#bunny motif being more relevant

[loveinlilies]

I couldn't figure out if they meant Tatsumi is a great driver he just likes to be insane while driving, but that's my new take on him. I bet he lives for being a speed demon- imagine this man in the illegal car build nightlife.

[singswan-springswan]

Frozen II justifies Jelsa

okay I feel like I should explain.

First of all, the time period lines up nicely

I don’t think it’s ever explicitly stated what time the Frozen adventures take place, but given by the photograph joke at the end of the second movie, it’s set somewhere around the early 1800s.

Rise of the Guardians also never gives a date for when Jack died, but if it was 300 years before present day, that drops him roughly somewhere in the 1700s or in the colonial era. 

Putting these two together, it seems neat that they come into their spirit forms at relatively the same time, and conveniently Jack is first too.

you could play around with the idea of Jack not quite getting the hang of his duties yet by the time Elsa comes along, based on the inconsistency of seasons (especially winter) that is a motif throughout both Frozen films, even at the very end of the second one

Let’s talk about the wind!

Jack’s wind and Elsa’s wind have the same personality for all intents and purposes.

Both are fun-loving, well-meaning, playful, kind, and always willing to help.

Both are also incredibly fond of their goofy little snow spirits

okay short conversation because I think I’ve made my point 

Frozen II put a lot more emphasis on frost...? like boi was that just you trying to show off your artists or was that actually relevant?

The first movie really only stressed ice and snow as aspects of elsa’s power, but in the second movie, we start to see different things. we see less and less of the snow and ice; in fact, she only really busts those out when in stressful circumstances.

by contrast, she seems to default to frost more and more. everything she touches with her power is more or less laced with frost. she opens the mist around the forest with frost. her dress is covered in frost. she tames Nok and Bruni with frost.

also, in the very end of the second movie, when it’s supposedly winter in the forest, everything is frosted over. the trees, the rocks, the leaves, even the ice has frost on it.

either this is just Elsa discovering a new softer side of her power or. you know. we use this to justify the crackheads.

moving on!

The realm of the spirits is openly acknowledged and tangible to the audience, which is something vital to the story of Guardians

Though never directly mentioned in Guardians, there seems to be a vast number of magical forces throughout the world, relevant to important concepts in society (or nature) like holidays or virtues and stuff like that. The “spirits” featured in the movie mostly derive their power and essence from the belief that people put it them---regardless of whether or not people acknowledge their existence

there are spirits for lots of different little concepts floating around out there. We know at least that the Ground Hog is real because the Easter Bunny has beef with him or somethin. And I’m not sure how many others are “canon” but I think Mother Nature is around, along with plenty of nature spirits and other patrons of holidays. The main thing is that all of them are tied to human beliefs or practices.

In Frozen II, we’re presented with a very classic collection of nature spirits. Most everyone thinks of air, fire, water, and earth as being the fundamental elements of nature, so if we’re following the logic that the beliefs of people give them power then it would make sense that these four elements have powerful spirits to go with them. That Elsa happens to be their ring-leader is probably just a mildly forced convenient piece of writing, which provides her with a hotline to the balance of nature and the spirit realm both.

Things like the trolls would also make sense in the universe if they’re just a physical manifestation of nature’s magic and sentience

plus if there are magical beings just kinda drifting around the world then it seems perfectly reasonable for Jack and Elsa to meet one another---especially since she’s the bridge or however that’s supposed to work idk

Elsa isn’t exactly a winter spirit, per se, but she is a spirit by definition. She’s literally called the “fifth spirit” of nature or somethin. She’s still tangible and visible, because she was born human, but it’s very clear by the end of the second movie that’s she’s no longer quite... mortal... I wanna say. I’m going to headcanon that she’s immortal now. Otherwise she’ll have to be replaced when she dies and like that’s too much effort. I mean it’d make sense if she was “transformed” (to use Olaf’s word) into the fifth spirit. 

Both Jack and Elsa strike that very specific type of winter too. We can obviously tell that winter is her favorite season, and she thrives in the chilly north where it’s always cold at least partly. Her whole aesthetic is built on the promise of winter and i think that’s a cool idea. haha. On top of that, Jack never totally struck me as the heavy snowfall kind of dude; his version of winter always seemed like the brisk flurries you get at the very start of the season. They’re made for each other, your honor. it helps that Frozen II was set in late autumn. like if that’s not a blatant message of “winter is coming!” then what is amiright. They both exude a kind of winter in its youth: something on the precipice of permanence, delicate and lively and strong all at once. Their vibes might be different, but I feel like they share the same direction of the season, if you catch me.

Anyway listen my point is just that I want them to be friends at the very least. We’re all going to pretend the age gap doesn’t exist because they are both unalive for lack of a better term and Chris Pine voiced Jack despite having a very deep manly voice that definitely wasn’t suited for a literal child. I want Elsa to be able to see Jack even though no one else can because she’s the bridge between humanity and nature and I want them to bond over wintertime and I want them to get into snowball fights and to make patterns in the frost and to chase the wind around just for funsies. I want Jack to teach Elsa to fly, which they quickly find is something she does not excel at. I want her to show him his connection to the season and his responsibility to maintaining it because he may have a good heart but he’s got no respect for rules and deadlines. I want her to convince Ana that Jack is real, so that someone else can see him too (up until that point, Elsa was talking about him like he was just Some Guy she met so Ana was going to believe her but then Elsa dropped the whole “winter spirit” bombshell and Ana thought she finally cracked so it took some convincing in the end). I want them all to have game nights on fridays. I want Ana and Kristoff’s kids to grow up always having believed in Jack. I just want Jack to have a nice lil family okay :’) one that tolerates his pranks and mischief and I want Elsa to relax and have some carefree fun moments. I want her to laugh and have crazy, harmless adventures and do goofy things just for the sake of it.

I put way too much thought into this but I saw a KRIFFTON of parallels between these two characters when I watched Frozen II so like,,, y’all get to hear about how I feel you’re welcome

[tricksheart]

That one idol anime that's become popular verse.

Akira Amano-Suou, is a single singer talent of Strawberry Productions. Also known to the public as Spade, he's known to take roles that the others at the talent agency doesn't want because of his permanent bored personality. Any job is better than nothing. This means he takes more of a villain troupe but can switch genres like romance and action if needed.

Akira makes sure he's successful to stay relevant in the world of showbusiness but not too much in order not to outshine the idol group that contains B-Komachi, as they are the pillar of the company and not him. Akira had joined the talent agency on his own free will, Aqua having nothing to do with him wanting to choose this company over others or being blackmailed / manipulated to pick this place to advance his industry career.

He's good at managing money, so Akira helps with keeping the books up to date and in the green with the others so the talent agency doesn't have to shut down or have a scandal like what had happened before Akira had joined the company. An odd, somewhat silent and eccentric person, Akira has a neutral relationship with most of the other members of Strawberry Productions.

Akira tends not to get involved with Kana but has a good rapport with Ruby and Mem-cho. He's indifferent to Aqua but does mockingly tell the guy to enjoy getting revenge and then trying to pick up the pieces later. Akira never got to meet Ai personally but really doesn't have too much to say, since he only knew and saw the idol version of her, not the real Ai herself. Does think her rabbit motif is/was cool, since his favorite animal is a bunny. Akira thinks Pieyon is hilarious.

His hit single that made him rose to fame was Black Rain, which can be listened to in the video game, Tokyo Mirage Sessions, by one of the talents from that series, Yashiro Tsurugi. Akira also does the voice work for this character ( note: not official as Yoshimasa Hosoya voices Yashiro instead in real life ).

[goldlightwriting]

Funny thing about rewrites. They typically involve respecting the show they're based on. The only reason your ideas get so popular is because they involve shitting on the show itself. And a rewrite that shits on the show its based on is nothing more than a spite-filled fanfic by an egotistical narcissist.

Alright, this is gonna be the only one of these I acknowledge. I know I probably shouldn't, but whatever.

First and foremost, buddy, you gotta realize something: there's a reason why so many people try their hand at rewriting RWBY. The thing is, I honestly don't hate the show. I watched it for years and even now I occasionally poke my head back in if only to see what happens to the characters that I'm invested in. The fact is, though, that RWBY is a show filled with passion but also a tragically huge amount of wasted potential. If you enjoy the show, that's fine, but being a fan of something doesn't mean you can't recognize or acknowledge its flaws.

The show has way too many power systems in play to the point that some of them become redundant, characters have an unfortunate tendency to act extremely inconsistently when the plot demands them to, and even the whole fairytale motif that's supposed to be a huge inspiration for the show is all over the place in terms of relevance (ie Penny and her entire story is a near one-to-one translation of Pinnochio, but Velvet has literally nothing to do with the Velveteen Rabbit aside from her name and bunny ears.)

Despite what you think, I don't hate RWBY, nor do I dunk on it purely because it's popular to do (if that were the case I would have made way more than two videos on it, but I genuinely could not care less about making content for popularity.) In fact, I don't do rewrites for ANY property I hate. I'm just offering up my own opinions about stories that I think could have been better, and I offer my own ideas and interpretations because I find that to be much more constructive than simply bashing something I don't like, as you seem to be fond of doing. I'm not gonna sit here and pretend my ideas are perfect, nor am I a master-class writer, but criticism should be supplemented with feedback for improvement. Otherwise, it's not worth hearing.

Anyways, any further blind anon hate will be deleted. If you want to have an actual discussion about my work then I'm happy to oblige, but shallow attempts at online bullying do nothing but bore me.

[tomatograter]

hey dirkjake guy , what makes you so interested in dirkjake so much ?

if I were to answer this with total accuracy we would be here all day and i’d have to hand you a 60 page peer reviewed thesis but since I don't have that time and i’m assuming you also don’t; There’s a LOT of things to work with if you read dirkjake as more than just… a vehicle for dirkcentric character angst. And they’re pieces actively embedded in the story! That matter! I like building fanwork around a textual basis and these two quite literally go as far back as being part of the guardians setting up SBURB beta in Act fucking 2. You can mine motifs until you’re dead. Here’s a contained, though by no means complete, list of things I particularly like about them:

1) Dirk and Jake both have highly imperfect experiences with their own gender/sexuality, partly out of societal pressure and partly because the story has decided what they ought to be. You've got two gay characters who are both a man in the WRONG way; Dirk overcompensates masculinity so hard he thinks of himself as too brash, imposing, damaging, nearly sizzling arsenic. Jake is expected to be the most perfect dude that has ever Het'd and fails in every feasible way because its not who he's comfortable being. He's not a wife-hunting casanova, He's just kind of a blatant useless fruit. Each of them thinks the other has it together and is doing sooooooooo much better than themselves, though.

I like that even though the adoration is mutual, the relationship is not smoothed out. It's not perfect from the get-go, and it's easier to make it awkward before making it good. We see them at their most immature, they have plenty of flaws, and they're extremely self-sabotaging in the way that isn't "cute" (or romantically convenient) but rather realistically concerning. I like seeing them working through it & maybe relapsing & putting in the effort to be better. They mean a lot to each other but have no idea how to go about it without putting on a show, it's comical to the point of being endearing. 

