#but i also think that its so pathetic of everyone else involved in this film to actively disregard that vision during this press tour

[ad1thi]

Justin baldoni decided to adapt It Ends With Us because he thought that stories about domestic violence, and specifically escaping and life beyond domestic violence deserved to be platformed.

Instead of being supported, he’s been mean girl’d by the cast; that’s treating the film like its this cutesy rom com : and I think this rly encapsulates everything that’s wrong with the book, and the fanbase it’s amassed

[fuckyeahisawthat]

So I finally made it all the way through Trust episodes 1 and 2 last night and I feel like I had some kind of filmmaking revelation about how deeply who you position as the protagonist influences how we perceive a story. I mean, this is stuff that I knew and I have talked about before, about how who you choose as the protagonist is the most important decision you make when creating a story because you’re telling us where we’re supposed to place our empathy and who we’re supposed to have hopes and fears for and who this narrative belongs to. But it’s striking to find an example that illustrates this so clearly.

Film language has a certain grammar that we’re used to reading whether we’re conscious of it or not, and the order in which we see things has a lot of power to shape what, and who, we perceive to be important. At the beginning of a film story, we’re used to seeing: Here’s a person! Now, here’s their problem. Watch how they try to solve it despite obstacles. That’s what this story will be about.

If you just watched the first episode of Trust and then I asked you to tell me what you thought the show was about, you would probably say it’s about Getty the eldest and his succession problems. The first episode sure sets us up to think that he’s the protagonist, which is a problem, because he’s not just a horrible person I don’t want to spend time with; he’s boring. He’s boring in a narrative sense, because he has no real obstacles in his life. He’s surrounded by people who are at his beck and call; he has all the power in every relationship around him, and so there are no real stakes for him, dramatically.

Lucky for us, he is not actually the protagonist. Little Paul and Primo are. They’re co-protagonists with parallel stories. They are the people whose wants we are following throughout the story. Little Paul wants to get out of this kidnapping alive, and Primo wants the ransom money. And the person standing in the way of both those things happening is Grandpa Getty. Functionally, narratively, he is the antagonist in both of their stories.

(This is why there are so many moments where, despite the fact that Paul is Primo’s prisoner, we see them hoping for the same thing to happen, and it sort of glues them together emotionally--both for us the audience and for the characters themselves--in a really interesting way.)

If you watch episode 3 as if it were the first episode of the series, who the protagonists are is really obvious, because we meet Little Paul and Primo, in sequences that tell us a lot about them, back to back right at the top of the episode.

If you watch the series in order, Little Paul’s character introduction happens when he shows up at his uncle’s memorial service in jeans. He is introduced in relation to Old Paul and Big Paul, as a problem and a disturbance in their worlds.

If you treat episode 3 as if it were the first episode of the series, Little Paul is introduced in his own world, living the kind of life he wants to live and having a blast. Then, we very quickly see his problem (he owes money to dangerous people) and we watch him try to solve it, fail several times, and then come up with the kidnapping idea which launches the main plot of the entire series. If we view it that way, everyone else in his family is introduced in reference to him, which is actually an accurate reflection of the structure of the story.

If we put episode 1 after episode 3, episode 1 suddenly becomes a lot more interesting. Because it’s no longer a story about Old Paul and his rich people family problems, it’s a story about Little Paul trying to get money from this rich asshole, money we already know Little Paul needs to solve a very urgent problem in his life. Suddenly the stakes are very clear and very high, and the whole episode is actually a microcosm of the main plot of the series as a whole. Little Paul needs a comparatively small amount of money to get himself out of a life-threatening problem, and his rich-as-fuck grandfather won’t give it to him.

Switching the POV and storytelling order around also gives episode 1 something it sorely lacks if you watch it as the intro to the series: suspense. Because we already know before Little Paul arrives at Sutton Place that he’s going to fail, and this will put him in the predicament that launches the main plot on its way. But Little Paul himself doesn’t know he’s going to fail, and we the audience don’t know how he’s going to fail, so things like the scenes of Little Paul charming his grandfather in various ways suddenly become interesting, because we’re waiting to see how and when all of this will blow up in Little Paul’s face. Even scenes of Old Paul being horrible to various people become ways of heightening the stakes, because we’re thinking about the fact that Little Paul’s life depends on getting money out of this motherfucker.

