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keltonwrites · 3 years ago

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Where no one knows your name

How many times is a person meant to make new friends? When I moved into an apartment in DC with an absolutely iconic girl from Craigslist, I wrote in my journal, “you never know when you’ll meet your next bridesmaid.” Charmingly juvenile, as I was 24 years old. Ironic, as I never had any bridesmaids. And embarrassing, knowing I wrote something that’s surely been embroidered on a bachelorette party t-shirt by now. My point was: you can meet people you fall in love with anywhere, anytime, assuming your heart (and calendar) are open. Now my heart and calendar are open and I am one of Elizabeth Bennet’s sad sisters, cloying and desperate for attention while everyone at the ball ignores me. Meeting people here is unnerving and hapless and eye-clawingly vulnerable. My first new friend told me she was moving away in a few months. Do you invest deeply in hopes of another faraway friendship? Do you just go back to waving as you pass on the street? I like this girl! What an embarrassing thing to have to say to someone! Do you just invite people to every and anything like a lunatic? I can’t even remember to call the people I am forever-and-ever in cahoots with. I’m also deeply bound by what I’ll call the Movie Trap: say it’s 3pm during not-a-pandemic, and you get the urge to see a movie. You look at the showings, and there’s one you really want to see at 7:15. You think to yourself, “I should make an effort,” and you text a friend. “Hey, you wanna go see This Cool Movie at 7:15 tonight?” No one ever says yes. Don’t give me an example of when someone has, because it’s always one of these answers:

“Oooh, I’m actually seeing it with Kate tomorrow - wanna come?”

“Can we go to the 9pm showing? Stuck at work.”

“Yeah but let’s see Movie You’ll Fucking Hate instead.”

Now maybe I’m just lighting flares guiding you to the worst parts of my personality, but this drives me nuts. No, Liz, I don’t want to go tomorrow. I want to go tonight. At 7:15. So I can be in bed by 10. And you’d have to drag my dead body and prop open my eyes to get me to see something like Marriage Story in theaters. The Movie Trap is a big reason I usually hang out by myself, or I make plans weeks in advance. (Don't I sound like a blast.) Just the idea of being like, “I like you! Wanna hang out in October?” makes me want to collapse into a puddle of sad adulthood. Which is why on Friday at 4:30pm, when a girl I’d met a week prior asked if I wanted to grab a drink, I just said yes. I put on a pretty dress, did my makeup, put stuff in a purse, and drove the 25 minutes to town. It was really fun! And how novel to have new contacts in my phone like “Maggie blue house” and “Jess concert friend” — a throwback to the days of “Greg guy on L train” and “Devon ad party.” The very concept of not knowing someone’s last name or even needing it, and a year from now updating their contact info and smiling at your origin story. But for the most part, no one is in our phones. In terms of phone numbers collected, here is the list:

Two friends we knew prior who thank god you guys exist.

New friend who is moving away.

New friend who is game to drink tequila and ride mountain bikes.

Neighbor-not-yet-friend who I really fucking like and am not sure how to cross hang-out threshold with.

Not to say there aren’t any other prospects or people I’m platonically gaga over, but I don’t have their phone numbers. There are honestly a lot of people like this because when you live in a small town (and you’re from the Midwest) you say “oop, sorry” to every person/object you bump into, and you say “hi :)” to every person you see. These are the rules. If I drive by you and don’t wave, it’s because I was so deep in a daydream I probably shouldn’t have been driving in the first place. This isn’t acceptable, because in our urgency to tattoo our vaccination status on our foreheads so we can make friends, it turns out just driving by someone can be a viable strategy. A few days ago, a man was driving by our kitchen window and then our driveway, and then he reversed back up to the kitchen window and started waving. Ben went outside — it was that kind of wave. The man had seen from his car a smokejumper emblem on the back of a truck in our driveway. “Hey, are you a smokejumper?” We aren’t. But my dad was, and he was in town visiting, accompanied by the emblem on the back of his truck. The guy said we should drink sometime. Numbers were not exchanged. We’ll call that a node, because it’s not quite a connection. And it’s mainly nodes, waiting to be connected, to have relevance. But first, no matter who you’re trying to befriend, you have to answer everyone else’s Do I Care Quiz. The quiz is employed by 93% of locals to determine how they feel about you existing within their personal 50-mile radius. The first question is non negotiable:

1) Are you visiting?

Variations on this question include “how long are you in town?” or “what brings y’all to town?” or my least favorite and most insulting, “did you just finish Jeeping?” I know I have blonde hair and say y’all, but how dare you. (Also, to be clear, you can own a Jeep, customize your Jeep, mod out your Jeep, and love your Jeep, but you’re not Jeeping until you drive too fast through a tiny town so you can hurl your Jeep over a mountain pass without ever getting out of it.) So the answer to “are you visiting” is “no, I live here.” Which brings us to the next question, my favorite for how loaded the gun, kneeling in the grass, scope on, target locked it is.

2) Are you part-time or full-time?

The first time I answered this question, I didn’t realize it was essentially like asking how someone voted in the 2020 election. The judgment was cocked and ready and the palpable relief/joy/or at the very least, tolerance, exuded by answering “full-time” was like when the sun comes out from behind the clouds on a 40 degree day. I was fine, but wow that does feel better. The third question though does not have a standard hoped-for answer. This is where nodes turn to connections turn to phone numbers.

3) What brings you here?

It seems like the best possible answer would be saying you work in town, and you’re going to begin construction on displaced-worker housing to ensure the people who run this town can actually live in it. We’d have everyone’s phone number. Saying you’re a writer who works remotely and bought a house from a legendary and beloved local who could no longer afford it is really something you keep to yourself. But in the interest of making friends, I just word vomit my entire history. We might as well find out at the onset if I make your eyes roll back into your skull. Not at all threatening that all it takes is a single social signal misinterpreted to be the absolute death knell of my ability to make friends in a town of some 1400 adults. In fact, I’ll share one such interaction. I was hiking with Cooper, about 5 miles by foot away from my house. I was on a trail, crossing a sloped meadow, and a group was traversing up the hillside to the trail. I said hi, where y’all coming from. One girl answered and we talked about the trail. She eyed me up and down. “Did you just move here?” “I did!” “I served your family last week,” she said. “Oh,” that phrasing. “Must have been my in-laws.” “Heard you bought Jack’s house. Such a bummer when locals like that are forced out.” “We didn’t even know about his house,” I said. “We were looking at another house and he asked his realtor if he could get us to come see his house. We just loved it, and him!” She had no emotional reaction to this. “You moved from California?” she asked. (Dangerous question.) “Yeah, got these sea level lungs, haha,” attempting to disarm with humor was a failure, “but couldn’t be happier to be out of California.” “It’s not like this all year. Winter’s really hard here, you’re in for a rude awakening.” “Well California’s the last place I lived, but I’m not from there. I’ve lived in brutal winters. At least Colorado gets sun!” I laugh with cloaked loathing. “It’s different when you live at altitude,” she said, like no human aside from her had ever been literally anywhere. “Are you trying to go around?” She indicated the path behind her. “No, y’all go ahead, just gonna wait to give you your space. I’m sure you’re faster than me.” “K, good luck making it to the lake." Maybe she was thirsty. Maybe she was hungover. Maybe she just has vicious delivery, but it felt like every blade of grass was leaning against the wind to listen. She was with four other people and not one of them said a word. I left that interaction not wanting to see another human ever again. But that interaction, and her intimate knowledge of exactly which house I lived in, made me want to decorate like we lived in a gingerbread house, all candy canes and plum drops, screaming to any passerby that we’re friendly. One of the mayor’s first questions to me was “what are you going to do to the house?” There are rules here about what your house can look like, and I kept emphasizing we bought the house because we loved it, not because we wanted to change everything about it. And now, instead of wanting to decorate the interior, I want to put up shades so we don’t contribute to light pollution, I want to hang a sign by the water spigot saying “grab some if you need” for hikers and mountain bikers, I want to paint a sign for the wild mint by our door that says, “I mint to tell you to take some,” because our neighbors were openly panicked they wouldn’t be able to just grab mint from the cabin’s garden anymore. Without question, COVID makes things harder. Dinner parties feel like dares. Dropping cookies off at someone’s house feels invasive. Grabbing a drink feels like the ultimate sign of trust. But at least we have nodes who can connect who can think to invite us and who can see that despite having lived in California, we’re not all that bad. In the meantime, I’ll be painting signs about water and mint, hoping to garner the benefit of the doubt from the so beautifully, earnestly, and waiting-to-see-if-you’re-worth-it doubtful.

Subscribe to the newsletter at tinyletter.com/keltonwrites — high altitude relocation and renovation in a tiny mountain town.

#amwriting #newsletter #making friends #how to make new friends #adulthood #small town life

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canary3d-obsessed · 4 years ago

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Restless Rewatch: The Untamed Ep 17 part one

(Masterpost of all the rewatches) (Canary’s pinboard of original content)

Warning: Spoilers for All 50 Episodes!

Inaccessible

Wei Wuxian hides in a boat among the lotuses next to a pier in Lotus Pier, the second-most-literally-named home in the show, after The Burial Mounds. This pier has a railing that goes all the way around it, without any ladders or anything. Not to be ADA on main but this means if you can't Jedi jump, you're fucked.

Hefeng Liquor

While Wei Wuxian waits and tries, not very successfully, to keep his shit together, he hears the guards talking about the local booze that they're going to drink at their murder victory party. We learn, in a desaturated flashback (that OP has done her best to resaturate), that this is lotus-infused wine invented by Wei Wuxian during happier days.

He kicks the flashback off with his favorite activity, Unnecessarily Erotic Beverage Drinking. (gifset) I’ve slowed this gif down so we can all appreciate the unnecessariness. The way his hand caresses that leaf OMG

Hopefully he is not drinking lake water out of that leaf. Side note: How is it possible that Xiao Zhan doesn't have a drinking water endorsement deal? I had to resort to Zhu Yilong's brand of water for this gag. I figure if it's good enough to pour directly onto a lightning burn like they do in The Lost Tomb Reboot, it's good enough for a leaf hummer chastely drinking out of a leaf

(more behind the cut!)

In his memory, Jiang Cheng tells him to stop fucking around and come help with the basket of lotus pods. Wei Wuxian responds by grabbing one for himself and then sitting his ass down and not helping. Cause he’s a motherfucking P.I.M.P.

Emotional Rescue

Wen Ning arrives on the pier with Jiang Chang, to Wei Wuxian's extreme relief. Look how much emotion Xiao Zhan is able to convey even with half of his face hidden, my lord.

Wen Ning carries Jiang Cheng on his back, in an echo of other significant piggyback rides in Wei Wuxian's life.

Wei Wuxian's relief is at war with his fear, seeing his brother in such bad shape. Remember, these are cultivators, who heal quickly and mostly don't get their asses beat this hard. The only time Wei Wuxian has been comatose was after the Xuanwu cave, and that was probably because of his prolonged contact with resentful energy/Yin iron.

Hibernating Zidian

Wen Ning gets ready for his first, but not his last, boat ride with an unconscious Yunmeng brother in it. He tells Wei Wuxian that Jiang Cheng is pretty fucked up but isn't dead.

Then he gives Zidian to him. Before we talk about Zidian, let's talk about BAMF Wen Ning. Wen Ning is an awkward goofball. He’s also insanely competent at just about everything--wine-drugging, dude-smuggling, corpse retrieval, dog acupuncture, drug pushing. As well as shooting rocks out of the air and, later, beating zombie ass, and resisting mind control. .

This is the foundation of their friendship; it’s not actually about Wei Wuxian being nice to the weird kid. He initially sought Wen Ning out for the same reason he sought out weird kid Lan Wangji--his martial skill. He accepts his weirdness and is protective of him because of his missing-spirit problem, but he did not befriend him out of altruism.

Wei Wuxian is so forgiving that he can smile fondly when looking at the weapon that whipped the shit out of him a couple of days ago.

Wei Wuxian puts Zidian down right next to Jiang Cheng's hand and...nothing happens. It doesn't recognize him or spark to life. This didn't seem meaningful when I watched it the first time, but rewatching...yikes. It KNOWS.

Wei Wuxian admits, with tears in his eyes, that there is nowhere safe for him to go with Jiang Cheng, and Wen Ning immediately offers care and shelter. Even though that is putting his own life at serious risk.

Life obligation is a common theme in CDramas. It’s often something a person chooses as a way of showing love. Guardian builds an eternal romance out of two people saving each other’s lives over and over. But accepting the obligation is a choice (in fantasy dramas, if not in real life). Love and Redemption has a gloriously harsh sequence where a life is saved, and the save-ee cooly rejects the saver.

Every time Wen Ning saves Wei Wuxian, he cites that one time that Wei Wuxian saved him from the water demon. And Wei Wuxian cites this rescue right here when he throws everything away to save Wen Ning. Meanwhile, Jiang Cheng doesn't acknowledge any debt to Wen Ning at all, only--grudgingly--to Wen Qing. And people are ok with that.

Basically all this is to say that I think Wen Ning leans into this life debt because he loves Wei Wuxian, and Wei Wuxian leans into it because he loves him back. Non-romantically, I think...at least on Wei Wuxian’s part. YMMV.

They go to pick up Yanli from their Granny, telling her to go into hiding. She starts to cry, not knowing how she'll manage on her own. Wei Wuxian tells her that they will come back, as Wen Ning looks super unsure about that.

Of course Wei Wuxian can't know, at this point, whether they will come back. Wei Wuxian always wants to make everybody feel better, and sometimes you really can't make someone feel better except by lying. He compulsively says shit that he thinks people want to hear, almost as if he was beaten frequently and arbitrarily as a child.

Wen Ning is doing his best for the recreational boat ride industry, as he rows the Yunmeng trio through some amazingly beautiful scenery.

Core Melting Time

Meanwhile, back at Lotus Pier The Yunmeng Supervisory Office, Wen Chao is hung over, Wen Chao is angry, Yawn

For some reason, Wang Lingjiao has suddenly decided to talk to Wen Chao in the most cloying and annoying way possible.

Also, the fact that she still addresses him as Gongzi when she is totally fucking him is kind of great. This is like those fics where Elizabeth Bennet calls Mr. Darcy "Mr. Darcy" even when they're married and hitting it.

Wen Zhuliu demonstrates why he's called Core-Melting Hand, by punishing the wine guard. He's able to melt a guy's core by grabbing him by the throat, and also picks him up, Darth Vader style, for extra meltyness.

All that stuff I said last time about Wen Zhuliu feeling ambivalent about being a villian...yeah, he seems to have gotten that right out of his system.

Chilling in Yiling

Wen Ning is doing his best for the recreational carriage ride industry. Wei Wuxian, after presumably several hours in the cart, decides that now is a good time to get curious about where they are going.

Here we start to see a new side of Wei Wuxian. Before this he was carefree, other than specific worries about his friends. He confronted danger with lightness and humor, or with temporary fear, that he let go of once the danger passed. Now, after all the deaths and seeing Jiang Cheng so injured, he's twitchy, anxious, and angry.

Very, very angry.

When he realizes that Wen Ning has brought them to the Yiling supervisory office, he goes off, demanding to know whose home this was before the Wens took it and grabbing Wen Ning and shoving him into a decorative...decoration. He thinks Wen Ning brought them here to harm them.

I wouldn't have thought such a pretty dude could be so menacing, but holy crap.

The way he's confronting Wen Ning here is not his normal style. He's not trying to provoke a bigger fight like he usually does; he's not trying to create distance, the way Jiang Cheng does. He's very intimate, getting right in his face and maintaining eye contact. He trusted Wen Ning and feels personally betrayed.

Shy little Wen Ning is remarkably calm when confronted like this. Wen Ning really isn’t afraid of anything, despite his general air of nervousness. (Full gifset of Angry WWX over here.)

He calmly and kindly explains the situation. He doesn't appeal to Wei Wuxian's trust, saying "oh I would never;" he appeals to his logic, which gets through to him.

Wen Qing comes out and the guards start banging on the door and Wei Wuxian flips out again, grabbing a sword and pointing it at Wen Qing as she decides what to do. Wen Qing seems unruffled by Wei Wuxian's sword pointing, and we see her weighing up the situation.

She makes her decision, sending the guards away and deciding to help the fugitives, officially joining the Clear Conscience Club. She could probably get Wen Ning out of trouble by turning them in, but she opts to put personal loyalty and her belief in her own ideals ahead of her family's safety.

Wei Wuxian is not ok. He’s just not ok. He tries to act like it after they get settled in with Wen Qing, but he's not, and I think that plays into his next several choices.

Next comes a whole sequence of Jiang Cheng being unconscious with pins in his head--ow--while Wei Wuxian twitchily tends to him.

This sequence is kind of unfair to Jiang Yanli. What matters to the story here is Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian's relationship, so that’s the focus of these scenes. But really, there is no way Jiang Yanli would not be at Jiang Cheng's side unless she was literally unconscious herself. Let's assume Wen Qing stuck a needle in her to make her rest while she has a fever. Shippers should also feel free to assume that Wen Qing spent hours at her bedside, tenderly wiping her forehead and holding her hand as she recovered. In his sleep, while Wei Wuxian sits by his side, Jiang Cheng calls for his sister, mother, and father, but not for his brother. Ouch.

Let's pause to appreciate Wei Wuxian's new outfit, which is the sort of getup most people in this society probably imagine Yiling Laozu wearing, rather than the low-key homespun stuff he actually spends his Yiling year in. This robe has fancy shoulders, shiny material, touches of Jiang purple, strange red hoody strings, and a fuckin' CAPE. He didn't bring any luggage with him from Lotus Pier, although he's still got his Yin Turtle Sword hidden in a bag of holding. So the most likely explanation is that Wen Ning hooked him up with this lewk. "Wei Wuxian is a nice person. He should have a magnificent cape."

Wen Wing and Wei Wuxian take a breather to stand on the porch and work out what their status is with each other, like a couple of fucking adults, which is amazing. Basically Wei Wuxian is ready to forget earlier Wen shenanigans, but is going to avenge Lotus Pier.

Wen Qing isn't enthusiastic about that but doesn't argue, just asking, mostly rhetorically, if he plans to kill her too. He's uncomfortable considering that; the role of avenger isn't one that's comfortable for him, although he turns out to be extremely good at it. He does not, of course, plan to kill her too. In a few months, imprisoned in a Wen dungeon, she will be the only Wen left alive after Wei Wuxian 1.5(No-Gold Edition) and Chenqing come to visit.

Jiang Cheng finally wakes up, and the first thing he does is to test out his spiritual power by hitting Wei Wuxian as hard as he can.

DUDE.

