#both given all the narrative attention and none of it simultaneously

[ssaalexblake]

I was gonna put jack crusher for that thing but i refuse to imply that that’s irrational

[tsutsumi-kaina]

Theory: AFO Gave Tomura Decay (Part 2)

Continued from this post (link!)

Warning: This post has spoilers for both the most recent chapters of MHA (up to ch. 316) as well as spoilers for Vigilantes (up to ch. 109).

Straight to the point:

5. Tomura’s eyes and hair change color with the activation of Decay

It’s easy to write this one off as the anime making questionable choices about Tomura’s color scheme yet again (five years of baby blue hair ya’ll)— but just for giggles, let’s just assume that Horikoshi did intend for Tenko's natural eye color to be black, just like Nana and Kotaro. 

Now, there's a theory that Decay's activation destroyed all of Tomura's melanin, which is a theory I enjoy because it totally tracks (albinos lack pigmentation and they have "red eyes" because we're seeing their blood vessels rather than the actual color of their irises). I also like the “his hair went white from the trauma” and “he straight up went super saiyan” theories, because I’m a sucker that kind of specifically anime bullshit. 

But what if none of those theories are right? What if there was another reason why Tomura's hair and eyes change color? What if the change was meant to foreshadow something just a bit more... sinister?

Presented Without Comment

Through Dabi/Touya’s story we know that quirk factors do have an effect on things like hair color, and can even change a person's hair color upon activation— when Rei’s quirk factor becomes “dominant,” we see that Touya's hair gradually begins to turn white as his body changes to become more suited to an ice quirk despite his own quirk being fire-based.

That sound familiar?

So, Tomura's change to red eyes and white hair specifically  starts to look more than a little insidious if we assume that A) AFO has always  planned to turn Tenko into a new vessel, and B) Tenko actually got his first “dose” of AFO in the form of Decay + a pseudo-vestige, and his body has been gradually changing to become more hospitable for AFO's quirk factor. Exposure to AFO’s quirk factor (and it raging around inside of him like a damn virus) may be the true cause of Tomura’s palette swap.

6. Tenko is 5 when decay manifests, even though it’s been repeatedly stated that age 4 is the latest age that quirks manifest.

This point has also been discussed to death, with people arguing that Tomura simply had to amass enough hatred for Decay to fully manifest (see point 2 on why this “explanation” was most likely just AFO being a gigantic fucking troll). I’ll instead encourage folks to evaluate this point from a narrative standpoint— Hori drew attention to Tenko’s age and his quirklessness for a reason.

“Will he like me if I get my quirk!?”  Uhhh....

And Tenko likely having been born quirkless leads to the next point:

7. Tenko, The Quirkless Wonder (or: how having a quirkless vessel is an integral part of AFO’s plan to snatch OFA and not straight up fucking die in the process)

Tenko being born quirkless makes him a perfect candidate to tolerate the simultaneous burden of both OFA/AFO without his lifespan getting completely drained in the process-- the nomufication surgery was more likely just a measure that was taken to make sure Tomura's body was strong enough to make use of both quirks right away.

8. You know what? *beats the dead horse anyway*

Man, isn’t there a sale at Men’s Warehouse you’re late to???

I know I said I wouldn’t touch on this point but come the fuck on, mister twenty-four-seven biz cas isn’t even trying to hide it 

Bonus Points:

Machia's sense of smell - Machia tracks others through scent, and is somehow able to locate Tomura after the LOV has hidden themselves deep within the mountains. This is in spite the fact that they've never met before (Machia literally asks Tomura "Are you the one who succeeded AFO?"-- so we can assume he was not secretly tracking or observing Tomura from afar).  We know that if Machia's never met a person before, he obviously can't track them via scent-- we see this when he has to stop and literally ask Mina for directions during a flashback. But he still manages to track down the LOV when not even the police/heroes had any inkling of their location. So. If Machia and Tomura have never met before, how was Machia able to find him? As funny as it is to imagine AFO rubbing a pair of dirty sneakers in Machia's face like he's an overgrown bloodhound, I'll put forth the following theory-- Machia was sniffing out Decay's quirk factor rather than Tomura himself. If Decay was formerly in the possession of AFO, and/or if a part of AFO’s quirk factor already exists inside Tomura, then tracking him down is a cinch for Machia.

AFO's pasttime is villain creation - There's a whole scene in Vigilantes where AFO discusses the true nature of a "villain," then brags about being able to create villains by causing imbalances in one's quirk + giving people unsuitable quirks + stimulating quirks with a "violent will" and forcing them to go haywire. It's, uh. Fairly damning, to say the least.

AFO may have used Decay to kill Nana - This one is more conspiracy theory than actual theory, and it may seem like a huge stretch, but hear me out! In its untrained form, we see that Decay reduces people to chunks instead of dusting them-- but it leaves their hands perfectly intact. It feels far too coincidental that AFO just so happened  to leave Nana’s hand intact after killing her, and apparently decided to preserve that hand for 30 years on a total whim— and then, wouldn’tcha know it, Tenko just so happens to manifest a quirk that pulps everything but miraculously leaves the hands of those victims perfectly intact. And AFO being sick enough to give a little boy who wants to be a hero the same quirk that killed his hero grandma is a given at this point.

 - - - - - - - - -

Anyway, I get that a lot of folks dislike this theory because it takes away a lot of Tomura’s agency-- but honestly, his entire character arc has been about him trying to rediscover his true self and reclaiming his agency after a lifetime of having his identity abused out of him by pretty much everyone he’s ever met. AFO was always going to be the final boss of that character arc, which has been less about “becoming the greatest villain” (and hoo boy people on twitter are reeeeally hung up on this particular misconception about Tomura’s arc) and more about discovering his true convictions and “becoming his own person”-- Just as Izuku’s character arc is about becoming his own person and learning to actually value himself, rather than him just becoming All Might 2.0 who acts as a hero at the complete expense of his own personhood.

I don’t feel that Decay being an implant from AFO harms Tomura’s character arc in any way-- rather, confronting the lie that he was somehow “born evil” and exists as a slave to Decay’s destructive impulse feels like the next hurdle Tomura needs to overcome before he can truly reclaim his agency. 

[fallout-lou-begas]

Regarding @yesjejunus:

(mentions of rape, abuse, and trauma herein)

I have never made an effort to hide it on my blog before, but I want to make it clear that yesjejunus is my friend and I care about them. If you ask me, it should be extremely transparent to all onlookers that the attack against them this week is motivated by more of a personal grudge and obsessive vendetta than any actual concern for the "well-being" of anyone "endangered" by them, evidenced further by the poaching of personal information gleaned from defunct social media profiles for no actionable reason other than intimidation, the willfully outlandish misinterpretations of inside jokes between friends, and the mutilation of the definition of "grooming" and the excessive outright fabrications required to distort their friendship with some adults who happen to be younger than themself into allegations of predation on minors. Yejejunus has not ever actually done anything remotely justifying this punitive severity to any other human being, and if you have your own grievances about their art, then no one is holding, and no one has ever held, a gun to your head to force you to like them, or like their art or seek it out. The sheer volume of harassment that they have received for scarcely more than fanfiction and fanart that people can avoid on their own terms through proper tag filtering or blocking is frankly unjustifiable.

If you are upset by a work of art that you encounter in fandom or otherwise then it is not an interpersonal conflict between you and the artist. The artist has not harmed you, the artist doesn't even know you. Artists may have a responsibility to utilize tags and warnings appropriately on broad or big-tent platforms, and yesjejunus fulfilled this responsibility thoroughly, but ultimately an individual is responsible for their own artistic consumption and for avoiding the art that they want to avoid themself. If there is something that you are entirely incapable of seeing even a hint of without lapsing into some kind of retraumatization, and an artist tags art containing this thing appropriately, then the onus is on you to have it filtered out and the failure is on you if you have not. Assuming that every individual artist must be held "accountable" for whether their art could possibly upset someone or not, and assuming that any given individual is helplessly incapable of avoiding art that makes them upset, is a destructive perspective that flattens the ability of artists to create that which means a lot to them personally, lest their own experiences discomfort some hypothetical audience, and regardless of whether it may provide catharsis or revelation for another.

Additionally, to assume that any and all depiction of abuse of any kind is inherently an endorsement, or a "glamorization" or "fetishization," is to forget that discomfort can often be the point of a work of art, as it is in the case of horror. To be abused, or even to simply exist in an unhealthy relationship, is also to often endure complex, contradictory feelings in which hate and love and fear and dependence and violence and affection and misery and happiness exist hand-in-hand and even simultaneously. To treat portrayals of these kinds of relationships that embrace this uncomfortable nuance as "glorifying" them simply because it's not monochrome in a black-and-white morality play is both naive and insensitive. I also find the coercion of artists into disclosing their various traumas in order to "justify" their creation of their art, as if their trauma must be approved as sufficient by a committee, reprehensible; however I also do not believe that someone must inherently possess some form of trauma to depict it in art compassionately and meaningfully.

I also think that the mammoth amount of cognitive dissonance required to make this the hill that one dies on when the subject at hand is fanfiction and fanart of an 18+, rated-M video game series in which horrible and traumatic scenarios such as rape, slavery, domestic abuse, mass death, and graphic violence are depicted in abundance, and in certain ways with even less sensitivity or tact than the fanwork, shouldn't be lost on anyone, especially since you are far less able to excise these aspects from the source material than you are able to curate your participation in a fandom.

I want to reiterate that your opinions on yesjejunus, or me, or any user on tumblr or any artist on the planet are yours and yours alone to have. Who you follow, who you unfollow, who you block, and who you filter is purely your prerogative and you are encouraged to use any and all choices, tools, and mechanics at your disposal to avoid anyone that you wish, especially if it's for your own well-being. I wish that more people would utilize these options instead of cultivating a climate of fear and paranoia regarding who one “associates” with, and I do despise the term “associates” because it both reads far too much into a random reblog or reply, and reads far too little into a genuine friendship of mutual trust and care. Still, I am severely disappointed that I have to explain that the line is drawn at hounding an artist obsessively for years with flagrant disregard for their own trauma, blaming that artist for one's own complete failure to stop seeking out that which upsets them personally, and talking over or distorting the experiences and trauma of other people to suit one's own vindictive narrative, and this line has been crossed far, far beyond where it lays.

If you're offended or upset by this post then I beseech you to at the very least follow my advice in the previous paragraph and see yourself out, and may we only ever interact again at your deliberate discretion. If you refuse to do that and would rather call for my public quartering while using literally none of the myriad options at your disposal to remove me from your online experience at no charge, then go fuck yourself, and you may dislike my opinions but you can't un-laugh at my excellent shitposts.

Ed.: I would like to reblog this one more time add an addendum in order to bring attention to an update from yesjejunus themself about their side of the situation this week. They explain why they create the art that they do, as a method of coping with and processing their own trauma. It’s okay if you could not possibly imagine yourself coping with your own trauma, should you have it, in the same way. To label the creation of such art for such purposes as something inherently impermissible or ineffective is not only gravely insensitive but factually indefensible, and I must reiterate my own point that if how they do control their own trauma upsets or risks (re)traumatizing you, then why not ensure that you never see it by using the free and comprehensive blocking and filtering options available to you on this website instead of death marching someone who’s already deeply victimized? The word again is control. To control these traumas through fiction and art is an incredibly empowering, restorative thing, and to label this practice as nothing but harmful to others is to ignore the complex and multifacted ways in which trauma takes shape, or can be shaped.

[blankd]

Thoughts on The Mitchells vs the Machines

I watched it a while ago and kept forgetting to post my thoughts on it, but some posts here on tumblr recently reminded me.

I disagree with the majority takeaways I see but is that not the spice of life?

As a standalone movie its inoffensive and the writing of it will likely exit my brain in a few months.  However I can appreciate that the visual style was different from the typical fare and the mixture of 2d elements for visual embellishments were mostly enjoyable and well-suited for Katie as the POV character.

It's a bit "hyper" for my liking, but that's fine, it's likely intended for an audience that's accustomed to the flood that is the current norm of the internet.  It was probably made with GIFable moments in mind and that is the most frequent content that is shared about it, so it certainly succeeded in that regard.

My more critical take is that jokes are delivered at the expense of what could be more authentic themes.  Quips are made that draw attention to character flaws or undercut questions the movie should try to answer, but inevitably they are ignored to move onto the next joke or story beat.

The rest would fall more into spoiler territory, so read more for that.

--"They Were Both In the Wrong"

I personally disagree heavily with the thrust of how "both sides" were wrong when the degrees are disproportionate.

I've seen claims that Katie was "as in the wrong" as her father, but she's incredibly patient to the man who does her material harm.

I've yet to have seen someone say specifically what Katie did *wrong* to her father that is at all on par with the *years* he at best hasn't been able to interact with her or worse, actively refused to engage with her interests.

I would generously venture that her flaw was that she was more willing to communicate her feelings to strangers, but she easily talks to her mother and brother- her brother even helps her with her movies and she happily engages him with his own interests, which pivots the point back to how her father is physically/emotionally unavailable and led to the erosion and distance between the two of them.

Due to this, MvM comes across more as Kaite having to do so much more to guide her father rather than a more mutual learning experience for the both of them.

--"Technology that [Dis]Connects"

It's probably beyond the scope and intent of the film, but I was surprised there was no examination about why technology can be more alluring than interacting with physically present people.

For better or worse, the internet can be used as a means of supplementing the validation and acceptance of family.  It can also lead to no longer connecting to people around them because of the validation high of appealing to a constantly 'awake' sea of strangers- the spotlight is warmer than the cold reality that they are not the internet image they have cultivated.

For example, the rival 'perfect' family was never revealed to be a carefully constructed highlight reel that Mrs. Mitchell envies, they really were actually that perfect- because that provides an easier punchline than an examination or acknowledgement of how the internet can create unhealthy expectations.

I also can't expect MvM to acknowledge the reality that LGBTA+ people who are rejected by their family resort to seeking a new one through the internet because it would be much harder to redeem/rehabilitate a man defined by being tethered to "old values" if he was homophobic instead of "overprotective" and apprehensive at his daughter's departure from home and her dubious art career.

But hey we got that quick line at the end that Katie likes a girl, so that's a diversity win or something.

(To be clear I'm not expecting a whole parade or even an A or B-plot dedicated to it, but I think it should be acknowledged that this kind of "surprise inclusion" is very easily erased with a change of audio and would be completely unsurprised if this were the case for countries that are homophobic.  People can be happy about it, but it is dishonest to pretend that this is a bolder statement than it is.)

In that sense, I do and don't hold MvM to taking a "safer" route about how family always has your back, but this still feels like an important omission considering the focus on technology and its dynamic with the Mitchells.

I will also say that it was also bizarre, to me at least, that the obvious route that her father sees the value of home videos didn't become an active point between him and Katie.  Or that Mr. Mitchell's carpentry never really amounts to anything despite having a sentimental wooden moose.

Lastly, I think it's an unintentional, but it's interesting that Katie going to college to pursue her passion is viewed as a Terrible Thing by her father even though if he had his way, he'd be ostensibly living in the woods away from everyone else except his wife.

This isn't a problem, people are a collection of contradictions, but It's fascinating to see what the *narrative* treats as a difficult sacrifice while simultaneously pulling at heartstrings when PAL cites how children ignore their mothers.  There's an unexamined comedy that Mr. Mitchell's losing out on his 'passion' to live in the woods away from people is treated as tragic despite the movie's insistence on staying connected with your blood family.

--"The Inconsistent Personhood of AI"

PAL is rightfully angry at being discarded for something new; it's provided as a glimpse of what Katie will do when she finds 'her people' at college.

This in of itself is a good hook, because there is no one universal answer to when a flawed relationship should be mended with compromise or if it's better off being broken for the wellbeing of the ones involved.  Family and relationships are not programming, it's a choice and a gamble for whatever it brings but is nonetheless something that must be mutually worked upon.

Initially I thought that PAL was being set up as an exaggerated parallel to Mr. Mitchell.  PAL and Mr. Mitchell did their best to provide for their family.  PAL and Mr. Mitchell are in different stages of being 'discarded' by their family.  PAL and Mr. Mitchell both retaliate at their lack of power in the scenario by using the power granted by their roles to infringe on the autonomy of others for selfish reasons.

PAL even gives a 'chance' for her plan to be halted with, I had assumed this was being set up as the thesis of the movie, about humanity and the value of family, relationships, etc. being used to help someone who is already hurting.

But despite Katie looking at the camera and explaining herself, it is never actually directly resolved or challenged because a punchline was deemed more desirable for this narrative climax.

This begs the question of why PAL bothered with the pretense that she could be reasoned with, especially since this is not some question leveled at all of humanity, just two people.

I'm curious how the writers came to the conclusion that this was the best execution of the scene or if Katie's speech was considered immune to any challenge from PAL.  Would anyone have accepted this outcome if PAL were not an AI but instead a person?

It's not necessarily bad writing they went this route, but I doubt anyone would consider this good writing either.

By the end of the movie, PAL is no longer a 'person' who was betrayed and is lashing out, she is an object to be destroyed because the movie has to wrap up.  No compassion or chances are spared to this AI that did literally everything asked of her except take being discarded quietly.

Did PAL deserve a redemption arc? For this length of movie, probably not.  But it could have concluded with a commitment to doing no further harm.  Instead it is an accidental glimpse at how easily the pretense of compassion can be quickly discarded and mostly unexamined with the right framing.

A likely unintentional example is the conditional humanity given to Eric and Deborahbot who are adopted as "family" while the rest of the robots are mowed down without another thought.  Some are even beaten and broken while begging for mercy, because again, it is a funnier punchline.

Far be it for me to advocate that the murderbots needed 'a second chance uvu' but for a movie whose conceit rests on 'sticking by family' and 'giving chances', the writers certainly made a choice in deciding which AI get honorary humanity and spared violent death- perhaps PAL had a point about humanity's callousness after all.  Bad robots are discarded, good robots get to live.

Even the CEO who realizes he enabled this mess (easily the most unrealistic part of the movie, honestly) is given another chance and he manages to take away a completely wrong lesson.