Big Paul also suddenly becomes more interesting, because the only thing that elevates him in this story from pathetic self-involved wallowing to a passably interesting tragic figure is the way his emotional self-involvement damages other people, particularly his own son. Now, instead of Little Paul showing up as a problem in Big Paul’s story, it’s the other way around. Viewed this way, Big Paul’s actions in episode 1 become a way of foreshadowing his actions in episode 7, which I think is a really effectively-told tragedy. Episode 7 ends with Big Paul finally doing the thing he’s been wanting to do this whole time, which is stand up to his father. But he manages to do it in the most selfish and destructive way possible, in a way that puts the lives of all of the characters we care about at this point at risk--Little Paul, but also Primo and Leonardo--and launches us into the tension of the pivotal episode 8.

Switching the episode order also makes a whole bunch of tiny details in episode 1 pop. We know Little Paul is lying when Old Paul asks him if he does drugs, so we’re waiting for that lie to blow up. The crucial detail of the Playmen magazine shoot is also highlighted, because we’ve already seen this photoshoot in the opening montage of episode 3 and we recognize the damning cocaine t-shirt instantly.

In addition to being an exercise in how directing the audience’s POV controls our emotional experience of a piece of media, this is also a really good example of how telling a story non-chronologically, in a way where the audience already knows how a plot point resolves, doesn’t kill the tension but can often heighten it. And in general this is something that Trust is very effective at--perhaps most masterfully so in episode 5, where we spend the entire episode knowing that Little Paul and Angelo are not going to successfully escape but still get extremely invested in them trying.

As for why the creators set the series up in a way that foregrounds the least interesting characters and buries the natural starting point of the story in episode 3...I don’t know. Desire (or pressure from the network) to frontload the actors who were best known in the US? Confusion about how (un)interesting these rich people actually are, and why? Who knows. But I think this contributed a lot to the mostly lukewarm critical reception when the show first came out (especially knowing that most reviews were only based on the first three episodes, which is what critics were allowed to see in advance of the premiere.)

In conclusion, now you have the correct viewing order for Trust; thanks to Luca Marinelli for being compelling enough to make me skip to episode 3 and get invested in this show; and if I ever teach a filmmaking class I am definitely using this as an example when teaching a lesson on suspense, POV, and choosing the most interesting protagonist.

[duhragonball]

So, Terminator 3.   T2 was such a huge hit that everyone just assumed a third movie was a given, but it took twelve years for it to finally happen.    The Wikipedia article has a section about the delay, but it’s really long and complicated, and I’m not that interested anymore.   The main takeaway is that James Cameron, who directed the first two movies, wasn’t involved in the making of T3.   Apparently, he really wanted to do it in 1995, but by the time the rights and everything got squared away, he got busy doing Titanic and Avatar or whatever else, and he decided that he’d already told the story he wanted to tell in the first two movies.   But he did tell Arnold Schwarzenegger to go for it if he got an offer.  

I guess the reason I’m explaining all of this was because I always thought Cameron did make T3, and the reason Linda Hamilton wasn’t in it was because of hard feelings over their divorce in 1999.  Which sounds kind of dumb now that I type it out.    A fan would think that, because they see actors appearing or not appearing in movies as the ultimate sanction, but for them it’s strictly business.   Arnold was in T3 because they paid him $30 million, not because he desperately wanted to play the character again.   According to the Wikipedia article, Hamilton wasn’t in the movie because there just wasn’t much they could do with Sarah Connor in the story.    Her role was to prepare John Connor for his own role.   This movie features him as an adult, so there’s nothing more for her to do.    Hamilton recognized this, and declined to participate.

I think T3 had a lot going against it, because it had so much to live up to, and fans of T2 had been waiting so long.   I think everyone wanted the T3 movie James Cameron might have made in 1995, but what they got in 2003 was this movie, which didn’t quite live up to the hype.   I’m not sure anything else could have lived up to the hype, though.    T2 had some mighty big shoes to fill.  

The big problem is that it’s basically the same plot structure as T2.  Two more Terminators come from the future and they fight over the life of John Connor.   After escaping the bad Terminator, John tries to stop Skynet from taking over and nuking humanity, and they end up having a final showdown with the bad Terminator along the way.  It really is the same movie in a lot of ways, so it just begs to be compared to T2, which only magnifies its flaws.  

