#both of which i think hold a lot of narrative and symbolic weight)

[pynkhues]

Sophie, have you watched Nosferatu, yet? The topic of gothic heroines resurfaced and with it the comparison of Loustat to Orlok and Ellen. would love to read a meta/review from you of it wrt IWTV.

I haven't yet, anon! It's been a pretty hectic start to the year with my sister and nephews staying with me, so I haven't made it to the cinema this week (hoping to get there on Tuesday, although I might be wrangled into taking the boys to see Sonic 3 instead of getting to see literally anything else, haha). I was wondering this morning if something had happened with the gothic heroine interpretation though because my Byronic hero post has been getting a lot of attention in the last 24 hours. I'll try and see Nosferatu soon though - I'm seeing a lot about it, and I have a few friends who are actually gothic horror authors and they've all hated it, which has actually made me extra curious, haha.

[lovely080222]

Arcane Season 2

Lately, I've seen a lot of content creators and people online reacting and talking about Arcane season 2 in a negative way, to the point where they say that the season was trash. And honestly it makes me mad. If the ending of the story, or the story itself wasn't your cup of tea, is okay. Media enjoyment and appreciation is subjective, however, we can all be objective when it comes to the actual content of said media...and that is what has me so disappointed on their takes, because their reviews (that I came across with) are flat out lacked on media literacy and did not entirely understand the source material they were reviewing.

Let's start with the character arcs...in my honest opinion. THEY WERE GOOD. ALL OF THEM. I feel like a lot of people are exaggerating when it came to the arcs (especially Vi, Jinx and Caitlyn's) saying that they were not developed enough like in the first season, but I disagree. Most of their arcs for season 2 were HEAVLY hinted and foreshadowed in season 1, mostly Jinx's and Cait's.

One of the arc that gets more hate is Vi's, and is because of the s3x scene of season 2 episode 8 and the finale of season 2 episode 9, and overall season 1. As well as her forgiveness towards Caitlyn and how she acted selfishly in that episode. However, they don't take into account 2 things: 1. Vi is heartbroken (for what it feels the 30th time in both seasons) because Jinx/Powder tears and rejects Vi's help and unconditional love (Vi's fatal flaw is not knowing when to drop the towel, and establishing boundaries for herself, believe me, I learned that THE HARD WAY ) .

2. Vi and Caitlyn might not have enough time to talk about their feelings as deeply as they would've liked (a literal WAR is coming) so, they did it in the most raw and truthful form of love language, touch and eyes. No words, they weren't needed either.

Don't blame her for doing what it felt right in the moment, also let's be real here. Jinx gave her consent, and decided to leave Vi (Vi doesn't know the context, we do), for her sibling's benefit and love for her, because it hurts to Jinx that Vi is not taking care of herself and not pursuing what she truly wants, which is Caitlyn.

Was it in the worst moment of Jinx deteriorating mind? Yes. Was it out of place?...Maybe. But, was it necessary for the plot? OBVIOUSLY.

The s3x scene holds and magnifies the arcs of the couple and their vulnerability (Vi taking the leap and show her feelings, and Caitlyn responding and being truthful of hers). There are videos that explain the importance and the weight that holds in the arcs of Caitlyn and Violet, way in depth and detailed. They all point out the symbols and meanings of their gestures, which are wonderful. And ties together their bond and their strengths. As a younger sibling, strangely enough, I connect with Vi more than Jinx. That is because of the parental and family expectations that they have on me. I had to take a role of being the caretaker since "I'm more mentally stable". So I understand why Vi is the way she is.

Therefore, I understand and relate to Vi wanting to be selfish for once, without feeling guilty about it later. Not having regrets.

I recently rewatched both seasons and I have to say, it all played out perfectly, including the finale. And it payed off to all the build up in season 1, because of the foreshadows and plot devices used in both seasons to tell the story. The plot points and story arcs were very good, especially since they all connected to the main theme, which is forgiveness. Where do you draw the line in where there is nothing left to forgive or how far are you willing to do so. The plots truly showcased what is Arcane (narratively and character) and how does storytelling (mostly subtext, non-verbal and visual ) actually work. The way the writers handled it was MAGNIFICENT and TRAGIC. Which serves right for the story they conveyed in the series.

I think, one of the reasons that this season was received poorly (compared to season 1) is due to the already constructed ending and story lines that we might have thought of. Which might have more things or less than the main series but it was something to cling on before the premiere of the last season. And because of it, they judge it extremely and harshly without actually taking into account what the story was actually about. Would it have benefited of more episodes? No. Would it have benefited of more runtime? in some things, yes but at the same time, i don't mind it and I believe that it is good. Would it have been better if there was another season to wrap up the story? Definitely not. That is due to the story being pretty much a solid story with a few strong undertones that have unfolded before its finale. I LOVE Arcane, and I would watch it again and again (both seasons). I think, it is one of the biggest series of all time and also the most compelling one in modern media). This final season brought me to tears and this hollow feeling in my chest yet satisfied by the way it ended the main journey of Runeterra, and opened to many more.

Also controversial opinion, but I like season 2 a lot more than season 1. And that is because, I love the development of it (the show of progression and how it embraces the themes showed on the series)

BTW, THE MUSIC SLAPS. BEST OST HANDS DOWN MIC DROP!!!!!!

(P.S. As an english literature major, I might have more insight on this but don't be afraid to disagree/agree in the comments)

I want to know how y'all felt and if you want to ask me something or debate this, you're free to do so. I hope I can create a save space for all types of convos about this show.

love,

~lovely References:

https://youtu.be/dRvgb_CB9Ss?si=rQGmpPAYL5XrDR1u https://youtu.be/LZ6szm2fmB4?si=k7l-OuE018PpctjM https://youtu.be/0nhTS9-P7eQ?si=MkMntcyQZTHPzgYZ https://youtu.be/l0-We7fyCaQ?si=aP-fhcWxSspphBT-https://youtu.be/sIJEQjMqiNA?si=xF8rt77LKAG0Kpp6 https://youtu.be/NtDGwZxQyio?si=ZTKq1E2VetcXkyis https://youtu.be/30zVFfziBuk?si=AQpE6cntutdQvBfz https://youtu.be/9Lro6HmaWiA?si=PxPq4U8s138nlHw4. https://youtu.be/W3cNewkYB8o?si=LsyGnzC3iaMpr7K1 https://youtu.be/nD9cNowdBQg?si=jxqwX1tmuunnZpHi

[roseofcards90]

I definitely agree that a lot of that diss track at the end is Kotoko also projecting her insecurities onto the other prisoners, not only calling them out rather shallowly, but also just the fact that her voice breaks right at the end??? The way in which she ends with Es, who is supposed to be her foil and the one she calls an “unloved warden” it’s like damn Kotoko you couldn’t be more apparent with the way you were probably treated back then huh 😭

I wanted to try and analyze the diss track more tbh LMAO but I don’t think we have enough information to really draw some good comparisons between Kotoko and the other prisoners for that. I can totally see some similarities for a few of them, but for others it’s a bit more unclear (Yuno is one of them like you mentioned). But these are the ones that come to my mind for Kotoko’s similarities with everyone else:

Haruka - hatred of childhood self because they were too weak (I just realized this but the fact that Haruka’s t1 song is called Weakness omg)

Yuno - ??? (I have no idea for this one tbh 😭 my best guess would be that they’re both hiding behind a mask, so their true selves are obscured a lot of the times)

Futa - ideals and handing out their own form of justice

Mu - putting yourself above everyone else in order to protect yourself, thinking that you were in the right and that you have done nothing wrong

Shidou - ??? (This one I’m speculating that family might be their similarity considering Kotoko’s symbolism with wolves and them being pack animals but I’m not completely sure. Another one could possibly be failing to save someone close to you if Kotoko did have someone close to her back then who she lost)

Mahiru - love and forgiveness

Kazui - lies and deceit, massive self-hatred (sorry Kazui 💀)

Amane - how the cycle of cruelty affects you and how Kotoko is a mirror of what Amane could be when she's older

Mikoto - protection through action(?) is the best way I can describe it, like with how they both use their own physical strength to protect either themselves or others

Es - foil in the narrative and holding up one’s duty

It’s very obvious though I feel like in Yonah, just with the way Kotoko switches up so easily with Es, it really makes you wonder if she never had that kind of emotional stability with an adult. Always changing, never predictable with what they’re gonna do or how they’re gonna react, so you have to watch them closely, just like how Kotoko does for everyone else in the prison.

When Kotoko thinks Es is being weak, she calls them out. When they are in clear distress, she wants to hug them, comfort them no matter what and reassure them that she will continue to act as their fang and do the “dirty work”. It’s like you said, she probably hated her childhood self for being weak, but she still wanted the comfort, she still wanted the protection she never got. So she gives it to Es because she probably sees a lot of her childhood self in them.

I didn't notice that similarity before with Mahiru not wanting to admit that she's not okay, so she crumbles underneath the pressure of trying to be continuously happy, just like how Kotoko is crumbling underneath the weight of justice. Interesting!!!

Also her having a difficult time trying to relax so she spends her free time mediating is an interesting detail from this interrogation:

And in Harrow, her movements are quick like a flinch but she seems like she's on edge a lot of the times too:

Constantly looking over her shoulder as if someone is there watching her:

Idk it's just all very interesting! I know people are looking forward to Undercover callbacks in the Deep Cover mv but tbh I just want Kotoko lore man 😭 I NEED MORE LORE

Kotoko lives to protect the weak. In her mind she serves the weak but the weak also serve her. They are her reason to live. Saving them makes her feel good about herself. She exists to save the weak and the weak exist to giving her a propose.

mahiru lives to love her boyfriend/be a good wife. She exists for him and their relationship by extension him exists to give her a reason to exist.

idk if this makes sense

but its like the idea of how they have formed their identities off of loving/saving other people but end up hurting those people because What they wanted was a propose and to fulfil their desire to the point they hurt and disregarded the party they were trying to protect/love. Kotoko wanted to punish the “evil” and mahiru wanted to be this ideal wife

Its not about what the boy friend needs in the relationship (not cake) it’s about mahiru loving him.

its not about what the weaklings want its about kotoko protecting them.

[autisticandroids]

Okay so this was a while back but im preety sure you had mentioned an au of yours where dean is a serial killer and cas successfully stalks him but i don't think you talked about it more than that and i just really want to hear a bit more bc that idea sounds so tastefully fucked up

okay so. weeks later i finally end up answering this ask. it inspired this post btw. anyway spn is a show that's like. all about justifications, as i said in the post inspired by this ask. it's about having no choice and doing what you have to do. and like there is the phantasy embedded in it, a phantasy that is both indulged and punished. but most importantly it's justified. the monsters are super strong to show how brave our heroes are for fighting them, the main characters let out great wails of grief every time their lady loves are violently ripped from them (even though now they are free to do whatever they want), the narrative twists to show our heroes as correct whatever they do. the fantasy (of being allowed to enact violence, of being free from feminine "control," of being right) comes first. the material construction of the universe of supernatural comes afterward. whatever the fantasy is, the universe of supernatural will provide material conditions to justify its acting-out.

and what this means is that our protagonists, dean in particular, are constantly doing just horrific things, which in any other circumstance would be unconscionable. but the universe of supernatural provides justification for these acts. the point of my serial killer au which i think about so so so much is to ask the question: what if these justifications melted out from under their feet? what if dean was left holding nothing but a lie and the weight of everything he's done?

therefore, the premise of my au is such (under the cut because this baby is long):

john and mary winchester, in the mid seventies, joined a doomsday cult known as the men of letters. the men of letters were rather unusual for a doomsday cult, in that they believed that the apocalypse could be prevented by human behavior. this started as correct living, correct worship, yadda yadda, the kind of behavior and thought control that cults are known for, but with the justification of: if you don't do this, the world will end. eventually, this escalated to human sacrifice. the men of letters managed to untraceably kill two homeless people in the late seventies. but they eventually fell apart. however, a month after john and mary left the men of letters (mostly john's choice, mary still believed), mary died in a house fire. john took it as a sign from god that actually, the men of letters were right, and the world would end unless john himself did something about it. so he took some of the (intensely numerological) theology of the men of letters. and he worked out his own formula. and he applied it to the yellow pages. and started ritualistically killed people to prevent the apocalypse, with his two sons in the back of the car.

now, obviously, this is some kind of grief induced temporary madness on john's part, shaped by the mental abuse he suffered in the men of letters. but the thing is, once you've killed a couple of people to prevent the apocalypse. well. there's this thing called the sunk costs fallacy. john wasn't gonna question his own beliefs after that.

and he raised his boys to believe it, too, or at least he raised dean to. they didn't tell sam what they did until he was twelve, and sam didn't buy it, tried to call the cops on them several times but in the end, they always prevented him. eventually sam ran off to stanford, where he now lives under a cloud of guilt that he's too loyal to his family to rat them out.

john died a few years back of a heart attack, but dean is convinced it's because he messed up a ritual two weeks before it happened, so it pushed him further into this belief system.

dean's killings (and john's before him) are ritualistic and distinctive, obviously the same killer each time. but they happen anywhere in the united states, seemingly at random, there are inconsistent amounts of time between each one (sometimes as short as days, sometimes as long as years), and there is no particular victim profile. obviously, since our killers are following an arcane mathematical formula to make their choices for them, but the police don't know that.

castiel novak is an unemployed shut-in with a small inheritance which he's living off of, a cryptography degree, and an obsession with all things morbid. he spends most of his time on the reddit true crime forums, playing amateur sleuth. by complete chance, he happens to recognize one of the symbols frequently used in corpse displays by the so-called sioux falls satanic slaughterer (so named because the first time three of his victims were in the same part of the country, it so happened that they were all in sioux falls, south dakota. this was in the late eighties.) as being mostly only used by a little known cult group called the men of letters, which dissolved in the mid eighties.

he only notices this because, as a teen, he had a special interest in cults and fringe religious groups. the men of letters weren't a particularly notable or well known phenomenon; they were small, and a lot like every other cult that formed during the seventies cult boom. (no outsider ever heard about the human sacrifice; there were rumors, of course, but they were garbled, sensationalized, and mixed up with satanic panic fodder.)

