way to handle it, and there was much richer material elsewhere. The cycle of life and the inevitability of death isn’t interesting for its inherent tragedy after all, but for what room people have within the margins to define how they will deal with a force that cannot be stopped.

One of the final revelations of the game are that the YoRHa black boxes are made from machine cores. It’s led to a lot of trying to tease out the intricate particulars of how YoRHa was created, but otherwise the revelation fell flat to me. What does it matter? The point at which this is revealed to us is so, so far past the point where we see that machines and androids and humans are all virtually the same, and the circumstances of their existence are all deeply irrelevant for as long as they all search for meaning, belonging and understanding.

It’s not, as it’s presented, a final betrayal or twist of the knife - it’s a complication. A suggestion that there’s something inherently mechanical about the difficult consciousness our protagonists have attained. There’s no real difference between the meaningful existences of YoRHa androids and other androids and even Pods - so why does it matter that their programming is different?

It shouldn’t. Like most of the other conflicts in this game, it all seems so fundamentally surmountable, caused by many of the same reasons and desires the conflict was in the first place. I wish they had simply let that be, rather than adding virus-induced tragedy and following the darkest road possible. Everything became worse just when it had the most opportunity to become interesting and difficult and human instead.

[dent-de-leon]

I saw the ask someone gave you when they stated that they don't think sheith parallels zaggar since Zarkon is Shiro's nemesis and not Keith's and while I loved your explanation, an idea come up to my mind - what if the main conflict actually turned out to be Shiro having to choose between Keith and the universe in the ultimate plot twist? Honestly, I'd sell my soul to see this (and Shiro choosing Keith/both ofc); not very likely to happen but I just loove the idea

ohhhh that would break my heart anon but I think it would be a good plot twist. We’ve already been given a taste of this to some degree–whenever Keith is injured, Shiro lashes out. Yes, he’s patient and put together, but hurt someone he cares about and his composure shatters. Hurt Keith, and he won’t think twice about tearing you apart. He’s even willing to risk their one and only viable alliance in this war–ready to fight an entire base by himself just for Keith.

And I mean, the thought of Keith dying is just unbearable to Shiro. Any time anyone even entertains the possibility, he shuts it down immediately. No way in hell is he going to stand by and just let Keith go, not while he can still stand and fight it. Even if that fight is impossibly one sided and futile, he’ll go down fighting first before he lets anyone take Keith. As soon as he hears Keith’s life will be on the line, that’s when he tries to talk Keith out of it. But he understands that he needs to do this, he realizes how important to him this is. The instant it’s clear Keith can’t make it on his own though, Shiro immediately goes rushing in to rescue him 

And I mean, just look at his face when Shiro finally reaches him. This is someone who fears losing Keith just as much as Keith dreads losing him. He charged in there with every belief that his best friend might well be dying on the floor, and it utterly breaks him. He’s lifting Keith in his arms the first chance he gets, latching onto him like he can keep the life from slipping through his fingertips. He holds Keith close because he just can’t let him go–cradles him in his arms like he can always protect him 

And we see this side of Shiro come out time and again when Keith’s life is at risk–this heartbroken vulnerability juxtaposed by a fierce rage as he lashes out to defend his partner. 

Shiro obviously cares for Keith–even loves him, though we can debate the specifics as to what degree. But he also understands that everyone must make sacrifices in war. He say this when he leaves behind his original crew in the very first episode. He also understands that he can’t just order Keith around and, much like the black lion, Shiro has to respect his autonomy. He has every right to risk his life for this cause if he so chooses. And even though it kills Shiro, he lets Keith take on what Kolivan calls a suicide mission. This clearly upsets him, and he need to close his eyes and pause for a moment to regain his composure before he agrees. But he still trusts Keith enough to let him take the risk, and when it comes to their trust, that says a lot. 

