#but also i think thematically. there's a lot to dig into how he acts and what his actions say

[linkspooky]

How to write the perfect revenge story with Kohaku-Sensei! What Tsukihime does better than Avatar the Last Airbender.

So a follower asked me why Kohaku was my favorite of the Tsukhime girls after I made an offhand comment on my Ciel/Noel post on how Kohaku is the perfect take on revenge. Both Noel and Kohaku's story arcs are near perfect revenge tragedies that make their characters the standouts in Tsukihime. I tried writing up just why I thought Kohaku's character was good but it kept turning into a carbon copy of this post by comun right here. Eventually I decided to dig deeper.

Why does Kohaku's revenge story work so well? Why does every other revenge story suck so hard in comparison? See the thing is I hate a lot of revenge stories in fiction because they are very shallow, black and white tales of the good guy giving the bad guy everything he deserves.

In other words, I'm disappointed by most omdern revenge stories because they display a critical lack of understanding of how cycles of abuse start in the first place, and how both sides on the conflict no matter what are equally human. Perhaps that's why Kinoko Nasu writes revenge so well, because he's a deeply humanist author who's not really focused on good guys or bad guys but rather just understanding the characters involved.

So to show just how well Tsukihime humanizes Kohaku as both victim and villain of the story, I'm going to compare it to one of the worst revenge stories I've read in fiction. Both of these stories are tragedies that kill their main character, a victim who just wanted revenge for the long abuses they'd suffered in life. However, one of these is Tsukihime, and the other one sucks. So without further ado under the cut.

ORESTES THE FIRST REVENGE STORY

So Yun is a character from a spinoff novel prequel of Avatar the Last Aribender, focusing on the life of Avatar Kyoshi. In a lot of ways Yun is like Noel. He's a completely new character, thrown into the backstory of an already established character. He also steals the show because he's allowed to be a lot more flawed and act as a villainous foil to the main character, Yun even acts as a Jungian shadow the second novel is literally called the shadow of Kyoshi.

However, there's one major difference Noel's character greatly enhances Ciel's even if she is fridged for Ciel's character development. Whereas Yun's character and the eventual ending the story gave him ruined any kind of enjoyment I could have had from the story for Kyoshi's character. In fact, I think Yun's death made the whole story fall apart thematically.

Which is ironic because it was the exact same ending. Noel's character ends with her dying by Ciel's hands. Kyoshi kills Yun with her own two hands in order to stop his revenge. In both stories the victim dies so why does one frustrate me to no end and the other ending elevates Tsukihime to one of my favorite pieces of fiction?

The devil is in the details.

Revenge stories are by their nature tragedies. It makes sense for them to, for the most part with a few hopeful exceptions have bad endings. Taking personal revenge against every single person who's hurt you grievously no matter how deserved that revenge might be does not solve the problem. In fact it creates several new problems.

This is pretty well explored tragedy in fiction, all the way back to The Oresteia. Orestes is the son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. If you know anything about the trojan war you should recognize those names.

The story begins like this, King Agamemnon of Mycenae offends the goddess Artemis by killing one of her stags. So, in retaliation she prevents the greek troops from reaching troy by taking the wind out of their sails, unless Agamemmnon kills his oldest daughter Iphigenia. Agammemnon drags his daughter away from his wife Clytemnestra who was crying and begging him not to and offers her as human sacrifice. Ten years later when Agamemnon returns home he finds his wife sleeping with another man, and the two of them together butcher him to avenge iphigenia.

Then in order to avenge her father's death, elektra urges her brother Orestes to kill their mother and the man she committed adultery with. Orestes eventually goes through with it out of duty to his father, but because he's committed the clan of kin slaying the gods send the furies after him to chase him down and torment him.

The revenge just continues to cycle. Orestes doesn't right a wrong by avenging his father's murderer, he just commits kin slaying a taboo among the gods. Even though he felt he had an obligation too because he couldn't let his father's murderer live, the gods don't let him live in peace. Orestes would have been chased by the Furies for the rest of his life if Athena didn't intervene and basically hold the first court case in order to rule if it was really just to punish Orestes like this.

The point of my long foray into greek mythology is that no matter how entitled each person in the revenge cycle might have felt to their revenge, in the end they were committing a horrible act. Clytemnestra was avenging her daughter against the man who killed him, but she alienated her other two children. Orestes was duty bound to avenge his father, but he still killed his own mother with his two hands. At each link in the chain there's no real innocent parties, and the moment you take revenge you become a perpetrator in this cycle of abuse as well.

That is I think a central concept that the greeks understood but many modern authors fail to grasp, that revenge is a cycle during which any time a person can become a victim of it, and also a perpetrator of it. It's not a matter of internal goodness or badness but rather an uncontrollable cycle of violence that people get caught up in.

What revenge stories should be about is escaping the cycle. When the character manages to escape like Orestes and live for something other than revenge that's a happy ending, but when the character fails to escape that's a tragedy. Whether or not a character actually accomplishes their revenge is a footnote.

The Count of Monte Cristo accomplishes most of his revenge but the act of revenge isn't what saves him, but rather the faithful love of Haydee who had always been by his side and the words "wait and hope." The Count isn't saved by the revenge he took on all the people who hurt him, but by the strength he had to wait through a terrible situation until it got better and then live on to the better future. Carrie accomplishes her revenge in burning down the school gymnasium and all of her bullies, then goes home and dies a few minutes after killing her mom the last of her abusers unable to escape the cycle.

While their endings are opposites, in both cases completing their revenge didn't give them any measure of peace at all. In fact, the Count almost in the course of his revenge committed a sin far worse than anyone had done to him by killing a newborn infant. No, any good revenge story should know that in the words of percy from Critical Role you can't murder your way to peace.

"There was nothing I could’ve done to save my family, yet I still sold my soul in search of vengeance. Later I allowed Ripley to leave, knowing full well she was a greater threat to the world than the Briarwoods would ever be. I traded the world’s safety for the belief that I could murder my way to peace; that if I could be a greater horror, it would bring my family back. And once this lie was shattered I scrambled to find a solution, to make a deal, to undo my mistakes and balance the scales. I now understand that there are no scales, there is no redemption, and no ledger that judges me good or evil. I am free to simply be myself and live with the terrible mistakes I’ve made." -Percy's Death Letter, Critical Role

In most revenge stories I've noticed that revenge is the main character motivator for the character taking revenge. Therefore the conflict becomes whether or not they can find something new to live for by the end of the story. The characters seeking revenge often make that revenge their entire reason for living, but then what next?

This quote from Oldboy a modern adaptation of the Count of Monte Cristo is relevant.

Seeking revenge is the best cure for someone who got hurt Try it The loss of 15 years the pain of losing your wife and child you can forget all this Once again revenge is good for your health But... What happens after you've revenged yourself?

What happens after you've revenged yourself should be the central question to these revenge arcs. The ones who don't have an answer to that question and are unable to free themselves from the cycle are the ones who end in tragedy.

YUN VS KOHAKU

Yun and Kohaku are characters from a western animated series that adopts eastern themes and a Japanese visual novel about vampires. These two characters come from very different genres of stories, an adventure story about magical warriors using martial arts to bend the elements and a horror story about vampires and serial killers respectively.

However, because both Yun and Kohaku are the central figures of a revenge tragedy they end up having a lot in common. The largest common thread between them is that both of them is that they are child abuse victims, specifically the victims of long term grooming.

They are children who were adopted and then groomed by their father figure for years. In Kohaku's case, it was sexual grooming, whereas in Yun's case it was grooming him into a child soldier. The official definition of child grooming works for both of these cases, it is when an adult forms a relationship with a child to sexually assault them or induce them into doing something dangerous or harmful to them.

Kohaku and Yun are more obscure characters though so for the sake of people who haven't read one or both of these series I'm going to go more into depth on their individual circumstances.

Kohaku is an empath, born with the ability to transfer energy to other people through sexual intercourse. She and her sister were brought into the Tohno Clan, because Makihisa Tohno the elder had demon blood in his veins. This demon blood made him at risk of going through a process called inversion, where he would slowly lose all his mind, all reason, and violently attack everyone around him until he was finally put down. In order to mitigate that risk, Makishisa engaged in regular sexual intercourse with a young Kohaku and made use of her abilities as an empath to control his demon side.

As the elder of twin sisters Kohaku made a deal with Makihisa that she'd let him use her whenever she needed as long as he never touched her sister. Since he kept his word to her, she found it hard to resent him in the long term. Also, because she was constantly high on drugs that made it impossible for her to feel pain.

"So, I took in everything Makihisa-sama wanted to do. I asked him not to touch Hisui-chan because I would take everything myself. He was probably ashamed and agreed to my request. He probably also thought it was better that as few people knew about this secret as possible."

Kohaku is eventually sent to take care of Makihisa's son who also inverted, but when he loses control and rapes her too that's when she loses her last bit of humanity and starts to think of revenge.

At this point she starts to think of herself as an unthinking doll who cannot move for herself, and can only move for revenge. She eventually starts to move against Makishia, first by informing Akiha and Hisui of the abuse she's suffered. She's surprised when Akiha immediately protests what he farther was doing right away, and the sexual liason ends and Kohaku becomes a normal servant. However, even after the abuse ends Kohaku decides to continue living for revenge leading to the main plot of the Far Side of Tsukihime.

Yun is the false avatar. If you've heard of Avatar then I'm sure you at least vaguely know of the concept of the avatar, spiritual guide in the world of avatar that reincarnates over and over again to guide both humanity and the spirits.

In the avatar prequel novels it's established each nation has its own way of tracking down the avatar, but because Kuruk died early and under mysterious circumstances the earth nation was in a panic to find the next avatar. Instead of waiting for more sure confirmation, they picked one random kid on the side of the road on what was basically a hunch that he was Kuruk's reincarnation. This kid was named Yun, a nameless but smart kid with no parents who was conning people by playing Pai Sho really really well. While all along the next avatar Kyoshi was right next to them as one of Yun's servants.

Yun is trained as the avatar through years, and is put through the kind of training that only the Zoldyck family from Hunter x Hunter would approve in. Including being forced to walk on spiked caltrops to learn bending, and being forced to microdose on poison to gain an immunity. Like, this is literally what Killua's parents did to him in HXH.

"I'm surprised you can move," Jianzhu said to him, more impressed than anything else. "Poison training," Yun spat through clenched jaws. "With Sifu Amak, remember? Or did you forget every darker exercise you put me through?"

Yun is a genius earth bender, a brilliant statesman, he works all around the clock to become the avatar everyone is telling him he's destined to be but he's not physically capable of bending any element other than earth. To the point where after a year of failing to learn fire, his bending teachers frequently lambast him as being lazy and not trying hard enough.

"Your situation isn't unique" Hei-Ran went on. "History is full of Avatars like you who tried to coast on their talents. You're not the only one who wanted to take it easy." Yun slipped. An event rare enough to notice. His motion took him too far outside his center of gravity, and he stumbled on his knees. Sweat stung his eyes, ran into the corner of his mouth. Take it easy? Take it easy? Was she ignoring the fact he spent sleepless nights poring over scholarly analyses of Yanghcen's political decisions? That he'd extensively memorized the names of every Earth Kingdom noble, Fire Nation commander, and Water Tribe Chieftan back three generations on the living and the dead? The forgotten texts he'd used to map the ancient sacred sites of the Air Nomads to such a degree that Kelsang was surprised about a few of them? That's who he was when no one was looking. Someone who dedicated his whole being to his Avatarhood. Yun wanted to make up for the lost time he'd squandered by being discovered so late. He wanted to express gratitude to Jianzhu and the entire world for giving him the greatest gift in existence. Taking it easy was the last thing on his mind. [Literally a few seconds later...] "In the old days, masters used to maim their students for insubordination," she said horsely. Yun restrained himself from flinching, "What wonderful modern times we live in."

So Yun is physically and emotionally abused by all of his teachers, Jianzhu, Hei-Ran and several other adults who were complicit with it to train him up into being the avatar. Then, when it turns out Yun isn't the avatar, he's immediately abandoned and left for dead.

Yun gets dragged into the spirit world as a human sacrifice to a horrifying spirit known as Father Glow Worm. He is abandoned by his master who makes no attempt to save him the moment he learned that he wasn't the avatar. Then, in the spirit world he fights Father Glow Worm for days and eventually has to eat him in order to escape home.

After getting to a random village he asks for water. Yun is mocked by a man he saved earlier fo rasking for a single glass of water. When the man throws the water on the ground and tells him to water bend it, Yun snaps and then kills the man who mocked him, the city guard, and everyone who was sitting in the teashouse and has his Geto moment. He decides to start living for revenge against all of the teachers who abused him.

"Well," he said out loud to no one. "It looks like I've been fired." Perhaps it was for the best. He would need the free time, because he had a losit of things to do. lots of personal business to take care of. And at the top of the list was paying his respects to Jianzhu. Filled with new purpose, Yun took off down the road, whistling as he went.

Both of these characters decide to make revenge their reason for living. To quote Oldboy, "Seeking revenge is the best cure for someone who got hurt. Try it." They also face the same fundamental issue, now that they're only living for revenge then what happens after they've revenged themselves?

These characters are also similar in a couple of other ways. They are schemers who mainly work through manipulating others. Yun fakes a political conflict between the fire nation royal family and another noble family in order to bring one of his abusers into the crossfire. Kohaku manipulates both SHIKI and Shiki through the use of drugs to orchestrate her revenge in the Far Side Routes.

They're also both trickster characters. Yun refers to himself as a clown and constantly hides everything behind a smile. "He added that smirk that everyone said reminded them of Kuruk's. After all, a clown needed his makeup." A major part of Kohaku's character is that after Hisui learned about how her sister was being abused she stopped smiling. Kohaku wanting her sister to be happy, started to fake a smile and goof around the way Hisui used to because she wants to see her sister smile again.

One more similarity before I begin dissecting their differences and the way these two characters are handled is that if Kohaku and Yun were the main characters of the story their revenge would undoubtably be framed as one hundred percent justified. If they were the main characters it would definitely be a kill bill situation.

I don't think they are justified, because straightforward revenge is boring. The fact that they are antagonists is the point of each story. I'm just making an underlying point on how a lot of revenge stories suffer from protagonist centered morality. It's alright if Maki Zen'in, or The Bride kills upwards of a hundred people in retaliation for the harm that was done to them and we're supposed to root for them without thinking too deeply on it because they're the protagonists of the story. Protagonist centered morality is bad, because it makes things too centered on the protagonist and therefore if the morality of a piece of based on the protagonist it will make things too easy and the protagonist will go unchallenged.

In fact, in the story of Tsukihime itself, the entire Tohno family thinks that Kohaku 100% has the right to take revenge against them. Akiha is fully aware of Kohaku's revenge scheme. She lets Kohaku get away with her revenge every step of the way, including taking what is essentially a bullet on purpose and dying for Kohaku's revenge scheme because she believes her family deserves it.

However, because they are not the protagonists they don't get the easy route of taking their revenge against the people who deserve it and then riding off into the sunset happily. No, Kohaku practically gets her revenge handed to her on a silver platter and still revenge doesn't fix anything.

Once again, revenge is good for your health, but...

WHAT HAPPENS AFTER YOU'VE REVENGED YOURSELF?

Yun and Kohaku are both characters who either lost everything, or had no reason to live to begin with and decided to make revenge a reason for living. Both of them were unable to keep living for revenge because revenge is unsustainable. It's not something you do once and you're done, it's a cycle. The act of participating in it continues to perpetuate the cycle. As a result both of them met their tragic end.

However, Kohaku's tragedy surpassed Count of Monte Cristo for my favorite revenge story in all of fiction, whereas Yun's ending made me want to rip his book in half.

There are some differences in how their revenge stories play out. Kohaku is a very unique character. In spite of being an emotionless doll, she takes her revenge not out of anger or hate but empathy. I can't word it better than Comun so I'll just quote their post:

Hisui route ends with the reveal that Kohaku masterminded the demise of the Toono family and her motives are pretty obvious but I never expect the way she felt about it. Kohaku describes herself as not as a human, but as Makihisa’s emotionless doll. Kohaku had to constantly intake pain-removing drugs in order to endure Makihisa’s (and latter SHIKI’s) abuse and this state of not feeling anything disconnected her from her emotions. Kohaku admits that, to some extent, she did all of this because it made her feel human a little. What you would expect from this premise? Kohaku channelling her remnants of humanity into hatred for the Toono family and orchestrating her revenge. Was that what really was on her mind? Nope, Kohaku (and Kinoko himself, as Fate/Grand Order is a great evidence of) has a much more positive definition of what it means to be human. Kohaku expresses her humanity through fairness, empathy and a desire to make the situation better. Even though, Makihisa singlehandedly completely ruined her life, she acknowledges that he didn’t do it out of sadism or perversion, he did because he really had no other choice in order to keep himself from inverting and causing even bigger harm to everyone. Kohaku sees Makihisa as much of a victim of this tragedy as herself. 

Kohaku's revenge actually takes a twisted form of empathy. Kohaku doesn't have the standard revenge motivation of just wanting to hurt the people who hurt her, because she can objectively see the points of view of almost everyone involved in the tragedy.

It's a bit like Orestes where there's no true beginning or end point. Makihisa is a sick pervert and the instigator, but he also didn't choose to be born with demon blood that made him liable to turn insane at any moment. SHIKI is kind of helpless in all of this, as another person with demon blood he couldn't help inverting at nine years old and going completely insane, he's not really in control of his actions. Hisui is an innocent, and while Akiha is a part of the same family the moment she learned what Kohaku was suffering she stood up for Kohaku and made it stop.