...And they're still the one person that makes the other feel like more than just a sum of poorly stitched frankenstein parts. 

2) Moving onto The Cringe Axis Of Relevance: Dirk and Jake are inextricable from the overarching plot and cyclical nature of Homestuck itself, Dirk as a motivator and Jake as a escapegoat. You could technically “pin” the “blame” of more than a dozen game changing plot events on them, and sometimes they’re not even aware of it. Beta Jake is HIC’s bastard child, a Dirk splinter is a core component of LE, Jake Harley translates the ancient runes in the frog temple containing the game code & is the one to release SBURB worldwide, eventually going on a time-displaced quest to get the game in motion; Ultimate dirk, funnily enough, is trying to do the exact same thing but much more shittily after borrowing one of Jake’s company ships and copying jadebot’s schematics for the purpose of making a robot daughter to forcefully restart Homestuck, The Webbed Comique, after its over. (Mom lalonde was Grandpa’s assistant & vaguely familial protégé, if you remember. Funny how that works!) And this is just like, in the text. Rose in the candy postscript directly drops it: 

I guess plagiarism is a backwards form of flattery :/

Alpha Jake in turn ends up flooded with promises of giving LE’s his first defeat, kickstarts a thousand little conflicts throughout act 6, brings dirk back to life with a kiss, sends the bunny back in time in the box (he was jade’s secret penpal that far back!), eventually only knocks caliborn on his ass because *Dirk* gets hurt in a fight, then it turns out davepeta is his sprite and actually the one fated to defeat the final boss, and that’s just the major stuff. Alpha Dirk & his dastardly AI-self messily usher the alphas into a new session, we only discover what the hell is up with alpha earth through dirk’s 20 page pesterlog gifted on jake’s birthday, Hal’s existence partly relies on Jake’s unending support- and so does Brain ghost dirk’s existence, for that matter. In big-scale and small-scale stuff alike, they’re tied up.

3) Overabundance of referential motifs: Homestuck is practically a big collage of character-relevant media. You can talk about things like some of jake’s favorite superheroes being similar to dirk, or how dirk and jake’s romance is jokingly compared to the Princess Bride via their planets/personalities/BGD literally quoting the movie and acting out the same sword movements, or how they both have a thing for artisanal puppetry, or how dirk is a history buff while jake is a time-displaced verbal oddity, or how Dirk's concerns with narrative philosophy and clean logic make him squarely Apollonian in certain lit terms & that is perfectly opposed by Jake's haphazard Dionysian approach! Or how Grandpa has an orange-lit room of knights and a replica of Iron Man’s armor (widely known for his fragile heart) to stand in for Dirk while Jake has his knight genre movie posters and dreams up dirk to serve the same role, or how the brobot, built with jake’s help, eventually has a nervous conniption and rips his heart out so it can be used as a battery - and while the moment is reminiscent of aradiabot's blue blood breakdown, the heart is actually the same kind grandpa had installed into jadebot; as both were created to protect someone dearly beloved.

Funny how that works x4

Or just how like, Jake fantasizes about Avatar while kissing a poster but mentally he's having an elaborate dream of putting Dirk in the role of the movie's lead to prove how Awesome And Perfect life can be. Or how brain ghost dirk tells jake he looks good when he's feeling like shit and jake, in turn, says his gay little prince outfit looks pretty sweet and not dumb at all, in a sort of covert pep-talk system covering for both of their masculinity hang-ups. That works too.

4) They're the only ship I can confidently compare to Shrek, the Movie, and make that into insightful commentary.

And lastly:

[raionmimi]

Is there a reason why that confirms we won’t get Tiamat in FGO mobile? I mean they got Da Vinci Rider and Bunny Scathach before us, it’s not like it’s full stop impossible.

Yes and no, Da Vinci Rider is different between Arcade and FGO mobile, both in art and skills, but she’s also heavily plot relevant in both. Bunny Sca is just a skin based on art that existed way before either were implemented in game

Tiamat as an entire servant is impossible in FGO mobile’s timeline, but Arcade has the benefit of it being a different timeline where the characters are either different or choose different actions. We’ve already seen that they’re not that willing to put the same exact servants in both games in order to make sure people spend their money. It’s taken this long for Tiamat to be summoned at all, and they’ve already given her a different class and a larvae/adult motif. It’s very rare that they’ll add her to mobile since they already covered everything

I’m half joking when I say it’s confirmed, but given that Sita and Setanta are probs the most wanted servants in Arcade prior and still haven’t shown up yet (and probs never will), I doubt that Tiamat, an even more hyped up servant would show up any time soon, or at all sadly. Though obv I’d love for that not to be the case

[loonatism]

WHAT IS THE LOONAVERSE? PART 2 – THE NARRATIVE DEVICES

LOONA is special among K-pop for its immersive storyline. These girls are not just k-pop idols performing a song, they also perform a story and that story is what we call the Loonaverse.

So, what is the Loonaverse? In a few words: The world and story that LOONA inhabits.

Yeah. Duh. But what is it?

Well… it’s complicated.

The Loonaverse is a fictitious story that borrows elements from real science and fantasy to build its world but also uses allegories, metaphors, allusions and other literary devices to tell its story. Our job as spectators (and specifically us theorizers) is to look beyond those devices to understand the message they are trying to send. In this post I’ll attempt to explain the numerous literary devices used to narrate the story of the Loonaverse.

So, these 2 things are LAW:

Each girl has two conflicts: an external one and an internal one.

The LOONAVERSE story is one of fantasy and mystery.

INTERNAL CONFLICT VS EXTRNAL CONFLICT

Or as I like to call it: UNIT vs SOLO

I’ve explained how the girls are trapped in a time loop and how escaping it was their overarching goal. This is the external conflict of the Loonaverse. The progression of this storyline is seen mainly in the Sub-Unit MVs and LOONA MVs but also in some teasers and other videos like Cinema Theory. The conflict is external because: 1) It comes from the outside. 2) The characters not have power against it, at least not at the beginning. 3) The conflict has effect over multiple people.

Also…

Every character has an internal conflict. A personal story. Each girl perceives the world differently and that changes the way they act and interact with each other. It is internal because: 1) It comes from within the person. 2) They themselves may be the cause for the conflict. 3) The conflict has effect on only one person: themselves. This Internal conflict is presented to us in the Solo MVs. Every solo MV is a window to the character’s mind. While the solo MVs are tangentially related to the main external conflict, they mostly focus on the internal conflict of the character.

External and Internal conflicts often mix and interlace each other to create a wider story. We will see how the external conflict fuels the internal conflicts of the girls and how their internal conflicts will shape the way they act towards solving the external conflict.

FANTASY AND MYSTERY

What is fantasy? The genre of fantasy is described as a story based in a world completely separate from our own. It usually features elements or magical/supernatural forces that do not exist on our own world. It is not tied to reality of science.

Wait a minute. You just spent an entire post explaining the science of the Loonaverse. You can’t call it fantasy now. Well yes, yes I can. Since most of the scientific elements I explained are theoretical, unproved in our world but in the world of LOONA they are a reality, a scientific reality. A reality that differs from our own, and thus a fantasy to us. But regardless of that the reason I call the Loonaverse a fantasy is because of the themes it explores.

Fantasy is a broad genre, it is one of the oldest literary genres, being found in old myths. Some of the themes often found in fantasy stories include: tradition vs. change, the individual vs. society, man vs. nature, coming of age, betrayal, epic journeys, etc. All of these themes are very present in the Loonaverse. But I’ll delve into each one as we encounter them.

What is Mystery? The mystery genre is a type of fiction in which a person (usually a detective) solves a crime. The purpose is to solve a puzzle and to create a feeling of resolution with the audience. Some elements of a mystery include: the Crime that needs solving, the use of suspense, use of figures of speech, the detective having inference gaps, the suspects motives are examined in the story, the characters usually get in danger while investigating, plus these:

Red herring. something that misleads or distracts from a relevant or important question and leads the audience to a false answer.

Suspense. Intense feeling that an audience goes through while waiting for the outcome of certain events.

Foreshadowing. A literary device that hints at information that will become relevant later on.

I just though you should know these definitions.

In the Loonaverse, the “crime” is the time loop itself, and the mystery is finding a way to break it. Or so we think. In reality, the “How do we break the loop?” question is solved rather easily. But can we really call this a mystery if the main question is already answered? Yes! It may no be a mystery story for the characters themselves but because BlockBerry uses various mystery genre tropes while telling the story, it is a mystery TO THE AUDIENCE.

That’s right! WE are the detectives!

In a classical mystery, the detective examines all clues, motives, and possible alibis, for each suspect, or in our case, each character. The same way we analyze every MV, every interaction, every possible clue to where and when everything is happening.

The Loonaverse differs from a classic ‘Who done it?’ by establishing that no suspect is actually guilty. The crime IS the loop, but no girl is responsible for it (or so we think). Our job as detectives is not to figure out who is doing this but to explain how and establish an timeline of events that shed a light to what really happened. In that sense, our job resembles more closely a real crime investigation than a mystery novel.

LITERARY DEVICES

There are many literary devices an author can use to tell its story. Too many to cover them all in here, so I’ll focus on the most recurrent ones in the Loonaverse:

Allusion. Referring to a subject matter such as a place, event, or literary work by way of a passing reference.

Archetype. Reference to a concept, a person or an object that has served as a prototype of its kind and is the original idea that has come to be used over and over again.

Faulty Parallelism. the practice placing together similarly structure related phrases, words or clauses but where one fails to follow this parallel structure.

Juxtaposition. The author places a person, concept, place, idea or theme parallel to another

Metaphor. A meaning or identity ascribed to one subject by way of another. One subject is implied to be another so as to draw a comparison between their similarities and shared traits.

Motif. Any element, subject, idea or concept that is constantly present through the entire body of literature.

Symbol. Using an object or action that means something more than its literal meaning, they contain several layers of meaning, often concealed at first sight.

Genre. Classification of a literary work by its form, content, and style.

Some other literary devices worthy of your private investigation are: Negative Capability, Point of View, Doppelgänger, Flashback, Caesura, Stream of Consciousness, Periodic Structure, THEME, Analogy.

About Genre:

Genres are important because they give a story structure. They help an author tell the story in a way that makes it simple for the audience to understand what kind of story is being told. The classic genres of literature are Poetry, Drama and Prose. Some scholars include Fiction and Non-fiction. 

In film there are a variety of accepted genres: Comedy, Tragedy, Horror, Action, Fantasy, Drama, Historical, etc. Plus a bunch of subgenres like Contemporary Fantasy, Spy Film, Slapstick Comedy, Psychological Thriller, etc. What defines a genre is the use of similar techniques and tropes like color, editing, themes, character archetypes, etc. 

I point this out because the Loonaverse uses many genres to tell its story. Sure, the main story is a fantasy/mystery but every MV or Teaser has its own genre (especially the solo MVs). So, when I point out later that Kiss Later is a romantic comedy or that One & Only is a gothic melodrama, this is what I mean.