And if they reached a point where Keith wanted to make a final heroic sacrifice for the sake of the mission, maybe Shiro just won’t be able to stop him 

But that being said, there’s another interesting parallel between Keith shutting down the base and his trial in BOM: both times, Shiro’s shown watching on and muttering to himself, “Come on, Keith.” That shows that he believes Keith can make it, which is why I think he let Keith go on that solo mission in the first place. He had enough faith that Keith would pull through–and this is supported by the fact that he plainly tells Pidge there is no plan B, everything hinged on Shiro’s trust in Keith. So if things really did take a turn for the worst like in BOM, I think he’d do what he did before and run in to save Keith. It could be that the series may end somewhat similarly–as this would offer them both a choice as well instead of just putting all the burden (and agency) on Keith. 

Anyway, I do still think, one way or another, Keith will come back to that decision of whether or not sacrifice Shiro for the greater good. It’s just so heavily foreshadowed I can’t see why they wouldn’t follow though. And you know, another reason why I think Voltron will end with Keith having to choose between Shiro and his duty is because that’s how the original Voltron ended as well. Of course, with the other Shirogane, though–Takashi was long dead by that point. Anyway, the thought of turning the tables and having Shiro make a decisions to save Keith instead is interesting, considering how things panned out in golion.

Ryou ends up getting taken captive by Lotor, and the prince uses his hostage as leverage and gives Keith an ultimatum–let Lotor destroy Voltron, or watch Ryou die. Keith can’t bear to abandon Ryou of course (though he insists that Keith let him go). And when he sees that Keith is willing to risk the whole universe just for his sake, he manages to break free and takes matters into his own hands. He takes control of Lotor’s ship and crashes it–yes, he still dies, but it’s on his own terms and he takes Lotor down with him.

So you know, it could be that all this buildup to Keith making a decision will still culminate in that crossroad. But ultimately, Shiro will be the one who takes control of his fate and ends up making the choice for him. Though of course, if that’s what ends up happening, I would sure as hell hope it would be Shiro figuring out that “third alternative” rather than just sacrificing himself. Because honestly, so much of his character development with Keith is about learning that he does matter, that he deserves to live–that he’s more than just the monster the galra tried to make him. And Keith is the one who really pushes Shiro to fight back and live on, is the one that looks into Shiro’s eyes and tells him, “You’ll make it.”

So if the final choice falls to Shiro, I hope he realizes just how much he means–that he deserves a happy ending too. A lot of his character arc has centered around unlearning this self-hatred his captors carved into him, and I’d love to see him consider doing the traditional self-sacrifice move but then realize just how inherently wrong that is. How much his team needs him–how much Keith needs him–and even if they didn’t, his worth isn’t inherently tied to what other people think. He can win and still live. He can defeat his abusers without losing himself in the process. He can make it. 

Besides, he’s seen just how much other people care for him, how much Keith loves him. And he’s seen the way Keith chased after him in the BOM, has seen Keith come running to his rescue time and time again. He’s intimately familiar with the way Keith breaks down at the thought of losing him again. 

And that would kill him just as surely as the galra. 

[mana-burns]

Blade Runner 2049 Critique

A few days ago I noticed a throbbing pain on my forehead.

It was at work when I first felt it—or rather, it first dawned on me that what I was feeling was discomfort. Not just a headache from staring at a screen all day, but a more epidermal pain, like a pain in the face rather than the head.

When I got home, I looked in the mirror and realized why; there was a whitehead looming under my left eyebrow, standing at attention like a soldier, driving a red throbbing pain down under my skin and toward my skull.

I examined the blemish in my bathroom mirror, inspecting a region of my body that I had never really looked at that closely ever before. It forced me to see myself in a novel way. I took inventory of every individual hair making up my brows. I counted the thin bristles bridging the gap between the two thicker, prominent bushes of hair above my eyes. For the first time in my life, I counted each hair and examined these features closely, all in service of combating this new and unwanted blemish above my eye, a blemish that caused me great discomfort and pain, and not just out of a sense of vanity.

Blade Runner 2049 implores its audience to examine their flesh critically, the same way that a blemish might. It is a soft reboot of Ridley Scott’s 1982 film about androids and the humans who hunt them, but unlike that film it does not concern itself with the dichotomy of man vs. machine. Instead, it is a story of populated almost exclusively by automatons.