(the men of letters' two sacrifices were nothing particularly romantic or fantastical. they first lured panhandler josie sands back to their compound with promises of food and a warm bed when she admitted she couldn't get a bed at a shelter, and was thinking of getting caught shoplifting just so she could be under a roof in the county jail. the men of letters' leader, a man who took on the name alistair, forced his inner circle to dress in the ceremonial black robes he had given them when he initiated them into his nearest and dearest, and which his wife had sewn out of old bed sheets and dyed black with home made oak gall dye. these robes still left black smudges on the wearer's skin occasionally if they sweated too much. josie was laid, bound, on the altar, a slapdash thing constructed over the course of two days from scrap plywood and a couple of milk crates. a rich red tablecloth purchased at macy's for $3.99 hid its ugliness and gave it grandeur. alistair attempted to kill the struggling miss sands by bringing a sharpened kitchen knife down on her bosom and piercing her heart, but, having never killed a human or even slaughtered an animal before, was unaware of the problem presented by the human ribcage. after rather ineffectually poking at the area beneath sands' bosom with his knife while she shrieked in pain and terror for about ninety seconds, alistair tried a different tack, and slit her throat, which worked just fine, and she bled out quite nicely. the second and final victim of the men of letters was a local vagrant named larry ganem, an older gentleman who walked with a limp. he was lured back to the compound in approximately the same manner as sands, but instead of being bound, he was fed stew laced with sleeping pills. even if alistair hadn't slit his throat, he wouldn't have woken up. it's actually arguable whether he was still alive at time of sacrifice; mary winchester (eight months into her first pregnancy), who, as a member of the inner circle, was in attendance, actually tried to take ganem's pulse as he lay on the altar (now covered by a different tablecloth; the red one had turned stiff with sands' blood and been subsequently burned) and found nothing, so it is entirely possibly only sands' death can be directly laid at alistair's feet, and ganem's is the fault of mrs. ellen harvelle, who prepared the laced stew. regardless, these two deaths are lessons in the nature of human evil: it is very rarely skilled, suave, or smooth. it's often slapdash, half-hearted, and just plain incompetent. but that makes it no less grisly. alistair may have begun to drink his own kool-aid, as it were, and escalated this far out of genuine belief that the apocalypse was coming and it was up to him to stop it, but it is far more likely that he sensed the imminent collapse of his little empire, and wanted to bind his subjects to him through the horrors of shared guilt, considering two lives a small price to pay for the continued loyalty of his inner circle. and the tactic worked: the men of letters didn't start to collapse in earnest until almost four years later. perhaps if alistair had continued the killings, the men of letters could have lasted for far longer, maybe even up until the present day. but it seems that alistair, a psychiatrist by training and unused to violence, simply didn't have the stomach for it. unlike, say, john winchester, who before his time with the men of letters had done a two year tour in vietnam, during which he had killed three living, thinking human beings with the american government's go-ahead.)

anyway. castiel is the first person, ever, to make the connection between the men of letters and the sioux falls satanic slaughterer. and once that connection is made, castiel begins to research the men of letters far more in-depth. and he notices something: the theology of the men of letters was intensely numerological, filled with patterns, significant numbers, and even spiritual equations.

castiel thinks of the seemingly random selection of the slaughterer's victims, and has an epiphany.

he cracks all his fingers, and gets coding.

six months. it takes castiel six months to discover an equation that could fit the slaughterer's pattern. it's complex, but also clearly based on several of the men of letters' holy numbers, and accounts for every single one of the killings. it also suggests that there should have been two or three more deaths scattered across the years, but more than likely those did happen, it's just that they weren't reported as part of the slaughterer's portfolio.

but much more importantly, castiel's model can also make predictions. there will be two killings, fifteen days apart, in a city seven hours' drive away, six weeks from now.

so castiel waits. and he books a hotel room. and two months later, he's waiting outside 217 oak street when a shadowy figure climbs up a tree and lets itself into the upstairs window.

dean winchester is feeling particularly all alone in the world when he breaks into maisey banks' home (217 oak street). his father has been dead for half a decade, and he hasn't spoken to his baby brother for twice that. it's not like this whole grizzly saving the world business makes him a lot of friends. so once he's done killing maisey (which is easy, she was ninety three and dying of cancer anyway. she doesn't even wake up when he slits her throat) and arranging her corpse in the appropriate manner, with prayers and sigils, he turns around. and sees a man standing behind him.

smiling slightly.

as he watches dean gut this old woman.

dean freezes.

the man takes a step forward.

"you're very attractive for a serial killer who's been operating since the eighties."

dean is silent.

"family business, is it?"

silence continues.

"i'm not here to report you to police. i'm just here to see if my algorithm worked right."

and dean finally breaks his silence: "what the hell is wrong with you?"

what's fun here is that dean knows (or rather "knows") that he isn't a serial killer. so he finds what cas is doing, this amoral serial killer stormchasing, morally repugnant. because cas has no way of knowing he isn't a regular serial killer.

there's also the fact that that cas proceeds to flirt with him. aggressively. and follows him back to his motel.

but the thing is that dean is all alone in the world. and as cas continues trailing him around, he starts getting, well, flattered. and feeling a little bit less alone.

it doesn't take very long before they fall into bed. even if cas is an amoral stalker with a fetish for what dean considers a distasteful yet necessary vocation.

so. they fall into bed. they fall in love. they make a little life together, in dean's big sexy car. dean tries to explain to cas that he's saving the world. that these people's lives are a necessary price to pay. and cas seems to listen.

of course, castiel doesn't believe a word of it. but he's found that he likes dean. really likes him. and he realizes that the collapse of dean's belief system would destroy him.

so he sets about becoming as complicit in it as possible.

even to the extent where, when dean is hit by a car and ends up into the hospital a day before one killing is meant to take place, castiel agrees to take on the job. (he doesn't actually kill anyone, obviously. but he does use his extensive skill with computers to create three fake newspaper articles which make it look like he has.)

but five years later, something goes wrong. really, really wrong. dean miscalculates the formula. and by the time he checks his work, the actual date of the next kill, as demanded by the formula, has passed. in fact, so have three others. and the world didn't end.

dean collapses. he hyperventilates. all those people. all those people. for no reason. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people. all those people.

cas seems totally unfazed. dean stares at him in shock. but cas just takes dean in his arms, and whispers in his ear: "oh, dean, i never believed in the equation. i love you no matter what you've done."

and dean buries his face in cas' chest.

[liquidstar]

I feel as if many people, myself included, have been having problems with the way “critical thinking” is conducted in fandom circles more and more. Which I’d say is a good thing, because it means we’re thinking critically. But still the issues with the faux-critical mentality and with the way we consume media through that fandom group mentality are incredibly widespread at this point, despite being very flawed, and there are still plenty of people who follow it blindly, ironically.

I sort of felt like I had to examine my personal feelings on it and I ended up writing a whole novel, which I’ll put under the cut, and I do welcome other people’s voices in the matter, because while I’m being as nuanced as I can here I obviously am still writing from personal experience and may overlook some things from my limited perspective. But by and large I think I’ve dissected the phenomena as best I can from what I’ve been seeing going on in fandom circles from a safe but observable distance.

Right off the bat I want to say, I think it's incredibly good and necessary to be critical of media and understand when you should stop consuming it, but that line can be a bit circumstantial sometimes for different people. There are a lot of anime that I used to watch as a teenager that I can’t enjoy anymore, because I got more and more uncomfortable overtime with the sexualization of young characters, partly because as I was getting older I was really starting to realize how big of an issue it was, and I certainly think more critically now than I did when I was 14. Of course I don’t assume everyone who still watches certain series is a pedophile, and I do think there are plenty of fans that understand this. However I still stay away from those circles and that’s a personal choice.

I don’t think a person is morally superior based on where they draw the line and their own boundaries with this type of stuff, what’s more important is your understanding of the problem and response to it. There are series I watch that have a lot of the same issues around sexualization of the young characters in the cast, but they’re relatively toned down and I can still enjoy the aspects of the series I actually like without it feeling as uncomfortable and extreme. Others will not be able to, and their issues with it are legitimate and ones that I still ultimately agree with, but they’re still free to dislike the series for it, after all our stance on the issue itself is the same so why would I resent them for it?

Different people are bound to have different lines they draw for how far certain things can go in media before they’re uncomfortable watching it and it doesn’t make it a moral failing of the person who can put up with more if they’re still capable of understanding why it’s bad to begin with and able to not let it effect them. But I don’t think that sentiment necessarily contradicts the idea that some things really are too far gone for this to apply, the above examples aren’t the same thing as a series centered solely around lolicon ecchi and it doesn’t take a lot of deep analysis to understand why. It’s not about a personal line anymore when it comes to things that are outright propaganda or predatory with harmful ideals woven into the message of the story itself. Critical thinking means knowing the difference between these, and no one can hold your hand through it. And simply slapping “I’m critical of my interests” on your bio isn’t a get out of jail free card, it’s always evident when someone isn’t truly thinking about the impact of the media they consume through the way they consume it.

I think the issue is that when people apply “Critical thinking” they don’t actually analyze the story and its intent, messages, themes, morals, and all that. Instead they approach it completely diegetically, it’s basically the thermian argument, the issue stems from thinking about the story and characters as if they’re real people and judging their actions through that perspective, rather than something from a writer trying to deliver a narrative by using the story and characters as tools. Like how people get upset about characters behaving “problematically” without realizing that it’s an intentional aspect of the story, that the character needs to cause problems for there to be conflict. What they should be looking at instead is what their behavior represents in the real world.

You do not need to apply real-world morals to fictional characters, you need to apply them to the narrative. The story exists in the real world, the characters and events within it do not. Fictional murderers themselves do not hurt anyone, no one is actually dying at their hands, but their actions hold weight in the narrative which itself can harm real people. If the character only murders gay people then it reflects on whatever the themes and messages of the story are, and it’s a major issue if it's framed as if they’re morally justified, or as if this is a noble action. And it’s a huge red flag if people stan this character, even if the story itself actually presents their actions as reprehensible. Or cases where the murderers themselves are some kind of awful stereotype, like Buffalo Bill who presents a violent and dangerous stereotype of trans women, making the character a transmisogynistic caricature (Intentional or otherwise) that has caused a lot of harm to the perception of trans women. When people say “Fiction affects reality” this is what they mean. They do not mean “People will see a pretend bad guy and become bad” they mean “Ideals represented in fiction will be pulled from the real world and reflected back onto it.”

However, stories shouldn’t have to spoon-feed you the lesson as if you’re watching a children’s cartoon, stories often have nuances and you have to actively analyze the themes of it all to understand it’s core messages. Oftentimes it can be intentionally murky and hard to parse especially if the subject matter itself is complicated. But you can’t simply read things on the surface and think you understand everything about them, without understanding the symbolism or subtext you can leave a series like Revolutionary Girl Utena thinking the titular Utena is heterosexual and was only ever in love with her prince. Things won’t always be face-value or clear-cut and you will be forced to come to your own conclusions sometimes too.

That’s why the whole fandom-based groupthink mentality about “critical thinking” doesn’t work, because it’s not critical. It’s simply looking into the crowd, seeing people say a show is problematic, and then dropping it without truly understanding why. It’s performative, consuming the best media isn’t activism and it doesn’t make you a better person. Listening to the voices of people whom the issues directly concerns will help you form an opinion, and to understand the issues from a more knowledgeable perspective beyond your own. All that means nothing if you just sweep it under the rug because you want to look infallible in your morality. That’s not being critical, it’s just being scared to analyze yourself, as well as what you engage with. You just don’t want to think about those things and you’re afraid of being less than perfect so you pretend it never happened.

And though I’m making this post, it’s not mine or anyone else’s job to hold your hand through all this and tell you “Oh this show is okay, but this show isn't, and this book is bad etc etc etc”. Because you actually have to think for yourself, you know, critically. Examples I’ve listed aren’t rules of thumb, they’re just examples and things will vary depending on the story and circumstance. You have to look at shit on a case-by-case basis instead of relying on spotting tropes without thinking about how they’re implemented and what they mean. That’s why it’s analysis, you have to use it to understand what the narrative is communicating to its audience, explicitly or implicitly, intentionally or incidentally, and understand how this reflects the real world and what kind of impact it can have on it. 

A big problem with fandom is it has made interests synonymous with personality traits, as if every series we consume is a core part of our being, and everything we see in it reflects our viewpoints as well. So when people are told that a show they watched is problematic, they react very extremely, because they see it as basically the same thing as saying they themselves are problematic (It’s not). Everyone sees themselves as good people, they don’t want to be bad people, so this scares them and they either start hiding any evidence that they ever liked it, or they double down and start defending it despite all its flaws, often providing those aforementioned thermian arguments (“She dresses that way because of her powers!”).

That’s how you get people who call children’s cartoons “irredeemable media” and people who plaster “fiction=/= reality!” all over their blogs, both are basically trying to save face either by denying that they could ever consume anything problematic or denying that the problematic aspects exist all together. And absolutely no one is actually addressing the core issues anymore, save for those affected by them who pointed them out to begin with, only for their original point to become muffled in the discourse. No one is thinking critically because they’re more concerned with us-vs-them group mentality, both sides try to out-perform the other while the actual issue gets ignored or is used as nothing more than a gacha with no true understanding or sympathy behind it.

One of the other issues that comes from this is the fact that pretty much everyone thinks they’re the only person capable of being critical of their interests. That’s how you get those interactions where one person goes “OK [Media] fan” and another person replies “Bro you literally like [Other Media]”, because both parties think they’re the only ones capable of consuming a problematic piece of media and not becoming problematic themselves, anyone else who enjoys it is clearly incapable of being as big brained as them. It’s understandable because we know ourselves and trust ourselves more than strangers, and I’m not saying there can’t be certain fandoms who’s fans you don’t wanna interact with, but when we presume that we know better than everyone else we stop listening to other people all together. It’s good to trust your own judgement, it’s bad to assume no one else has the capacity to think for themselves either though.

The insistence that all media that you personally like is without moral failing and completely pure comes with the belief that all media that you personally dislike has to be morally bad in some way. As if you can’t just dislike a series because you find it annoying or it just doesn’t appeal to you, it has to be problematic, and you have to justify your dislike of it through that perspective. You have to believe that your view on whatever media it is is the objectively correct one, so you’ll likely pick apart all it’s flaws to prove you’re on the right side, but there’s no analysis of context or intent. Keep in mind this doesn’t necessarily mean those critiques are unfounded or invalid, but in cases like this they’re often skewed in one direction based on personal opinion. It’s just as flawed as ignoring all the faults in the stuff you like, it’s biased and subjective analysis that misses a lot of context in both cases, it’s not a good mindset to have about consuming media. It’s just another result of tying media consumption with identity and personal morals. The faux-critical mentality is an attempt to separate the two in a way that implies they’re a packaged deal to begin with, making it sort of impossible to truly do so in any meaningful way.

As far as I know this whole phenomena started with “Steven Universe Critical” in, like, 2016, and that’s where this mentality around “critical thinking” originated. It started out with just a few people correctly pointing out very legitimate issues with the series, but over time it grew into just a trend where people would make cutesy kin blogs with urls like critical-[character] or [character]crit to go with the fad as it divulged into Nostalgia Critic level critique. Of course there was backlash to this and criticism of the criticism, but no actual conversation to be had. Just people trying to out-do each other by acting as the most virtuous one in the room, and soon enough the fad became a huge echo-chamber that encouraged more and more outrageous takes for every little thing. The series itself was a children’s cartoon so it stands to reason that a lot of the fans were young teens, so this behavior isn’t too surprising and I do believe a lot of them did think they were doing the right thing, especially since it was encouraged. But that doesn’t erase the fact that there were actual real issues and concerns brought up about the series that got treated with very little sympathy and were instead drowning out people’s voices. Though those from a few years back may have grown up since and know better (Hopefully), the mentality stuck around and influenced the norm for how fandoms and fandom people conduct any sort of critique on media. 

That’s a shame to me, because the pedestal people place fandom onto has completely disrupted our perception on how to engage with media in a normal way. Not everything should be consumed with fandom in mind, not everything is a coffee-shop au with no conflict, not everything is a children’s cartoon with the morals spoon-fed to you. Fandom has grown past the years of uncritical praise of a series, it’s much more mainstream now with a lot more voices in it beyond your small community on some forum, and people are allowed to use those voices. Just because it may not be as pleasant for you now because you don’t get to just turn your brain off and ignore all the flaws doesn’t mean you can put on your rose-tinted nostalgia goggles and pretend that fandom is actually all that is good in the world, to the point where you place it above the comfort and safety of others (Oftentimes children). Being uncritical of fandom itself is just as bad as being uncritical of what you consume to begin with. 

At the end of the day it all just boils down to the ability to truly think for yourself but with sympathy and compassion for other people in mind, while also understanding that not everyone will come to the same conclusion as you and people are allowed to resent your interests. That doesn’t necessarily mean they hate you personally, you should be acknowledging the same issues after all. You can’t ignore aspects of it that aren’t convenient to your conclusion, you have to actually be critical and understand the issues to be able to form it. 

I think that all we need is to not rely on fandom to tell us what to do, but still listen to the voices of others, take them into account to form our opinion too, boost their voices instead of drowning them out in the minutiae of internet discourse about which character is too much of an asshole to like. Think about what the characters and story represent non-diegetically instead of treating them like real people and events, rather a story with an intent and message to share through its story and characters, and whatever those reflect from the real world. That’s how fiction affects reality, because it exists in reality and reflects reality through its own lens. The story itself is real, with a real impact on you and many others, so think about the impact and why it all matters. Just… Think. Listen to others but think for yourself, that’s all.

[lucemferto]

Hey girl, don’t mind me, I just quickly went and rewrote Dream SMP Season 2.

I’m focusing on the big plot stuff from Season 2, which makes it really easy for me to make it good, because I don’t have to contend with all the hard parts like dialogue and scene pacing and stuff. As an additional challenge to myself, I try to change as little as possible. If I don’t mention stuff (like the Egg-Arc) then that means I’m fine with them the way they are.