TLDR:

The Loonaverse is the world and story that LOONA inhabits. It borrows form real life science and fantasy elements to better tell its story. Each girl has an external conflict (escaping the loop) and an internal conflict (portrayed in the solo MVs). Both conflicts interlace to tell the story. The Loonaverse is a story of Fantasy because it takes place in a different world from ours and it is a Mystery because it is told using various mystery tropes. The story uses multiple literary and visual devices to tell it’s story and fuel the mystery.

REMEMBER: This is all my interpretation. My way of comprehending and analyzing the story. You don’t have to agree with everything. I encourage you to form your own theories. Remember: every theory is correct.

After all that you may be wondering what the story even is. And we’ll finally be getting to that. While I have my own interpretation of the timeline, themes and who did what. I think it’s more fun to slowly explore every brick instead of just summarizing it in one (incredibly long) post. I’ll do that much, much, much later. The journey will be just as interesting as the destination. I hope you’re in for the ride.

Let’s get to the real deal: The MVs. I’m going in chronological order so let’s start with girl No. 1!

Next: The bright pink bunny of LOONA: HeeJin’s ViViD.

[sneakydraws]

Well, here it is - a lengthy explanation of each card in my mdzs major arcana deck and what I meant to convey/what i would have changed in retrospect/what alternatives i considered! It’s a bit messy and my typing style is lazy but hopefully it will be an interesting read to some of you :)

And so you don’t say I didn’t warn you - jiang cheng’s section (11 justice) is absurdly long lmao

0 the fool  I elaborated on this in the post itself but yeah basically jin ling is kind of representative of all the damage and trauma caused by the past, and there’s a kind of danger there of him falling victim to the same vices as the older characters and repeating the same mistakes and perpetuating the cycle of war and misery (the cycle that we already see with how the jin sect became the new wen sect, and later with how jgy became the new wwx) and he has a lot of room to grow! He grows so much over the course of the novel, comes to realise the complexities of the past and gets a harsh life lesson in how nothing is as black and white as it seems. But ill save talking about his progress for the end, for now whats important is that he has room to grow and also a dog. I don’t really have a justification for the sun, i mostly just thought it looked sick? It made its way to the next card as well, where it makes a bit more sense, but then i realised it was a dumb motif to include 1 the magician I still very much like wwx for the role, and that illustration would have probably had him raising a corpse on his left and pointing threateningly to the sun on his right. I considered including the table as well, with some mdzs relevant items replacing the card suits. Anyway, like i said wwx got a few cards to himself already so i went with the alternative wq design, since i think she fits the card as well. Both she and wwx are highly skilled people, extremely driven once they set their mind to something. The card to me symbolises the creative mind as well as a general drive for action, which fits them both - wwx was famously a prolific inventor, and wq came up with a previously unheard of surgery, after all. This card strays pretty far from the rider-waite deck design, largely because i was still figuring out how i wanted to approach this series, but you can still see the influence. 2 the high priestess I was actually going to skip this card at first because I couldn’t think of a fitting character, but once i considered a qings character post death, it all fit pretty well. She was already a highly intuitive person in life, and in sharing her memories with wwx she is, in a way, relaying a kind of secret knowledge. Anyway she’s one of my fav characters so im glad i got a chance to include her. The coffins could be interpreted to be xxc and sl or xxc and xy 3 the empress Theres other mother figures in mdzs who got to be mothers for a longer time, but jyl definitely embodies the positive aspects of this card the best. She’s nurturing, kind, emotionally supportive, she already mothered wwx and jc quite a bit when she was young. Plus i liked that the rw card had both water and flowers, making an easy lotus connection. In retrospect the stars look kind of out of place and i should have replaced them with something more relevant... Also, i should have had her hold a lotus seed pod instead of a flower, haha 4 the emperor Like i said I considered jc for the role but hoching bullied me into admitting that nmj was better… they’re both more of an inverted emperor than an upright one but then again theres hardly any character in mdzs who would fit upright emperor so. Jgs was also considered but he’s even uglier than nmj so i couldn’t bear to draw him 5 the hierophant It was pointed out to me that lqr would have fit this card better and the truth if that statement haunts me to this day. Unfortunately I have no space in my brain for lqr so lxc got the role instead. My main reason was his role during the wen destruction of gusu lan, when he ran away with the contents of the library - this is why there’s bookshelves behind him. The keys, take, from the rider-waite deck, are meant to represent the gusu pendants that allow you to enter 6 the lovers Im sure many people would have chosen wangxian here but I uhh don’t really care abt wangxian personally? And also their love story is so convoluted that jyl and jzx seem idyllic by comparison lol. Also i didnt really have an idea for who to put in the angel’s place for wangxian… mme jin certainly did not get these two together in the end but undeniably she and mme yu did initially give them a chance to fall for each other so. Thats something i guess. Anyway the trees became their sects’ flowers and the mountain became the burial grounds - an omen of their tragic fate, basically 7 the chariot There might have been other characters who fit this card better but i couldn’t really think of another card for lwj and i thought it would be weird to not include him… anyway i don’t really care for current timeline lwj BUT i do like that he was clearly influenced by wwx to walk his own path in life based on his moral convictions rather than follow his sect’s rules blindly. The chariot is to me a card of self control, self determination and focused action, so it seemed fitting. The composition felt kind of empty without the actual chariot so i padded it out with the guqin, the cloud recess in the bg (it doesn’t look great but i tried to replicate the drama design….) and the bunnies which conveniently fit the colour scheme of the sphinxes in the rider-waite design 8 strength Like i said before, my interpretation of this card is more… morally ambiguous than the quote unquote official meaning, so i thought about manipulative or duplicitous characters more than kind characters whose strength is expressed through gentleness (though i did consider jyl briefly for the latter interpretation). As such, i considered both jgy and nhs, but ended up going with jgy largely because i couldn’t pass up the opportunity to put the nie sect’s beast as the lion. 9 the hermit My thoughts immediately went to bssr lol. It may be an overly literal interpretation but whatever, i like it just fine. And i like that i managed to echo the rider-waite silhouette in the mountain and the tree (and even in bssr herself) 10 wheel of fortune God i love the parallels between these 2… this card to me is about how you cant trust your current situation, good or bad, to last forever, and these 2 embody that perfectly imo. Wwx went from son of a well off servant and a powerful cultivator, to street rat orphan, to adopted son of sect leader jiang, to double orphan, to MIA, to terrifying but admired warrior, to terrifying and despised traitor, to dead, to, at the very end, suddenly respected and trusted again. The dishonesty and cheapness of whatever the public’s current opinion of him is is portrayed beautifully as far as im concerned. And jgy of course claws his way up to power only to instantaneously become public enemy number one, to the point that he’s probably blamed for stuff there’s no reason to believe he had a hand in. Wei wuxian’s silent astonishment at how quickly the cultivation world turns against jgy and towards him again is a delicious moment of thematic resonance.  11 justice I settled on this card for jc after he got booted from the emperor seat but i do think it fits, in a somewhat convoluted way. I turned both the sword and the scales into visual representations of the golden core transfer (can you tell im obsessed with it). According to biddy tarot, the justice card is partly about searching for the truth, and the scene where jc finds out about the transfer is of course a big deal. I was also very influenced by the reversed meaning again - which is about being reluctant or unwilling to face or accept the consequences of your actions. I feel on an intuitive level that this fits jc but I’m not sure how well i can explain it - it’s something about how he’s a little too comfortable scapegoating wwx for things that were also, if much less so, influenced by his actions, and also something about the way he keeps wwx at an arm’s length emotionally but still leans on him and accepts his support when he really needs it, and somewhat hypocritically expects wwx to put the needs of him and the jiang sect before the needs of others. And also something about the core exchange is the consequence and proof of wwx’s deep - terrifyingly deep, even - love and care for him, which is something jc doesn’t seem to let himself acknowledge. Maybe even something about how you could argue that the way all of the jiangs acted around wwx - jfm’s favouritism that left him with the feeling of a debt he needs to repay, mme yus insistence that he be a servant more than a brother to jc, prepared to give his life for jc, and jc’s own unwillingness - or inability, he was a child after all - to clearly acknowledge wwx as an equal to himself, enabling wwx’s self sacrificial and protective tendencies - that all of this was what caused wwx’s complete and unquestioning willingness to do whatever it took to protect jc, and therefore paved the way to the golden core transfer. And i don’t mean this to be scapegoating jc - especially considering how young he was when this all went down, it wouldn’t be fair to expect this level of emotional perceptiveness, awareness and maturity of him - but i think adult jc has to grapple with the fact that the chain of cause and effect was not as simple as wwx fucking everyone’s lives up to be a martyr, and that both jc and his parents had a role in that story as well. I don’t even necessarily think this is something that jc only realised in the current timeline - i think it’s something he felt on some level this whole time, and it probably led to a lot of feelings of guilt - but the suibian reveal definitely puts it in sharp focus, and i think he’s now better equipped to handle this introspection than he was as a recently orphaned, traumatised teenager, lol. ANYWAY the window with the fabric is both a nod to the rider-waite design and a reference to the destruction of lanling - i actually did some basic ass research for this, and it seems that in ancient china fabric would indeed be hanged in a window if the normally used paper was damaged. The design of the window, as well as the very idea to use it to imply the reconstruction of lanling, was taken from this great piece of jc angst by my pal moroll1! Oh yeah also the covered window kind of works as a denial of forgiveness for jc because it’s like a halo but covered up... Also I completely forgot to put a blindfold over his eyes which would be perfectttt because blind justice and the core exchange......... ok moving on 12 the hanged man I always have issues with this card because i cant find a satisfactory summary of what it’s really about. Best i can tell it symbolises a need to hit pause, surrender or let go of something… ive also seen it tied to sacrifice? So mo xuanyu doesn’t fit perfectly, but sacrifice is definitely there in a surface level reading kind of way, and the idea that you have to surrender or let go in order to achieve your goal does fit the whole deal of getting revenge but giving up your life in exchange and not being there to see it 13 death This is probably one of my favourite cards, definitely not because I have huge issues with change or anything…. I see this card as signalling the necessity of change or putting an end to something / leaving something in the past in order to start anew? At first i considered putting past wwx, mxy and current wwx here as a kind of transformation and one cycle flowing into the next... But firstly, I’d already used mxy in the very previous card, so putting him in again would feel like overkill, and secondly, the longer I thought about it the less convinced I was that this would even fit with the card’s meaning? Because coming back from the dead doesn’t like... trigger an internal transformation within wwx or anything? Anyway, fun fact: the design I ended up going with was actually originally intended for judgement! I thought I was being very clever with the whole “figure plays an instrument and the dead rise” parallel, but apparently I’d just completely forgotten that the judgement card had a completely different composition... Truly I was boo boo the fool... But yeah anyway at the end of the day I figured the design would kind of work for death as well, with Wen Ning and the theme of transformation, (since in his case coming back as a fierce corpse does actually mark a certain transformation in behaviour) and Wei Wuxian’s protection of the Wen people essentially signifying an attempt to break the cycle of oppression if that makes any sense? Like, wwx is trying to revolutionise the way the world works a bit, if you catch my drift 14 temperance  The centrist card! Again this is probably going off track from the “official” interpretation, but to me this card has a certain “don’t commit fully; do everything in moderation; don’t take either side” flavour to it that i personally find infuriating irl and that i very much assign to lxc. It’s entirely possible that I’m misinterpreting his character because i didn’t really pay him (and the 3zun in general) much mind while reading, but hell, I’m allowed to pick favourites and choose who i want to interpret deeply vs shallowly. Again, i wish id chosen lqr for hierophant because its so annoying for a character i don’t care about to get two cards…. But oh well 15 the devil My alternative idea for this was jgy as the devil and lxc plus nmj as the figures, but since all three had been featured already (multiple times, even!) i figured I’d go with xy instead, especially since he’s among my faves lol. I think the devil signifies something along the lines of unhealthy attachment, obsession or addiction, which isn’t 100% accurate in the case of xxc and a-qing, but if i stretch it a bit to cover toxic relationships in general, and especially manipulation or negative influence, i don’t think it’s half bad. My main struggle here was to choose who amongst the xxc/sl/aq trio to choose for the human figures. 16 the tower Arguably jin zixuans death and the following massacre of nightless city were the final and most direct reason for the siege of burial mounds, and the tiger seal is good shorthand for wwx’s loss of control over his powers, which led to the deaths of jzx and jyl. When reimagining major arcana i like to feature some kind of building in this card (spoilers for a possible future project but in my rose of versailles major arcana set the tower is bastille) and even if it’s not a tower, the image of wwx looming over the gathered crowd from atop a rooftop is so good i couldn’t resist 17 the star Struggled with this one - considered both jin ling and lsz for it, as symbolising a hope for the future, but that was kind of covered by the world so it wouldn’t make sense to include here as well... As usual when I struggle with interpreting a card (as opposed to understanding it but struggling with matching a character to it, like with death or moon) I went to biddy tarot and read all the details about its meaning. What i got was that this card signifies an incoming period of introspection and inner peace following a time of turmoil, as well as a general moving on into a new, better phase of one’s life or finding new meaning and purpose. The figure also suggests someone vulnerable, but possessing a keen sense of intuition as well as a good degree of practicality and common sense. Given all those, I settled for mianmian because IM LOVE HER..... I also kind of see her as a prelude to the “just one person is enough” theme present in tgcf!! And i think her decision to abandon her sect because she saw the toxicity and corruption in it is a very inspiring action - even if it didn’t make a large visible impact, i think the appearance of her and her idyllic family at the very end of the novel - paralleling and mirroring wangxian - implies that at the end of the day, it was a meaningful one 18 the moon Another card i ALWAYS fuxking struggle with - this time less because i can’t grasp its meaning and more because I can never find a character that fits it well. I usually get fixated on the “dreams and subconscious” part, but if i lean more on the “disguise, deceit, anxiety and fear” part, i eventually figured the whole yi city arc wouldn’t be a bad fit. I say the entire arc because it really does encompass all those themes if you include both the past and the present - xue yang’s disguise, his tricks with the villagers, a-qing’s lies and even xxc’s reluctance to talk about his past as well as xue yang pretending to be xxc all fit the disguise and deceit angle, and the general mystery and creepiness of the current timeline yi city work well with the anxiety and fear - the mist, the slow uncovering of the past, even a-qing being revealed to be an ally after scaring the shit out of the protags. I definitely struggled with including all the elements and characters, and even moreso with making them vaguely fit the rider-waite composition, but i think it ended up okay ish. OH and i completely forgot to draw mist swirling around them :( 19 the sun I was considering mianmian’s family for this one, but since I used her for star, I ended up with wwx and his parents instead. Once again I’m reinterpreting the card a bit - normally I think it symbolises incoming times of pure happiness and abundance, as well as a connection with the inner child, but I gave it more of a nostalgic or sentimental twist - wwx looking back at the brief glimpse of his happy childhood. 20 judgement another card that i struggle to interpret a bit... Here i actually used the tgcf tarot zine as a reference! In it judgement is summarised as “rebirth, following duty, absolution” SO i figured that nhs, mxy and wwx all together would fit pretty neatly... wwx achieving (public) absolution through clearing his own name after being reborn, and nhs sort of calling on wwx to expose jgy’s crimes... It’s a bit messy but not bad I think! 21 the world This ties very closely to my read on mdzs as a story - which is that it’s, at the end of the day, largely about cycles, and about how hard it is to break them, but how we gotta keep trying and have hope anyway. Or maybe more precisely, that the people directly involved with and influenced by the trauma of the past might not be able to get over said trauma and that the hope for healing from it will be shouldered by the new generation. Or something like that… Basically what i mean is that jc and wwx and lwj and lxc and nhs and jgy and all these people who were in the thick of the sunshot campaign and the siege are so profoundly affected by it that it genuinely feels by the end of the story like there is little hope for them to ever truly overcome that trauma and build a better future without repeating the same old mistakes - but there is a glimmer of hope in the new generation, specifically in jl and lsz. And it’s a bit paradoxical, because they have also been directly impacted by the past tragedies - lsz having his entire clan wiped out after wwx failed to protect them, jl losing both his parents to wwx’s mistakes - but despite that loss, and despite coming from arguably the two opposing sides of the past conflicts, they are both, in the end, capable of moving past that tragedy, of recognising the complicated nature of those conflicts (jl’s moment of clarity at the end is both heartbreaking and hopeful) and forging friendships between clans in the process. I honestly think that the extra where jl is struggling to assert his authority as sect leader, to treat his subjects well and to cooperate with other sects in a truly amicable way is the single hopeful ending note for the larger themes of the novel - it allows us to imagine that maybe these kids can learn from the mistakes of their elders rather than getting sucked in by resentment at those mistakes, and actually build a brighter future for the cultivation world. And sidenote, this is also why i have a soft spot for jin ling and lan sizhui as a ship... speaking of which their poses were directly referenced from the lovers card ehehe