Speaking of-

--"Maybe I Shouldn’t Have Used Tech Like This"

There's a particular image/gif set posted about MvM with the CEO apologizing for the machine uprising, attributing it to unchecked technology and monopolies.  I've always seen it accompanied by people congratulating the scene as if any of this is at all relevant to the movie.

Charitably, these are people who haven't watched the movie and don't know that PAL is a phone AI single-handedly doing this, but most take the stance that this scene is proof the movie is not saying technology is bad, only corporations are.

The speech isn't technically wrong but it is so utterly divorced from what happens in the movie that it's surreal to see people congratulate it as anything but a moment of soapboxing.

None of the datagrabbing was used at all as part of the takeover.  It's all magical kid-friendly terminators with no relevance to what anyone's browsing history is.  If the company was one that produced robot assistants instead of a being a super tech monopoly, there would be no narrative difference.

The closest to a predatory tactic that is used in MvM is the offer of free wifi which is used to lure most people into their cells which they happily comply with. Curiously this... commentary of people’s mindless addiction to technology is not acknowledged by the Tumblr Court with the same intensity as the CEO’s speech.

But more constructively, I do feel it’s a missed opportunity that Katie who's supposed to be an extremely online person apparently never said any bad things about her family or made any petty vent films for PAL to weaponize.  Instead an in-media audio at one of the outskirt locations was used to accomplish its Traitor Revealed moment.

IN CONCLUSION

MvM is a movie that involves topics that ought to be touched on and explored properly in media and chickens out on all of it due to possible concerns with age-appropriate handling or because it was more committed to its comedy than whatever it has to say about family, change and how technology affects people.

It also reminded me that I hope media will finally graduate from the trope that if you spec into any ‘outdoorsy’ hobby you are incurably afraid of technology.

[vidalinav]

I go back and forth with this...

But I do want the sisters to be close... I think. 

Ultimately, they’re not bad with each other, even if they have such contention, what sisters don’t? They all have shown that they care about each other, enough to sacrifice some part of themselves. Their personalities may be different, but that’s just how family is. If anyone knows how family actually are, as opposed to this kind of weird version of “family” that the IC made, which blurs the lines between romance, family, and co-worker, it’s these three? 

They slept in a room together with one bed, why wouldn’t they hate each other on the simplest level? All of them have gone through some horrible things that cannot be denied on any level. They don’t each really understand each other yet, or even empathize, but I imagine that has a lot to do with the fact that they don’t know each other fully, the whole story of what each of them have been through. No one knows that Nesta was physically abused by her grandmother and emotionally abused by her mother. They don’t know truly why Nesta hated their father or that she was assaulted by Tomas or what she went through in the cauldron or that she hated herself and didn’t want to exist. They can connect some dots, but not in any way that matters. No one knows what Elain goes through on a regular basis, that she is no where near fine, and that her pleasant personality is fake at best, because I’m sure she is not a-okay. They don’t know what she felt when she was younger, being kind of cast aside, by both mother and father really, as I’m sure they were not attentive. They don’t know what it felt like for her to go into the cauldron, and finding out you have a mate right there, and though we’ve seen the effects, we haven’t seen her thoughts. No one knows what Feyre has gone through, the anger, the hatred, the abuse, Under-the-Mountain, killing those fae, being the High Lady now who doesn’t really know what she’s doing, and now having many of her own family kind of not looking to her as that role, because she really doesn’t know what she’s doing and she’s very young and not given too much authority even under the pretense of her having authority. Honestly, if you read all of the books, the parts with only the sisters, they’re not even that horrible. They act like sisters. They do what sisters do. 

It’s a very interesting thing, because I don’t always mean to paint the IC as a horrible group, but they’re group dynamics taint a lot of healing that could be more easily mitigated if not for these additional people who think they know what’s best or who have to think of their court too instead of how well they’re family is functioning. Because Nesta, Elain, and Feyre don’t have this dynamic of being co-worker/family. They only know family. A traumatized version, but that’s not uncommon to anyone in a family. These girls are very young compared to these fae, but they have not dealt with their issues in 500+ years, no one should be telling them how to do things, when to do it, and each of them is more powerful than any of them at any given moment, even probably Elain. Which is why to Amren is like oh look, these three sisters could make you High King. B.S. All three of these girls want support and a good time. None of them want war or power--clearly. 

So, I would actually like them to have a role in these books where they undeniably stand up for each other, not in an individual sense, but in we’re The Archeron Sisters sense and if you do it to one of us, you do it to all of us. Like the Umbrella Academy level of unity, where they come with ugly memories, but they’re like well with the end of the world in sight we’ll just have to make new memories. Becuase honest to god, I don’t want this fake narrative of everything is okay now, and we can move on up. Our families can be joined and all is well.

Give me conflict but also give me understanding. Give me Feyre and Nesta being like wtf Elain when she starts her healing journey and with whoever romance she has, both of them being gossipers and sticking their noses in her business when Elain is secretive and Elain getting pissed, give me Nesta and Elain being like hell no you’re touching my sister simultaneously when Koschei the big bad is like I want one of you or both of you or whatever. Give me Feyre and Elain being like I don’t know what Nesta is doing, I think she’s been hanging out with Cassian too long, has she always been like this? When Nesta gets into inevitable shenanigans because trouble follows her around. Give me all three of them saving the day, because no one can do it better than them. EVER. Because they don’t have any of the skill and they’re just making it up as they go along, as you do, but they’re minds are fresh and their spirits hopeful and they can do this. Give me the Archeron Sisters deciding that even though they have friends outside of themselves, they are sisters. Only sisters. Because they’re forced together by familial ties, because they have a shared history, and they’ve seen each other at their worst, at their ugliest, and they still choose each other now, because through all five books, Nesta, Feyre, and Elain undoubtedly loved each other even if they didn’t understand how that love was shown. Not a sisterhood, or friends that are absolutely supportive, but sisters!

Give me substance or don’t give it to me at all. 

[prairiedust]

More Last Holiday Musings...

I want to poke at that interdimensional geoscope a little more, because upon reading it over again, I think I splashed it up a little fast and there are a couple of points I’d like to be clearer about. I meant to queue this up to post last night but also want it to be up before Gimme Shelter so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

This is more blue curtains lit crit with a dash of folklore and an honorable mention for post-structuralism. And we’re talking about Supernatural after all, so this is sort of... well, it’s about endings.

Last Holiday was not a typical “filler” or even a typical MOTW episode. It felt extremely insular, possibly more so than any other episode I can think at any other point in the series. As opposed to the usual crowd of “locals,” a spate of victims, and a couple of red herring suspects, the only other people in this ep besides the Winchesters (including Jack) and Mrs. Butters were the two vampires and Cuthbert Sinclair. There was no “case” as in a usual MOTW-- there was no Chuck Struggle, either, and the lack of mytharc was strange against the lack of “filler” schema. That lack of “MOTW investigation” marked this episode also as being about “curiosity”-- the Winchesters all-too-quickly took Mrs. Butters for granted-- Dean even dismissed her as a “Magic Roomba” and that seemed to settle the matter. Furthermore, the moment that Dean spotted Mrs. B in his room, the stage was set for Antics ™ when she held up his goofy Scooby boxers, and indeed a zaniness, an almost manic energy drove the action forward at a breakneck pace. [Spoiler alert, we do get “investigation” in the next episode, 15x15 Gimme Shelter, as stills and the preview show that Castiel and Jack will be teaming up together, in yet another shake-up of the usual “MOTW” template, almost like we can expect the other side of a coin when Sam and Dean switch places with Cas...] These features set Last Holiday apart as not so much “filler” as “between,” as in there was struggle before, and there will be struggle after, but for a while there was cake. (Contrast this to the usual “peril of the threshold” that usually shrouds liminality if you’d like.)

At the end of Last Holiday, however, we finally get to find out what that old blue telescope really is, and with that name we get confirmation that there are no more alternate universes-- Chuck has burned them all. Viewers are left to come to the conclusion that in retrospect the telescope-thing could have changed the course of season 13 completely. The reveal is played off as darkly funny, but it’s also kind of a gut-wrenching moment, too. All the heartbreak of the last two and a half years, reviewed now through the lens of “if only.” If only they’d known about Mrs. Butters from the time they found the bunker, “none of this would have happened”… they’d have had monster radar, they’d have had the geoscope, they would have had supernatural help of a completely different level.

The temptation to read Last Holiday as a Chuck-free episode is strong, but fraught-- the threat of Chuck’s involvement has been established by a pattern this season (well the pattern is woven throughout the whole series really but Dabb has deliberately structured these last three seasons with an exponentially increasing frequency.) I feel like we’ve been conditioned this season in particular to hold ourselves in a perpetual flinch, to be afraid of what we’ll learn “in retrospect.” That geoscope was really_good_subtext, and it is entirely possible, even encouraged, at this point in the plot to take information we’ve learned from the naming of the object, examine our own conditioned response to this episode, and apply both things to the structure of the season so far and make a prediction as to what might happen in the main plot. That’s what I mean about subtext getting loud. We’ve been given the green-light to make a prediction about The Struggle and march forward with it, and see if we will be correct by extrapolating the pattern, or if that expectation will be subverted (the twist is set up to run either way, so either outcome is satisfying.) It is Melville-esque architecture of the highest degree;I could write another thousand words just about that. So I have a prediction that I’m hanging on to, because of what we’ve learned from the geoscope, and what kinds of clues were hung up in Last Holiday, and I’m super excited to either have my hunch confirmed or be frightfully and delightedly surprised. I mean, where the fuck did Jeremy Adams even come from? He’s like our own Mrs. Butters, showing up in the last quarter to run a couple game-changing balls into the end zone, it’s bonkers. I mean, I know writing mysteries is hard and requires still AND cunning, but damn, son.

But anyway, back to the geoscope… 

I’m perplexed, from a very “lit crit” perspective, but this is where I’m at and why I referenced blue curtains-- if you shine too bright a light on subtext, does it evaporate-- like looking through an interdimensional geoscope and not seeing anything-- or is “subtext” sometimes not some ephemeral fever-dream that we as viewers conjure up through our experiential interlocution with the text but something a writer has steeped into the narrative as part of their craft? Or when you’re talking about an evolving iteration of writers, is it possible that one picks up a thread that another wove in for something else, repurposing or amplifying it? And, when perhaps is something deliberately instilled in the text in order to become “text” at just the right time? In Moby Dick, [spoiler alert lol] Quequeg’s coffin-- formerly one of many symbolic vehicles used to foreshadow the doom of the Pequod-- is repurposed as a life buoy and becomes the actual object that saves Ishmael’s life, transforming it from a portent of disaster to a symbol of salvation and then to one of Ishmael’s guilt for surviving Ahab’s madness-- the guilt that had been made text by the very opening line of the book, “Call me Ishmael.” In retrospect, the connotations of wandering, exile and salvation behind the name that the narrator gives himself become crystal clear. The problem that the post-structuralist model of “reading” as simultaneously “creating the text” has manufactured is that the idea that “subtext” can often be discounted as something dreamed up wholecloth by the reader, and thus inferior, imaginary, even delusional (and I use that last word knowing what a loaded term that is in the spn fandom, but this is not about a ship, even) where once it was considered to be a valid and measurable part of the text itself, like that dang coffin. It was the basement, the underpinnings, the catacombs below the opera house sure, but it helped to hold up the structure. And for some reason, putting subtext into a piece of media has become passe, or cringe? Anyway, not to be bitter on main but it didn’t used to be this way, at least not in the heady early days of postmodernism. So that green light? Critical hit against blue curtains. And while yes, some readings are going to be better supported than others, and the wild variety of checklists in this fandom mean that some conclusions have been drawn which can’t pan out, if you’re paying attention to the structure, the subtexts, the alchemical/psychoanalytical/postmodern themata, the ending will be very satisfying. 

So. What was once speculated to be a symbol for emotional lows or turning points (among other things) in the bunker was textually hit with a bright green light, then Dean got curious about it in text, and we were told-- in text-- that oh it’s just a fancy spyglass, and now that the other worlds are gone, it has no purpose…. that’s what I mean about the geoscope now being “pure”-- it wasn’t clear whether the telescope ever had any function, subtetxtual or not, and now that it’s certain what it’s “function” was, it’s now freed up as a “symbol”-- unless like in Moby Dick it’s new “purpose” is revealed later, but right now it’s caught in this liminal place of not-quite-clue and not-quite-metaphor... 

However, and I didn’t put this in my first post because I was trying to be fast and not a wet blanket, but I felt like finally naming the geoscope was an ending. 

This is literally Singer, Dabb, and Co tidying up the house before locking it behind them.

I think when Dean said he didn’t see anything through the “telescope thing,” that we’re to understand that maybe this was the last hurrah of the cute, zany, campy “subtext” or even “metatext” if you’d rather that so many of us have been parsing and which has gotten so weird and bright since season 12/13. I think I said in one of the folklore posts that writing about some of the things I write about feels like making daisy chains in the endzone during the big game. Which is fun, that’s how I personally got through having to be in AYSO soccer for four years, by looking for four leafed clovers and eating orange quarters. And we got a wood nymph in this episode, textually even, so I could easily check the “folklore” box on this one. But the sheer euphoria of Last Holiday and all the sparkles it brought into the story aren’t meant to last. When you look back on fifteen years of text, a lot of it is bleak, miserable stuff. That’s not to say that episodes like Yellow Fever and Hunteri Heroici and Fan Fiction et al shouldn’t be celebrated. But I think from here on out, things are going to be less “golly gee, three birthdays!” and more “There she blows! --there she blows! A hump like a snowhill!”

This episode was a gift in many ways, not just for the sense of glee it transmitted-- it also did so much work and there are things I want to yell about in the way language was hit, the red versus green lighting, the way the backwards holidays worked, the projector as a metaphor for Mrs. B projecting her regrets and fears onto Jack, the amount of food that was created and consumed, how that smoothie was also an echo of “fairy food” or an underworld pact if you squint-- but the stakes are so high now. We haven’t been shown the next valley-- there was no final scene of Chuck rubbing his hands together like the villain from a melodrama, for example-- but the last image we got was Jack blowing out a candle. After the candle is blown out, the cake is dismantled and consumed. Once the story is over, all the themes that are so hard to grapple in a text like a television show can be gathered up and analyzed. (IS that all, though? After all, Dean made his own cake later, which, like, echoes of the “oh two cakes” comic lol...)

Since I really never want to leave anything I toss out on this blog on a last note of doom and gloom, however, I do want to say that I too understand what that last image meant. It meant, as Sam said, make a wish. Think of the future, think of free will, and hope for something wonderful to happen. (or do like me and wonder what the hell Jack wished for with dread and anticipation ha ha ha.)

[chatsanova]

Have Another Go At It: Chapter 2

AO3

When La Grande Paris and Chloe collapsed, it seemed like nothing Chloe ever did would matter ever again.

Every snap at Pierre, every name-dropped or rule bent in the name of Chloe getting what she wanted, none of it would ever matter again. It didn’t matter before either, Chloe had just tricked herself into thinking it did. Her thoughts went like this: grief, guilt, regret, distraction then denial.

Chloe had always loved being center stage. It was where she thrived her whole life. Sure, her father was always busy, and sure, her mother was always gone, but to everyone else, she was the most famous, the most beautiful, the most worthy of their attention.

Occasionally she’d use her status to make things work in her direction, but Chloe just saw that as using her resources.

At her lowest points, she’d use it to humiliate others, but negative attention was still attention.

To those around her, dare she say, those that care about her, it seemed her reign of boisterous claims and attention-seeking would never end. She’d assumed they thought the worst of her, that she would fall into more destructive means, and slowly she’d become too much for her Pierre, for Sabrina, for Adrien. She’d never deserve them and it seemed most stuck around for employment. Her father paid well for friendship.

Adrien always insisted that he never accepted money as there was no point for him to do so. And well, he was in the same boat. Adrien was the first person that understood her, that knew why she was always clinging to her fame. He didn’t always agree with it, but he understood it. At that point, it was all she could ask for.

Plus, for a long time, she had Adrien’s undivided attention. He didn’t know any other kids, he was homeschooled, and Chloe was the only option for companionship. Maybe Adrien was never paid, but the sentiment of sticking around simply because there were no other options had plagued Chloe as well.

Then he came to school with her. It had taken some convincing, but Adrien’s mother thought it would be good for him, as long as he kept up with modeling.

Adrien’s attention wasn’t undivided anymore. Adrien became fast friends with Alya, also new at school, and Nino seemed attached to Adrien’s hip merely two days in.

Alya and Nino tolerated her but had a nasty habit of trying to stop Chloe from picking fights with Marinette. Adding pure, soft, can do no wrong Adrien into the mix didn’t help.

She’d been forced to mellow out in order to keep Adrien around. It was a lot easier to do so after the incident. Picking fights with Marinette stopped instantaneously, though she could feel Marinette’s irritation at the prospect. Marinette never wanted pity, but it’s what she received, even from Chloe.

Marinette had sort of snapped in a weird direction.

It was like she suddenly felt the need to grow up all at once. She wasn’t at school for 2 weeks and when she reappeared, she looked completely different.

She stopped wearing handmade clothes, she stopped putting her hair into pigtails, she just stopped. Her grades slipped, though the teachers also took pity on her.

Marinette waffled in between efforts for attention and not wanting anyone to notice her.

The new clothing style said attention, Chloe thought, recognizing it in herself.

She got looked at more often for tight-fitting jeans, mesh shirts, and dark lips extenuating her blue eyes. But then her closed-off attitude, her snappy remarks, those were defense mechanisms to push people away.

Chloe realized a long time ago that looks were something you can control. Attention is something happily given to pretty people, and sometimes when you can’t control what sort of attention you’re given, looking a certain way gives you a way to drive your own narrative.

Being in the papers for being pretty is more fun than being in the papers for being a bitch. Chloe and Marinette understood that if you’re going to be a bitch, you might as well be an attractive one. People are more willing to forgive a pretty bitch.

These thoughts occurred to Chloe during her distraction phase. It was easy to be distracted by a girl who was sitting right next to her, silent but present, especially one dressed for attention-seeking.

Neither of them wanted attention right now, and they were both sitting with the precisely right person to avoid it, but Chloe allowed herself to be distracted by Marinette. It was better than the alternative.