"But, there wasn't anything else I could do. Without a purpose like that, I couldn't live. A doll cannot move on its own. Without anything to guide it, it can't move." "But still--" ...... That is unforgivable.

Comun frames Kohaku's motivations as genuinely believing the world would be better off without the Tohno bloodline, because it only has caused everyone involved with it suffering. Therefoer she makes a plan to kill every member of the family, except for Hisui and Shiki who are technically innocents, and then herself finally so Hisui can run off into the sunset together with Shiki who she'd always loved.

I'd also add that on top of empathy there's also a certain justice in her actions. Not justice in the sense that she has to hurt the people who hurt her, more like justice in the sense of fairness? Like, Kohaku isn't driven by personal hatred but rather a desire to make things fair and balance the scales. A family like the Tohno who cause misery to everyone shouldn't exist, because people shouldn't have mixed their blood with demons in the first place. There has to be a consequence to Makihisa's actions because you can't get away with child rape and the only one who could enforce it was her. The same way that Kohaku considers everyone's opinion equally and considers everyone equal victims in this twisted family cycle of revenge, Kohaku also acts to make things more fair.

To quote Percy again, it's like she's trying to balance the ledgers.

"And once this lie was shattered I scrambled to find a solution, to make a deal, to undo my mistakes and balance the scales. I now understand that there are no scales, there is no redemption, and no ledger that judges me good or evil."

Kohaku's also constructing a narrative around her pain. She needs a reason to keep living, and that reason is the narrative she's constructed, the story she told herself that she only half believes that everyone would be better off if everyone associated with the Tohnos, herself included, except for Hisui and Shiki died off.

Of course this is just a narrative. A lie she is telling herself to justify her actions. Because Kohaku acts out of fairness, and empathy, but she also acts for the sake of acting. She wants a reason to move, because otherwise she would just be a doll, passively enduring suffering. The story she tells herself is in the end a lie, like all stories are. Kohaku ignores the feelings of two people in her assumption that everyone would be better off without the Tohnos, that is her own personal feelings towards Akiha, and Hisui's feelings towards her. Kohaku understands that the reason Hisui can't smile any more is that she's too horrified at all the things her sister endured to protect her. However, she can't grasp that killing herself in front of Hisui would just make Hisui live with that guilt forever. That Hisui would rather be miserable with her sister alive than happy with her dead.

(From the good ending)

"Nee-san......? Nee-san, hold on......!!" A desperate cry. Seeing that, the girl smiles like a child. "...... Huh? ...... Don't do that, Hisui-chan. Crying like that, it feels...... like back then." "What---Nee-san, why----" "...... Yeah, because if I, don't do, so, you won't be, able to return, to the way, you were." Her words in pieces, and with glazed eyes, she speaks to Hisui. "---------Nee, san." Hisui's face contorts in grief. Her tears flood her face. "...... Why? That's fine. I was okay with the way I was. If you were happy, then I was happy. I---I was always protected by you, so---" I was always happy. Painfully, she swallows her last words.

Yun is in comparison less magnanimous towards his abusers. He wants more straightforward revenge against his teachers and all the people who "lied" to him by promoting him as the false avatar.

This is the biggest area where he differs from Kohaku. Rather than Kohaku, I'd say he's more like Geto, someone with a savior complex who genuinely put their all into being good because they believed they had the responsibility to save people, only to be then betrayed by those same people they were working so hard to save.

I do still think empathy is the central motivation for both characters. Kohaku commits revenge out of a twisted sense of empathy to see the perspectives of everyone involved and decides the only way to fix everything is to destroy it all and wipe the board clean and give the two innocents in the Tohno Household a fresh start.

Geto and Yun are both high empathy individuals whose empathy for other people twists them so much when they're confronted by human ugliness and selfishness, that they end up turning on the same people they wanted to save. They feel a bone deep empathy that twists them into monsters because they're not able to exist in an unfair or imperfect world that isn't the way they imagined it to be.

'...no matter what, I hate non-sorcerers. But it's not like I hate everyone at Jujutsu Tech. It's just...' It's just that it was what Geto had to do. In some ways, Geto and Yuuta were the same. Geto was too sincere. To someone like him, the reality that the world of sorcerers presented to him was just too cruel. '...that in a world like this, I couldn't be truly happy from the bottom of my heart.' To live for the purpose of being yourself. And for that goal, Geto could only continue to pursue his twisted dream, drowning himself in the curse that lies in the gap between ideal and reality. This was the final confession of a man who could only choose to warp himself, who had erased himself in pursuit of his goals. The only person who could bear such a curse was Gojo Satoru. JUJUTSU KAISEN ZERO LIGHT NOVEL

Geto is broken by the idea that all of his comrades and himself are considered expendable, and they're all meant to sacrifice themselves for an ignorant public. Yun is broken by the fact he broke his body and mind trying to be a great avatar because he wanted to help people, only to learn that it was all for nothing because he was discarded the moment it turned out he wasn't the avatar.

(Yun is more Morgan Coded but that's a different post).

It was too late. "I dedicated my life to people like you." Yun said. He couldn't tell if he was laughing, crying, croaking out beastial sounds of fury. "I wanted you to thrive. I wanted you to prosper. I tried so hard."

However, I'd say both of them Kohaku and Yun are driven by an underlying idea of fairness. They're not taking bloody violent revenge for personal gratitude, but because they can't cope with the unfairness of the world they're living in and are trying to find some ways to balance the scales.

Yun is so driven by fairness that he doesn't want to punish Kyoshi even though she technically stole the title of avatar from him. He considers her innocent of the whole thing, and even sympathizes with her and the struggles she carries right now as avatar.

"I can't believe you think I would ever hurt you." He gently tugged the closed fan out of her right hand. "You, the one innocent party in this whole affair! I would never hurt you, Kyoshi! For Yanghcen's sake, I used to be your whole life.!" He dropped the weapon and it pinged against the ground. "I know what's happening here. Your duties have gotten to you haven't they? I remember what it was like, carrying the weight of Four nations on my shoulders. Jianzhu used to liken them to unruly students in a classroom, requiring the guidance of a strong hand." He paused and chuckled, "I used to believe it meant showing the wya, leading my example. Now I know better. The world is a child refusing to listen, creaming in a tantrum. It needs to be slapped a few times until it learns to be quiet."

I think this is essentially the difference that makes one narrative and breaks the other. Nasu is fully aware of Kohaku's humanity even as she calls herself a doll. He goes to great length to demonstrate Kohaku's humanity in all the ways I pointed out above, by showing how much she sympathizes with others, by how she protected her sister, by how she's guided by principles.

More than anything, it sympathizes with Kohaku by making us as the reader understand that while she did bad things it was in retaliation to an even more horrible evil done to her. Also, that Kohaku only did these things because revenge was the only way she could think of to live, Kohaku was just a victim coping in the worst way imaginable. I think Nasu really nails down the hopelessness of someone who's clinging to revenge because they can't think of any other reason to live.

Whereas so much effort is put into Yun's backstory and detailing all of his suffering, only for him to be treated like a very standard villain. Like, honestly, Geto is a genocidal maniac and he's framed way more nicely by the story he's in than Yun. All Yun really wants to do is kill his abusers and that is apparently a sin too deep to continue living with.

Geto who does way worse things than Yun, and who is also killed by his former best friend is shown way more love and acceptance in his ending than Yun is.

This was the final confession of a man who could only choose to warp himself, who had erased himself in pursuit of his goals. The only person who could bear such a curse was Gojo Satoru. Where did it go wrong? And how could they start over again? The answer was left in their far-away, far-away youth. And even considering everything that had happened until now, it was clear that this story was about to end. But, there was one thing that was concrete. Even if everything was different now, there was still one thing that - from the very moment it all started - had never changed. Gojo knelt down, meeting Geto's eyes as he sat there. '...Suguru.' '...?' Geto Suguru. It was a named that the Jujutsu Tech organization feared: one of the four special grade sorcerers, who had killed over a hundred ordinary people, who had been named and exiled as the most evil curse use. But to Gojo Satoru, he was —— '————, ————' '...ha.' When he heard the words Gojo blurted out, Geto couldn't help but laugh. Such embarrassing (t/n: makes you self-conscious) words. Even why they were students, those words had never been said before. 'You should've at least cursed me a little before the end.'

In the actual manga of JJK too, Gojo tells a teenage ghost of Geto that if his adult self was there he was the only one who could have satisfied him. Gojo thinks about how he has to finally catch up to Geto after being left behind that day, when he moves on to kill the higher ups. Gojo's dream of protecting the youth came about because he never wanted someone to suffer alone like Geto did again.

Whereas, this is basically the only thing Yun gets told from his best friend and the hero of the story who is supposed to be the chosen spiritual guide of humanity chosen by the gods.

“It’s time to let go.” Kyoshi lowered her hands. “Whether you kill me here today or not, you have to let go of what happened.” “And it didn’t brting me peace. It was wrong that you were lied to, Yun. It was wrong for Jainzhu to do what he did, but he’s gone. Whatever pain and anger you have left - you have to live with it. You can’t put it on anyone else.”

Have you tried, uhhhhhh getting over it?

The "you have to live with it" is just particulary insensitive because as I went to great lengths to demonstate above, Yun was TRYING to live with it. Just like Kohaku, revenge was the only reason he could come up with to keep living.

It's fine if the heroes cannot find a way to reach out to save Yun in time and he dies because living for revenge is unsustainable. That's what happens to Kohaku, that's what happens to Geto. There's just a cruel lack of empathy in the way that Yun's death is framed. It's framed as a mercy killing, because Yun, a like eighteen year old boy who was retialiating against his abusers was just apparently so beyond hope. Not to mention that Kyohsi deliberately sides with one of the abusers and gives Hei - Ran a chance to redeem herself, but doesn't give that same chance to Yun her victim.

It's just this way that they characterize violence as bad but don't analyze at all where the violence came from or why they'd want to retaliate in that way. Gojo mercy killed his best friend Geto, but he also realized that the problem didn't begin with Geto and sought to create change in Jujutsu Society after Geto's death in order to try to break that cycle.

"I'm sorry for saying you have to live with your pain." Kyoshi put her palm into his chest in a gesture of comfort. "Because you won't." The cold she sent through his body formed a tunnel of ice between his ribs. It happened so fast, and with so much force, the air behind him turned to frost. With his heart and lungs frozen solid, Yun fell to the side.

Kyoshi kills Yun by freezing his heart. She specifically uses a technique that was taught to her to heal people, to murder him and put him out of his misery.

In the aftermath Kyoshi buries him and then lets the entire world remember him as a boy who went crazy and tried to kill the avatar. She doesn't even like... tell the whole story. That he was abused and lied to his whole life to clear his name.

Like, what a great friend.

This is what happened with Noel and Ciel too, but as I said in my Noel / Ciel post, Ciel killing Noel is meant to make her look like a terrible person. Noel is a victim caught up in circumstances, and Ciel could have saved her much earlier by lifting a finger and now that it's too late all Ciel can do is coldly put her out of her misery because Ciel isn't a hero. Shiki, a character who chops women into tiny little pieces has the opportunity to kill Noel a couple of times and doesn't do it, because he knows that killing her would be wrong and leaves it up to Ciel to decide.

Noel is fridged and dies a miserable death as a victim but it serves the greater story purpose of pointing out what a terrible hero that Ciel is. However, in avatar, the story still wants me to believe that Kyoshi is the hero so the only way they can accomplish that is by villainizing Yun and giving him an unsympathetic death.

if you wanted Yun's life to be some great tragedy, then you should let Kyoshi look bad. Let Yun died because Kyoshi completely failed to save him, have it be her wrongdoing. If you don't want Kyoshi to look bad, if you want her to be a hero then have her save Yun. You can only have it one way or the other. If the only way you can make Kyoshi still look like a hero is by victim blaming a victim of long term child abuse for not just getting over it then I don't know what kind of story you're writing there.

The writing just needs Yun to be a straightforward twist villain in the end for Kyoshi to defeat, so they downplay all of these good points and his status as the victim to make him fit into a more two dimensional role. If Yun is wrong because violence against his abusers won't solve his problem, then why is the solution for Kyoshi to just put him down with violence? Why is Kyoshi's violence sanctioned but Yun's violence not sanctioned? Kyoshi is allowed to kill Yun and put him out of his misery, but Yun can't kill his abusers? It's justice when Kysohi does it, but revenge when Yun does it? Kyoshi preaches that you can't stop the cycle with violence you have to let go then proceeds to end the cycle... by murdering Yun.

You can't preach this empty revenge bad message unless you're willing to look into why a character like Yun would want revenge in the first place, and how the world has failed him in ways that he thinks the only way to keep living is for revenge. You can't just tell him to let go without showing both him and the audience what letting go would look like.

This is exactly what Tsukhime did right with one of the most beautiful scenes in all of fiction, by showing that the cycle didn't end with Kohaku killing her abuser, and it didn't even end with Kohaku killing herself because each time she tried to enact revenge all she succesfully did was bring more pain into the world.

"But----" "Eh?" "But, there was just one strange thing." Really just a little bit. She said that as her eyes trailed off into the distance. "Akiha-sama protected me in the end. I knew there was a fifty-fifty chance she would do that. I stayed close to her for that reason. Revealing Makihisa-sama's abuse and devotedly helping Akiha-sama who was slowly turning nonhuman. ---Yes that's right. Really, I knew she would die protecting me." That smile. Even though she is smiling, she looks really sad, as if she's-- "But----I was really surprised at the time. Why is she protecting me? Why is she protecting me, risking her life?" ---She looks like she might burst into tears. "I still don't actually understand if I was actually happy or sad when Akiha-sama died. But when I wake up in the morning, I take tea to her room even though I know she is gone. Isn't this strange? Even though there's no one in that room anymore."

Kohaku thought she was relieving everyone of pain by killing the Tohno, that everyone would be better off, but the moment she succesfully kills Akiha she regrets it. It's all so hollow that she goes to Akiha's room every day for like a month leaving tea in front of her door.

Kohaku's identity is so wrapped up in pain, she forgets that in spite of the pain caused by those bonds there's also love. Hisui might not be able to smile because she feels constant guilt over how much Kohaku endured for her sake, but that doesn't mean Kohaku disappearing would fix that because she loves her sister.

Kohaku may think that Akiha is better off dead, that they're both better off dead because they only cause each other pain through their twisted connection but once Akiha is dead she goes to her door and leaves tea there every. single. day. because she valued her connection to Akiha so much.

Then she kills herself by gauging her knife out with a heart, mirroring Akiha who was pierced by the heart protecting Kohaku. "Hang in there...! Why, why did you do that...!" "Because revenge was the only thing I could do----I can only disappear when it's all over. I tried to find new springs, but I could never find one, and time ran out." She smiles. That... for no reason at all---- "What the hell is that? What are you saying...!" I look at the wound like I did to Akiha. ---She won't make it. It has pierced her heart. "........." Why? There was no reason---I just can't bear the sadness.

Revenge was unsustainable but because she couldn't be her genuine self in front of others, because she couldn't get in touch with her genuine feelings of affection for people like Akiha tshe couldn't find any other reason to live in time.

Even after Kohaku has just confessed to orchestrating the murder of Shiki's sister and terrorizing him for weeks on end, Shiki still begs for her to live though.

"...... Right? You're a normal girl who liked Akiha, was always worried about Hisui, and laughed when we talked about stupid things. So----" Even if she wished it and caused the deaths of Akiha and SHIKI... "--Kohaku, there was no reason for you to die." Increasing my grip, I say these words from the bottom of my heart.

I think that's ultimately what makes Kohaku's story superior, because it is at its heart a story about an abuse victim who couldn't find any better way of living. The story bends over backwards to show us all of Kohaku's good qualities, and how it's those good qualities that led to her fall, not any internal badness on her part. Even if Kohaku is someone who's capable of doing bad things and got a whole bunch of unrelated people serial killed by SHIKI. The tragedy is also on the onus of the main character. That's what the story of the ribbon is for, the whole thing could have been prevented if Shiki could give the ribbon to the proper girl in time. The whole thing is written with the premise that Shiki could have saved her, and he does in her route. It's as much of the main character's failure as Kohaku's.

On the other hand, the tragedy in Yun's story isn't that Yun is a longterm victim who didn't get the help he needed in time. It's that Kyoshi is sad because she has to put down her childhood friend like a mad dog. All of Yun's good traits are invalidated and he's painted as a villain to make the story simpler and as a result it's far more boring and doesn't have anything to say about abuse, or the human condition and how it survives terrible abuse like Nasu's writing does.

That's why Nasu is the goat.

At least until Tsukihime Remake comes out and Kohaku's route gets padded out with filler and turned into a giant extended boss fight that didn't need to exist at all that takes like five hours to finish NO I'M NOT BITTER ABOUT CIEL ROUTE'S TRUE END IN THE REMAKE AT ALL.

[madamescarlette]

Actually one thing that fascinates me about the shift between the book and the movie for TBoSaS is the actual intent put behind two of Snow's biggest game-changing (ha) actions, dropping the handkerchief in the snake's tank to save Lucy and recording Sejanus' confession and subsequently betraying him.