Look at Wei Wuxian's face, as he goes from happy, to shocked and hurt, to laughing it off. It's exactly like when Jiang Cheng shoved him in the Rock Lady temple. Has Wei Wuxian spent all of his years with Jiang Cheng going from affection, to hurt feelings, to pretending it's fine? God, I think he probably has.

This episode raises a question that will come up again later, but never be answered. That question is, what the fuck are these weird footies and why the fuck does Jiang Cheng wear them to bed?

Jiang Cheng reveals that his golden core is gone, that he can't cultivate any more, which means he can't avenge his parents or achieve any ambitions in life. Nobody has apparently given any thought to why Wen Zhuliu is called "Core-Melting Hand" before this, which is hilarious, frankly. If I fought with a guy called, for example, Brain-Eating Mouth, I think I would make certain assumptions about him and what he planned to do with my brain.

Something interesting is happening in this moment, because as he comes fully back to consciousness, Jiang Cheng pours out all of his trauma and horror to his brother, telling him about the core melting and practically wailing about his feelings over it all. And his brother understands, and ultimately finds a way to help him. What does Wei Wuxian do after his own trauma? Keeps it secret, so nobody finds a way to help him, although many people try to. So Jiang Cheng is, in this way at least...emotionally healthier than Wei Wuxian? That's unexpected.

Jiang Cheng is super upset and is mad at eternal scapegoat Wei Wuxian for saving him. Jiang Cheng would rather be dead than be a regular person. Whereas Wei Wuxian, faced with the same problem, is like, *shrug* I’ll adapt. These are both valid emotional responses to suddenly becoming disabled. Losing a golden core is definitely a disability, in this environment; it's not just about magic sword fights. Jiang Cheng's home is designed for people who can fly; Lan Wangji's home is designed for people who don't feel cold, and Wen Central is made of actual lava, for example.

Jiang Cheng is already struggling with a lot of difficulties. He was raised by shitty parents, he's got anger management issues, he has a crushing weight of responsibility. And now he's also lived through the deaths of most of the people who matter to him. If sword cultivation is the one thing that gives him joy in life (ok one of two things, obviously fashion also gives him joy because he WORKS it), he can't reasonably be expected to rally when it's taken away.

Oh, honey. Oh, baby boy.

Wen Qing picks the worst moment to come in and tries to tend to Jiang Cheng, who starts off being devastated that the girl he likes is seeing the wreck he's become, and then moves along to helpless rage when he remembers that she's a Wen, and he screams at her to get out.

Jiang Cheng is not able to put personal loyalty ahead of clan loyalty like Wei Wuxian is. Partly this is his nature, and partly it's his role as the lineal descendant of the clan leader. As a firstborn son of a gentry family, his destiny as clan leader is in his blood, and so is his responsibility to the clan. When Wei Wuxian praises Song Lan and Xiao Xingchen for caring less about bloodlines than about shared ambition, he is speaking from the position of someone who's bloodline ain't shit. Jiang Cheng will never be able to share that perspective.

Next: More of this excruciating episode!

Writing prompt: The Day I Discovered I Could Melt Your Fucking Core, by Wen Zhuliu Drabble prompt: Why I Wear Socks to Bed, by Jiang Cheng

#fytheuntamed #the untamed #the untamed gifs #wei wuxian #jiang cheng #wen qing #wen ning #restless rewatch the untamed #canary3d-original #my gifs #the untamed spoilers

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parisofpeoplez · 4 years ago

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Hello I'm back again trying to get this out of the way so that I can MOVE ON GOD. I have soo many feelings from Vincenzo finale and I feel emotionally exhausted, so I'm going to try and sort my thoughts out here. This is going to be very long and chaotic....

I had started watching this show sometime in March and caught up with the episodes in the week before episode 13-14 aired. That's when I discovered the fandom on Tumblr. I've never been a part of such a fandom and it elevated the whole experience so much more and let me just put it out there first and foremost - y'all are the most intelligent, funny and creative people I've ever come across.❤ Living in today's reality where we can't even meet our friends, having a collective community experience with you all was honestly such a comfort. I will forever be grateful to this show for giving me this experience ❤❤

I've been trying to look at the positive sides of the finale but it's difficult to do so. Not saying there's aren't any, I just feel the not-so-positive ones outnumber the positive ones imo...

I've become so attached to this show that I've even surprised myself. Props to the writers and creators for creating characters and giving them such good development arcs. I truly came to see the Geumga plaza gang as a family. Blood is not what makes you a family and they proved this till the very end.

Hong Cha Young my queen....I absolutely adore her. I've never come across a female character like her in any show. I love her quirks (like even the way she walks with a bounce in her steps is so extra!) and I love her strength. She was ready to go all out to make her father's murderes pay, which is probably why I have sort of mixed feelings about her character in the last episode. On one hand I do know that her want for revenge against them is what started it all, and she deserved to kill Zumba Snake and Han-seok. But it is one thing to want to kill someone, and another thing to actually do it yourself. In the initial eps, we saw that she made Vincenzo promise not to kill anyone, but went back on it with 'promises can be broken out of necessity'. And yet, she ended up staying at Vincenzo's place out of fear that he would actually kill. She might have went back to making peace with the fact that Vincenzo is bound to kill and yet, when she witnessed one of the cryatal balls dying (idk his name), she had to take the time to remember why she was doing what she was doing, and why she had been supporting Vincenzo all along. As viewers we would have been satisfied had she been the one to kill Myung hee (since she was the one who gave the order to kill Cha Young's dad), it would honestly be completely out of character for her. She's a ruthless, cunning lawyer, but not a killer. Which is why I completely understand why the writers decided not to go that way.

On the other hand, Vincenzo has grown up in the Mafia, this is what he has learnt his entire life and what he's best at. He understood that it would have long lasting emotional impacts on Cha Young if she killed. He didn't want her to suffer like he does, which is why he offered her an out in ep 19, warning her that they will now become monsters, and delivered the final blow to Myung hee and Han-seok.

I am satisfied with Vincenzo being the one to kill them. But what I am not satisfied by at all is how Cha Young was essentially side lined in the finale, and the fact that Han-seo sacrificed himself in the end. They could have written Cha Young being involved in some way. The entire sequence in the beginning of ep 20 could have been so much more impactful, had they taken a slightly different route. I still do not understand why they didn't make Han-seo push/kick Han-seok's hand so that that last bullet ends up somewhere that is not a human body. I am as annoyed as I was when Gu Seung ju died in CLOY. I know that they had been foreshadowing his death all along, right from the moment when Cha-young and Vincenzo have that conversation about how underdogs more often than not end up dead (or something along those lines, I can't recall exactly), and then more recently in the last eps, but still it would have been a great twist for him to actually be alive, and reveal it later in the episode like they did with Mr. Lee. (Please Mr. Lee's potential death sub plot was just....NO. It was unnecessary to give him a fatal wound and make us believe that he was dead ESPECIALLY after they killed Han-seo). At the very least, even if they did want to kill Han-seo, they could have written it better and given some sort of closure to his character. I will forever mourn his loss...

Coming on to the deaths of the antagonists. Choi Myung Hee's death was.....something. To be very honest, I don't really know how I feel about it exactly. Not saying I hated it or that she didn't deserve it. I liked the whole bit about making her dance one last time. I just really don't know how to feel about actually watching her burn. As for Jang Han-seok's death, I think it was a bit too gruesome for me to digest (he deserved it tho) but I really liked two things about it - Vincenzo taking his watch and the crow. Now THOSE were satisfying.

As much as I hated it when Vincenzo had to leave, after thinking about it, I feel it was necessary. The police were after him and they literally did not have the time to fabricate any sort of evidence that would gurantee him to walk a free man. Even if they had tried to do it, it would've been a gamble. Vincenzo had to leave so that he can come back to Cha Young later and not end up behind bars instead. Yeah I know he was going to retire initially but after Luca's visit, he realised that he can't leave his family in Italy alone. The Mafia are his family after all. He's grown up and spent his whole life amongst them, he can't just leave them to defend themselves, esp when their boss is his incompetent brother. He had to take care of them first because that is what they do, they look after their own. Even though he offered the enemies money, it would only keep them away for so long and there would always be more enemies.

I'm not gonna talk about my thoughts on Chayenzo since I already made a long ass post about it (x)

I did not mean to ramble on so much but oh well! I couldn't sleep last night with so many thoughts running around my head and I needed to vent them out, so here we are lol. These are just my ramblings on the last episode, not the whole show. It is still one of the best shows ever created and I don't want to let the ending ruin that for me. It will take some time for me to accept it tho. Not in the mental state to go for a re-watch but I probably will at some point when I'm not feeling so emotional (is it the PMS? It v well could be lol) and when I do, I will be v conveniently only skipping to the kiss scene and ignore the rest of ep 20 lol (It was an amazing kiss scene okay).

#anxious gal shares her thoughts #more like word vomits #I'm not a writer by a long shot but the WAY these TV SHOWS of all thing make me furiously type on my phone #do I have anything else left to say?#I don't know #I hooe not lol I'm scaring myself okay #it is just a show why am I so attached??#anyhooo #long post #vincenzo #vincenzo spoilers #hong cha young

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coramvobis · 4 years ago

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Imagine an South Korea!AU where Seo Dan and Seri are both chaebols... (part 1 because this is getting out of hand)

Obvs, Seri and Jeong Hyeok are married already bc this STORY IS ABOUT DAN AND HER HAPPINESS SO TAKE A BACK SEAT BINJIN.

Jeong Hyeok, pianist, whatever. Sickeningly in love with Seri. Seri is basically the same as CLOY, just got the man AND IS BEST FRIENDS WITH DAN EVEN THO DAN WOULD NEVER SAY IT OUT LOUD

My boy Seung Joon, a poor boy who’s living in a shitty small ass closet of an apartment. He’s just gotten fired from his job bc he prob gives out free shit or something to old ladies and loses profit or whatever that he did as a job

Now Dan is obvs CEO of you guessed it, her moms cosmetic department store but imagine it’s like a chain now and it’s big and international. That’s prob how she met Seri, two strong women in the business. Instead of competing they got together and TAKE DOWN ANY MAN WHO THINKS THEY CAN WALK OVER THEM

So Dan, workaholic, doesn’t take care of herself very well bc she wanna make her moms company the best she can. Doesn’t date v often and so her mom is like dan u need to go out more!!! You can’t just hole up in your office everyday, you’re at the perfect age for marriage and kids!!

Dan, not having it, bc single is the new trend right? (IM CRYING) basically brushes her mom off n was like I don’t need that kind of burden right now and was like I don’t have time to cater to a mans ego where they want to be the alpha and like her to be a docile housewife. And listed all the things that she doesn’t wanna deal with when being with a guy.

Mom, I swear she’s my fave, like second to seo dan. Mom being the smart ass bitch that she is, went and posted an ad, like discreetly Ofc, looking for a stay at home husband. And proceed to like list all the requirements.

Guess what. seung joon saw the ad and was like this sounds fun and totally replied to the ad. Not knowing it’s for like a fucking millionaire or whatever.

Comes the day of interview, mom went thru all the candidates, some were plain ugly (dan has taste and she doesn’t want her grand babies to b ugly), some were creepy (like srsly), and some just outright lied on their app and did NOT in fact want to be a stay at home husband but wants to “fix” her daughter.

So this is where our boy seung Joon comes in right. With his charming suave self and a killer smile, charmed the pants off mom and landed himself a trial period of 6 months.

U might be wondering. After mom set it all up, she went to see Dan and told her the good news. Dan was HELLLLAAA PISSED Ofc and was like MOM WTF DID U DO. Moms like I found u a suitable candidate! And bc nobody can out argue her mom, dan is like ok fine, I’ll try it for 6 months but if it doesn’t work out u can’t interfere in my personal life ever again. Mom Ofc agreed bc mom knows everything.

So fastforward.

Seung Joon is literally the perfect stay at home husband(fiancé???). He realized this is literally his dream life. He gets to live with a gorgeous woman and take care of her and don’t have to work????

Every day seung joon would cook her breakfast (which dan is like ??? Bc her breakfast was a cup of coffee), prepare her lunch with like a cute lil note about how he hopes her day is going well, or not to forget to take a break, or something cheesy n cute ok. Like it just shows he cares. When dan comes home he’d have dinner ready and he would b like the devoted husband and ask about her day n everything (Ofc at the beginning she’s prob like only replying with one word or two, then slowly she starts to say a little more when she realized he actually wanna hear about her day.) when dan stays late at the office, he would bring dinner to her and stay just enough to watch her finish dinner. Then one day he just shows up to pick her up from work BY WAITING OUTSIDE HER BUILDING UNTIL SHE COMES OUT. And so after that dan just sends him a txt when she’s about to leave so he doesn’t have to sit and wait. And SEUNG JOON BECAME HER DRIVER TOO. They just spend a lot of time together ok. Whenever Dan isn’t working, he tries to be with her. Bc he’s in love.

Lbr seung joon fell in love with her like at first sight ok. He just wants to know everything about her and wants to care for her and just make sure she knows she’s not alone and she can rely on him too bc he’s there for her and her only. He wants to be the person that she depends on, the person she shares her thought and emotions with. He wants to make her happy.

So they ended up with a routine of sorts. They started texting each other throughout the day (ok seung joon txts her and she just subconsciously smiles at it bc it’s always something stupid or flirty or just something so very seung joon, but she secretly like it even tho she doesn’t know why)

Seung joon takes her on spontaneous little dates when she’s free. He makes sure she’s having fun, he tried to teach her how to make food once and it ended terribly but it was hilarious and they were LAUGHING AND JUST CUTE.

I can’t.

Six month mark coming up right. Seung joon knew already like two months in or something when dan started warming up to him that he wants this. He wants this for as long as he can. He wants to marry her bc she’s amazing and literally a goddess. She’s exactly his type (TEARS R STREAMIMG DOWN MY FACE) so he used the little savings he’s got and went and bought this cute ring right. Not the biggest diamond. It’s nothing flashy but pretty. It’s pretty and sophisticated and it reminds him of dan. So he’s got it all planned right.

On the last day of the 6 months period, Seung joon made like this romantic ass dinner for dan. Decorated the place and all. Made it look a+. They had a rly nice time n they were so comfortable (dan even laughed at one of his jokes and he felt like he was on top of the world). The night was winding down. Seung joon was getting nervous but Dan’s fave song came on and it was Time.

So he reached for Dan’s hand and started his whole speech (you know the one. The one on the bridge where we all just died a little bc damn that’s cute) and at the end, he kneel in front of her with the ring between his thumb and forefinger. AND ASKED IF SHE WILL HAVR HIM AS HER HUSBAND BC HE WANTS TO SPEND HIS LIFE MAKIMG HER AS HAPPY AS SHE MAKES HIM.

Dan, not knowing that Seung joon was actually going to do this, was SHOOK. She thought they both knew it wasn’t gonna be like a Marriage thing after the 6 months but here he is. On one knee. Looking at her with those soft eyes.

She wrapped her hand over the ring and Seung joons hand and frowned. Ofc. Seung joon knew what that meant but a little bit of him still HOPED LIKE I HOPED THEY WOULDNT KILL HIM and dan said no. She can’t marry him. She was sorry but he’s like don’t apologise right. Bc even tho he’s like dead ass heart broken, he doesn’t wanna hear her apologise to him about this. So he got up, put the ring back into his pocket, and started cleaning up the dinner table like nothing happened. He told Dan to go rest n shower like it was just another regular night with them.

Ofc. The next day, Seung joon is GONE GONE GONE. he left a little card that says thank you on it but nothing else. All of his things r gone.

Dan’s mom called n was like SO HOW DID IT GO. And dan just tells her that Seung joon is gone. He proposed and she said no. And he left.

AND SCENE. tbc

#crash landing on you #seo dan #gu seung joon #gu seung jun #I literally don’t have time to write a fic but #fuck #the feels caught me off guard again #I’ll never be over how dirty they did to my girl seo dan #she deserves the world #and in my world seri n dan r bffs and not fighting over a boy #chicks b4 dicks #shit I wrote

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tht-lesbian-fangirl · 5 years ago

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Do you ever 100% have those days when you believe supercorp is in fact canon in all the ways compared to the het tropes? But there’s the thorn on your side that’s “waiting” on everybody behind the show to “confirm” what we’ve been saying and preaching for years now? And if it highkey comes down to the show pulling a catradora on us with supercorp I’ll be totally fine with it because I’ll just take that as a big fat “I told you so” to the haters. Analysis GO OFF 😚

Dude, you have no idea how many little break downs I have every once in a while because I just feel so confident that Supercorp will happen! Everything in the Supercorp-specific writing, music, cinematic tropes, actress choices, etc. has shown that Kara and Lena will and should be canon. Look, I’m in graduate school for psychology and I haven’t taken a film class in my life. I’ve never even been a big “shipping” person. But I watched Supergirl live all throughout undergrad, often with my straight friends (who were less into the show) and even they noticed all the things that we "delusional" fans discuss.

Iconic Superhero/Love interest tropes

The Hero having to choose between saving their LI or kids/city/world, but miraculously save both. May I present Exhibit A:

The LI standing between the Hero and their one weakness: literally every time Lena has built anti-kryptonite suits, protected Kara before she knew her identity, and specifically Exhibit B:

Dramatic saves of the LI: I present the longing looks mid-rescue for Exhibit C:

The Hero running flying toward certain death to save their LI: Kara disregards a kryptonite bomb in Exhibit D:

The LI being the last to know the hero's identity, but Hero will still risk their identity to save the LI: Everyone say hello to Exhibit E:

The Hero finding strength from their LI: the CW sure loves using El Mayarah in Supercorp posts! And social media aside, we've seen how confident and strong Lena makes Kara, both in dialogue and visually. (And it's a bonus that Kara makes Lena stronger too!)

Everything with food

Kara literally referred to food as a love language when talking to Nia. Only an episode or so away from bringing Lena food from 3 different countries. And let’s remember how Kara offered to fly to Italy for her first date with James...

Kara also always brought Lena food, even before season 5. That was their Thing.

We also have to talk about the absences of food: Kara dropping potstickers at Pulitzer ceremony when she sees Lena and not accepting Dansen’s invitation to get food after her falling out with Lena.

It was established all the way back in Season 1 (very much so in the fun Flash crossover) that Kara thinks food is more important than everything and will often use it as a coping mechanism when she’s sad (like in Season 2/3 about Mon). Yet, she’s so devastated over Lena that she can’t even eat her favorite foods? Interesting.

Color schemes and certain shots

The red/blue color scheme consistently used with Supercorp, with exception to the purple tones used in Season 5 to represent their conflict.

No other love interest for Kara has consistently used that iconic Super/LL color palet. Not James, Mon, William, or the two episodes with Adam.

I'd like to specifically remind everyone how Kara chose to wear purple with William, against Alex's explicit advice.