I wrote this in an hour, so don't expect it to be good, pls.

Whether you agree or think this is trash, I'd be so interested to hear your thoughts!

ACT I

Fundy’s early arc with Ghostbur, Eret and Phil is great and should stay the way it is. It sets up the character relationships and potential for conflict that we can explore in the future.

Similarly, I wouldn’t change too much about the conflict during Exile with one exception: Both Tommy and Quackity don’t want to include Technoblade. Instead, they believe that they can take one Dream by themselves – this is important for Techno’s, Tommy’s and Quackity’s personal journey later on. In this rewrite, Quackity also didn’t found El Rapids, but instead recruited George & Sapnap to L’Manburg – because his stated goal is to make L’Manburg the strongest nation on the server, so why would he make a rival nation with a plotline that goes nowhere?

What’s also important is that it’s revealed that Dream has a spy in L’Manburg around here. Maybe Tommy confessed his burning of George’s house during a cabinet meeting and word still got out to Dream. Who knows, but it’s important for later.

Something big that I would change about this Act I is that I would give Techno an actual B-plot. As it stands, Techno’s early plotline was just “Grrr, I’m angry that Tommy would use me like that! Someone killed my cows and robbed me! L’Manburg will know my wrath”

3 weeks later

“Nevermind, I’m a pacifist now and live in the arctic”

Instead, we pick up where S1 left off. Techno is intent on destroying L’Manburg and instituting anarchy. During that time, he comes into conflict with Quackity’s henchmen (Fundy, George, Sapnap, etc.) to establish that L’Manburg could be an actual threat to him.

We also have some conflict with Phil. They’re old war buddies, but Phil’s son built L’Manburg and Phil himself is unofficially Tubbo’s advisor. I think them reconstituting their friendship will take up this early part until Tommy’s exile – it makes for a nice foil to Tommy’s and Tubbo’s friendship falling apart.

Technoblade also tries to recruit people like HBomb and Niki to his cause, but they’re hesitant, because, you know, he sent Withers to destroy their home. Not the best first impression. Techno is hurt, but convinced it’s because of L’Manburg propaganda and they don’t want to work with him, because they don’t see him as useful.

ACT II Part 1

Exile-Arc basically stays exactly the same – with one notable difference. When Technoblade comes to visit Tommy it’s not to mock him – it’s as a final attempt to convince Tommy to join him. It’s a first culmination of Techno’s character journey so far: His previous interactions with the citizenry of L’Manburg has left him shaken, but not shaken enough.

Tommy truly does need “The Blade” right now and he has no reason to further believe L’Manburg’s propaganda. So, by Technoblade’s inner logic, Tommy should accept.

But he doesn’t. Tommy viciously rips into Technoblade and gets very personal (he’s in a bad space, understandably) – Techno can play it off nonchalantly, but either the cinematography or some later moment shows us that he was hurt by this.

Nevertheless, he gives Tommy a compass that points to his HQ, showing us that he cares about Tommy, like he did during their early days in Pogtopia.

This is where we implement some big changes. The story of Technoblade and the Butcher Army becomes the A-plot, while the Exile becomes the B-plot.

It makes perfect sense. The Exile-Arc is a very inward-focused, almost a character study of Tommy and Dream. It doesn’t have a lot of big narrative movement – so the perfect time to execute on that narrative movement in the storyline that has a lot of moving pieces.

So, after Tommy chewed him out, Techno is hurt and meets with Philza. Techno then explains that for him anarchy always was the natural order of things – to fight for a world where only the strongest survive – but pursuing anarchy like that has left him empty. Philza then explains that anarchy should be more about helping people and building an equal community.

We’re all but stating a major thematic conflict of this storyline: Fighting those who wronged you vs. Helping those in need. All this while also exploring the philosophy of anarchy with Techno and Philza serving as symbolic stand-ins for some different thoughts on the matter.

So, while Tommy’s Exile is going on, Techno refines his approach. This goes hand in hand with Quackity using his henchman to turn L’Manburg into a totalitarian police state in order to root out Dream’s traitor (told you it would become important later).

This will be the main conflict here in the first half of Act 2. Quackity and Philza will play shoulder-devil and shoulder-angel respectively for Tubbo and Fundy, pulling them in different directions. Ghostbur also hangs around L’Manburg – a constant reminder for Tubbo of the most sanitized version of President Wilbur and the lofty ideas he stood for.

This is another big thematic conflict for this storyline – externalized in part through Ghostbur’s presence: When do the ends no longer justify the means? It also feeds into the motif of Tubbo and Tommy becoming like Schlatt and Wilbur respectively (even if that’s still mostly superficial).

During this political turmoil, Niki is getting into Quackity’s crosshairs. She opposes his policing and brutal methods. So Quackity really focuses in on her and she has to live with constant surveillance, searches, etc. Niki tries to talk to Tubbo about this, but he says it’s necessary to keep L’Manburg safe. Slowly, Niki grows disillusioned with L’Manburg.

It is during this time that Niki gets into contact with Techno and the two start to form a bond and helping the citizenry hold out hope during this time (I don’t know who would be the citizenry, probably people that don’t have their own storyline going on such as HBomb, Vikkstar, Lazarbeam, etc.)

And we can have a few lorestreams like that, where the conceit is that Techno’s sneaking into L’Manburg to help people and there’s actual tension.

All this culminates in Hog Hunt. Fundy sees Phil, Niki and Techno team-up. He confronts them after Techno left and Phil begs Fundy to not out them – but their divide has grown too deep (and we’ve actually shown that during Fundy’s streams this time).

Quackity has Phil and Niki incarcerated (L’Manburg has a prison now, it’s not as good as Pandora’s Vualt). Tubbo is deeply disturbed that Philza and Niki would betray him by working with the man that took one of his canon lives and finally gives the Butcher Army his presidential approval. Quackity was already prepared and the events of Hog Hunt play out as we know them.

ACT II Part 2

Again, plays out relatively similarly, except for one major difference: Tommy comes to Techno with the explicit purpose of asking for his help. Exile has left him really hardened, probably more so than we have currently.

This would a.) make Tommy a bit more proactive in his partnership with Techno and b.) actually gives some weight to Techno’s later beef with Tommy, because now it’s based on more than just some flimsy phrasing during S1.

Otherwise, this plays out relatively similarly – Techno and Tommy maybe share a few more character moments, just to drive home that Techno cares about Tommy. Also, none of that dumb keeping it a secret whether or not we destroy L’Manburg – that’s some contrived nonsense and I hate it.

Tommy knows that Techno wants to destroy L’Manburg and while he’s conflicted, he ultimately goes along with. Once he gets his discs back, everything will be over after all. The destruction of L’Manburg will have been worth it.

Part of the rising action will be breaking Phil and Niki out of prison instead of the petty bullshit about Techno’s items that he doesn’t need. This is where we have the initial confrontation between Tommy and Tubbo (and Techno doesn’t ruin the moment by being his worst self).

Other plot points include: Techno receives the Wither Skulls over the course of him and Tommy working together by some mysterious benefactor. This is after he and Tommy confronted Dream. He doesn’t tell Tommy who the benefactor is, even though he knows (spoilers: it’s Dream).

Meanwhile, Tommy, Techno, Niki and Phil are secretly rigging New L’Manburg with TNT a la Wilbur, just to really drive that comparison home. Niki is getting really angry; she has suffered enough and she’s really gonna get revenge.

One of her big moments of terrorism before the Green Festival is burning down the L’Mantree (maybe we can include some character conflict Fundy, so we have these two people who were once really close friends now so warped and torn apart by these two sides at war).

Meanwhile, Quackity has figured out that Ranboo was the traitor and is pushing for Tubbo to execute Ranboo for the greater good of L’Manburg. Tubbo is hesitant, but as there’s no moderate voice in the cabinet anymore, he concedes to the idea.

Finally, the Green Festival is here. This part is really … tough to rewrite, because you have to accommodate so many different character arcs, but I’ll try my best.

In a move not unlike during the Red Festival, Ranboo is revealed as the traitor and put in the execution cage (because those parallels). Tubbo feels really bad about it.

This is when Tommy and Techno start their assault and unleash the whithers. L’Manburg is under attack and we have the big fight between Tubbo and Tommy. We get the big shout-out “The discs were worth more than you ever were” and the ensuing epiphany on Tommy part.

Techno’s calling for him to explode the TNT, but he doesn’t do it.

Quackity is calling for Tubbo to execute Ranboo, but Tubbo has an epiphany himself and refuses. Both their personal conflicts are resolved here. Also, we have some nice parallelism between Quackity and Techno as Tubbo’s and Tommy’s respective bad influences.

Techno – understandably this time – feels betrayed and hurt. He and Tommy have their shouting match. Quackity tries to attack Techno, but during their match they accidentally trigger the TNT. Quackity’s hunger for power has created the grave of his ambitions.

(Niki is also pissed at Tommy and Fundy is fully distraught, because L’Manburg was everything he had left from Wilbur).

Dream steps out of the shadows and reveals that he was Techno’s mysterious benefactor. He gets his hands on the second disc and gloats to Tommy. The scene from Doomsday plays out only that Techno shows some stings of remorse for helping Dream accomplish what he wanted. (Quackity flees the ensuing chaos).

Dream tries to goad Tommy with the discs, but Tommy doesn’t bite, because he has resolved his Want vs. Need now. Dream is frustrated, but retreats for now.

ACT III

In the aftermath of ACT II, I think it’s very important to hammer home that this wasn’t a win for Techno, Niki or Phil. For that to work I think it’s important to make clear that Tommy’s and Techno’s bond was genuine and that they really cared for each other during the Bedrock Bros thing. Neither of them is happy for how this turned.

Niki is plagued by nightmares and sleeps in a prison cell like in the current canon. She stands in symbolic for the emptiness that vengeance brings. Phil is shaken from his talk to Ghostbur and he’s the one who brings up that maybe what they did wasn’t for the best.

Then Techno and Phil have a discussion about the nature of anarchy again, calling back to that earlier conversation at the beginning of Act 2. Techno also feels empty – his vengeance and the destruction he wrought left him no happier.

Meanwhile, Punz and Tommy are actually spending some quality bonding time. Thanks to the medium, they could simulate that pretty well. Punz actually gets attached and when Dream mentions his coup-de-grâce, the cinematography shows that Punz isn’t too happy about it.

Tommy and Tubbo prepare to fight Dream on their own terms. They know, they have to stop him lest he hurts the people they care about (this makes both of them a bit more proactive in the finale). Punz (as per Dream’s orders) tells Tommy where Dream is hiding. Tommy thanks him, oblivious that Punz is a traitor, but Punz feels bad. He has grown attached to Tommy.

During the Final Disc War we actually get two perspectives: One is Tommy’s and Tubbo’s as we know it (only without the constant “Your discs or Tubbo”-stuff) and the other is Punz’s. He has decided to help Tommy even though there’s nothing monetarily in it for him.

First, he goes to Quackity, but Quackity says that Tommy has betrayed him and L’Manburg and that he gets what’s coming to him.

In a last-ditch effort, he goes to Techno. Here’s where we resolve that thematic conflict (Vengeance vs. Charity) for the Techno-Butcher Army storyline: Quackity has chosen to perpetuate the cycle of vengeance (because he will be the villain in S3), but we want some nice character development for Techno.

Niki is against it and stays put, but Techno and Philza ultimately decide to go with Punz and the others to help Tommy.

Finale plays out the same. Stuff’s still awkward between Techno and Tommy/Tubbo; they haven’t resolved all their problems, but it’s a first step. Some good set-up for S3.

And that’s my basic rewrite. It’s long and probably not the best.

[iamkidfish]

Why Shelby’s teeth works so well as a metaphor for her sexuality

I know this has been talked about a lot but I got sent an ask that made me have a Shelby breakdown so I just thought I’d add my two cents :’)

It’s pretty clear Shelby’s sexuality is linked with her teeth. She says that her flipper is something that holds back all this “ugliness”-referencing the expectations of her life, her internalized homophobia from her father, and the guilt she feels over Becca’s death. That’s a lot of emotional weight packed into a tiny little piece of plastic, but it makes sense.

1. Expectations/Performance: Very quickly into Shelby’s episode, we see how ‘fake’ she really is. (By fake, I mean conforming to the expectations her family and life has provided to her as a means of self-preservation and survival) The pageants, the boyfriend, her teeth are all ‘given’ to her as things she is expected to perform under or with but Shelby’s compliance is a double edged sword: it allows her a safety net (to play a ‘role’ in her family/community but still have these feelings for her best friend) but it’s also the rope that’s constricting her

Does Shelby even like pageants? We know she’s good at them but why did she start competing in the first place? Was it Dave, who saw some early signs of Shelby liking girls and forced her to participate in one of the most gendered things in existence? Or does Shelby put herself into that environment willingly, knowing how she feels about Becca (or girls in general) as a way to shove down her feelings?

We know Shelby is perceptive of these expectations because she lays them all out in her argument with Toni in episode: “I’m not just talking about pageant stuff”. The first time Shelby kisses Becca she’s in a pageant dress (another thing symbolizing her expectations); the first time she kisses Toni, they’re literally talking about expectations in Shelby’s life-”You’re free here Shelby, On an island a million miles away from whatever bullshit expectations and if you’re not taking advantage of that, I don’t know what the fuck to tell you”. Also important: both of these scenes/kisses have a fallout; the first being the marker on Shelby’s dress (and her father noticing the mark and the kiss) and then Shelby literally running away from Toni in the second scene (and running back to expectations/role she’s known her whole life).

It’s also important to note: Shelby’s line to Martha in the pilot “I do family, I do jesus, I do pageants.” those are the three things that are actually harming her/forcing her into these boxes. 

2. Dave Goodkind and internalized homophobia: Oh Dave...nothing like giving your kid years of trauma

Jokes aside, this is the most obvious connection between Shelby’s flipper and her sexuality. It’s mentioned in the show that Shelby first gets her fake teeth when she’s 11 and that’s a long time for her to link all of her insecurities and doubts and negative self-image to her retainer. I’m not completely sure but I think it can be easily interpreted that’s when Shelby realized she liked girls (or at least Becca)

Remember, Dave tells Shelby “God only does beautiful” after her parents initially say no to getting the permanent implants and I’m willing to bet that’s something he started to tell her when she first realized she needed the implants at 11.

It’s only until after Dave catches her kissing Becca that he starts to talk about “fixing” things

(Another important note: the scene where Shelby confronts her father about the kiss, he’s on the treadmill and in the very first scene we see of Shelby’s flashback, Dave is leading the cycling class. Exercise is another motif that is present during Shelby’s episode that relates back to the idea of image/appearance/expectations)

Dave tells Shelby “I still pray for everyone even if they don’t deserve it, even if they can’t be saved” and this is the first moment where it all crashes down. This is when his narrative changes and he changes what he’s telling Shelby to fit the narrative he has constructed.

So he decides to attack Shelby at her most vulnerable: the night she wins the pageant competition which, subsequently, is also the night she finds out that Becca has died. I’ve decided there is no way that Shelby’s parents (at least Dave) don’t know about Becca’s death. Other than the fact that they’re living in a small, conservative, religious Texas town, Shelby’s mom mentions Becca’s ‘mental health problems’, making it clear the news got out into the community, even if Becca’s parents tried to keep it under wraps.

Dave only mentions the possibility of Shelby getting permanents after the pageant competition, when he knows that Becca is dead, which is interesting to me. Obviously there could have been other times he mentioned it, but the writers’ specifically chose to include it in that scene, emphasizing the metaphor of Shelby’s sexuality being linked to her teeth. Dave is telling her “look, Becca’s death is your fault, the relationship that has been broken to the most extreme, these things are fixable. and you will be fixed.”