Chloe didn’t speak; Marinette didn’t speak.

Maybe it didn’t matter if people noticed you, as long as they kept their mouth shut about it.

She couldn’t remember why they had fought so regularly. They seemed so distant, those arguments. She assumed she had done something entitled and Marinette had done something condescending and they’d argue until someone got involved and they’d part ways until their next encounter. Maybe at that point, both had each other’s attention.

Around Marinette, Chloe felt seen. Not in a positive way but definitely in a way that allowed Chloe to feel better about herself for a few quick moments. They both fought for the moral high ground and both won in their own eyes.

Occasionally, Chloe’s thoughts would circle back around to her parents, but she quickly pushed them away. She had to, otherwise, she’d break down again.

So she studied Marinette’s hair, her eyebrows hidden beneath her bangs. Her eyelashes. Her eyes stared into nothing, or maybe into something deep in her brain. Those tended to be the same. She wondered what she was thinking about.

Chloe had wrapped her arms around her legs and buried her face in her knees. At some point, was it two? three? hours of sitting on the ground, Marinette said something.

“Do you,” she cleared her throat from disuse, “Do you need a place to stay?”

Chloe looked up sharply. Marinette also seemed surprised at the suggestion, despite the fact that she had offered it.

“Sorry, I’m just thinking... if you needed to...you could stay at my house…”

Of all the things Chloe had thought about, her physical things hadn’t even crossed her mind. Her physical home. Her home had collapsed. She’d cared so much about her shoe collection 12 hours ago and now she couldn’t be bothered.

“Oh…” Chloe lowered her face back into her knees, “I hadn’t thought about it, I guess.”

“Well, If you do…” Marinette trailed off, the offer hanging in the air. It was the official olive branch.

They hadn’t been fighting, but they weren’t friends by any means. It seemed like this was saying, “I’m willing to move on if you are.”

Maybe it wasn’t the right time, or maybe it was the best time. Maybe they desperately needed someone in their corner. Maybe Adrien hadn’t understood Chloe for a long time. Maybe Marinette and Chloe had always understood each other.

Maybe seeking attention meant seeking those that were willing to give it.

“Thank you.” And they fell back into silence.

If Chloe had thought about it, which she hadn’t, she’d probably assume that she’d stay at Adrien’s. But Adrien was in his own headspace now.

Then her thoughts shifted to the denial. This denial was justified, Chloe felt, because Adrien had practically been saying it all day.

“None of this is right.” Which in Chloe’s mind translated to, “None of this is real.”

She had felt the wrongness before but now couldn’t attribute it to anything but grief. People always tried to bargain, right?

What if none of this is real? What if my parents aren’t dead? What if I can get them back? But Adrien hadn’t lost anything. What excuse did he have for making up shit in his brain? This is what Chloe said to herself in order to decide that whatever Adrien needed to do to “fix” things, she’d do it. Because maybe, just maybe, the madman was right. That her parents shouldn’t be dead. That this was fixable.

Nino and Alya had explained their dreams to Marinette. They were more than dreams, they all understood that, but Marinette was having a hard time latching on.

“We just need to know what you think feels wrong,” Nino said. Marinette scoffed, not out of malice but out of frustration. Her arms crossed defensively against her chest, her head shook bouncing hair on her shoulders, her mouth struggled to form words. Adrien understood that frustration, as he was currently feeling it as well. It was not being able to find words that should feel so normal, and knowing something is wrong but not anything else.

“I don’t know! I don’t know what feels wrong! Everything feels wrong!”

It occurred to Adrien that you can’t really feel water when you’re surrounded by it.

Everything about Marinette’s life was wrong, as far as he could tell. He wouldn’t be able to tell you what was correct exactly, only that if you squint really hard something about her was familiarly incorrect.

It wasn’t easy to explain, and he wasn’t the best with words anyway. He glanced at his friends, who returned his glances, each with a tinge of sympathy. He couldn’t tell who the sympathy was directed towards but suspected it wasn’t mutually exclusive.

Adrien was obviously more affected by this phenomenon. Dreams were one thing, but Adrien’s mood had been violently swinging all day. It was to be expected in the midst of a national crisis, but this had begun before the building fell.

He cried when there was nothing to cry at, both in happiness and grief. He felt as though he were living two days simultaneously, one very different, but maybe not much better.  And to him, Marinette was at the epicenter.

Feelings around her thrashed like waves against a rocky shore. He tapped his foot impatiently and crossed his arms, becoming jittery. He paced around the hallway.

“Adrien?” Chloe sounded more concerned than she really should have been. Adrien felt guilty for not being the one next to her to deal with her parents. And then ashamed of his guilt and then ashamed of his own self-pity.

He was so caught up in his own bullshit that he had stood to the side while Marinette, of all people, comforted her. It was bizarre, wrong, and also the best thing to happen today.

“Sorry, I’m just...confused.” His mental failings shouldn’t be a priority right now. People have died.

It wasn’t his place to be more distraught than those around him. His parents were still alive and well, his home unaffected, his life unchanged. That felt incorrect too, somehow. He felt as though his life had changed significantly, just in a way that was unplaceable. Like pointing at it would be pointing at air.

The news outlets and websites said that outside wouldn’t be safe until the next morning so everyone camped out in the main gym. There were a scattered number of teachers that had arrived before the collapse but apparently most had been stuck in a Ladybug induced roadblock.

They instructed students to stay calm and a few reached out to Chloe specifically, checking in occasionally, but Chloe made it clear that the teachers should focus on the other students. They looked surprised at this sentiment, but continued to try to help those who seemed more visibly distraught than Chloe.

They had been advised to stay put until the next morning, so the teachers gathered yoga mats and the school’s few sleeping bags from upperclassmen camping trips. A few blankets scattered the floor. There wasn’t enough for everyone so some used jackets or backpacks as pillows. The students gathered together, select laughter echoing through the gymnasium. But otherwise, it was about as quiet as an entire school of 14-18 years could be.

They struggled through another explanation, but Marinette remained unconvinced. Chloe explained her dream, eerily similar to Nino’s about a purple butterfly and not being in control. They watched her carefully. When she was done, she looked over at Marinette, who looked sympathetic and maybe a little confused.

“I’m sorry, this all seems odd, I’ll give you that, but I just don’t recognize it as familiar.”

They all turned to look at Adrien. He’s the one who needed this, he’s the one with the next step. He had no answers. He hadn't told her his dream yet. He wasn't sure he could.

“No, I’m sorry. Maybe...maybe it’s nothing. Maybe nothing is going on.” he pressed his palms into his eyes, rubbing away a headache he didn’t know he had. “Maybe I’m going crazy.”

“How can you say that?” Chloe glared, “How can you claim, how can you...give me hope that none of this is right, that maybe we’re in some sort of dream, and then just toss it aside like it’s nothing? What if my parents are supposed to be alive right now, Adrien? Do you want to just ignore it? You want me to live a life I’m not supposed to be living?”

“Chloe, I never claimed this world isn’t real, just that it’s wrong.”

“Then that’s what I’m saying. This world...isn’t real.”

“Chloe…” Alya reached a hand out to her.

“No.” Chloe stood, turned, and walked away, leaving Alya’s hand suspended in the air.

For the first time in months, Marinette slept in a building with other people in it. More people than she ever had, really. She slept on a blanket, sharing with Alya and Chloe, who had come back only when she realized she didn’t want to be alone.

She didn’t say that, of course, but no one commented on her return either. They didn’t talk about the feeling for the rest of the night, instead opting for silence or half-hearted plans for the next day.

Adrien said Chloe could stay at his house. Chloe didn’t even have to ask. Marinette and Chloe shared a glance before Chloe agreed.

Marinette had a dream on the gymnasium floor. She wasn’t lying when she said Alya, Chloe and Nino’s dreams didn’t sound familiar, but this one was not unfamiliar .

She stood on a rooftop, wind-battered her skin, and she was cold. She couldn’t possibly be really cold, it wasn’t real, but she shivered. She felt the chill on her arms. It wasn’t right.

When she looked down at her hands she was surprised to see them. She felt as though something was missing from her skin. Her hands bolted to her ears and felt nothing.

In front of her, the scene was incomprehensible. There were two people, wearing garishly ridiculous outfits. It didn’t seem like they should be a threat, but in her dream, her pulse quickened.

One of them had a gun. It wasn’t pointing at her but to an empty spot next to her. Panic ran through her spine all the way down to her bare fingertips. There’s someone missing. Where...where was he? For some reason, she couldn’t bring herself to look downwards. She knew something was just below her vision if she could move her neck every time she pulled, her vision remained stiff, forcing her chin to remain level.

The woman with the gun, she sauntered to them, Marinette and the Something. She dipped into her blind spot and came up with a ring. The man, he looked grief-stricken, panicked, and angry.

“NATALIE.” his voice boomed in the quiet city. It...shouldn't have been quiet.

“Relax, boss, once you have the miraculous everything will go back to normal. You’ll have your family back.”

“Then give me the ring”

“Hold on a second, I want to talk to the girl.”

“No, enough of this. Give me the miraculous.”

Then she held up the gun to his chest. Marinette couldn’t move. She couldn’t do anything. She was hopeless. She was helpless. She was weak.

“Give me the earrings, Gabriel.”

“Nat-”

A click of the gun, “I’m not asking.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’ll get you your family back Gabriel, but I want something too.”

“How do I know you’ll bring her back?”

“Because I don’t want you causing me trouble on the other side. Gotta keep you fat and happy. The earrings.”

He held them out. She turned around and walked where Marinette couldn’t see. A shining light sparked into her field of vision. And then a stronger brighter one a few seconds later. And then...and then there was nothing but light.

Marinette woke up her arms tight around Chloe. She gasped (from the dream) and made eye contact with the back of Chloe’s head. She’d gotten so tense during her nightmare that she’d pulled Chloe against her chest.

Okay, I’m big spooning Chloe Bourgeois.

She couldn’t even think beyond that. She felt another body on her other side, Alya sleeping peacefully.

She needed space. Room to breathe. Sitting up proved to be easier than standing up. She managed to get free, grab her backpack, and flee into the hallway, still buzzing with public school lighting. She aimlessly walked the hallways. A teacher stopped her once, she quickly rambled about going to the bathroom and they let her go. She took deep breaths trying to remember everything about that dream. The names. The faces. The location. It already began to blur in her mind. She remembered the gun and the earrings and the ring and the chill on her skin and how wrong it felt. She felt something, someone, missing from her field of vision.

She sat and drew everything she remembered. Her hands, the roof, the gun, the earrings and the ring in the hand of the wrong people. The flashing in the corner of her eye, the grief stricken angry face of the man in purple. The cruelness of the woman in blue. She couldn’t quite remember her face.

Adrien wasn’t going to sleep, he knew that when he woke up this morning. So when he saw Marinette grab her backpack and run, it wasn’t a large leap to try and talk to her. Problem was he couldn’t find her.

“Mr. Agreste, what are you doing up and about?”

“Bathroom, ma’am.”

The teacher narrowed her eyes.

“No fooling around, Mr. Agreste.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it.” He couldn’t remember what he had done to receive a reputation of tomfoolery but apparently word had spread. That wasn’t even his teacher. He almost asked if she had seen Marinette, but that wouldn’t have helped.

He found Marinette on the roof.

“What the fuck, Marinette?”

“GOD! Fuck, Agreste, you scared me.”

“You’re on the roof.”

“Well spotted.”

“Why?”

“Needed some air.”

“Toxic, debris-filled air?”

“That warning came down hours ago.”

“What are you doing?” he gestured to her notebook.

“Drawing, Agreste, what does it look like?”

“It looks like you’re on the ROOF during a traumatic NATIONAL CRISIS. Please just come down.”

“Oh. OH! No, Agreste, I’m fine. I’m good. I just needed to…” she trailed off.

He looked around. From here, you could see where Le Grand Paris used to be.

“The world is fucked,” he ran his fingers through his hair and sat down next to Marinette. She flipped her notebook closed. She was drawing a pair of hands.

“Well spotted.”

“Marinette, I think it’s my fault.”

“Full of yourself, are we? Center of the world Adrien Agreste? The only one who realizes the world is fucked?”

“Jesus, I’m trying to,” he sighed, “Fuck, Marinette.”

They were silent for a while.

“Marinette, your life is wrong.”

"You keep saying that."

"I mean it, I don't think this is how things were supposed to go."

"You can't just brush off things you don't like with denial, Agreste. At least, that's why my therapist says."

Adrien laughed, "Watch me."

"Blondie, I can't help but want to believe you, and that's why I can't do this. Whatever it is you're doing. I can't let myself believe that nothing is permanent. I can't just go along with it because I think I'll see my parents on the other side."

"No, I know that. Of course, I know that." Adrien uses his hands to push himself off the ground, spinning that he's sitting across from her, "I just...Marinette I'm going to tell you my dream."

"Ooookay."

"No, my literal dream, the dream that I had last night, not like, my existential drea- ya know what, never mind."

"No, I get it," Marinette smiles, and it's good to see.

"Alright, I'm on this roof."

His dream starts on a roof. Of course, of fucking course it does.

"And there's something next to me that I can't see. And I'm looking at this roof and there's a guy in purple, with, like, this butterfly brooch on it. It's a ridiculous fucking outfit." Marinette has to smile. "And he's talking some big game about something miraculous. And I'm pissed. I'm angry as fuck. And then this equally gaudy bitch pulls out this canister that's got my MOM inside which is wild, and then I'm cussing this guy out. Just screaming at him. I honestly don't remember what I said. Then he moves to that place I can't look, ya know, that blind spot? And comes back with earrings. Then the bitchy lady comes back and I wake up."

"Wow, that's quite the dream." If Marinette hadn't experienced what she just experienced, she would have thought that's a fairly normal dream dream.

"Now, I know how that sounds."

"Sounds like a dream," she lied.

"No, I know, dreams are crazy in general, but I swear more happened than that. I just, it felt so weird, like I was actually on the ruth, filled with rage. I just need to know who was next to me."

Me. Adrien was next to me.

[dweemeister]

Soul (2020)

2020 dashed the best-laid plans, disrupted dreams, and brought disease. For almost one full year now, COVID-19 has upended society the world over, and taken the lives of almost two million as of the publication of this review. The pandemic, as contemporary readers may notice, has taken its toll on the film industry too. If you are reading this in the distant future, Soul is the first film that I have written in which its release date was delayed and its distribution altered because of the pandemic (from June 19 to Christmas). Pete Docter’s first directorial effort since becoming the chief creative officer of Pixar is part of a phenomenon which may or may not last past the pandemic. Soul, like a few other high-profile releases in 2020 and early 2021, debuted simultaneously in reduced-capacity theaters and streaming, via Disney+. The film itself is middling Pixar. But given the studio’s high quality – albeit sullied over the last decade with underwhelming sequels and glaring missteps from some non-sequels – it is still something worth celebrating.

Joe Gardner (voiced by Jamie Foxx) works part-time as a middle school music teacher in New York City, but quietly harbors dreams of pursuing his dream of becoming a jazz pianist. Taking an opportunity to audition for professional jazz saxophonist Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett), Joe receives an offer to play with Dorothea’s band. Ecstatic, speaking giddily on his cell phone on the musical adventure that awaits that evening, Joe has forgotten to look wherever the hell he is walking. As a result, he falls down a manhole, Looney Tunes-style. He awakens as a fluorescent blue-green blob, his soul on a stairway to heaven. No, not yet, Joe says. He runs backwards, but ends up in the “Great Before” – a place where unborn souls are endowed the traits (in the form of a badge) that will direct, but not predestine, the course of their lives. In a case of mistaken identity, the Great Before’s leaders assign Joe to 22 (Tina Fey) as her counselor. 22 has been stuck in the Great Before for eons, fostering a cynical view of human existence that has confounded her previous counselors (“You can’t crush a soul here. That’s what life on Earth is for.”). If you are asking whether or not Joe will be the one that shows 22 life’s beauty, you clearly have never seen a Pixar movie before.

The English-language film’s voice cast also includes Graham Norton as a sign twirler extraordinaire, Rachel House, Alice Braga, Richard Ayoade, Donnell Rawlings, Questlove, and Daveed Diggs. Veteran actress Phylicia Rashad plays Joe’s mother (who disapproves of his dreams of playing jazz professionally). This is the first Pixar movie without a character voiced by John Ratzenberger.

22 and Joe will prematurely escape to Earth, but the plot is unnecessarily complicated by a body swap and a tired trope of modern animated features: a non-white character accidentally spending more than half the film in the body of an animal. The Emperor’s New Groove (2000) and The Princess and the Frog (2009) are among the highest-profile examples of the trope. Like Cuzco and Tiana in those past films, Joe is not white – and, automatically, is someone the likes of whom has very little history of starring in a mainstream American animated feature. To see him lose his bodily agency for almost the entirety of the film is frustrating. The screenwriting team (Docter, Mike Jones, and Kemp Powers) declines to explore Joe’s racial identity, instead favoring the hero’s journey (Pixar has never deviated from this template, but that has not prevented them from making great films) and the predictable pratfalls often present in Pixar’s movies. Soul’s body-swapping comedy not only brushes away any such exploration of racial identity, but relegates the film’s jazz (an African-American creation) as ornamentation, overcomplicates the narrative structure, and interferes with its messaging. None of these issues existed in Coco (2017) – an unabashedly Mexican glimpse into the culture surrounding Día de Los Muertos and Mexican regional folk music all while retaining its primary themes.

Soul shares the introspective spirit of Docter’s previous film, Inside Out (2015). The lack of external adversity in both films allow us to better understand the passions of the main character. Joe’s conflict stirs from within – his dreams and expectations against practicality and unexpected realities. More prevalent than in Inside Out, Soul’s moments without dialogue poignantly depict those contradictions and unmitigated thrills. In Joe’s case, his near-total dedication to jazz is celebrated – never excessively mocked by 22 or any other character. But his passion, the film says (and as revealed through 22’s temporary occupation of his body), cannot alone quench the fullest expression of his humanity. The film is at its best in two types of contradictory moments. The first type occurs while Joe is playing his piano; the other appears when the film stops for several seconds to admire a minor detail, overlooked by everyone passing by except 22, along New York’s streets. In the latter, the film is allowed to take a breath, allowing just the ambient noise to play in the sound mix – the rustling foliage in the wind, the light traffic of one-way streets, the whoosh of passing subway cars. It is the closest Pixar has ever come to refuting Alfred Hitchcock’s flawed, oft-quoted statement that the movies are, “like life with the dull bits cut out.” For it is in some of life’s mundanities that 22 sees life as worth living. It is life’s mundanities that lie at the heart of Soul’s most powerful moments.