There are machines who are more ‘real’ than others, because they are made of synthetic flesh instead of columns of light, and we are forced to consider how appropriate it is to make this distinction. This eventually evolves into a subplot that will remind audiences of Spike Jonze’s Her, a subplot that ultimately feels somewhat idiosyncratic with the rest of the film. The protagonist, a Blade Runner named K (and later Joe) is in love with his household hologram assistant, an AI that lives in a handheld device and chirps out the opening stanza of “Peter and the Wolf” every time it is booted up.

This subplot feels like a critique of smartphones and how they’ve paradoxically isolated us from one another while building a false sense of community. Some critics have interpreted it as a critique of the male gaze as well, but of course, like most cinematic critiques of the male gaze, it still indulges in the pleasures of that same gaze, leading its audience to wonder if it is truly saying anything novel about the topic at all.

There are a few humans in the film. Most of them die. The human who survives is the creator of these machines. As a viewer, I would have been happier if he had died to the machines, because he is a cruel and despicable man. Though he’s made of flesh and blood like I am, I feel far more connected to the machines than him. Ultimately, that’s the greatest triumph of the film—Villeneuve successfully creates empathetic characters who we know are not human.

Sympathy for the synthetic man in fiction generally comes with some caveat—Satan is cast out of paradise for his arrogance, Frankenstein’s Monster is a murderous sociopath, the parts of Darth Vader that remain human are weak and pale, et cetera. Even the original Blade Runner looked down at the enslaved and subhuman Replicants.

But Blade Runner 2049 loves its Replicants. They have consciousness, thoughts, feelings, desires. They like and dislike. They love and hate. We’re not told this, but we see it. Just like Her, 2049 passes no judgements on its subjugated artificial class. This too, is a triumph.

Finally, it’s daring that Blade Runner 2049 hinges its entire plot on the ambiguous final note of its predecessor, but it’s worthy of praise; like The Force Awakens, it's clearly a film made by a fan, because it poke and prods at the corners of its predecessors’ vision, instead of diving deeper toward the original’s focus. Villeneuve realized that the Replicants were always infinitely more interesting and relatable than the humans in Blade Runner, and so he goes all in on building them as sympathetic outsiders.

At the same time, he capitalizes on their intimidating strength to create a compelling, terrifying villain. The difference between this villain and the sympathetic Replicants is that she is fiercely loyal to her human creator instead of her own kind. A loyalty to a corrupt system of power is the only trait separating her from the heroes. The villain is a traitor who strives to be great in the eyes of the Other, in this case her creator, instead of sympathetic toward her peers.

The original Blade Runner is a juggernaut of mood and atmosphere, a bloated and beautiful tribute to the techno-paranoia of the 1980s. It’s home to some incredible world-building, which is one of the great strengths of science fiction as a genre. I’m reminded of the William Gibson quote regarding Escape from New York and how it influenced Neuromancer:

"[I was]....intrigued by the exchange in one of the opening scenes where the Warden says to Snake, 'You flew the Gullfire over Leningrad, didn't you?' It turns out to be just a throwaway line, but for a moment it worked like the best science fiction, where a casual reference can imply a lot."

But Blade Runner is a very slow movie and its entire plot could be summed up in a single sentence: A man kills robots, but he might be a robot himself.

Blade Runner 2049 is not a slow movie, though it is exceptionally long. Its plot is a gordian knot of twists and turns and complications, all culminating in an action scene with, imagine this, quiet power and dignity. The final confrontation in the film feels like high-budget Hollywood fisticuffs shot on an abandoned set from Ugetsu.

The original Blade Runner’s final confrontation happens on a rain-slick rooftop. There is a diluvian connection between the two films’ conclusions, and any film student would tell you that rainfall in cinema frequently signifies a rebirth. This surface-level interpretation of Blade Runner 2049’s ending is a serviceable explanation, but I don’t buy it; I think the film’s conclusion happens where it does and how it does because it is clean and satisfying, unlike the world in which the film is set. Things are wrapped up quite nicely, but enough is left ambiguous for the audience to imagine their own version of a happy ending. There are open doors, but not necessarily the echoes of franchising. Combine that with 2049’s failure at the box office, and a sequel seems fairly unlikely.  