Obviously with the shift of medium they have to make things more obvious, but it's just opened more depth of thought to me because in-book how he recounts these actions are as reflexive, things done in the moment without really thinking about it (when using the remote he literally says his hands "acted on their own [...] before he had been aware of deciding to do it") vs. how in the movie he seems to actively think through and enact them knowingly. You can still make an argument that the Sejanus situation is pretty much the same, especially given that he more goads Sejanus into talking, but with Lucy's situation he literally RACES out, tears his stitches and finds the tank and doesn't just drop the kerchief, he literally has to stuff the stupid thing in a side vent, a far cry from the book's version, where he drops it and wonders if he hallucinated the entire thing.

I actually really, really am intrigued by it as a narrative change though because a) him actually consciously doing these things puts more weight behind them, they're not just things that HAPPENED to him (a common stance he takes internally), they're things he cared about making happen so he did them, but also b) it places Lucy Gray as continually the one being who makes him most human, so it makes sense that his most kind-hearted action is a decision to try to save her.

One thing that made me saddest about his character from the book was that he has this seeming inability to view anybody as a fully-fledged human besides himself (even his Capitol classmates are differing levels of crass or try-hards until he needs a reason to be emotional about them, and THEN what he cares about with them is their shared childhood memories, almost never anything about them in the present day) but when he's a mentor is the time that he becomes most fully-fledged, he has sympathy (however fleeting and easily retracted) for Clemensia and Jessup besides wanting Lucy to survive. And perhaps he only does it because he feels that he owes Lucy a debt for saving his life, but it still happens, and he still ends up seeing them.

To me, this disproves his and Dr. Gaul's thesis; I don't really think the most base human instinct is for us to hurt each other, I think it's closer to not wanting to leave each other behind. When he has the least to gain from these people, what he cares about is their survival, the least amount of their pain. What we want from each other is for you to get home safe. That's what gives it such beauty that he would risk so much to get Lucy home safe, and so much more damning that he would throw Sejanus to the wolves. That there is equal impetus behind the choice to save somebody at risk to yourself, just as there is behind condemning somebody who placed their absolute trust in you; these are the choices that make a man. Sometimes, even a flicker of humanity can save your soul within you. The tragedy is he simply didn't want it to be saved, so the flicker burnt out before it could even take shape.

[mirror-to-the-past]

So.... I bolted to the finish line of Dream Drop as I had nothing else to do today.

I am still collecting many thoughts, sentiments, attempts at analysis, etc, as I always do, but this game just had a lot to offer so I'm still weeding through the freshly tilled flowerbed that is my brain at the moment. Holy mother of run-on sentences (you're gonna see a lot of those).

First off, I wanna thank this game for doing so much for Sora and Riku's characters. The inverse development they had through the course of the plot was really interesting to follow, actually, and none of it's out of nowhere!

Since KH1, Sora's had the repression subplot and embracing the strength of others as his own. Here, he tried to do the same, but with everything that's happened to him since, all of which he doesn't even necessarily remember, and all of the emotions and memories he's been touched with and made more and more aware of- he's on shaky ground and the same ol' methods don't fit like they used to! Understandable! And Xehanort/13 Darkness gang just feeds into that. He expands on Sora's questioning of his identity, suggests the lack of validity of his emotions. Everything that could be used to describe Sora in a positive light in wake of what's happened to him, he finds a negative spin on it to really dig at Sora's core:

'You're confused about the direction your life has taken? Hm, wonder how much of you is even real. Your emotions? Memories? Could be fabrications. Or someone else's. Who knows...'

'Your heart is a refuge for lost souls, hoping to find a new future? Nah, screw that. Your heart's a prison. Your very existence binds people, Sora. And of course, you just love holding people back.'

'Aw, you follow where your heart leads? Cute. People's feelings have never led them astray before, huh? Why don't you just keep being a precious little idiot though, it works great for us.'

Xigbar particularly, was brutal as always. Loved the scenes with him and Sora in The World that Never Was. So well crafted. He towers over him, gets all up in Sora's business and you can see how uncomfortable Sora is. He pokes directly at Sora's two biggest insecurities:

Weakness; being incapable and helpless.

Not being wanted/needed, or dragging others down.

He goes on his whole spiel where he specifically highlights how Sora's pretty much leftovers. He acts like he's a good for nothing- "As if the Keyblade would choose a wimp like you." And childish for simply feeling the pain of others: "Oh... thank you, Sora's heart, for pushing him right into our clutches. Aren't hearts great? Steer us wrong every time." (Love that line) And Sora figures out that Nobodies have the capability of essentially learning to gain their own heart (CALLED IT, YES- BUT ALSO 😭 you poor guys. I think every party that could have benefitted either didn't care or didn't figure it out.), only to be further disparaged by Xemnas essentially being like 'Yeah, and then they got manipulated anyway, hah. Just like you.' Just two grown ass men bullying and gaslighting a teenage boy to heighten his insecurities. Because "possession" just seems to be a symbol for one losing themselves.

Xehanort as a character just gives those vibes of an individual who takes, takes, and breaks someone down until they don't feel like themselves anymore, becoming an extension of their manipulator. He preys upon vulnerability and lack of self assurance and it's so good, hah. So, that's the reading I find most appropriate for his thematic relevance, in relation to KH's continuous crisis of what makes up an identity. I mean, just look at how Xehanort describes the others they were considering as a dark vessel- Riku's "immune to the darkness," in other words, immune to obfuscation/has more solid connections. Roxas was considered as too driven, assured in his place in Sora's heart when he forged his own trial-by-fire path. Both people that came to peace with themselves and what they wanted through hardship, one way or another. Now, I'm not saying Sora hasn't felt hardship, but when your theme is "repression," he's up against amnesia, feelings of others encroaching on his own, and a lack of self evaluation. He has more of himself in others, at the moment, and that's leaving him vulnerable.

So, you can only imagine how Sora feels at the game's conclusion, denied a rank of Keyblade Master, those words lingering in his mind as one of the most recent things he's heard, near death(?) experience, and Sora had been filled in I'm sure on how Riku was endangering himself for Sora's sake. I'm sure he feels super great about all that.

(His "What do you want me to see?!" line after Roxas disappeared... haha... I'm well.)

Meanwhile, Riku. His whole arc was the polar opposite! By the end of this game, he was the most self assured than we've seen him the whole series! 🎉 Hooray! At least someone gets to be happy! :'D

But for real, *wow.* Personal quip, I doubt I need to go heavily into the queer connotations of Riku's journey to easier vulnerability and self acceptance, especially in this game, because I'm sure anyone who takes time to read this can probably see it, but wow. The way he learned to change his reflexes and actions throughout the course of the story in a number of small, meaningful ways was so sweet. It was cheesy, sure, but him openly laughing with the other teens in Traverse Town. Him admitting to the nature of his insecurities to help another, and then getting comforted by Esmeralda in return, who assured him it was understandable to have walls around his heart/keep parts of himself separate from the world when he was still unsure and figuring out his feelings (lines that drive me crazy, 2023). Him rolling his eyes at the "All for one and one for all," motto before reflecting on Sora's openness and inclusion, and deciding to give it a try, himself. So many little things where he learned to laugh and reminisce freely and it reminded me of the snippet of how he was when he was younger in BBS, which, speaking of- all those steps towards healthiness made it so that throughout the entire game, unlike CoM, where he fought in darkness with self hate, and Days, where he lost himself completely, he never battled with notable levels of internal darkness to try to win anything. He found his strength to protect the things that matter, like he always wanted, by being himself, unapologetically.

...I wish I played this game in middle school or something. Alas.

(Also Riku Dream Eater theory was a go, boys! Also like how there was no explanation other than *X. Heartless voice* "Yes adopted son of darkness, you were down so bad you changed species to protect Sora from bad dreams as soon as you subconsciously felt suspicious vibes." And that's all we're gonna fucking get, so deal with it *mic drop*. 😂 Was pleasantly surprised Sora's clothes were also plot relevant, and I feel better about disliking them now. They branded him, eugh.)

Speaking of being yourself, but perhaps being too many of yourselves, in this case, here's my obligatory "cries at the endgame" sentiments. This one was less hype than the others, but punched me directly in the heart instead. Oh. My. GOD? That whole sequence of Riku diving into Sora's heart (with all of his memories floating past? Lord I'd be so embarrassed if I was ever in such a situation- it's so personal, y'know?), entering its innermost reaches, answering the questions... holy guacamole guys I think I left a part of me on those sunset beaches, there. That whole scene was a KH1 reference with the questions (I answered in terms of how I best thought Riku would answer), Riku and Xion's sitting placements on the Paopu tree (also Riku saw Xion as Sora *fist pumps in sad success*), and I'm almost *certain,* especially since it was right before "What are you most afraid of" that my theory of Riku overhearing the Sora&Kairi dock convo in the first game was valid. I mean, just look at the dude's face after staring out at the sunset. M'boy Riku looked downright melancholy and I trust KH microexpressions with my life. (And speaking of microexpressions, Sora's smile looked suspiciously forced when congratulating Riku on becoming a Master, poor fella. He was trying so hard to be a good sport about everything with that messy situation.)

Dream Drop Distance did so much with how we're finally having all of the separate plot points converge and it was so surprisingly satisfying. Sora seems to be picking up more about Naminé, he's aware of Xion and is trying to figure out who she is. Roxas seems to be losing himself or doubting who he is outside Sora and aaaahh?? No?! My beautiful boy, don't do this, we'll get you out! I miss Axel, but we've got Lea, who keeps getting deadnamed (he got chosen as a Wielder by the universe for his troubles). I want to see more of Ienzo, he endears me, especially when he's told "shut up nerd" by Lea. Foreshadowing about Ventus (when he smiled upon feeling Sora's happiness with the Dream Eaters post-credits, something got me in my core about imagining Ventus experiencing all of Sora's joys and hurts while he grew up. I wonder if he'll feel any affection for Sora's friends as if they were his own, as well.). We finally got Ansem's data he implanted within Sora. Kairi is being brought back into the plot since KH2!! HYPE! *On my hands and knees*

Anyway this game was good. I probably have more to say because there was just so much but yeah.

Edit: Almost forgot the thing I groaned at my TV for earlier! ^_^

*ahem*

They composed a Heartsong and each of their hearts play a piece of a Duet version of Dearly Beloved, which is the Title Theme for the Entire Franchise, and Definitely Doesn't have any romantic connotations as a phrase or anything. Also they Definitely do not have a Two-Part-One-Whole Keyblade that isn't (so far, I'll catch up) explained, and is a phenomena not previously noted throughout the games, that has a Paopu Fruit hanging off the end.

Man, all this stuff tuckers an epic gamer out. Think I'll go replay Hades, Stardew Valley, Undertale/Deltarune as a break, considerably less gay games. (Har, har)

[themelodicenigma]

What do you think about how kingdom hearts chooses its theme songs? Some soriku fans are talking about passion being about sora and riku's 'love'....

I mean, Sora and Riku's reunion in the game is obviously a central part of this larger theme of reunion, and it acts as a conclusion to Hikari/Simple & Clean thematically. But it's much more simple than that based on what's been told about it's conception and how it was utilized. For example:

---Following the previous game, Utada Hikaru also sang the theme song for this game, "Passion." Nomura: Many fans seem to have the image Kingdom Hearts = Utada Hikaru so I didn't think of changing that at all. This time I wrote a story explanation for her that's longer than the previous game's. We decided to have it played at the last scene, so for me the theme was "Sora and Riku's reunion." I wrote stuff like "An image of a reunion, a happy moment in a way" and "Like a Hikari 2" in there.

Based on the phrasing, the most optimal understanding for the last two sentences is if "Sora and Riku's reunion" is in regards to their reunion with everyone else, i.e. the last scene where the song played which prompted the thought of said reunion. There's a missing context of "with everyone" there not being said, but that's fine really as something just being said. I mean, highest chances are the "image of a happy reunion" that Utada Hikaru received, amongst other specific things unbeknownst to us (they also wanted to convey a lot of different things)—what they got should have also involved the nature of the last scene considering it's where the song plays besides the intro and features the conclusion to Hikari nicely (even without digging into the undertones then of Sora and Kairi specifically there). I don't think there's a single main theme that isn't inspired by or is detached from the last scene of the game within it's conception. -shrug- So it's pretty important as a focus.

Reunion and Friendship are huge themes in KH2—how is it not going to be about THE ultimate and final, full circle reunion in the game. Come on now. XD

However, even with the implied "Sora and Riku's reunion (with everyone else)", their reunion obviously still is a large part of the wider theme within the game's ending here. Sora literally spent the game looking for him, he thought Roxas had killed him (the word for "defeat" in JPN is the same that Sora used to Mickey when talking about defeating Ansem SoD)—so especially because of the latter, their literal reunion at TWTNW was a big, touching moment. Showing Sora and Riku on the beach (their "symbolic" reunion with their talk on the beach) as the traditional last in-game picture (which is also moments before reuniting with everyone else), thus also makes a lot of sense too for capturing this theme. Even Nojima utilized the friendship between Sora and Riku as a theme for the scenario. But overall, the boys finally together again and reuniting with everyone else back where the game began, and ending with Sora and Kairi cementing it in reflection of a conclusion to Hikari—it's pretty perfect.

So yeah. Still, it does have a specific application that goes beyond Sora and Riku, though. It's a bit different than Hikari's conception and Chikai's application, how those two evidently are a direct reflect Sora and Kairi in conception, but these wouldn't be themes unless they represented something wider and thus, and also had wider application too beyond it's origin. The most easiest way to see this is how it's used for other games—this mostly applies to Dearly Beloved (especially this as THE main theme), Hikari, and Passion, but Chikai is just...directly and exclusively about Sora and Kairi at this current point. lol

[bisekcual]

Man Dominate Person scares the shit out of me. And I imagine it's not something that Hob shakes off very easily long term, considering his long deep shame and fear of not following orders.

for SURE. i think brennan played it off pretty well in the episode for like comedic purposes, and also for the fact that like, with time constraints being what they were nobody could really ham up how awful some of the shit that was happening in that fight was. not necessarily a bad thing - bit of a diatribe, but i agree with a number of people on here who said the shortness of the final fight was actually a little thematically interesting, setting aside the doylist explanation for it. namely, the fact that it was so swiftly done reminds us of two things:

1) the PCs are arch fey and, mechanically, extremely arcanely powerful, and are restricted from acting out almost exclusively by the rigid structure of fey society and the social obligation to uphold it; and 2), building off of that, that really any number of fey could have done this, had they, like the pack of pixies, just decided not to put up with it anymore. any arch fey could have, if they were brave enough, decided to become courtless. any arch fey, especially those powerful ones in the court of wonder, could have, if they cared enough to challenge them, gone against apollo and suntar. it becomes clear that the court of wonder is only so powerful because nobody before the pack of pixies had dared to question their dominion. it is that radical act of reaching out, of interrogating the society you lived in, that freed them to change everything.

anyway, dominate person. i think it made sense from a doylist perspective not to really dig into that because there wasn't really like… room for a whole thing of hob making contesting checks against it and struggling with it, which would've been a much different thing to watch, because there was only really one round of combat before it ended. i think especially after the day he'd had (see: that meme of hob getting beat the hell up by the engagement, rue breaking up with him, getting shot in the back, and a couple other things i'm forgetting), it would really shake him to have been controlled like that and made to strike out against a friend as a result of it.

i really think that feeling would sicken him, and it's possible that it would've been another big part of his motivation to leave the goblin court. rue's speech to him was obviously a lot on its own, but from a perspective of interiority - rue's speech imploring him to think for himself and question why he follows orders, what it's all for, is immediately followed by him being magically puppetted against his friends. it's almost poetically terrible, and i think it would really get him thinking about what orders mean to him, and what it would mean to live a life where he never felt that way again.

[29pageshomestuckeveryday]

Homestuck, page 3,696

[S] ==>

Storyboards: http://readmspa.org/storyboards/03693.swf.html

Song used: At The Price of Oblivion by Malcolm Brown

song commentary:

Malcolm Brown:

The name comes from a line of Rose's during Act 5 while discussing her options of survival with Doc Scratch:

TT: But it's a little disheartening to learn I'm now faced with not one, but two suicide missions at once.

TT: One to destroy Jack's power source and defend all of existence, and another to ensure our cosmic progeny at the price of oblivion.

As soon (like, not a minute after) as I saw Rose go grimdark, I decided to wrote some hilariously ANGRY AND KICKASS BATTLE MUSIC for her (presumed inevitable) battle with Jack. The original sort of concept was something like the music of Guilty Gear - All guitars and organs and the like. It took several attempts to try and tone it into something useful, but in the end I decided to dig up Chorale for Jaspers - A previous bit of music used for representing the death of Rose's cat (The main themes here being the death of Rose's mother and the anger she feels afterwords).

So that's where we start, with a kind of messed up, creepy violin rendition of Chorale for Jaspers, before we start to build up and then kick into the main part of the song. Around 1:00 we here the music box chords from Black Rose/ return, then at 1:20 it's another Keytar Solo from me (I'd just bought it and was feeling cocky). The rhythm guitar and guitar solo at the end was also me and also something I was terrified to do since I don't normally do "Live" playing (Everything is usually sequenced). In this case, a lot of it was so difficult to do (Because I can barely play guitar. At all) at this speed most of it was played at a slower tempo and then sped up digitally (HAX!).

The drums were easily the funnest thing to sequence in this thing, mainly all the awesome fills and the double bass step at the end. The final guitar solo is an attempt to reference Rose's original "Strife" theme - Aggrieve. It's very loosely there, and I reckon needs to come back in some fashion since it's actually kind of awesome.