Again the metaphor is basically confirmed with the order of scenes in Shelby’s episode. Dave continues to push Shelby into getting the permanents, even after Shelby’s mother looks shocked and protests, saying “if it can be fixed, the pain is worth it”. I think in the very next interview scene Shelby tells Faber and Young that she had “very different plans” for the summer and she also has her flipper still (and it’s still cracked), signifying Dave’s plan for her conversion didn’t work. Assuming that’s how Gretchen marketed it to him for him to agree to send her.

I know there are also some theories around saying that Dave is also gay but went through some kind of conversion therapy, from the way he talks to Shelby, and with all the metaphor about the teeth being genetic-I couldn’t find the post but thought that was interesting to add. 

3. Guilt about Becca’s death

Oops this is getting long so I’ll make this short. 

But Shelby tells everyone that know one else knows about her flipper, except in the flashback scene where Shelby kisses Becca, Dave invites her to stay for dinner. Obviously this had a double meaning, but what’s important is that it’s casual and feels authentic, like it’s been happening for a long time. And why shouldn’t it, Becca and Shelby have been friends for years, of course Becca is going to eat dinner with Shelby’s family. So she has also seen Shelby’s flipper/knows about her teeth. 

There’s a lot to be said about the parallels of Toni and Becca both telling Shelby that they “see” her in someway but for me, the most important part is after Leah accuses Shelby of being the spy in ep 7. Both Toni and Becca, the only two people who Shelby has confided in her feelings with/kissed and know about her teeth, say that “see” her. 

Shelby tells Toni, it’s “just another reason to hate me, not that you need any more” connecting back to the conversation she had with Becca on the porch, and you realize that, through the connection, Shelby fully blames herself for Becca’s death and feels as if Becca hates her, because, she believes, Toni does too.

[bone-and-butterflies]

Writing Lesson I:

Working around your characters

The worst thing a character can do is annoy the audience. Murder is forgivable; being incredibly annoying to read is not.

The second worst thing a character can do is act out of character.

This becomes a problem because even the characters a writer thinks they know backwards and forwards will change as that character is put into words. You can plot out every detail of your story and still run into a moment where a character makes a choice that is fundamentally out of character.

For example, I planned to have one of my characters(we will call her Bloody) end up looking at a portrait of her dead mother; however, Bloody would never do that on her own because Bloody likes to avoid problems she does not know how to fix.

My original solution was to have her trip, but this solution did not work for the setting of a well maintained hallway.

So how does one fix an out of character moment?

Establish why that scene matters, both in functionality and within the story you are telling, or through it out and start over. Bloody seeing a portrait of her mother serves both to show the audience a lot more of Bloody's physical appearance by comparing her appearance to her mother's (function) and to tell the audience a lot more of Bloody's feeling about her late mother (story).

Cancel out one character trait with another. Because Bloody likes to run away from her problems, it would be out of character for her to seek a source of her problems out. However, Bloody also goes out of her way to fit within her culture's societal norms for the approval of others in her community; therefore, we can use one character trait to effectively cancel out another trait by introducing a member of her community to hold her accountable.

Combine with miscellaneous ideas to give the scene more narrative weight. At this point in my story I had been wanting to introduce a character who is a religious leader so I can better understand my fantasy world's religion, so I decided to have this character influence Bloody to look at her mother's portrait. With this addition, I can introduce my world's religion and its effects on Bloody's society as well as showcase one of Bloody's character traits on top of my other reasons for this scene. Also I get to introduce another character, which is always interesting.

And there you have it! Fixing an out of character decision is all about understanding how a character's traits interact with one another and how that character functions within their environment, whether it be one character, societal expectations, or both at once for maximum efficiency and a handy dandy bit of symbolism!

[dreamersleeps]

I keep re-reading MHA 299 and I know many are upset Hawks is standing up for Endeavor but... I get the whole chapter was setting up that Hawks is going to commit suicide by heroically protecting Endeavor. He doesn’t want to look at the alternative because it just adds to the tragedy of his life, but also because he wants to die. He probably feels he doesn’t HAVE to investigate it at ALL because what does it do for him? He’ll be dead and it won’t be something he has to worry about.

Hello, it’s nice to talk to you again! :) So I’m not sure if this is the response you were looking for cause I just sat down, began writing and it kinda went off topic? I’m not entirely sure, but thank you for sending your thoughts and opinions in!

I read over Chapter 299 a few more times and I’m not sure if I really interpreted it as Hawks wanting to die. However I think I can kind of see what you mean by he’s going to commit suicide in the sense that (depending on the outcome) the action of Hawks going to help Endeavor is “suicide” in that it is his choice. 

I think the root of my interpretation lies with my opinion that while Horikoshi does work with heavy and difficult subjects, I can not see him ending the story of Hawks’ with death. While I think he could die in a metaphorical or symbolic way (something I believe has already happened when he took Jin’s life) when his story ends, a physical death is not impossible.

Just to express my train of thoughts easier, the following panels are not in the exact order of how they appear. 

"Endeavor’s in Trouble” 

I can see how you could interpret what Hawks says as him “standing up” for Endeavor but I did not really read it in that way. Standing up for him implies that he is in a way “okay” with what Endeavor has done in the past, and if we get more on Hawks’ thoughts later it will be clearer on where he stands but if this is all we get, I’d argue that he is not “letting things slide,” because it’s Endeavor. 

All we currently have is that Hawks states, “Endeavor’s in trouble.” I think he’s most likely referring to Dabi here. 

I guess you could argue that he may commit metaphorical suicide by choosing to help Endeavor. If we want to continue pursuing the Icarus narrative: then even after falling and after gaining his freedom, Hawks chooses to head towards Endeavor, or the sun again.  

So as you convey, this is the controversial page. 

“Even if what Dabi says about the Todoroki family is true... I know things are different now.” 

The inclusion of Hawks’ memory of Shouto and Endeavor is very, very important here. It appears in the middle of this sentence. I’d argue that Hawks here was not brushing off or ignoring what happened in the Todoroki household, and again this is mainly because of the inclusion of the memory which happens during the Endeavor Internship arc. This is how he is thinking through the situation. Seeing as we get a glimpse of Hawks’ past memories, I’m sure that he has been contemplating about everything that was revealed by Dabi. Especially considering that Hawks most likely can relate to Touya to a certain extent. 

Hawks’ hero career involved a lot of him having to collect information, analyze information and reach a conclusion in order for him to act upon it. Perhaps that is why when he states, “I know things are different now,” it comes off as very bold. I think the boldness of his statement is what may have upset people but I think it has to do with the way he’s been trained to think. 

The secret missions Hawks had to undertake while working for the Hero Public Safety Commission required one to detach their job from their individual feelings and thoughts. He must not let sentiments get in the way. 

Sentiments 

As always, I like to include definitions of words I find very important that could be understood differently based on who you are - what are sentiments? A couple definitions that come up in the dictionary are: 

1) an attitude, thought, or judgment prompted by feeling, 2) an idea colored by emotion (Merriam-Webster) and 3) exaggerated and self-indulgent feelings of tenderness, sadness or nostalgia (dictionary) 

We see that feelings and emotion get in the way with his job when Hawks confronts Jin. Hawks had a connection and relationship with Jin that he did not have in his life. As we see below in Chapter 265 even Dabi points this out, “Looks like sentiment tripped you up after all, hero!” Yes, ultimately Hawks takes Jin’s life but I do believe he was hesitant and did not want to. The dialogue between the two has Hawks expressing that he believes that Jin is a good person who was dealt an unlucky hand in life. 

While he does convey that he wants to “save” Jin by helping him but after already assessing the threat he believed Jin posed and with the arrival of Dabi, Hawks weights his options and chooses to take his life. 

From a detached, cold reading of this scene, Hawks does mess up. His hesitance distracts him and makes himself vulnerable to Dabi’s attack which badly burns him, and he loses a large portion of his feathers. 

Now I’m only going to focus on the fact that Hawks takes Jin’s life and the thinking that went behind it. I’m not here to discuss in depth about my thoughts and opinions on the matter however I think by the end of this post, you may have an idea on where I stand.  

What is a hero? 

Okay, my wording here is confusing but I’m going to try the best I can to convey what I’m trying to get at. There is also the idea of the two concepts of heroism that float around the manga: 1) working as hero as an occupation and being able to fulfill that role, and then 2) one who we label as a hero/heroic in how they think and act. For both we think of saving, strength, power, charisma, etc. 

Then there are the other qualities we tend to associate with the second concept of who/what a hero is: being selfless and compassionate, having moral integrity, showing concern for others no matter who it is and being understanding of others’ perspectives. There are others as well but these are what come to mind at the moment. 

While the qualities I list above can be associated with heroes in general, in BNHA there has been an effort to differentiate at least two different concepts of heroism. The biggest example was with the introduction of the character Stain. If the reader had not been questioning hero society beforehand, Stain told us directly to think critically and refrain from being passive like the characters in the story. Due to the emergence of quirks, there were those whose quirks deemed “unacceptable” by society, their existence often leading to a difficult life or being  labeled as a villain. The demand for heroes created the concept of the hero as a job. 

And so heroes became celebrities. They are rich and influential, and they cover the cities with their faces to sell and endorse products. Even the physical copies of the BNHA manga have ads of various pro-heroes selling products in the back. There’s plenty of other criticisms that you could talk about such as the Hero Billboard Chart. 

While the older pro-heroes seem to have lost or never embodied the meaning of what the reader may argue as “being a true hero,” we see that there is a difference with the students, but first let’s go back to Hawks and Twice again. 

Yes, Hawks attempts to save Jin but the outcome is that he takes his life instead. Definitely not what the act of saving is supposed to look like. As seen above, Hawks had already verbalized that he may have to kill Jin. I’ll also throw in that I felt like Hawks was looking down at him in pity (like he does with his parents) and determines that Jin is need of saving. Hawks reaches that conclusion himself. But that is not what happens. Instead he decides that the death, or “sacrifice” of an individual is worth it if he can save hundreds or thousands of others. In this way you could argue that he has successfully acted to fulfill his job as a hero. But, as many people were wondering: 

Aren’t heroes supposed to save everyone? 

Perhaps one of the defining qualities of a hero is that they chose to save indiscriminately or most importantly, whoever they can reach. 

In the same arc we get Midoriya who is faced with a very similar situation. Shigaraki poses as a significant threat to the heroes and the rest of Japan. Midoriya knows that Shigaraki can wipe out all of those he holds dear to him and the rest of Japan if he is not stopped. Midoriya sees firsthand Shigaraki’s terrifying and destructive powers, his friends, teachers and allies being critically injured. He is with the knowledge that the people in his life and millions others may lose their lives. 

When faced with such a horrifying outcome, would stopping Shigaraki be enough? I’m assuming that taking his life would have been a very tempting option. To take a life to save millions of lives.

But even after all that we get this page spread of Midoriya’s final thoughts before he loses consciousness at the end of Chapter 295. 

Midoriya chooses compassion. 

The juxtaposition of Midoriya’s thoughts and image gave me chills when I first saw it. We see the outcome of the conflict: a quiet, lifeless city in ruins with the dust in the process of settling. This is the result of Shigaraki’s destruction. The reality that there are thousands of civilians who got hurt, are critically injured or even dead hangs heavy in the air. When society chose to ignore Shigaraki and the heroes chose to label him as an evil, unredeemable villain, Midoriya has chosen to look directly at him. 

Based on the first concept of what a hero is/does according to hero society, Midoriya dues not fulfill his duty as a hero after failing to defeat Shigaraki, however based on the second concept because he chooses compassion he has begun to embody the ideals of who a hero truly is.

Hawks is tripped up by sentiments but acts to finish the job the way he sees fit. 

exaggerated and self-indulgent feelings of tenderness, sadness or nostalgia 

He tries to be compassionate and understanding but isn’t. He has an image of Jin he created himself that is not the true Jin, hence why they are mere sentiments. He chooses to focus on his mission because he does not actual understand how Jin was feeling. This results in him looking past Jin’s life to protect the lives of millions of others. In contrast, Midoriya recognizes Shigaraki, the person who is standing immediately in front of him. In its purest form, to be a hero means to save indiscriminately and to save those you can reach. 

Being a hero as a career in BNHA becomes tricky as it means to defeat and take down villains, and choosing who to save as Hawks demonstrates. 

However to save someone like Shigaraki, Dabi or Toga (who were all let down by hero society) requires someone to take the more difficult path to reach a hand out with selflessness, compassion, and understanding. It seems that Midoriya, Shouto and Ochako will be the ones to extend their hands to them. 

“Starting With my Origin” 

Children often are only able to understand and grasp basic concepts. A hero is someone who saves you, or puts a smile on your face. We get a glimpse back in to Hawks’ childhood, to that innocent concept of heroes that Hawks had. 

As they say, “Never meet your idols/heroes” mainly because they are not actually who they are portrayed to be. The world looks very simple when you are younger, black and white, but as you grow and experience more of life, you start to begin to see just how complicated things are. There are way more gray areas when you begin to look closely. 

Similarly, Hawks does not see him in the same lens as he did in his childhood. He understands that the image of Endeavor he had when he was younger is not who Endeavor actually is. I don’t think that Hawks’ decision to want to go help him was made without thought. He takes in information and contemplates on it until he makes a conclusion. For someone who was actively seeking out more information, I’m wondering if all he has is what Dabi has stated. We have to remember that the information we have as the reader is not the same as the characters in the story. I’d also argue that he is not ignoring what Dabi has said but taking into consideration the past and whether Endeavor is working to change. 

Now that he is most likely no longer working for the Hero Public Safety Commission, he is free to do as he please, and as seen earlier, he chooses to walk towards Endeavor. The team up between the two in Fukuoka, and the ambush against the League of Villains and Meta liberation army may have strengthened their relationship but Hawks wanting to help Endeavor this time does not stem from hero work. 

Wanting to help Endeavor will put him directly on the path towards Dabi. 

Like you, some people believe that he may as in consequence for his actions, he will ultimately crash in to the ocean like Icarus, and die. The final fall. Perhaps his mistake will be that he will choose to pick Endeavor over Dabi, or find himself in a position where he may believe he has to take Dabi’s life away as well. 

Others believe that Hawks has had his Icarus fall already but will learn from the consequences of his actions. He’s died, but has been reborn like a phoenix. Shouto will be meeting Dabi again as well, and as we’ve seen, like Midoriya, he sees Touya as a person: his brother. He even identifies himself to him. I’ve seen people talking about and hoping for a team up between Hawks and Shouto so we’ll see what happens if they do. 

I’m going to bring the very last page back, but most of Chapter 299 has to do with Hawks’ childhood. His mother would ask him about why he was born and what the point of his wings were for and Hawks’ answer is to save people.

“Starting with my origin, so to speak... Endeavor’s in trouble.” 

We get a focus, visually to Hawks’ back. The origins of what allowed Hawks to save and be a hero: his fierce wings quirk, and it looks his wings are healing and growing back. I think you could also see it as him referring to Endeavor as well. The hero who saved him when he was a child, could also be seen as his origin.

During the High End vs Endeavor fight in Chapter 190, we see some of Hawks’ insecurities. Hawks is/was insecure about his back, and that is where his wings are. This was during the time when Hawks was working as a hero because it was his job. He did have that desire to save people but it was only a muted motivation behind what he did: he worked as a hero as a job first. I’m wondering if things have changed. 

Putting this all together, I think I’m currently leaning towards the second possible outcome from what I listed before. If Hawks can go back to his origin and become someone who tries to embody the true heroism. Of course he’ll stumble but it’ll still be a drastic change from how he had been living before. 

While I understand that many people are upset about these panels, I think we have to wait to see what will happen. To be honest, while I’d personally prefer the second outcome, I think I would be satisfied with either outcome. 

As the reader, we certainly can argue that Hawks is a tragic character however I’m not sure if Hawks considers his life as “tragic.” I think he will continue to do what he can as I feel like he defines his purpose based on what he does.

So will Hawks be tripped up on sentiments again, or will he be able to think and be understanding like Midoriya? 

As for now, I think it may be the first. 

[drazavonia]

She will no longer "Embrace Destiny"

Destiny is more often that not a goal or fate one's life is chained to. If destiny is a force of the universe, no one can "control" destiny so to speak. However someone of a higher power, domain or "providence" can change the destiny of one with lesser power, control and/or knowledge (of their own destiny).