There are always lighting choices made with Supercorp shots. No other duo (besides dramatic Danvers sisters shots) seem to have such artistic care.

Do I even need to mention the balcony scenes? Both at the Pulitzer Ceremony and in scenes from multiple seasons where Kara has hovered over Lena's balcony-- most notably in 5x03.

Like seriously, do I need to mention the scene from 5x08 where Kara and Lena are looking longingly at the same picture of the two of them?

Music

If I know anything as a musician, I know scores. And Blake Neely has created certain melodies just for Supercorp saves. There’s the typical “Supergirl hero” melody, but it’s rarely used for scenes with Lena (besides the one instance in 5x07 cliff scene, when Neely combines the Leviathan theme with the Supergirl theme).

If you want to listen to examples: the brief save in 2x15 and the plane save in 3x05. Both melodies are unique, unreleased scores that (to my musical knowledge) have not been repeated with other Kara rescues.

Also, can we talk about how Supercorp has their own heroic theme, composed specifically for the 100th episode? Played by a live orchestra? For the one AU where Kara and Lena were partners from the start?

Decisions made by Melissa and Katie

We know they've known about Supercorp since at least the end of Season 2. Melissa showed Katie and they've been aware for years.

Yet, they play into the Supercorp dynamic. Longing stares, giggly dialogue, tear filled eyes, etc.

Regarding Melissa specifically: for her directorial debut she made two significant decisions. 1. She chose to have a camera pan over the room during Lex's speech, showing only Lena noticing Kara leaving and upset. 2. She dressed Lena in two comics Lois Lane outfits, one of which in red to parallel Kara's blue.

Melissa also has played Kara's interractions with Lena very similarly to how she played the Kara/James dynamic in Season 1. Something she chose not to do with Mon or William. But let's get into my next point...

Direct parallels with heterosexual superhero couples most on the CW

This includes Westallen, multiple iterations of Clois, Olicity, WonderTrev, Karolsen, PeterMJ, Deckerstar, Brainia, SpiderGwen, Lanolsen...need I go on??

On my blog, I have them tagged as: supercorp and hetero hero parallels

Individual ships are tagged as: [couple]/supercorp (ex. clois/supercorp)

Apologies for just giving links, but damn if I wrote all of the parallels out then it would probably take days and this post would be absurdly long.

And let’s not forget all the parallels Supercorp has with canon w/w

This includes Korrasami, Catradora, Clexa, Dansen, Avalance, Harlivy, Sanvers, etc.

I have these examples tagged similarly to the het examples: supercorp and canon sapphic parallels (same with individual ones)

You’ll notice there are actually more posts and parallels between Supercorp and het couples (the couples that most non-LGBT fans think of as more valid lmao), so take that as you will🙃

Despite the mistreatment of Supercorp fans, and LGBT fans in general, by some actors and crew, and despite the tone deaf plot lines and usage of characters, Supercorp has consistently held up with all of my points stated above. That's why I still have days where I can just feel it in my bones that Supergirl is playing the slow burn game with Supercorp. It clearly won't be as well-done as Catradora, because of how much sh*t they've pulled over the seasons. But just like you, I have days where I get strong feelings that maybe it’s all part of their poorly thought out plan and we’ll get that validation and happiness.

#sorry for the delay anon!#i had to finish up something for school before i could jump into This #also plz forgive my horrendous gifs. they aren't my Thing #supercorp #supergirl analysis #asks

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the-lady-writes-what · 4 years ago

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20. Tenya Iida

Theme: Vampire, Southern Gothic

Kinks: Outdoor sex, biting (duh), slight blood kink, mild spanking, mild punishment play, brat calling

All underaged characters are aged up. Tenya is 18+. Don’t come for me unless I send for you.

(The original Master List will change slightly from story to story. I keep adding stuff that I did not put on the original list)

Masterlist

You closed the ornate French doors behind you and stepped out into the night. The evening was sticky with the high humidity, but it was better than the sweltering heat inside. You fanned yourself with a silk fan and wandered into the garden. Cicadas hummed wildly in the trees while crickets chirped in the grass. In the air hung gardenia, wisteria, and homegrown lemongrass. So much better than the cloying, choking smell of cheap perfume, and even cheaper cigar smoke. You were dragged here almost against your will. The only things you liked about the party were the cocktails and the lovely new cocktail dress you got to show off. It was a silk and chiffon dress that wrapped around your body like a second skin. Best of all, it was in your favorite color.

Here in the deep south of Louisiana, the silk and chiffon were welcomed in the heat. The evening had cooled a great deal since the afternoon when you arrived at this southern palace. If it had been hosted at an actual plantation home, you would have chosen to wear your new favorite dress to a different venue.

Thankfully, the house was less than fifty years old and was owned by your boss, who liked a certain amount of Americana, odd for someone who was Japanese. But who were you to judge Mr. Toshinori?

Perhaps it wasn't the best idea to walk into the night all by yourself. If quirks weren't bad enough, add vampires into the mix, and you have a world turned upside down. Before you ask, vampires were never real until someone had the misfortune of having a literal vampire-quirk. It spread by accent when that civilian had gone too long without sating themselves on living blood, they infected another. As it came to be known throughout the world in news and social media, the vampire quirk was passed through bites and the exchange of blood. The victim still kept their original quirks, but now they had to have blood to live, they can't step out into the sun unless the victims wanted serious burns, and they grew pale or gray like death, depending on skin tone.

But the party was too stifling.

Half the guests were strangers to you, friends of Mr. Toshinori. The other half of the guest list included people who just made you feel terrible. They weren't bad people, but they reminded you of a time when you had someone special. Tenya has been missing for two years since the vampire quirk first infected Japan. Though a lot of work had been done to quell the problem, many were still missing. One day he was there, fighting crime and protecting you and the city. The next, he was gone. Vanished. His family and agency didn't know where he'd gone, much to your horror. Two years later, there were more questions than answers.

The fresh air was necessary for you not to lose your mind or get plastered in front of Mr. Toshinori's friends. Tonight felt similar to summer evenings in Japan, so it wasn't out of place. You stepped further away from the house and squinted into the yard. A full moon pierced in between the branches and shed some light. You found a path that led out into an unfenced part of the yard. You weren't sure if Americans were fond of wide open backyards, or if the fancy house was built so far from the nearest neighbors, a fence seemed silly. You glanced over your shoulder, then continued. You didn't mind the grass tickling your legs, but it was the bugs treating you like an all-you-can-eat buffet. You found a pebbled path and took it to avoid all the bugs. Your heels weren't very high at all, so walking down the trail wasn't a significant feat. You circled the property, always making sure that you could still make out parts of the house.

The night grew longer. Sooner rather than later, someone was going to miss you at the party. Your quirk wasn't strong against most people, let alone someone infected with a vampire quirk. You think about going back but only think. The night air is so clear and breathable. You didn't even mind the bug bites and humidity. You made another circle around the house's property before your legs started to hurt. Behind a gardenia bush stood a stone bench perfect for you to rest. You sank down with a sigh. The smell of gardenias was almost too much before a new smell wafted towards you. It was a smooth, masculine cologne. You smelled it before and knew it well.

You sprang to your feet to follow the scent. It led you back around the house where no one in the windows could see you scurry through the bushes. The lights of the house slowly began to disappear the further you traveled. A finely manicured garden gave way to the wilderness. Moonlight and starlight guided you deeper still with frogs croaking around a small moss-covered pond. Moonbeams split between the branches of a weeping willow to outline the shadowed figure sitting at the base of the tree. You stopped in your tracks. Your heart started pounding.

The figure rose to their feet and turned towards you. A summer breeze brushed the leaves out of the way to reveal their full form.

"Y/N?"

Tenya's voice froze the blood in your veins. Tears welled in your eyes at the first intonement of his voice, and you took a cautious step towards him. Your legs shook to the point that you weren't able to stand any longer. Your heel snagged on an upraised root and sent you tumbled over. Tenya's superior speed let him catch you before you landed on the loamy ground.

"Are you alright?" Iida asked.

You balked. Your jaw dropped to the ground.

"Am I okay? Are you okay? What happened? Where have you been?" You had a thousand more questions. Instead, you chose to grab hold of his shirt and bury your face inside his chest.

His arms hesitantly wrapped around you. You breathed in his scent deeply. You missed this smell. Almost as much as you missed the man himself.

"I've missed you so much," you sighed.

"I…I missed you too," said Tenya.

You didn't bother to dry your eyes as you lifted your head to look up at him. Tenya's eyes glowed red in the dark. Gasping, you pulled away slightly. Tenya ground his teeth and turned his eyes away from you. You felt his arms slip away from you even though you still clutched his shirt.

"I'm sorry, Y/N. I couldn't stop him. I wasn't trying to apprehend a criminal, but he bit me. I couldn't face my family or you after knowing what I became."

"Then, why are you here?"

"I made arrangements with Toshinori. I only wanted to see you one more time. I wanted to see how you were if you were eating right. If you moved on." Your heart sank. You reached up with both hands and held his face and turned it slowly over to yours.

"Move on? You hoped I moved on?" Your voice cracked at the insult. "All I wanted was to know what happened to you, Tenya. I love you, I don't care what you've turned into! You gave yourself up in the pursuit of justice. You're my hero, Tenya. How could I move on from you?"

You didn't give him a chance to make a rebuttal. You kissed him hard on the lips, licking and biting where you could. You both stumbled to the ground, Tenya being too distracted to stop the fall. You straddled his hips and held his head between your hands. Your tears watered his cheeks as you kissed his lips and each cheek, his eyes, chin, forehead, and both of his ears. You kissed him all over until his face was cherry red.

"Y-Y/N! Calm down, I understand! You, you love me. But there's something you need to know."

You stopped for a moment. More so to catch your breath than because he told you to. You wanted to kiss him all night. His eyes glowed red in the dark. Tenya leaned forward and braced his hands against the moist earth. As he sat up, you felt his hardened member poke between your cheeks. Tenya parted his lips. Two slivery fangs protruded from pinkish gums.

"I've been infected by the vampire quirk, which makes things like this…awkward. You have no idea how many nights I thought about you. Wondering if you would still want me after finding out I was infected. I wanted to go to you and," Tenya swallowed hard. "Do unspeakable things to you."

His face grew redder. The tips of his ears turned bright pink. You stifled yourself to keep from laughing. No matter how adorable you thought his face looked, that didn't make the situation any less severe. You needed to focus on what he was about to say.

"I found myself going to your apartment and thought about how your neck would feel against my new fangs as I thrust inside you. I wondered what you would sound like as I…fucked you and sucked your blood. I was afraid that you would think of me as nothing but a monster."

You reached behind your back, where Tenya's cock stood at attention. You wrapped your hand around him and pumped him through his clothes. This made the man beneath you buck his hips.

"Does this look like I think you're a monster?" You asked slyly.

Tenya grunted as you pumped him harder. You shifted forward a little, so you could unzip his pants pull it out. You couldn't tell whether it was the vampire quirk that made him so big and hard all of a sudden, or your administrative kisses were enough to make him rock hard.

In a flash, you were pinned to the willow tree, shielded from all view except for Tenya's. The wind was knocked out of you that you didn't get the chance to recover. The sounds of tearing fabric reached your ears before you realized that it was Tenya, your sweet Tenya, who was doing the clothes-ripping. Your silk panties were reduced to shreds by the time he was done with them. The seams of your dress were also ripped in his furor to get you to spread open for him. Tenya gave no warning before plunging right in. You moaned at how full you felt, how the veins of his cock rubbed you the right way. You tossed your head back as Tenya slammed his hips into yours. His teeth left indents in your shoulders and the tops of your dress, where it slipped from your shoulders. Tenya's speed and rough treatment made the willow tree shiver along with you.

"You're devious, you know," Tenya growled. "Fucking a vampire in the middle of the woods. You should be punished for having such a lewd mind."

Tenya held your legs wide open and pulled them taut behind his back. Your ankles instinctively crossed each other at the small of his back, and your heels dug into his flesh. Not that Tenya seemed to mind or notice. Tenya held you tight against him until there was no more space between you. In your lust-filled haze, you could no longer tell where you ended and where Tenya began. He pounded your cunt with the ferocity of a starving man at a buffet. You giggled how earlier you thought yourself an all-you-can-eat buffet for mosquitoes, and here you were being served up to someone who likely hadn't had sex for two years.

One of Tenya's broad hands came down against your thigh, turning it bright red with his handprint.

"Laughing…at a time like this, YN?" Tenya grunted with a deep thrust that kissed your cervix. "You should pay attention when you're getting punished."

If this was punishment, then you were going to be a very bad girl for your boyfriend.

"Mhmm, Tenya. Do it again. Fuck me harder, spank me more!"

Tenya slowed only to give you a stern look. His hips never stopped moving, and his cock was still heavily buried in you. He glowered at your sheepish smile.

"Is that how you want to play, little brat?"

You challenged him to a fight you could not win. Still buried deep within your inner walls, Tenya laid you out on the grass, hair and torn chiffon rumbled on the ground. He held your legs up to your chest and demanded that you hold them there. Your shoulders pressed into the dirt, but you didn't mind. Tenya resumed his seat in your warm walls and started stretching you out anew. This new angle was superb for reaching deep inside your cunt and hitting your cervix over and over again. Tenya clawed your body like it was his own toy to play with. Having never before seen this side of Tenya before, you moaned at the rough treatment. Your juices spread all over your lower belly, thighs, and the Tenya's pelvis. Stars danced in front of your eyes as you felt your whole body tighten. Your back arched taught like a bow. Your hands clutched the ground for support as you felt yourself falling. Tenya snapped his hips with enough strength to break your bones. Heavy ropes of cum warmed your walls and lower belly as it spread. You were utterly boneless despite Tenya slowly pumping more into you.

His head leaned down and pressed his lips against your throat. You felt the pinpricks of his fangs jut against your flesh, teasing and threatening at the same time. Slowly, you nodded your head.

Tenya waited for no more. He sank his teeth into as he started his pumping again. His thrusts were slower but harder. Each bone-shattering snap of his hips dragged you back up to that wonderful precipice you'd just fallen over. You moved your hips against him and wrapped your arms behind his neck. Tenya was careful not to take too much or too quickly. He suckled your blood with a strange gentleness that contrasted the harsh thrusting inside your womb. That only changed when he climaxed again, fangs and cock still fully sheathed inside you. You milked him while his mouth laved up the crimson rivulets.

You reached up to cling to his shoulders as Tenya carefully pulled away to avoid hurting you further. The ache in your legs was proof that you had never experienced the like before. However, it was a delicious pain. You vaguely remember Tenya rearranging your clothes and his before picking you up off the ground. You fell asleep in his arms, listening to the hum of cicadas.

#kinktober week #kinktober my hero academia edition #my hero academia #mha #mha fanfiction #mha smut #tenya #tenya Iida #vampire!Tenya

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grigori77 · 4 years ago

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2020 in Movies - My Top 30 Fave Movies (Part 2)

20. ONWARD – Disney and Pixar’s best digitally animated family feature of 2020 (beating the admittedly impressive Soul to the punch) clearly has a love of fantasy roleplay games like Dungeons & Dragons, its quirky modern-day AU take populated by fantastical races and creatures seemingly tailor-made for the geek crowd … needless to say, me and many of my friends absolutely loved it. That doesn’t mean that the classic Disney ideals of love, family and believing in yourself have been side-lined in favour of fan-service – this is as heartfelt, affecting and tearful as their previous standouts, albeit with plenty of literal magic added to the metaphorical kind. The central premise is a clever one – once upon a time, magic was commonplace, but over the years technology came along to make life easier, so that in the present day the various races (elves, centaurs, fauns, pixies, goblins and trolls among others) get along fine without it. Then timid elf Ian Lightfoot (Tom Holland) receives a wizard’s staff for his sixteenth birthday, a bequeathed gift from his father, who died before he was born, with instructions for a spell that could bring him back to life for one whole day. Encouraged by his brash, over-confident wannabe adventurer elder brother Barley (Chris Pratt), Ian tries it out, only for the spell to backfire, leaving them with the animated bottom half of their father and just 24 hours to find a means to restore the rest of him before time runs out. Cue an “epic quest” … needless to say, this is another top-notch offering from the original masters of the craft, a fun, affecting and thoroughly infectious family-friendly romp with a winning sense of humour and inspired, flawless world-building. Holland and Pratt are both fantastic, their instantly believable, ill-at-ease little/big brother chemistry effortlessly driving the story through its ingenious paces, and the ensuing emotional fireworks are hilarious and heart-breaking in equal measure, while there’s typically excellent support from Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Elaine from Seinfeld) as Ian and Barley’s put-upon but supportive mum, Laurel, Octavia Spencer as once-mighty adventurer-turned-restaurateur “Corey” the Manticore and Mel Rodriguez (Getting On, The Last Man On Earth) as overbearing centaur cop (and Laurel’s new boyfriend) Colt Bronco. The film marks the sophomore feature gig for Dan Scanlon, who debuted with 2013’s sequel Monsters University, and while that was enjoyable enough I ultimately found it non-essential – no such verdict can be levelled against THIS film, the writer-director delivering magnificently in all categories, while the animation team have outdone themselves in every scene, from the exquisite environments and character/creature designs to some fantastic (and frequently delightfully bonkers) set-pieces, while there’s a veritable riot of brilliant RPG in-jokes to delight geekier viewers (gelatinous cube! XD). Massive, unadulterated fun, frequently hilarious and absolutely BURSTING with Disney’s trademark heart, this was ALMOST my animated feature of the year. More on that later …

19. THE GENTLEMEN – Guy Ritchie’s been having a rough time with his last few movies (The Man From UNCLE didn’t do too bad but it wasn’t exactly a hit and was largely overlooked or simply ignored, while intended franchise-starter King Arthur: Legend of the Sword was largely derided and suffered badly on release, dying a quick death financially – it’s a shame on both counts, because I really liked them), so it’s nice to see him having some proper success with his latest, even if he has basically reverted to type to do it. Still, when his newest London gangster flick is THIS GOOD it seems churlish to quibble – this really is what he does best, bringing together a collection of colourful geezers and shaking up their status quo, then standing back and letting us enjoy the bloody, expletive-riddled results. This particularly motley crew is another winning selection, led by Matthew McConaughey as ruthlessly successful cannabis baron Mickey Pearson, who’s looking to retire from the game by selling off his massive and highly lucrative enterprise for a most tidy sum (some $400,000,000 to be precise) to up-and-coming fellow American ex-pat Matthew Berger (Succession’s Jeremy Strong, oozing sleazy charm), only for local Chinese triad Dry Eye (Crazy Rich Asians’ Henry Golding, chewing the scenery with enthusiasm) to start throwing spanners into the works with the intention of nabbing the deal for himself for a significant discount. Needless to say Mickey’s not about to let that happen … McConaughey is ON FIRE here, the best he’s been since Dallas Buyers Club in my opinion, clearly having great fun sinking his teeth into this rich character and Ritchie’s typically sparkling, razor-witted dialogue, and he’s ably supported by a quality ensemble cast, particularly co-star Charlie Hunnam as Mickey’s ice-cold, steel-nerved right-hand-man Raymond Smith, Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery as his classy, strong-willed wife Rosalind, Colin Farrell as a wise-cracking, quietly exasperated MMA trainer and small-time hood simply known as the Coach (who gets many of the film’s best lines), and, most notably, Hugh Grant as the film’s nominal narrator, thoroughly morally bankrupt private investigator Fletcher, who consistently steals the film. This is Guy Ritchie at his very best – a twisty rug-puller of a plot that constantly leaves you guessing, brilliantly observed and richly drawn characters you can’t help loving in spite of the fact there’s not a single hero among them, a deliciously unapologetic, politically incorrect sense of humour and a killer soundtrack. Getting the cinematic year off to a phenomenal start, it’s EASILY Ritchie’s best film since Sherlock Holmes, and a strong call-back to the heady days of Snatch (STILL my favourite) and Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels. Here’s hoping he’s on a roll again, eh?