When Andrew told me he was going to use this one for a fight scene I was looking heavily forward to it. Imagine my surprise when just as it's about to kick off... John gets himself stabbed.

Author commentary: When you find the murder scene, that triggers the end of the game. John gets a vaguely sad look on his face, and the kids strike cool poses to begin what surely will be a very intense and long-lasting round of battle. Except for the fact that, outside of any logical reasons for the battle to be cut short, you know this is going to be a bullshit fight scene fake-out because I hate making battle scenes because they're a huge stupid waste of my time and energy no matter how "cool" you end up thinking they are. I'm insanely right about this, and cutting this battle short so I could go right back to writing long conversations between Dave and Terezi was absolutely the right call. Fanboys always wanted me to do more cool fight scenes and got grouchy when I didn't. It's one of the many reasons why so many fanboys of a certain ilk are completely terrible. Actually, in many ways a great deal of the thematic focus of Homestuck as a piece of metafiction revolves around my contempt for certain kinds of fanboys, which should provide a lot of material for discussion in the Act 6 books. Sounds great, right? Of course it does, and I know you can't wait to hear all of my good shit when it comes to the gratuitous write-ups on Caliborn-meta that is in store for you. In fact I would go as far as saying that much of HS, and Act 6 especially, reads as sort of an allegorical poison pen letter to the worst types of fanboys and their deleterious effect on the media they consume. It dispenses repudiation by profiling them psychologically, determining what they value most in media (i.e. in relation to the meat vs. candy binary), and strategically turning the screws through various acts of deprivation, fake-outs, long indulgences antithetical to their most cherished "values," and so on. If you could boil down my relationship with the "shitty fanboy" archetype via HS, all you really have to do is skip forward to the part in A6 where I'm talking to Caliborn through his giant computer and tormenting him by gluing his mouse to the desk, blaring loud music he can't mute, etc. That scene says it all about my ongoing relationship with these guys, and the manner in which I generally felt inclined to "serve" them through my work.

But that's all kind of a huge tangent in the context of the current scene. Bottom line: John gets insta-stabbed from behind by a teleporting dog with lightning-fast reflexes. Jack's been getting angrier the longer he's been sniffing John's scent without being able to follow it. He probably just didn't want to take any chances in letting him get away this time. Also he's super powerful and John still just sorta sucks? He gets better, though. Later while sleeping, Dream Hologram (?? I'll have to work on a term for that) John gets a rematch and holds his own pretty well. Anyway, this death doesn't stick, obviously. It's neither Just nor Heroic. So this cheap insta-slaying also serves as a good excuse to start demonstrating the mechanics of god tier resurrection.

The blood-spreading pattern is a callback to…the very first page of this book! Same exact wound from the same exact sword. The first from the front, the second from the back. Jack is great at stabbing John but bad at killing him.

Rose is pissed. Okay, this DEFINITELY means we're going to see a big awesome battle now, right? Right???

Actually, no, she just blows up the entire castle immediately, almost certainly incinerating the corpses of Mom and Dad, making funeral plans a lot harder. Roxy would be absolutely dismayed at this squandered opportunity for a grand, double-open-casket funeral. Revenge-looney grimdark Rose just doesn't THINK.

What a drama queen.

[thecrushheb]

Finally finished Pathfinder Kingmaker! Clocked in at 158 hours. A full 20 more than Wrath of the Righteous. Unlike WotR I played on core difficulty and never had to drop it, more because of me than either game. I'm sure WotR gets spikier due to the epic levels thing going on, but I'd have to give it another go to see if it's actually that much harder. Biggest difference in difficulty for me was that this time I actually understood how to buff for each situation (on second thought, the 20 hour difference might just have been in buffing lmao, not really but, like fr).

Spoiler review below the cut

The story isn't quite on par with WotR, and the companions are nowhere near, but the diversity of the campaign was vastly vastly superior. From kobolds and trolls, to liches, to barbarian hordes, to fey, and really almost everything in between it felt like. I mean there were times where it really felt like peak rpg for me. Vordekai right into Armag was an insanely cool stretch. Compare that to WotR where its really one note, just demons and cults. From P:K to WotR there was a huge jump in quality basically across the board, except for that one drawback.

Speaking of characters, I didn't really connect with anyone except Ekun, Tristian, Harrim aaaand.... Kind of Jubilost? I liked others, Nok-Nok was good of course but had little depth, linzi I was sad to see die but she was a bit too earnest and glowing to not get on my nerves. I finished everyone's quest. ended up killing Jaethal at the end of hers (deserved, i was playing good). Tristians story was the best written, Harrims was compelling and how they let more and more depth to his philosophy drip in was good. Ekun had a great arc and good writing to his story too, probably the best actual positive change arc with how I played him. Have to say the voice acting on everyone was top notch. I'd be lying if I pretended Amiri didn't get old quick, and Octavia is not what I'm looking for in a relationship story and it felt like that's pretty much what she was only written to be so that got old too. Val was interesting but also felt like the writers were trying to say something but they weren't sure exactly what during the writing or they had a good arc and felt like it was too on the nose preachy so they muddled it idk, but it felt kind of all over the place with its point. Hated Reg, he was annoying and evil, Jubilost could have done with a more compelling story I didn't dig the bleaching and he also had no arc. The idea and arc behind Kalikke/Kinerah/Kaessi was awesome but underdelivered and i was kind of romancing them but their class wasn't useful enough to have them around that much or maybe I just didn't feel like putting in way more extra time figuring out how to get them to be great. I did like their story a lot, but then at the end I think there was a glitch and I couldn't recover them in the house and they didn't show up for the last battle. I loved how Tristian and Harrims plots made them seem mythical, Tristian tied into the main plot made him so awesome.

I played mostly with a party of Ekun (and Okbo! Got to be great friends with my panther) Val (fully buffed ended up with 68AC for the battle with the Lantern King) Octavia, Tristian, and Jubilost. Most substitutable was Jubilost because he was just extra DPS but his bombs not missing and being tripping made him indispensable at the end, plus great buffer. I played a Druid, the anti-Fey one, and it was great. Having 3 tanks was dope with my panther, Ekun, and Val.

To conclude, Pacing sucked and Kingdom management was the culprit it wasn't worth all that time for what it was. Companions were good enough with a couple moderately memorable ones. Main plot was good, might have been great with proper pacing because of how varied it was but it's impossible for me to give a better grade, definitely not top or anything because it wasn't really thematic or philosophical at all, but they weren't reaching for that. Mechanically it was absolutely top level. Got me to think deeply about my choices but play with some freedom, pushed me to try not to rest exactly the right amount, couldn't have asked for a better challenge - fun balance. Wont replay probably ever because I didn't feel like I missed anything and the kingdom management would be even more unbearable a second time. It felt decently reactive in the ending slides, but actively reactive... A little lacking compared to WotR or even something like Mask of the Betrayer and certainly not BG3 which is the goat in that regard. 158 hours well spent, didn't regret them, might inspire me to replay WotR but I probably should finish BG3 first at least once.

[nautilusopus]

I posted 6,915 times in 2022

255 posts created (4%)

6,660 posts reblogged (96%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@lets-jam

@tofucasserole

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I tagged 1,600 of my posts in 2022

#bird - 397 posts

#friend art - 224 posts

#forfdorfsorf - 101 posts

#pokemon - 62 posts

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Longest Tag: 140 characters

#......i will not look at the notes i will not look at the notes i will not look at the notes i will not look at the notes i will not look at

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

75 notes - Posted May 13, 2022

#4

nobody else is writing meta analysis for vivarium so i guess i have to do it

Vivarium is a 2019 horror film that the internet doesn’t seem to know what to think of. Most YouTube videos as per usual don’t wanna engage with it on anything more than an extremely literal surface level (hence the abundance of “VIVARIUM EXPLAINED” videos that just recap the plot to you as though you can’t see with your eyeballs that yes, he put on the nametag, that sure is what happened onscreen, yes I fucking get it the boy is like a cuckoo-esque brood parasite I GET IT) that ultimately devolve into speculative fanfiction about how effectively the aliens can take over the world. There are a few people here and there a little more willing to at least engage with what the movie has to say, and from there you get takes about how it’s about how the golden capitalist ideal of the suburban nuclear family is a banal hellscape, which I’d say is generally pretty accurate. Tom spends his entire time at Number 9 labouring, digging a hole while Gemma looks after the boy because he doesn’t know what else to possibly do with himself, an action that wears him down and ultimately costs him his life, and for all his trouble all he’s found is the body of the last guy who tried to labour his way out of this situation. All he’s done is created is a grave for his “offspring” to dump him into. 

Like, as far as Capitalism Bad stories go this one’s pretty on-the-nose, and a lot of the people griping that the story was confusing are mostly the ones that seems to have missed this. (For an even longer tangent about how a lot of scifi stories aren’t going to make sense to you if you resist the very obvious thematic readings they’re giving you because you think things can’t be that deep I recommend Dan Olson’s excellent video on Annihilation.)

Occasionally, though, you get people also mentioning how it’s a little about animal rights, and even more especially about nature versus nurture. For the most part, Tom and Gemma are not kind to the boy. They (understandably) have nothing but contempt towards him. They openly discuss how creepy he is when he’s within earshot. At one point they try to lock him in the car to starve just to see if whoever comes to get his body can be forced to let them go, and they only back out on the plan when the fact that he looks and acts like a child in that moment gets to Gemma and she lets him out. Eventually, the boy grows into an emotionally distant young adult that locks Tom out of the house to die and doesn’t seem to give two shits about their suffering now that he’s bigger and stronger than his “parents”. Surely, we think, if Gemma and Tom had been kinder to him, he would have grown into a kinder adult, even if he was an alien? Are they not perpetuating this literal cycle of violence? 

And with regard to the nature versus nurture reads, I actually directly disagree and find it at odds with the Capitalism Bad message, because my read is this:

No amount of kindness or understanding would have turned the boy into a good person, and acting like it would have is in fact part of the trap. Gemma and Tom would have wound up used up and dead either way, because thematically speaking, what the boy is there to do is to collect data.

More under the cut, I have a lot of opinions about this.

The boy’s creepy alien gimmick is mimicry. It’s what the realtor (p clearly a member of the same species) does when trying to entice Tom and Gemma into Number 9. The realtor is better at saying context-appropriate things than the boy is, but still slips up every now and then, and even so his mannerisms aren’t quite right. At best, he sounds like he’s regurgitating a script (a bit more admissible given he’s trying to sell something). At worst, he parrots Gemma’s “no, not yet” back to her in exactly her voice. Everything he’s saying, it’s clear he’s going through motions without any real understanding of what those motions are, beyond, “This is the thing you say to sell a house.”

The boy is demonstrably worse at it. He’ll parrot entire conversations back to the people who had them regardless if it makes sense to do so. He rarely speaks in his own voice, instead chopping up various words he’s heard from both parents. He doesn’t seem to have much sense for what is and isn’t appropriate to mimic (to the point of Gemma quite transparently tricking him into revealing he’s an alien outright), much less what makes sense for him to mimic. 

He develops this skill gradually over the course of the movie, gets a bit better at putting together sentences people can actually reply to. But even then, he doesn’t seem to engage with the context overall of the conversation. After aforementioned alien reveal, with Tom growing sicker by the day, Gemma begins to cry and back away in horror, and we get this exchange:

The boy: Are you [overwhelmed] again, Mother? Gemma: I am not your mother! The boy: Are you [overwhelmed]? Gemma: I want to go home. The boy: Silly mother. You are home!

There’s no real engagement with the actual conversation at hand. This is the kind of script a reply bot runs. It emulates emotion the same way it emulates everything else. 

His nature is reflected by the surroundings: The identical miles of houses with framed pictures of those houses on their own walls, with no real understanding of what people do and don’t want in the aesthetics of a house. The food that looks correct, but has no flavour or nutritional value, eventually leading to not just Tom’s death, but eventually Gemma’s. The entire world, from the Number 9 house to the suburbs of Yonder in general with its fake clouds, to the boy and its interactions, are fake, hollow, and the kind of thing an alien with no real care for the real human experience beyond perpetuating the system’s own growth would create.

And at this point hopefully some of you have noticed, we’ve seen this exact behaviour pattern before.

i’m quoting the reply on that second one here by @dukeofankh​ because it’s extremely relevant to this entire thing:

I’m honestly reblogging this again because the more I stare at it, the more I feel like this is staggeringly relevant art.

Like, so much of modern capitalist marketing is the construction of these superficially personal narratives. Giving the sense, not only that the brand fits in with your identity, but that it is almost a sentient individual itself that has a personal relationship with you. Corporations have personalities. They want to be your friend, and the reason that the entire internet economy runs on the currency of data right now is that the only way to prop up the illusion that they care about you is by already having the information about you that real people would gain by paying attention

But the only way they can collect and sort all that data is with computers, without any actual humans involved past setting up the parameters and pressing “go.” And computers are fucking idiots.

Which leaves us here: this false, saccharine message of togetherness and community–community between you and your friends but more importantly between all of you and Facebook–stripped fucking bare by the fact that the cookie-cutter algorithm can’t tell the difference between friends supporting and caring about each other and Thanos with a dumptruck ass.

The boy is here to collect data, and he collects it and regurgitates it as though it all has equal relevance to the situation at hand. 

He reacts with the same polite indifference to open contempt, genuine warmth and an attempt to bond with him, terror directed at him, and pleas for mercy from him. Later on when we get a glimpse of the “inner workings” of the house, we see the boy watching another set of parents rawdogging the shit out of each other, and applauding appreciatively with the same blank amusement as he applauds to everything else. He sees Gemma and Tom dancing to the music from their radio outside, trying to have one bright moment with one another despite the grim circumstances they’re in, and he immediately inserts himself into the moment with zero awareness that he isn’t wanted here (granted that’s also extremely a little kid thing to do lol). 

Which leads to the fact that that isn’t to say he doesn’t have his moments of personality. He smiles at positive attention (as well as negative attention), he enjoys interaction. He throws a tantrum when he’s told he can’t watch fucked up alien meat television at 3 am and turns it right back on. About the only time we get a genuine reaction from him is when he gets locked in the car to starve.

But then, so do things like Alexa, or Siri, or Cortana. You can have little conversations with it. It can tell jokes. You can ask it the meaning of life and it’ll tell you 42. You can insult it and it’ll do an EPIC SNAPBACK OMG SO SASSY. The people who designed it want you to view it as a friend, even as it sits there and spies on you and integrates itself more and more into your life. 

Gemma lets him out of the car because (also understandably) she can’t bring herself to kill something that looks like a child. Later on, when she speaks with a dying Tom, she wonders why she didn’t kill him when he was still small. Tom tells her, “Because you’re a good person.” Their problems could have maybe (I mean probably not we’ll never know, at the very least Tom wouldn’t have died of exposure maybe) been solved if they just locked the thing in the car and ignored it, but in the end they still wound up viewing it as a person. 

Tom and Gemma openly comment that the boy is always, always watching them, knowing full well they’re within earshot of him. He doesn’t retaliate for this, they’re never punished for saying it. Why would he? It’s what he’s there to do. He knows they know he’s watching. Water is wet. The boy watches.

Of course, when he is older, and better at putting together conversations that sound like an actual person, Gemma is openly terrified of him. His mannerisms don’t change, but conversationally he seems to at least understand whats being said to him, and is willing to ask more in-depth questions, graduation from, “What’s a dog?” to “Why did you say ‘you’re welcome’?”

By the end of the movie, the boy matures into a man. He’s gotten a bit better at knowing which words to parrot at what time, something we can watch him improve upon as the movie goes, and still insists, to Gemma’s last breath, that she’s his mother and that she is home. Gemma dies telling him, “I’m not your fucking mother.”

This is maybe the only other genuine reaction we get from the boy: a disappointed, “Whatever,” before he zips up the bodybag and chucks her into the hole as well. He cleans up the house for the next occupants and leaves. He takes the now-dying realtor’s nametag and puts it on himself, folds up the old realtor and stuffs it in a drawer, and takes his place in the office ready to lure the next couple to the suburbs of Yonder, with words that almost, but not quite, convince you he’s a person, and by that point it’s too late. 

The boy was only ever there to make sure someone would be in Number 9 to make sure someone would be there to raise the next boy to make sure someone would be led to Number 9 to raise the next boy. 

And who among us haven’t left this exact message, or even said this exact thing out loud, to the bot hanging over our shoulder watching us constantly, politely asking if we want help or suggested content?

See the full post

94 notes - Posted August 1, 2022

#3

Breeds of Kill Six Billion Demons fans

Roleplayer: Largely harmless, just here to have fun, have been following the comic since day one. Mildly irritating to wade through when you look through the comics for actual discussion about the story, since a lot of their posts are shaped by headcanon by necessity. Usually chill.

Lore Bro: Similar brand of annoying to the roleplayers in that they assume their headcanons to be canon and act accordingly, but infinitely less fun to read because they don't even have the courtesy of pretending to be a dragon first and will not back the fuck off when proven wrong. Will get very, very angry when their headcanons turn out to be wrong. Are here primarily for the lore in fact. Become even more upset when it becomes clear Abbadon isn't and consider it a failure of writing.