With the assistance of a legion of cultural consultants, Soul is, in spurts, a casual, intentionally unremarkable foray into New York’s black community and a faithful depiction of jazz performance. Animation history has long caricatured black roles in various ways, so the Pixar animators took pains to faithfully render hairstyles and varying skin tones to highlight the diversity of appearance in African-American communities. Many reviews of Soul will justly extol the background art, but plaudits must also go to the character design of the numerous African-American supporting figures across the entire film. It endows the film with an authentic vitality that I cannot envision happening in a film released by a studio concentrating on CGI animated features. A short scene to a barbershop underlines this laudable attention.

As a pianist and violinist, one of my personal pet peeves while watching movies is when an actor is fake-playing an instrument – it can be comically, pathetically obvious. I am certainly not the only one, as I’m sure some orch dorks, band geeks, and other instrumentalists might attest. Animated movies are not spared our eyes and ears. Soul, however, represents a glorious break from expectation. In a film already boasting photorealistic backgrounds and uncanny lighting effects, Joe’s piano playing is some of the most “realistic” I have seen in an animated film. His posture and muscular movement made me forget, momentarily, I was watching an animated movie. Perfectly rendered, too, are his fingering patterns (for the sake of consistent character design, Joe has elongated fingers). This musical accuracy extends to all other musicians in the film, too. It is glorious to behold as a musician. Soul could easily have cracked jokes at the expense of Joe’s passion. That the film affirms his love for jazz, all while tempering his desires (through 22, his mother, and other factors), is a high-wire balancing act that triumphs.

Soul’s score is split in two: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails fame (2010’s The Social Network, 2020’s Mank) compose for the scenes in the Great Before and jazz pianist Jon Batiste composes for the scenes in New York. Anyone who has read in my past reviews about my thoughts about film music are probably guessing that I dislike Reznor and Ross’ compositions for film. They would be correct. So far in their nascent film scoring careers, Reznor and Ross’ ominous synths for David Fincher’s movies sound too much like background droning, minimalist aural wallpaper. Their scores – all texture and little else – have no life outside the contexts of the movies they appear in. In Soul, Reznor and Ross develop a soothing synth sound that is some of their most melodic film music yet. It sounds like Jerry Martin’s music for the less interesting moments from the early Sims and SimCity soundtracks. Still, the score – even in its best moments, such as the lustrous cue “Epiphany” – suits the portions of the film it appears in. Perhaps Reznor and Ross are finally making progress towards understanding how melodic structure can dramatically reshape a film’s drama.

Down on Earth, Soul plays the music of Jon Batiste, perhaps best known as the bandleader of his band Stay Human on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Not all of Stay Human’s members were selected to perform for the score, as Batiste chose a handful of musicians from outside his band. The jazz score is mostly original, but includes variations on four pre-existing songs: “Space Maker” (Walter Norris), “Cristo Redentor” (Duke Pearson), “I Let a Song Go Out of My Heart” (Duke Ellington), and “Blue Rondo à la Turk" (Dave Brubeck). Batiste’s jazz influences are too many to name for a review not solely dedicated to the score, but suffice it to say that Batiste intended his part of the film score to serve as a soft introduction to viewers who might not be accustomed to jazz. In this half, Batiste captures the bustle of New York City with his signature floating piano solos. Backed by tremendous saxophone lines, percussion, and double bass, this is a decidedly acoustic affair in marked contrast to the music of Reznor and Ross. The musical contrast is profound, easing the viewer into Soul’s occasionally chaotic narrative structure. By film’s end, though, despite Batiste’s end titles cover of The Impressions’ “It’s All Right” (a wise selection in no small part due to its lyrics), I wanted more from the jazz half of the score and wished it was held greater prominence in the film. Am I unashamedly asking for someone to hire Jon Batiste and give him the freedom to compose an unconstrained jazz score? Of course!

In a year where straight-to-streaming movie releases have dominated the American film industry, Soul ranked third in viewership behind Thomas Kail’s live stage filming of Hamilton (2020) and Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 1984 (2020). Has Pixar righted its inconsistent form apparent over the 2010s decade? Can they ever recover the alchemy that reeled off consecutive pop culture touchstones and wondrous films for fifteen years (1995’s Toy Story to 2010’s Toy Story 3, excluding Cars)? Soul might not be the fair winds needed to steer Pixar from its worst habits, and it is unfair to place such a burden on this film. That fifteen-year run might also never be matched again. For what Soul represents to Pixar’s rather monochromatic leadership and narrative groupthink, it is a fascinating step outside the familiar.

My rating: 8/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL).

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.

[smokeybrandreviews]

Smokey brand Movie Reviews: Blyat

ne of the films i was looking forward to, like, years ago was The New Mutants. If you follow this blog, then you know I'm a massive fan of Magik, the teleporting mutant sister of Colossus and Hell-Lord of Limbo. In come canon, including the main 616 Marvel universe, Illyana Rasputin is even in line to be Sorcerer Supreme. The second Fox announced there would be a New Mutants flick, i knew my darling Darkchylde had to make an appearance and, much to my joy, she would, portrayed by Anya Taylor-Joy. Perfect f*cking casting, man. And then the film was relegated to oblivion for years. Whispers of a movie that should never be screened abounded and i was loosing hope it would ever be released. I lost interest after a while but, after he Disney merger, it got a release date! And then the Wuha happened. Eventually it was dumped into theater with absolutely no fanfare. Recently, there have been digital releases and the hard copy blu rays are coming out in a few days so i bit the bullet and decided to finally check it out.

The Great

Look, i told you before, the only reason i wanted to see this movie was because of Illyana and the fact they cast Anya Taylor-Joy was straight up perfect. This sh*t is tantamount to RDJ as Iron Man or Jackman as Logan. It was just that perfect. And, like those other actors i just mentioned, she embodies Magik as a character, even if her accent is a little iffy. Magik is easily the best thing about this film and, overall quality be damned, Anya’s portrayal is worth the price of admission.

The Good

The concept of a capeflick meets horror film was a stroke of genius to me. I thought, similarly to a Doctor Strange flick, that melding of genre could be incredibly interesting. There’s a lot of potential that can be tapped there. The fact that they opted to adapt the Demon Bear arc of the New Mutants story line lent itself to a horror narrative perfectly. I was glad this was the narrative they chose to bring to the big screen first.

The visual prowess of this film is unassailable. This thing looks much more expensive than the budget they were given. Magik’s soul armor, the ethereal visage of the Demon Bear, that hellish flair of Limbo, and even the Smiley Men are all rendered with aplomb. I really enjoyed the look of this film.

The escalation of Dani’s powers was portrayed pretty earnestly. The fact that Dani Moonstar can manifest the nightmares of those around her so, having that as an anchor to this films conflict was a stroke of genius. You can get some pretty incredible visuals when the narrative revolves around the nightmares of traumatized teenagers.

There is some solid direction in this thing. You can tell that there was a story to be told and

The representation in this cast, and the cast as a whole, is amazing. I absolutely adore it. Dani is native American and they cast Blu Hunt in the role, an actual Lakota. That was dope. Dani is also, canonically, lesbian. They didn’t even shy away from this, writing a relationship with the Scottish mutant, Wolfsbane, portrayed by Maisie Williams. I was actually really surprised they would even present that aspect of the character, which frustrates me even more that this thing didn’t get the necessary attention it should have. That level of representation continues with Henry Zaga as Sunspot, both of whom are Brazilian. Even Dr. Reyes is represented by a woman of color in Alice Braga. That sh*t is dope as f*ck. I also need to mention Charlie Heaton’s Cannonball. That southern accent was hilarious. Plus, as kind of a bonus, f*cking Marilyn Manson voices the Smiley Men. What??

I just really want to emphasize how much i adored the relationship between Dani and Rahne. That sh*t was f*cking beautiful!

That f*cking Demon Bear, tho!!

LOCKHEED!!!

The Bad

The pacing in this flick is borderline schizophrenic. You never feel like you have enough time with these characters or their development but, simultaneously, we spend way too long getting to the next scene. It’s weird to see in a proper, big budget, flick tied to a blockbuster franchise like the X-Men.

This film was edited by someone with tourettes. It feels like there is a whole ass second movie that can be constructed by what’s missing from this one. It’s coherent enough but there is definitely a cut of this film that has more exposition and far more fleshed out characters

The climax, while riveting and everything i wanted to see in a New Mutants film, seems rushed. This thing should have been a whole ass spectacle but they didn’t have the budget for it, which sucks, because this thing could have been one of the best X-Films if the studio actually believed in the damn thing.

The writing in this thing is pedestrian at best. People don’t talk like this, let alone teenagers. It’s weird hearing certain things come out of these character’s mouths, like it’s forced or rushed. I think the script could have used at least one ore rewrite to really focus these characters and make them feel like proper people and not just tropes in a movie.

The Verdict

This movie feels small, almost Shyamalan-esque, but with none of the genius and all of the limitations. Watching this makes me fell all of the disappointment i felt at the end of Glass. Just like the bookend to the Unbreakable trilogy, The New Mutants has lofty ideal and well of potential but it never reaches any of that. I mean, the premise is genius, the framing mechanism is brilliant and the cast is perfect. None of it comes together in a coherent package, though. It feels all over the place, like there is no direction or focus. I can see the forest through the trees but i don’t think anyone in charge of this production could see anything other than dollar signs and it really shows. New Mutants isn’t as bad as Dark Phoenix but i can tell that this version is a completely different movie than what was originally presented and i think that film might have be absolutely terrible. New Mutants feels like a first attempt, like a Phase One MCU film. It’s not Thor, for sure, but it ain’t Iron Man ether. It;s literally about as good as Incredible Hulk. Yeah, that’s a good comparison. They’re both entertaining movies with great ideas, solid cast, and decent performances but it’s nowhere near as good as the rest of the better films in their retrospective franchises. The New Mutants is worth a watch if you’re a fan of the X-Frachise but, if you wanted to pass on it, you wouldn’t be missing much.

[smokeybrand]

Smokey brand Movie Reviews: Blyat

One of the films i was looking forward to, like, years ago was The New Mutants. If you follow this blog, then you know I'm a massive fan of Magik, the teleporting mutant sister of Colossus and Hell-Lord of Limbo. In come canon, including the main 616 Marvel universe, Illyana Rasputin is even in line to be Sorcerer Supreme. The second Fox announced there would be a New Mutants flick, i knew my darling Darkchylde had to make an appearance and, much to my joy, she would, portrayed by Anya Taylor-Joy. Perfect f*cking casting, man. And then the film was relegated to oblivion for years. Whispers of a movie that should never be screened abounded and i was loosing hope it would ever be released. I lost interest after a while but, after he Disney merger, it got a release date! And then the Wuha happened. Eventually it was dumped into theater with absolutely no fanfare. Recently, there have been digital releases and the hard copy blu rays are coming out in a few days so i bit the bullet and decided to finally check it out.

The Great

Look, i told you before, the only reason i wanted to see this movie was because of Illyana and the fact they cast Anya Taylor-Joy was straight up perfect. This sh*t is tantamount to RDJ as Iron Man or Jackman as Logan. It was just that perfect. And, like those other actors i just mentioned, she embodies Magik as a character, even if her accent is a little iffy. Magik is easily the best thing about this film and, overall quality be damned, Anya’s portrayal is worth the price of admission.

The Good

The concept of a capeflick meets horror film was a stroke of genius to me. I thought, similarly to a Doctor Strange flick, that melding of genre could be incredibly interesting. There’s a lot of potential that can be tapped there. The fact that they opted to adapt the Demon Bear arc of the New Mutants story line lent itself to a horror narrative perfectly. I was glad this was the narrative they chose to bring to the big screen first.

The visual prowess of this film is unassailable. This thing looks much more expensive than the budget they were given. Magik’s soul armor, the ethereal visage of the Demon Bear, that hellish flair of Limbo, and even the Smiley Men are all rendered with aplomb. I really enjoyed the look of this film.

The escalation of Dani’s powers was portrayed pretty earnestly. The fact that Dani Moonstar can manifest the nightmares of those around her so, having that as an anchor to this films conflict was a stroke of genius. You can get some pretty incredible visuals when the narrative revolves around the nightmares of traumatized teenagers.

There is some solid direction in this thing. You can tell that there was a story to be told and

The representation in this cast, and the cast as a whole, is amazing. I absolutely adore it. Dani is native American and they cast Blu Hunt in the role, an actual Lakota. That was dope. Dani is also, canonically, lesbian. They didn’t even shy away from this, writing a relationship with the Scottish mutant, Wolfsbane, portrayed by Maisie Williams. I was actually really surprised they would even present that aspect of the character, which frustrates me even more that this thing didn’t get the necessary attention it should have. That level of representation continues with Henry Zaga as Sunspot, both of whom are Brazilian. Even Dr. Reyes is represented by a woman of color in Alice Braga. That sh*t is dope as f*ck. I also need to mention Charlie Heaton’s Cannonball. That southern accent was hilarious. Plus, as kind of a bonus, f*cking Marilyn Manson voices the Smiley Men. What??

I just really want to emphasize how much i adored the relationship between Dani and Rahne. That sh*t was f*cking beautiful!

That f*cking Demon Bear, tho!!

LOCKHEED!!!

The Bad

The pacing in this flick is borderline schizophrenic. You never feel like you have enough time with these characters or their development but, simultaneously, we spend way too long getting to the next scene. It’s weird to see in a proper, big budget, flick tied to a blockbuster franchise like the X-Men.

This film was edited by someone with tourettes. It feels like there is a whole ass second movie that can be constructed by what’s missing from this one. It’s coherent enough but there is definitely a cut of this film that has more exposition and far more fleshed out characters

The climax, while riveting and everything i wanted to see in a New Mutants film, seems rushed. This thing should have been a whole ass spectacle but they didn’t have the budget for it, which sucks, because this thing could have been one of the best X-Films if the studio actually believed in the damn thing.

The writing in this thing is pedestrian at best. People don’t talk like this, let alone teenagers. It’s weird hearing certain things come out of these character’s mouths, like it’s forced or rushed. I think the script could have used at least one ore rewrite to really focus these characters and make them feel like proper people and not just tropes in a movie.

The Verdict

This movie feels small, almost Shyamalan-esque, but with none of the genius and all of the limitations. Watching this makes me fell all of the disappointment i felt at the end of Glass. Just like the bookend to the Unbreakable trilogy, The New Mutants has lofty ideal and well of potential but it never reaches any of that. I mean, the premise is genius, the framing mechanism is brilliant and the cast is perfect. None of it comes together in a coherent package, though. It feels all over the place, like there is no direction or focus. I can see the forest through the trees but i don’t think anyone in charge of this production could see anything other than dollar signs and it really shows. New Mutants isn’t as bad as Dark Phoenix but i can tell that this version is a completely different movie than what was originally presented and i think that film might have be absolutely terrible. New Mutants feels like a first attempt, like a Phase One MCU film. It’s not Thor, for sure, but it ain’t Iron Man ether. It;s literally about as good as Incredible Hulk. Yeah, that’s a good comparison. They’re both entertaining movies with great ideas, solid cast, and decent performances but it’s nowhere near as good as the rest of the better films in their retrospective franchises. The New Mutants is worth a watch if you’re a fan of the X-Frachise but, if you wanted to pass on it, you wouldn’t be missing much.

[captaiinkick]

                      𝟘𝟘𝟙 .  RELATIONSHIPS 

* THE LOVERS, REVERSED ; disharmony, loss of balance — ZIA

    it’d be instinctive to think the chemistry between captain kick and babydoll would transcend into their real-life dynamic, will has had issues communicating with zia. none of it is her fault, of course; to in any way mislead her into thinking it is would pain him even more. the conflict began back during the team’s first run, and fifteen years or so later it lingers. the feelings were there - will knew how zia felt, and he reciprocated the feelings since the very beginning. zia has always been the only person he’s ever pictured himself being in a relationship with ( reason why he never came close to establishing anything official with anyone else. he tried several times, but he kept coming back to the memory of zia and how unhappy he felt without it ). however, he always simultaneously feared and dislike the thought that forcing them together would drive them further apart. he didn’t want their relationship to be a mere fabrication, a narrative crafted for the sake of toy sales and viewer ratings. in his stubbornness to keep it from happening, will distanced himself from zia, effectively damning the relationship from seeing the light of day. he regrets all the discomfort and suffering he may have caused her, but he’s yet to learn to make himself available to her and get over his worries to make their connection work. of course it’s easier said than done, but will doesn’t want to think of what would happen if something were to go awry in one of the missions, and the two never got to experience the relationship they’d wanted & deserved.

* THE WHEEL OF FORTUNE, UPRIGHT ; change, cycles — ALEC

   will never really knew how to feel about alec -- well, actually, he did, but it was too chaotic and ever-changing to put into words. the few constancies in his attitude toward the other man remain, however. it all stems from will’s own insecurities. he’s become convinced he’s not the best fit for the position of the team leader, namely because it should be filled by someone like alec rather than himself. he excels in every way in which will doesn’t, and it scares will to his core. he constantly thinks of the many ways in which the team would benefit from having alec as the frontrunner, and he’ll get so consumed by his own stream of thought that eventually the idea of stepping aside and giving his position up to alec will begin taunting him. but at the moment, all of this remains unvoiced. the one thing that makes will feel like his stay is worthwhile is being at the head. it’s become such a relevant influence on his self-confidence, his identity. without it, will doesn’t know what would become of him, but still he can’t say it doesn’t feel unjust to deny the team the leader they deserve. 