18. SPONTANEOUS – one of the year’s biggest under-the-radar surprise hits for me was one which I actually might not have caught if things had been a little more normal and ordered. Thankfully with all the lockdown and cinematic shutdown bollocks going on, this fantastically subversive and deeply satirical indie teen comedy horror came along at the perfect time, and I completely flipped out over it. Now those who know me know I don’t tend to gravitate towards teen cinema, but like all those other exceptions I’ve loved over the years, this one had a brilliantly compulsive hook I just couldn’t turn down – small-town high-schooler Mara (Knives Out and Netflix’ Cursed’s Katherine Langford) is your typical cool outsider kid, smart, snarky and just putting up with the scene until she can graduate and get as far away as possible … until one day in her senior year one of her classmates just inexplicably explodes. Like her peers, she’s shocked and she mourns, then starts to move on … until it happens again. As the death toll among the senior class begins to mount, it becomes clear something weird is going on, but Mara has other things on her mind because the crisis has, for her, had an unexpected benefit – without it she wouldn’t have fallen in love with like-minded oddball new kid Dylan (Lean On Pete and Words On Bathroom Walls’ Charlie Plummer). The future’s looking bright, but only if they can both live to see it … this is a wickedly intelligent film, powered by a skilfully executed script and a wonderfully likeable young cast who consistently steer their characters around the potential cliched pitfalls of this kind of cinema, while debuting writer-director Brian Duffield (already a rising star thanks to scripts for Underwater, The Babysitter and blacklist darling Jane Got a Gun among others) show he’s got as much talent and flair for crafting truly inspired cinema as he has for thinking it up in the first place, delivering some impressively offbeat set-pieces and several neat twists you frequently don’t see coming ahead of time. Langford and Plummer as a sassy, spicy pair who are easy to root for without ever getting cloying or sweet, while there’s glowing support from the likes of Hayley Law (Rioverdale, Altered Carbon, The New Romantic) as Mara’s best friend Tess, Piper Perabo and Transparent’s Rob Huebel as her increasingly concerned parents, and Insecure’s Yvonne Orji as Agent Rosetti, the beleaguered government employee sent to spearhead the investigation into exactly what’s happening to these kids. Quirky, offbeat and endlessly inventive, this is one of those interesting instances where I’m glad they pushed the horror elements into the background so we could concentrate on the comedy, but more importantly these wonderfully well-realised and vital characters – there are some skilfully executed shocks, but far more deep belly laughs, and there’s bucketloads of heart to eclipse the gore. Another winning debut from a talent I intend to watch with great interest in the future.

17. HAMILTON – arriving just as Black Lives Matter reached fever-pitch levels, this feature presentation of the runaway Broadway musical smash-hit could not have been better timed. Shot over three nights during the show’s 2016 run with the original cast and cut together with specially created “setup shots”, it’s an immersive experience that at once puts you right in amongst the audience (at times almost a character themselves, never seen but DEFINITELY heard) but also lets you experience the action up close. And what action – it’s an incredible show, a thoroughly fascinating piece of work that reads like something very staid and proper on paper (an all-encompassing biographical account of the life and times of American Founding Father Alexander Hamilton) but, in execution, becomes something very different and EXTREMELY vital. The execution certainly couldn’t be further from the usual period biopic fare this kind of historical subject matter usually gets (although in the face of recent high quality revisionist takes like Marie Antoinette, The Great and Tesla it’s not SO surprising), while the cast is not at all what you’d expect – with very few notable exceptions the cast is almost entirely people of colour, despite the fact that the real life individuals they’re playing were all very white indeed. Every single one of them is also an absolute revelation – the show’s writer-composer Lin-Manuel Miranda (already riding high on the success of In the Heights) carries the central role of Hamilton with effortless charm and raw star power, Leslie Odom Jr. (Smash, Murder On the Orient Express) is duplicitously complex as his constant nemesis Aaron Burr, Christopher Jackson (In the Heights, Moana, Bull) oozes integrity and nobility as his mentor and friend George Washington, Phillipa Soo is sweet and classy as his wife Eliza while Renée Elise Goldsberry (The Immortal Life of Henrietta Jacks, Altered Carbon) is fiery and statuesque as her sister Angelica Schuyler (the one who got away), and Jonathan Groff (Mindhunter) consistently steals every scene he’s in as fiendish yet childish fan favourite King George III, but the show (and the film) ultimately belongs to veritable powerhouse Daveed Diggs (Blindspotting, The Good Lord Bird) in a spectacular duel role, starting subtly but gaining scene-stealing momentum as French Revolutionary Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de Lafayette, before EXPLODING onto the stage in the second half as indomitable third American President Thomas Jefferson. Not having seen the stage show, I was taken completely by surprise by this, revelling in its revisionist genius and offbeat, quirky hip-hop charm, spellbound by the skilful ease with which is takes the sometimes quite dull historical fact and skews it into something consistently entertaining and absorbing, transported by the catchy earworm musical numbers and thoroughly tickled by the delightfully cheeky sense of humour strung throughout (at least when I wasn’t having my heart broken by moments of raw dramatic power). Altogether it’s a pretty unique cinematic experience I wish I could have actually gotten to see on the big screen, and one I’ve consistently recommended to all my friends, even the ones who don’t usually like musicals. As far as I’m concerned it doesn’t need a proper Les Misérables style screen adaptation – this is about as perfect a presentation as the show could possibly hope for.

16. SPUTNIK – summer’s horror highlight (despite SERIOUSLY tough competition) was a guaranteed sleeper hit that I almost missed entirely, stumbling across the trailer one day on YouTube and getting bowled over by its potential, prompting me to hunt it down by any means necessary. The feature debut of Russian director Egor Abramenko, this first contact sci-fi chiller is about as far from E.T. as it’s possible to get, sharing some of the same DNA as Carpenter’s The Thing but proudly carving its own path with consummate skill and definitely signalling great things to come from its brand new helmer and relative unknown screenwriters Oleg Malovichko and Andrei Zolotarev. Oksana Akinshina (probably best known in the West for her powerful climactic cameo in The Bourne Supremacy) is the beating heart of the film as neurophysiologist Tatyana Yuryevna Klimova, brought in to aid in the investigation in the Russian wilderness circa 1983 after an orbital research mission goes horribly wrong. One of the cosmonauts dies horribly, while the other, Konstantin (The Duelist’s Pyotr Fyodorov) seems unharmed, but it quickly becomes clear that he’s now the host for something decidedly extraterrestrial and potentially terrifying, and as Tatyana becomes more deeply embroiled in her assignment she comes to realise that her superiors, particularly mysterious Red Army project leader Colonel Semiradov (The PyraMMMid’s Fyodor Bondarchuk), have far more insidious plans for Konstantin and his new “friend” than she could ever imagine. This is about as dark, intense and nightmarish as this particular sub-genre gets, a magnificently icky body horror that slowly builds its tension as we’re gradually exposed to the various truths and the awful gravity of the situation slowly reveals itself, punctuated by skilfully executed shocks and some particularly horrifying moments when the evils inflicted by the humans in charge prove far worse than anything the alien can do, while the ridiculously talented writers have a field day pulling the rug out from under us again and again, never going for the obvious twist and keeping us guessing right to the devastating ending, while the beautifully crafted digital creature effects are nothing short of astonishing and thoroughly creepy. Akinshina dominates the film with her unbridled grace, vulnerability and integrity, the relationship that develops between Tatyana and Konstantin (Fyodorov delivering a beautifully understated turn belying deep inner turmoil) feeling realistically earned as it goes from tentatively wary to tragically bittersweet, while Bondarchuk invests the Colonel with a nuanced air of tarnished authority and restrained brutality that made him one of my top screen villains for the year. One of 2020’s great sleeper hits, I can’t speak of this film highly enough – it’s a genuine revelation, an instant classic for whom I’ll sing its praises for years to come, and I wish enormous future success to all the creative talents involved.

15. THE INVISIBLE MAN – looks like third time’s a charm for Leigh Whannell, writer-director of my ALMOST horror movie of the year (more on that later) – while he’s had immense success as a horror writer over the years (co-creator of both the Saw and Insidious franchises), as a director his first two features haven’t exactly set the world alight, with debut Insidious: Chapter III garnering similar takes to the rest of the series but ultimately turning out to be a bit of a damp squib quality-wise, while his second feature Upgrade was a stone-cold masterpiece that was (rightly) EXTREMELY well received critically, but ultimately snuck in under the radar and has remained a stubbornly hidden gem since. No such problems with his third feature, though – his latest collaboration with producer Jason Blum and the insanely lucrative Blumhouse Pictures has proven a massive hit both financially AND with reviewers, and deservedly so. Having given up on trying to create a shared cinematic universe inhabited by their classic monsters, Universal resolved to concentrate on standalones to showcase their elite properties, and their first try is a rousing success, Whannell bringing HG Wells’ dark and devious human monster smack into the 21st Century as only he can. The result is a surprisingly subtle piece of work, much more a lethally precise exercise in cinematic sleight of hand and extraordinary acting than flashy visual effects, strictly adhering to the Blumhouse credo of maximum returns for minimum bucks as the story is stripped down to its bare essentials and allowed to play out without any unnecessary weight. The Handmaid’s Tale’s Elizabeth Moss once again confirms what a masterful actress she is as she brings all her performing weapons to bear in the role of Cecelia “Cee” Kass, the cloistered wife of affluent but monstrously abusive optics pioneer Aidan Griffin (Netflix’ The Haunting of Hill House’s Oliver Jackson-Cohen), who escapes his clutches in the furiously tense opening sequence and goes to ground with the help of her closest childhood friend, San Francisco cop James Lanier (Leverage’s Aldis Hodge) and his teenage daughter Sydney (A Wrinkle in Time’s Storm Reid). Two weeks later, Aidan commits suicide, leaving Cee with a fortune to start her life over (with the proviso that she’s never ruled mentally incompetent), but as she tries to find her way in the world again little things start going wrong for her, and she begins to question if there might be something insidious going on. As her nerves start to unravel, she begins to suspect that Aidan is still alive, still very much in her life, fiendishly toying with her and her friends, but no-one can see him. Whannell plays her paranoia up for all it’s worth, skilfully teasing out the scares so that, just like her friends, we begin to wonder if it might all be in her head after all, before a spectacular mid-movie reveal throws the switch into high gear and the true threat becomes clear. The lion’s share of the film’s immense success must of course go to Moss – her performance is BEYOND a revelation, a blistering career best that totally powers the whole enterprise, and it goes without saying that she’s the best thing in this. Even so, she has sterling support from Hodge and Reid, as well as Love Child’s Harriet Dyer as Cee’s estranged big sister Emily and Wonderland’s Michael Dorman as Adrian’s slimy, spineless lawyer brother Tom, and, while he doesn’t have much actual (ahem) “screen time”, Jackson-Cohen delivers a fantastically icy, subtly malevolent turn which casts a large “shadow” over the film. This is one of my very favourite Blumhouse films, a pitch-perfect psychological chiller that keeps the tension cranked up unbearably tight and never lets go, Whannell once again displaying uncanny skill with expert jump-scares, knuckle-whitening chills and a truly astounding standout set-piece that easily goes down as one of the top action sequences of 2020. Undoubtedly the best version of Wells’ story to date, this goes a long way in repairing the damage of Universal’s abortive “Dark Universe” efforts, as well as showcasing a filmmaking master at the very height of his talents.

14. EXTRACTION – the Coronavirus certainly has threw a massive spanner in the works of the year’s cinematic calendar – among many other casualties to the blockbuster shunt, the latest (and most long-awaited) MCU movie, Black Widow, should have opened to further record-breaking box office success at the end of spring, but instead the theatres were all closed and virtually all the heavyweights were pushed back or shelved indefinitely. Thank God, then, for the streaming services, particularly Hulu, Amazon and Netflix, the latter of which provided a perfect movie for us to see through the key transition into the summer blockbuster season, an explosively flashy big budget action thriller ushered in by MCU alumni the Russo Brothers (who produced and co-wrote this adaptation of Ciudad, a graphic novel that Joe Russo co-created with Ande Parks and Fernando Leon Gonzalez) and barely able to contain the sheer star-power wattage of its lead, Thor himself. Chris Hemsworth plays Tyler Rake, a former Australian SAS operative who hires out his services to an extraction operation under the command of mercenary Nik Khan (The Patience Stone’s Golshifteh Farahani), brought in to liberate Ovi Mahajan (Rudhraksh Jaiswal in his first major role), the pre-teen son of incarcerated Indian crime lord Ovi Sr. (Pankaj Tripathi), who has been abducted by Bangladeshi rival Amir Asif (Priyanshu Painyuli). The rescue itself goes perfectly, but when the time comes for the hand-off the team is double-crossed and Tyler is left stranded in the middle of Dhaka with no choice but to keep Ovi alive as every corrupt cop and street gang in the city closes in around them. This is the feature debut of Sam Hargrave, the latest stuntman to try his hand at directing, so he certainly knows his way around an action set-piece, and the result is a thoroughly breathless adrenaline rush of a film, bursting at the seams with spectacular fights, gun battles and car chases, dominated by a stunning sustained sequence that plays out in one long shot, guaranteed to leave jaws lying on the floor. Not that there should be any surprise – Hargrave cut his teeth as a stunt coordinator for the Russos on Captain America: Civil War and their Avengers films. That said, he displays strong talent for the quieter disciplines of filmmaking too, delivering quality character development and drawing out consistently noteworthy performances from his cast. Of course, Hemsworth can do the action stuff in his sleep, but there’s a lot more to Tyler than just his muscle, the MCU veteran investing him with real wounded vulnerability and a tragic fatalism which colours every scene, while Jaiswal is exceptional throughout, showing plenty of promise for the future, and there’s strong support from Farahani and Painyuli, as well as Stranger Things’ David Harbour as world-weary retired merc Gaspard, and a particularly impressive, muscular turn from Randeep Hooda (Once Upon a Time in Mumbai) as Saju, a former Para and Ovi’s bodyguard, who’s determined to take possession of the boy himself, even if he has to go through Tyler to get him. This is action cinema that really deserves to be seen on the big screen – I watched it twice in a week and would happily have paid for two trips to the cinema for it if I could have. As we looked down the barrel of a summer season largely devoid of blockbuster fare, I couldn’t recommend this enough. Thank the gods for Netflix …

13. THE TRIAL OF THE CHICAGO 7 – although it’s definitely a film that really benefitted enormously from releasing on Netflix during the various lockdowns, this was one of the blessed few I actually got to see during one of the UK’s frustratingly rare lulls when cinemas were actually OPEN. Rather perversely it therefore became one of my favourite cinematic experiences of 2020, but then I’m just as much a fan of well-made cerebral films as I am of the big, immersive blockbuster EXPERIENCES, so this probably still would have been a standout in a normal year. Certainly if this was a purely CRITICAL list for the year this probably would have placed high in the Top Ten … Aaron Sorkin is a writer whose work I have ardently admired ever since he went from esteemed playwright to in-demand talent for both the big screen AND the small with A Few Good Men, and TTOTC7 is just another in a long line of consistently impressive, flawlessly written works rife with addictive quickfire dialogue, beautifully observed characters and rewardingly propulsive narrative storytelling (therefore resting comfortably amongst the well-respected likes of The West Wing, Charlie Wilson’s War, Moneyball and The Social Network). It also marks his second feature as a director (after fascinating and incendiary debut Molly’s Game), and once again he’s gone for true story over fiction, tackling the still controversial subject of the infamous 1968 trial of the “ringleaders” of the infamous riots which marred Chicago’s Diplomatic National Convention five months earlier, in which thousands of hippies and college students protesting the Vietnam War clashed with police. Spurred on by the newly-instated Presidential Administration of Richard Nixon to make some examples, hungry up-and-coming prosecutor Richard Schultz (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is confident in his case, while the Seven – who include respected and astute student activist Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) and confrontational counterculture firebrands Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Succession’s Jeremy Strong) – are the clear underdogs. They’re a divided bunch (particularly Hayden and Hoffman, who never mince their words about what little regard they hold for each other), and they’re up against the combined might of the U.S. Government, while all they have on their side is pro-bono lawyer and civil rights activist William Kunstler (Mark Rylance), who’s sharp, driven and thoroughly committed to the cause but clearly massively outmatched … not to mention the fact that the judge presiding over the case is Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella), a fierce and uncompromising conservative who’s clearly 100% on the Administration’s side, and who might in fact be stark raving mad (he also frequently goes to great lengths to make it clear to all concerned that he is NOT related to Abbie). Much as we’ve come to expect from Sorkin, this is cinema of grand ideals and strong characters, not big spectacle and hard action, and all the better for it – he’s proved time and again that he’s one of the very best creative minds in Hollywood when it comes to intelligent, thought-provoking and engrossing thinking-man’s entertainment, and this is pure par for the course, keeping us glued to the screen from the skilfully-executed whirlwind introductory montage to the powerfully cathartic climax, and every varied and brilliant scene in-between. This is heady stuff, focusing on what’s still an extremely thorny issue made all the more urgently relevant and timely given what was (and still is) going on in American politics at the time, and everyone involved here was clearly fully committed to making the film as palpable, powerful and resonant as possible for the viewer, no matter their nationality or political inclination. Also typical for a Sorkin film, the cast are exceptional, everyone clearly having the wildest time getting their teeth into their finely-drawn characters and that magnificent dialogue – Redmayne and Baron Cohen are compellingly complimentary intellectual antagonists given their radically different approaches and their roles’ polar opposite energies, while Rylance delivers another pitch-perfect, simply ASTOUNDING performance that once again marks him as one of the very best actors of his generation, and there are particularly meaty turns from Strong, Langella, Aquaman’s Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (as besieged Black Panther Bobby Seale) and a potent late appearance from Michael Keaton that sear themselves into the memory long after viewing. Altogether then, this is a phenomenal film which deserves to be seen no matter the format, a thought-provoking and undeniably IMPORTANT masterwork from a master cinematic storyteller that says as much about the world we live in now as the decidedly turbulent times it portrays …