Looking back, I’d like to add some symbol of jin ling’s trauma so that it mirrors baby wen yuan in the tree stump... maybe his father’s sword? 

[queen-erika-the-songful]

Okay, here are my initial thoughts on Princess Adventure. These are in no way organized; they’re just as I can remember them. Feel free to send asks if you want

- Barbie defending Chelsea’s creativity and imagination is great to see. It’s one of the best parts of Dreamhouse Adventures so it’s nice to see them continue that in this film

- I like “Try It On” a lot more now. It’s not my favorite, and I think it’s one of the weaker songs in comparison to the rest of the soundtrack, but it’s honestly kind of a bop.

- “It’s like they don’t even want me in this movie!” LOL even Tammy herself knows she’s been done an absolute injustice.

- Holy crap Amelia’s plan is so freaking funny to me. She could’ve just, like...invited Barbie over to her kingdom since she’s the princess and was already a fan of Barbie’s vlogs anyway. But nah, she’s gotta have this whole convoluted “cultural exchange” bullshit I just can’t

- Speaking of Amelia, it’s a little disappointing that we don’t spend nearly as much time with her as we do with Barbie, and, thus, we don’t get to see who the supposed “real” her really is. She says she finally got to explore things about herself, like her fears and dreams, but she never goes into details. Ironically, the audience never gets to see who the true Amelia is, we just have to go off what she said about “who [she] is does matter”. I mean, we certainly get glimpses of it (again, the convoluted plan - she’s obviously ‘act first think later’), but overall it’s not nearly enough, at least to me

- “(Not A) Picture Perfect Girl” might just be my favorite song from this movie. It honestly made me tear up a bit. We’ll see if that changes over my next rewatches

- The running gag with Trey mixing up Barbie and Amelia while Ted and Ned knew was a lot funnier than I expected it to be

- Trey is now trans and you can’t change my mind.

- I really appreciate “Somewhere New” a lot more now since seeing it in the movie. I love that the choreography starts on the plane. It was a cool choice that really felt like a “musical” thing to do. I also like that everyone got to sing at leaset a line or two on their own. 

- WTF happened between Floravia and Johanistan? Did they have a war or something? Why are they being united into just a bigger Floravia? It sounds pretty fishy. I can understand why Johan is so upset based on what little information is given to us, so I wish they had gone into it a bit more.

- Johan asked “Amelia” (Barbie in disguise) if she remembered what they said they would do as rulers when they were kids. That never comes back and it really bothered me. What was the promise? That they’d rule together? That they’d treat each other’s kingdom equally? I actually thought at the coronation that Amelia would give the answer to that question (something like “Johan, remember what we told each other...”) and then do something like absolve the treaty so that she and Johan would rule their own respective kingdoms. l

- IDK, I think I would’ve just liked it more if Johan had been like Amelia’s brother/cousin/whatever that wanted to become King. He’d be a more boring villain that way but it would be less complicated than this.

- WE GOT REPRISES OF 2 SONGS BUT THEY AREN’T ON THE SOUNDTRACK?! I will NOT stand for that. As soon as the movie comes out on DVD I’m ripping those tracks out and adding them to my playlist

- I really thought Ken and Barbie were finally going to get together. I shall now accept my clown shoes and wig. I’m already applying the makeup now.

- The sequence for “Life in Color” disappointed me a bit. It’s one of my favorite songs on the soundtrack, but the placement in the movie felt like it came out of nowhere. I was really hoping for a nice, tender moment between Barbie and Amelia. Even if they were kept separated, it could’ve started with them video-chatting again. Maybe they’d talk about their personal struggles and then Barbie would stop the recording (”We don’t have to film this...”) and they’d just have a moment between themselves to talk.

- On the other hand, “King of the Kingdom” was such a good scene. It was very entertaining and I laughed a lot (which I had to hold back a lot since I was still at work). Also, those boys can move!!

- To make up for all of the interruptions and missed opportunities, Ken Carson deserves at least 3 episodes centered on him and his life and 1 where he finally tells Barbie how he feels

- TAFFY HAD NO REASON TO BE IN THIS MOVIE. I don’t care that Barbie almost always needs an animal sidekick. Snowy (Amelia’s bunny) fills that role. Taffy just gave everyone a freaking heart attack. Also, how the heck did she survive the plane ride? California to Floravia is a 10-hour flight so how did she stay unnoticed for so long?? ROBERTS FAMILY, GET SOME DAMN LEASHES!

- Speaking of that scene, I hate it. It ate up valuable time that could’ve been later spent developing the plot or Amelia’s character. It was only like 2 minutes but in a movie that is already pretty short (1hr11min) every second counts

- Can DA please finally drop the whole “Hey look Renee is claustrophobic” already? It’s repetitive as all hell and honestly it rubs me the wrong way how often it’s played for laughs. It works in the DA Halloween episode since it’s all about everyone facing their fears but everywhere else it feels like a cheap & undeserved laugh (it only happens twice in the movie I think but I wanted to mention it anyway)

- Morningstar being a little bitch to Barbie was hilarious. I don’t really like animal toys anymore but I’d totally buy her. (She’s part of a doll-horse set called Prance & Shimmer Horse. The Barbie doll has Amelia’s princess dress).