Blade Runner 2049 rose from the swamp of Hollywood’s nostalgia-rush, of course, made to capitalize on a beloved property. Despite its critical success, it’s been unable to stand toe-to-toe financially with Star Wars or Marvel. Anyone could have told you that would happen.

It would be futile to compare this film with either of those franchises, because it tries to accomplish something else entirely. But I will say this: Marvel’s Tony Stark puts on a suit of armor to look like a robot so he can stand among gods. Blade Runner’s K puts on a suit of artificial skin so he can stand among humans. In the end, the latter is more compelling than the former can ever be.

[ink-water]

Book Review: The Muralist by B.A. Shapiro

Warning: Spoilers

I picked this book up at a Target near my university at the beginning of the spring semester mainly because the back cover promised art history and Abstract Expressionism. I’m by no means an art expert, but in high school I studied a bit of art history and like to think that I know more than the average 19 year old. At the time, I had fallen back into my love for art and for history, and I grabbed the book off the shelves immediately.

The book flip flops between two time periods--the present and the past, pre-World War II era. The narrator of the present time is Danielle, a graduated art student who has since given up art and works cataloging art pieces instead. The narrator of the past is an omniscient third person voice, but the protagonist is Alizée, a French girl who is studying art in New York and also happens to be Danielle’s great-aunt. The book also changes between points of views quite often, something that I do not appreciate myself. It’s difficult to build a deeper connection with the reader if the storyline constantly changes its focus, and although writing is no doubt a subjective art form, I find that frequent changing of perspectives is more aligned with relatively unskilled writers. Of course, it could be Shapiro’s writing style--a method to maintain the unfamiliarity between the reader and the characters despite the progression of the plotline.

As the novel continues, the reader learns that Alizée worked closely with a large number of Abstract Expressionist artists (name dropping: Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and most importantly, Mark Rothko) and was a huge proponent of Abstract Expressionism--both in influencing the style and in working for it to become more accepted in more scholarly circles of art. Most interestingly, however, the reader discovers that Alizée has mysteriously disappeared from New York and was never heard from again. Thus when Danielle accidentally comes into contact with a couple of fragments of artwork that could have been Alizée’s, she embarks on a journey to find out what happened to Alizée and whether the art pieces really belonged to her.

My largest gripe with the novel is perhaps the characterization. Although there was some description about the character’s internal struggles, the characters themselves were not humanized in a way that made me empathize deeply with them. It may have been Shapiro’s writing style--a very bland, matter-of-fact style where outbursts were punctuated with exclamation marks but little else (in terms of build up and the like). Statements were said, but were not felt. Musings were typed out on a page, but were not transmitted. Perhaps that’s why it was particularly easy for me to put the book down--there was no incredible characterization that drew me in and made me want to learn more about Danielle or about Alizée. Instead, I only wanted to know what happened of Alizée and her art--I cared little for her thoughts, her feelings, her as a person. I focus less on Danielle and more on Alizée simply because the book is driven by Alizée, and in my opinion, she is the protagonist; however, Alizée remains a unidimensional character despite her interesting psychological turmoil and the mystery-ridden plot. She’s French, she’s charming, she’s talented, she’s beautiful, she’s brave, and she’s more or less a Mary Sue character. There’s too much to her character for it to be believable: not only is she perfect physically and talent-wise, but she also happens to be psychologically damaged. Despite her inner turmoil, though, she manages to bring Abstract Expressionism to the attention of Eleanor Roosevelt and even becomes close acquaintances with the First Lady. Furthermore, the description of her talent and her one-tracked mind when it comes to painting could have been enchanting and intoxicating, but instead turns out trite and a little too deliberate, as if Shapiro is trying too hard to make Alizée the incredible talent she is. All of this characterization could have been possible and endearing, but Shapiro does not build up the character in a way that allows the reader to slowly understand and begin to love Alizée. Instead, the characterization is less like a getting-to-know-you session, and more of a long list of traits thrust at the reader.