12. GREYHOUND – when the cinemas closed back in March, the fate of many of the major summer blockbusters we’d been looking forward to was thrown into terrible doubt. Some were pushed back to more amenable dates in the autumn or winter (which even then ultimately proved frustratingly ambitious), others knocked back a whole year to fill summer slots for 2021, but more than a few simply dropped off the radar entirely with the terrible words “postponed until further notice” stamped on them, and I lamented them all, this one in particular. It hung in there longer than some, stubbornly holding onto its June release slot for as long as possible, but eventually it gave up the ghost too … but thanks to Apple TV+, not for long, ultimately releasing less than a month later than intended. Thankfully the film itself was worth the fuss, a taut World War II suspense thriller that’s all killer, no filler – set during the infamous Battle of the Atlantic, it portrays the constant life-or-death struggle faced by the Allied warships assigned to escort the transport convoys as they crossed the ocean, defending their charges from German U-boats. Adapted from C.S. Forester’s famous 1955 novel The Good Shepherd by Tom Hanks and directed by Aaron Schneider (Get Low), the narrative focuses on the crew of the escort leader, American destroyer USS Fletcher, codenamed “Greyhound”, and in particular its captain, Commander Ernest Krause (Hanks), a career sailor serving his first command. As they cross “the Pit”, the most dangerous middle stretch of the journey where they spend days without air-cover, they find themselves shadowed by “the Wolf Pack”, a particularly cunning group of German submarines that begin to pick away at the convoy’s stragglers. Faced with daunting odds, a dwindling supply of vital depth-charges and a ruthless, persistent enemy, Krause must make hard choices to bring his ships home safe … jumping into the thick of the action within the first ten minutes and maintaining its tension for the remainder of the trim 90-minute run, this is screen suspense par excellence, a sleek textbook example of how to craft a compelling big screen knuckle-whitener with zero fat and maximum reward, delivering a series of desperate naval scraps packed with hide-and-seek intensity, heart-in-mouth near-misses and fist-in-air cathartic payoffs by the bucket-load. Hanks is subtly magnificent, the calm centre of the narrative storm as a supposed newcomer to this battle arena who could have been BORN for it, bringing to mind his similarly unflappable in Captain Phillips and certainly not suffering by comparison; by and large he’s the focus point, but other crew members make strong (if sometimes quite brief) impressions, particularly Stephen Graham as Krause’s reliably seasoned XO, Lt. Commander Charlie Cole, The Magnificent Seven’s Manuel Garcia-Rulfo and Just Mercy’s Rob Morgan, while Elisabeth Shue does a lot with a very small part in brief flashbacks as Krause’s fiancée Evelyn. Relentless, exhilarating and thoroughly unforgettable, this was one of the true action highlights of the summer, and one hell of a war flick. I’m so glad it made the cut for the summer …

11. PROJECT POWER – with Marvel and DC pushing their tent-pole titles back in the face of COVID, the usual superhero antics we’ve come to expect for the summer were pretty thin on the ground in 2020, leading us to find our geeky fan thrills elsewhere. Unfortunately, pickings were frustratingly slim – Korean comic book actioner Gundala was entertaining but workmanlike, while Thor AU Mortal was underwhelming despite strong direction from Troll Hunter’s André Øvredal, and The New Mutants just got shat on by the studio and its distributors and no mistake – thank the Gods, then, for Netflix, once again riding to the rescue with this enjoyably offbeat super-thriller, which takes an intriguing central premise and really runs with it. New designer drug Power has hit the streets of New Orleans, able to give anyone who takes it a superpower for five minutes … the only problem is, until you try it, you don’t know what your own unique talent is – for some, it could mean five minutes of invisibility, or insane levels of super-strength, but other powers can be potentially lethal, the really unlucky buggers just blowing up on the spot. Robin (The Hate U Give’s Dominique Fishback) is a teenage Power-pusher with dreams of becoming a rap star, dealing the pills so she can help her diabetic mum; Frank Shaver (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is one of her customers, a police detective who uses his power of near invulnerability to even the playing field when supercharged crims cause a disturbance. Their lives are turned upside down when Art (Jamie Foxx) arrives in town – he’s a seriously badass ex-soldier determined to hunt down the source of Power by any means necessary, and he’s not above tearing the Big Easy apart to do it. This is a fun, gleefully infectious rollercoaster that doesn’t take itself too seriously, revelling in the anarchic potential of its premise and crafting some suitably OTT effects-driven chaos brought to pleasingly visceral fruition by its skilfully inventive director, Ariel Schulman (Catfish, Nerve, Viral), while Mattson Tomlin (the screenwriter of the DCEU’s oft-delayed, incendiary headline act The Batman) takes the story in some very interesting directions and poses fascinating questions about what Power’s TRULY capable of. Gordon-Levitt and Fishback are both brilliant, the latter particularly impressing in what’s sure to be a major breakthrough role for her, and the friendship their characters share is pretty adorable, while Foxx really is a force to be reckoned with, pretty chill even when he’s in deep shit but fully capable of turning into a bona fide killing machine at the flip of a switch, and there’s strong support from Westworld’s Rodrigo Santoro as Biggie, Power’s delightfully oily kingpin, Courtney B. Vance as Frank’s by-the-book superior, Captain Crane, Amy Landecker as Gardner, the morally bankrupt CIA spook responsible for the drug’s production, and Machine Gun Kelly as Newt, a Power dealer whose pyrotechnic “gift” really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Exciting, inventive, frequently amusing and infectiously likeable, this was some of the most uncomplicated cinematic fun I had all summer. Not bad for something which I’m sure was originally destined to become one of the season’s B-list features …

#onward #onward movie #The Gentlemen #spontaneous #spontaneous movie #hamilton #hamilton movie #sputnik #sputnik movie #The Invisible Man #Extraction #extraction movie #the trial of the chicago 7 #greyhound #greyhound movie #project power #2020 in movies

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mst3kproject · 4 years ago

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The River of the Giant Alligator

A bunch of Italians pretending they’re not Italian in a movie about a guy who chose the wrong place to build a hotel… it’s like Avalanche by way of Devil Fish, with an alligator. And racism. You can’t have a 70’s Italian jungle movie without the racism, and this one layers it on real thick. I think The River of the Giant Alligator has its MST3K bases covered.

Rich Asshole Joshua has opened Paradise House, a resort in the middle of the ‘virgin jungle’. He proudly tells visitors that not only has he left the surrounding ecosystem undamaged, but he’s helping the local people by giving them jobs and improving their standard of living. Naturally it’s not as simple as that. Trouble begins when Sheena, the model they brought for their advertising photographs (just for a dash of Killer Fish), vanishes overnight. Photographer Daniel and hotel manager Ally go to the locals looking for her, and are told that the River God has awakened and intends to drive the white people away by assuming the form of a giant crocodile and eating them all. Considering how mind-bogglingly stupid the tourists in this movie are, that should take all of twenty minutes.

The locals, who call themselves the Kuma, have a name for their River God but it’s pronounced five different ways and I won’t guess how to spell it. Because of the deep breathing sounds that presage its first appearance, I shall call the creature Darth Gator.

Let’s get the basics out of the way first. The whole movie is dubbed and the voice actors are bad. The Darth Gator prop is completely immobile but they mostly keep it in the dark or in really tight shots so we don’t notice… it’s only the occasional ill-advised wide shot where it’s obviously fake enough to be funny. There’s a spiky fence that exists mostly so that people can get impaled on it and a cloying little kid for no reason whatsoever. The ‘wildlife’ is a stock footage smorgasbord that includes orangutans and hippos on the same river. The worst effect in the film is a terrible miniature shot of the hotel on fire, which would have looked just fine if the people involved hadn’t forgotten that flames don’t scale.

So all that sucks, but is fairly harmless. Now let’s talk about the racism.

We’ll start with the movie’s treatment of its two ‘love stories’, and I use the floating commas because neither of them quite qualifies. Daniel and Ally are the main ‘couple’ of the movie. The camera lingers on each of them to show that he thinks she’s beautiful and she thinks he’s rugged, and they spend the whole movie hanging out on balconies and boats together and discussing whether the resort is good or bad for the local people… but they never get so much as a kiss. This is kind of nice, actually, because there’s very little time to stop and make out when you’re being chased by a large carnivorous reptile. It does, however, make for a hell of a contrast between them and the other ‘couple’ we see.

This is the model, Sheena, and her Kuma boyfriend. I am unclear on where this movie is set (the closest we get to a clue is Ally referring to the area as ‘the Orient’, which could honestly mean anything) but it’s perfectly clear that the reason they hired a black woman for their publicity photos is to make the place look ‘exotic’. There’s a weird moment when Joshua attempts to flirt with Sheena by telling her, “it occurs to me that Eve herself may have been black”, which… yes, that is how human evolution worked, what about it? All that aside, at the end of the day, Sheena runs off for a romantic evening with one of the tribesmen. We never see her talk to this guy or have any clue what made her pick him over any of the others. They just go fuck on a beach and then get eaten by an alligator.

So… we have blonde, blue-eyed white people having a perfectly chaste, wait-for-marriage love affair in which they actually get to know each other… and black people who run off with a stranger and screw out in the open like animals. Holy shit. I want to say I hope this wasn’t something the film-makers actively thought about, but it might be worse if they didn’t. Naturally, this is also a version of the ‘people who have premarital sex must die’ trope from slasher movies, and the movie makes doubly sure we know this is Bad Behaviour by having Ally remark that the Kuma are forbidden from visiting ‘the Island of Love’ on the full moon.

The deaths of Sheena and Nameless Kuma Guy also begin a pattern that lasts almost the entire movie. Even though we’re told, repeatedly, that Darth Gator wants to drive the white people out of his jungle, for the vast majority of the running time it’s the brown people who are getting chomped. We’re told that twelve white missionaries came here years ago and Darth Gator ate all but one of them, who then became a crazy jungle man (not gonna lie, Father Jonathan was my favourite character and I wish we’d seen more of him). We see Sheena, her boyfriend, and the boyfriend’s brother get eaten alive. Furthermore, most of the white deaths in the movie are at the hands of the Kuma, who run in and kill the tourists with spears and fire arrows in the belief that they’re doing their god’s bidding, and much of this happens offscreen. Those hit by the arrows quickly fall into the water and vanish from sight. The only time the camera lingers on a white person dying is Joshua, who I guess they think deserved it. The impression one gets is that white death is a horror better implied than shown, while brown death is a spectacle. Again… holy shit.

The River of the Giant Alligator can’t seem to decide what we’re supposed to think about the Kuma people. Early in the film they’re portrayed as victims. These foreigners have invaded their land and built this giant hotel, and claimed to be helping them by giving them ‘work’. Ally notes that they’ll be able to live longer, healthier lives, but Daniel wonders if it’s worth it when they’ve basically become Joshua’s slaves. The movie leaves this question hanging there without exploring it any further. When Daniel and Ally come looking for information about the alligator attacks, the Kuma direct them to Father Jonathan, knowing they’re more likely to believe a white man, even one who’s obviously not quite all there. The movie really wants to be about the exploitation of indigenous peoples, treated as decorations and curiosities by white tourists.

The problem is, it wants to eat that cake, too. By the end of the story, the Kuma have devolved into stock savages. They attack the hotel and kill everybody, and kidnap Ally so they can tie her to a horizontal King Kong contraption as a sacrifice. The ending just makes it all the more confusing, as they turn up to discover that their god has been blown to bloody chunks after biting into a van full of explosives, and they cheer and they just leave. Is it really that easy to kill a god? Won’t a dead god demand vengeance anyway? Does this mean they actually like the white people after all, and were only angry because Darth Gator was eating them?

The ending also muddles the movie’s other point, about the nature of eco-tourism. One of the selling points of Paradise House is that it’s in the middle of virgin jungle. Joshua brags about how he’s left the surrounding ecosystem untouched – but then we cut straight to trees being cleared using dynamite, and later we see live piglets being thrown into the river to keep the crocodiles hanging around so people can gawk at them. You can’t build a hotel in the middle of a place and then call it ‘virgin jungle’. You’re the one who violated it!

The script is a little unclear on whether Darth Gator is a natural or supernatural threat. Ally and Daniel insist that it’s no mere alligator (I don’t think this movie knows the difference between crocodiles and alligators any better than I do) and Father Jonathan seems to believe it’s the Devil Himself, but it certainly dies like a flesh-and-blood creature. Whatever its nature, it’s clear enough that Darth Gator represents the jungle striking back at these intruders to drive them out. The Kuma literally say as much. So what are we to take from the fact that it dies at the end? Have we won the right to destroy the forest by killing its guardian? I don’t believe the people who make these movies think this stuff through.

I can tell that we’re supposed to hate the tourists, and we do, although not always for the reasons the movie wants us to. Minnow, the red-haired little girl who ‘only likes to play with boys’, tries so hard to be Adorable that you want to punt her across the room. Her mother leaves her to wander around the hotel alone, because Mummy’s got a smarmy mustached boyfriend to bang (even this relationship gets more attention than Sheena and Unnamed Kuma Guy, by the way… we are told that Mummy and Mustache have met before, and are here mostly to see each other rather than the jungle). Other notable annoyances include a lady who seems perfectly sane until she starts talking about the aliens, and a guy who loves to complain about Youth These Days and will seize any opportunity to do so.

I kinda wanna gripe about these obnoxious characters, but I don’t feel like I can. You may recall that I spent a month stuck on a cruise ship earlier this year. I can tell you definitively that these people do exist, and I hate them even more in real life.

Man, this could have been a fun monster movie. I’ve seen movies about man-eating crocodiles (or alligators… does it honestly matter that much?) that I really enjoyed. Primeval wasn’t even that bad – it was about how humans are more monstrous than anything nature can produce. Lake Placid had that immortal bit where Betty White says if I had a dick, this is where I’d tell you to suck it. The River of the Great Alligator is just boring bullshit and things that seem kinda racist on the surface but then you think about them a little longer and realize they’re incredibly racist. I went into this one hoping to like it, but it absolutely pissed on the last shreds of my optimism... like a lot of other things in 2020.

#mst3k #reviews #episodes that never were #the river of the great alligator #the great alligator #fuck this movie #fuck it so much #70s

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punchdrunkdoc · 5 years ago

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Updated K-drama list (2)

4 more shows DONE. I’m seriously obsessed guys.

I’ve also updated the list to include some ratings - mainly how many tissues you’ll need, and how amazing the architecture/interior design is in the houses. Seriously, some shows I could barely concentrate on the subtitles because the sets were so gorgeous!

FAVOURITES

1. Crash Landing on You

He’s from North Korea. She’s from South Korea. They never should have met, but they’ll change each other’s lives.

This was my first K-drama, and its still my favourite. The full cast of characters is great, the lead romance is ANGSTALICIOUS and its genuinely, laugh out loud funny (when its not making you cry or swoon).

Male lead: Officially the best boyfriend ever. With added dimples.

Tear-jerk factor: 4/5

ArchitecturePorn: 2/5

2. Descendants of the Sun

A special forces Captain meets a capable and beautiful trauma surgeon. They feel an instant bond, but their jobs and philosophy on life get in the way, threatening to tear them apart.

Halfway through this show, I seriously thought this might overtake CLOY as my No. 1 fav. I absolutely LOVE watching competent people doing their jobs really, really well - and this had it in spades. I also ADORE the male lead character, and the romance was beautiful…but it didn’t quite nail the angst, and the last minute was a bit twee, which kept it in the No.2 spot.

Male lead: A cocky, charming, absolute BADASS...with the most adorable, cheeky smile.

Tear-jerk factor: 2/5

ArchitecturePorn: 0/5 (mostly crumbling buildings and sterile hospitals!)

3. Healer

The lives, and pasts, of a hot shot reporter, a spunky young tabloid journalist and a mysterious thief-for-hire intersect.

This was so addictive - the plot was tight and engaging, and this is one of the few shows I’ve watched where there didn’t seem to be a lot of filler. I loved the central 3 characters, and the romance was amazing. I especially loved that the male lead started off such a brooding loner, but he became super-affectionate as soon as he admitted his feelings. So many good hugs and lots of face-cradling in this one.

Male lead: Effortlessly beats up 2 henchmen while comforting his girl over the phone. What’s more to add?

Tear-jerk factor: 1/5

ArchitecturePorn: 1/5

4. My Holo Love

A lonely woman falls for a holographic AI and then meets his creator...

I love the concept of this show (I’m a big sci-fi nerd), and it was beautifully shot. The lead relationship is well developed and it doesnt fall into a typical love triangle. I’ve come to realise it utilises a lot of K-drama tropes (face-blindness! shared childhood trauma!), but it does it really well, imho.

Male lead: Tortured loner genius. My catnip.

Tear-jerk factor: 2/5

ArchitecturePorn: 2/5

5. Goblin

A 900yr old immortal guardian finally meets the ‘bride’ who will end his existence

Once I got over the slight ick-factor of the age difference between the two characters at the beginning, I really fell for this show and it’s world. It had me in tears. And I especially loved the secondary character of the Grim Reaper.

Male lead: Surprising innocent and funny for a 900 year old

Tear-Jerk factor: 5/5

ArchitecturePorn: 3/5

6. What’s Wrong with Secretary Kim

An personal assistant decides to quits her job in order to get a life. Her boss has other ideas.

I loved the female lead in this - as I said, I’m a sucker for uber-competent people, and the actress is STUNNING. Her boss is self-centred, entitled and vain...but over time, somehow that just becomes endearing! This show also has lots of very good kissing scenes...and when he started to unbutton her shirt during one encounter, I was SCANDALISED (did I mention these shows are usually very PG!!)

Male lead: Like I said, somehow makes vanity and narcissism endearing. Also not afraid to get his shirt off and flash his 6-pack. Bonus.

Tear-Jerk factor: 0/5

ArchitecturePorn: 4/5

7. Legend of the Blue Sea

A mermaid comes onto land to find the man she loves

The (literal) fish-out-of-water scenes in the first half of this show were hilarious - the actress is a comic genius! The romance was nicely done, and there wasn’t a lot of extraneous plot or too many characters. I couldn’t stop watching this one!