Twitter Brainrot: Are looking to this comic to deliver Good Representation and Moral Truths. Very angry that Steven Universe advocates genocide and war crimes. Continually shocked when a trans character makes a bad, selfish decision, or a pee-oh-cee slices someone in half with a very big sword and intestines fly everywhere and they choke to death on their own blood. Wants you very badly to know that this behaviour is NOT okay or healthy in real life! <3

Comment Poets: Try to say deep one-liners in a similar voice to the Song of Maybe. At best state the obvious. At worst, directly embody that Dril tweet about there beign zero difference between good and bad things. Whoa....... maybe the bad guys had a point........ makes you think............ Can't knock them too hard though because they're some of the only people in the comments actually directly trying to directly engage with the comic and its subject matter! Good for you guys, keep up the good work, maybe work on the delivery.

Immigrated Warhammer 40k Fan: Just here for the swords and gunmechs. Might be a bit lost but haven't figured out this is a Wendy's yet. "i don't like how you demonised these god emperor cops >:( liberal agenda much??? why are there so many gays in here for no reason? good job ruining your comic you soycuck"

Horny On Main: Home of sexual. Know a good pair of tits when they see them, regardless of whether they're attached to a buff despot with sad dad energy or a desiccated mummy. Invaluable members of the community, braver than any marine. Thank you for your service. #AllisonsAreolaTruth

The Rhyming Wax Head: The only cool roleplayer. Only broke character the one time and it was fully justified

118 notes - Posted November 11, 2022

#2

See the full post

347 notes - Posted May 20, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

okay FIIIIIINE i'll throw my hat into the Goncharov ring

Been a while i've done a proper movie breakdown, may as well be this one.

Rather surprisingly (but perhaps not too surprisingly given the unexpected renaissance of things like the original Dracula and Breaking Bad on this website out of seemingly nowhere and with very little prompting), I'm seeing a lot of new people suddenly interested in Martin Scorsese's seminal film classic Goncharov, originally released in 1973. Obviously a movie like that doesn't make it coming up on 50 years without generating a lot of discussion about the different ways the movie resonates and why, but coming into it in 2022 there's been so much cultural cruft that's collected around Goncharov that (similar to stories like Fight Club and Scarface) it's a little hard to parse what it's actually about with all the mythologising that's gone on around the characters.

Those movies, in one way or another, are about portraying the downfall of their protagonists -- Fight Club's after ironically creating another system of control and dehumanisation and becoming what he sought to destroy, Scarface's after being consumed by the wealth and power he's amassed. A lot of people assume it's that kind of story, because aren't most well-loved movies? However, I think this is ironically an assumption made because of the genre of film it is. All the people that aren't going, "OMG Goncharov is so cool and badass and fucks bitches," are going, "WOW I can't believe Goncharov is a cautionary tale about power corrupting," and in the process people miss that Goncharov is first and foremost about loss, in all its different forms.

I'm both kind of surprised and frustrated people miss this, given how utterly pervasive the movie is with its clock symbolism -- it's the one thing everyone remembers about it, it was in all the tie-ins. I dunno, maybe that got funneled back into the theory where they're meant to reinforce how Goncharov is just a mortal man at the end of the day, which is fine I guess, but the movie overall becomes a lot clearer when you interpret it through the lens of, "These things are gone and you can never get them back; clocks don't go backwards."

One of the most fascinating things about the movie is how every character embodies a different kind of loss. I'm gonna ease into this and start not with Goncharov but with:

Rybak, who is usually associated with loss as we typically think of it, i.e. the loss of loved ones via death. This comes up all the time, either in his trust issues (why he's being such a prick at the wedding), in the card game (he never bothers to bet much money, knowing he's bad at poker, and still loses all the same). Rybak is terrified of loss, cannot manage it, and ultimately is punished by losing what few people he had left and then being spared by Lorenzo who deems him punished enough, and is forced to survive, to grapple with what his life is now without them.

Goncharov's is actually more subtle, and it's loss of small, insignificant things as a result of the larger losses he believes he's processed. This is something that's frequently contrasted against Rybak. The pawn shop going under is actually a microcosm of this whole thing. Goncharov anticipates that this is obviously going to lead to financial issues for him, plans accordingly to deal with this, and... it works! He's saved! Except that means card games can't be hosted at his place anymore, given it's burned to the ground. Does this matter, in the grand scheme of his life? No, of course not. Poker night still gets had all the same. But it is different now, and always will be. Little things like this continue to add up, until something as insignificant as a towel -- a towel that never should have been in his room, but Sofia is no longer there to drop off his laundry and chat with him -- is ultimately the final nail in a coffin built of insignificant splinters, each one an imperceptible change underneath the much more larger, noticeable story beats of things like grief.

Otto is the big obvious one I'm not gonna linger on: loss of his youth, moments in the past that he wants to redo but can't. Most people at least seem to have gotten this one.

(This is also what the clocks get associated with a lot, which again, doesn't NOT make sense but also if it were just for this one character that, while thematically important, was honestly just a side character with limited screentime and only two scenes, would they really be all over the movie before Otto's name is even mentioned?)

Sofia's a bit abstract, and is the loss of self -- of the familiar anchors we have to who we are, what we think our core principles are, our place in society, who we want to be to our loved ones -- and by the time she dies she is rendered utterly unrecognisable to herself, and is horrified by it. She grieves herself the same way Rybak grieves his wife (even gets a direct visual callback via the way her face is lit when she's burning Lorenzo's check). You see echoes of this in Goncharov as well, but while Sofia is grieving the person she used to be, Goncharov is grieving the world around him (even though really, it's the same world it always was -- time keeps ticking on, one second per second, and neither one of them can ever un-fire that gun).

Lorenzo, tragically, gradually loses his freedom (and maybe in a parallel world would actually be the protagonist of a movie where he chokes on his own hubris like everyone seems to think Goncharov is GRUMBLE GRUMBLE). As he comes into his own more and more by his family's legacy, he is afforded fewer and fewer options about what decisions he can even make. Arguably he was doomed from the start, but the further he clings to power as a means to freedom, the more it drives him to destroying everything he ever (thought he) cared about. The tragedy of his character, and what makes him a good villain, is that he can clearly see what he is doing to himself and he absolutely hates it (his walking out early at the wedding is a tacit admission of this), but his absolute refusal to accept loss, to accept grief and pain and all the awful shit that comes with the human condition, is what causes him to toss aside every out he has because if he has enough CONTROL over his situation, surely he will never have to lose anything ever again. But, really, he already has.

I dunno. Goncharov is one of those movies that is great, and everyone seems to realise it's great, but nobody ever really puts into words why, and that's how you get Fight Club fans lmao. And it sucks because the actual discussion around the movie beyond "it's another hubris story but REALLY GOOD guys" is so much more fascinating and a much more earnest emotional truth that just never gets talked about.

2,301 notes - Posted November 20, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[neversetyoufree]

what makes vanitas such a good character i love him so much but i can’t put it into words

I think, funnily enough, a big part of what makes Vanitas such a good character for me is that way that he’s allowed to be, well, bad. He’s deeply traumatized, and as we learn more about him throughout the series, we see more and more ways that his past has affected him, and despite him acting so heightened and theatrical, at his core, he just feels really real. He’s not just some ~damaged badboy~, he’s genuine person with issues, which means sometimes he lashes out and acts like a petty little bastard, or a misogynistic creep. And we can see and sympathize with his hurt, but at the same time see the ways that he genuinely kinda sucks. And that makes for really interesting reading!

Like, we’ve all seen the “generic asshole with a heart of gold” trope before, and Vani could have so easily been that, but he really isn’t!

He’s an asshole, yeah, but only in ways that feel warranted based on his past. He loathes people that try to selflessly protect others, especially himself, he hides information constantly, and he tends to try and hurt or cast aside anyone that strikes too deep at who he really is. And that’s just a few of his issues; the list could go on! But the thing is that, looking at all of his flaws, they all feel like they have a reason to be there. He’s not just a jerk for jerkiness’s sake. The issues about protection? It all goes back to his guilt and history with Misha. The withholding of information? It’s his dislike of talking about himself and his (pretty justified, to be honest) assumption that neither Chasseurs nor Vampires ever want to listen to him. The aggressive evasiveness about his true self/emotions? He’s just fucking defensive and scared. In full context, Vanitas’s assholery ends up making him look sad and hurt, rather than edgy and cool, which makes him a lot more interesting than your run of the mill jerk character.

And as for the “heart of gold” part, that really doesn’t apply to him either. He’s not a bad person by any means, but he’s not exactly an unambiguous good guy either. He’s definitely got goodness in him, but half the time he insists on viewing that goodness as a weakness and trying to repress it. He’s just, like, a trainwreck of a guy. His morals are a mess.

He’s doing a great good by saving vampires from being cursed, but he’s doing it only for himself, with no regard for whether they want his “salvation.” He shows a lot of selflessness in Gévaudan, drawing on his Mark’s power and damaging himself in order to save Chloé and Jean-Jacques, but he does all that only after Noé insists to him that they should stay. Before that, he was so stuck in his uncaring persona that he was ready to walk away! (Though I’m sure he would have regretted that if he did). He can’t stand others getting hurt for his sake, but he’ll never admit it, and he puts on a show of hiring “shields” only to try to hurt or discard them if they actually shield him willingly.

He’s got less of a heart of gold, and more of a heart of silver *at best*, but he isn’t overly condemned by the narrative for this. He’s just presented as is, selfishness and trauma and all. And now thanks to Noé’s influence, he really is starting to mature into a better person.

And of course, I think the context of the series as a whole also helps how well he works. A character like Vanitas wouldn’t fit in every story, but one of VnC’s biggest running themes across all of its main characters is trauma and the way that it changes people, which means he fits quite well. He’s not just complexity for complexity’s sake. His history and issues are all thematically relevant.

Also, on a more meta level, I think he’s just really fun to dig into. He’s so dishonest, always trying to put on a show of being this suave, unaffected coolguy despite being so hurt and sad underneath, which means there’s layers to almost everything he does. Why is he doing anything at any given point? You could ask him, but he’d never give you an honest answer. It’s up to us (and Noé) to figure it out! And that makes him really compelling to read about, because he’s just begging for analysis. I look at him and I just wanna peel those layers! (Insert Shrek joke here).

Tldr: Vanitas is kind of a messy shithead, but presented in a way that feels both justified and really honest and real, which makes for a fascinating character to read about.

[marley-manson]

#also would be curious about how you see BJ walking away because I'm not really sure how I see it #I've considered different things but I haven't decided

@thebreakfastgenie My assumption is mainly that at the time it was written it wasn’t really supposed to reflect too much on BJ or his relationship with Hawkeye, it was just what needed to happen for the scene to be effective. Hawkeye needed someone to deliver the monologue to, and then that person needed to leave so Hawkeye could get driven out past the 4077 sign before getting out himself. I could see anyone being BJ there - Klinger, Trapper, Radar, whoever.

Not because they know he’ll get back out and help (though Trapper might’ve sold that take just because he knew him longer), but because short of bodily dragging him out of the bus, what more can they do? An inspirational speech, maybe, but that wouldn’t fit the depressing darkness of the scene imo, and I do think it works best thematically if Hawkeye gets out himself, not because someone else encourages him. There’s something so effective in Hawkeye walking back into the MASH alone, to go do surgery. As much as I really really love Hawkeye’s like, psychological dependence on other people, that grain of resilience that remains even when he’s alone is so good.

And yeah saying BJ walks away because it’s the most dramatically effective option is kind of not really in the spirit of fandom analysis lol, but it’s such an early episode for him, before the show really started digging into Hawkeye and BJ’s relationship, that I can’t really imagine it was intended as anything like a defining moment. And it doesn’t have the vibe of one to me either - BJ walking away feels perfunctory, not particularly important.

But that said, I think it does fit BJ really well lol. Whether by accident or design, he does this a lot with Hawkeye later on - backs away from his emotional struggles. It reminds me of later episodes where BJ’s repressed, detached attitude is portrayed as a flaw and a point where he and Hawkeye (and sometimes others) clash. I’m thinking things like the scene in The Grim Reaper where Hawkeye is ranting to him about getting court martialed and BJ tells him dude has an open and shut case while sipping a martini before storming out because Charles is trying to steal his jacket.

Or Back Pay, where he tells Hawkeye he’s tilting at windmills and refuses to help until he snaps himself and independently steals the jeep at the end, or Rally Round the Flagg where he acts above it all before snapping, or Blood and Guts where he ignores Hawkeye’s outrage at the reporter to focus on the motorcycle, etc. And of course the hospital scene in the finale which caps this pattern off magnificently.

Which is not to say he doesn’t support Hawkeye in plenty of other episodes ofc, there’s more where they team up than where BJ leaves Hawkeye to do his thing alone. But this is a recurring point of contention between them - BJ staying detached from Hawkeye’s emotional spirals.

I don’t think The Late Captain Pierce was intended to be an early instance of this, because a) idt he’s purposefully staying emotionally distanced from Hawkeye’s breakdown here, he’s just out of his depth like most people would be and he does his best and b) this didn’t really start happening much until the last few seasons anyway, but man like, it’s still pretty easy to compare it to BJ leaving Hawkeye’s room in the finale.

(lol the timing of this conversation during this whole bj/hawkeye night.)

What other interpretations do you have of that moment, out of curiousity?

[bettsfic]

could you share the director's cut of digging for orchids?

i have never rewritten a fic so many times as i did with DFO. there are some chapters that went through six revisions. i just kept getting it wrong.

so while i was reading tgcf, i was already coming up with fic ideas. for some reason my first fic idea was an au where hua cheng is a hospice nurse. i was just really into the emotional fuckery and whump of book 4. after revising it three or four times i realized there was just something about it that wasn't working and decided to write something a little more light-hearted.

(i still want to finish and post the hospice au. it's on the list! [it's xie lian's father who is in hospice care, and xie lian is dealing with daddy issues alongside a mounting crush on the in-house hospice nurse])

anyway. even early on while reading tgcf, i knew i wanted to do an actor au, but i thought they were both going to be actors, xie lian the washed-up has-been and hua cheng the rising starlet who grew up with xie lian's movies. that was going to be a different fic. DFO's initial draft was about xie lian as a former stunt actor who couldn't act anymore due to an injury, and hua cheng was his weird roommate/bff who was kind of slowly piecing xie lian's life back together. initially i wanted the story to be about xie lian's slow recovery from a pill addiction and finding more effective pain management.

why did i read tgcf and come away with story ideas about hospice care and the opioid epidemic? i have no idea. that's what happens when you read a 600k-word novel while glaringly depressed i guess.

i would write 10k, cut 6k, add 10k more, cut 8k, back and forth. it was awful. it took me weeks to realize the problem was the xie lian was OOC. without much thinking about it, i had given him my belief in the highest ideal: becoming a cottagecore ho. and then i realized, xie lian is a god! he wants to be worshipped! so modern au xie lian would be a superfamous c-drama actor and he'd want his acting career back. i think i related so much to xie lian i neglected to realize the ways in which we're different. i would absolutely hate to be famous. and it was hard for me to write the drive for attention-seeking as a positive thing, after so much of my life being convinced it was the worst thing a person could be. so that was one of the major narrative questions for me -- how can i portray xie lian's ambition and desire to be worshipped in a positive light? how can i make it a strength?

once i realized all that, the plot came a lot easier. i still think because of all the major changes, the pacing is kinda wonky (it takes 10k just to reach the hook). and thematically it's all over the place, but i also think those things are what make it tgcf fanfiction, because tgcf is a thematic and pacing nightmare (lovingly).

the chronic pain aspect was hard to write, because i don't currently live with chronic pain but i used to. i didn't want to write a "and then he made a full recovery!" kind of story, because a lot of his battle involved dealing with the shame of his injury and its aftermath. i hope i did that aspect of the story justice. when i had chronic pain, i struggled a lot with the underlying belief that it was normal and i didn't deserve to be helped. that was the epiphany i wanted for him, the realization he deserved to recover. obviously that was heavily inspired by the self-harm themes of tgcf.

and lastly, possibly the most fun part of DFO for me was coming up with hua cheng's art, which i based on all the truly wild stuff i saw when i was doing artist residencies. i hope i did that aspect of the story justice too -- i learned so much from the artists i stayed with, and even if i couldn't fully understand their work, i still had a deep respect for it.

despite all these struggles i really had a good time writing it. i'm glad it found its audience, and i'm grateful for all the comments, fanart, and translations i've received for it.

it’s @oficmag promo day, send me asks!

[hamliet]

The Girl Who Gets to Have It All: Buffy Summers

So with @linkspooky​‘s encouragement, I have binged Buffy the Vampire Slayer and relived my childhood culture. And, it's a 10/10 for me. Not that it doesn't have flaws, but it's genuinely one of the best stories I've seen, with consistent character arcs, powerful themes, and a beautiful message. It's also like... purportedly about vampires and demons and superpowered chosen ones, but it's actually all about humanity.

Buffy was able to be a teenage girl, allowed to like the things teen girls are scorned for (boys, shopping, etc), to be insecure about the thing teenage girls are insecure about (future careers, dating, school, parents), and to be a superhero with its good and its bad aspects. The story wasn’t afraid to call Buffy on her flaws (sometimes she got in a very ‘I am the righteous chosen one’ mode) and to respect and honor each of her desires (to be a good person, to be loved, and more). The story listened to what she wanted and respected her desires, giving her the challenges needed to overcome her flaws while also never teaching her a lesson about wanting bad boys or romance is silly or any manner of dark warnings stories like to throw at teenage girls. 