The main difference is that John thought he already stopped Skynet years ago, so he’s horrified to learn that he only postponed the inevitable.    He goes to a lot of trouble to try again, but the audience probably already anticipates that this won’t work.  T2 was ambiguous about this, but T3 actually shows the nuclear missiles launching and destroying their targets.   So it’s kind of a downer to watch.   We even learn that Future John will die in 2032, because the good Terminator in this movie was the one who kills him, before he got reprogrammed to protect Present John.

The other difference is the addition of Kate Brewster, who’s fated to become John’s second-in-command and wife.   The bad Terminator was actually sent to kill her and other would-be Resistance leaders, until it discovers John and changes priorities.    Future Kate is also the one who sends the good Terminator back in time.   I never fully understood Kate’s purpose in the movie, since she’s basically a spare John, but I think they needed a viewpoint character.    In T1, Sarah was the viewpoint character, then it was John in T2.   But in T3, Sarah’s dead and John already knows all about this stuff, so there needed to be a new character with a special destiny.   The trouble is that I don’t think Kate gets a chance to digest this very well, probably because we’ve already covered this twice before already.  

I think this is the movie where the time travel stuff really went off the rails.  T1 was very consistent about establishing a predestination paradox.   T2 hinted that the future could be changed, but never made it clear whether it actually changed or not.   The value was in the attempt, not the result.   But the T-850 tells John that “Judgement Day is inevitable”, and that he only postponed it from its original date in 1997.  So they managed to change the future, just not enough.   Fair, but how does the T-850 know this?   Shouldn’t he be from the same altered future, where Judgement Day happened in 2003?  

Also, this movie introduces more Terminator varieties.   In the first movie, the T-800 is stated to be new in the future.   Then in the second movie, the T-800 admits that the T-1000 is much more sophisticated, because it’s an “advanced prototype.”   In this movie, the T-850 claims to be obsolete, and says the T-X is much more advanced.   So it sounds like Skynet was busily inventing better Terminators for these missions, except it shouldn’t have had time for that.   It lost the war and had to use the time machine as a last-ditch effort.  It’s weird enough that it used the time machine three times, but it shouldn’t have had years to do this.   The Human Resistance captured the time machine shortly after winning the war, right?   I really hope T4 explains some of this.

Roger Ebert called this movie “Essentially one long chase and fight, punctuated by comic, campy or simplistic dialogue."   The first 24 minutes are fairly dull, but once it gets rolling, it’s pretty fun to watch.    But he’s right.   When I watched all the DBZ movies in 2019, I realized that Movie 7 is just one big fight scene, with some slice of life stuff at the beginning to set things up.    T3′s basically the same, with very little else to occupy its time.   T1 had the relationship between Sarah and Kyle, and T2 had Sarah’s hangups and John’s bonding with “Uncle Bob”.   T3 really only has Kate and John hanging on for dear life as their protector drags them through the story.    It’s a fun chase, with lots of guns and explosions and breaking stuff, but there’s not much more to it.  

So what’s good about this movie?  What makes it really stand out?   Well, for openers, the T-X is pretty cool.  The T-1000 was going to be difficult to top, and I don’t think the T-X ever succeeded, but it wasn’t for lack of trying.   She has liquid metal on top of an endoskeleton, so she can disguise herself, but she can’t seep under doors and stuff like that.   Also, she has weapons built into her body, so she’s the only time traveler who could actually bring future weapons with her into the past.   Also, she can control machines, like when she hijacks a bunch of police cars and fire trucks to help her chase down John.   She’s ridiculously overpowered, and she does not give a fuck who knows it.  The previous Terminators at least attempted to keep a low profile, revealing themselves only when ready to attack, but the T-X just wreaks havoc all over the place.    She’s not worried about the authorities or a lack of firepower, or anything at all, so she’s free to execute her mission with reckless abandon. 

Second, I take some solace in John Connors personal crisis in this movie.  He was kind of chill about the whole thing in T2, because he got his mom back and he had a cool robot pal, and they seemed to have the whole Skynet problem figured out.     In this movie, Sarah’s dead, and he doesn’t know what to do with himself.  He can’t quite believe that Judgement Day won’t come, so he lives off the grid and tries to avoid everyone.   He doesn’t want the Future War to happen, but at the same time, his life has no purpose without it.   Later, he becomes despondent and says that he must not be the chosen one after all, because he’s no leader and he never was.  