Male lead: Cocky, arrogant conman with a soft mushy centre

Tear-Jerk factor: 1/5

ArchitecturePorn: 3/5 (I want a hidden room!)

Notable mentions

These are shows which I completed and enjoyed but they didn’t set my world on fire. Usually because they were overly long, or the plot got in the way of the characters/love story. If I have to fast forward large chunks of side-plot and endless tertiary character interactions, its not making my favourite list

1. Suspicious Partner

A young, hardworking lawyer has her life turned upside down when she is put on trial for murder.

This was overly long, but the serial killer plot had some nice twists and it was central to the story, so it didn’t feel extraneous like some of these types of plots do. I really enjoyed the central romance - the 2 characters sparked off each other well, and the female lead actually got to kick some ass in this!

2. My Love from the Star

Alien stranded on earth meets an actress soon before he’s due to be rescued.

I finally gave this another chance, and I’m glad I did. The female lead got a LOT less irritating, and I enjoyed the present-day romance and all the flashes back to the past. However, the ending was really abrupt and disappointing (which kept it out of my favourite list). There should have been 1 less filler episode in the middle, and a decent, fleshed out finale instead.

3. Strong Girl Bong-Soon

A woman with inherited super-strength gets a job as a bodyguard for an eccentric young CEO

The lead couple in this are AD-OR-ABLE and I loved their relationship. But there was a weird tone issue in this show. The romance is super cute...but there’s a whole dark sub plot involving multiple women being held captive by a psychopath. I ended up fast forwarding most of that, and just concentrated on the romance.

4. Touch Your Heart

Star actress rocked by scandal works at a law firm to prepare for her comeback role

This starred the secondary couple from Goblin and I really like them, even though they are playing very different characters in this (more opposites attract, than doomed lovers). At first I found this too ‘cutesy’, but I’ve since realised the sound effects/graphics are a K-drama thing and not unique to this show, so I’m not as down on it as I was. I still had to fast forward a lot of the secondary romances which I wasn’t invested in.

5. Hyde, Jekyll and Me

A woman becomes involved in the lives of 2 men, who share one body

This stars Hyun Bin from CLOY and he is sooo watchable, especially as the slick-haired, glasses-wearing, uptight Seo-Jin. And the show started well...but quickly went off the rails into a convoluted, dragged-out revenge plot.

6. Melting Me Softly

Two people are accidentally cryogenically frozen for 20 years. They have to navigate the modern world and their new lives together.

Another good concept, but it ultimately descended into little more than a light work-place romance. Had a couple of good kissing scenes, but it was overall a bit forgettable.

And the DNF:

1. My Secret Romance

I started watching this because I was looking for something a little less PG - the characters have a one night stand in the first episode! But I couldn’t get passed the bad acting and cheap production.2

2. Master’s Sun

I liked the premise but the 2 leads weren’t very attractive (at least in comparison to the insanely beautiful actors/actresses in the shows listed above). Call me superficial, but I couldn’t see myself spending 17 hours watching them and willing them to kiss.

#cloy #descendant of the sun #goblin #healer #my holo love #legend of the blue sea #kdrama #melting me softly #hyde jekyll me #touch your heart #suspicious partner #my love from the star #strong girl #whats wrong with secretary kim

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cobrakiin · 4 years ago

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The Arrangement

Cojeel Week prompts - Day 4 + Day 6: Meeting + Hunting.

Actual Dragons AU | Rating: T+ [Minor descriptions of blood/injuries, swearing]

It had started with a strange scent that he had never smelled before, carried on the wind into the flight’s territory.

Except… that wasn’t true, now that he was tracking it. Not entirely. He pressed his wide, dark nose to the earth, sniffing at the clawed tracks in front of him; checking the scent again, just to be sure. Male. Cloying and herbal, a heavy smell like lavender; tinges of a rotting yet earthy scent - and the smell of blood. Gajeel had smelled this scent before.

A couple weeks before, Natsu had come back after getting into a rough fight, his wounds oozing this scent. A poison dragon, he’d said. It’d taken two weeks for the young fire dragon to bounce back to his usual over-excitable self, even with Wendy’s healing element; the wounds just didn’t want to close.

Not that Gajeel didn’t understand why another dragon would want to snap at the annoying, pink-maned menace - Natsu had a habit of not being able to tell when others weren’t interested in play-fighting, and on that day he happened to pick the wrong playmate. But this new dragon wasn’t part of their flight - but you don’t go barging into someone’s home and attack someone without consequences.

And if Laxus didn’t want to do his job as the alpha of their flight and protect the dragons under him, then Gajeel would gladly do it. Especially if it meant one-upping that fat, furry, zappy jerk.

The footprints were narrow and dragonic in shape, and the weight looked to be on the balls of the foot with the tail dragging along behind; a two-legged gait, which meant either that this poison fucker was taking his time strolling through... or he was injured, unable to fly, and trying not to use his front legs. Given that Gajeel could still pick up traces of blood, it was probably the second. It meant that he would catch up to this stranger sooner rather than later.

With smooth, wide strides on muscular legs, he followed the trail until it edged into one of the rivers that ran through the flightlands… where it stopped.

No tracks emerged on the other side.

If he squinted, he could make out the uneven steps in the center of the river, headed downstream. Gajeel craned his head down to the water’s edge, eyeing one of the submerged footprints, snorting at the loose rocks and smell of mud. Going into water was better to avoid other races tracking scents, not other dragons. Any wildborn dragon worth their salt would know that.

“Great, another domestic,” he muttered to himself, putting two and two together. One in the flight was enough; the former-domestic alpha in question knew how to throw his weight around - all fifteen tons of it - but he barely knew how to act like a dragon outside of that.

Whatever. It would slow down his prey even further.

The iron dragon didn’t have to travel the river bank long before a wet trail of water led off into the forest again. He waded through the water with ease and pressed his nose to the wet splotches on the ground - blades of grass and leaves of shrubs moving as his nostrils worked - finding the cloying scent in question stronger.

And that was when he saw it - eyes, watching him from the underbrush. He barely had enough time to harden his scales before a fanged maw erupted from the foliage in an attempt to bite him.

Gajeel reared back in surprise, before bringing his forelegs crashing down with all his weight in attempt to crush this attacker, a move that shook the ground - and just barely missed.

Metal breed dragons had wings that were thick and heavy: better for short trips, shielding, and propelling lunges. A rebound attack from the side was fared no better against the iron dragon, as he shielded himself with the dark limbs and threw himself into the move, pushing the attacker back with surprising ease. If he had to guess, he had a three ton advantage over this new threat.

When he finally whirled to face the poisonous interloper, he wasn’t sure what to expect beyond something worth fighting. And it certainly wasn’t… this.

This intruder in the flightlands was very striking in looks... and also literally.

Where Gajeel had a stocky torso and plated scales and claws, as his kind were apt to, this stranger was… very sleek. The stranger had a longer, thinner torso; a round, flat head and short snout, with an S-curve neck, long limbs and fingers tipped with cruel-looking white claws.

Where dark spikes decorated Gajeel’s snout, brows, neck, and forelimbs; his horns thick and curled back - and this stranger barely had horns! Actually, they were… more like long thorns. Thin and sharp, the right one was broken.

And where Gajeel was dark gray with black mottling, black mane - this stranger was several bright colors. Purple scales with maroon dusting the joints gave way to a pale white underbelly, yellow speckles dotting along the spine and cheeks. And a crimson red mane.

The stranger’s long tail whipped in warning and he hissed for so long it was any wonder he had any breath left after. It was enough of a reminder to drag Gajeel out of his thoughts, and back to the fight at hand.

They circled each other, daring the other to strike; they were too close in proximity to set off any proper elemental roars, physical hits were the only option in such a situation. Gajeel had his defense, but even on two legs, this other dragon seemed to be more on the unexpectedly speedy side.

Red eyes scanned the other’s awkward movement. One of the stranger’s wings, the one on the side he tried to keep away from Gajeel, was folded strangely, his arm on that side tucked up a little too tightly. Gajeel hadn’t noticed it at first with the other’s natural reddish colorings, but there was dried blood coating that whole shoulder and limb.

“Looks like you had a number done on ya,” Gajeel commented.

The other dragon curled his upper lip back, exposing thin, sharp fangs. “What’s it to you, rust breath.”

Gajeel shrugged off the insult, he’d been called far worse before. “Someone in my flight got into a fight with a poison-breed dragon that wandered into our territory. Seems like you’re the only one around here that fits that description.”

The stranger briefly paused, tilting his head ever-so-slightly. “The fire dragon,” he said. “You saw the damage I did. But you know the damage he could do, as well.” Gajeel blinked - he didn’t recall saying that out loud.

“Ya don’t look or smell crispy,” Gajeel snorted in explanation. “So that damage on you ain’t from him, is it?”

The stranger watched him with violet eyes. Guarded and new and knowing - and his gaze made Gajeel’s scales writhe hotly and his posture straighten.

This was offset by the faceful of sand and pebbles the stranger threw at Gajeel; and any thoughts of looking into the other dragon’s eyes left Gajeel’s mind. “Watch it,” he growled. “I know you domestics ain’t got proper dragon manners, but throwing sand’s a dirty move.”

“Says the feral,” the stranger threw back with a light hiss. “If you were going to outright attack me, you would have done it by now-”

“Tch, save it, pillow princess,” Gajeel heckled, thudding his plated tail against the ground. “I’m not gonna attack ya, not in that sorry state yer in. Wouldn’t be right.”

Slanted violet eyes narrowed. “What makes you think I won’t attack you?”

“You made it this far into our territory after beating the snot outta another dragon, so you ain’t weak or stupid.” Gajeel shook himself free of the sand, his hard scales clinking lightly. “Your wing’s all fucked up, so you can’t fly. You’re not gonna get far on two legs and smelling ta high hell of blood. The last thing you need right now is a hard fight and you know it.”

The stranger eyed him, catching on to what the iron dragon was suggesting. “I’m not interested in charity from ferals.”

“Who said anythin’ about charity?” Gajeel scoffed. “You’d owe me a real fight.” He lifted a foreclaw and motioned dismissively. “Once you’re not so sorry-lookin’. S’gotta be better than running from whatever did that to ya.”

The stranger’s tail kneaded in the air as he gave it some thought. “You have a point,” he conceded. “A shitty point, but it’s a point.”

“That any way to talk to someone that’s offering to save yer ass?”

“Let’s say I take up your offer,” the stranger said, ignoring Gajeel’s comment entirely. “I’ll leave when I heal up.” He held his head at an angle, a cocky grin spreading along his purple-pale maw. Gajeel’s heart beat just a little faster at the sight. “And if you can catch me, then maybe you’ll get a fight. Maybe you’ll even live after.”

“S’not what I offered.”

“You know us domestics,” the stranger mockingly said. The poison dragon started pacing around Gajeel again - when had they stopped? Gajeel spun to face the stranger just as the stranger’s tail teasingly brushed along the length of Gajeel’s. Gajeel’s scales shuddered, he suppressed the desire to splay his wings in show at the touch. “We just don’t have any manners.”

He snapped his teeth at the stranger. “At least you admit it. And speakin’ of which, ya haven’t-”

“Told you my name?” the stranger offered, both cutting off and completing Gajeel’s sentence. “Now what fun would that be, Gajeel.”

The iron dragon sharply snorted, his nostril flaring. He knew he definitely hadn’t told this poison fucker that. Yet, anyways.

“If I tell you my name, no more questions after,” the stranger’s tone was less teasing as he spoke this time. Timid, almost. A trace scent of fear intertwined with the cloying, earthy rot smell. “Got it?”

It was Gajeel’s turn to skeptically eye the other dragon. He nodded.

The stranger tilted his chin up. “Cobra,” he introduced himself. “My name’s Cobra.”

“Well, Cobra, my den’s this way.”

#fairy tail #gajeel redfox #erik cobra #cojeel #cojeelweek #fuckyeahcojeel #cobra #fanfic #actual dragons au #it still lives haha #inb4 someone calls me a furry

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wistfulcynic · 5 years ago

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Words Unspoken 2 / 2

Summary: Emma and Killian have been best friends for five years, roommates for three, and in love with each other since the moment they met. Their timing is awful and their communication even worse, until Killian takes a drastic step that finally forces them to talk about their feelings.

Words: 2.8k

Rating: leaning into M in this chapter

On AO3 | Tumblr

(I managed to write a two-shot. It didn’t expand. It stayed the length I originally planned. WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING???)

(and also that was like a little poem. Aw)

(I’m in a weird mood you guys)

Chapter 2:

Killian woke up slowly, wincing at the pounding in his head and the unpleasant taste of stale rum on his tongue. It took him several minutes to come fully awake, and several more to work out where precisely he was.

It looked a hell of a lot like Emma’s bedroom, which was surely impossible.

He racked his brains for any memories he could shake loose of the night before. He had been feeling lower than usual, missing Emma so much he felt her absence as physical pain, desperate to see her but not wanting to nag when she was so busy with work, and when their estrangement was his fault. Not wanting to beg.

He remembered going to the bar to try to numb the ache, remembered buying a bottle and refilling his glass more times than he could count until the jagged edges of his heart had dulled enough that he could think of Emma without pain. After that… had he argued with David, perhaps? He remembered being angry, stumbling outside to escape his friend’s cloying concern and finding Emma somehow there… an Emma straight out of his rum-drenched fantasies, who let him hold her and touch her as he’d never dared to do before. Hazy impressions remained, of silken skin and fragrant hair and a frantic need to keep her close, but beyond that… nothing.

Had he woken up literally anywhere else he’d have shrugged the whole thing off as a dream. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time he’d dreamed of Emma. But here in what was most assuredly her bedroom, with her scent still on the pillow next to him… what the devil had happened last night?

He sat up, groaning as pain pierced his skull, and gingerly eased himself onto his feet. His clothes were on the floor and he managed to pull on his jeans, but his shirt and jacket were all tangled up together and he had neither the balance nor the concentration necessary to untangle them.

Coffee first, he thought. And something grease-soaked and salty. Then he would maybe be capable of dressing himself.

He made his way into the kitchen where he found Emma, the morning sunlight glinting through the loose waves of her hair, holding a bottle of Gatorade.

“Drink this,” she said.

“Coffee—” he began, but she cut him off.

“You need to hydrate. Gatorade first, then coffee.”

“But—”

“I have bacon. If you drink the Gatorade you can have some.”

“And eggs?” he ventured.

She smiled. “And eggs.”

He took the Gatorade. “You’re a goddess, Swan.”

She turned away before he could see the pink flush that spread across her cheeks at the compliment.

The Gatorade revived him, and the Advil Emma gave him alongside his coffee took the edge off his headache, and by the time he’d polished off a plate of bacon and eggs he felt just about equal to facing the consequences of whatever he’d done the night before.

“Emma,” he began hesitantly. “Do I have anything to apologise for?”

“What do you mean?”

“Anything I did or said last night that was… inappropriate.”

“You don’t remember?”

“No.” He couldn’t tell if her expression was relieved or disappointed. Perhaps both.

“You didn’t do anything.”

Killian frowned. He may not have Emma’s lie-detecting superpower, but he knew this woman well enough to tell when she wasn’t being truthful.

“You can tell me, love,” he said gently. “Whatever it was, I’m already sorry.”

Hurt flashed across her face, startling him.

“Of course you are,” she muttered.

“What does that—”

“You didn’t do anything, Killian,” she said. “Really. You were drunk, I brought you here, Ruby’s clothes were all over the sofa so I put you in my bed. You passed out as soon as your head hit the pillow.”

“And you’re sure that’s all.”

“Yep, that’s all.”

Something still wasn’t right, though. “And I didn’t say anyth—”

“I told you no! Look, can we just—” she broke off, staring uncomfortably at her coffee cup, her fingers toying with the handle. “Do you have any plans for today?”

Nothing he wouldn’t happily miss for the chance to spend it with her. “No.”

“Do you maybe want to hang out? Watch Bake-Off? There’s a new season on Netflix but I haven’t been able to watch it. It just… seemed wrong, without you.”

He knew exactly what she meant. “I haven’t watched it either, love. That sounds wonderful.”

Her bright smile made him want to cry, or to fall at her feet and beg her forgiveness. He’d been a fool to think that moving out would dull his feelings, that anything could make him stop loving her. All his leaving had done was highlight how miserable he was without her, and that he needed her in his life in whatever capacity she would allow.

Emma pushed Ruby’s laundry to one side and she and Killian sat close together in their old familiar way, her curled against his side, his arm resting on just enough of the sofa back to not technically be around her shoulders. They put the show on and she snuggled into him as she always had. His heart clenched painfully, but it was a good pain, Killian thought. Far better than the pain of her absence from his life had been.

He turned his head, letting his cheek just brush her hair, letting his eyes fall shut as he breathed her in. Gods, he loved the way she smelled.

But there was an odd tension in her shoulders and when he opened his eyes again he saw her twisting her hands together, fingernails digging into her palms.

“Swan, what’s wro—”

“‘Love you,’” she burst out.

Killian almost swallowed his tongue. “What?”

“‘Love you.’ That’s what you said. Last night. You said you missed me and asked me not to go, and then you said ‘love you.’ And then you fell asleep.”

He was a bloody stupid arse, thought Killian. “Swan—”

“Did you mean it?”

He could easily evade her question, he knew. He was good at dissembling. Hell, he could outright lie. But he was weary of pretending, and of his own cowardice.

“I meant it very much,” he said softly. “I love you, Emma, I always have. I’m sorry if that makes you uncomfortable and I’ll understand if you—”

He choked on the remainder of his words as she launched herself at him, knocking him backwards onto Ruby’s laundry. Before he could gather his scattered thoughts her lips were on his and Emma Swan, love of his life, was kissing him for all she was worth.

For a moment Killian was frozen, stunned by the feel of her body pressed against his, by the heat of her mouth, by the shock of his all his dreams coming abruptly and unexpectedly true. He was attempting to process it, to understand what exactly was happening, but then Emma moaned, just a small noise in the back of her throat, and rolled her hips against his and his brain shut down completely.

He plunged his hands into her hair, opened his mouth beneath hers. She met him eagerly, her own hand fisting at the nape of his neck, the other digging into the bare skin of his shoulder. Her hair was silky between his fingers, her tongue soft in his mouth, and Killian was drowning in heat and lust and love. He must have imagined kissing Emma a thousand times, ten thousand, but even in his filthiest dreams it had never felt this good.

She shifted above him, bringing her knees up to frame his hips and grinding down on his erection. He moaned, helplessly bucking up into the heat of her core, one hand sliding down her back to grip her ass and pull her closer, losing himself in her scent and softness as the friction of her moving against him slowly drove him insane. She sat up and he actually growled, but she just shot him a saucy look and pulled off her tank top to reveal her bare breasts.