- “This is My Moment” really warmed my heart. The last shot with Amelia and Barbie smiling at each other reminded me a lot of Princess & the Popstar actually. I also really like how they brought back stuff from “Try It On” for Barbie’s verse. Musical finale numbers that bring back earlier motifs is something I just cannot get enough of. 

- I liked Alfonso. Like Amelia said, he means well; he just didn’t put as much thought into what Ameila herself wants as he could have. But hey, he was learning just as much as they were

- I LOVED all of the stuff with Barbie trying to make it big and that bitch Rose Ross being all “This is what you have to do to make it sweetie :)” like that’s a great thing to show to kids. You can want to be famous and expand your content like Barbie wanted to, but you have to be smart about it, and you have to stay true to yourself. That plotline also mixed pretty well with Amelia’s life being formulated for the public too. I really did like all of that stuff about how media, social media especially, is constantly fabricated and edited to make things seem easier/better than they might be in real life. 

- THEY FINALLY WENT BACK TO INDIVIDUAL END MORALS THANK GOD. I got really tired of seeing “This is our story, what’s yours?” after every Barbie movie, especially when every movie that used it wasn’t going for that message. Hell, that’s not even a lesson or anything, that’s just a random end quote.

- “Life doesn’t happen on camera. Life is what happens when the cameras are off” THAT IS SO GOOD AND RELEVANT I CAN’T EVEN!!!

[allywrites360]

Red Shoes - Analysis/Review

“You’re the most beautiful woman in the world… whether my eyes are open… or closed.” - Merlin

““But I’m still that Merlin inside.” - The one who grew. The one who changed, and learned to love himself and others for more than what’s on the outside. I know Snow is the main example of self love in this film, but Merlin provides a great example of this; something we don’t often see in male characters.”

--

So this film just released in North America, and I thought I’d share some thoughts and overall themes/metaphors from this film. But first, I’d just like to encourage you (if you haven't already) to go and support this film. It pretty inexpensive, and was made by an independent animation studio, which I think is absolutely amazing. Now onto the analysis!!

Love the concept of everyone being an adaptation of a fairytale character; adds to the society being shallow and appearance focus as a whole, as fairytales were traditionally focused on dichotomy and physical beauty.

The lighting, and really animation as a whole, is phenomenal for a film made by an independent studio. The shading and colour grading is a real standout, though. And the landscapes!! They feel really three dimensional, and gorgeous.

[ID - A shot of a sunrise, beautifully lit behind a belltower - End ID].

Scoring/motif for the main villain is amazing.

Introduction to the protagonist is really not setup well. Did she actually get sent away from the palace? How long was she gone? How desperate is she to save her father? All of these questions are left unanswered, and no prominent character traits are shown through her first scene. She could be clever? All she did was change her hiding spot, so even that’s a stretch.

I hate the king’s narration. The dialogue is choppy, and repetitive in a completely irrelevant way.

The lore around the tree is really unclear. Why haven’t the shoes worked for Regina? Why do they work for Snow? Will they not regrow?

Love the transition scene to the dwarfs; makes it feel as though they’re just been walking listlessly since the spell was cast. Which, y’know, more or less true.

[ID - A shot of the seven dwarfs walking together through the centre of a forest in midday, looking slightly dejected - End ID].

Love the fact the mirror points out that ‘wisdom’ and ‘kingdom’ don’t rhyme; I paused to point that out.

I will say that the action scenes are really well directed/choreographed. The camera flows really nicely, and always follows our protagonists (ooh, tying into the dichotomous nature of fairytales overall?), which makes the stakes and emotions feel higher/more personal.

The villain’s voice acting and dialogue is really sharp and entertaining. She feels like a real threat (and also uncannily similar to Gothel but).

Love the wooden front on their house disguised as a castle. Really nicely done metaphor for them clinging on to a cheap version of their pasts; refusing to move on, which is torn down when she arrives. Also ties in to the “what’s on the inside outweighs what’s one the outside” moral.

[ID - The seven dwarfs’ house, which is a cave, with a wooden cutout shaped and painted like a castle sitting in front of it to give the illusion of a grander living space - End ID].

Can I also say I love that her first reaction isn’t insanely positive to her new appearance? In general, she just notes there’s been a change, which is a really nice subversion of the ‘overweight people have to be unhappy at the outset’ trope.

Her facial expressions are also really animated, which is something I’ve always loved (see Ariel, Anastasia, etc.), especially her eyes. Really well designed. Actually, all the expressions suit the characters’ personalities really well. Great job, animation department!

The fact that all seven dwarfs are names after popular mythical characters is really inventive (much more so than simply naming them after a character trait), as well as having their diverse fighting style be built from that, which I loved. Could even be allusions, but I don’t know enough about the original stories to say.

Hate the electric guitar of Prince Average. Highlights how much he doesn’t belong in this movie. His name is horribly uncreative, and his pop culture references break the forth wall, and aren’t funny, as they aren’t used properly. With him as the involved antagonist for most of the film, I can’t take the threat seriously. Other comic villains have been done so much better, such as Prince Charming from Shrek. The only valid line he has is about ‘dwarfs’ vs. ‘dwarves’; I never know which to use. “Finally, the big guns, thank you!” One more fourth wall break from this man I swear.

Love the added detail of the shoes not being able to be removed once you place value on the beauty they give. It’s hard to let go of that temptation; and if you don’t, you won’t be seen as your true self. It also highlights how she loves herself at the outbreak of the movie, and is therefore able to remove them freely. Also gets rid of the the deus ex machina of her shoes coming off freely in the water.

Wish we could’ve seen her doubt grow as she realizes they wouldn’t have helped her in her original form. Feels like we were a bit disconnected from her emotions. Which might not be a bad thing… if we assume Merlin in the protagonist.

Nice foreshadowing to her father being the bunny; if you know to look for it.

References such as ‘#blessed’, or ‘Pablo Picasso’, don’t work in the slightest. They serve no purpose, and aren’t funny simply because most would recognize them.

Normally I would make a note about Merlin and Snow having really standard, basic designs, but one, this animation studio is small, and on limited resources, and two, it, again, relates back to the shallow, uninteresting societal expectation of beauty that refuses to be unique.

Ahh, nice that apples are what trip the guards up in the chase scene through the market. Symbolic.

Love that she’s willing to defend the dwarfs even when she realizes they won’t help her in her original form. Again, wish we could’ve seen her emotions pertaining to that a bit more, although the reflection shot in the mirror (reflected from the shot at the start of the scene) was nice. Speaking of that, the broken, fragment reflection of her ‘fake’ self, is beautiful, because it isn’t a representation of herself, however at the end of the scene, we see the reflection in the same manner, but with her original self, but due to newly inflicted self doubt, we get a split second of that reality being fragmented too.

[ID - Snow White frowning as she looks into a shattered mirror leaning against the wall of an alleyway in her society-dictated “beautiful” - End ID].

[ID - Snow White looking into the same mirror, frowning, and having removed the shoes, restoring her to her original appearance - End ID].

The three bears (I’m assuming an allusion to the Goldilocks mythos) don’t really serve any plot relevance… however they are cute, so make of their inclusion what you will.

Again, the scene where she exits the dwarfs’ home; it would’ve been great to see a shot of her internal conflict before she submits herself to giving up her freedom for Merlin and Arthur’s. Relating to that, I have noticed that the hostage situations have shockingly low stakes in this film. For instance, at the end, Merlin is simply held in a branch, and a second later, Snow is willing to give up her life to set him free.

The movie didn’t end up using this (which was a nice subversion of expectations), but if Merlin had used all his spells in the final battle, and needed just one more shot, it wouldn’t have been a deus ex machina, because we establish previously he has the one Snow gave him for luck. I assumed it’d comeback again, but turns out they just used it as a symbol (for having the flower, a symbol of outside beauty, float out of his hand), for him letting go of his shallow mindset.

[ID - Snow White (wearing the shoes which change her appearance) smiles at Merlin, in his dwarf form. In his hand there’s a paper flower she folded from one of his spells - End ID].

Really love the joke about the mirror being hurt by smoke. Get it? Smoke and mirrors? Now that reference is funny; and also ties into the theme of false fronts/illusions. But not gonna lie, all that was an afterthought. It genuinely made me laugh.

Love that they rebuild the house too. It’s not beautiful, at least in a traditional sense. It’s cracked, uneven, but personal to them; they did it as a family. I’ll give the writers credit for so fully entrenching the theme into every frame and action. Nothing is meaningless in this film. Well, at least surrounding the protagonists.

Ooh, ooh, I could forgive the use of pop as their love motif if at the end, when there are no facades, it’s replaced by original scoring. I don’t remember that scene in all that much detail though.

The tree thing is… strange, I’ll admit, but considering Regina puts all her stock in the beauty which comes from the magic tree, it makes sense it’d be rooted into her magic in some way. The apple details are cool (notches shaped like seeds on the trunks), if nothing else, considering the scene with the three attacking is not investing the slightest, beyond some inventive attacks from Merlin (the action and attacks surrounding him aren’t executed all that poorly).

The directing in general is phenomenal in this movie; which is something I’ve been trying to put a bit more attention on lately.

Love small details like Merlin holding his back after the fight, circling back once again to the fact these characters are more similar than they realize (if you remember, that’s what she used as a cover when she first woke up).

[ID - A shot of Merlin running, pressing a hand against his back as he does so - End ID].

Okay, I can suspend my disbelief for a lot of things in this movie, but when Snow dives into the lake, that surface tension would’ve seriously hurt her. If even some waves would’ve been added, it would’ve not only added suspense to the scene, but made it a bit more grounded as well.

“Who do you like more, Snow White or Red Shoes?” “Easy, it’s Red Shoes.” “Who does Red Shoes love more?” “Easy, it’s me. Wait… no. It’s you.” That line is by far my favourite from the film. I love that it shows his guilt. She’s chosen to love him despite his appearance, but he won’t do the same for her. And now he has to look in the mirror at that ugly part of his personality.

[ID - At night, Merlin in his dwarf form stands beside Merlin in his human form. The dwarf version of him looks irritated as he looks up - End ID].

(Assuming Merlin named the rabbit, and if I’m being honest I didn’t pay attention to that) It’s sorta fitting to his character that he named it ‘Long Ears’ - a notably physical attribute.

While I do like that, just because the climax called for it, the sword didn’t suddenly lift from the stone, I really dislike that it was broken out by sheer force; which goes goes against the entire magic system/point of the sword and who gets to hold it.

Kronk as the magic mirror is hilarious. I want to credit the screenwriters for his lines… but I have a strong feeling it was mostly improv. Well done whoever is to credit for that.