It respected teenage girls--nerdy girls like Willow, jocks like Buffy, lonely wallflowers with trauma like Dawn, and popular/snobby ones like Cordelia, girls gone wild like Faith. It never once reduced them to the stereotypes that were lurking right there: each character was fully rounded, human, flawed and yet with respected interests and goals. This is so rare for a story that I’m still in awe. 

The story as a whole follows Buffy from 15 to 21, of her as she grows from teenager to adult. She acts like a teenager and grows to act like a young adult, wrestling with loneliness and duty. The adults, like Giles, Joyce, and Jenny, are not perfect either, but neither are they “bad parents” or “bad mentors” necessarily. Joyce in particular says something terrible to Buffy, but she tries to do better, and it’s rare to see a parent in YA stories shown with such nuance. Basically, it wrote the long-lasting adult characters as human beings, too. 

Speaking of growing up, I appreciated how Buffy’s love interests mirrored this. Angel was someone Buffy loved and admired, wanted to be like, but who was always either extreme good or extreme bad, and combined with Buffy’s own tendencies towards black-white thinking, made for a beautiful relationship to help her grow, but didn’t necessarily form a foundation for a long-term partner. Spike, on the other hand... they both saw each other at their worst and were drawn to each other even then, and were inspired to become better because they couldn’t bear to be a person who treated the other person so wrongly. They pushed each other to become the best them they could be, and believed in each other. Also, Spuffy is an enemies to lovers ship for the ages. 

(Also, most of the other ships were well-done or at least can be understood. Riley was very obviously wrong for Buffy which paralleled Harmony and Spike in being 100% wrong for each other. Cordelia and Xander were a fun ship even if we all knew it would never last, and Willow and Oz were beautiful and cute. But Xander and Anya and Willow and Tara? OTPs. As were Giles and Jenny, the librarian and the computer teacher.) 

That said, it’s not a perfect series. No story is. All of the characters and ships had problematic aspects to them worthy of critique, and the writing is very 90s in a lot of ways. It’s a product of its time, and in many ways it’s good society has progressed beyond some of the tropes/metaphors used in the show. In other way, though, the show was ahead of its time, and in a good way it wasn’t bound by the fear of purity policing with its takes on redemption (many characters would never fly today). 

So, in order of seasons ranked from my very favorite to my “still enjoyed it very much” (no season was actually bad, imo), here’s my review. I’ll also review my top 10 villains in the show, because Buffy does villains very well in terms of the redeemable and irredeemable.  

Season 7:  Yep, the final season was my favorite. 

Overall Opinion: Buffy's finale is literally "f*ck them men, our power is ours" and while it seems cheesy it actually works (also, f*ck in both a literal and figurative sense). The series strongly hit all the themes: love as strength, and redemption. Buffy consistently shows love as her strength--*all* kinds of love. Friendship w Willow/Xander, familial with Joyce/Dawn, romantic with Spike/Angel. These types of love are also never pitted against each other as is so often the case in current-day media. It's beautiful. Also, Spike’s confrontation with Wood was so powerful in terms of exploring forgiveness, redemption, and reconciliation: where they overlap and where they don't, and what it means to move forward. 

Unpopular Opinion: I have seen a lot didn’t like the inclusion of Potential Slayers, and while I agree they could have been better incorporated/characterized, it was a great way to show Buffy’s final stage of growing up to be ending her chosen one status and projecting/multiplying her powers over the world. 

Biggest Critique: Kennedy was female Riley--the anti-Tara to Riley’s anti-Angel (by ‘anti’ I mean opposite in every way). Kennedy was annoying and immature. Her role, like Riley’s, was less about exploring her as a character and more about her just being stamped as “love interest: lesbian.” 

Favorite Episodes: Beneath You, Lies My Parents Told Me, Touched, Chosen

Season 6: 

Overall Opinion: I said this on Twitter, but I felt like this was Buffy’s The Last Jedi or Empire Strikes Back moment. It is polarizing and dark, deconstructing the tropes it stands on--but by digging to the core of these tropes, it actually makes what’s good about them shine brighter. Everyone’s enemy was the worst versions of themselves. Giles left Buffy, Willow's struggle to relate to the world led to her trying to destroy it, Buffy hurt everyone through her anger, Xander abandoned Anya at the altar, Spike... yeah. It ages well as an integral part of the story, and the Trio were eerily prophetic. 

Unpopular Opinion: Dawn is a great character with a good arc. A traumatized teen acting out and struggling to come to terms with loss and identity? She wasn’t whiny; she was realistic. 

Biggest Critique: Willow’s addiction coding (I’ll discuss this below) and Seeing Red as an episode. I see the argument for both of its controversial scenes from a narrative perspective: Willow starts the season not grieving Buffy but instead being determined to fix it with magic and needs to learn to grieve, but. Still. Bury your gays is not a good look. For the Spike scene... he conflates sex/passion and violence (”love is blood, children” is something he said way back in season 3), but like Tara’s death, it had more to do with Spike (as Tara’s death did for Willow) than with Buffy’s arc, and as for the actual execution... they really botched that. Did it like... have to go on that long or go that far? No. Also, the framing was good, but inconsistent with the rest of the series (Xander to Buffy in the hyena episode, Faith to Xander and to Riley, etc.) 

Favorite Episodes: Once More With Feeling, Smashed, Grave

Season 3 (tied with Season 5):

Overall Opinion: The opening continuity of Buffy meeting Lily/Anne after saving her life in Season 2 was sweet. The Witchhunt episode had really powerful subtext: stories of deaths that aren’t even true are actually demons that possess the town and convince them to turn against their children in the name of protecting the children. It’s a good commentary on, oh, everything in society. Faith’s character arc was fantastic, and her chemistry with Buffy was off the charts (look, I may be Spuffy all the way, but Fuffy has rights). The finale was satisfying in so many ways, seeing the entire graduating class unite to destroy the Mayor and the school with it, symbolizing Buffy et al’s readiness to move on to college. Oz's relationship with Willow was very sweet and meaningful for a first romance for Willow. 

Unpopular Opinion: I actually don’t really have one. Maybe that the miracle in Amends was earned? I think you can make a decent case that Season 3 is the best written of the seasons, but can only truly be thematically appreciated to its full potential in the light of subsequent seasons (which finish Faith’s arc and deconstruct Buffy’s).  

Biggest Critique: It forgot Buffy killed the hyena guy in Season 1, making her continual insistence that she can’t kill people very ????? 

Favorite Episodes: Lovers Walk, Amends, Graduation Day Part 2 

Season 5, which ties with Season 3:

Overall Opinion: The entire season is about family and what it means, from Tara’s to Buffy’s to the Scoobies. I loved Glory aka Enoshima Junko as the Big Bad, I loved Dawn’s interesting meta commentary on retconning (like, the fact that she’s retconned in matters), and most of my ships are still alive. Joyce’s relationship with Spike is one of the most heartwarming aspects, and Spike’s arc’s desire is clearly highlighted: he wants to be seen as a person. The episodes after Joyce’s death are the most honest portrayals of grief I’ve ever seen, and absolutely brutal to watch. 

Unpopular Opinion: Buffy’s choice at the end seems a deliberate inversion of her choice at the end of Season 2 (sacrifice a loved one to save the world), but it actually isn’t: much like at the end of Season 2 where Buffy skips town because she’s devastated after killing Angel and doesn’t want to sort out being expelled, her mom knowing she’s the slayer, and her own trauma, Buffy’s sacrifice here was as much about her wanting the easy way out of relationships, family, college, etc. as it was about saving Dawn. Buffy’s death is coded as a suicide, which Season 6 emphasizes as well. 

Biggest Critique: Like Season 3, I don’t have a lot to critique here. I wish the suicidal coding had been a little more obvious in Season 5 itself, but also I’m not sure it could have been more obvious; it’s pretty apparent if you pay attention. Maybe also that Buffy and Riley’s relationship failing should have been more squarely blamed on Riley, you know, being insecure and cheating. 

Favorite Episodes: Family, Fool for Love, Intervention. 

Season 2:

Overall Opinion: Heartbreakingly tragic but exciting and revealing at the same time. It asked the viewer interesting questions about redemption and forgiveness and atonement through Angel being honest about his past, and then decided to show us his past now reenacted, challenging us. And still, we saw them save him in a parallel to saving Willow in Season 6 (but Season 2 was tragic because it wasn’t enough, while Season 6 was not). Jenny’s death was agonizing, and the scene were Angel watches Buffy, Willow, and Joyce get the news through the window was powerful. We didn’t have to hear them to get the grief. 

Unpopular Opinion: Jenny’s death isn’t a fridging; it works for her arc too when you consider her history. She worked to save the person whose life she was tasked to ruin, and it cost her her own--yet she still succeeded, because Jenny brought joy and wisdom to the show. Kendra’s death, on the other hand... was because they needed the stakes to be high--but we already knew that before she died. So, her death was useless. 

Biggest Critique: The subtext was Not It. It was essentially “do not have sex. Your older boyfriend will lose his soul, kill your friends, you’ll lose your family, your school, your home, and have to kill your true love or else hell will literally swallow earth.” 

Favorite Episodes: School Hard, Passion, Becoming Part 2.

Season 1:

Overall Opinion: I really liked it; it’s just lower on this list because the others are just better. It’s a great introduction to the series and to its characters, from Giles to Buffy to Willow to Jenny to Cordelia. It has great subtext a lot of the time (for example, Natalie French as She-Mantis is a literal predatory bug who engages in predatory behavior with students). Additionally, it subverts the typical YA trope of two guys and a girl, in which the girl is usually the least interesting character. Buffy and Willow were both fully fledged characters from the beginning with distinct strengths (even before Willow became a witch, as she wasn’t one in season 1 yet), while Xander was the more ordinary of the group. 

Unpopular Opinion/Biggest Critique: Xander’s arc showed its first flaws that unfortunately continued throughout the series: his writing was either very good or very indulgent in ways it never was for other characters.  (cough, the hyena episode, cough, in which he gets to skirt responsibility--and acknowledges that he is skirting it--for something the show will later hold others to account for). Xander’s just kind of inconsistent, which weakened his character over all. (Which is why both his love interests--Cordelia and then ultimately Anya--were good for him: they did not indulge him.) 

Favorite Episode: Witch, Nightmares. 

Season 4:

Overall Opinion: it’s still a good season. It’s a good portrayal of college and the growing pains of branching out, the strains of college growth on relationships (romantic and platonic). It shows us the first hints of Spuffy, giving us some serious Jungian symbolism between Spike and Buffy early on, and does well in establishing Xander/Anya and Willow/Tara as beautiful OTPs. Faith and Buffy’s foiling is fantastic. The Halloween episode was very fun as well. However, it suffers because its Big Bad, Adam, is not all that compelling thematically--yet, he could have been. See, the final battle pulls off the Power of Friendship in a really strong way but notably the season does not end there. Instead, it ends on dreams of each character’s worst fears, continuing what we saw in Nightmares in Season 1. Why? Because it shows us that the characters’ wars aren’t against monsters, but monsters of their own making: their flaws. Adam, as a literal Frankenstein, exemplifies this, but it wasn’t capitalized on as well as it could have been. 

Unpopular Opinion: Beer Bad isn’t a bad episode, at the very least because Buffy gets to punch Parker. It’s not one of the series’ best, obviously, but it does give Buffy an arc in that she gets her daydream of Parker begging her to come back, but she has overcome that desire and her desire for revenge. If we wanna talk about bad subtext in Season 4, Season 2′s Not It sex subtext continues in the Where the Wild Things Are episode in this season; it’s a powerful callout of abusive purity-culture churches, until the fact that the shame creates a literal curse undermines the progressive message it’s supposed to send. Also, the Thanksgiving episode (Pangs) is a nightmare of white guilt and Oh God Shut Up White People. 

Biggest Critique: Riley is awful. Like Kennedy, he had “love interest:normal” stamped on him and that was it. The thing is, he could have worked as an Angel foil, representative of the normal-life aspect of Buffy to Angel’s vampire/supernatural aspect, but the writers never explore this and seemed to even try to back away from that later on. They threw all the romantic cliches at the wall to see what sticks, from klutzy “I dropped my schoolbooks, that’s how we met” to cliché lines that had me rolling my eyes. Do you know how bad a romance has to be to make me dislike romantic tropes? 

Favorite Episodes: Fear Itself, Hush, Restless

Villain rankings: 

Dark Willow, the only villain to be truly sympathetic. While the addiction coding was insensitive and, while unsurprising for its time, aged extremely poorly. That said, Willow’s turn to the dark side after Tara’s death worked well for her character and the story: it was believable and paid off what had been building since Season 1's “Nightmares” episode (Willow’s inferiority complex). 

Glory managed to be genuinely terrifying, and humorous/enjoyable too. Her minions and their numerous nicknames for Glorificus were hilarious, as was her intense vanity. Her merging with Ben--a human being who genuinely wanted to be kind and good--added complexity and tragedy to her role. 

The First. A really good take on Satan. The seventh season as well as the First’s first appearance in season 3′s “Amends” had kind of blatant Christian symbolism, and so the First being essentially Satan works. Their disguising themselves as dead loved ones and the subtle manipulation they used to alienate people was really disturbing and well done. 

The Mayor, who was a terrible person but a truly good father. He provided an interesting contrast to the normal ‘bad dad’ bad guy character, in that he provided Faith exactly what the other characters refused to: he saw the best in her and offered her parental support, while the heroes didn’t and wound up pushing her away. 

The Trio, who were villains ahead of their time: whiny fanboy reddit dudebros, basically. The stakes seemed so much lower than fighting Glory, a literal god, the previous season. But that’s why they worked so well for Season 6′s human themes, and were especially disturbing because we all know people like them. I also appreciated the surprisingly sensitive takes on Jonathan and Andrew, who got to redeem themselves, but Warren did not, and I don’t think he should have either. 

Angelus + Drusilla. I’m ranking them below the Trio because Angelus was just sooooo different from Angel that it was difficult for me to feel the same way for him. He was still Angel, so it wasn’t possible to enjoy his villainy, but he also wasn’t nearly as sympathetic as Dark Willow, had no redeeming qualities like the Mayor, and wasn’t as disturbingly realistic as the Trio. However, the emotional stakes were excellently executed with him as the Big Bad, in that you were never quite sure how to feel and it just plain hurt. Also, Drusilla was a favorite recurring character. She was sympathetic and yet batsh*t enough to be enjoyable as a villain at the same time. 

The Master, who was just completely camp and really worked as an introductory villain. He was scary enough to believe he was a threat, and was funny enough to introduce the series’ humor as well. He was, like Glory, an enjoyable Big Bad. 

The Gentlemen, the one-off villains of Season 4′s Hush who were genuinely terrifying. It’s not as if they got a lot of explanation or any backstory, but they didn’t need it. 

Caleb, the misogynist priest. Fitting with the First’s Christian symbolism, Caleb serving as a spokesperson of all bad religious beliefs felt appropriate. He was also a good foil to Warren--being actually supernaturally powered instead of a wannabe--and to Tara’s family in being full-out evil. I despised him. 

Snyder. Okay Snyder is not a Big Bad like Adam is, but let’s face it: Adam is lame compared to the other villains. But Snyder as a principal? He was so irritating and yet really well used in the series to critique overly strict, hypocritical teachers. Like, we all know teachers like him. I loved to hate him, and his ending was so satisfying. 

[mc-critical]

(Okay head’s up, I’m going to be on your blog a lot since I absolutely LOVE your takes and analysis’.) Do you think (strictly theatrically speaking, not in the non-fictional and historical sense) Suleyman really loved Hürrem? As I watched the show I found it very silly how other characters of the show would remark how Suleyman “loved Hurrem so much he refused to ever take another concubine again” because..he did? And multiple times from what the viewers have seen too. Majority of the times the concubines/other women in Suleyman’s life (Isabella, Firüze etc) were only removed from his life via Hurrem’s intrigues, not by Suleyman’s decision. What do you think?

Aww, thank you so much for the nice words! 💕 Be here as much as you wish, absolutely no problem! (there are some takes I've had in the past that are quite passive-agressive in retrospect 😅, so I might as well also give you a heads up.)

As for your question, I think yes, SS loves Hürrem, but in his own, sometimes honestly incomprehensible (even outright toxic), way.

The writers perhaps wanted to hint at love at first sight in the beggining, due to the way she fainted in his arms in the first episode and how he kept thinking about her (that Ibrahim had to tell him that where he was supposed to go was the other direction) and the wave of excitement and anticipation he felt while waiting for her. But when they spent two nights together and he truly got to know her, was where it was at. Her uncanny ability to make him laugh, entertain him in a way no one else had before, was what impressed him first. He felt calm, safe in her presence, and wanted to keep this probably forever, along with him doing whatever else he wanted in the meantime regardless.

I feel the point of contention of whether he truly loved her or not comes from the fact that, the show wanted to make their love story integral to their both historically thematic and narratively soapy story - what I mean is, they wanted to make it the central plotline. And as a central plotline, it creates and/or extends on the other plotlines, having to show the other characters' reactions in excessive detail and even center parts of their motivations around it. You see how S01 and S02 of the series played this aspect of Hürrem and Süleiman's story completely straight - it presented it as The Love, this big, (thematically and narratively) unprecedented thing, this vital aspect of the series' DNA, the very tool that moves the story forward, that is only bound to have consistent narrative opposition: and I'm not referring only to Isabella and Firuze and all the other concubine arcs that force love triangles suited for the genre, it all is also about the continuous, frequent attacks on their love, that only stopped when the show made a complete genre shift by the second half of S04 and didn't have much time left. They worked with the idea that the more this love is attacked and antagonized, the stronger it becomes and the more shall people root for it. That's where the problem comes, because in retrospect, you can honestly see that these attacks played a major part in provoking a bunch of stuff SS did for Hürrem. Mahidevran beating her to death and poisoning her? SS gives Hürrem a chamber only for herself. (the other one she shared with Ayşe.) Them accusing her incessantly? Valide complaining about her? The various attacks? He continues to care even more for her. Valide and Ibrahim arranging that attack with the bandits? He married her. And one would wonder: is this even genuine or does the writing simply use her enemies' failings to lead Hürrem to SS? Is that the only reason he actually cares? What does MC want to achieve?