Except, he is, and he has to be, and he becomes one at the end of the movie, when he finally accepts his fate.   There’s something very powerful about the shot of Kate holding his hand as he prepares to give orders to the other survivors on the radio.  They’re stuck in this dark future now, and they have to see it through together.  

I think, whenever I watched these movies before, that I never really “got” John Connor as a character.  In T2 he was a kid, so I just wrote him off.   He wasn’t John Connor yet, so it didn’t matter much.    In T3, he seemed extremely pathetic, and I took his lack of confidence at face value.   I thought he really wasn’t ready to lead, and he only ended up in that role by default.    But this time around, I see how in T2 he was the moral center of the good guy team.   Sarah was lashing out at everyone and the Terminator only cared about mission objectives, but John kept reminding everyone of the value of human life, and what they were all fighting for.   Even as a kid, he got “it” in a way that others didn’t.   In T3, he’s demoralized, but he still knows how to do this stuff, and how to lead.  He just doesn’t feel motivated until the final act of the movie.  

That didn’t stick with me when I first saw this movie in ‘03, but I’m older now, and less sure of myself than I used to be, and all the validation I get feels hollow and unconvincing.  Like John, I may be aware that I have the capacity to do things, but it doesn’t always feel like it’s enough.  That’s what T3 has that T2 doesn’t.   It’s that crisis of confidence that separates the two films, although it’s subtle enough that it’s easy to overlook. 

[opalmaplehibiscus]

Jamil’s Guide to Get the Okay From Your S/O’s Parents HC

HC on how Jamil Dealt w/ Everyone when trying to get Permission to Date Reader

*Continue ver. Of Jamil and His Adventure with Romance HC

·       So, you would think that since the 1st year crew witnessed the confession, you and Jamil would be dating right? Haha, wrong

·       Deuce and Epel would be giving Jamil death glares every time he says hi to you when meeting each other in the hallways, giving light kisses on the cheek or forehead, or even approaching you in general

·       The two would pick a fight with Jamil, making delinquent-like facial expressions and cracking their knuckles going as far as to even growl when Jamil doesn’t stop walking up towards you

·       They felt like dads that were about to give up their kid to some evil maniac, tainting their once innocent child to a “I hate you Dad” delinquent – and they weren’t having that. Excuse you, I raised that kid and you’re about to ruin all my hardwork? F*** you, like hell I’m letting you do that

·       Jamil would get annoyed by it. But, he would hold back his sneer since he knew that you treasure your friends, and he literally just started dating you (although Deuce and Epel would like to say otherwise). Yeah, no, he’s not willing to get dumped when their relationship hasn’t even lasted a day

·       He would let his tongue use its magic, not his unique magic, but its flattering magic in hopes to convince Deuce and Epel to let him at least get a foot closer to you

·       And to the horrors of Dad #1 and #2, they nearly fell for it. Nearly. That is until Ace comes in to save the day

·       Ace would make it seem like he approved of you and Jamil at first. At first

·       Out of all 5 of them though, he was  #2 most overprotective dad 

·       He’s seen your ups and your downs. And he was freaking saved by you not once, but twice. Not only that, but you tolerate his jerky-side and continued to support him nonstop. He cares about you and wants you to be in good hands, not get hurt

·       After witnessing Jamil’s true side and how much of a jerk he was to Kalim, yeah, Jamil was added to Ace’s black list. Now that he’s dating you though? He’s on the hit list now

·       And to emphasize that Jamil would never get his approval, Ace would take you somewhere else whenever Jamil ends up arguing with Deuce and Epel

·       Jamil would notice it right away, and try to get through or at least stop it, but Deuce and Epel, following the plan the 1st year squad created, would continue to block his way, even going as far as to insult how ugly he looked when he was OB. Which was taboo.