Kairi was only four years old when Apprentice Xehanort took her, experimented on her and shipped her off of her world for two purposes apparently:

1) For her "Heart of Pure Light" to resonate with the "key bearer" and lead Xehanort to them.

2) As of Melody of Memory, apparently Apprentice Xehanort also wanted Kairi to arrive in a world of neither light or darkness which could possibly be The Final World. Ironically, this would mean he was successful on both accounts by the end of this game.

However, it's clear up above Kairi is upset and that line of "You're the one who keeps messing with my fate" implies much like how Aqua finally figured out in Kh3/Remind that Xehanort possessed Terra, Kairi will finally find out how and why she was ripped away from her grandma and home of Radiant Garden. Not only that, but it shows us she never really had a choice in how her fate was twisted and manipulated to whichever way the Xehanorts needed at the time:

- Apprentice Xehanort shipping Kairi off to Sora and Riku

- Ansem SOD/Riku sacrificing Destiny Islands causing Kairi's heart to take refuge in Sora's heart.

-Xemnas and Xehanort taking Kairi to crystalize her heart to use as a final gambit to open Kingdom Hearts.

The next lines "If it weren't for you Sora and everyone would be safe...I won't let you walk away" indicate for Sora, her friends and herself, she will no longer allow anyone control over her destiny. She has the strength and determination now to make her own destiny and fight against anyone who messes with her fate again.

This is the reason I can see Kairi getting a new keyblade.

A lot of the main characters' keyblades are symbolic of their hearts and roles within the series, as well as how they've grown and evolved over the course of their journeys.

The most obvious case being Riku.

Riku

Kingdom Key> Soul Eater

The Kingdom Key was originally meant for Riku, as he was the keyblade's chosen. But when he chose to give in to the darkness the keyblade went to Sora instead, and of course Soul Eater was a weapon of darkness given to him by Maleficent to signify his alignment with her.

Soul Eater> Way to Dawn

It's in the name.

But seriously Way to Dawn is a perfect symbol of Riku's journey of acceptance of his darkness and redemption from kh1 to kh2. The keychain is the dark heart on his "Dark Riku" form which signified his complete fall to darkness. But from the keychain upwards we see the "Gazing Eye" encircled by an angel wing and demon wing, symbolizing Riku's decision against alignment with light or darkness. Afterwards majority of the blade is the demon wing from Soul Eater largely because Riku's role within kh2 is him working from the shadows undercover as Ansem and doing his best to distance himself from his friends who walk the path of light. However at the very end, an angel wing meets the large demon wing which is symbolic of us teaming up with Riku finally, as he showcases his mastery of light and darkness alongside Sora and friends.

Way to Dawn> Braveheart

In DDD, Riku materializes Soul Eater and questions his worthiness as a keyblade wielder. He still has doubts but still continues to hold on to his true motivations being to protect Sora. Riku accepts that he can use the power of darkness while standing firmly on the side of light to protect his friends. He no longer needs to find or follow the way to dawn, because by the end of DDD came the Dawn of Riku, a Keyblade Master and Guardian of Light.

And "Braveheart" is pretty simple. Riku found the strength to protect what matters, and it's perfectly symbolized by Riku's sacrifice for Sora.

"I'm ready now, I'm in control now."

Terra and Aqua (technically Ven as well) have never left home by the beginning of BBS and throughout the game they experience trials and tribulations that challenge their friendship and we see by their Keyblades at the end the results of these trials.

Terra

Earthshaker> Ends of the Earth

Strong and powerful, after hearing Riku's motivation for strength being his friends he bestowed upon him the keyblade which reignited his devotion to his friends. This is also symbolized with Lingering Will, as that's the keyblade he's left with. He'll go to the ends of the earth to save his friends and right his wrongs.

Ends of the Earth> Chaos Ripper

Terra's devotion to protect his friends turns into rage against Xehanort for killing Eraqus, taking his home and manipulating him. Allowing darkness to further consume his heart.

Aqua

Rainfell> Stormfall

Aqua's journey mostly consist with things happening around her and to her friends. Aqua being the only master of the three and worried for their safety, Aqua does her best to assume responsibility and watch over them. Much like rain, it was a light and simple task. But Xehanort's manipulations and temptations with both Terra and Ven, increased Aqua's worry and need to have control over her friends to keep them out of danger. Unfortunately certain seeds had already been planted amongst them, causing Aqua's worry and concern to come off as patronizing and distrustful of her friends. This weakened the trust in the bonds they share making her job to protect them even more difficult and adding to the weight of responsibility she carries.

Stormfall> Brightcrest

Terra and Ventus have both lost their hearts to darkness. With Venuts sleeping in Castle Oblivion and Terra taken over by Xehanort, Aqua was their only chance of ever coming back. She was the only one who knew how to find Ventus and the only one left to defeat Xehanort once and for all. She stood tall and was willing to risk it all for her friends, she was their "light in the darkness".

Ventus

Wayward Wind + Lost Memory

Ventus' keyblade is the only one that doesn't evolve or change throughout the game. Instead Lost Memory is gained when Vanitas forces Ventus to remember how he came to be. Ventus gains a newfound acceptance for his fate with this knowledge and only cares if his friends are safe.

Axel/Lea (Dark Rescue)

Flame Liberator

Axel betrayed the organization. Axel did everything he could to keep Roxas and Xion unaware of the truth so they could live in blissful ignorance (or be happy). He saved Sora at the last minute in DDD and made it his mission in KH3 to get Roxas back. He even declared to Saix that he would bring him home as well. His keyblade represents his determination to save and free his friends from a cruel fate.

Destiny's Embrace also tells a story for Kairi, but much like how she got it, the symbolism isn't representative of her personal journey.

- The keychain of Destiny's Embrace is funny enough, a popular fruit. When two people share paopu fruits, their destinies become intertwined.

- The chain, unlike many others is a red thread in knots, most likely representative of the Red String of Destiny. The "Destiny Knot" (pokemon references ftw) is what ties two people together romantically or what ties two destinies together.

- The hilt of the keyblade is the King chess piece. The king in this case referring to Sora (Crown, Throne, Holds his keyblade like King Arthur in artwork). To me this is symbolic of how Kairi has literally held Sora's fate or destiny in her hands at certain points in the series.

• In kh1, Kairi reverts Sora back from a heartless/the darkness after sacrificing himself to restore her heart.

• In khcom, in order for Sora to regain his memories, he has to focus on his "light in the darkness".

• In kh2, it's not until after reading Kairi's letter to him that the Door to Light opens the way for Sora and Riku to return to Destiny Islands in the realm of light.

• In kh3, it's Kairi's light that keeps Sora from fading away within the demon tide and holds him together so he can save the other guardians.

- Surrounding the grip is a heart with half of it having a sea/ocean/wave aesthetic. It could be representative of Kairi's heart and the heart of her nobody counterpart Namine, whose name means wave.

- Half of the heart with the vine extending down the blade is identical to the keychains of Sora's Ultima Weapons in kh1,2,DDD,3.

The crown connects to the heart which belongs to both Kairi and Namine which makes sense because Sora and Kairi together created Namine.

- I'm not sure what the blade symbolizes aside from maybe fire because of her entanglement with Axel (doubt) or more likely the fires of Kairi's determination to improve, so she can stand by Sora and Riku.

- The flowers at the end with "logo" heart of course represents Radiant Garden. I think Nomura always planned to explore Kairi's past at some point especially with how connected it is to Union X, and that Kairi as well her grandma would be the bridge connecting the past and the present.

However, because of kh3 and most likely M.O.M, I think Kairi will quite literally be freed from "Destiny's Embrace", both Xehanort and the keyblade.

Like I said before, a lot of the symbolism for Destiny's Embrace is externally based. Mostly because Kairi never gets the chance to shine nor do we get to see what's going on inside of her head. Some of this is also because of Kairi's reluctance to bring up her past trauma when asked about it.

• Sora is gone, no need to be a plot device/motivation for him. Instead it's the other way around.

• Namine is her own person now.

• Melody of Memory will finally tackle and resolve Kairi's past.

Everything Destiny's Embrace represents will be resolved by the end of Melody of Memory. So just like how Riku completed his Darkness character arc by the end of DDD and got Way to Dawn replaced by Braveheart as a symbol of his newfound growth, either by the end of M.O.M or in KH4 Kairi will be rid off all of the things holding her character back from truly growing on a narrative and meta level and the keyblade that symbolizes all of those things:

Destiny's Embrace

*This is the other part of the Melody of Memory sticker post.

(Credit to Hartmann-lionhart for their Destiny's Embrace/Ultima Weapon Analysis)

[pynkhues]

Love your analysis on Beth’s playing a role to control Dean—but now I’m curious about your thoughts on the ottoman haha

Oh my gosh, thank you for taking the bait and asking, haha. I’ve been thinking about the ottoman all week, because it felt like such a strange and very specific thing for the writers to bring up again in the context of Dean, Judith and Beth in 3.11 after Beth had made the joke about it to Rio in the bar back in 3.08. And hey! I get a lot of asks about writing and about critical creative theory, and how to develop both those skills, and I always give the advice to start by asking why.

So let’s ask why together, because let me tell you: if something in a story feels strange, and it’s specific, and especially if it’s repeated, it usually means the writers want you to notice. And if they want you to notice, that in turn means it’s either a) an important plot point (which, err, I don’t think the ottoman is, haha, unless somebody stashed some money in the thing), or b) it’s important symbolically (and sometimes both! The flashforwards on Breaking Bad in particular did that really well).

So yeah, I’ve been thinking a lot about the ottoman, and these two, seemingly flippant references to it, and ultimately it’s reminded me of a post I never actually wrote (classic Sophie, haha), about Beth and Judith in 2.09 and 3.02, and that kind of made a feedback loop in my head and - -

Look.

Basically I think it’s a symbolic rejection of Beth’s old life / Judith’s life; an important character beat for Beth, and an indicator that she’s more than what she was with Rio, and that she won’t ever be more than that with Dean, but that’s a lot. So.

Let’s break that down a bit.   

Mommy Dearest

While motherhood is a central theme of this show, I am perpetually fascinated by the fact that the only mother to the main characters we really know is Dean’s mother, Judith, something that does actually feel like a deliberate choice.

After all, I could write a whole fresh essay about how it seems that Beth, Annie and Ruby each function as mothers themselves in ways that reflect a multigenerational trauma, and, ergo, a damaged mother in their own childhoods – we learnt in 2.08 after all that Beth and Annie’s mother was bedridden with depression, if nothing else, and Ruby’s mother was widowed when Ruby was just a young teenager (to say nothing of the trauma Ruby must’ve faced herself losing her father at that age) – but actually…that’s as much as we do know about them.

Dean though.

Well. 

We actually know probably more about his family and his history than we do about any other character on the show. We know his parents were John and Judith. We know that his father created Boland Motors and that Dean inherited the business from him. We know that John cheated on Judith throughout his career, and that Judith briefly tried to go back to work herself as a shop girl before feeling forced back home.

We know that Judith sacrificed everything – her career, her autonomy, her body, her happiness – to give Dean the illusion of a perfect family. While Dean might not know all the details himself, he’s certainly picked some of the expectations of that up through his parents, because ultimately, he expects Beth to do the same. And she did! And still does, in many, many ways.

There are a lot of examples of this, but the biggest one, of course, is the arc across 2.07 through to 2.10, which culminates with Dean holding their children ransom at Judith’s house, blackballing Beth into caving, and then flat out not caring about her inner life at all in 2.10.

That entire arc hinges on a lot of things, but one of the most integral conversations within that is the one Beth and Judith have at Emma’s birthday party in 2.09.

A conversation that’s pretty sublimely paralleled in 3.02.

2.09 vs 3.02

Beth and Judith’s conversations at Emma’s birthday party in 2.09 and then in the Boland kitchen in 3.02 are in fact two scenes that are also in conversation with each other. They’re different, but they’re the same. They’re circling the same information, while offering new takes, bantering old jokes that pivot into new jabs. They’re great, and I know they’re nobody who watches this show’s favourite scenes, but I actually love both of them a lot, and I think they’re really important – not just for Beth as a character, but for the show’s themes overall.

The scene in 2.09 falls on the back of Dean having taken the kids, and Beth’s grief arc around that. She only gets the invite to Emma’s birthday party because Dean’s put her in a position where she has to ask for it, and within the first 20 seconds of Beth and Judith exchange while they’re cutting up Emma’s birthday cake, we get this absolute gem:

Beth: [Dean]’s a good dad.

Judith: So was John. Not much of a husband though.

Judith goes on to confirm  that John cheated (with enough women she “stopped counting”), just like she now knows Dean did, but that’s not the point, and it’s not the thrust of the conversation.

The throughline is that men might cheat, and you can leave them, but as a mother, your responsibility is to them. You have to sacrifice your own needs to give them the best life you can.

In both Ruby and Annie’s cases, these are moral sacrifices to create financial gains for those children. Ruby’s in a loving marriage and needs to pay for her daughter’s medication, so that’s all literal with her. For Annie, it’s not quite as literal, but explores a parallel morality by way of her empathy – she feels no moral guilt about robberies, but she feels moral guilt by way of Marion and Nancy, in order to provide for her son.

Beth’s not like them.

She enjoys crime. She empathises with others, but isn’t a bleeding heart like Annie.

All of Beth’s sacrifices are felt personally.

She dims her own light, her own passions, her personality, her needs, her ambitions, to fuel the light of Dean’s, or for their children.  

It’s a conversation she has again with Judith in 3.02.

Judith’s been helping out more since Beth went to work. It leads to a few confrontations across the episode, but the one between the two of them in the kitchen after dinner is pivotal. I could actually transcribe the whole conversation here, because it’s honestly awesome, revealing dialogue, but instead I’m going to break it down into three little blocks.

a) The first in that it tells us how much Dean diminishes and doesn’t think about his mother.

Beth apologises for the fight which Dean ignores, and Judith asks a simple question:

“Did Dean ever tell you that I worked?”

No, Beth replies, simply, effortlessly.

A telling thing for a couple who have been together for over 20 years.

b) It builds to Judith telling Beth about having Dean, and then –

Judith: Everyone’s fawning over this new baby boy, while I’m just…nothing. Empty. Flesh and hormones over ice.

Beth pours them both a drink.

Confides that she had post-partum depression too.

c) But that’s not what Judith is saying. Judith’s not empathising with Beth, she’s telling her to go home.

Beth: Your happiness was important too.

(beat)

Judith: How much does the card shop pay?

Beth: You shouldn’t have quit.

Judith: And you should be home for dinner if you don’t want the kids saying grace…what a lie, huh? That we can have it all.

This scene is sharp, and it’s designed as a narrative weapon against Beth, who is desperately trying to keep her family above water, and actually gives Beth the triple duty in terms of protective responsibilities.

She’s trying to provide for her children, of course, and trying to justify her own purpose outside of motherhood to her mother-in-law, while also concealing from Judith how much Dean has failed their family in every way.

Judith gave up everything for Dean, so what can Beth do except placate her?

The thing is, these two conversations have very, very different results. 

In 2.09, Judith’s conversation with Beth was a key part of Beth ultimately quitting both crime and Rio, and trying to revert back to the woman she was – the woman Judith would always be. 

3.02 had a very different outcome.

Beth didn’t quit.

She doubled down.

Not only that, it directly pivoted into a scene where Beth, Ruby and Annie were criming, fucked a part of it up, and Beth’s instant response is “What would Rio do?” trying him into that overall arc.

The Ottoman

Which brings us, finally, to the ottoman!

It’s an offhand joke in 3.08, right? Beth’s dressed up, and she and Rio are in one of their games of eternal bargaining after she robbed him and he replied by stealing literally everything she owned. She’s trying to earn it back, he says he has something for her, she jokes, “My ottoman?”

It’s not serious. She’s not serious, which already loads the term, but Rio’s response is equally light, equally dismantling.

No.

The thing he has for her is Boomer.