* STRENGTH, REVERSED ; insecurity, doubt — LAURA

   will’s aware that he wasn’t particularly close to laura back in the 80s. he felt there were a couple barriers between them, namely the different ages and the nature of their positions ( captain kick would be seen mainly with babydoll, after all ). still, behind the scenes, he made sure for them to be on at least good terms. there was some contact throughout the years, but it was admittedly more sporadic than with other exemplars. now, however, will’s perception of laura has changed, if he were being honest. they are similar to those which he holds for alec, in the sense that it pains him to see someone clearly more qualified, skilled and deserving of a leadership position remain under ‘his’ command. he carries a bit of guilt for this, and is often unsure as to whether or not to divulge this to her. again, this is mainly out of the fear that once the bureau and the exemplars discover that they’d be better off following someone else’s calls, then that makes him dispensable. 

* THE EMPEROR, UPRIGHT ; authority, control — CESARE

  things with cesare have always been tricky. will’s opinion on him shifts from time to time. sometimes, he’ll delight in some wishful thinking and hope the two could reap the benefits of a more balance partnership. it’d be for the better, after all. this whim, however, is often shot down in the face of an argument or a disagreement. will thinks it wrong to challenge cesare’s position ( surely the bureau granted him that degree of authority for a reason, and being born into a family who instilled in him an admiration toward hard workers, he simply cannot bring himself to disregard him on that basis ). however, that doesn’t mean he’ll stay quiet and agreeable all the time. the two have starkingly different views as to how approach certain parts of the missions -- will lets himself be lead by emotion, while cesare’s strategic thinking is unparallaled. so whenever it gets too much, there’s bound to be a clash -- in times like these will doesn’t mind being a bit more brazen than usual, since he very well knows the lives of so many are at stake. 

   at the same time, will admires and envies cesare. he wishes he could be that collected when under pressure, or that he had his ease with words. he wouldn’t want to be in his shoes, however, given the bureau’s undermining of his performance ( will doubts he would make it through that kind of pressure ). sadly, more often that not whichever positive feelings he has for him will be placed on the back burner as conflict between the two unfolds. 

* TEMPERANCE, UPRIGHT ; finding meaning, patience — DAMIEN

   yet again, will wishes this relation, in particular, could be less complicated. then again, he’s to blame for it. back during their first run, will felt guilty damien would be forced out onto the sidelines. he wanted to make sure he felt welcome in the team. slowly, their conversations became more common, and nowadays will would say the two are good friends. they bonded during very personal moments, and many of his favorite memories are of times spent with damien. however, it is a bit more complex than that. naturally, there are so many aspects of damien’s life that will is not aware of, and out of a fear that he’d be overstepping any boundaries, will maintains his interactions with damien as formal, ever so nonchalant, but never entirely honest. he conceals most details of his own personal life to damien too. while he wishes he could bring himself to be honest, will cannot find it in him to own up to this helplessness and vulnerability. troubling damien with that burden has never been an option. so for the most part, will relies on small talk, and the moment it crosses that line, he feels exposed and bothersome. the last thing he wants is to bring damien’s mood down, or have him waste his time keeping watch over him. though, there are so many similarities between the two that surely neither of them have realized, and they could definitely become great sources of support for one another if will weren’t so afraid to admit defeat. 

* THE SUN, UPRIGHT ; joy, celebration — TANGO

   will likes tango. while he was initially startled by the sharpness of his fangs, it soon became clear that the ferocity and wildness that the media used to characterize him was far from the truth. tango was kind to will in a way some people weren’t, but more importantly, he always treated him with dignity. this never failed at moving will, and he’s never managed to grow angry at the other. he admires how well-meaning and resilient tango has remained, especially considering the media’s scrutiny and the bureau’s treatment. that being said, there are so many things about tango that intrigue will, but he finds it impolite to ask and/or pry. he would also like to know more about what life with such heavy involvement from the bureau has been like, but again, will thinks it might be insensitive to ask such specific, obvious questions -- or worse, that more than just come off as nosy, that it’ll bring more attention to his strict living conditions and somehow prompt him to feel downtrodden. truly, will thinks tango deserves the best. not only has he had to deal with having the reputation he did, to have the coverage bite into the narrative of ‘wild beast’ so frequently. he knows it is hard, but will wishes tango could enjoy a much freer life once the missions are over and done with. 

* THE HIGH PRIESTESS, UPRIGHT ; inner voice, intuitive — BETH

   beth and will are very similar on so many levels. they are both natural caretakers and seek to ensure everyone’s wellbeing. but much like with damien, the extent to which will voices his deeper, more emotion-heavy thoughts is very limited. he has a good relationship with beth, but he is not always honest with her. from what she has disclosed to him, and the few letters exchanged here and there, will got the feeling that she was doing fine. and if that is the case, will is happy. beth is someone who he felt also didn’t get to thrive back when the team was first assembled, and being responsible for accounting so many civilians, he thinks it is about time she got more recognition. 

    at the same time, will wishes there could be a more transparent channel of communication between them. her accident with the faulty wings wasn’t a secret, but will’s thoughts and emotions in the aftermath were never extended over to her. ever since that happening, will’s become more apprehensive and protective toward the team since he has realized there are external factors at play that he can’t control. he so deeply wishes he could bring it up in a discussion with her, but he doesn’t want to go there fearing it’d be like pouring salt into a wound.  

* THE MAGICIAN, REVERSED ; illusions, out of touch — ADDY 

will wishes he could be like addy. he has never had it in himself to be reckless, to be impulsive. the fact that addy manages to pull them off with such ease is admirable in his mind ( it even becomes an enviable skill in his eyes ). he understands that to be forced into such a one-dimensional character must’ve been rough, but he is mostly blinded by the awe and wonder which he’s always experienced when seeing addy out in the field. seeing her stunts used to make him feel like a kid, all full of excitement and a thirst for adventure. he lived vicariously through the unrestrained attitude of the character, because he felt like he was not allowed to act in such a way as a child. he always looked up to addy in a way, and how she balanced tallahassee’s exuberance with her own aim to keep everyone safe. deep down, he wished he possessed that ability, that he would stop feeling so self-conscious and tied down by his inhibitions- since he can’t, he’ll just resort to watching addy continuously do it with that unparalleled facility. 

* JUSTICE, UPRIGHT ; clarity, truth — BENJI

   will feels a lot of respect toward benji. he has always helped not only will, but the team as a whole. he could confidently call benji one of the pillars of each operation, and has no clue what would become of each mission were benji not involved. will has always watched benji do his job with a certain curiosity and intrigue, even though he didn’t grasp most of the concepts benji’s work oversaw. not a day goes by where will doesn’t feel thankful for having druid on board, but sadly, the difference in their positioning and tasks during the missions felt like somewhat of a barrier between the two. now that the team is back together, will has been trying to gather some courage and voice the admiration he feels towards benji. he thinks of pendulum, and how much was left unsaid when she passed, so he doesn’t want to make the same mistake again.

[fieldbears]

Washed-Up Stucky MNF/Fic Writer Provides Endgame Opinions

I’m going to try to tackle this linearly, at least to begin with:

I am very much Team Bored With MCU Hawkeye, but I want to give sincere props for the cold open, which I think accomplished several things simultaneously: recapped the consequences of the last film (since, hey, it’s been a fuckin while), set the tone, and began Clint’s narrative arc.

That said, jesus, I’m still irritated by the shoe-horned family to begin with. First they were invented for convenience and narrative stakes, and then their final, ultimate reason for existence was to be temporarily fridged. Take a moment to imagine a world where Clint was the circus runaway loner he was supposed to be, who only had his coworkers as found family, who either responded to The Snap by throwing himself harder into his teamwork work OR went rogue because his sense of justice and agency was so fucking destroyed by what happened. He didn’t need a blood family to have the arc he had. And he didn’t even need the arc he had. But this is a bitchfest about a choice made many years ago, not made in this final movie.

The first third of that movie was rough. The whole thing had the narrative flow of “A Series of Related Short Stories Played One After the Other”, but the first third seems to be Failing To Establish the New World and then Clumsily Establishing The Emerging Situation.

The establishing shots and scenes to show the audience what The Snap’s consequences were worldwide were... lacking. It’s dark? No more baseball? People are relying on natural light instead of interior lighting, but this is also happening at Avengers HQ, where they clearly still have power and internet access to work their tech, so... was it just an aesthetic choice? I feel like the film tried to spend time showing us what the consequences were for the average New Yorker, but instead we get a weird Canonly Gay Russo Character who gave a good performance that tells us about the human loss but not about the mechanics of this new world. We get the ‘no baseball’ shot and all we get afterward are ‘people miss the missing people’. But restaurants still exist? Businesses are functioning? (Wouldn’t New York run kind of smoother if it wasn’t overpopulated?) I feel like we were invited to start thinking about how this dystopia works, but were never given answers. (There are so many interpretations of how things could go wrong if certain people just disappeared, and their knowledge/access were suddenly unavailable, and none of it was explored, even briefly, outside of establishing shots.)

The Garden Planet - it’s discovery, the traveling to it, the fight there - lacked emotional grounding in a way I find hard to explain. The audience was excited for Brie Larson being a fucking boss, and the quick execution of the grab-him-and-cut-his-arm-off plan was satisfying, but the twist and subsequent letdown was just a weird beat after a slog to get there, after waiting on a deep letdown beat from the last movie.

Last thing about flow and emotional beats, because I want to move on to character analysis, and this is a huge one for me: Clint’s fight in Tokyo and Steve’s fight with himself were some of the biggest missed opportunities in the entire film.

Not counting the football field brawl at the end, which I don’t count as a real fight scene, these are the two major fight scenes of the entire film and as far as I can tell, there was no effort made to make these showpieces. They went to the trouble of bringing Clint to Bladerunner Central, and pit him against the last bastion of aesthetic-obsessed mafia in the world. The panning camera in the interior as Hawkeye fought goons brushed past lazy fight scenes that only showed who was winning, not the brutality that Clint was supposedly falling into, not the grit of this new awful world, just... shapeless dark bodies getting thrown through windows? And on top of that, they could have made up (or picked from canon) any Big Bad to pit him against outside in the street, and we get an Orientalist sword fight that could have fit in nicely on a CW superhero show, and some of the most unnecessary exposition dialogue I have ever heard. Someone bothered to weave Clint’s arc in earlier, with Rhodey explaining to Natasha that Clint’s gone International and also Worryingly Dark. Why the fuck do we have the ‘I’ll give you anything you want’ line, on the rotten cherry on top of ‘stop being mean to the yakuza, we didn’t start it’? You already covered his motivations with the cold open.

And while Steve’s fight ended in a FABULOUSLY HEARTBREAKING WAY, the fight itself was nothing - you can pick little character details out like how they both ditched their shields almost immediately, and it was funny that Then-Steve mistook Now-Steve for Loki in the first place, but it was still a completely lost opportunity to get one true superhero battle in this three-hour slog. Both Steves could have gotten up and carried out the rest of the narrative after a decent brawl, but instead they fall a great distance after some blocked shots and it... was nothing? Missed opportunity for some cool shit.

Okay, skipping to character assessments now:

Clint’s character has been mishandled from the beginning and this seemed to be the “better late than never” eleventh hour arc. Except the end of the arc is unclear - it made sense for him to fall apart after losing his Shoehorn Family, but how did Natasha’s choice to fall do anything but fridge someone else, with more agency this time? It makes Natasha noble, which she already was, and it made her win against Clint, which I appreciate, but Natasha didn’t need salvation through death and Clint learns nothing by getting them back, just experiences relief.

Bruce. I want to say, first, that I love Hulk in a Cardigan. Cardihulk can stay. I want fanart, I want t-shirts, give me all of it. But Bruce’s explanation of “I scienced it so I could get the best of both worlds” only gives us half of the acceptance that Banner’s character is already working towards. As we saw most explicitly in Ragnarok, the Hulk isn’t just a physical form, he has his own separate consciousness, originally defined by rage but revealed to be more complicated. Bruce merging into Cardihulk seems to have... erased Hulk’s separate consciousness without merging it into himself? If there had been some acknowledgement of a second voice still within him that shot out opinions or demands for certain menu items in the diner, this would have been a much cleaner end to his arc, which has been equally messy between actor and narrative shifts.

Speaking of Ragnarok... it’s time! Are you ready? Have you read articles about the Gambit Gambit too? Are you fucking depressed that a fat suit was used for comedy gags in the year of our lord 2019? Because I was. The Russos seemed to... not struggle with what progress Ragnarok had put onto Bruce and Thor’s characters, but reject it. This movie’s Thor was anxious for laughs, was desperate for easy answers to a a feeling of lost heroism, and it didn’t feel like a familiar character. The time-travel scene with his mother wrapped it up very elegantly, and was well performed, but that scene didn’t need to follow a series of “chunky drunk in sweatpants” jokes to show us that Thor was struggling. Everyone in the film is fucking holding on by their fingernails, but only one is played for cheap laughs.

At least we get the bisexual Asgard lady king we deserved.

Tony got the right death. He got a hero’s death and Pepper’s last lines of “you can rest now” were exactly the right lines to wrap up an arc characterized by fear and a desire to protect and control at any cost. I knew the MCU was never going to really acknowledge that Tony’s The Problem, even with lines like ‘you should have let me do the fascist robot thing, that was gonna work fine’ thrown around pretty much as soon as he touches down on earth again.

I’m not sure if there’s much to say about Natasha. It was fitting that she was running HQ, that she was struggling, that she was rejecting emotional help from Steve but clearly still close with him. Seeing her break down after hearing the report on Clint felt right after, I think, being told by several directors (or making the personal acting choice? idk) to just be as flat and as decolletagey as possible. And again, while I feel like she would be self-sacrificing on that cliffisde if given the opportunity, and that she would win, the narrative choice to place her there and have that be her end didn’t really give her anything she didn’t already have. She had nothing to prove.

I have a hard time really laying out my thoughts on Steve without launching into the pregnant absence of Bucky, but I’m going to try. Chris Evans did a good job being the emotional heart of a really fractured story with a lot of conflicting pieces. Seeing him lead a talk therapy session after The Snap seemed very out of character for him until one realizes that Sam isn’t there to lead it himself. His scene offering help to Natasha was another good scene between them proving that not every m/f relationship has to be sexual to be interesting or add to the plot. His leadership speech during the Stupid Fucking Slow-Mo Heroes’ Walk to the platform was well done and makes me think of what could have been for the MCU, if they’d ever just let them be a cohesive found-family team for twenty minutes and let them fight some doom-bots or something. Fuck. Imagine.

Something weirdly satisfying about the deceitful ‘hail hydra’ line in the elevator. Yes? Yes.

The hammer scene was satisfying to me without being too gratuitous, but I’ll acknowledge that some people weren’t into it. Having paid more attention to Steve’s arc than most, I’ll argue that he earned it several times over.

His ending - that is, the secret life he alludes to but doesn’t explicitly reveal to Sam - is earned too. I’ve read at least one thing saying that Steve’s arc was all about him learning to let go, but that’s... never what Steve does. Not at the end of any arc, of any comic story, does Steve let go. Not of his principles, not of the people he loves, he is always “Thinking... Thinking About Bucky!” and getting in fights he can’t necessarily win. So I don’t think his final ending is ever Learning to Let Go. I think it’s fair that it’s Just Once, Just This One Time, Getting What You Want And Getting To Enjoy It.

And now I’m backtracking to Bucky. I’ve read one article already that theorizes that Steve’s arc, which was highly prioritized, included literally as little direct interaction with Bucky as possible because... the MCU? the Russos? Marvel?...  is aware that Steve/Bucky is the most popular same-sex ship in the MCU. And that’s tiresome as fuck but I think there’s some truth to it. I wonder if, like in Civil War, we’ll hear later from the actors that a lot of contextual one-on-one scenes were shot and then mysteriously cut from the final edit.

I will say that in my head, Bucky is relaxed when Steve goes back in time for the final time, and lets Sam goes to talk with Steve one-on-one at the bench, because Bucky is not worried if Steve will come back, and does not feel a need to check on Steve on the bench. Because, like Peggy, Bucky has been getting secret visits too. Maybe as far back as during his time in Wakanda, but certainly since the final fight with Thanos. Bucky was calm because he already knew. He didn’t miss Steve because Steve hadn’t given him an opportunity to do so.

d

[shesgottawatchit]

Eve’s Bayou (1997), dir. Kasi Lemmons

The 1990’s saw a transition in African American filmmaking when Black Female Directors started to emerge in the industry.  One Director in particular, Kasi Lemmons, rose to critical acclaim with her directorial debut Eve’s Bayou (1997) which met to extremely positive reviews and remains an important and influential text concerning themes of race and black feminist ideologies.

When examining feminist texts within African American Cinema, it is crucial to study the representations of Black Womanhood throughout the history of Black filmmaking, especially texts derived from female directors.  Early representations portray the black female through the use of stereotypes (discussed previously) in the form of the Mammy, the Mulatto, the Jezebel or Sapphire.  The black female identity is often linked to the body, presented as exotically intriguing or erotic; she is hyper-sexualised which contrasts the more passive white female character.  Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou manages to connect these ideologies of Black Womanhood, while simultaneously subverting them to approach such concepts on a feminist level, discussing the mistreatment and misrepresentations of Black Womanhood on the big screen.

Born February 24, 1961 in St. Louis, Missouri US, Kasi Lemmons made her acting debut in television movie 11th victim (1979).  She went on to star in Hollywood hits such as Spike Lee’s School Daze (1988) and Academy Award winning The Silence of the Lambs(1991).  In 1997, she emerged in the industry when she wrote and directed her first feature length film Eve’s Bayou, starring renowned actor Samuel L. Jackson and upcoming actresses Jurnee Smollett-Bell and Meagan Good.  Eve’s Bayou centralised on Black family life, narrated through the main character Eve, the youngest daughter of the Batiste family.  Bayou delivers themes of adultery, sensual eroticism, supernaturalism and witch craft, all of which are tied together in black ancestry and history; depicting the more social and family oriented problems faced by middle class Blacks, situated in 1960’s Louisiana.