There are people who say that the entire point of SS loving her was that she was so different from everyone else (and that the concubine arcs ruined it), and yes, it was like that, in the very beginning. First impression is important and he truly began to enjoy her a lot since their first two nights, for her bringing him something new. However, both of Hürrem and Süleiman's characters and their relationship overall, drastically evolved throughout the show. When the first impression had passed and Hürrem gained SS's utmost attention and she became pregnant, she very quickly started taking stuff for granted, considering him only hers (the demonstration of the ring in front of Mahi; the twinge of jealousy towards Ibrahim.) and as a parallel, him still being a Sultan, having to follow the customs anyway, and calling Gülnihal in his chambers twice. Both of their ways of living clash, because Hürrem wants a monogamous relationship and takes every sign of care for him at face value, while SS lives in an environment that wants him to do what is expected of him.

SS both loves and hates when Hürrem stands up to his will. There have been times where she acted rashly, making borderline silly accusations (like blaming little Mustafa for the fire in E10), where she made moves out of jealousy (like stealing Isabella's pendant) and where she was complaining to him for something she didn't succeed to get (like Valide's chambers in S03). Süleiman sees her rebellious nature and goes out of his way to do moves to spite her. (this guy invited Isabella on a halvet out. of. sheer. spite and nothing else! smh honestly..) But there are as many times where he simply covers what she did (like killing Isabella) and caves to her demands anyway! Why would he cave to her demands and close his eyes on so much stuff she did, if he doesn't feel at least something for her?

The different treatment she gets also comes into play, because no matter how many times she's attacked and he seemingly stood by and watched aside from more serious cases, all it honestly does, is trigger his protective instincts. Despite of all the bumps on the road, Hürrem always was his darling, his special snowflake, whom he clearly felt something for. If anything, he wouldn't have freed her and this isn't something he would do to just anyone. (as we see how he refused to free Mahidevran when she desperately begged him to in E45.; and what's important, him freeing Hürrem wasn't provoked by someone else attacking her.) And when she makes all these jealousy fits, he listens, because Hürrem's character development represents full adaption to the circumstances of the harem, and by that, getting just like the others and learning their tricks. This has turned him off numerous times and when she shows that rebellious side of hers yet again, he couldn't help, but listen. What he said to Ibrahim after he sent off the Russian concubines, is especially telling: "No. (I don't love Hürrem as much as she loves me.) But now I fell in love with her even more." This summarizes extremely well what he thinks of her at this point, because while he's ready to cut her some slack, he's still helpless to her.

Though, later down the line, it gets very abundantly clear that if he loves her, he doesn't love her because she's different and she's rebellious, but because she's loyal to him. Infinitely loyal. She loves him this much, that she's not only ready to willingly drink poison and kill herself for him anytime, but she doesn't even want to give up his throne. It is all very well highlighted by his infamous line to Fatma: "Hürrem is not an angel, but she has something that none of you have. Loyalty! Absolute loyalty... / "She never saw anyone else on the throne but me." Over the years, SS began to live with the dramatically increased paranoia of betrayal, turning his natural ego from a strength, to an everlooming weakness. It destroyed every single relation of his, except for Hürrem. She's the only person that wasn't targeted by this crippling paranoid fear, he perhaps found piece and tranquil in her presence, because he knew that she wouldn't ever turn her back on him. And all these times he got mad at her, he had halvets to spite her, he caused her to prove to him how much he loved her, it turned out to be not only because his ego was tempered with, he wanted to test her loyalty the entire time. And all the times he prevented her from digging deeper into him and told her to stay out of political matters, now in S04 he no longer does that, since she actively joins every single conversation. Hürrem and Süleiman's relationship was put in a thorough deconstruction in S03 and S04, because after the slow Cerebus Syndrome transition began occurring and Yılmaz Şahin fully took over the script, the narrative stopped playing the love story completely straight and it put in the impression that it isn't focused on as much as it was before. So its more problematic aspects began showing even more down the line and it all lead into this very realization. The last episodes of Hürrem's life, while seeming like a cop-out, are genuine love letters for the fans and for Hürrem, with having Süleiman realize who he will lose and what will happen next, giving her the attention he never did. (I think the best Hürrem and Süleiman scenes we got, were in these episodes, along with the ones in the beginning episodes and right after the wedding, in E43-44.)

[And the episodes after Hürrem's death also make us question whatever he cares for her, because all he did there was straightforwardly betray her dying wish. Still, we should keep in mind that SS was at the peak of his downward spiral and it was Hürrem's death that sealed everything for him - losing the person who loved you dearly and was the most loyal one to you in your book, only caused catastrophic and devastating results, with SS going in her chambers in E136 and begging her to forgive him, right before the big fight between Selim and Beyezid began. There is everything else he did, yes, but losing HER is what caused him the truly neverending misery and what pushed him to such extremes, the loss of her loyalty broke him and finished him.]

Isabella and Firuze and Nazenin also add to these tests of loyalty, as well as being love triangles, added in for the drama. I feel SS did this not only to spite Hürrem, but also because he liked her unpredictability and he truly never expected for her to be this loyal in his eyes. It is possible he thought at some point due to his paranoia that she would give up on him, betray him, knowing that she also has her own ambitions. But seeing that none of that happened... perhaps all these continuous rifts in their relationship strived to show how strongly she loved him after all and maybe he came to appreciate that, even if it were too late. {note: the others said that SS loved Hü not exactly because of him refusing to take in concubines, but rather not taking concubines in for a long time. It illustrates more their hopes and beliefs (Mahidevran in E61: "Did you really think that his majesty couldn't be with other women?") and arguments presented when they need to win someone over for their cause to get rid of her. (like Hatice with Afife in S03) I always considered the Firuze arc more of a thematic tool than a dramatic one: aside from showing an actual continuous rift between Hürrem and SS, it breaks Hürrem's season two finale victory in half, enforcing even further that there isn't just any true long lasting victory that the themes won't condemn in this franchise. Nazenin was more for the parallels (Nurbanu - Nazenin; Hürrem - Gülnihal), while I never fully figured out what Isabella Fortuna was for, tbh.}

{He regarded Isabella as more of a toy, unfortunately, even with him saying that it was all somehow "a political game" with her and we had only him succumbing to his "manliness", protecting her from the snake and inviting her to a halvet only to spite Hürrem. With Firuze it was, admittedly, a bit more complicated, because he sure was infatuated with her to some extent, recited the exact same poetry to her, as well, but then again, we have the poisoning as a factor, and we have no idea to what extent it began to affect his psyche, besides him having to lay in bed in E78. I don't think Hürrem's intrigues had anything to do with the feelings he had for both of them, and I believe he would at some point have let them all go, exactly due to his ego and loyalty complex.}

I don't say that Süleiman's love for Hürrem is a healthy one, because oh noo, IT IS NOT, very far from it, in fact. Especially with the writers still keeping the status-quo with them the exact same even after he freed and married her, and for a while, it never made an actual difference. However, it is something that he didn't feel for anyone else in this harem and I would say that he indeed cherished it a lot.

[madmaddoxfuryroad]

HSMTMTS: Season 3 thoughts

So I’ve been ruminating a lot about this show today (like every other day) and I got to thinking about what they might do for season 3. Less so plot-wise (I mean season 2 is just over halfway through), but more about what musical they might do, what the cast might be, and how that could tie into the individual characters and their arcs (some more so than others, but c’est la vie).

In trying to figure out what musical they might do, I started first with the obvious: what does Disney own? I don’t think they would return to the HSM franchise (until the final season, but thoughts on that for another day), so anything related to that and other DCOMs I counted out. I also eliminated all Disney animated/princess films. I love them, don’t get me wrong, but seeing as this season they are doing BATB, I don’t think they would immediately go into another animated-film-adapted-for-broadway right after that. So at that point I wasn’t quite sure where to go. Mary Poppins was really the only other thing that came to mind and while I love the film and broadway show I just don’t think it fits the cast well slash even has enough parts to really showcase them. You have Mary and Bert. And then I guess Mr. and Mrs. Banks? Then the kids are a whole other issue. It just felt messy. So I just started thinking about broadway shows that I like, I mean if they wanted to, Disney has the money and could pay for the rights to use most shows. Then everything fell into place.

Into the Woods. I am 100% positive I am letting my bias for this show cloud my judgement, but if you stick with me, I think I can persuade you (or not, your mind is your own and I respect that). First off, Disney owns it. At least I think they do. They made the movie (RIP), so I am going to safely assume they have the rights at this point. Next, yes it contains fairytale elements, which might make you feel it’s a little too close to BATB, but it is such a deconstruction of fairytales and their tropes that I almost feel like it is an amazing follow up to a more traditional fairytale. It introduces conflict and the real world into these fantasy scenarios, which I feel goes really well with high school in general and growing up, expectations being shattered, and learning to alter your world view (I really love this play). Plus, I think it would be exciting to see this cast do a more broadway-type show. Obviously BATB is a broadway show, but I think there is a lot of reliance on knowing the film and less on the play itself. And not going to lie after Julia Lester’s rendition of “Home” last week (which I have not STOPPED listening to) it would be amazing to hear these teens tackle more broadway-style music. Which, takes me to my final point: the cast. What I love so much about Into the Woods is how it is very much an ensemble cast. Yes some roles are bigger than others, but if you have a named character, odds are it’s a fairly good role. And the whole HSMTMTS cast is so talented, I like the idea of them picking a show where it does not feel like anyone is sidelined with their part. Now the only thing left to do is cast it…

FULL disclosure. I ran into an issue early on that I ended up thinking Ashlyn was perfect for every female role and Seb was perfect for every male role. But I was eventually able to push through and cast it (in my humble opinion) pretty well. So I am just going to go off in the order that I cast them, because I think it will help explain my thought process.

THE CAST

Cinderella - Nini. Once I got over my need to hear Julia/Ashlyn sing “No One Is Alone” (loophole to this coming later), this felt like a pretty natural fit and was one of the easiest to cast. For one, I just think Olivia’s vocal range pairs very well with Cinderella’s and she could do beautifully with her songs like “On the Steps Of The Palace”. But what really got me was the way she parallels the character so perfectly. Cinderella is a character who always dreams of more but isn’t quite sure what that “more” is. And because she isn’t *quite* sure what she wants, the character is often seen grappling with indecision (see: “On The Steps Of The Palace”). Most of Act I is her being stagnant and letting the Prince take the active role. Finally in Act II she starts to get a better sense of who she is, who she wants to be, and what she doesn’t want. So this felt like it tied in really nicely with Nini’s journey and would be a great role for her, especially when…

Cinderella’s Prince - Ricky. Yes, yes I know. Ricky and Nini playing love interests? Groundbreaking. But stay with me. For one, I just like the idea of Ricky not getting the lead male role, and this part is perfect for him, regardless. The whole relationship between Cinderella and her Prince mirrors Nini and Ricky remarkably well. The way the Prince sees Cinderella as this perfect maiden who, if he could just be with her, would be the only thing he would ever want/need. But of course this isn’t realistic and isn’t how relationships work, which they both come to terms with by the end of Act II. Their break-up/parting ways scene might be my favorite in the entire play and I think it would be so great for Ricky and Nini to get to perform. In part because the conclusion of the scene is basically them both admitting that they will always love the idea of the other, even though they don’t actually work as a couple. (**I am operating on the assumption that they will have broken up in season 2 and are still broken up, but never really dealt with it). Honestly I recommend just watching the scene I will link it here (it goes from about 2:12:35-2:15:00). Plus, I could totally see there being an episode where they are trying to rehearse this scene, but it just isn’t working so Miss Jenn has both of them improv it or rewrite the lines to something that might feel more comfortable or personal. And I just see that being a really beautiful moment for the two and a chance for growth and closure. I could go on about this dynamic, but I will move on to my final point: “Agony”. First, while it is mostly a comedic song, you can take just the first verse of the song and recontextualize it really nicely as a Ricky pining kind of song, which I absolutely dig (not quitting on my Rina endgame, and you can’t make me) I mean: “If I should lose her, how shall I regain the heart she has won from me? Agony, beyond power of speech, when the one thing you want is the only thing out of your reach”. And BONUS I think we could also get a full-on version of “Agony” in all its absurdist glory with…

Rapunzel’s Prince - EJ. Well, sort of. Technically, no. BUT for the purposes of “Agony”, yes. At this point EJ will have graduated, but I don’t think he will be written out of the show, so it remains to be seen exactly what his place will be. I just think these two 100% need a song together and this is 100% that song. I could see it being something as simple as EJ is helping out with the show, the unnamed kid playing Rapunzel’s Prince is out, so they have EJ fill in. Or they have to have him go on for that kid last minute during the performance. It’s a quick, easily explainable thing that would have SUCH a great payoff.

Jack - Big Red. This was certainly one of the easier ones to cast, but my first thought was of course Seb. Jack is just a boy whose best friend is his cow and Seb radiates that energy. But I needed him for something else. Enter Big Red, the perfect Jack. For one, Big Red has a lot of that starry eyed wonderment that Jack has, that none of the other characters do. There is a purity and innocence to the way Jack sees a lot of things. That pairs nicely with Big Red. And it also opens the door for him to grow and mature more as a character. By the end of the show, Jack is in a place where is needs to transition more to adulthood and with Big Red being a senior by season 3, I think there is a lot of potential here. Also, with Big Red as Jack, I really like the character he is often paired with in scenes, but I will hold back until I get to them.

Witch - Kourtney. Yes. It is her time. One can debate over which character is the “main character” of Into the Woods, but for me it’s the Witch. And Kourtney deserves this. Did I heavily consider Ashlyn for this as well? You know I did. But I grow more and more confident in the casting of Kourtney the more I think about it. First thing’s first: the Witch belts, and I mean BELTS. Dara is such a powerhouse vocally that she would crush every moment of that; I have total faith. But the Witch also has such quiet and tender moments that people don’t think about as much, but are so necessary for the character to be effective and I think she also has that on lock. We have not seen a ton of it (so I would be eager to get more) but when she did her version of “Beauty and the Beast” she was able to find soft but strong moments in the song, and it was so lovely. Then, from a more thematic POV, the Witch is characterized as “the voice of reason”. While everyone else is running around in their fairytale dream world, she is always the one there dolling out the reality checks. And if that ain’t Kourtney. Basically, I think it is her time to get the lead and she would be amazing in this role.

Baker - Seb. Finally settled on a role for him. But really, how could it be anything else? I have felt since the first time we heard him sing (in Truth, Justice, and Songs in our Key, I think) that he was severely underused. The Baker is essentially the male lead, and he has earned it. I don’t think there’s much more that needs to be said here.

Baker’s Wife - Ashlyn. Here’s the thing: could someone else be cast as Baker’s Wife? Yes. And I am sure they would do a fine job. But the thing about this role is that you often don’t realize how fantastic it is until you see someone really great playing it. There’s heart, humor, tragedy, and so much more all wrapped into this character and I would far and away trust Julia/Ashlyn with this above all others. And Baker’s Wife gets to sing a short reprise of “No One Is Alone” so I get to win both ways. No matter how I try to cast it or rearrange characters, I keep coming back to the fact that Ashlyn is just hands down the correct choice. Plus she is one of the better options when it comes to having chemistry with Seb. And I’m not even talking about romantic chemistry, just more about the camaraderie of it, and being able to really see them as a team worth rooting for. They both have an inherent sweetness that makes you care for them, which is crucial for the show. AND this would be another opportunity for Julia Lester to flex her acting after playing VERY different roles in HSM and BATB. Basically, I don’t know when it happened, but I think I am a Julia Lester stan and I only want what is best for her and I think this is it. 