·       The duo would then be facing a pissed Jamil, who gets angrier when he sees Ace sticking his tongue or giving a knowing-smirk behind his shoulder as he takes you far, far away from him

·       And every. time. it. happens. Jamil would be tempted to use his unique magic. The only reasons he wouldn’t were because of 1. You, 2. He just got over OBing and wasn’t dumb enough to use it when he wasn’t done recovering, and 3. You

·       If Ace was bad, Jamil had it worse with Sebek

·       Surprisingly, the half-demon/half-human was #1 most overprotective dad

·       When Sebek watched how Jamil betray Kalim, he felt betrayed and angered

·       He thought him and Jamil were similar, with the want of wanting to protect their master while feeling honored to stay by their sides

·       After watching the magicam, he was already ready to take down Jamil. But boy oh boy did he had the guts to date you

·       Sebek: PREPARE TO DIE SNAKE Jamil: WHAT THE ACTUALLY F- Kalim: NO CURSING JAMIL! Well, at least not in front of your s/o Jamil: … F-Duck

·       Sebek wouldn’t hold back and literally tries to kill Jamil while Jamil runs away, screaming profanities left and right. Sebek wouldn’t admit it even in his death, but he holds you close to his heart

·       Jack, being the nicest of the five, would interview Jamil, interrogating him to T. He’s also the one that gives the okay sign to attack Jamil once he sees that the coast is clear

·       When Jamil talks with Jack, it goes more or less smoothly except for some bumps along the way

·       Jack: You better watch your back, if you ever hurt [Y/N]… Jamil: Do you expect me to actually take you seriously? I bet I can beat you even when you’re using your unique magic Jack: Even in front of [Y/N]? Jamil: You’re becoming more like your dorm leader Jack: You do realize that I’m the easiest one to get permission right? Jamil: Did I ever mention that your unique magic makes you look majestic. Honestly, I admire it

·       In the end Jamil does get Jack’s permission to date you. And thanks to that, he was able to get Deuce and Epel’s permission more or less. If you take out the threats and insults and him nearly getting caught by you when he was about to roast them

·       Just when he finally, and miraculously, finished getting all the first years’ permission, someone taps him on the shoulder. When he turns around and sees the rest of the dorms, his face turns pale

·       Are you kidding him? Why the actual crap are they involved? Just let him date you for gosh sake!

·       Out of all the dorms he had the easiest time to get approval, it was Heartslabyul

·       Riddle was similar to Jack, where he interrogated Jamil, probing around to see what were his true intentions of dating you

·       After the whole, intense event, Jamil was able to prove that he wanted to date you out of love and adoration he held for you. To be completely fair, he had no choice but to give honest answers since Riddle had used his unique magic on him, while Cater was filming him with his phone and Trey, who he thought would be the softest one of the three, was giving him a glare that could potentially put the devil to shame

·       The talk with Octavinelle was just a shaming session. They would continue saying “shame on you for so and so” or “you really think you could date [Y/N], when you’re only going to do this and this”, listing everything he had done in chapter 4. When they mentioned you not liking guys that would scream “DOKAN! NICE SHOT!”, he wanted to just dig a hole

·       Pomefiore though made Octavinelle seem like a baby. Until then, Jamil thought he had the sharpest tongue in the school. But that obviously wasn’t the case

·       He found it strange that Vil had politely asked him to stop by his dorm so they could talk, and thought that if he used his flattery again, he’ll at least easily get approval

·       The blows Jamil faced was too much though. Vil and Rook, when they want to roast someone – they don’t hold back

·       Jamil’s pride was completely trampled to the point he wasn’t able to get up. From judging his taste in fashion to criticizing how he looked when he Obed - and what do you mean he looked like Juju?! He looks nothing like that dumb snake! His looks, at the least, is decent compared to the rest of the school! WHAT DO YOU MEAN HE’S JUJU?!?!?!?

·       Vil: Honestly you just remind me of that one snake that always sticks its tongue out on the side of its tongue from that one voodoo movie Jamil: What? I’m not that dumb snake! Vil: You’re right. That’s just an insult to the poor thing. You look like Jafar

·       We don’t talk about Savanaclaw. Don’t mention it to him, don’t try to ask about it to him, don’t bring it up to him

·       Jamil: Why the hell do I need to get approval from you? Leona: Is that how you’re going to talk to their parents when you ask for their permission to date [Y/N]? Jamil: At least they’ll like me unless a pathetic cat who’s only liked by a kid Leona: … “I am hunger. I am thirst. I am which steals your tomorrow –”

·       Honestly, Jamil didn’t know why you didn’t mention that you were friends with Malleus Draconia? That guy isn’t your “cute, kind and shy Tsunataro”!!!! He’s THE Malleus Draconia!!!!!