Eve’s Bayou

Lemmons’s opening party scene immediately sets up an idealised Black middle class life and emphasises the centrality of Bayou’s female led cast.  Matty Mereaux is dancing with her husband Lenny Mereaux, close up shots of him groping her buttocks are shown; her body parts are immediately fetishized.  Moments later she dances seductively with Roz’s husband Louis Batiste; she pulls up her dress to reveal her stockings and places her head around Louis’s groin area.  This sultry depiction of Matty’s character becomes problematic when applying Laura Mulvey’s work: Visual and Other Pleasures of ‘The Male Gaze’ to the text.  Here, Matty is seemingly objectified by the male viewer to be offered as none other than a placement of sexual desire for the male viewer.  However, Bell hooks, a pioneer of  her work on Black spectatorship, in particular Black female spectatorship, challenges and attempts to deconstruct Mulvey’s theory of ‘the gaze’ stating Black audiences can “both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming what we see”.  Black female spectators have thus since been able to adopt anoppositional gaze, placing white womanhood in the eye of the phallocentric gaze, enabling them to not “identify with either the victim or the perpetrator” (hooks, 1992)

Not only does this opening scene construct themes of erotica and woman as objectified beings.  Lemmons’s overall set up, choreography and mise-en-scene is a huge movement away from previous African American depictions, seen in early 20th century texts.  Here, the Batiste family, are portrayed as a well-mannered, well-spoken middle class family, with lavish clothing and a large country home.  A huge contrast to the savage and uncivilised representations of tribal African Americans portrayed in early Black Cinema.  As the majority of the cast is formed of Black actors and actresses, this idyllic family unit provides the ability for white audiences to identify more closely with Lemmons’s characters.

“the representation of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego of the male hero stands in stark opposition to the distorted image of the passive and powerless female character”

                                                                       Laura Mulvey, 1975/1989, p. 354

Mulvey theorises that male characters play a dominant, powerful role within the narration, while the female characters must submit to a more passive, powerless position in cinema.  Mulvey argues that the audience adopt ‘the gaze’ as we constantly view texts through the dominated male lens of the industry, although “the power of the gaze is not invested in all men, but in White men, and the object of the gaze is not all women, but White women” (Hollinger, 2012, p. 194).

Roz comforts her three children after Mozelle’s vision of a child being hit

One way Lemmons subverts this idea is to centralise her female characters.  Eve, the youngest daughter of the Batiste family and her adolescent sister Cicely play a vital role in the progression of the narrative and it is they who hold the power over there adulterous Father Louis.  Alongside their Mother Roz and Aunt Mozelle, together provide a primary example of female solidarity.  Mother Roz is shown to empower the family unit, unlike Louis, whose Fatherly absence only heightens Roz’s empowered status.  hooks states that “once black folk had gained greater access to jobs, revolutionary feminism was dismissed by mainstream reformist feminism when women, primarily well-educated white women with class privilege, began to achieve equal access to class power with their male counterparts”  (2000, p. 101).  Black women and black feminist ideologies were pushed aside once White females started to benefit from feminist movements – “working class white females were more visible than black females of all class in feminist movement”.  However Black women were the voice of experience, “they knew what it was like to move from the bottom up” (hooks, 2000, pp. 103-104).

White women primarily benefited economically from the reformist feminist gains in the workforce, “it simply reaffirmed that feminism was a white woman thing”

                                                                           bell hooks, 2000, p. 107

Although she is subject to notions of patriarchy, (she stays home while Louis works to keep their home) this is quickly dismissed by the audience due to Louis’s controversial actions of adultery against his wife.  His affair with Matty (stereotyped as the Jezebel) interwoven in the plot, highlights mistreated stereotypes of Black Woman.

Cicely is slapped by her Father after she attempt to kiss him

Although these women initially appear empowered in Bayou,it is needless to say that Lemmons still intersects themes and ideas already imposed on black women in film.  Firstly Eve adopts the role of the maid, who does the family chores and cleans the house; several of her costumes reflect this and she is even seen with a feather duster cleaning.  Alongside this, Matty is presented as the whore, who endeavours in a relationship with Louis.  Despite the period setting, for such a contemporary text, these representations still manage to surface in contemporary Black Cinema as a constant reminder of the painful history of Black colonisation and slavery in early 20th century America.  Another character devise that Lemmons utilises to explore Black history and the mistreatment of female slaves is through character Cicely, who we believe is abused by her Father.  It is not until the end of the film that we are told it is her who instigated an incestuous relationship with her Father.  “The elusive qualities of truth are given attention in the film… Lemmons provides two sequences of the same event, each bearing the narration by a different character…  both Eve and the audience have to deal with two versions of a truth that each character professes” (Donalson, 2003, p. 190)  From her actions, she is muted throughout the film; powerless and unable to reveal what really happened.  Cicely’s powerless state can be seen as symbolic of the mass rape that occurred on plantations to multiple slaves across America.  In narrative form, this becomes complex due to Cicely’s initial confession and the film’s final twist.  Either way, the audience is still partial to the implied rape of an adolescent by her Father.  The final shot we see of her as she leaves the Batiste family home is her signalling to Eve to keep quiet.  This can be seen to parallel the voiceless African American Slaves, especially the abused woman who could not fight for their rights as slaves, let alone their civil rights amongst a prominent  patriarchal society.

[whatsupwhump]

Whump Bump of the Month:  Laws of Motion

(where the new, the slightly old, and really old fanfic gets bumped to your attention in broken down, comprehension reviews)

Whump Bump of the Month: Laws of Motion

Written by: pennflinn

Posted on Ao3: November 26th, 2017

(word count: 4,858)

Fandom: Flash (CW TV)

Ship: Barry Allen/Iris West

Summary: A collapsing building is just part of the job. Being buried beneath the rubble was never part of the bargain.

Obvious but obligatory warning: The following contains spoilers for the entirety of the aforementioned fan-fiction. It contains quotes and personal opinions, both done out of appreciation for the author’s time and efforts put into their work.

“Laws of Motion” written by @pennflinn was chosen for the b-lated January Whump Bump of the Month for it’s astounding ability to allure a heartfelt sense of loss of hope, struggle, pain and heroism in its such short word count.

@pennflinn is far from new to bringing her audiences in with little words, instead focusing on simplistic punches that wrap up her plots tighter than a shiny Christmas present. There’s no dragging alongside a prologue or introduction when starting this fic -- rather you’re immediately presented with the problem Team Flash and Barry Allen are faced with: a collapsing building.

As the narrative so wonderfully goes on to say, none of this is new for our characters. Iris makes a mental note that, albeit hesitate to call it routine, burning buildings and breaches in the space-time continuum were all coming to be the norm. Still, Pennflinn doesn’t fail to captivate a sense of urgency between characters, gut-punching usage of verbiage like “His groan turned into a drawn-out yell” and “She was staring at her phone, pale as a sheet” doing wonders to satisfy a whump itch.

Character Whumped:

Barry Allen

The Enjoyment of Whump!Barry:

Barry Allen is a unique character for whump, not in the sense of being a superhero -- of which a lot of fans like to gravity towards for the trope of “hero who can’t save themselves” -- but because he has superhealing and an intolerance to prolonged pain, poisons and medications. It’s the latter that really makes the Whump!Barry spark. Though your time torturing the fastest man alive is limited, it can be intense, brutal and bring a mental and/or emotional pain after.

Flavor of Whump:

Foreign object in the skin -- a building collapsed leaves Barry with a back full of tiny shards of glass.

Comforter of the hurt/comfort:

Primarily Iris West with a dash of Cisco Ramon and Caitlin Snow.

[ Laws of Motion ]

The story transcends similar to a constantly moving camera, capturing moments of time scattered throughout an otherwise routine and somewhat insignificant event in Team Flashes life. It’s even mentioned in narrative that after having his back broken, clearing the use of his legs leaves more than just Barry with a sigh of relief.

[ Laws of Motion ]

| Cisco broke into a shaky smile. "So, you've just had a building dropped on you. How do you feel?"

"Spectacular," Barry croaked. He was cut off from further comment by Caitlin tearing off his cowl and fitting him with her own oxygen mask.

"Does anything feel broken?" she asked, while simultaneously shining her penlight into his eyes. Iris didn't need the light to tell that he was definitely concussed. "Can you move your legs?"

It was always the worst case scenario, ever since the Zoom incident. And judging by the way he'd been hunched over that girl, tons and tons of metal pressing down—

Barry's face scrunched as he agonizingly bent one knee, then the other. He groaned as he let them drop back to the table, but he bent each of his arms up as well to prove his mobility. At least, what limited amount he had. |

The groundwork is laid down neatly and without hesitation as Caitlin goes on to explain what the readers already know, and are subsequently excited for.

[ Laws of Motion ]

| Tweezers already in hand, Caitlin felt around for one piece near Barry's shoulder blade. "I'm going to have to pull these out, Barry," she said, having learned over time to narrate her actions. Whether or not it helped with the pain itself, it at least seemed to help Barry in identifying the source of it. "Some of these are..." She moved lower, frowning at the soft flesh beneath Barry's ribs. "...they're buried pretty deep, and I'm afraid some may have splintered into smaller pieces under your skin. They're going to require a minor surgical procedure—"

Barry moaned, and Iris whipped her head toward Caitlin. "Surgery? Isn't that the kind of thing that local anesthetic is for?"

"Minor surgery. We can't use anesthetic," Caitlin said, her face drawn and tight and deliberately blind toward much of the world. "You know that."

"I don't want to," Barry said, shaking his head, half-delirious, the fingers on one arm clenching and unclenching on the sheets. Based on the look of it, Iris was pretty sure the other arm was broken. "Please. Don't. Not now, please." | 

The introduction of a Barry who doesn’t have the strength, mental or physical, to withstand the usual agony of healing his injuries is what makes this story so unique. Pennflinn goes on to spend time focusing on Barry’s struggle with the pain, his ability to hold it together deteriorating moment by moment.

[ Laws of Motion ]

| She pried the pieces from his upper back first, and quickly, so Iris and Cisco could plant their hands on Barry's shoulders and hold him down while he thrashed, screamed, begged, sobbed.  |

Credit where credit is due to a moment of weakness written sharply yet precisely as Pennflinn makes the decision to capture Barry’s pain in short, gut-punching words.

Comfort is later found in the source of Barry’s lightning rod, Iris West. After giving him as much time as she felt she could, she goes to find him in one of the bathrooms in the deepest part of STAR Labs.

[ Laws of Motion ]

| Barry was facing away from her, and even though he was in front of a mirror, he didn't see her—his head was bowed over the sink, his working hand planted on the side and shoulders hunched. The way his spine curved reminded Iris of how he'd looked when he'd been uncovered from the rubble. Arched over the little girl, bracing against whatever might bear down on them both, getting crushed beneath the weight of a building. A loose shirt covered the damage: the stitches, the layers of gauze, the deep red bruises, the cast that encased his shattered arm.

In the ten seconds Iris waited in the doorway, he didn't move an inch, not even when she gave a light knock. It was only when she stepped into the room itself, her heels too loud on the tile, that Barry stirred. She knew better than to touch him, especially not without warning, especially not now. The physical wounds on his back were one thing, but she knew from hard past experience that they were only part of the unconscious touch aversion in situations like these.

"Barry?" she whispered, venturing to break the ice that way instead.

At this, he lifted his head and met her eyes in the mirror.

The lower lids of his eyes were pink, and his whole face sagged. He met her gaze with desolation, misery, a pleading look that said, I don't want to do this anymore.

Without a word, Iris moved forward. She reached out a hand tentatively. He allowed her to place it on his shoulder, her touch light. His face didn't crumple, exactly, but it wilted deeper into defeat. His breath shuddered under her palm, and she softened. |

The clarity of imagery here is worth noting and while never caught properly on the show, I would pay to see this recreated by an artist. Iris’s ability to wordlessly comfort Barry in his weakest moments, free of any judgement or disgust, is beautifully written here.

It’s not long after that Barry disappears, seemingly stuck in his own head.

[ Laws of Motion ]

| He picked up on the fourth ring, just when Iris was beginning to wonder if he'd left his phone behind as well.

"Iris."

"Hey," she replied. All at once she was very aware that she had no idea what she intended to say. "I just woke up. Are you alright?"

"Taking a break." Barry's voice sizzled, popped, through the phone line. "Might be a couple days. Don't worry."

He hung up before Iris could confirm that she was worrying, despite anything he said to the contrary. She held the phone up to her ear still, listening to the dead air.

It was only later that she'd see the international charges tacked on to her phone bill, a twenty-second call at 5:45 in the morning. |

His return is met with doubt, capturing a side to the hero often not seen. The strong, brass, brave Flash is suddenly exposed in the presence of his loved one, stating his nearing approach to a breaking point.

[ Laws of Motion ]

| After the meta had been safely locked away, Barry sat alone for a long while in the recovery bay, elbows up on the cot, face buried in his hands.

"I can't do it," he'd said when Iris had sat beside him. Even under her light questioning, he hadn't said a word more, and eventually she'd let him be.

That evening in the apartment, Iris kept the evening news on low while Barry made dinner. It was part of her nightly routine, practically required given her choice of profession. Tonight, she tuned out most of the national news, the breaking stories, in favor of listening to Barry putter about the kitchen. Steam whistled from a pot, a knife thunked against a cutting board, a can opener ground dully against metal.

The latter part of the newscast, near the end of the broadcast, was what caught her attention. Not because of what they were saying, but by what they were showing. Images of the ruined apartment building, the few piles of rubble that still remained.

Throwing a glance over her shoulder to ensure that Barry was busy, she turned up the volume a few clicks.

"…still missing, following an evacuation by Vibe. Vibe has since ignored our request for comment. With us tonight we have a very special guest in the studio. Six-year-old Grace Parks was shielded from the falling building by the Flash, and she has a message for him tonight. Grace?"

Grace Parks, round-faced and pink-cheeked and so vibrantly alive that only a six-year-old could be, faced the camera. She wore an earnest expression as she studied the camera lens, no doubt never having anticipated appearing on the news.

"I just wanna say," she began in her squeaky voice, "that Flash told me I was gonna be okay and now I'm okay. And I hope he's okay, too. I miss him." She glanced furtively off to the side, as if looking for confirmation that she was doing well. When she turned back, the corners of her mouth were downturned slightly. "Flash, if you're listening, I miss you. Thank you for saving me. You're my hero. And I wanted to say that. Thank you."

The feed cut back to the two news anchors, one of which was nodding sympathetically. "No doubt we all feel the same as little Grace—"

Some sixth sense caused Iris to angle her face back, and she was shocked to find Barry standing behind the couch, fixated on the TV. She quickly punched the mute button on the remote. |

Barry’s struggle between his own physical well being and the well being of others is so well detailed in the story, if not profoundly stated in the scene that follows.

[ Laws of Motion ]

| Once, when they were kids, Iris had accidentally knocked over Barry's Lego Star Destroyer and sent hundreds of tiny pieces skittering across the floor. Through her tears, she'd apologized over and over, feeling she'd destroyed something precious, something that could never be put back together. But it can, Barry had told her. Staring at the seemingly infinite number of broken parts peppering the bedroom floor, Iris had asked How? And Barry had smiled reassuringly: One block at a time. |

The story concludes as Barry aka the Flash goes to spend his time rebuilding the building that collapsed, inspired by the little girl he saved and returning her home to her.

Favorite Aspects:

[ Laws of Motion ] holds a side of Barry Allen that I have yet to see in any other written works. It seizes a side of weakness to his character without over-saturating the emotions. The blip of tears, cries, struggle and agony are all believable if not as well executed as Grant Gustins performance of Barry Allen within the show.

With his friends and family lending support, as well as all of Central City, he moves forward past another physically demanding injury with the mere words of, “tell me where I can go next.", exquisitely if not perfectly capturing the true essence of the the Flash.

[chanoyu-to-wa]

Nampō Roku, Book 3 (2):  Jōō Creates the Fukuro-dana¹.

2) When the [need] for [something like] the fukuro-dana [arose], [this kind of oki-dana] was made, for the first time, by Jōō².  But once [the precedent had been established], numerous other oki-dana were created [by other chajin].   Nevertheless, no [other] tana surpasses the fukuro-dana³. As for the kane, [the fukuro-dana] fully conforms [to all of the teachings], and is equal in every respect to the daisu [and the] kyūdai [及第]⁴.

    There is this verse by Jōō:

               waga na wo ba Daikoku-an to iu nareba                    fukuro-dana ni zo hiji ha komekeru

               [我名をは大黒菴といふなれば                    袋棚にぞ秘事ハこめける]⁵.

    After [the autograph of this poem] was passed over [to Rikyū], it was treasured [by him], and constantly used [as a memento of Jōō]⁶.

   With respect to Jōō, he lived on Shijō [四條]⁷ in Kyōto, next to the Ebisu-dō [夷堂]⁸.  (The Gods) Ebisu and Daikoku are usually lined up together [in artistic representations]; and because of this, he wrote Daikoku-an [大黒菴] on a [wooden] plaque with his own brush, and hung this up [on his teahouse as its name].

==========================================================

Kaki-ire [書入]⁹: 

❖ There is a fukuro-dana that is painted with lacquer so thin that the wood-grain is visible.  [This tana] is in all other respects identical to the unpainted version.

    There is a slight difference in the temae [between these two versions] to which one must be sensitive:  [with respect to placing] the chakin [on the ji-ita of the tana], and [the need for] such things as a shiki-kami [敷紙]¹⁰, and so forth.  Also, with respect to placing things [on the tana], one should be especially vigilant¹¹.

❖ As for the arrangements for the fukuro-dana, the same kind of care should be taken as in the numerous [parallel] instances when the daisu is used.  Rough sketches will be provided [that illustrate certain of these arrangements].  When the number of objects are few, [it is important to remember that] if none are exceedingly wonderful [pieces], then the way the things are arranged itself should take precedence¹².

==========================================================

Kaki-ire [書入]: 

❖ Concerning the leaves¹³ illustrating the transmitted arrangements for the fukuro-dana, some of them show arrangements that were passed down from Jōō, while others were composed by Rikyū¹⁴.