And sure, there’s a lot to unpack in that, but what’s important here is that Rio treated the ottoman as something as frivolous as Beth treated it. They were on the same page – in maybe one of the few moments they were all season.

He knew as well as she did that the ottoman wasn’t something she needed.

The scene in 3.11 is really different.

Beth’s literally dressed down, on the toilet, in the robe she wore when she broke up with Rio in 2.09. Dean barges in, tells her no one will give him money to buy the hot tub place, then instantly breaks into a diatribe about how his mother wants to give them his ottoman.

Beth: We don’t have a couch!

Dean: I told her that.

Beth: Good.

Dean: The ottoman will be here tomorrow.

[Beth sighs]

Dean: I know, I’m sorry.

[beat]

Dean: I just don’t want [Rio] involved again.

The scene serves the purpose of, once again, emasculating Dean – showing that he can’t get out from under his mother’s thumb in the same narrative beat that it tells us as an audience that Dean can’t wriggle out from beneath Rio’s either – at least not as long as he’s with Beth.

In turn, the ottoman as an object holds a lot of narrative weight.

It’s something Beth and Rio can joke about, and something that labours on Beth and Dean’s marriage.

On a deeper level, the ottoman is something that holds a purpose, yes, but needs other items to be complete.

On its own, an ottoman is a joke. With a couch, it’s a living room.

Beth wants the couch – she wants the career – she wants the functionality and purpose of it. She wants to build her home herself, not scrape around for leftovers, nor rely on superficial or frivolous function in the way that she did before she robbed Fine & Frugal.

Beth is a character bursting with purpose, utility, passion. She wants to build this new life, not accessorise it, and Rio knows it, and Dean can never offer it to her, and that matters to her, particularly as she tries to untangle her future from Judith’s.

What I’m getting at is that I think Beth made a very different decision in 3,02 than she did in 2.09. She decided she was going to do this. She was going to be less of an ornament in her own life, and it would take her away from her children but hopefully give her more function to provide for them, and notably for herself too, and I think the narrative symbol of the ottoman is that the domestic goddess / Judith image isn’t her anymore, at least not exclusively. It’s not what she needs, and Rio knows that, and can laugh with her as she makes a joke of it, while Dean knows it, but will never fully support or empower her in disentangling from it. 

[myaekingheart]

Thoughts on Writing Trauma in [Fan]Fiction

For some reason, I’ve been thinking a lot about the inclusion of trauma in fiction, namely fanfiction. It’s one of those things that so often pops up in fic but just because it’s done often doesn’t necessarily mean it’s done well. I feel like this is especially true for writing original characters.

Precursory trigger warning for speaking about, you know, trauma (suicide, self harm, eating disorders, death, etc.) in depth. As you can probably already predict from the title. Full text under the cut for brevity’s sake. 

Traumatic experiences and backstories are like this rite of passage in fanfiction. Most everyone’s earliest original characters are always given the most heartbreaking, terrible backstories possible because we, as authors, think that that will make our readers more sympathetic to them. I say this as someone who is definitely guilty of this myself. And this is all well and good--some of the most popular mainstream characters come from terrible backstories. It can help explain why characters do what they do and act the way that they act when they are first introduced in a story, and provide space to allow them to grow and evolve throughout the plot (for better or for worse). 

I think the issue in giving a character a traumatic backstory, however, lies in the way that this is presented. So often I feel like tragic backstories are used to try and force readers to empathize with and love a character. It’s the almost overbearing sense of “please love me” that I think can cheapen the effect of this developmental tactic. You can’t force an audience to love a character and laying it on thick with why the audience should love your character often seems to do the exact opposite. Readers don’t like to be told what to do or what to think or who to root for. Your character has to prove that they are worth rooting for, or not, based on the way that their past influences their present and the fate of their future. A character who was neglected by their parents as a child is obviously going to be desperate for affection, but think about how it makes them desperate. Do they find themselves constantly in abusive relationships because they are willing to take whatever they can get from whoever will dish out “love” to them, regardless of whether it’s healthy or not? Or because they find comfort in a sense of abuse based on past experiences? Or in contrast, do they push everyone away because they are terrified of letting themselves be loved and opening themselves up to getting hurt again? I know every writing class ever always harps on the “show, don’t tell” but this is one case where I feel like it’s really important. Readers are not stupid. We don’t need to be told straightforward why a character is doing what they’re doing, and sometimes laying everything about a characters past out from the get-go can even dampen the allure of your character. Let the readers learn about the character at the same pace that they would let someone else learn about them. Human beings don’t give away their entire life story in one sitting, and your character shouldn’t, either. 

Not only are traumatic backstories so common in fiction, but so are traumatic plotlines. It’s fun to put your characters through hell! It’s fun to break them down and see them at their lowest, when they are left with nothing. After all, conflict is the gasoline which fuels the car of your story and sometimes you never really know what a character is capable of until you break them. I feel like the most symbolic and succinct way to describe this is through that quote “Your characters are like geodes. If you want to see what they're really made of, you have to break them.” However, trauma is a tricky subject. There is a fine line between being authentic and meaningful in dissecting traumatic experiences and laying it on too heavy for the sake of being edgy. I feel like that’s another mistake so many early writers make: feeling as if you have to put your character through ten layers of hell in order for the audience to care about them, too. But this is a dangerous game and trauma is a very personal thing. You don’t want to write insensitively about something very significant at the risk of alienating or even maddening the communities that have personal experience with whatever trauma you’re exploring--if you haven’t experienced it yourself, too, that is. I am a huge supporter of using fiction as catharsis for coping with and processing trauma and anything else troubling that you as a writer may be dealing with, and every situation is different so of course your specific experience will not fit everyone’s narrative of how that trauma may transpire. And if you have been through this sort of thing personally, of course you can be trusted with writing candidly and authentically about it because those are your experiences and no one can steal those from you! You deserve to approach the subject in whatever manner you feel is best for both the story and your own mental wellbeing. For those aiming to write about trauma that they don’t have personal experience with, however, it is so important to write these scenarios with respect. Please do your research, read personal accounts and familiarize yourself with all the ins and outs of what you’re aiming to write. Read up on what it’s like to attempt suicide, what happens after a failed suicide attempt or self harm gone wrong, what to do when you suffer a miscarriage, what grief feels like, what a panic attack feels like, the challenges that chronically ill people face every day and the things that can go wrong when we have flare-ups or are not given the accessibility we need. Don’t trigger yourself, of course, but make sure you are well informed so that you can write trauma in a way that is respectful and authentic. 

I am also not going to sit here and tell you not to stack trauma onto a character in a story. I know that life happens and sometimes multiple bad things pile up all at once. Fiction is no different and it’s certainly not uncommon to see a string of bad things befall a character in a story, either. The thing that is important to consider with this, however, is not only respect and authenticity but the way in which these sorts of things would realistically affect someone. The domino effect should feel believable.

For example: character A gets a phone call that character B, their best friend and love of their life, has unexpectedly been killed. This is a traumatic experience enough on it’s own, and the story deserves to explore this character’s consequent grief as they try to navigate their life with this massive hole in their heart now. Perhaps the last thing that character B told character A was something about unwavering support for A in the pursuit of their lifelong dream, something that holds weight and that the grief of losing B can serve as both an obstacle and a motivator for achieving. Familiarize yourself with the after effects and symptoms of mourning in order to write character A’s grief as authentic. Say, for example, they are having trouble sleeping. They are constantly tired but can never fall asleep when they want. They are driving somewhere a few days later and begin dozing off at the wheel. They subsequently get into a nasty car accident. Character A ends up in the hospital with severe but not life-threatening injuries--injuries that completely erase any and all hope of character A ever achieving their dream. What does this loss feel like? How heavy is the betrayal in their chest after having felt so determined to fight against the grief weighing them down in order to accomplish their goals for the sake of character B’s memory? Consider the emotions. Consider the anger and the hopelessness and the depression. Consider what your character decides to do about this. Consider how your character attempts to cope. Perhaps they turn to self harm. Perhaps they feel that the only way that they can manage the pain that they feel is by cutting. Maybe they even think that if they make themselves bleed, it will give an outlet for all of the pain that’s stirred up inside of them. Maybe they even feel as if that pain is deserved, as if everything is their fault (whether it realistically is or not). Maybe they revel in the pain, maybe it becomes the only thing that keeps them sane even if they logically understand that this is unhealthy and dangerous. And maybe their emotions get the better of them and they accidentally take things too far. They accidentally attempt suicide and wake up in the very same hospital they were in when they got into the car accident. The very same hospital where character B was also pronounced dead. Focus on what this means for the character and the story. We as the audience should be able to understand why this character felt like it was necessary to do what they did and what they were feeling in the moment of having made that decision, as well as how having failed will influence and effect them moving forward. That progression should be clear and visible, it should be easy for the audience to track and follow the plot of. 

And while writing trauma can be fun and interesting, on the same note of authenticity it is also important to ensure that we are not glorifying trauma, either. We should not be presenting these situations as fabulous deaths and drama. Trauma is a very real and very heavy thing that should be handled with care for the sake of respecting both the characters and the readers. Readers who have gone through similar trauma should not feel as if their struggles are being written as a joke or not taken seriously. They should be able to empathize with the character even if the struggles presented in the story do not exactly mirror their own. Like I said before, the trauma should be believable. And readers who do not have experience with these subjects should not feel inspired by the trauma itself. It is one thing to present a character who is perseverant despite their setbacks, who pushes forward even when it would be easier to quit, and even when they want to quit, but it is another thing entirely to present a character who glamourizes these struggles. A character with an eating disorder should not be seen as an aspiration for thinness and a character who self harms should not be seen as “edgy” and “cool” for hurting themselves. If we are going to write about trauma, we should accept the responsibility that comes with writing subjects in a way that is respectful and authentic rather than glamourizing trauma.

We as writers, however, should not accept the responsibility of censoring ourselves for the sake of a reader’s preference, by the way. We can include trigger warnings and tags all we want, and I think we ought to for the sake of being responsible and letting our readers know exactly what kind of story they are getting into, but that’s just the thing. The reader should know what kind of story they are getting into, but if they click on something with explicit warnings/tags that they know are going to trigger them and continue reading anyway then that is on them and not us. We should not have to completely omit trauma and other taboo/sensitive subjects from our writing for the sake of purity culture. 

And on one more note in terms of the inclusion of trauma in fiction itself, also consider how a character’s trauma affects the people around them. How does a character’s suicide attempt affect their best friend? Does their mother recognize their disordered eating behavior? Is their mother the reason behind their disordered eating behavior? Does the character’s love interest cock a brow at them wearing a hoodie in summer and grow curious as to what they’re hiding? And even more: how do the people around your character influence or inspire or motivate them to get better? Or not? Are they steadfastly loyal and determined to help your character through their pain? Or do they feel as if it is not their responsibility to shoulder your character’s burdens and they would rather exit from their life completely? Your character does not exist in a vacuum, so it is important to consider not just the way in which they respond to the world around them because of their trauma, but also the way in which the world responds to them because of their trauma. Let your character exist in conversation with their universe and their social circle. Let your character’s trauma barge in and create a big, looming, unwelcome presence. Let your character work through their trauma in a way that feels believable, and let the people in your character’s life respond to that in a way that feels believable, too. 

Overall, just approach trauma with respect and authenticity. Create characters that feel real and believable. Don’t try to force your audience to love your character but rather work to create a character that is dimensional and messy like real people. Let your audience learn your character in the same way that we learn about other people in real life. Let their past trauma influence the way they act in the present and the way they exist within their world and among the people in their life. Do your research, be candid and honest, and above all handle with care. 

*Note that I am of course not the end all be all and I do not consider myself some sort of wealth of writing knowledge. I am only writing based on my own personal experiences and things I’ve gleaned from both college-level creative writing courses as well as both reading and writing fiction, specifically fanfiction, for years. 

[funkymbtifiction]

Hey, I’ve been waiting for the Hamilton typings for so long I’m so glad they’re finally here YAY :D My question: what do you think of Burr as a Si dom? I’ve seen him typed as a Ni dom a lot because he projects himself as playing the long game and “waiting for it”… but his words seem empty to me.

Through the musical I don’t see any evidence that he is actually projecting into the future like he says he is. He seems like someone who understands how politics works in practice. Talk less, smile more. You don’t rush to fight, but spend time around someone important (like Washington) and it’ll push you up the ranks. There are reckless moves (like throwing your weight behind a constitution that may not work) and acceptable moves (like switching parties and taking over a vulnerable seat). And Hamilton frustrates him by breaking every one of these rules and succeeding. I see his planning for the future as reactionary, not premeditated. He’s obsessed with Hamilton’s reckless wins and it precipitates both his big numbers (Hamilton asking him why he doesn’t go after Theodosia before Wait For It, and Hamilton putting himself in the deal-making process in The Room Where It Happens). In fact, in Wait for It, I see him as rejecting symbolism - if there’s a reason, he’s willing to wait for it, ie. if it’s fate or some other force that has caused him to have all these experiences, or if Hamilton’s really a genius for accomplishing so much, then that can reveal itself in its own time. Meanwhile he’s going to trust in his way of doing things. But Hamilton’s success after success breaks him and he throws himself into an election run.

So why does he say he’s “waiting” and claim to have plans that he keeps close to his chest? I think his 3 core is desperate to project achievement and it’s at odds with his Si that wants to gather information first. And he keeps getting attacked for not jumping into action by a guy who (frustratingly) has a knack for doing just that and winning. He needs to preserve his own self-image by recasting his perceived inaction as tactical. To be fair to Burr, he probably does have plans, but I’m not convinced he has future-rooted Ni dom type plans.

I think a lot of this is dependent on how you interpret the musical itself, but I’d love to hear your thoughts, you’re pretty much my MBTI hero at this point xD

I did also consider ISJ, yes. I bounced a lot between the two, and I intend to watch the musical again and pay closer attention to him and Hamilton, because I am not 100% certain for either one of them. (It’s hard for me to watch something that moves that fast and is so ‘quick’ for the first time and keep track of everyone and their motives -- to just enjoy it, I have to lose myself in it, and if I lose myself in it, I’m not analyzing it, but if I’m analyzing it, then I’m not enjoying it as much.)

The problem with typing Hamilton is that the rapid-fire nature of the music and its enormous cast means there isn’t a huge amount of time for character development, and often the characters are a composite of different types to make the narrative move along. Hamilton should play as an ENTJ (so much natural workaholic behaviors, poor emotional awareness) but he lacks Ni and I would have to argue a semi-constant Te/Se loop, due to his chronic inability to see ahead, predict the fall-out of his decisions, etc.

The same goes for Burr -- all that really comes strongly across is that a) he is extremely hesitant to make things happen (and jealous of anyone who does), b) he has no real sense of personal morality (and if he does, it’s hidden beneath his 396 ‘Bermuda Triangle’ of mental cycling and ‘wear a mask’ behavior), and c) he has something holding him back. Insecurity? “Wait for it” anticipation?

Low Se not knowing how to make things happen in the real world?

Or Si-dom “wait, what’s happening here, I joined the group, I paid my dues... why isn’t this working???”

I agree with you in that he seems to have no personal vision he wants to impose (although a LOT of his lyrics are philosophical in nature and somewhat abstract, which is why I leaned more toward INFJ), so he could be ISFJ.

I will try and squeeze in another viewing sometime soon.

- ENFP Mod

[nestofstraightlines]

HDM S02E01: The City of Magpies

I’m going to be doing long-form reviews of the episodes of His Dark Materials series 2. For context on my broader feelings you might be interested to check out my writing here but as a quick precis: I’m a long-standing lover of the books with a lot of interest in the art of adaptation! Episode spoilers after the cut; previous-series spoilers from the start.)

Well, welcome back His Dark Materials! Whatever my feelings about how well or badly anything is accomplished in this series I’m always so delighted to find myself sitting down to watch a version of this story on the telly of a Sunday night.

And what is more - The City of Magpies is a very promising start to the new series.

... But as I’ve come to expect, where this series succeeds it does so more in spite of the writing than because of it.