Little Red - Gina. “Didn’t see that one coming did you?” -Pietro Maximoff. And honestly same. There’s always that tough moment in casting when you’ve done the more obvious ones and then you feel sort of stuck with cast choices that weren’t really your choice. But this one really grew on me. Hopefully, I can do it justice. And I will be the first to admit Gina deserves her time to shine because I do think she is amazing. It just isn’t her time yet. It also doesn’t help that Into the Woods is one of the LEAST dance-centered shows and dance it where she really puts all others to shame. So this is where we landed. But it works. I promise. Little Red as a character is pretty naïve, but covers it up with over the top confidence. That feels pretty Gina. I love where her character has gone and all the growth she is displayed in trying to be more vulnerable. But there is still a part of me that does miss mean girl Gina and I think Little Red is a great way to get that energy without backtracking the character development. I don’t think she would be the stereotypical “bratty” Little Red, but I think she could still do something great with it. Also very similar to Jack, Little Red is one of the more innocent characters that has to grow up and face a lot of harsh realities over the course of the play. And I have no doubt Gina would nail that aspect of it, too. And speaking of Jack, Little Red has a number of scenes interacting with him and you know what that means: Gina and Big Red bonding time! I really like the idea of these roles bringing the two closer as friends. And I already head-canon that they would have a ton of fun playing with the fact that they are now Big Red and Little Red (especially since he is on the shorter side and she is on the taller side). Basically I see this as a way for them to build up a really good rapport. I am also pretty convinced that Big Red is a secret Rina shipper, and this would only add to that. And finally even though this is not a dance-heavy show at all, one place where they could add a dance is during “Hello Little Girl”. Now I will be the first to admit that this song is dicey at best, particularly for Disney. But even a scene working on the dance with just the instrumental, no lyrics, could be great. I see it as a partner dance with the wolf (I don’t know dance terms, so maybe this is super vague). And oh, wouldn’t you know it? Cinderella’s Prince is often double-cast as the wolf! (WHAT ARE THE CHANCES) Meaning the Wolf would also be good ol’ Richard Bowen. And I like the idea of getting Rina scenes of them trying to work on the dance, but Ricky is super bad a leading, and they just have fun trying to figure it out. It’s also nice that it is absolutely not a romantic dance so the two wouldn’t feel any added pressure and could just have fun with one another, and that really is when Rina is at its best (not that I would say no to a scene where Gina has to teach Ricky the BATB waltz, but I digress).

Narrator/Mysterious Man - Carlos. By process of elimination, you probably could have guessed who was next. And I know this one also feels like a weird choice but I do kind of love it. First you have the narrator, which is another one of those roles that is only as memorable as the actor playing it, which I think is right up Carlos’ alley. He is always trying to put his unique stamp on things and be memorable and he would take the narrator in a very enjoyable direction. There’s also the matter that I see Carlos as something of an assistant director with Miss Jenn, which makes him a third-party observer of the shows inherently, so it is almost a little meta that he would also end up being the narrator. Then there’s is the mysterious man. I love the idea of Carlos getting to play two very different characters, but I love it even more because the mysterious man is the father of the baker which makes for a lot of sweet moments between the two of them. Yes it might be a little weird for Seblos to be playing father and son, but there is such a vulnerability and tenderness in the moments between the two characters, particularly during “No More” that I can get over it. Because I think they are one of the few pairings on this show that could really pull that off. I just think this character would be a great way to exhibit the range of Carlos.

**BONUS ALTERNATE CASTING**

I really, really love this idea and could not fault them if this was the direction they went, but I ultimately decided against it, mostly because I felt too strongly about another character having the role BUT:

Baker’s Husband - Carlos. I just really love the idea of Seblos getting to be front and center, with their dynamic as the focal point of the show. And honestly Carlos would also do an amazing job as this character. I mean, Seb and Carlos singing “It Takes Two”? How sweet is that? This would also be a great way for the development of their relationship to get a little bit more attention, instead of a side story here and there. There is a lot that could be done with this from a story perspective and I would be here for it.

Unfortunately, then that leaves me unsure of where to put Ashlyn. She could be Jack’s mother, but that feels like such a waste of her. I mean, she would do well and she does have the lead this year, so it’s not SO terrible her having a more minor character, but it just doesn’t feel right. And I really just feel so strongly that she would be the best option for Baker’s Wife out of everyone. And it opens the door to develop the Seb and Ashlyn friendship more, which I am always here for. 

Anyway. Those are my thoughts. If you made it this far: wow and thank you!

[nautilusopus]

nobody else is writing meta analysis for vivarium so i guess i have to do it

Vivarium is a 2019 horror film that the internet doesn’t seem to know what to think of. Most YouTube videos as per usual don’t wanna engage with it on anything more than an extremely literal surface level (hence the abundance of “VIVARIUM EXPLAINED” videos that just recap the plot to you as though you can’t see with your eyeballs that yes, he put on the nametag, that sure is what happened onscreen, yes I fucking get it the boy is like a cuckoo-esque brood parasite I GET IT) that ultimately devolve into speculative fanfiction about how effectively the aliens can take over the world. There are a few people here and there a little more willing to at least engage with what the movie has to say, and from there you get takes about how it’s about how the golden capitalist ideal of the suburban nuclear family is a banal hellscape, which I’d say is generally pretty accurate. Tom spends his entire time at Number 9 labouring, digging a hole while Gemma looks after the boy because he doesn’t know what else to possibly do with himself, an action that wears him down and ultimately costs him his life, and for all his trouble all he’s found is the body of the last guy who tried to labour his way out of this situation. All he’s done is created is a grave for his “offspring” to dump him into. 

Like, as far as Capitalism Bad stories go this one’s pretty on-the-nose, and a lot of the people griping that the story was confusing are mostly the ones that seems to have missed this. (For an even longer tangent about how a lot of scifi stories aren’t going to make sense to you if you resist the very obvious thematic readings they’re giving you because you think things can’t be that deep I recommend Dan Olson’s excellent video on Annihilation.)

Occasionally, though, you get people also mentioning how it’s a little about animal rights, and even more especially about nature versus nurture. For the most part, Tom and Gemma are not kind to the boy. They (understandably) have nothing but contempt towards him. They openly discuss how creepy he is when he’s within earshot. At one point they try to lock him in the car to starve just to see if whoever comes to get his body can be forced to let them go, and they only back out on the plan when the fact that he looks and acts like a child in that moment gets to Gemma and she lets him out. Eventually, the boy grows into an emotionally distant young adult that locks Tom out of the house to die and doesn’t seem to give two shits about their suffering now that he’s bigger and stronger than his “parents”. Surely, we think, if Gemma and Tom had been kinder to him, he would have grown into a kinder adult, even if he was an alien? Are they not perpetuating this literal cycle of violence? 

And with regard to the nature versus nurture reads, I actually directly disagree and find it at odds with the Capitalism Bad message, because my read is this:

No amount of kindness or understanding would have turned the boy into a good person, and acting like it would have is in fact part of the trap. Gemma and Tom would have wound up used up and dead either way, because thematically speaking, what the boy is there to do is to collect data.

More under the cut, I have a lot of opinions about this.

The boy’s creepy alien gimmick is mimicry. It’s what the realtor (p clearly a member of the same species) does when trying to entice Tom and Gemma into Number 9. The realtor is better at saying context-appropriate things than the boy is, but still slips up every now and then, and even so his mannerisms aren’t quite right. At best, he sounds like he’s regurgitating a script (a bit more admissible given he’s trying to sell something). At worst, he parrots Gemma’s “no, not yet” back to her in exactly her voice. Everything he’s saying, it’s clear he’s going through motions without any real understanding of what those motions are, beyond, “This is the thing you say to sell a house.”

The boy is demonstrably worse at it. He’ll parrot entire conversations back to the people who had them regardless if it makes sense to do so. He rarely speaks in his own voice, instead chopping up various words he’s heard from both parents. He doesn’t seem to have much sense for what is and isn’t appropriate to mimic (to the point of Gemma quite transparently tricking him into revealing he’s an alien outright), much less what makes sense for him to mimic. 

He develops this skill gradually over the course of the movie, gets a bit better at putting together sentences people can actually reply to. But even then, he doesn’t seem to engage with the context overall of the conversation. After aforementioned alien reveal, with Tom growing sicker by the day, Gemma begins to cry and back away in horror, and we get this exchange:

The boy: Are you [overwhelmed] again, Mother? Gemma: I am not your mother! The boy: Are you [overwhelmed]? Gemma: I want to go home. The boy: Silly mother. You are home!

There’s no real engagement with the actual conversation at hand. This is the kind of script a reply bot runs. It emulates emotion the same way it emulates everything else. 

His nature is reflected by the surroundings: The identical miles of houses with framed pictures of those houses on their own walls, with no real understanding of what people do and don’t want in the aesthetics of a house. The food that looks correct, but has no flavour or nutritional value, eventually leading to not just Tom’s death, but eventually Gemma’s. The entire world, from the Number 9 house to the suburbs of Yonder in general with its fake clouds, to the boy and its interactions, are fake, hollow, and the kind of thing an alien with no real care for the real human experience beyond perpetuating the system’s own growth would create.

And at this point hopefully some of you have noticed, we’ve seen this exact behaviour pattern before.

i’m quoting the reply on that second one here by @dukeofankh​ because it’s extremely relevant to this entire thing:

I’m honestly reblogging this again because the more I stare at it, the more I feel like this is staggeringly relevant art.

Like, so much of modern capitalist marketing is the construction of these superficially personal narratives. Giving the sense, not only that the brand fits in with your identity, but that it is almost a sentient individual itself that has a personal relationship with you. Corporations have personalities. They want to be your friend, and the reason that the entire internet economy runs on the currency of data right now is that the only way to prop up the illusion that they care about you is by already having the information about you that real people would gain by paying attention

But the only way they can collect and sort all that data is with computers, without any actual humans involved past setting up the parameters and pressing “go.” And computers are fucking idiots.

Which leaves us here: this false, saccharine message of togetherness and community–community between you and your friends but more importantly between all of you and Facebook–stripped fucking bare by the fact that the cookie-cutter algorithm can’t tell the difference between friends supporting and caring about each other and Thanos with a dumptruck ass.

The boy is here to collect data, and he collects it and regurgitates it as though it all has equal relevance to the situation at hand. 

He reacts with the same polite indifference to open contempt, genuine warmth and an attempt to bond with him, terror directed at him, and pleas for mercy from him. Later on when we get a glimpse of the “inner workings” of the house, we see the boy watching another set of parents rawdogging the shit out of each other, and applauding appreciatively with the same blank amusement as he applauds to everything else. He sees Gemma and Tom dancing to the music from their radio outside, trying to have one bright moment with one another despite the grim circumstances they’re in, and he immediately inserts himself into the moment with zero awareness that he isn’t wanted here (granted that’s also extremely a little kid thing to do lol). 

Which leads to the fact that that isn’t to say he doesn’t have his moments of personality. He smiles at positive attention (as well as negative attention), he enjoys interaction. He throws a tantrum when he’s told he can’t watch fucked up alien meat television at 3 am and turns it right back on. About the only time we get a genuine reaction from him is when he gets locked in the car to starve.

But then, so do things like Alexa, or Siri, or Cortana. You can have little conversations with it. It can tell jokes. You can ask it the meaning of life and it’ll tell you 42. You can insult it and it’ll do an EPIC SNAPBACK OMG SO SASSY. The people who designed it want you to view it as a friend, even as it sits there and spies on you and integrates itself more and more into your life. 

Gemma lets him out of the car because (also understandably) she can’t bring herself to kill something that looks like a child. Later on, when she speaks with a dying Tom, she wonders why she didn’t kill him when he was still small. Tom tells her, “Because you’re a good person.” Their problems could have maybe (I mean probably not we’ll never know, at the very least Tom wouldn’t have died of exposure maybe) been solved if they just locked the thing in the car and ignored it, but in the end they still wound up viewing it as a person. 

Tom and Gemma openly comment that the boy is always, always watching them, knowing full well they’re within earshot of him. He doesn’t retaliate for this, they’re never punished for saying it. Why would he? It’s what he’s there to do. He knows they know he’s watching. Water is wet. The boy watches.

Of course, when he is older, and better at putting together conversations that sound like an actual person, Gemma is openly terrified of him. His mannerisms don’t change, but conversationally he seems to at least understand whats being said to him, and is willing to ask more in-depth questions, graduation from, “What’s a dog?” to “Why did you say ‘you’re welcome’?”

By the end of the movie, the boy matures into a man. He’s gotten a bit better at knowing which words to parrot at what time, something we can watch him improve upon as the movie goes, and still insists, to Gemma’s last breath, that she’s his mother and that she is home. Gemma dies telling him, “I’m not your fucking mother.”

This is maybe the only other genuine reaction we get from the boy: a disappointed, “Whatever,” before he zips up the bodybag and chucks her into the hole as well. He cleans up the house for the next occupants and leaves. He takes the now-dying realtor’s nametag and puts it on himself, folds up the old realtor and stuffs it in a drawer, and takes his place in the office ready to lure the next couple to the suburbs of Yonder, with words that almost, but not quite, convince you he’s a person, and by that point it’s too late. 

The boy was only ever there to make sure someone would be in Number 9 to make sure someone would be there to raise the next boy to make sure someone would be led to Number 9 to raise the next boy. 

And who among us haven’t left this exact message, or even said this exact thing out loud, to the bot hanging over our shoulder watching us constantly, politely asking if we want help or suggested content?

TLDR anyway yeah the movie is “capitalism bad nuclear family in suburbia is a banal hellscape” still but there’s LAYERS you see

[fuckinglovemanga]

Yes, I hate Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist.

Ok this is a bit random for my blog but I just have to say this shit somewhere cause since I first saw this film last year I have yet to find anyone with my take on it who has reviewed it.

Ok so a common criticism of this movie is that it’s misogynistic. And it definitely is. But not for the surface level reasons that people seem to think. I don’t see a lot of people trying to engage with the thematic core of the film. Lots of feminists have criticized it for depicting fgm but it goes way deeper than just that. The reviews I have seen seem to take one of two routs: 1) This film is a masterpiece of cinema, a mystery that we will never know the answer to or 2)The film is weird and gross and I don’t like it.

Nature

So what’s the movie about? Well, here’s my interpretation, and I think it makes quite a bit of sense given what the Trier presents us with. I think this film is trying to make a statement about “human nature”, and the nature of men and women. Eve’s road towards insanity begins when she prioritizes her orgasm over her child. That starts a downward spiral of insanity, which culminates in her castrating her husband, and then herself. This demonstrates an inability to reconcile a woman’s sexual desires with her motherly instinct. Also, the famous scene in which Eve becomes “one with the green” is symbolic of her letting her natural instincts take over. What follows is her spiraling into insanity and acting completely irrationally while her husband’s attempts to reason with her fail. So women= irrational and men=rational. And then Adam sees a fox that tells him “chaos reigns”. In the end of the movie, chaos (aka the natural instincts of humans) does end up taking over, as Adam kills Eve by burning her (we’ll come back to that). If all that talk of humans’ biological instincts reminds you a bit of Freud, that’s intentional. The film namedrops him at some point, saying that he has been debunked. However, the film’s narrative seems to be in support of his ideas. Unless of course the whole thing is being sarcastic. We’ll come back to that too.

Witches

During Adam and Eve’s stay in the cabin, Eve is working on a paper on the burning of witches, which she calls “Gynocide”. For context, there are a number of academic writings, most notably Silvia Federici’s “Caliban and The Witch” claiming that the witch hunts were in a way, the beginning of modern misogyny, as they set traditional gender roles in stone by marking everything women did that wasn’t related to breeding and child rearing as immoral and “satanic”. The witch, as a figure in our culture, represents a woman out of line, grotesque, insane, the opposite of what a woman ideally should be. Not only is the witch infertile (old, unattractive and generally disgusting), she also murders babies (see?) and uses their blood in satanic rituals that allow her to fly. The broom is a symbol of domesticity used in a twisted and unnatural way. I think it’s safe to say that, within the contest of “Antichrist”, Eve is the witch. As the name Eve suggests, the character is meant to be an avatar for all women, her witchiness an underlying element of all women. But Trier doesn’t present this in such a one- dimensional fashion.

Eve’s internal struggle

Eve seems to have two sides to her. Her sexuality is demonstrated as contradictory to her motherhood, a contradiction she herself cannot reconcile. She hates herself for putting her sexuality over her child. In fact, the sheer amount of self- hatred leads her to cut her own clitoris. Notably, she says: “The witches deserved to die”. Now, this is where the core of the film’s misogyny lies. Trier is projecting his own misogyny onto the character of Eve. It is men who are unable to reconcile sexuality with motherhood, because they perceive women in general based on their perception of their mother. Preforming fgm on women, is a result of the patriarchy, of man’s desire to castrate women, to remove their sexual pleasure, in order to control them. There never were any witches, men created the concept of the witch, and killed millions of innocent women in the process. Eve’s self hatred doesn’t make sense if we go with this interpretation, as it’s not internalized misogyny. It comes from her, not from male influence. Essentially, Trier absolves himself of misogyny by projecting it onto his female character.

Freud

So, the reason why Freud’s theories are no longer considered legitimate is because they take societal things (such as women's’ desire to escape a misogynistic society by adopting male social roles) and attribute it to “nature” (women have a subconscious desire for a penis in order to sexually subjugate their mother the same way their father does). Freud took social roles for granted and tried to explain them with some bonkers conflict between instincts (id) and society (superego). But humans’ biological instincts are a load of bullshit, as they have are not acknowledged by sociologists and social anthropologists, and there is zero scientific proof for their existence. This narrative is actually pretty dangerous because it leads us to believe that opressive social roals are fundamentally unalterable, a product of nature. 

Conclusion

The film ends with a bunch of modern women walking in the woods after Adam’s burning of Eve. The whole thing is meant to signify that, after Adam and Eve followed their “natural” paths, the modern woman was born. And the critics gasp “Oh my how unbelievably deep and profound”. So, as I have hopefully demonstrated, it is none of the above. Rather, it’s shallow, stupid and dangerous in terms of its messaging. But is Trier trolling everybody and being sarcastic throughout the whole film? He did say he enjoyed seeing people get angry at the film. I did some digging, and fond out that Trier actually wrote the film during a time of depression, while he was struggling with various mental illnesses. That doesn’t seem like a state of mind that produces a sarcastic work for trolling the masses. Also, the filmmaking echoes serious emotion to me.  But hey, I don’t know. In fact, we’ll never know. But I had to say all this, someone had to. We must redeem the witches.