Now this action scene, with Merlin being attacked by the tree roots, is insanely well done. For maybe the first time in this movie, I feel the suspense I’m intended to, and the setup and just character movement in general is really inventive. You feel his emotions and breath in this scene, which takes serious talent.

“How could she possibly want to save you more than she wants to be beautiful? Did you cast a spell?” - On a related note, I’m proud of this movie for not falling into the traditional ‘misunderstanding breaks up characters before the final battle’ (they technically do split up, but it’s the fault of Merlin’s unresolved selfish intentions rather than a petty matter) through Snow seeing the love spell, and assuming the worst even though Merlin never uses it.

The vines could be a metaphor as well; in this battle, they’re the shallow desires holding him back, while he, with the assistance of others, has to break his own way out (as shown by him using his lighting to crack a small hole in the doors (or exit) of the room.

[ID - Merlin is running towards the “camera”, however, he looks surprised as a vine grabs his waist, and attempts to drag him back into the castle - End ID].

“I’m sorry, Snow White.” That’s the first time he uses her name; and he does it mentally; in a voiceover. It isn’t to impress her, or win a competition. It’s how he truly sees her now. Also, so beautiful how his motives go from being self centred, to focused on her; he changed because of her influence. It’s been done before, but that doesn’t make it any less meaningful here.

“You’re the most beautiful woman in the world… whether my eyes are open… or closed.” That wasn’t his final line (he survives), but if it was… that would’ve been so powerful. Still is, just in a different way.

“I kinda liked the short and green Merlin.” “But I’m still that Merlin inside.” - The one who grew. The one who changed, and learned to love himself and others for more than what’s on the outside. I know Snow is the main example of self love in this film, but Merlin provides a great example of this; something we don’t often see in male characters.

And I loved that it was a hug immediately after his spell is broken. He isn’t trying to gain anything, he’s just happy to be with her, which is super romantic. 

[ID - Both now restored to their original forms, Merlin and Snow White sit on the ground just outside the palace hugging each other, both smiling with their eyes shut. The king, and a few of the dwarfs stand in the background - End ID].

Onto a few of my favourite lines;

“I was worried about you!” “I was worried about me too. But- but mostly you!”

“If you could see the real me…” “I think I can see the real you… eyes open or closed, I still see Merlin.” What a great line. What a great theme. You don’t need to know the facts about someone, or see their original appearance, to know who they are. And I think that’s beautiful.

“Someone you’l be proud to be seen with.” “I think you’re right.”

“I thought that we were both under the same spell… but I was wrong.”

“He likes you more than he likes me,” as she looks down at the shoes.

“Who do you like more, Snow White or Red Shoes?” “Easy, it’s Red Shoes.” “Who does Red Shoes love more?” “Easy, it’s me. Wait… no. It’s you.”

“How could she possibly want to save you more than she wants to be beautiful? Did you cast a spell?”

“I’ve never been so glad to be chubby and green again.” - Because it means he’s not alone.

“I’m sorry, Snow White.” 

“You’re the most beautiful woman in the world… whether my eyes are open… or closed.”

“I kinda liked the short and green Merlin.” “But I’m still that Merlin inside.” 

I’ll just say, as an ending thought, that the 2D animation of their wedding is adorable.

Overall, I’d give it 8/10. Nothing phenomenal that was entirely groundbreaking, but there’s a lot of heart to be shown here, with some truly amazing characters, even if some of their universe isn’t all that intriguing. Would highly recommend.

[tempest2k]

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For starters, I’m rereading Homestuck using The Unofficial Homestuck Collection, developed by Bambosh. It’s a fantastic program and if you haven’t downloaded it yet, I highly suggest you do so. I literally cannot recommend it enough. If you’re still not sure, here’s what it looks like in use.

So, Homestuck. There’s a few things we need to discuss before this blog can truly begin. First of all, I am 100% on-board the June Egbert train. However, (and please hear me out), I will not be referring to her as June Egbert 100% of the time over the course of this blog. When quoting characters or screen-capping text, I will make no effort to edit her name. In terms of my own original writing in these segments however, I will always refer to her as June. Secondly, this blog will NOT be spoiler-free. This is coming from the perspective of someone who has already read Homestuck trying to reread the entire thing in full. Comparisons to my experiences are vital to understanding my relationship with the work over all this time. Do not continue if you haven’t read Homestuck. With that out of the way, let’s get started.

This is June Egbert. We all know about June Egbert, Zoosmell Pooplord, Heir of Breath and all that. To be quite honest, reading this very first part of Homestuck was utterly mind-numbing. I had a conversation about it with a friend, and I think this comparison is quite accurate:

(x)

So far, I don’t feel like I’ve gotten much outside of this familiar slog, but sylladex logic and jokes are just as fun as they’ve ever been. Though honestly, that’s most of what Act 1 has going for it? Homestuck started this way because it was a forum adventure, and I can’t see any story starting quite like this again. I’m reintroduced to classic pesterlogs of yore, and it feels a bit like coming home. June and Dave have some fun conversations, though I will admit in hindsight that Rose being referenced many times to have hit on Dave is very disturbing. I can only hope that this is one of those instances where this twist was thought of after these logs were written.

GameBro magazine was pretty funny, I guess? I don’t know, there’s not a lot of memorable things here to analyze. I already feel like I’m almost done with this post, and It’s only barely started. This post feels a lot messier than my Vast Error blogs, so let’s try to get things a little on track.

When June goes outside, we get a short animation with “Windchime Foley” by Clark Powell in the background. Combined with the light prose, it says to those at the time, and to those who somehow went in blind without any knowledge of its extremities, that Homestuck is not an average comic. Homestuck is a webcomic, and it’s going to take full advantage of its medium as a story told in a web browser.

Shortly after this we get to the part where June sees the SBURB Beta through the kitchen window, and the comic’s first STRIFE page is reached. As a neat interactive game, it still holds up, I think. There’s no real goal, just endlessly looping as you attempt either of the two clickable options. The song Harlequin by Mark Hadley is fantastic, and a motif that’s widely referenced throughout the discography.

Skipping around a bit, there are a lot of sylladex shenanigans that I still really enjoy! They were why I remembered the comic enough to give it another go several years after I had first given it a shot, and they do hold up quite well, I think. The smoke pellets being set off by Sassacre’s book is a really fun thing? I forgot about it, and the way the sylladex is essentially just waiting to set off a chain of events is super interesting and FUN. It’s fun, okay? June also acquires the QUEUE modus, which also leads to some fun shenanigans. The data structure theming of the inventory system makes a lot of sense, though gets kind of thrown by the wayside as the comic goes on. In my opinion, the more creative modi are far more interesting. The queue modus makes opening the package she’s received from one of her friends a major pain.

It’s the bunny! In the box! The bunny was successfully removed from the box. I’m pretty sure this right here is why a lot of people associate June with bunnies, and I can’t really blame them. This particular bunny’s journey is far, far from over, however.

After this, Rose and June install SBURB and connect to each other! But this is where I decided to stop for now. Now, this has been written on and off over the course of a week I think? I have some thoughts I’d like to share that I’ve been pondering in the off-time.

The captchalogue system is really interesting, because from a story perspective at this point, it acts as a method of creating plot points. It also forces certain things to happen. The unpredictability of when it’s going to be relevant next is quite interesting. Act 1 is just a lot of fun, even if it was sort of a chore to reread. I can’t tell if that’s because I’ve read it before, or if it’s just not capturing me how it used to.

That’s pretty much all I have to say this time, and I’ve spent far too much time on this blog. See you next time.

[mmmmalo]

Back when Jane landed on LOCAH, I noticed that the obelisks emblazoned with various aspect symbols told stories relevant to the corresponding kid (x)(x). Ordinarily I would expect Jane’s planet to be entirely designed around Jane’s fears/desires, but for whatever reason LOCAH was interspersed with references to the dreams of others. Openbound seems to be doing something similar: Despite Meenah (Roxy’s doppelganger) being the central figure of the dream, the four clusters of trolls in Openbound might correspond to the four alphas.

Jane > Kankri-Latula-Porrim

Jake > Cronus-Mituna

Roxy > Meulin-Kurloz

Dirk > Rufioh-Horuss-Damara

I will definitely need to reread Openbound AGAIN (x) to see if this holds water, but for now, here’s a cursory attempt at noting relevant connections between the alphas and their troll clusters. Ideally, these will give me footholds for how to approach the text on my next pass.

______ Jane

Kankri’s vocal assertion of chastity could be related to crockertier!Jane’s CEASE REPRODUCTION... it would assert a certain disgust for sex, which was point of emphasis for Jane in the Epilogues. Kankri’s obvious interest in Latula despite this could pertain to Jane’s own contradictory attitudes towards sex...?

her interests in correcting her friends use of language (the phrase “grammar nazi” comes to mind) seems to have morphed into Kankri enforcement of politically correct terminology among his peers

(though then again, careful choice of words is a motif that persists beyond this section of the game)

Jane comes into conflict with gender just like Roxy, so the Kankri-Porrim conflict still seems applicable...

Latula... well, you could definitely say Jane embraces girl power

______Jake

Cronus’s interest in downplaying his sexual desires is consistent with Jake’s behavior around Aranea, and the self-disgust expressed via Erisolsprite balking at thinking of Dirk as a piece of ass...

The mythic namesake of Cronus ate his own children, which should be juxtaposed with Caliborn’s art request (and seahorse dad, who has a baby in his belly)

I wonder if the moments where Cronus says something and then tries to take it back are co-morbid with the child cannibalism motifs... the urge to place what came out of you back inside you (another variation on putting the bunny back in the box)

Jake and Mituna are head-trauma brain-damage helmet-buddies

Cronus’s comment on loving to express himself to someone that cannot understand him is quintessentially English, and bears a clear relation to Grandpa’s courting of a doll. Jake would seem to have a certain fear of being understood -- that communication involves the possibility of rejection, mockery, etc.

What am I to make of Cronus being human kin, in this context. I suppose it would relate to Jake’s interest in savagery, since he dresses up as a Navii in the credits. Though its funny how identifying with ‘savages’ necessarily others them and frames his current position as that of civilization...

_______Roxy

Everything from the original post continues to apply most clearly here... the only new info is that Roxy’s image of miss zipper-lips (^+++++++^) maps pretty well to Kurloz’s shush-stitches (pronounced like suspicious)

I should also consider placing more importance on Kurloz’s dressing as a skeleton... with cat as child, the association of bones with death perhaps emphasizes Kurloz as the adult, within the metaphor? Though then again, Jake’s skulltop would suggest that Mituna’s helmet might be reasonably compared to the skull, and Mituna is positioned to be the ‘child’ in the paradigm with Cronus....