Everything to do with the set/location work here is spectacular. I was excited and intrigued by screen-Cittagazze more even than when I read the book. Whatever my overall thoughts on the first series I admit of a few moments where I think the TV adaptation has actually done something better than the books themselves, where the adaptation has done the best thing adaptations can do - found some new angle of interest in this new form. For instance, In the first series I loved the re-staging of the battle of Bolvangar fight within the claustrophobic walkways of the compound itself.

Now we have a Cittagazze which is, I think, even better than book-Cittagazze.

And it’s not a case of design = good, but story = bad either, because things like set design aren’t separate, at their best, from storytelling. It’s not just that Cittagazze looks cool, but that the way its designed and filmed is carving out the emotional and narrative space appropriate for this part of the story. The step motif seen all over city picks up on the Escher-like image from the title sequence and that association immediately elevates Cittagazze into significance from its first moments. We know from the titles this image of Lyra and Will meeting/paralleling each other within this motif, and climbing… the design and presentation of this city setting are injecting all the right kinds of energy and anticipation into the story where the writing is, well, not always.

While we’re on the subject of good storytelling, though, I also want to praise daemons. I’ve written lengthily on how poorly I think daemons were handled in the first series, and it was brilliant to see some early promise of significant improvement for the second.

And yes, that’s partly because there’s simply more Pantalaimon on screen. That’s thanks to an increased budget, as well as the handy story fact that now the A-plot has left Lyra’s world that budget just doesn’t have to cover as many daemons. But the real difference is that daemons are handled better in story terms here than they were across almost the whole first series.

Pantalaimon here actually operated according to what is supposed to be his narrative function in His Dark Materials rather than just feeling like an expensive spare part. He was a foil and sounding board for Lyra, a means to personify her dilemmas and doubts as a character. And we see in The City of Magpies decent writing in establishing how Pantalaimon and Will relate to each other, as well as Lyra and Will, both as new ideas and characters. As well as their relationship being cute, it actually uses Pantalaimon as he’s intended; to be a way of showing a more hidden side of Lyra. If Pantalaimon likes and wants to trust Will we know that Lyra feels that way on some level.

It’s not flawless, and I thought we needed a bit more imagination and space given to how Will responds to Pantalaimon. I’ll come to it later, but Will’s doesn’t feel terribly anchored in any particular character context in this episode and I missed the sense of him reacting to all this new and fantastical stuff.

But the character/relationship dynamics were including daemons successfully, and that’s new.

And another thing: though I don’t know how the next few episodes will look of course, I’d be very happy now for Pantalaimon to be put on the back-burner for a while.

That’s the kind of handling of daemons I’ve always advocated for, not necessarily more of them, but rather more careful and intelligent work to use them as a story piece rather than meaningless clutter.

Stories don’t need to constantly be juggling every possible ball: you develop one part to a point it can be set aside while you pick up the next. So daemons are something that as long as you do the work in the right places you don’t  need to constantly be seeing them outside of those.

I.e. now we have this solid work done in establishing the dynamics of Will/Lyra/Pantalaimon, it’s going to be fine for Pan to pretty much disappear mouse-formed up a sleeve for the next few episodes; we’ll need him to clear space for other parts of the narrative.

While we’re talking daemons I’ve also got some kudos to spare for their handling outside of Pantalaimon too. Something I wrote about here is how daemons are a versatile narrative tool; here a full character, there a personality-free symbol; there a malicious animalistic imp etc. This episode is showing much more understanding already that daemons can operate differently according to milieu and purpose of scene. In the Magisterium scenes, the daemons are more like well-deployed character notes, unobtrusive as the costume choices.

Again, it’s not all praise: the witches’ daemons are still dull, cardboard exposition-dumpers even more than their human counterparts; Lee’s dynamic with Hester is still feeling a bit try-hard and vaguely conceived, and the golden monkey feels under-utilised as the omen of horror he was in the books. I guess Ruth Wilson’s performance doesn’t leave a lot of room. Unlike the book-Coulter, screen-Coulter contains all the shades and affect of the character in one body, so there’s just not a lot of room left for the monkey to bring in anything notable. But it does seem a shame that when there’s that reveal of Mrs. Coulter being unexpectedly present in that first scene, it doesn’t come in the form of the monkey climbing into shot.

So moving more generally into the writing:

This episode is very plot-light: we don’t get into any world-hopping this episode, we just have Lyra and will meeting and forming a dynamic, and a few set-ups for what will become plot (the native children, the tower, the spectre-eaten man and, sigh, the knife calling to Will I guess).

That’s a pretty solid call, I think, in general. It gives us a chance to feel the significance of the relationship that forms here, and to have a cool-down/gather ourselves from the huge events that brought series one to a close. But it;s also  a dangerous call when it comes to Thorne’s weaknesses as a writer. It means this episodes needs to be all about a relationship arc as its story and he’s bad at those.

The worst episode of series one was episode two The Idea of North, where he failed to notice he’d written himself into a story-less corner with how he handled the Lyra/Mrs. Coulter dynamic in their introductory scenes in the first episode, and so we had an episode with nowhere to go in terms of emotion, character or relationship.

Happily, the the Lyra/Will dynamic fares much better as the core of its episode. Even Thorne can’t entirely bunk the arc of these two interesting kids meeting and bouncing off each other.

But I’ll be damned if he doesn’t appear to be trying to suck the life out of it.

My hypothesis is that Thorne is just a very soapy writer. He cut his teeth on soap-form dramas like Skins and Shameless. That’s not an insult in the sense that soaps are ’low art’; my point is that he writes to serve meandering status-quo, for shows that have nowhere in particular to go, no forward momentum. I.e. he can write a perfectly good conversation scene but he can’t stack these scenes to show how two characters are progressing into something different from where they started. When we have a simple relationship-focused story as in this episode or The Idea of North you really see exposed how his scenes just fail to follow one from the other in his writing in the most fundamental ways.

So all of Will and Lyra’s scenes are good. Some are lovely. But they fail to really impart a sense of any core or significance to this relationship. (And that failure to discover the character/relationship engines is probably why we get the lean into prophecy and destiny, but I’ll come to that presently). Sometimes they feel oddly disjointed, and maybe it’s partly editing and lost scenes, but it’s definitely not all that.

For example, after the scene where Will saves the cat (or, you know, Saves The Cat) it feels weird that we don’t see or hear about the cat in the next scene. Sure I can infer that Will just let it loose somewhere that seemed safer, or whatever. But it’s less the logistical question that bothers me and more the sense of a lack of consequence from one scene to the next. The saving of the cat was a dramatic and emotional high point in the episode. The cat became a symbol and a macguffin – and then immediately disappeared between scenes. That goes for really all of the scenes’ relationships to their neighbours. For example, I don’t know why Will deduces that Lyra comes from a different world. Again, it’s not that I can’t fill in some plausible detail there but rather that it feels like what’s missing is the actual story part.

Or it’s half-there, I dunno. Because once again the series does raise things consciously which are great angles, it just doesn’t do enough with them to quite hold weight. E.g. I liked the beats that Lyra moves through in her initial encounter with Will. She gets the drop on him (in a lovely mirror of her S0101 encounter with Lord Asriel, where she was the one pinned); they talk – and then she realises he doesn’t have a daemon and backs off. She reacts with fear in the book too, but I really like the series turning that into a whole beat. After Lyra’s experiences in series one Lyra is, literally, triggered by the idea of a daemonless person and needs to get out of there. But again, the series doesn’t execute that idea very sharply or follow through on it much. We get this set-up, that this is going to be an obstacle for Lyra. But we don’t get the story beat of what gets her/them past that. But then we get a nice moment with Rullio, where Lyra shows how her experiences have made her kinder and softer in some ways. And then we get, towards the end of the episode the line that pays of Lyra’s initial fear and rejection of Will: “You do have a daemons,” she says, “You just can’t see it.” That’s a lovely character-informing pay-off, I just wish there was some writing that better made a story of how she got from point A to point B.

But I really do appreciate all that stuff. It’s crucial storytelling work to establish this sense of where Lyra is at psychologically/emotionally in terms of the particularmaterial she’s going to be dealing with this series. It’s valuable to see how she’s coming of series one feeling and thinking about this daemon stuff because that’s going to be relevant to how she deals with things like spectres and Will (and his world’s) daemonlessness.

Lyra’s part in the episode isn’t flawless….

And look, I mean, it’s not easy, this continuity of story and character, it’s really not. But Thorne has chosen to expand and extend on the book and that’s great but whenever he creates any additional material to the book’s scenes, the time spent almost always feels either under-utilised or misguided. Thorne’s added scenes often seem concerned with addressing practical issues or getting into fairly irrelevant back/side story which is harmless enough in itself, but he tends to do things which actively undermine the main story.

In S01E01 we opened with the scene of Lyra being delivered to Jordan which is bad because – well, for reasons too many to go into here, but which I talked about here. It’s a scene which is concerned with the how we got here without understanding that showing that part of the story can undermine the reality of where we find ourselves.

In S02E01 we again open with new material, this time scenes of Lyra making her way across country to eventually find the city of Cittagazze. And it shows the same problems, though thankfully less egregiously. This sequence is just too ungrounded in any kind of believability. I’ll aceot the idea of Lyra travelling for days as a passing mention. My mind will fill that space in with whatever plusible detail it needs to. If you show it, like this is shown, I stop believing it, because all you’re doing is pressing implausible detail upon my imagination. It undermines the main body of the story because I can’t believe the slightly-scruffy, slightly downcast Lyra who arrives in Cittagazze is someone who has been sleeping in caves and eating what she can find. That Lyra would be a filthy, feral, half-starved animal.

When the consequences of her hardship are so lightly felt it undermines an awful lot about the series. I can’t invest much in future trials very seriously when I’ve seen this level of hardship and hardiness handled with such breeziness.

As for Will…

It’s nice to see a version of Will that’s softer, less grim and less certain. Honestly, while I like book-Will as a character, I’ve never been wholly enamoured of the way he slots into HDM because his strength and competence seem to so frequently require Lyra to be silly and disempowered. He prompts a ‘chickification’ in her. So I’m up for lovely Amir-Wilson-Will.

But at the same time, that soft, sweet, fairly light/open-hearted affect does jibe oddly with the given facts of the story. In contrast to Lyra Will really didn’t feel very informed as a character by his recent history. As far as I noticed he doesn’t so much as mention the beloved mother he recently surrendered to someone else’s care, nor so much as cast a troubled look into the middle-distance to remind us of the fact that he, you know, recently killed someone and has a feeling or two about that, probably.

We don’t see much by Way of Will reacting to the fantastical and unbelievable, outside of when Pantalaimon first speaks in his presence. So Will feels a lot less grounded in particularity than Lyra so far.

Coming back to the relationship arc itself:

I’m finishing up a piece at the moment on The Haunting of Bly Manor and how it relied on meaningless, unstoried circumstance to move events forward. It had to do that because it hadn’t actually got a core story; it was an adaptation of The Turn of The Screw which remained pretty faithful to events and chronology but changed enough about the core that the story didn’t go any more. So the big beats have to be convenienced into happening.

I mention it because I see the same issue here, in (so far) less egregious form: Lyra and Will’s alliance is all circumstance.

In any story, and certainly any plotty story like His Dark Materials, events are moved forward by both external factors and happenstance as well as character choices. But those external factors should be built to work for and with a character story. Circumstances should push characters to make choices it is interesting for those particular characters to make, etc.

I feel that Will and Lyra’s alliance in this episode isn’t founded on anything particularly meaningful. Thee wasn’t a strong sense of why these two would connect and/or team up, say. It felt plausible to imagine that if Lyra and run into Angelica first she might equally have teamed up with her.

In the book this meeting is moved through more swiftly and it’s not long before Lyra and Will have realised that they might do better in their individual plans working together rather than separately for now, and are forging ahead with the plot.

And I do think it’s interesting to slow that part of the story down, but only if you feel you’ve got any actual story beats to explore within it. If you’re going to take longer to tell the story of Lyra and Will moving into a team relationship, I’ll need you to justify why that part of the story has any weight of interest. You need to be telling me the story of why these two team up, or why they make a good team.

I think what Thorne misses, as a writer who is so weak on structure, is that things don’t automatically get stronger for seeing more of it. In the first series – in the first episode – Thorne imagined that he could and should make the Lyra/Roger bond register more by showing us more. He gave it more screentime and showcased more moments of closeness. But he missed that there’s nothing more to show. In fact the more I saw of Roger, compared to the book, the more alienated I became because all I saw was how little he resembled a real child and how falsely his and Lyra’s relationship rang when pushed to be Significant.

Lyra and Will’s relationship is one that can take more attention. But it’s still the case that drawing it out doesn’t automatically make it better. You lose more than you gain if you’re not careful: here you’ve lost the sense of momentum from the book, momentum that pushed a very wary alliance into something more interdependent as the plot moved it.

And actually though the book’s time spent here is briefer, it is also better written as a progression. Pullman has a clear understanding of who his characters are, where they’re at and what would be needed to prompt them to have things happen or shift.

The show includes the great book moment where Lyra asks the alethiometer moment who Will is, learns he’s a murderer, and is like, “This is good news.”

That moment is an actual beat in the book. Lyra, having encountered this new person, asks the aletiometer to fill her in at the first opportunity she gets. She is facing a fork in the road and what happens there is telling in several ways: firstly we see how dependent she is on the alethiometer. Secondly we see how the alethiometer is certainly not totally neutral in the way it presents its ‘truths’. Most significantly, we get a character-establishing (or I guess, ‘reminding’) beat in Lyra’s unusual reaction to the statement. It’s a turning-point: Lyra decides to ally herself with this boy, and we also get a steer as to what ideas are going to play out here. We see that Lyra is operating according to a somewhat eccentric set of standards here and probably has some work to do interpersonal-relationships-wise. “I like him because he’s a murderer” is a good place to start a relationship arc from because it’s a hell of a false philosophy.

In the show… well, one thing I like is that we find Lyra here refusing to use the alethiometer. As I say the show is frequently great at picking out these new ideas that seem to spring logically from the book. Sadly it’s just as frequently bad at deploying them well.

So I love that Lyra has been wary of the alethiometer ever since it failed to warn her on Asriel’s plan for Roger. That’s great. It’s another place where Lyra feels informed by her recent history and it’s a nice complicating factor to take into this second season where the alethiometer might easily become too convenient a plot element. I just wish I thought that the series was going to do anything with that, or even be very consistent about it,

Because here it doesn’t really develop, resolve or advance. She refuses to use the alethiometer until, for no reason, she does use it. There’s no particular prompt that changes her mind and unlike in the book there’s no turning point attached to this version of the he’s a murderer moment.

Lyra has here already passed the point where she’ committed to teaming up with and trusting Will. She’s eaten his cooking, she’s connected him emotionally with Roger, she’s moved into ‘his house’, they’ve saved a cat together and had a bonding moment on the incredibly cool steps and made their plans. So this moment can’t do anything to their relationship: they’re already where this ought to take them.

Unless the arc is to be that these two characters have a good start but then distrust or wariness enters in because Lyra gets this answer that makes her see that there’s more to Will than meets the eye? That could work, except nope, because one way or another this series immediately cancels the impact of the line and instead places all its eggs in the ‘prophecy’ basket.

Not irrelevantly, the TV version of the scene also does another thing the series is prone to: it shies away from the hard edges of things and mitigates and softens the moment.

In the book the alethiometer simply says, he’s a murderer, and Lyra is immediately relieved to hear it. It’s undoubtedly a funny moment but it’s also a character-true and significant one. It’s striking and odd and so we’re forced to think about why Lyra would have such an unexpected reaction and we come up with some significant stuff about who she is and where she’s at emotionally.

The series (which obviously has to have Lyra narrate what the alethiometer tells her) has her say, “He’s a murderer – but the good kind.”

That for me totally misses the point of the moment. It skews both Lyra’s character and the moral character of the story universe. It sounds like the alethiometer has made this moral pronouncement, that it has both dubbed the accidental death Will was involved with ‘murder’ and absolved him because, I don’t know, he’s a goody. That implication of that is just fundamentally opposed to everything the books, much less this moment, are about.