His growl became ravenous, his hands desperate as they dragged her back down, sliding over soft skin to cup a softer breast, dragging his tongue across her nipple and revelling in her moan.

He wanted to tell her how beautiful she was, how silky and warm, how very deeply he loved her and how he’d longed for years to touch her like this, but he was too overwhelmed, too intensely aroused, and for once in his life the smooth talking Killian Jones found that words failed him.

They were failing Emma too, though that was less surprising. She had always been more inclined to action. “Fuck,” was all she managed to gasp as his mouth left her breast to trail sucking kisses up her neck. She was on fire, dripping wet, wanting a million things and unable to vocalise any of them, barely able to moan two short words. “Fuck, Killian.”

“Well don’t fuck him there.” A sharp voice penetrated her lustful daze, and Emma looked around to see her roommate standing behind the sofa, watching them with a mixture of amusement and exasperation.

“Ugh.” Ruby rolled her eyes. “Five years of yearning looks and doe-y eyes and when you guys finally manage to hook up it’s on my clean laundry? Really?”

“Um.” Emma struggled to think as Killian, completely oblivious to Ruby’s presence, continued to suck on her neck. “Sorry?”

“Whatever. Just put your tits away, would you, I’ve got people coming over.”

Killian chose that moment to nip at her pulse point and Emma’s eyes closed on a moan, her fingers sinking into Killian’s hair as she held his head against her.

“Are you kidding me?” cried Ruby, exasperation overcoming amusement. "You had years when you could have fucked in the living room all you liked, but I live here now and...” She trailed off when she realised neither of them had heard a word she said.

Scowling, she marched over to the sofa and smacked the back of Killian’s head. He jolted backwards in surprise, blinking dazed and unfocused eyes at her.

“What?” he snarled.

“Look, I get that this is a long time coming,” said Ruby, holding tight to her patience. “And I’m really glad you two have finally figured out you’re crazy about each other. But can you please not be naked in the living room? I really do have people coming over.”

The haze was beginning to clear from Killian’s eyes and he had the grace to look abashed. “Sorry, lass,” he said. “I got a bit carried away.”

“We got carried away,” said Emma. “Sorry, Rubes, we’ll... take it to the bedroom?” She looked to Killian for confirmation. He nodded eagerly.

“You do that.” Ruby watched —amusement now edging exasperation again— as they stood up, awkwardly navigating Emma’s bare chest and Killian’s prominent erection and practically running the few steps to her bedroom door. It shut behind them with a bang, followed immediately by the dull thud of a body being pressed up against it. Ruby rolled her eyes but couldn’t suppress the smile that curved the corners of her mouth several minutes later when she heard the squeak of bedsprings and the clatter of a metal headboard slamming into a wall. The smile remained even as she calmly picked up the remote and turned the volume up on the television.

Way up.

—

The second time Killian woke up in Emma’s bed was far better than the first. He wasn’t hung over, for one thing, and for another she was there too. Wrapped tightly in his arms, sound asleep and drooling on his chest.

He had never been happier.

(“I do too, by the way,” Emma had whispered that afternoon as they lay entwined in post-coital bliss. “Love you, I mean.”

His grin felt wider than his face. “I know.”

She slapped his chest. “Oh my god, did you just Han Solo me?”

“What? No! I bloody said it first!”

“Maybe, but you’re pretty damn smug considering I didn’t say it back,” she huffed.

“That’s because I know you, Emma Swan, and I know you’re far more show than tell,” he said, flipping her onto her back and leaning over her, giving her his very finest cheeky smirk. “I figured when you tackled me and kissed me senseless that was your way of declaring your undying love.”

“Well, I don’t know about undying…”

“I do,” he said, abruptly sincere. “If these past months have taught me anything it’s that I will never stop loving you. I can’t. It’s impossible, and I know because I tried really bloody hard.”

“Why didn’t you ever tell me before?” she asked softly, a wealth of meaning behind the question.

Killian rolled back onto his side and pulled her into his arms again. “When we met you were with Neal, and you seemed happy enough,” he said, stroking her hair as he spoke. “I never thought he was worthy of you, but I couldn’t be sure if that was an objective assessment or if I was just projecting because I wanted you so badly myself. Then he left and you were so hurt and just… desperately sad, love, and I wanted to tell you then how I felt but I didn’t think you were in the right mental state to hear it. And I— I didn’t want to be the guy you used to get over the guy you loved. I thought if I waited until you’d healed… but then you met Graham, and he was the one to make you smile again, and I knew it was too late, and I’d missed my chance.”

“But I split up with Graham years ago!” cried Emma.

“I know, but by the time you did I was drinking so much and I’d had so many relationships fail. I knew it was because they weren’t you, but each one still felt like a failure and I was just such a mess, Emma. I didn’t feel like I had any right to pursue you when I had so little of value to offer. And then you asked me to move in with you, and I thought, well that’s that, then, she just sees you as a friend.”

Emma bit her lip, tracing patterns through his chest hair with her fingertips. “I went out with Graham because he reminded me of you,” she said quietly. “Not a lot, but just in some little ways and I thought maybe it would be enough. But it wasn’t and I broke up with him, and... when I asked you to move in… it wasn’t a conscious thing, but… I guess I was kind of hoping that being together all the time, you know, something might happen… with us.”

“Why didn’t you ever kiss me before?” he asked, echoing her earlier question. “Woman of action that you are.”

She snorted. “Really? You think I should just have grabbed you and laid one on you, out of nowhere?”

“And why not?”

“Why no— You always had a girlfriend, Killian! Like, always. And they were always so, I don’t know, polished. And I just figured I wasn’t your type.”)

Killian shook his head, still astounded at what idiots they’d both been, how much time they’d wasted. Emma shifted in his arms, pressing closer to him and muttering in her sleep. He resisted the urge to kiss her before recalling with a flash of joy that he didn’t have to do that anymore. He was allowed to kiss her now.

So he did, soft, gentle kisses on her hair, trailing down her temple and across her cheek to her chin. He kept them light but still she awoke, blinking sleepily and giving him a shy smile. “Hey—” she began, and was cut off by his lips.

“Well, good morning to you,” she laughed when they broke apart some minutes later, leaning her forehead against his. “Is it morning? It’s still really dark.”

“It’s, um…” Killian groped on the bedside table for her phone. “It’s one forty three a.m.”

“So, technically morning.”

“Technically.”

“Which technically means we can have breakfast.”

He laughed. “Technically. Are you hungry?”

“Are you kidding, I’m freaking starving. I had a very active afternoon, you know.”

“I do recall something to that effect. Do you think Ruby’s friends are still here?”

Emma was silent for a moment, listening. “I don’t hear anyone.”

“They probably fled in terror, with all those noises you were making,” he teased.

“You weren’t exactly quiet yourself, buster.”

He kissed her again, stroking his hand over her bare hip. “You know, Belle’s sabbatical will be over soon and I’ll need another place to live,” he said, watching her closely. “Perhaps, if you’d like, we could find one together? Someplace with thick walls so you can scream in ecstasy as loudly as you need to.”

“And will I be needing to?”

“Oh, I think I can guarantee that you will, love.”

“Bold words, Jones,” she purred, as her hand began to trail down his abs. He caught it before it reached its intended destination.

“I thought you wanted breakfast.”

“Mmm, yes I do. Later.”

#cs fic #cs ff #cs ff au #roommates au #roommates #friends to lovers #mutual pining #secret feelings #pining idiots #words unspoken #profdanglaisstuff

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dzamie · 5 years ago

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I watched the live action Jungle Book! I’d say it was disappointing, but I set appropriate expectations going in. So, imma get into it:

So, the good parts first, in no particular order:

I really like Kaa’s hypnosis effect. The Disney animated movie’s swirling colors always looked really, really goofy to me, but the live-action’s waves of light and dark were very well done and legit alluring.

There are a lot of little jokes here and there that I feel were written in case they wanted to use them in a commercial. “You have never been a more endangered species than you are at this moment” is actually pretty darn funny.

The bodies moved well. King Louie was really the only animal I thought was straining realism too far; the positioning of limbs and torsos and stuff was pretty spot-on. Tails were a bit wonky, but you have to be looking for something like that, as someone with a slight tail fetish might.

This is definitely unintentional, but Mowgli makes an “oof” sound whenever something bowls into him or he leaps roughly against something. It sounds like the Roblox hurt noise. Tone-breaking, but HILARIOUS.

Having Mowgli seem to fear the bonfire was a nice touch.

As was having the final fight seem to take place at the watering hole, this time during wet season. Far from dry, the exact opposite of the Water Truce occurs - everything is in conflict.

Now, the less pleasant bits.

I mentioned the Water Truce callback was neat? Yeah. What a shame they took multiple minutes to repeat over and over that the Water Truce was that there was a truce around the watering hole. I’m glad they used all that time to explain why it was that Shere Khan wouldn’t attack anyone so he could conveniently see the man-cub. Also to set up the schtick where Mowgli has been Inventing Things because he is a Man.

Elephants are now a religion. I don’t like it, especially because it’s used to set up Mowgli rescuing a baby elephant from a hole, so that Baloo and Bagheera can see that Man Is More Powerful Than God.

The wildebeest herd exists only for shakycam purposes. There really isn’t much reason for Mowgli to not go directly into the river and escape Shere Khan on a log that way.

Oh how they ruined Kaa. I do rather like how she has a more cloying, sweet personality (it’s not better or worse than the animation’s rather goofy fellow, just different), but they whole-ass saw a snake character and thought “hey wouldn’t it be cool if she never wove around him or approached him from different angles? Let’s make sure to never show her for more than 8 seconds at a time, too; we MUST cut between her and Mowgli. There’s simply no way to shoot a scene where they’re both in the shot, talking.”

I hope you like snakeless ScarJo voiceover, because that’s literally half of Kaa’s appearance, from first line to last. It’s great that the man who hurt Shere Khan with fire just happened to be Mowgli’s dad, because I guess it’s not enough that Shere Khan wants to kill all humans in the jungle; he must have a Deep Personal Connection with the man-cub.

I can sort of understand coming out of the hypnotic vision to see Mowgli entirely in her coils, from a “this is Mowgli’s perspective” point of view, but wow it’s really unsatisfying. Look, the animated version had Mowgli slide into pre-coiled snek body, but at least we saw them interact. Kaa is pretty much a static prop here. What a waste of a serpentine character.

For someone who is afraid of heights and doesn’t know Mowgli, Baloo sure is eager to climb a big, tall tree and risk his own life against a giant, hypnotic snake.

Minor note: with all the focus on seeing Kaa from Mowgli’s point of view, Disney sure chickens the fuck out when it’s time to be snake chow. C’mon, you stupid mouse, show us what Kaa looks like inside.

It’s kinda weird that Bagheera and Baloo are so familiar with each other, considering that Mowgli has been in close contact with Bagheera all his life and neither met nor heard of the bear.

Shere Khan is almost comically evil to the wolves. Makes it hard to take his “I’m actually justified in my desire to kill you” thing seriously.

I feel like Disney hasn’t grown out of its “haha imagine SONGS in a CHILDREN’S MOVIE. What a stupid fucking idea” phase. Baloo and Mowgli sing off-tempo and off-key, and King Louie does a weird half-speaking thing that lets you know they want to do a song, but haven’t the slightest clue how to transition into one, and they still want to pretend to be a gritty serious realistic movie with no singing because that’s too silly.

King Louie Is Twenty Five Goddamn Feet Tall Because We Watched King Kong The Other Day

They set Louie up to be a mob boss, calm and composed for like a minute or two, and that goes out the window in no time flat. They try to bring back that structured “I help you you help me bada bing bada boom" thing back in the chase scene, but literally nobody cares what the chaser says in the chase scene. If they did, it wouldn’t be a chase scene.

“No, they don’t fear me, they fear you.” Except clearly they fear you because your MO this entire time has been “let’s kill and threaten animals and see if Mowgli comes back faster.”

Baloo, the laziest bear you ever did see who heard the wolf pledge exactly one (1) time and immediately dismissed it as propaganda, can recite it from heart because Shere Khan needs to be directly confronted with The Power Of Friendship

Can’t be a climax without fire. It’s a good thing that Mowgli can always find a safe path through this raging inferno that’s been burning steadily through the forest for the last few minutes or more.

Mowgli’s entire strategy hinges on many things that could go wrong at any moment:

a) the vines don’t catch on fire as he’s running through the burning forest

b) the vines and branch don’t catch on fire after he suspends them in the air in the middle of a huge forest fire

c) the dead tree, notably made of dead wood, which some may know to be extremely flammable, is not on fire nor does it catch on fire as he’s climbing it

d) Shere Khan follows him onto the branch

e) Shere Khan leaps at him on the fragile branch that Shere Khan seems to notice is weak

f) the vines and branch don’t catch on fire while he’s climbing them in the middle of a huge forest fire

g) he finds a way back out of the woods literally filled with fire

h) Shere Khan even follows him all the way in rather than going “nah the little bitch is gonna burn. Let him.”

i) the animals forgive him for setting the trees ablaze

They let ScarJo sing Trust In Me during the credits. Minor suggestion: don’t.

I choose to interpret Mowgli not seeing what happened with Kaa and Baloo to mean Kaa is still alive, and the monkeys trying to dig Louie out of the ruins to mean that he’s dead. This is entirely because of favoritism.

Compared to the animated version, this movie is much more based around Shere Khan, compared to around Mowgli and the jungle. Rather than “Mowgli won’t be safe here; send him to the Man Village so Shere Khan won’t kill him,” it’s “Mowgli won’t be safe here, but Shere Khan is going to threaten and probably kill us until Mowgli returns anyway, which he surely will because Shere Khan said so.”

They tried to do a grey-morality sort of thing by justifying Shere Khan’s fear of fire and hatred towards Men. But it kind of backfires because Shere Khan keeps being incredibly evil for no particular purpose aside from making his death be a good thing for everyone, and the one crime Mowgli commits (big fire) would not have happened if Shere Khan hadn’t announced his plan to kill the man-cub.

I really miss the allegories to different kinds of philosophies towards society from the animated version. The live-action replaces them with examples of different abusive relationships (Baloo is a manipulative fast-talker, Louie is supposed to be a mob boss, Kaa’s comfort is genuine but overshadowed by a desire to do harm), which is... nice, but not really my cup of tea.

Holy shit there is SO MUCH SHAKYCAM. You can barely see some of the scenes from all the shaking around. “Did we inspire adrenaline in you? Don’t you wanna go fast?” Yes, of course, but what am I doing this about? “...SHAKYCAM!! LOUD NOISES!!” It’s overstayed its welcome.

Realistic CGI animals are actually terrible at emoting.

This felt like yet another action film. Every opportunity they had, they threw in another fight scene or chase scene. You could take most of them out, cut off about 15 minutes from the movie, and still not have removed anything important.

All in all, I’m glad I now have 22 seconds of Kaa saying things. They really shouldn’t have given ScarJo so much coverage in the commercials, though. She’s in the movie for about 4 minutes, and she’s a visible snake for much less. I don’t think I’d pay to see this, and really this just gives me more reason to not watch other Disney live-action remakes.

Shakycam should have died eight years ago. Bring back shot composition.

#text #long post #The Jungle Book #reviews

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duhragonball · 6 years ago

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Dragon Ball Z Movie 3: Tree of Might

Movie time again. This time around it’s “Tree of Might”, which premiered on July 7, 1990, between Episodes 54 and 55 of the anime.

I feel like this is one of the more popular movies of the lot, but it’s never been high on my list. There is a lot to appreciate here, but there’s some things that bug me, and I guess they don’t bug anyone else quite as much. It’s definitely way better than “World’s Strongest”, so I don’t want to overstate my case here.

The movie opens with a space probe heading for Planet Earth. Pretty sure someone making this movie had just watched “The Empire Strikes Back.”

On Earth, Bulma, Krillin, Oolong, and Gohan are on a camping trip. Okay, so I guess there was at least one other meeting between Gohan and Oolong after Movie 2, and this was it. I’m curious to see if they ever interact in any later films, or the TV series.

Honestly, I’m not really sure why Oolong would be involved here. In the last movie, it made sense, because he was the only one who would drag Gohan out on a Dragon Ball hunt, which drove the whole plot. Here’s he’s just chilling out with the trio who went to Namek. He feels like an odd man out.

I feel like this movie is angling at being an epilogue to the Namek Saga, since it depicts everyone safe and sound on Earth. It doesn’t fit well with continuity, but the Namek Saga was still in progress when this movie came out, so I can’t blame the writers there. In any case, the implication is that Bulma, Krillin, and Gohan all got back to Earth, and the first thing they wanted to do together was spend some quality time with Oolong.

Anyway, Gohan’s mom made him pack a ton of stuff he probably wouldn’t need for a camping trip.

Nearby, that probe lands in the forest and the heat of the impact starts a fire! Ruh-roh!

Krillin wakes up to the smell of burning everything, and we see all the animals fleeing in terror, including this little dragon.

Krillin tells Gohan to use his ki to put out the flames.

While they do that, Gohan notices the dragon trapped under a... log? It looks more like a really long piece of rock, but I don’t know what you’d even call that. Gohan lifts it up and the dragon moves to safety.

Later, the fire’s out, but the forest is still ruined, and the gang feels sorry for all the homeless animals. I don’t know, maybe I’m jaded, but I always found it a little cloying how all the animals just stand around at the edge of the forest, looking all sad, like they’re neighbors or whatever. I don’t know what real deer do in a real forest fire. Maybe they just die, but I’m pretty sure the ones who don’t just keep running until they find somewhere else to live.

Then Krillin has a great idea...

Dragon Ball Z! Wow, this is a great idea, Krillin. This show kicks ass, but unfortunately they already made it, so it’s not really your idea, you know?

But seriously, Krilln plans to track down the Dragon Balls just so they can wish to have the forest restored. In lieu of the usual opening credits, we get this montage of the gang collecting the Dragon Balls. Here’s Gohan flying an aircraft. I’d ask why they thought this made sense, but they had Gohan fly an aircraft in the last movie, so whoever made Tree of Might can just claim that the precedent was already set.

Just a thought, but maybe the reason Gohan does all this zany stuff is because Chi-Chi makes him study too much. By that I mean, she wants him to become a scholar, but for some reason she made him read an entire pilot manual, just in case it ever came up in some entrance exam. We’ve seen how well Gohan absorbs information, so naturally he’d finish the book and want to try it out for himself. Chi-Chi probably made him read a book about lion taming, and then she wonders why Gohan ran off to join the circus.

Here’s a variation on the OP, only with a dinosaur chasing Gohan instead of Bulma. Gohan ought to be strong enough to kick that dinosaur’s ass, though.