·       Jamil has felt fear before. He’s familiar with it. He felt it when Kalim was about to die from poisoning, when Kalim fell his magic carpet, when he found an assassin disguised as a servant, waiting to kill Kalim in his sleep. But the fear he had for the Diasomnia dorm tops all that.

·       He never would’ve thought that out Silver, Malleus, and Lilia, he would be most scared of Lilia

·       What baby face? What about him talking like a grandpa? All Jamil sees is Satan in a body of a dark fae 

·       When he was able to finally leave their dorm, he nearly fainted from the sheer pressure they emitted. They do not hold back on their blood lust. Whoever gets on their bad side, his condolences. You aren’t going to survive

·       When you greet him from the dorm’s entrance, he demands you to spoil him for a week while resting his head on your shoulder and hugging you tightly

·       When you hug him back just as tight, and patted his head while saying he did good, it reminds him why he still did it and that everything was worth it. Your mere presence was enough for him, yet when you comfort him? It was the best thing ever

·       After resting and spending a whole day with you (it ended up becoming more of a therapy session for his newly formed PTSD from Diasomnia), he prepares himself to face the final boss: Kalim

·       Despite Kalim already telling him that he supported their relationship, Jamil knew better than to just leave things at that

·       Jamil was aware how precious you were to Kalim especially when he heard Kalim saying you were his bffl right after Jamil

·       When he heard how you helped Kalim become more honest with his feelings and spent time hanging out with him when he was lonely, the feeling of guilt crashed into Jamil

·       It was times like this that he’s reminded how much of a jerk he was towards Kalim and that he should do a better job giving Kalim the respect he deserves

·       So, when he approached Kalim and asked Kalim’s approval, the conversation between Kalim and Jamil ended up being another heart-to-heart conversation with Jamil wanting to actually gain approval as someone Kalim would honestly support, not because he was his best friend

·       In the beginning, their talk resembled that of a person consulting a relationship counselor when Jamil was talking about his honest opinion of him dating you, his feelings for you and how he honestly felt nervous around you. Despite his calm and chill demeanor, Jamil talked about how he was scared of hurting you. Even if it wasn’t his intention, he was scared that he might screw up

·       Kalim, being someone who knew him the best, would point out everything good about Jamil, and Jamil would forever hold it a secret in his heart, but when Kalim mention how Jamil was someone he would trust despite everything that happened

·       The conversation shifts  towards them telling each other how much the other changed and developed after the whole Chapter 4 incident

·       When Kalim brought up how he learned to be more observant and considerate towards him, Jamil felt his heart beat faster from the nervousness and guilt. Jamil wanted to tell him that Kalim did more than enough, that he was, other than you, the only person in the world who would ever give him honest praises. That Kalim would forever be his irreplaceable friend

·       Yet, Jamil could only hold back seeing how this was going to a rare moment that Kalim actually opens up and spills everything that was piling inside of him. And if he interrupted, he knew that Kalim would end up stop talking about it, and how was he going to know that Kalim is actually okay with him dating you when it hasn’t even been a few days since the two of them went back becoming buddies?

·       When Kalim starts talking about how closely he holds Jamil and you to his heart, and that he wants to see the two of you becoming happy, Jamil would deny the fact that he was tearing up. Nope you’re just seeing things, Kalim, I’m not about to cry. I said I’m fine, Kalim no seriously I’m okay Kalim-

·       When he sees you coming out of your hiding spot from Kalim’s room, he surprised

·       You confess to Jamil that you came to also gain Kalim’s approval just a few hours before he had arrived, but stayed back out of your concern for him

·       When you noticed how Jamil started to look offended and thought you were suspicious of him using his unique magic on Kalim like he did before, you clarified and mentioned how Jamil looked nervous, heck more nervous then the time he had to talk to Diasomnia which led you to stay back and morally support him

·       Jamil would try to hide his blush, embarrassed and touched that you stayed back for him

·       He pulls up his hood, press it down firmly on to his head, pulls the strings until his face wasn’t visible, and he lied there in ball position

·       It took you and Kalim a good hour to coax Jamil to get him off the ground, and another hour to get him to take off his hood

[palmtreepalmtree]

Hey everyone!  I am pleased to present the first holiday edition of...

The Worst Movie on Netflix Right Now™!

Today we’re going to talk about the first Netflix holiday release, Holidate.