It’s such frustrating storytelling because the character story is right there. It would all work well if not for the inclusion of one single moment-ruining line.

Funnily enough, I felt that there is a single line of S01E01 whose removal would immediately improve more than one episode. In that instance, it was where Lyra vocalises her decision to go and live with Mrs. Coulter: ““If the Gobblers have Roger she’s our best chance to getting him back”. It’s line with brings to a close all the tensions that have been set up in the Lyra/Mrs. Coulter dynamic, settling into an unstoried synthesis that Lyra has reconciled a wariness or Mrs. Coulter with her own particular agenda and decided to accompany Mrs. Coulter on certain terms. That is what leaves episode two, The Idea of North, without a story to tell, because that relationship story has already been resolved and brought to catharsis.

Here we have just the same problem in just the same way. Again, we are heading into episode two of the series in question focused on a new relationship in Lyra’s life, and again all the show would have to do is cut the final line of her dialogue reflecting on that for it to be great. End on the revelation, “He’s a murderer” and you’ve got a great set-up of tension and ambiguity to fuel this ongoing story. End on “… But the good kind” and all you’ve done is assured us that there’s nothing to be intrigued or interested by here.

So the moment’s deployment in the series doesn’t create intrigue or tension, it doesn’t inform us about Lyra’s character and it’s not even very funny or striking here. In the book it’s funny because Lyra’s “phew” is kind of an unhinged way to react. Here the ‘yay murderers’ thing is indicated as the alethiometer’s phrasing/opinion, so there’s no joke.

So yeah, lots of bad and lack-lustre writing choices within the A-plot and yet still overall it all works This is what I mean when I say this show succeeds in spite of its writing!

The witches, Lee, Magisterium. Mrs. Coulter stories meanwhile… are all fine. I like the series’ version of cloud pine. Er… nothing much to say really; these threads were fine. They’re pulling their weight so far better than in season one’s early episodes, where the Gyptian scenes often felt fillery; too many in number weighed against how much story they actually had to tell.

So finally I just want to complain about prophecy. As a result of a failure to find the character-motivated reasons for things happening, a lack of faith in the story unfolding in itself, Thorne is continuing to go hard on this destiny stuff which is such a boring crutch of a device.

Yeah, there was prophecy and predestination in the books. But it wasn’t a crutch, it wasn’t a lazy way to excuse why your characters are involved in events or why they are significant to one another. It was a. a theme to be interacted with (and not necessarily trusted) and b. not a motivator or relied upon to make things happen; stories worked whether or not the idea of prophecy was in play. The sense of destiny and the questions of agency gave what already worked narratively on its own a heightened feeling, a sense of having greater significance than they might at first appear to. Prophecy, in short, didn’t make His Dark Materials go, it lent a wider significance to a story that worked in itself.

So after a generally great episode I was super disappointed to see Will having unmotivated, meaningless destiny flashes of the knife. But I’m not going to get too churlish yet. I’m too pleased to see His Dark Materials back and too impressed with Cittagazze to dock too many points. I’m giving The City of Magpies:

B+

(Measured against the series’ own standards. For context my marks so far would be:

 S01

E01 Lyra’s Jordan:                  B

E02 The Idea of North            E

E03 The Spies                        C

E04 Armour                            C

E05 The Lost Boy                   C-

E06 The Daemon-Cages        B

E07 The Fight to the Death    C-

E08 Betrayal                           C+)

[arthistoryhelena]

Hieronymous Bosch (1490-1500), ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ [Oil on Canvas], Museo del Prado, Part 2 of 3

Welcome back for part 2 of this extremely exciting triptych! This analysis has been split into three (much like the triptych itself) - the last post explored the actual formal characteristics and structure and the religious context within which it was made. This part will look at the contents of the left and central panels, and the last part will explore the final panel and any other bits and bobs not already discussed.

let’s commence!

l e f t   p a n e l

The left panel is the Garden of Eden, and art historians view this as a depiction of the moment God gave Eve to Adam. I have some opinions on this, but perhaps this is not the best platform to remind people that women are not objects to be given to men, so I shall refrain.

Adam has a bunch of emotions, obviously, because he’s never seen a woman before. He’s surprised at God’s presence, is reacting to an awareness that Eve is the same as him, and he is feeling a primal urge to reproduce (sexual arousal for the first time).

There are also many different animals to be found in this scene, some of which are exotic and are thought to be included to appeal to knowledgeable and humanist viewers of this work (the Renaissance was all about learning and going back to the superior knowledge of the Classical Age - think Greek and Romans, philosophy, new science). Animals include: giraffe, elephant, lion with prey, birds, winged animals, fish, person with duck beak reading (mood), cat with lizard, and rabbits.

The rabbits that are found behind Eve are supposed to be a symbol of fecundity, and the dragon tree represents eternal life. A snake around a tree and a creeping mouse nearby are also both universal phallic symbols. The snake may also allude to the temptation of Eve that ultimately leads to the rest of the scenes in the panels.

c e n t r a l   p a n e l :

The central panel draws many parallels with the first panel, particularly in composition. The skylines are the same, and the pool in the centre resembles the lake in the other scene. This may have been practical - Bosch probably didn’t want to make life more complicated for himself - but also visually links the two concepts of the Garden of Eden and the Garden of Earthly Delights together.

Instead of the scene being a paradise, many people are depicted as enjoying pleasures. The centre frame could therefore be an allegory of spiritual transition or a playground of corruption.

On the right hand side, there is a group of four individuals, three of which are covered in light brown body hair. Some art historians argue that these representations of wild/primeval humanity symbolise an alternative to civilised life, whereas others connect these figures to whoredom and lust. From my 21st C perspective, I would link them to animals and backwards evolution, but famously there wasn’t that knowledge about evolution until the 19th C, and it is unlikely that it would have been depicting groups of people from other continents. Yes, there were monstrous races, but these usually featured stuff like having dogs’ heads or having no neck. Your average medieval Dutch person probably had no idea what a gorilla was anyway. There wasn’t a developed patriarchal structure that put races in a hierarchy, so this theory is unlikely to ring true because it assumes a modern narrative, which just didn’t exist. Hair, however, was associated with puberty, being one of the visible changes that all genders went through at a certain age, so will inevitable be linked with sexuality. This holds a lot more weight, and I would be inclined to go with that.

Anyway, enough about hairy people!

Weird things in the painting:

A man lying on a strawberry

Giant ducks playing with tiny humans

Fish walking on land

Birds living in water

A passionate couple in an amniotic fluid bubble (gross)

A man inside a red fruit looking at a mouse in a cylinder

In this painting, there is an inconsistent perspective, if any. In the foreground, there is no order, and instead there are small designs where proportion and logic are abandoned. Bosch has employed depth, but one-point perspective hasn’t been used. This will be a cool new technique popularised by the Renaissance, but clearly Boschy-boo has not got the memo.

There is great emphasis on the two sexes attracting each other amongst oversized fruit. Fruit obviously is a symbol of reproduction, and everyone’s naked, which is another less-than-subtle way of bringing lust into the painting.

There are no children or old people - this scene exists beyond the constraints of temporal reality - so this panel could indicate that there is no consequence to the people’s actions (or so they thought!?!?!). Some imagine this panel to be an illustration of the world if Adam and Eve have never been driven out of Eden, or if humans could return again to Eden after working away the Original Sin (Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil). Is this heaven??

In the background of the central panel, there is an ascending figure who appears to represent the end of the binary of the sexes. There is also reference to a snake biting its own tail (a symbol of eternity) in a knight with a dolphin tail sailing on a winged fish; the knight’s tail curls back and touches the back of his head.

PART 2/3

[bitchcakegreen]

A View from Behind the Camera - GoT episode 6 x 9 - Battle of the Bastards part 4

Hi all! I am so sorry I haven’t had much time to meta lately. There’s been a lot going on in my life with the holidays and work and just being plain lazy about it. But I’m here to rectify that right now! We ended our last directorial analysis of the BoTB with Jon facing off in front of thousands (really 500 extras) of Ramsay Troops. For this post I’m going to jump forward a bit to the Black Moment and take it form there. There is quite of bit of serious battle work in between these two posts and it doesn't feed the narrative as much as it is juts gorgeous choreography to watch. SO without further ado here we go! 

We are going to start this at the ‘black moment’ or the moment when Jon is buried under a pile of bodies and men. In storytelling, the black moment is “usually one of the most emotional sections of a story, so it can be difficult to pull together” It is that moment when everything looks bleak for the hero or protagonist and the audience is just not sure they will make it to the other side. In Jon’s case, his forces are exhausted - physically as well as literally - and they are trapped in a classic Roman Testudo formation around them. 

No I have seen a few metas  and posts about how this mirrors Dany’s slave crowdsurfing, but that’s not really the case. At least not from a technical standpoint. What have right here is a shot that is meant to convey the sheer size of what is happening to Jon. He is buried in the apex and at the bottom of this pool of bodies. The weight of the fate of Winterfell is literally crushing down on him. Sapochnik removes all music from this section and all the audience hears is heavy breathing as we cut to the darkness engulfing Jon. We are in his POV at this moment. In Dany’s slave surfing moment we are given the symbolism of her rising above and being separate from those around her. She is essentially ‘better’ then those she is surfing on. For Jon, it is the opposite. He is entrenched, he will forever be part of and at the bottom of those who fight for the North.  This is the true black moment, in more ways than one. 

Jon is literally and figuratively drowning and grasping for breath. The audience is given only the muffled sounds of battle, this is meant to mimic what Jon is actually, or would be, hearing in this moment. The farther Jon is pulled down into the crush of bodies the more muffled the sound gets. 

Next we have the camera panning from ‘below’ Jon to over his head as he crawls out. The camera continues to pan up until we have a extreme wide shot of the crush of bodies with our ‘hero’ in the center. 

I really love this shot because it tells such a great story in it’s simplicity. We have the strains of “My Watch Has Ended” as Jon climbs out. The subtly in such a huge shot is like art. This is followed by a quick cut to a medium close up of Ramsey that pans in tighter. What I love about this moment as well is that Iwan has been directed to NOT sneer, NOT be smiling and cheerful. AT this point his character thinks he has won and in this moment Iwan chooses to play that as an inevitable outcome. He assumed this is what would happen. He’s won. As he knew he would. 

Next we cut back to a close up of Jon as he strains to get out of the crush of bodies (sorry for the overuse of this term but it truly fits) It is a profile shot with the sun peaking out of the clouds over the top of Kit’s head (This would have been put in post production) almost casting a halo around our ‘hero’ 

 We cut to an over the shoulder of Jon watching the continued carnage around him. We see WunWun in the distance trying to fight his way out. This is met with a close up of WunWun as he swats at the bad guys around him, pulling arrows out of his side as he goes. The camera then shifts to a wide shot of Tormund butting heads with SmallJon Umber, Jon in the background. The music is swelling as Tormund is getting his butt kicked. The camera then cuts to Jon, still trapped, looking over his shoulder at Davos who is a bit away from him. The camera pans to make Davos the center of focus and the audience now starts to hear the horns.

Davos looks around briefly in the shot until we cut back to Jon, who is in closeup, and is also looking around. Next we cut to Tormund and SmallJon. They stop fighting briefly and we get a confused look from SmallJon as the horns continue to blow. Now in this brief section we have about three camera angle changes in quick succession. First a two shot of SJ and Tormund, then an below the elbow shot angled up att Tormund(This is to really emphasizes the move that Tormund uses to pin SJ’s arms) Then a cut to an over the shoulder of Tormund as he bites SJ’s ear off. Finally we have a close up of Tormund as he leans back and spits out the ear. A few more quick shots to cover the ass kicking Tormund gives SJ and then we cut to Ramsey in a medium close up. He is right of center of the shot and focused in that direction. A single horn blast happens and Iwan is directed to turn his head and focus on the left side of the shot. 

Cut to a slow mo close up shot of the Knights of the Vale sigil flag as it flaps in the breeze. The music swells as we now get the “Trust Each Other” theme. The camera pans, still in slow mo, down from the top of the banner to the rider. There is a quick cut at about halfway down the rider’s body to a wide shot of the Knights of the Vale as a collective. 

We hold with the riders for a few seconds, still in slow mo, before we cut back to Ramsey in a medium shot.From there we go to an extreme wide shot of the Vale army pouring over the ridge onto the battlefield. 

We pan back as they keep coming until the GA realizes we are in a POV shot over Ramsey’s shoulder. From there we quick cut to Jon in close up staring off to the left of the shot. What is assumed is that he is looking at the Vale army, but that’s not really where his focus is. In the next shot we cut to a wide of LF and Sansa on horseback at the head of the army. They are stationary and the Vale riders rush past them. We quick cut back to Jon and it is in this moment that the audience is made to realize that Jon and Sansa have made eye contact, over the field of battle and are focusing on each other for a moment. The moment is broken at the end of the close up shot with Jon as the bodies surrounding him start to move. We have a close up of Sansa now and she looks pensive and then she looks away to the right side of the shot, she is focusing on Ramsey now. 

(For my own personal enjoyment...doesn’t this look seem familiar *cough* winterfell is yours, your grace*) 

We cut to a close up of Ramsey and a gorgeous piece of acting on Iwan’s part. He is focused on Sansa and you can see the disbelief just rocket across his face. 

We then cut to an action shot taken from a lower angle as the horses thunder across the battle field toward our trapped Wildings/Northmen. Then several back and forth quick cuts of Tormund stabbing the hell out of SJ. Then we cut to an extreme wide shot of the Vale riders breaking the formation and essentially ‘freeing’ our heroes. (I use the quotes for heroes because as we all know, there are no real heroes in this show. They are all grey at best)

A cut to a wide angle upward shot of WunWun fighting off Bolton men. Followed by a frenzied panning right and left to show the chaos of the Vale riders breaking through and the battle tide turning. Then we have an over the shoulder frame up of the field between LF and Sansa’s shoulders. Even though the shot contains them both it is worth noting that Sansa is always the main focus. She is in sharper contrast then LF. You can bet your ass this is deliberate. 

We pan forward a bit and that brings us closer to Sansa before we shift POV and are now focus on a front close up of her. This shot pans forward as she smiles slightly. Then the shot shifts again and we see a wide action shot of the Vale bannerman in the thick of the fighting. Off the left side of the shot Jon starts to climb up the bodies and into focus. He stands and then the camera shifts to an over the shoulder shot of him focused on Ramsey downfield. 

Camera shift to a medium shot of a bloodied and dirty and pissed off Jon. Which holds for a moment before we have a wide profile shot of Ramsey. What’s great about this small shot is that we see Ramsey through a haze of smoke. One of his flayed men burning is off camera and it’s darkening the shot. It’s a great metaphor for the destruction of his army. He never comes into full focus in this shot. 

Cut to Jon in an upward medium shot, WunWun behind him. Jon has a bloody Longclaw clutched in his hand and his right of center in the shot and focused off camera at “Ramsey’. Tormund climbs into the frame from the left bottom corner. We hold a moment with Jon center, flanked by WunWun and Tormund. 

Cut to a close up of Ramsey. Iwan has been directed to be scared here. This is the first time we see Ramsey scared. Iwan plays it tight and not over the top which really works well for his character. Cut to a close up of Jon that pans tight. Then to a medium shot of Ramsey on horseback. He turns and starts to ride out of the frame and then we cut back to Jon in close up. He ducks out of frame and then we shift to a medium shot of Sansa on horseback, she is clearly focused on Jon, this shot pans in slightly before we shift to an extreme wide shot of the battlefield and Jon chasing Rasmey. This is down in a POV over Sansa’s shoulder. 

Finally we cut to a closeup of Sansa. She is scared to death. 

If you don’t focus on the details you mess so much. What is so amazing about Saponchick as a director is you can see how different his approach is as opposed to someone like Alan Taylor (You all know how I feel about that hack).There is more thought in each frame then in many other episodes combined. 

And that is where we will end for this post. In the next one we will look at the beat Ramsey to a bloody pulp in the courtyard scene. See you next time!