For some reason, Tien and Chiaotzu happen to be jogging by while they’re at it. Small world, I guess.

And then Gohan shows up with the last ball. Good thing, too. The theme song was almost over.

And finally we get the title card. Granted, these trees in the background don’t look very mighty, but bear with us, we’re getting to that.

DRAGON DRAGON! ROCK THE DRAGON! DRAGON! BALL! Z!

DRAGON DRAGON! ROCK THE DRAGON! COME! COME GET ME!

The sight of Shenron panics that little dragon Gohan saved, and it tries to attack him? That seems like an unusual response. Gohan calls him “Haiya Dragon”, so I guess he named him off-screen?

In the English dub, the dragon was named “Icarus”, which I frankly prefer, because what kind of name is “Haiya Dragon” , anyway? That’d be like naming your son “Hello Human.”

Shenron flails his tail around, and maybe he was getting ready to slap some sense into Icarus, or maybe he didn’t even notice the guy. Anyway, Gohan holds Icarus back and makes their wish.

And the forest is saved! I assume the gang finished their camping trip and went home. All the animals return to their burrows and trees and bushes or whatever, and the probe robot crawls out of its crater. Wait, that can’t be good.

The probe sends signals back to a group of aliens. They confirm the presence of life signs on Earth, although no one can believe it, because they know the Saiyan Kakarot was sent to Earth, and he should have wiped out all of its life a long time ago.

Okay, but why did they bother sending the probe if they didn’t think there would be anything there worth finding? Well, anyway, the probe reports that Earthis a suitable environment for the Shinseijuu Tree, which is Japanese for “Divine Essence Tree” Tree. Um, I think the subtitles goofed a little. I’m just gonna call it the Tree of Might.

That reminds me, the actual title of this movie is Chikyū Marugoto Chōkessen, which means “A Super-decisive Battle for Earth.” It’s also been called “Super Battle In the World”, which sounds pretty dumb. For some reason, most of the movies have Japanese titles that absolutely refuse to indicate what they’re about. Literally every DBZ movie could have been called “A Super-decisive Battle for Earth.” Well, I guess Movie 6 was a battle for New Namek, but Meta-Cooler would have attacked Earth eventually.

Later, we find Goku and Gohan chillaxing in the oil drum they bathe in. Chi-Chi’s tending the fire that keeps the water hot. Does Chi-Chi bathe in this thing? She’d have to, right? I’m surprised that erotic DBZ fan artists haven’t jumped all over that concept. “Oh, now that the fire’s going and I’ve taken off my clothes, I can climb into this oil drum and take a bath! It’s a good think I live in the middle of nowhere, so no one can see my boobs!”

But then Icarus shows up and frightens Chi-Chi until Gohan explains who he is. Chi-Chi immediately takes a dislike to the creature, and I’m with her on this one. Icarus is a stand-up dude and all, but he looks kind of creepy. He’s supposed to be cute, but he ends up looking like one of those Precious Moments figurines.

Chi-Chi tells Gohan to take the dragon back where he came from. Goku tries to stick up for him, but she won’t hear of it.

Gohan shoves Icarus away, but let’s be real here, he could carry Icarus all the way back to his forest if he really wanted to.

Then Goku leads them both to this cave he fixed up as a hideout for Icarus. This seems pretty dumb. Goku tells him not to let Chi-Chi know about this, but how did Chi-Chi find out about Icarus in the first place? He followed Gohan to the house where she could see him.

But Icarus is grateful, and he licks Goku. See, Goku looks way, way cuter than Icarus. They really tried to hard with Icarus’ design.

Meanwhile, Yamcha’s cruising around in a car he bought with a 15-year loan, when suddenly he gets blasted out of the sky by...

... one of these assholes, I guess. If I understand correctly, they blasted a big crater in the ground so they could plant their Tree of Might seed, but I don’t really understand why they couldn’t just use a gardening spade.

Tell you what, let’s go over these guys names right now. The big red one in the center is Amond. The guy on the left is Daiz. He wears pink leg warmers.

The alien in the silver armor is Cacao. I think he’s a cyborg, but who cares? And the two little purple guys are Rasin and Lakasei. They’re all wearing Frieza Soldier gear, so does that mean they work for Frieza? Well, we’ll get to that.

The seed starts growing almost as soon as it hits the soil.

Meanwhile, the aliens’ mysterious leader notes that this was all made possible by Goku’s failure to destroy the planet’s population as he was supposed to do.

The Tree of Might is huge, to the point where its roots erupt underneath a whole city, which I’m pretty sure is miles away from the forest where it was planted.

In the forest, Icarus watches this enormous tree finish growing, and he knows things are looking bad.

Meanwhile, most of the major Dragon Ball characters have gotten together at Goku’s house. I’m not sure why. Also, they didn’t invite Launch, which is kind of bullshit.

Bulma gives Yamcha shit for buying such an expensive car, and accuses him of trying to impress girls. So yeah, about the continuity of this movie. These characters won’t be reunited on Planet Earth until Episode 120 of the TV series. By the time that happens, Gohan’s a few years older, and Goku’s learned to turn into a Super Saiyan, so this whole movie just doesn’t fit. Nevertheless, it seems to depict a possible scenario where the good guys managed to return safely from Namek and wish all their dead friends back to life. In other words, this is the first time Bulma and Yamcha are seen together again since his death in the Saiyans Saga, and what is she doing? Yeah.

Same, Tien, same. Chiaotzu’s not gonna let this stop him from enjoying free refreshments though.

Then Icarus shows up at the window, and Goku and Gohan get caught trying to keep him, but they miss the fact that Icarus came back to warn them about the Tree of Might. Too bad he can’t talk.

Fortunately, King Kai can talk, and he can communicate with Goku telepathically, and he warns him about the Tree of Might. Well, “warn” might not be the right word. According to King Kai, the Earth was doomed the moment the tree took root. It’s basically a parasite on a planetary scale. As it grows, it sucks the nutrients and life force from the host planet, reducing the whole world to a lifeless desert.

So where does something like the Tree of Might come from? King Kai says it was originally grown so that the gods could eat its fruit. That sounds halfway plausible, until you consider that a lot of the “gods” in this franchise aren’t nearly as awe-striking as the Tree of Might. It’s hard to imagine someone like Kami planting a tree like this, destroying a whole planet just to eat its fruit. King Kai literally cooks his own meals, and he seems to eat the same stuff as everyone else. King Yama has a tree in hell that bears fruit reserved specially for him, but it’s not nearly as big as this one. I could imagine Beerus snacking on fruit from a tree that kills whole planets, but he’ll settle for cup ramen. More importantly, Beerus and his ilk wouldn’t be introduced to the franchise for another 23 years.

I’m not sure what King Kai is trying to tell Goku. If it’s too late, why bother telling him about this at all? Is he trying to suggest that Goku should evacuate the planet?

Well, King Kai should know better, because Goku stone cold does not give a shit. As soon as he hears about this crisis, he immediately makes plans to go beat up a tree. His plan: Let’s all go shoot it with our best hand lasers. Diagnosis: Awesome.

Then they all put their hands together in a show of solidarity. It’s time to show that tree who’s boss! Look at Chiaotzu. He’s literally lying on top of the table just to reach the others.

Then Gohan tries to join in, because hell yeah. Gohan can help. He fires some really good hand lasers, especially for his age.

But his mommy said no, so he’s gotta stay home. Better luck next time, kid.

Krillin notes that his wish to restore the forest was a total waste, since this stupid Tree of Might wrecked it all over again. I think the whole point of that forest fire was just to give the characters a reason to use the Dragon Balls early, so that way they wouldn’t be able to wish their way out of this situation. I’m not sure Shenron could remove a tree this huge, but it’s a moot point now. The Dragon Balls won’t work again for another year.

So they shoot their finest energy blasts at the base of the tree, and it does nothing. Krillin suggests another try, but Yamcha points out that if they use too much power they could destroy the Earth instead.

Then these jerks show up. Okay, so this is one thing that’s always bugged me about this movie. From here on, much of the action takes place on the Tree of Might itself, so you end up with a lot of indistinct backgrounds which are probably meant to be super-giant tree bark. It just makes it hard to tell where anyone is in relation to anything else. What exactly are they sitting on here? Why does the Tree of Might have all these convenient ledges and horizontal surfaces for people to stand on?

Yamcha demands vengeance for his dearly departed car. Uh, yeah... Whatever gets you in the zone, buddy.

The boys square up for a fight. You know, I remember watching parts of this movie on Toonami back in 1999, and scenes like this, and Yamcha’s appearancs in the Frieza Saga, were really my first introduction to the character. What really stood out for me was that he looked almost exactly like Goku. Kind of like how Flash Thompson was a big fan of Spider-Man, and one time he dressed up as Spidey for a Halloween party, and the real Spider-Man had to trick Green Goblin into thinking that Flash was the real thing. It just really looks like Yamcha is this jock who decided to dress up like Goku because he loves Goku so much.

Anyway, these two guys do some dumb shit. I really hate Rasin and Lakasei. Just... everything about them sucks. They sound terrible in every dub, they look like inflamed hemorrhoids, and they do absolutely nothing to move the story forward.

Tien blinds them with the Solar Flare, and that’s about the only effective offense the Z-Figthers manage in this whole movie.

It’s really a shame, because this is one of the few movies that actually bothers to use Yamcha, Tien, an Chiaotzu, and they get jobbed out. Would it have been so bad to have Yamcha use his Spirit Ball on Cacao and actually hurt him? Krillin’s Kienzan is one of the more serious techniques in the series, so I might have been cool to actualy see him kill somebody with it. I’m pretty sure Chiaotzu has never won a fight in Dragon Ball up to this point. Would it have been so bad to just let him kill Rasin? But no.

I always wondered why they included Yamcha, Tien, and Chiaotzu in this particular movie, but now that I’m watching them in sequence with the anime, it makes some sense. Around this time, the TV series had just revealed that they were training with King Kai in the afterlife, and one could certainly speculate that they would get resurrected later on, and play a role in the final battle with Frieza and/or Vegeta. I think “Tree of Might” was trying to play along with that idea, except it never actually pays it off.

Chiaotzu is in trouble for a while, until Gohan suddenly shows up to help. Turns out Icarus managed to bring him to the forest where the battle was going on, so now he’s here to turn the tide. Or something.

This attracts the attention of the boss alien, who recognizes Gohan as a Saiyan.

So he goes out to meet the kid, and realizes that he must be Kakarot’s son. He introduces himself as Turles and...

Yeah, he looks like Goku. That’s the big twist.

Only it’s not much of a twist at all. Turles explains that it’s not even that big a deal that he and Goku look alike, since they’re both “disposable, lower-class warriors.” According to Turles, low-class Saiyans “only come in a few types.”

I’ve seen this line interpreted in many different ways. Some fans have suggested that the Saiyans cloned their low-class warriors. I think a lot of fans prefer the idea that Turles an Goku might be related somehow. Bardock and Goten’s close resemblance to Goku seems to support this. Hell, Gohan looks a lot like Goku if you don’t take the hair into account.

I think there’s always been a desire to make something more out of Turles than what the movie offers. The fact that he looks like an evil Goku is easily the most intriguing thing about the character, and this movie does absolutely nothing with it. Turles himself acts like it doesn’t matter, and Gohan is the only character who even seems to notice. So why did they bother making him look like Goku in the first place?

I feel like part of the idea here was to explore the idea of what Goku might have been like if he hadn’t hit his head and turned good. Turles could be a glimpse into what Kakarot might have done as a villain, although he’s so different from the real Goku that it doesn’t seem all that convincing. They could have made him look like another Saiyan, and it wouldn’t really affect anything.

Turles’ main personality trait is that he seems to want to recruit Gohan and Goku to his cause, saying that Saiyans should stick together. I’m not sure if he truly believes that, or if he just thinks that his gang could use a couple more Saiyan lackeys. He talks up the space pirate life as an endless romp around the universe, taking whatever he wants and enjoying food and drink as he pleases. Again, I don’t know if that’s a genuine sentiment, or if it’s just his recruitment pitch.

Piccolo shows up and tries to save Gohan, but Turles makes short work of him, and goes back to tormenting the kid.

Turns out he can make one of those fake moon things just like Vegeta.

He forces Gohan to look at it, and then he destroys it as soon as Gohan turns into a giant ape.

He says it’s because he doesn’t want to turn into a giant ape himself, but why wouldn’t he? Why did he turn Gohan into a giant ape? He doesn’t need any help to beat the Z-Fighters. Is he trying to prove a point? Gohan won’t even remember anything he did in ape form. Also, shouldn’t the transformation wear off once the fake moon is gone? Turles accounts for this by saying it’ll stick for a little while, even after the power ball is gone, but that doesn’t sound right. When Piccolo blew up the moon, Gohan changed back immediately.

For that matter, what good is the fake moon technique if it can be dispersed so easily? Krillin could have attacked it during the Goku/Vegeta fight instead of trying to cut off Vegeta’s tail.

So now Goku has to fight his own son in giant ape form. To the movie’s credit, this is a big highlight, because it’s the only DBZ movie to feature a giant ape transformation. And that’s all well and good, but it seems kind of empty to me because I have no idea why Turles set this up. Does he want Gohan to kill Goku? Is that supposed to make Gohan more eager to join him?

The fight ends up in a cavern, which I think turns out to be the same cave Goku used as a home for Icarus. That, or Icarus just happened to be here. Either way, just seeing Icarus calms Gohan down.

This is cute and all, but it seems odd that Oozaru Gohan would react so strongly to Icarus when he didn’t even recognize his own father.

Irritated, Turles tries to attack Icarus, which turns Gohan against him. Turles tries to kill Gohan with a laser donut...

But Goku cuts off Gohan’s tail before it can hit him, and he shrinks back to little kid size just in time to fall through the donut. I guess it’s lucky that Turles relies on donut-shaped attacks.

Turles then offers to spare Goku if he pledges to join him, but Goku refuses. He came her to whip a tree’s ass, and if Turles is pro-tree, then he can get wrecked along with it.

Then all of these creeps show up to fight Goku first. See, this is dumb. They not only made a clean sweep of Goku’s teammates, they didn’t even defeat them on screen!

Here’s a shot of Tien passing out from the hypothetical beating he took from Amond or some other guy.

Well, at least this sets up a cool scene where Goku has to fight them all by himself, right? Not really, Goku squashes them all in matter of seconds.

Meanwhile, Piccolo tries to take on Turles, but he’s just no match for him.

Boom, roasted.

I mean, why couldn’t Yamcha take this guy out? What was the point of having Yamcha in the movie if Goku was going to beat all the bad guys by himself?

With the rabble cleared away, Goku finally gets down to business. Turles panics when he sees how strong Goku is, so he runs away...

...and picks a piece of fruit from the Tree of Might. Why does he stick his tongue out to eat it? That just looks kind of weird.

Basically, the fruit of the Tree of Might ramps up a person’s battle power, which allows Turles to overpower Goku with ease. This is the core concept with Turles, I think. The challenge with this movie was to invent a new villain who could challenge Goku in the same manner as Vegeta and Frieza. Well, that’s a tall order, because Frieza was hyped as the strongest guy in the whole universe. A Saiyan villain would have made sense, except Vegeta was the strongest Saiyan, and the only one left. To introduce a new Saiyan, you’d have to explain why he’d be strong enough to rival Vegeta or Frieza.

The solution is the Tree of Might. I can’t find the line now, but there’s a part of the movie where Turles or one of his crew mention that the Tree of Might will make Turles strong enough to defeat Frieza. It’s pretty clear, then, that he’s a renegade from Frieza’s organization. They have their old uniforms, but instead of working for Frieza, they just roam the universe looking for places to plant their Tree of Might seeds. They grow a new tree, eat the fruit, get stronger, and then repeat the process. Turles started out as a weakling like Goku once was, but he found a way to cheat the system, and now he’s on his way to becoming the strongest in the universe.

Turles leaves Goku when he refuses to surrender, and then Goku’s friends speak to him telepathically. I’m not sure when they learned to do that, but whatever. They beg Goku to get up and try a Spirit Bomb, and Goku finally musters the strength to try it.

While he does that, the Z-Fighters assemble for one last stand against Turles. I guess this is supposed to buy time for Goku, but I’m not sure he needs it. Turles isn’t actually doing anything at the moment.

But it doesn’t work. The Spirit Bomb relies on borrowng life energy from everything on the planet, and that’s been drained away by the Tree of Might, so Turles thwarts Goku’s attack with ease. Oh, he also clobbered the Z-Fighters, so they’re down too. Triumphantly, Turles looks at his fruit crop. Where exactly is this that he’s standing right now?

But Goku isn’t beaten yet. He drags himself back into the fight, and confronts Turles one more time.

See, this time, Goku has a way to make the Spirit Bomb work. If all of the Earth’s energy is in the Tree of Might...

... then he’ll just draw the energy from the fruit instead of the planet, and make a Spirit Bomb from that.

There’s this tense standoff, and then they both attack each other in a single instant, and Goku’s Spirit Bomb wins out. I always have trouble remembering how this movie ends, and I think it’s because the climactic moment is so quick. I’m pretty sure they tried to imitate a gunfight from a western.

Turles gets consumed by the Spirit Bomb, and it drives him up through the trunk of the Tree of Might. Really, this makes a lot of sense as a finale. Turles’ trump card was to eat one piece of fruit from the tree, but Goku drew power from all of the fruit, so naturally his Spirit Bomb would be stronger than anything Turles could handle. And it’s an elegant solution to the problem posed by the tree. It was completely invulnerable to Goku’s own power, so he ended up using the Tree of Might’s own energy against itself.

All of this causes the Tree to glow yellow and disintigrate into sparkles of light, which rejuvenate all life on Earth.

So this dying deer is okay again, and presumably so is everything else.

Later, everyone celebrates with another camping trip. Launch got snubbed again.

Oolong tries to praise Icarus for his role in the battle, but Icarus nearly bites him.

And Piccolo sort of chills out by a waterfall somewhere, and that’s the end of the movie.

So it’s a pretty decent entry in the movie series, but I find it to be a mixed bag. The highlights are things that don’t quite get developed enough. Yeah, you have Turles, Great Ape Gohan, Yamcha, Tien, and Chiaotzu, but for my money, merely having those things in the movie isn’t enough. It’s what you do with them that counts. I find it particularly frustrating that the Dragon Ball Wiki has all this lore on Turles’ gang, but none of it ever made it into the movie itself, which is their only appearance. What’s the point in having a backstory for Daiz if it never comes up anywhere? His entire character arc was blowing up Yamcha’s car, and then getting decked by Goku.

Still, if you like Spirit Bombs, this is one of the best Spirit Bomb finishes ever. And the Tree of Might is a pretty cool idea. And the visuals are a big step up from World’s Strongest.

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