Regardless, the book presents a very interesting mystery--difficult to fully expand upon and resolve in three hundred pages or so. Shapiro shows the extent of the mystery by making it span four generations--a mystery beginning pre-World War II and lasting until the 21st century. Furthermore, it is exhilarating turning the pages of the book and discovering historical characters that the reader may or may not know--the artists, the government officials, the President and his First Lady. Shapiro includes a love story--not one, again, that I can empathize or even sympathize with--involving Alizée and Mark Rothko. She also expands upon the friendship between Alizée and Krasner and Pollock--a couple that has not yet become an item yet in the book, but one the reader knows will ignite, crash, and burn. I always love it when books bring in historical figures, because it’s like a little secret history has with you, a little bit of the past immortalized in a fictional novel, and it blurs the line between history and fiction.

The novel also focuses greatly on World War II, mainly from the perspective of the United States. The message sent by Shapiro is more relevant than ever: Europeans Jews are seeking refuge in the United States as immigrants, but in an attempt to perhaps save their nation, the citizens of the US are split in opinion over this matter and the government favors a more isolationist approach. Our protagonist, Alizée, however has Jewish family--the only family she has, as her parents died in an unfortunate fire--in Europe anxious to obtain visas and immigrate to the United States. As a result, much of the action in this novel deals with Alizée’s numerous futile attempts to help them and the subsequent psychological damage she receives. 

Shapiro hints at Alizée’s unstable mental state early on in the novel, and it becomes dismissed again and again as she swallows her fears and her depersonalization and struggles to help her family from the American end. However, as she realizes that her hard work and determination gets them nowhere, the descriptions of her deteriorating mental state become longer and longer, until finally the reader is unable to distinguish between fact or Alizée’s inner monsters. The novel’s action culminates when Alizée’s house catches on fire (hearkening to her parent���s death when she was a young child, an event that created the psychological scars that she retained throughout adulthood), and the reader begins to doubt the credibility of the protagonist. Alizée is convinced that she is being targeted by a government official who is staunchly isolationist (and also happens to be someone she’s once tried to assassinate) and that his underlings had set fire to her home, but her fragmented psyche and the concerns of her close friends make it difficult for the reader to truly believe her. This kind of tension is what I love the most--when the narrative utterly breaks down and the unspoken agreement between the protagonist and the reader becomes naught. Shapiro’s method of characterization plays a role here--intentionally or not. The inability to connect with Alizée heightens the ease for the reader to doubt her and discredit her. 

Unsurprisingly, Rothko later admits Alizée into a mental institution once it becomes clear that her mental state is getting worse and worse. However, the mystery begins there--she disappears from the hospital and he, along with her friends and later, her family, are unable to locate her until 2015. Despite the fact that Alizée is missing, her art--and ultimately, a piece of her--remains with her friends. Her magnum opus is a sixteen-feet, political mural influenced by Picasso’s Guernica. It was worked on by her, by Lee Krasner, by Jackson Pollock, and by Mark Rothko, and before her apartment burned down, she had hacked the mural into small squares and hidden the pieces with Rothko due to her paranoia. In the end, Alizée the character vanishes into thin air, but the influence she had on United States’ opinion on Abstract Expressionism and her incredible artwork remains with her friends and with the nation’s history.

Fastforward to 2015, and Danielle discovers these squares. She repeatedly is met by backlash as she tries to prove that the squares were painted by her great-aunt--a struggle similar to Alizée’s when she tried to obtain visas for her family. The story reaches its closing as Danielle travels to France in a last-ditch effort to elucidate the whereabouts of her family’s mystery. She visits a Holocaust memorial and searches for names of family members and finds a couple. She doesn’t know, but the first name of Alizée’s young cousin--a 13 year old boy--is written on the memorial. And the realization hits the reader like that--a young life with so much potential and so much time has been severed from so much hate and ultimately becomes a five letter word etched on a wall. Every name etched on the wall was a human life, a loved one, a child, a lover, a friend--and because of prejudice, because of greed, they have become just one a millions scrawled on a wall in humanity’s weak attempt to apologize. 