_________________________

◎ Before we progress any further with the translation of Book Three, something should be brought to the readers’ attention, since I am worried that I may have given the wrong impression with respect to some of this material.  While a number of sections in this book contain material that is overtly spurious, this does not mean that every detail -- even in these entries -- was fabricated by the person or persons responsible for corrupting the text.  In fact, part of the success of this sort of fraud lies precisely by taking historically accurate information, and then twisting the context to make the total say what the perpetrator wishes it to say.

    In the previous installment (which was the first that translates material from Book Three of the Nampō Roku), many of the details referring to Jōō's modifications are quite accurate*:  for example, Jōō does seem to have simplified the architecture of the 4.5-mat room in the manner stated in that entry -- and, indeed, a “secret book” by Jōō might be expected to contain just such details (along, perhaps, with an explanation of his reasoning).  What is spurious is the context -- that the 4.5-mat room was originally created by Shukō, and that Jōō's modifications were (in effect) subsequently repudiated by Rikyū, who replaced the yojō-han with the straw-thatched hut†, which he thenceforth used on every occasion, never again performing chanoyu in any other setting.

    The 4.5-mat shoin (shown above) had been used as the standard place for serving tea since before Shukō arrived in Japan from the continent (indeed, it was so even before the appearance of chanoyu‡, when tea was made at the o-chanoyu-dana in the anteroom attached to such a shoin, from where it was brought out into the shoin to be drunk), with most of the details established by Nōami for Yoshimasa once it became fashionable for the host to serve tea with his own hands at a daisu that was set up in the shoin itself..

    Meanwhile, the original small tearoom** -- the nijō-daime [二疊臺目] -- was created simultaneously by Jōō (left) and Rikyū (right) in 1554, with each of their rooms displaying details that became fundamental to all later tearoom design, and it was this same room that Rikyū continued to use as his small room for most of his life -- reducing it to a two-mat room only after he entered Hideyoshi’s employ, probably because Hideyoshi felt uneasy with the daime-gamae, since this arrangement prevented him from seeing what the host was doing clearly.  This hardly could be considered repudiation of the earlier model, but an evolution spawned of necessity.

    Yet within this misleading narrative, the details of the changes that Jōō enacted remain authentic, and it is to understand these details that we should read this book. __________ *As I have written several times before, the contents of this book are based on a secret text written by Jōō, which he then transmitted to Rikyū (according to Rikyū's own words, as recorded in his densho).  Consequently, things related to Jōō and his teachings should contain at least a core of truth.  It is only when certain details were “stretched” (or fabricated) to make these things appear to conform with Kanamori Sōwa's history of chanoyu in Japan that the text needs to be weighed very, very carefully.

†Indeed, the Sen families used the expression sō-an no cha [草庵の茶] (or sō-an cha [草庵茶]) -- tea of the grass[-thatched] hut -- to define their machi-shū-based practice (especially in contrast with the developing daimyō-cha [大名茶] that was increasingly favored by the military class).  This term persists even today, and it is expressly said that this term (and its idea) derive directly from Rikyū (which they do not).

‡Chanoyu, as a performance of a temae before the eyes of the guests, should not be confused with the drinking of matcha.  Matcha had been drunk for several centuries in Japan, using most of the same utensils as continued to be used later, before chanoyu appeared -- around the time of the collapse of the Koryeo dynasty (in 1403).

**It is believed that Shukō may have served tea in his 2-mat cell.  However, this room was his residence, rather than a properly appointed chashitsu.  Other earlier small rooms -- such as the fuka-san-jō in the Shū-un-an -- likewise were residential cells.  Jōō's Yamazato-no-iori [山里の庵], and Rikyū's Jissō-an [實相庵], were the first two ko-yashiki ever to be erected specifically for the reception of guests for chanoyu (rather than as residences for the monk-chajin who occupied them).

¹The editing of this document, from being a text written by Jōō into one describing the process, becomes apparent here.

    Whether this was done by Jitsuzan (who appears to have been working under the assumption that all of the documents in the Shū-un-an had been written by Nambō Sōkei*), or by an earlier person whose purpose was to incorporate this material into the narrative sponsored by the Tokugawa bakufu (and/or the Sen family), is not clear. __________ *In this instance, perhaps he was imagining that Sōkei had transcribed a narrative delivered to him by Rikyū.

²Fukuro-dana wo koshirae-taru, kore Jōō ni someru [袋棚をこしらへたる、これ紹鷗に初る].

    Koshirae-taru [拵えたる] means “wish to make,” “have a desire to make;” or “when there was a need (or desire) to make....”

    Someru [初める] means to begin to do (something), do something for the first time -- in this case, begin to use the fukuro-dana as the first substitute for the daisu.

    In other words, this passage is suggesting that the creation of the fukuro-dana came about in response to the appearance of a need (or desire) to distance chanoyu from the daisu; and when this need was recognized, it was Jōō who responded by starting to make the fukuro-dana.

    In fact, the original tana -- care must be taken not to confuse the (kiri-kiji) fukuro-dana [袋棚] with the so-called Jōō-dana [紹鷗棚] (which is painted with Shunkei lacquer)* -- had been created by Shino Sōshin [志野宗信; ? ~ 1480]†, for the purpose of holding the utensils used during the appreciation of incense.   Jōō's arrangement of his tea utensils on the fukuro-dana mirrors the Shino family's arrangement of the incense utensils‡. __________ *I mention this because Tanaka Senshō seems to feel that the text is referring to both of them.

    According to Rikyū's densho, the lacquered Jōō-dana was created for displaying special utensils in the tokonoma, while it was the kiji fukuro-dana that was placed on the utensil mat and used when serving tea.

    Apparently the fact that both of these tana have a ji-fukuro is the source of this confusion.  Various "secret" arrangements for the Jōō-dana appeared in the early Edo period, in works associated with the machi-shū followers of Imai Sōkyū.

†The first generation Shino Soshin's dates are also given as 1406 ~ 1490.

    However, it is also possible that this tana was actually created by his son (who was also born in Korea, and immigrated to Japan together with his father), and who also used the name Sōshin [宗信; 1441 ~ 1522].  Since the Korean line of this family died out with the third (or possibly fourth -- the use of the same name by the first and second generations of the Shino family has resulted in confusion over how to interpret the fragmentary records that survive from the period) generation in 1571, and was carried on by their Japanese disciples, the details of the early history of the family was, for the most part, lost.

‡Jōō modified Shino Sōshin’s tana by replacing what originally was a pair of  hinged doors (with a locking mechanism, to secure the contents:  the host’s precious kyara incense was supposed to be kept in the ji-fukuro) with a single lift-out door (this enlarged the opening, making it more hospitable for some of the larger things that were used for chanoyu).

    As for the logic behind Jōō’s arrangements, while the Shino placed the akoda [アコダ = 阿古陀] (a mizusashi-sized hibachi -- called akoda because its shape resembled this early-summer melon -- in which the burning charcoal, that would later be transferred into the kiki-kōro, was kept) on the ji-ita beneath the naka-dana, Jōō placed the mizusashi there:  the function of the mizusashi (in chanoyu) poetically resembles that of the akoda (in the appreciation of incense).

    Jōō's arrangements of the other utensils (as are recorded in this book) parallel the Shino's practices in much the same way.

    It must be remembered that Jōō drew most of his early guests from among the group of people who assembled for the Shino family’s ko-kai:  Jōō seems to have begun by staging incense gatherings of his own, and only slowly started to shift the emphasis toward chanoyu.  It should not surprise us, then, that Jōō kept many of the details the same, especially in the early years, so as not to confuse his guests, while the substitution of tea utensils for incense ones often follows the same sort of intellectual route that poets use when deriving a new poem from an earlier example.

³Fukuro-dana ni sugi-taru tana nashi [袋棚に過たる棚なし].

    Sugi-taru [過ぎたる] means to surpass, go beyond.  In other words, though a number of other oki-dana were subsequently created by various people, none of these are better than the fukuro-dana*.

    The all-pervading nature of this tana can be seen from the fact that (at least originally) the fukuro-dana was used not only in the 4.5-mat room, but in the 2-mat daime room (enclosed within the daime-gamae -- which seems to have been designed specifically with this idea in mind).

    It must be understood that, from the earliest days, the daisu (on which was placed the bronze furo) was used in the shoin.  Jōō created the fukuro-dana for use with the ro -- which, originally, was used all year round as the symbol of wabi-no-chanoyu.  Using the furo during the warm months, and the ro during the cold months was a convention that appeared much later. __________ *Indeed, it can be argued that all of the other tana that came into being after the fukuro-dana were derived from it -- by dividing the fukuro-dana in half, and using either the right side (where the mizusashi is placed beneath the naka-dana and ten-ita), or the left (where the ji-fukuro is at the bottom), independently.

    Rikyū's hitoe tsuri-dana [一重袋棚] (a tsuri-dana with a single shelf), in fact, was derived from the naka-dana of the fukuro-dana -- as was Furuta Sōshitsu's futae tsuri-dana [二重袋棚] (Oribe’s tana had two shelves, and so was derived from both the naka-dana and the kō-dana of the fukuro-dana).

⁴Kane yorozu totonoite, daisu kyudai ni mo otoranu tana nari [かねよろづとゝのひて、臺子及第にもおとらぬ棚也].

    Kane [かね] refers to the teachings of kane-wari [曲尺割り] -- or, in this instance, perhaps specifically to kane [矩], meaning “measurements.”  The fukuro-dana fulfills (totonoite [調いて]) all (yorozu [萬] -- literally, the ten-thousand) details of the teachings.

    Daisu kyūdai [臺子及第] means the daisu [臺子] and the kyū-dai daisu [及第臺子] (its name was abbreviated here).  These were the two tana whose use predated the fukuro-dana in chanoyu.  Otoranu [劣らぬ]:  otoru [劣る] means to be bad or inferior; otoranu [劣らぬ]* means in no way inferior to (literally, “the state of being inferior does not exist”).  So, the fukuro-dana is in no way inferior to either of its predecessors.

    Here it might be good to point out that it is not quite right to speak of an hierarchical relationship between gokushin-no-chanoyu (the tea of the daisu) and wabi-no-chanoyu.  The two are equal.  They simply represent different approaches to the same central idea†. __________ *The form otoranai [劣らない] is the modern equivalent.

†The offering of a bowl of tea to the Buddha, as a spiritual quest.  As I have written before, when Rikyū performed chanoyu in his Mozuno ko-yashiki, using a mukō-ro, kiji-tsurube, the Ko-mamori chawan and a chū-natsume, an ori-tame chashaku, and a take-wa for his futaoki, he was performing a gokushin-temae just as surely as if he had been seated in front of a shin-daisu adorned with with nagabon futatsu-gumi [長盆二つ組] and nanatsu-kazari [七つ飾り].

⁵Waga na wo ba Daikoku-an to iu nareba, fukuro-dana ni zo hiji ha komekeru [我名をは大黒菴といふなれば、袋棚にぞ秘事ハこめける].

    “If I may be known as Daikoku-an, then it is in the fukuro-dana that I hide away my secrets.”

    This poem is usually known as the Daikoku-an no uta [大黒庵ノ歌].  Apparently the possession of the autograph (which Rikyū said he found folded up within this document, and which he subsequently had mounted as a kakemono) announced to those who saw it (or, later, heard about it) that Rikyū was Jōō's acknowledged heir*.  (This seems to have been necessary, because Imai Sōkyōū had been charged with taking charge of Jōō's collection of meibutsu tea utensils†.) __________ *Thus he quotes the poem in his early densho, which seem to have been written around the time (perhaps circa 1573) that he entered public life as a teacher of tea.

†In those days, possession of a utensil implied that the owner was also a party to the secrets of its use.  It was precisely because of the unprecedentedly large number of meibutsu utensils that Jōō kept in his personal collection that he was considered, by his contemporaries, the preeminent master of his generation.  Nobody, since the days of Ashikaga Yoshimasa, had ever owned so many famous things.

    Imai Sōkyū, as Jōō's brother-in-law, had been asked to look after Jōō's young son Sōga (who was 5 years old at the time of his father's death), and he was given charge of the collection of meibutsu tea utensils as Sōga's inheritance (on the understanding that the collection would be passed on to Sōga when he was old enough to make use of them).  The trouble between Rikyū and Sōkyū arose precisely because Sōkyū decided to sell a number of these things in order to reimburse himself for the expenses of Sōga's keep.  Possibly Sōkyū decided that, since Sōga was a follower of Rikyū's simple style of chanoyu (which generally eschewed the use of such famous things), Sōga would never need them (and furthermore, as a disciple of Rikyū, Sōkyū appears to have felt that Sōga would never be the teacher that his father had been, hence they would be wasted on him).

    We must remember that the early version of chanoyu practiced by Jōō was, in many respects, similar to the style taught by the modern schools, in that different utensils had special (and secret) ways of being handled.  Rikyū did away with all of those details, preferring to use everything the same way (his small chaire-bon allowing even the bon-chaire to be handled almost the same way as an ordinary chaire or natsume -- without a tray -- was used).

    On Sōkyū's side, this behavior (which he appears to have considered as a sort of repudiation of Jōō’s teachings) seems to have been his main bone of contention with Rikyū (so that after Rikyū's death Sōkyū and his followers did everything in their power to restore things to the way they had been during Jōō's middle period -- the time before Rikyū began to have an influence on his chanoyu).

⁶Kayō ni hizō-shite jōjū ni mochiirareshi nari [かやうに秘蔵して常住に用られし也].

    Kayō [通う] means to pass something over (from one person to another).

    Hizō-suru [秘蔵する] means to treasure, prize, cherish (something) -- with the additional nuance of preserving it, keeping it safely.

    Jōjū [常住] means, always, constantly, eternally, for the rest of ones life, and so forth.  The verb mochii-rareru [用られる] means to use something, or make use of something.

    The statement that Rikyū “made use” of (the autograph copy of) this poem implies:

1) that he considered it to be a memento of Jōō (since the was his explanation for his name), as if it were Jōō himself who was present whenever the poem was displayed*; and,

2) that he displayed it to others to show that he had received it from Jōō (which was tantamount to Rikyū being named as Jōō's heir -- since the possession of this document, as having been received from Jōō, meant that Rikyū was now entitled to use it as his own name-poem, that Rikyū now had the right to use Jōō's name as his own). __________ *The reason why we bow to the kakemono is because it is considered to be the “shadow” of the monk who wrote it.  The scroll represents his physical presence (rather than simply being a piece of art).  This is why these writings were venerated as they were -- they were a relic of the man who wrote them.

⁷Shijō [四條] is Fourth Avenue.  This was one of the major avenues running east to west.  The name is usually written Shijō [四条] today.

⁸Ebisu-dō [夷堂]:  apparently a small hall or shrine dedicated to Ebisu [惠比須]*, perhaps located in the business district between Kawaramachi-dori and Karasuma-dori, which does not survive. (Due to the obvious difference in names, it cannot seem to be associated with the Ebisu-jinja [惠美須神社], which is located east of the Kamo-gawa). __________ *Ebisu is, among other things, considered to be the God of Commerce and Wealth.  It would be logical for a small shrine to this deity to be erected in the city’s business district.

⁹Kaki-ire [書入] is a block of text inserted into a document, often functioning like a footnote.  If there is space, it was written interlineally.  However, in the case of a notebook* (which seems to have been the format of the original document), the page could be split open at the fold, and the kaki-ire was added on the back side of the leaf to which its contents refer.  The length of some of the kaki-ire in the Nampō Roku suggests that this was the method used.

    Kaki-ire were often written by someone other than the original author, to offer additional information necessary to understand the original text.  Tanaka Senshō states in his commentary that the present kaki-ire was not present in the original work, and so was added later __________ *A traditional Japanese notebook (called a sōshi [雙紙], a reference to the doubled pages) was made by folding a long sheet of writing paper like a fan, and then stitching along one edge.  Each leaf, then, was doubled (this helped to prevent ink from leaking through and obscuring what was written on the adjoining page).

¹⁰Chakin・shiki-kami nado no rui nari [茶巾・敷紙等ノ類也].

    Traditionally, the chakin was placed on the ji-ita of the tana (such as on the ji-ita of the daisu)*; or, on the shiki-ita (in lieu of a tana).  However, if the fukuro-dana is unlacquered, the chakin should not be placed on the tana†, since the fine dust clinging to the wood may soil it.  (Also, the damp chakin could stain the wood, which would make it appear impure.)

    The word shiki-kami [敷き紙] refers to a piece of paper that is folded (and sometimes cut as well)‡, to be placed under the shin-nakatsugi (when the nakatsugi is not tied in a shifuku).  This practice is said to date from the time of Shukō.  However, it appears that the author of this note believed that this usage was predicated on the tana being unlacquered (so the implication is that a shiki-kami is not necessary if the tana is lacquered)**. ___________ *On the fukuro-dana, the chakin was placed in front of the mizusashi.

†It should be placed on the lid of the mizusashi:  the fukuro-dana is used only with the ro.

‡According to the Three Hundred Lines:

“(298) 中續敷紙の事  [The matter of (displaying) the nakatsugi with a piece of paper under it.]   

    “This refers to the situation when a nakatsugi that does not have a shifuku is arranged on the daisu [or other tana] as a chisō (an act requiring a special effort on the part of the host, something done especially for the guest).

    “Three sheets of thin paper should be folded together in half, and then folded again [imitating the way a paper kama-shiki is folded]; and this is placed down [on the shelf], with the cut edges in front and on the left (and so the folded edges are on the right, and on the far side), and the nakatsugi is then rested on top of this.  Depending on the size of the nakatsugi, the paper should be cut so that the shiki-kami is between 4-bu and 6-bu larger than the bottom of the nakatsugi on all four sides.   

    “Some people also take away approximately 1-bu from each of the four corners (shown in the sketch, above, on the lower right), but others do not like this idea.   

    “Kama-shiki paper (this is similar to kaishi) turned back-side out may be used.”

**However, this thinking is erroneous.  The reason for the shiki-kami is because the shin-nakatsugi has straight sides.  So, if the base of the tea container is placed immediately adjacent to its kane when displayed on the tana (as is the rule), the nakatsugi will not overlap (be associated with) its kane.  Placing the nakatsugi on a shiki-kami eliminates this problem, since the paper overlaps the kane.  (The size of the paper is important so that it does not inadvertently contact another kane.)