_______Dirk

It was always clear that this section was based on Dirk-Jake, but I supposed rooting the scene in Dirk’s mind offers a rationale for why

Horuss is horse-kin... I am forcibly drawn to the Beyond Canon (tm) image of Dirk with a single central troll horn, to make himself a unicorn

This actually brings me back to the reading I was gravitating towards back when I was reading Roxy as a trans woman -- that the Rufioh-Horuss breakup might be read a castration allegory, given Horuss’s self-presentation as a horse cock. But since that cock is also Horuss’s face, the castration is also decapitation, which puts us in more familiar Dirk territory

Weird feminization of the body is definitely in Dirk’s wheel-house... (after all, the head is associated with the dick) so the dysphoria represented by Damara capturing Rufioh’s happy thought would seem to apply to Dirk. (Not presently sure wear I presently stand wrt trans readings of Dirk, but maybe navigating this section will help me out)

Relevant to the above: Rufioh calling girls ‘doll’ connects the feminization of the body to puppets

But what does this mean for all of the yearning for lost children in this section...? Should that be read as Dirk’s desire, or as the superposition of Roxy’s?

I should plug the “anecdotes strain plausibility” post here (x)

Oh shoot, if the ‘gotta hatch em all’ turns out to be a Dirk thing... it would seem Roxy is definitely not the only one with an Adam and Eve complex...?

[recentanimenews]

Bookshelf Briefs 10/18/19

Bakemonogatari, Vol. 1 | By NISIOISIN and Oh!great | Vertical Comics – For years there wasn’t a Bakemonogatari manga. It’s not clear why; perhaps Nisioisin didn’t like the format, perhaps the iconic SHAFT anime made it a hard act to follow. In any case, getting Oh!great to draw the story was an inspired choice—the ridiculous over-the-topness that grew tiresome in Air Gear and Tenjho Tenge fits in perfectly with Araragi’s fevered fantasies and Senjogahara’s verbal lacerations. This first volume takes us almost to the end of Hitagi Crab—indeed, it cuts off right near the end, awkwardly so. Still, for anyone who gets overwhelmed by the novel’s verbiage, this is a great purchase. There’s even a bit of added content, though only a bit. – Sean Gaffney

If I Could Reach You, Vol. 1 | By tMnR | Kodansha Comics – Teenage love can be dumb, but not always. Sometimes people are well aware that the feelings they have are never going to be requited, but that does not actually stop the feelings from being there anyway. It’s especially troubling for Uta, the girl that she’s fallen for and her childhood friend. Unfortunately, her brother was also Kaoru’s childhood friend, and they’re now married. Uta is living there due to circumstances, and must continue going to school and living her life while falling deeper and deeper into her passions. I must admit I found her school life a bit more interesting than the home life. Still, this manages to be a potboiler but not in a Citrus way, which is good. – Sean Gaffney

Komi Can’t Communicate, Vol. 3 | By Tomohito Oda | VIZ Media – After a second volume where I had to make it a full review so I could rant, this one settles down quite a bit. Yamai is still around but far less, and the emphasis is firmly on Komi trying to make progress. She does—in fact, her goal of “100 friends” is up to eleven by the end. We also get a better idea of her home life, and it turns out that both Komi and her brother take after their father, while the mother is a total chatterbox. As with the first two books, the best moments in the volume are more heartwarming than funny. Komi at the pool, where her accidental trip and fall means she has to sit by the side, leading to her castigating herself till Tadano steps in. There’s also a lovely festival at the end. Cute as heck. – Sean Gaffney

Ms. Koizumi Loves Ramen Noodles, Vol. 1 | By Naru Narumi | Dark Horse – The back cover promises “a fun food manga that will show you around the authentic ramen culture of everyday Japan,” and on that, Ms. Koizumi Loves Ramen Noodles delivers. I doubt I’ll be able to retain any of the information imparted, but it was interesting, all the same. Ramen-obsessed Koizumi is fine, but I’m less fond of Yu Osawa, the girl who’s desperate to become friends with Koizumi. Watching her friends become friendly with Koizumi—by demonstrating an affinity for ramen rather than interest in her—eventually drives Yu to the point of flailing on the ground and crying, “Why won’t you be friendly with meeeee?” It’s very unappealing. She does start to win Koizumi over by the end of the volume, though, which I guess is good for her. I’m not sure I’ll be back for volume two. Maybe. – Michelle Smith

My Hero Academia: School Briefs, Vol. 3 | By Kohei Horikoshi and Anri Yoshi | VIZ Media – Set just before and after the U.A. students have moved into the dorms, the third volume of My Hero Academia: School Briefs has a recurring motif wherein Hatsume Mei’s inventions cause trouble, including a fun chapter where the kids, on edge from telling ghost stories in Tokoyami’s room, hear a strange buzzing sound that Aizawa begrudgingly comes to investigate. My favorite stories, though, are the a-day-in-the-life entries told from the points of view of Ida (who worries he has ostracized his classmates by being too strict) and Kuwai (Koji’s pet bunny, whose inner narrative turns out to be surprisingly and delightfully erudite). I especially liked that both stories showed Bakugo in a good light, including a moment in Ida’s story where Bakugo prevents a surprise from being spoiled and one in Kuwai’s where he checks on the bunny to make sure it’s okay after it briefly escaped Koji’s room. I’m really glad we’re getting these stories! – Michelle Smith

My Hero Academia: Vigilantes, Vol. 6 | By Hideyuki Furuhashi and Betten Court | VIZ Media – This takes place a number of yeas before the main series, so we can’t really get cameos from 1-A. But we can see the teachers, some of whom aren’t teaching yet. This volume gives us a lot of Eraser, who ends up dealing with Koichi against his better judgment. Meanwhile, Koichi is doing the sort of quirk experimentation that 1-A requires in its students, and finds new uses for his quirk. This really does have in its background plot the idea that someone who fails (or in this case misses) an exam is not a terrible person, but society may treat them that way. And, yes, there’s still quirk drugs going around, this time lading to infiltrating a mixer, with the help of Midnight. Good times. – Sean Gaffney

Natsume’s Book of Friends, Vol. 23 | By Yuki Midorikawa | VIZ Media – It looks as if this is now a yearly series, but that makes each new volume a rewarding experience. This one has two main storylines. In the first, the boys of Natsume’s class get involved in a school’s urban legend about a painting, which may or nay not be supernatural in origin. Then, Natsume and Natori end up visiting a seemingly abandoned house that in reality is being maintained by Matoba and his people, and requires a certain ritual to go well. That said, nothing goes perfectly with Natsume around. Again, the big reason to read this is the natural empathy Natsume has to nearly everyone around him. He is absolutely a good boy—a cinnamon roll, in fact. – Sean Gaffney

Otherworldly Izakaya Nobu, Vol. 4 | By Natsuya Semikawa and Virginia Nitouhei | Udon Entertainment – I like the way that the semi-regular cast show up over and over, sometimes because they’re plot-relevant, and sometimes just to eat more of their favorite food. One of our lothario knights ends up having a food discussion with a woman who is clearly a noble, only he doesn’t really get this. A lady knight shows up looking for the enemy that she fell in love with years ago… only to find the waitress of the izakaya (the blonde, not Shinobu or the little girl) is his wife. Meanwhile, Nobuyuki may be getting closer to Shinobu, but it’s pretty clear food is more important to both of them. Still makes me hungry, but good stuff. – Sean Gaffney

The Poe Clan, Vol. 1 | By Moto Hagio | Fantagraphics – It’s always cause for celebration when more of Hagio’s work is released in translation, doubly so when that work is the highly influential shoujo classic The Poe Clan. Originally published in the 1970s, the series’ focus is on a family of vampirnellas and their interactions with humans, particularly how they prey upon them to sustain their own lives or to initiate them as members into their immortal clan. The first English-language volume from Fantagraphics, released as a beautiful hardcover omnibus, collects six chapters of Hagio’s epic. Though the chapters are all related to one another, the story isn’t presented chronologically and instead shifts between time periods as well as characters. But tying everything together is the presence and spectre of Edgar—a young man whose mortal and immortal life are both tragic. Delectably dark and dramatic, I’m looking forward to the final volume of The Poe Clan a great deal. – Ash Brown

Sacrifical Princess and the King of Beasts, Vol. 7 | By Yu Tomofuji | Yen Press – Sariphi is making friends and influencing people, but her royal fiancé is never far away. She needs to show that she can handle things on her own, so is sent to a nation to essentially bring greetings from the King. Things get complicated, though, because her bodyguard accompanying her is a hyena, and they’re treated as untrustworthy and evil. It doesn’t help that, in order to make himself look good, he deliberately puts her in danger so that he can save the day. But of course Sariphi can see the good within him. She may need to double down on that, though, as the cliffhanger implies he’s about to be framed. An underrated shoujo series. – Sean Gaffney

By: Ash Brown

[richmeganews]

Billie Eilish’s Spooky Teen Pop Shouldn’t Scare Adults

Does it matter that Billie Eilish, this year’s buzziest new pop star, is a kid? Is it okay that headlines about her debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go, have led with phrases like “teen pop prodigy,” “not your typical 17-year-old pop star,” and “defines 21st-century teenage angst”? If labeling is passé—and Eilish’s relentlessly surprising music makes a great case that it is—isn’t it square to fixate the number of years she’s been alive? Ageist, even? Can’t we just listen to the music?

I’m really asking because I’m trying to understand my own reaction to her rapidly exploding popularity. When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? sent me, on first listen, on a cringe binge. She opens with the slurping noise of her dental braces being removed. She sneers “duh” in a chorus like she’s Bart Simpson. One track has a bunch of The Office samples. Another comprises ukulele and baby talk. Everything is, in one way or another, “spooky,” but in the air-quotes, kawaii sense. Think The Nightmare Before Christmas. No, think Corpse Bride. No, actually, think Monster High Dolls, which update Barbie’s cayenne-cleanse proportions with Pixar-character eyes and the glamour of rotting flesh.

Do you hear what I’m doing here? How predictable, closed-off, and stereotype-reliant it is? My first rejection of Eilish was just a blunt reaction to brattiness as brattiness: a taking of the bait. As subsequent listens have convinced me that something very exciting is actually going on with Eilish, and further listens have me worrying it might be my favorite album of the year, it’s all making this mid-pack Millennial feel pretty old. Not just because of the teen signifiers Eilish uses. But because of the poise, the connections being drawn, and the sharp craft on display. How did no one make music like this before?

For what it’s worth, the comparison to Monster High is particularly unfair. Eilish—an L.A. showbiz daughter who, working with her producer brother Finneas O’Connell, has earned millions of streams since 2016—is not plastic. Fashion-wise she goes for XL sweaters and posture-wise she gives a good slump, which might help ensure she’ll not get railroaded as a sex-kitten object like the then-18-year-old Fiona Apple—an obvious influence—was. Generally, her edge is of the straight kind. Spiders, blood, and light S&M are motifs. But she rolls her eyes at drugs on “Xanny,” which imagines if an Amy Winehouse ballad depicted partying only as pathetic. The NC-17 teases of “Bad Guy,” the album’s opening banger, seems rather sarcastic, and the ending scene of its visual comes off like a fakeout regarding girl-on-video tropes.