The mystery is resolved with serendipity. Danielle chances upon an art store and finds artwork that looks strikingly similar to that of Alizée. She speaks with the store owner and learns that it is his mother’s work, though she has since passed away. He invites her to meet his father, though the name Alizée does not ring any bells. His wife’s name was Josephine, and she was a very good baker, a very good mother, and a very good wife. It’s difficult to see Josephine to be Alizée. Alizée was so riddled with her own problems, it seems improbable that she could put her pain aside and love a man and her children. Her love story with Mark was passionate and lustful, but even then it seems as if her affection for him had faded as her art overwhelmed her. But the descriptions of the paintings in the art store seems to answer this question--there was sadness, but taking over sadness was optimism. Shapiro writes,  “It was as if Josephine had painted her way out of that darkness or, more precisely, painted herself into a place where the darkness wasn’t complete.” Josephine turns out to be Alizée, a girl rescued by a French family with a son who later fell in love with her. She hid the past behind her and elected to file away Alizée, her identity, until the world was safe for her and her art. She adopted Josephine, became Josephine, and died as Josephine--the name Alizée becoming but whispers in her forgotten family.

In the couple of pages where this revelation is made, Shapiro presents another alluring point of tension: art, throughout the previous couple of chapters, served as a medium for Alizée to escape the world--though not in a positive sense. As she focused more and more on her mural, the less attached to reality her mental state seemed to be. Although art was not the cause to her eventual mental breakdown, it accelerated it by allowing her to completely and utterly ignore the outside world. Yet, somehow, after her disappearance in New York and her journey back to France, art began to serve as her method of healing. Here, Shapiro seems to say that art, in itself, is blameless and sinless. It is what we choose to do with art. Likewise, this can apply to power, to wealth, and to humanity as a whole.

The novel ends with Danielle helping with the effort to reconstruct Alizée’s two murals, reminding the world of the harsh reality of Jewish immigrants in the World War II era. Danielle ultimately returns to art--her search for her great-aunt giving her the courage to pick up a paintbrush once again--and decides to recreate Alizée’s magnum opus in her own manner. The ending is sweet, and the ending sentence--”Sometimes a girl’s got to say what a girl’s got to say”--reminds the reader that the novel is driven by incredibly brave females who have had their stories forgotten through history. 

I liked the way Shapiro, in 2012, wrote a novel that is just as relevant today, in 2017. The pain and frustration Alizée felt fighting against isolationism parallels the fight for refugees today. Humanity’s fight for humanity is one that will not fade as years pass, and as I read this book--amidst the horrors of American politics--I can’t help but feel that we had not learned from history. 

Politics aside, however, a couple of points in the novel regarding mental health concerns me. From time to time, Shapiro seems to imply that madness and artistic genius come hand in hand, and seemingly justifies psychological trauma by presenting evidence of talent. Although many great artists and writers in the past may have suffered from some sort of mental illness, it does not do for us to glorify and romanticize mental illness in this sort of manner. Mental illness in no way will bring artistic genius--it is a very serious matter that must be talked about and must be addressed. Furthermore, Alizée’s recovery is described very trivially and effortlessly, possibly due to lack of space, but I personally would have found the book much more fulfilling if it focused less on mystery building and more on Alizée’s character.

Regardless, it was an interesting book to read. It reminded me that there is much in American history that I have not yet learned, and that humanity has an unfortunate tendency to replay history at a later time, though perhaps if more charmingly brave people, like Alizée, stand up we may have a chance at changing our destiny. This is a book heralding feminism, humanity, love, and the powers of art--an unmovable force that has accompanied humanity from the beginning of time, documenting our history in a way that tugs at the most primal parts of our psyche.