    When the nakatsugi is tied in a shifuku, however, the shifuku is necessarily wider than the nakatsugi (if only slightly).  Thus, when the bottom of the nakatsugi is oriented immediately to the side of its kane, the shifuku will overlap the kane, and so fulfill the needs of kane-wari.

¹¹When placing things with a rough foot (such as a chawan) on a lacquered surface, it was traditional to place a towel* (or a piece of paper) underneath -- to prevent the foot of the utensil from scratching the lacquer.  

    If the tana had been painted with thin lacquer†, this point was especially important, since the lacquer can easily be scratched away.  On an unlacquered tana, such care is possibly not necessary. __________ *This was made like a chakin, but longer.

†An unpainted tana was, at least in theory, used only once.  The purpose for coating the tana with lacquer was so that it could be used again and again with impunity.  If the utensils scratch away the lacquer, the tana will be ruined.

    Traditionally (at least since the Edo period), an unlacquered tana (such as the fukuro-dana, or the take-daisu [竹臺子] -- or Rikyū's maru-joku [丸卓] or shi-hō-dana [四方棚]) was used only once in its original state.  After it had been used, the tana was rubbed (or painted) with a thin coat of lacquer, and so it could be used again.  But the unlacquered state was special, and this is how it was supposed to be when entertaining a very important guest.

¹²To sum up Tanaka Senshō's comments:  the arrangements used on the fukuro-dana are the same as [those used on] the daisu; and there are the same number [of arrangements].

    The primary point of difference is this:  things done with the daisu must be absolutely correct -- the utensils must be appropriate, and they must be in perfect condition.

    But because the fukuro-dana is used with the ro, less refined utensils can be used, as is appropriate to the setting (whether the fukuro-dana is being used in the shoin, or in a more wabi sort of room).

    Ultimately, the arrangement of utensils on the daisu should be a work of art in itself.  But, with respect to the fukuro-dana, it is important to remember that the fukuro-dana is not a display shelf for decorative objects.  So, while the arrangement should be pleasing, the primary reason for the arrangement is to help the host serve the tea efficiently.  This is the real difference between the daisu and the fukuro-dana.

¹³Kiri-kami [切紙], “cut paper,” means that each of the sketches was done on a separate piece of paper (rather than on a scroll or in a notebook).

¹⁴As mentioned before, of the 26 arrangements for the fukuro-dana included in Book Three of the Nampō Roku, only one is found in an identical form in Rikyū's writings -- the arrangement for the shin-nakatsugi, shown below.  (The writing reads, above, from the right, hikkiri [引切], hishaku [ひしやく], nakatsugi [なかつぎ]; and below, mizusashi [水さし], fukuro [袋].)

    While it is possible that some of the sketches included in this collection were Rikyū's creations, it actually seems unlikely -- since the arrangements found in his densho (all of which I included under footnote 6 in the introductory essay*) are always much simpler than those that are shown in this book, the majority of which clearly belong to Jōō's middle period. __________ *The URL for that post is:

https://chanoyu-to-wa.tumblr.com/post/185391761796/namp%C5%8D-roku-book-3-introduction

    By comparing the seven arrangements illustrated by Rikyū himself with those that will be shown later in this book, the difference between Jōō's and Rikyū's approach to the fukuro-dana will become eminently clear.

[fyeahfantasticfour]

1960s Sue Storm: A Recuperative, Feminist Reading

I’m not going to pretend that comics in the 1960s weren’t sexist by today’s standards. Of course they were. All popular media from that time was. Second Wave Feminism, at the time Sue first appeared in November of 1961, was still in its infancy and hadn’t yet made its way into popular consciousness (Betty Friedan’s groundbreaking feminist tract, The Feminine Mystique, wouldn’t be published until 1963). Pointing out all of the ways in which Lee/Kirby’s run on the Fantastic Four is sexist is not much of a challenge and not very interesting — what I’m going to do by reading 1960s Sue against the grain is something far more nuanced that I hope will restore some of the agency that fandom interpretations have stripped away from her. I am striving for a recuperative reading of 1960s Sue Storm, one that pushes back against the fairly common and pernicious notion that she is or ever has been “just” a meek and mild housewife, because she never has been that, and I think that highlighting the degree of agency, strength, and courage she had even in the 1960s will help emphasize that. I don’t find the complete and total erasure of the level of agency Sue did, in fact, possess in the 1960s to be particularly nuanced or feminist because it ignores how transgressive she would have seemed at the time. So I am going to point to moments during Lee/Kirby’s run where Sue exhibited agency, strength, and power that were feminist for the period in which they were written, while simultaneously acknowledging that the narrative frequently undercuts and underserves her. I am not at all pretending that any of this was intentional on Jack Kirby or Stan Lee’s part -- I don’t and can’t know that, and frankly, I don’t think it matters in this context.

To begin with, Sue’s invisibility can be read as a critique of sexism, since it grants her both the ability to escape the male gaze and to weaponize her societal invisibility as a woman. I’m sure we’ve all heard of Ellison’s 1952 novel Invisible Man, which comments on both the hyper- and invisibility of black men. The manner in which Sue’s powers function is not unconnected to Ellison’s nameless Invisible Man. Sue’s physical beauty always exposed her to a great deal of unwanted male attention, but that surely escalated after she became famous as a member of the FF, thus becoming hypervisible to a degree she hadn’t been before. We see this in Fantastic Four v1 #10, when a strange man on the street recognizes Sue and interprets her fame as permission to harass her. Her invisibility allows her to dodge him and his gaze while she vehemently condemns his misogynistic behavior. 

Note that it’s specifically framed as Sue resisting, by turning invisible, his reductive view of her as a beautiful object that exists for his pleasure and not much else. “Mmm -- you shouldn’t ever turn invisible, doll!” he tells her. “How’s about a smile for one of your fans??” This is immediately followed by Sue directly defying him by both refusing to smile and turning invisible, thus removing herself from his sexualizing male gaze. Sue’s invisibility is in this way feminist and transgressive -- if women within the highly patriarchal society of the U.S. in the 1960s were given little choice but to exist as sexual objects on display for the titillation of the men around them, their subjectivity and humanity stripped from them, Sue’s invisibility gave her the power to defy that narrow categorization and control when she is seen and by whom. She claimed for herself the power to remove herself from the patriarchal male gaze that sexualized and dehumanized her whenever she wished.

Cut for length.

Her invisibility also allows her to transgressively wield her enemies’ sexist tendency to overlook and underestimate her against them (i.e., treat her as though she is insignificant and thus invisible). She is only successful in defeating male villains when she turns invisible because none of them ever think to wonder what happened to the FF’s female member. They are too busy focusing on the men, who they mistakenly view as more powerful and thus more of a threat than a mere woman. In Fantastic Four #5, for instance, Victor Von Doom demands that Sue surrender herself as a hostage so that he can coerce the male members of the team into doing as he demands. Victor’s plan hinges around Sue being a helpless damsel in distress, but Sue turns the tables on Victor by making the decision to go with Victor part of HER plan to gather information and draw him out into the open. Notice that Reed defers to Sue’s leadership here:

And her plan ultimately works. She defeats Victor and rescues herself and her teammates, all of whom would have been murdered by Victor if not for her. She is able to do so only because Victor does not deem her much of a threat and therefore overlooks her. She might as well have been invisible, as far as he was concerned—and she uses that fact to defeat him.

This overlooking of Sue by male antagonists happens repeatedly -- for instance in Fantastic Four v1 #95, when the Monocle also forgets about Sue completely:

Fantastic Four #5 is not the only time in the 1960s that Reed defers to Sue and her leadership, might I add -- in Fantastic Four v1 #20, Sue proposes one that centers around her taking the Molecule Man’s wand away, and Reed agrees to play bait for her:

They are working as a team here, as equal partners, which is what Lee at least presented Sue as, even if his ability to imagine what equality for a woman looked like was severely limited. Within the comics themselves, Sue herself has always insisted on equality both as a team member and as Reed’s lover and, later on, wife. In 1964′s Fantastic Four Annual #2, Reed, concerned with his girlfriend’s safety, decides that Doom is far too dangerous an enemy for Sue to go up against, but Sue insists on being treated like a full member of the team, as she always has been—and even threatens to break up with Reed if dating him means that she’ll be left behind on dangerous missions. 

And she actually follows through on that threat nearly a decade later in 1973′s Fantastic Four v1 #130, which takes place after they’re married and have a son. The Frightful Four attack and Sue participates in the battle, but when Reed orders her to get their infant son to safety and Sue doesn’t listen, they get into an argument. Reed is livid that Sue (recklessly, he believes) prioritized remaining in the fight over their baby’s life, and Sue is equally furious that Reed is treating her as though Franklin’s mother is all she is rather than as an equal teammate. She then leaves him for the first of two times (the other being during Civil War I). 

When they reunite, Sue is adamant that she be treated as an equal by all of them. Reed struggles at first to stop being so overprotective of Sue, but he does his best to comply because she has been very clear that if he does not, he will lose her permanently. By the time Marvel Two-In-One v1 #67 was published in 1980, he is able to tell Ben that he’s made his peace with the fact that Sue has just as much right to put herself in harm’s way as he does:

It’s worth noting also that in every version of the origin story, Sue’s decision to become a superhero—i.e., a warrior, on active, front-line duty—is never questioned by Reed, Ben, or Johnny (contrast that with Wonder Woman two decades or so earlier, who was initially relegated to being the Justice Society’s secretary). As a matter of fact, while Reed mentions in Fantastic Four v1 #22, the issue where Sue develops the ability to create forcefields, that Sue has been doubting the value of her powers and her usefulness to the team, he emphasizes that, to the contrary, she is “about to become the star member.” So not only has Sue always been a member of the FF, 22 issues after her first appearance she was already being presented as its most powerful member thanks to her forcefields. Needless to say, the fact that Sue was not only a member of the FF but also explicitly its most powerful member was fairly groundbreaking for the 1960s. I struggle to think of another team from that time period that could say that its female member(s) were the most powerful or that their superiority was openly acknowledged by every male member of the team.

Sue was also an active part of the team from the beginning and went everywhere her team members did—to the moon, other planets, other dimensions, Monster Island, the heart of Latveria, up against the Hulk, Skrulls, the Molecule Man, etc.—no matter how dangerous. She occasionally even spearheaded their attacks on villains and even made her own battle plans. In Fantastic Four v1 #3, which was only the FF’s third appearance, Sue goes after the Miracle Man by herself because she believes that she alone will be more effective than an entire army battalion:

Sue takes on a leadership role in these early issues far more often than anyone nowadays ever acknowledges. In Fantastic Four v1 #23, when the FF start to bicker and question why Reed gets to be the one in charge, Ben, Sue, and Johnny all vote for who they think should lead the team—and Sue votes for herself. She isn’t content to simply be a part of the team. It is 1964, and she already wants to lead the FF and thinks it’s time for a woman to do so.

And she one day would. By the 1980s, she was already the FF’s second-in-command, in charge when Reed wasn’t there, and she briefly took over leadership of the team when Reed was abducted and put on trial for saving Galactus’ life. In the 1990s, when Reed was twice presumed dead, Sue became the team leader both times and Ben and Johnny answered to her. By the 2000s and 2010s, the balance of power in Reed and Sue’s relationship has shifted almost entirely in Sue’s favor, to the point that Reed himself admits that Sue is the real leader of the team:

But it’s not as though these panels have no precedent, even all the way back in 1970′s Fantastic Four v1 #98:

Reed and Sue’s relationship has simply never been what fandom makes it out to be -- one that is profoundly unequal, where Sue gets no say at all in anything. It’s always been more of a back-and-forth, more of a partnership. Sue has always had the power to order Reed around (in certain contexts, at least) and Reed has always listened to Sue and her advice. Her power and influence has indisputably increased over the years, but it’s important to note that it was never wholly absent.

I could also point out that Sue has a perfect right to lead the team she was largely responsible for creating. Her role in the formation of the FF tends to be vastly underestimated. Sue was instrumental in orchestrating the FF’s theft of the rocket ship that Reed designed, which has been canon since Fantastic Four v1 #1. Without Sue passionately persuading Ben to fly the rocket (while Reed stood silently by), the flight never would have happened:

Neither was she solely motivated by her love and loyalty to Reed—in this, the original version you see above, her sense of patriotism had just as much to do with why she decided to accompany Reed on the rocket flight. Later writers have even portrayed Sue as being motivated by a love for adventure that rivals Reed’s and, more importantly, as being responsible for pushing Reed to go through with his plan -- Reed says point-blank that he was “content doing pure research” until Sue “pulled me out of the lab and into your amorphous idea of ‘field work.’” Despite the fact that it’s largely (wrongly) understood as Reed’s plan and Reed’s decision, I think that canon actually points to the theft of the rocket ship as being something that Reed and Sue decided and implemented together—or, arguably, even as more Sue’s than it was Reed’s. He floated the idea. She made it happen. Ben decided to pilot the rocket because Sue talked him into it. Johnny tagged along because of his love for Sue. The FF would never have come into being if not for Sue.

While 1960s Reed has become something of the poster boy for 1960s sexism in fandom, I think that attitude is unfair, inaccurate, and detrimental to fandom perceptions of Sue. At the time, Reed certainly wouldn’t have been read that way -- he gave his wife a great deal of freedom and autonomy for the time period, readily acknowledged that she was more powerful than he was, followed her leadership at times, and even personally trained Sue in hand-to-hand combat. Sue, it’s worth pointing out, has always defied and exceeded conventional femininity’s bounds, and Reed has never had an issue with that -- to the contrary, he’s actively supported and encouraged her. In Fantastic Four v1 #17, for instance, Victor abducts Alicia Masters, and Sue is the one who finds her first. When Victor enters the room, Sue is so confident that she can defeat him singlehandedly in hand-to-hand combat that she calls him her prisoner and says that she’s been looking forward to proving what she can do on her own:

And then she does, and Victor is forced to resort to pointing a gun at her to defeat her (this was before her forcefields):

She is so confident that she can beat him in hand-to-hand because she has been trained to fight by Reed, who even in the 1960s thought his girlfriend should know how to fight and didn’t think it too unladylike. 

Furthermore, I would argue that Sue chose to marry Reed rather than Namor precisely because Reed was significantly more respectful of her agency, consent, and right to self-determination and bodily autonomy than Namor ever was (...not that that’s a high bar). In Fantastic Four v1 #11, Reed, while discussing his and Sue’s lengthy romance (at the time, they were childhood sweethearts who had known each other their whole lives), brings up the fact that Sue has not decisively chosen between him and Namor. Sue tells him that she doesn’t know how she feels, and Reed very respectfully says that he understands how she feels and promises he won’t mention it again until she does, a promise he, crucially, keeps. 

Fantastic Four v1 #27, however, is the pivotal issue where Sue definitively chooses Reed over Namor, and she does so because Namor proves to her that he has no respect for her or her wishes while Reed proves that he does. The issue begins with Namor deciding unilaterally that he has waited long enough for Sue to make up her mind -- he wants the decision made on his terms, at his pace, rather than on Sue’s. So he announces to his people that he’s going to marry Sue now (without having bothered to ask her what she wants, if she’s ready, etc.) and then goes to the Baxter Building and beats up Sue’s family. When she arrives, she is horrified at what he’s done and frantically tries to see if her 17yo baby brother is all right, but Namor knocks her out and abducts her. She wakes up to find herself trapped in a glass bowl and screams to be let out, but Namor ignores her pleas:

This is a clear violation of Sue’s right to bodily autonomy and self-determination. She does not want to be in that glass bowl, but Namor does not listen to her or care about her consent. Namor is attempting to coerce Sue into behaving as he wishes -- i.e., imposing his will on her -- rather than allowing her to make up her own mind as Reed did. And he has the colossal gall to literally blame the victim by implying that she made him abduct and imprison her because of her indecisiveness. Reed, let me point out, never felt the need to do the same, despite being in a worse situation, given that he and Sue had known each other their whole lives, been dating for years, and were virtually engaged before Namor showed up. Despite all that, when Namor taunts Reed by asking what he would do if Sue chose Namor rather than him, Reed replies that Sue will, of course, decide for herself -- but on her time and her terms, not on Namor’s or Reed’s. Sue, unsurprisingly, announces at the end of this issue that she loves Reed and not Namor, and that was the end of the love triangle for the next decade. 

Reed continues to be uncertain about her feelings, however. He doesn’t propose until Fantastic Four v1 #35, and he does so only after Sue herself says that she has been waiting for him to propose and echoes back the phrase (“It’s always been you!”) that Reed used to declare his love for her in Fantastic Four v1 #11. He waited until she signaled to him that she was ready, on her own terms and at her own pace. 

I keep reading people wondering why Sue would have chosen a nerd like Reed over a hunk like Namor, and this is why. Reed proved to Sue that he respected her right to decide who she loves on her time and her terms, and Namor proved definitively that he did not.

And even after Sue marries Reed and has a baby, she does not quit the team or remain at home. While she does take a brief leave of absence during her pregnancy, she returns to active duty in a rather spectacular way. Reed, Ben, Johnny, and Crystal are all in Latveria, powerless, and on the verge of being blown up by Doom’s bombs, along with the village they are in. The bombs go off...and everyone is mysteriously fine. No one can understand why they’re still alive until Sue materializes, and they realize that she saved everyone with her forcefields. 

Reed is overjoyed that she’s there -- despite the extreme danger -- and not at all upset by the fact that she has returned to active duty. Let me also point out that there was never any question of Sue leaving the team after she married Reed or even after she had a baby, and this at a time when it was expected and commonplace for women to quit their jobs and become housewives after marriage. Reed, Ben, Johnny -- they all simply assumed Sue would continue on the team as she always had. 

So of course comics in the 1960s were sexist, of course Sue was sometimes frustratingly passive and silent by today’s standards, but that doesn’t erase or diminish all of the times when she was not. Sue has been fighting tooth and nail to assert herself as an equal for decades, and personally, I think that her tenacity, determination, and courage even when belittled and underestimated by the men around her make her just as much of a hero as her superpowers, if not more so, and I am, frankly, tired of fandom's constant belittlement of Sue.