Her voice—especially on her songs before this album—somewhat follows this decade’s trend of ineffably Swedish, chubby-bunny torch singing, heard in its most tolerable forms from Lorde and Ellie Goulding. But Eilish is an intelligent and unpredictable performer who, on When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, whisper-sings, whisper-raps, and whisper-hums more than she does anything that could be described as crooning. Cybernetic-soul vocal manipulation recalling Bon Iver and The Knife—and Kanye West’s knocking off of both—is omnipresent. Finneas’s production follows in pleasing Yeezus style with sparse doorknock beats and jump-scare samples cut with bright, bent keyboard lines. If this all sounds a bit fussy and like ASMR bait, well, it is. But Eilish writes in melodies akin to nursery rhymes and ancient folk tunes. The balance of strange and simple usually works.

The early portions of the album trigger a sugar rush with fidgety tracks that are only a few clicks on the weirdness scale from the stuff of Taylor Swift’s Reputation. The romping is fun while it lasts, though some of the tunes feel interchangeable. Right now I’m finding myself stuck on replaying the lurching singalong of “Wish You Were Gay,” which despite catching some Twitter flack is actually a decent corrective to the Katy Perry “Ur So Gay” tradition. Eilish isn’t shading a guy’s effeminacy, she’s just treating sexuality as no big deal by wishing he had an ulterior motive for rejecting her. It’s not a groundbreaking sentiment, but it’s also not one that’s been expressed before in quite this manner, which makes it typical of Eilish’s relationship to originality.

The album’s deeper pleasures come later in velvety, sad ballads. Finneas’s harmonic layers breathe and quiver while Eilish, gratifyingly, works with more ambiguous meanings than on the uptempo songs. “Listen Before I Go” might be dicey in its romanticization of self-harm—it’s a farewell note from the top of a building—but there’s no denying its cinematic pull as the sound of police sirens fade in. On “I Love You,” the final song before an overture-as-finale track, Eilish’s performance draws a clear and breathtaking division between two modes: wanting to be too cool for desire, and actually experiencing desire. It’s one more ratification that she’s not a shtick, she’s a songwriter.

If anything feels fundamentally young about the music, it’s the heaping amounts of self-identification. Eilish has decided who she is and she wants to tell the world, with a bluntness of the sort that can soften as compromises and course-corrections pile up over the years of someone’s life. She has a “soul so cynical” and renders her heartaches and head rushes in the gothic terms of sin, addiction, and secrets-keeping: a pretty familiar character, really. Or maybe she—as well as other darkness-chasing, chart peers—represents Gen Z cycling back to Gen X’s disaffected purity after the market-minded can-do of the Millennials. (Are the Mansons of the ’90s, Shirley and Marilyn, that decade’s most underratedly relevant stars?) Now, it’s reductive to argue that age cohorts share some cohesive outlook. But Eilish clearly welcomes it. “We’re being ignored and it’s so dumb,” she told NME of the teens. “We know everything.”

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[mmmmalo]

I literally never have any idea what you are talking about when you are discussing symbolism in homestuck

Oh no! That’s like half the reason I’m here. Um… okay here’s an attempt at a crash course on stuff relevant to the last thing I wrote:

A good chunk of Homestuck is built upon feelings of nostalgia, taken to mean a sort of intense separation anxiety with the past. John speaks about this when he watches Con Air with Jade – John wants the movie to feel like it did when he watched it with his Dad long ago, but the feeling from when he was a kid is gone. This upsets him. Moreover, John’s freakout starts at the moment Cyrus puts a gun to the bunny’s head: Con Air itself is partly about Nic Cage trying to return to the life he lost when he went to jail, and ‘putting the bunny back in the box’ is a metaphor for the attempt. Cyrus, in threatening the bunny, is highlighting his role as a force preventing things from going back to how they were. Thus, if we are to believe that John is responding to the movie thematically, Cyrus confronts John with his own inability to go back to a happier past – and this recognition is met with anger.

In making the leap to the psychoanalytic motifs, it helps to recall the part where baby!Dirk responds to being born by cracking open his ectotube and crawling back inside. Dirk, who aspires towards his “ultimate self”, illustrates here that he envisions his ascension as a return to the ‘essence’ of Dirk from which he (and all other iterations of himself) arose, as represented by the ectoslime. Baby!Dirk gestures at unity with his ectoslime/essence by crawling back into the place from which he was born, which I’m basically claiming is a “return to the womb” on a symbolic level, or at least that this is a useful parallel to draw. (A related motif to think about: Dirk decapitates himself by sticking his head inside a box, which as per Con Air symbolizes the place you wish to return to)

Castration becomes unavoidable as you try to relate all of this to Dave, whose occasional references to banging hot moms are part of an ongoing reference to the Oedipus Complex. Critically, the complex is not /just/ about wanting to bone your mom, but also fear that your dad will chop your junk off if you do. The breaking of Dave’s sword on the rooftop is a realization of this fear (yes, we’re doing the “swords are phallic” thing). But Dave has no mom that he knows of, so what gives? The answer is in the way Bro inexplicably breaks the record emblem on Dave’s t-shirt, as though he has introduced a fissure into Dave’s very identity. Life with Bro has made it very difficult for Dave to be honest with himself, which is to say, Dave pictures Bro’s abuse as having divided him from an ideal “true self”, which can feel emotions without all the anxious ironic detachment. I mentioned before that seeking unity with that from which you came is a “return to the womb”. This is the sense in which the Oedipal mom attraction becomes relevant: the return to the past is sexualized. The ‘home’ Dave wishes to return to is /himself/, and in this sense Dave is his own hot mom (which is related to how often Dave compliments his own looks – he is literally attracted to himself).

At a certain point, all of the above motifs kind of collapse into each other. Hatching from the shell that contained your primordial goop (Dirk) is analogous to being violently separated from yourself (Dave), which is why Dave’s entry item (an egg) hatched at the exact moment that Bro slices a meteor in half: the abuse that divided Dave from himself, his “castration” by Bro, is simultaneously the “birth” that separated him from his “mother” (which is also himself).

[…That last paragraph is probably the least clear I’ve been so far, but I’m struggling to figure out how to better phrase it and I don’t want to dwell on this post more than a day. Sorry. Pick out a bit that’s unclear and I can elaborate, if you like.]

Roxy is also on the childhood nostalgia train, so like the other kids, her psychic life contains some birth metaphors through which these thoughts (and others) are filtered… and those are what I’m presently developing a model for.

[mmmmalo]

is there anything to be said about the parallels batween the jacks and vriska (sword through the chest, missing and eye and an arm, vris and slick dying on the same page, etc) or is that just paradox space being paradox space

There is definitely something to be said, though I don’t know what it is. It’s also pertinent that Vriska shares motifs with Snowman, namely the 8 Ball and BLUH BLUH HUGE BITCH. Since the Intermission takes place in Felt Manor, the events within ought to function as a depiction of the mind of Lord English – so understanding the roles of Slick and Snowman in whatever psychological story is going on there would probably be helpful in understanding both Vriska and Lord English. But I was never able to manage that, so, alas.

I do have ONE thing to say, but first I have to talk about the Terminator films. There was something Sarah Conner said to a Skynet engineer in T2:

“Fucking men like you built the hydrogen bomb. Men like you thought it up. You think you’re so creative. You don’t know what it’s like to really create something; to create a life; to feel it growing inside you. All you know how to create is death and destruction…”

This line later comes to haunt her son, John Conner, as he faces down Skynet in Terminator: Salvation. As a soldier, John deals primarily in death and destruction against machines, but when he is forced to recognize that a machine could nonetheless be a person, his position is complicated. During the climactic battle, John is forced to bring his ostensible enemy from the brink of death, jump-starting his heart with a handy pair of electrical wires. At this moment that John forgoes his feud, that he takes Frankenstein’s lightning in hand and creates life, Arnold Schwarzenegger comes out of nowhere and stabs him in the back with an iron girder, which erupts from his chest like a fucking Xenomorph.

So the moment John Conner chooses life over death is supplemented with a violent Hollywood shorthand for birth: chest-burster.

Since face-huggers and chest-bursters are the main components of Fiduspawn, I’m inclined to think Hussie is familiar with this particular subset of psychosexual symbols. So with the above reading in mind, Terezi’s sword sticking out of Vriska’s chest is possibly much funnier than it has any right to be – like within the paradigm for death we’ve established (that the circumstances of a character’s death bear some relation to a latent wish), Vriska getting a visual chest-burster can be linked to her getting her head and arm blown apart by the magic cue ball (since both of those motifs represent birth). Also relevant that Vriska refers to these sort of deaths as getting “sucker sta88ed”, when we’ve recently connected the Auryn within the cherub’s juju to the prenatal unity of mother and child? (x) Getting “sucker sta88ed” is thus linked to the ouroboric cancer symbol (69), cancer being yet another cipher for pregnancy.

All of which is to say, in this context at least, is that chest-burster stabs seem to add more evidence to what we’ve know for a while: that death is eroticized (x).

Revisiting John’s own sucker stabbing has given me a tentative idea for how to integrate Jack into the psychosexual proceedings: recall when Mom and Dad shared a cake as the image of John drilling filled the surrounding clouds, and as the sexual tension tightened, Bec Noir arrived and dealt out murder as the simultaneous severance and culmination of their union? I wonder if that makes Jack the baby. Or to shoehorn in an Oedipal trifecta again, I wonder if Jack’s rank being that immediately below King and Queen positions him as the Child to Father and Mother, in the abstract.

To issue a small correction to the model of King and Queen put forward in the Dirk/Roxy post (x): the King is still associated with pregnancy. But the Queen is not primarily linked to impregnation, but isolated ejaculation, which /is/ freedom, which /is/ birth, as elaborated in recent discussion of the cherubs. (x) This is the WV/PM contrast between democracy and liberty, that which ties people together (Blood) versus that which separates them from each other (Breath) – and thus pregnancy versus birth.

Insofar as Lord English comes to displace the Black King in Act 6, Spades Slick breaking into his vault is another exercise in Putting the Bunny Back in the Box? A motif perhaps subtly reiterated by Slick climbing into his own warchest, or various moments of the Midnight Crew forcing the Felt inside of their respective boxes, or Biscuits climbing into his oven… But weirdly, even though Snowman is kind of acting as the law (broken head upon turning back time, castrated arm upon entering forbidden vault), and even though those motifs of separation are linked to birth (x), she’s also the one who traps him in the vault? Which reads more as insemination I guess, with ‘freedom’ immediately resulting in ‘confinement’, and Jack is babby. 

Which makes it sounds like the fantasy permeating the mind of Lord English is not particularly fantastical? Like a rote pregnancy. Though I suppose this doesn’t account for the way becoming a symbolic fetus also made Jack a ‘god’, insofar as he now has access to the fourth wall…? Hm

Insofar as Jack and the Queen form a Child/Mother pairing then, Vriska having elements of both could align with her chestburster death? But this still leaves a lot unexplained, like when Vriska climbs into the symbolic maw of Lord English and “dumps” the symbol of her reality out of a chest after plucking it from the flaming red X in English’s bowels…? I think we’re hitting a stopping point, but this was good progress. Thank you for the question!