Deep sigh.

OYEZ, OYEZ.  NOW COMES BEFORE THE COURT THE CASE OF PALMTREEPALMTREE V. NETFLIX.

NETFLIX PRESENTS FOR CONSIDERATION IN THE HOLIDAY ROMANCE GENRE THE NETFLIX FILM KNOWN AS HOLIDATE (HENCEFORTH ”THE FILM”).  THE FILM IS CHARGED WITH UNNECESSARY ADULT LANGUAGE, POOR CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT, CRUELTY TO SINGLE PEOPLE, AND NEGLIGENT TREATMENT OF SERIOUS FIREWORK INJURIES.

PALMTREEPALMTREE, PLEASE PRESENT YOUR CASE.

Thank you, your honors and friends and gentlepeople of the jury.  Today we consider a film known as Holidate and whether it’s worthy of our collective viewing.  Let’s cut right to the chase here.  It is not worthy of our time.

Let me break this one down for you:

THE PREMISE

The premise of The Film is pretty much the only thing that’s not bad about it.  A young woman, tired of feeling uncomfortable as the only single person at family get-togethers, makes a pact with a handsome man that she randomly met at the mall to be each others’ so-called holidates.  They basically agree to attend whatever events need attending on the holidays with zero romantic expectations.

As a premise for a rom-com, this is totally sound.  We’ve arranged for our two heroes to spend quality time together that will eventually lead to them falling in love, right?  Right.  

So where does this go wrong?

UNNECESSARY ADULT LANGUAGE

The Film kicks right off with a mature rating.  It really wants you to know it’s mature.  In fact, this is the first line of the movie:

She promptly extinguishes that cigarette on the head of a light-up Santa Claus. You might immediately think, OH HAHA FUNNY.  But no, it’s not.  Take it from an expert.  Cursing for cursing’s sake is not funny.  It’s true that the word ‘fuck’ may have a funny fucking rhythm to it, but the word alone is not a fucking joke.  It’s not inherently funny to say ‘FUCK.’  Also, ‘pussy,’ ‘slut,’ and ‘clitoris.’  Not funny when you’re just working it into a sentence for no purpose.

It’s like this movie wants to be the Bad Santa of holiday rom-coms.  But who the fuck asked for that?  This movie is like the girl who claims she’s ‘not like other girls.’  This movie is the girl who ‘doesn’t know why, but only has guy friends.’   This is the ‘girl who listens to the Joe Rogan podcast’ of rom-coms.  None of these things fucking exist.  But this movie sure is trying.

POOR CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT

Listen, I’m not saying that all women in the world have friends.  But most women in the world (especially pre-long-term partnership) have some sort of friend group.  Even if it’s long distance or online or something.  But the main character here, played by Emma Roberts, appears to have no one.  Just her consistently abusive family members (more on that later).  

The premise of this movie quickly morphs from “I need a date to bring to my family events,” to “I need a date for every holiday on the calendar including ones that don’t involve my family.”  Why does she want to hang out with this rando on St. Patrick’s Day?  Cinco de Mayo?  Halloween?  WHERE ARE HER FUCKING FRIENDS?

There are no friends in sight.  This would be more believable if the script even hinted that she had friends.  Like maybe she’s tired of third-wheeling it with her couple friends while she tries to find dates of her own?  Or maybe she’s super emotionally wrecked from her last guy (even though she only dated him for a few months!?!?!?)  But no.  Instead, she spends the better part of the year of this movie going out with this fucking placeholder instead of trying to meet people or having fun with her actual fucking friends.  

Her personality is just a general sketch of habits: eats junk food, smokes and lies about it, works from home, enjoys pajama pants, etc.  We know nothing about her otherwise.  At least she’s not clumsy.

If it seems weird that I haven’t mentioned the male lead that’s because he’s fucking boring and I don’t really give a shit about him.  He’s oatmeal.  

CRUELTY TO SINGLE PEOPLE

I honestly can’t believe I have to say this, but if you’re going to make a rom-com that people can relate to maybe you should not spend the entire film showing contempt towards single people?  Actual lines from the movie:

[with shock horror] “What do you mean, you don’t have a date for Valentine’s Day!?”

“She’s going to die alone in a wheelchair and a diaper.”

“Human beings aren’t meant to be alone on the holidays.”

“She doesn’t need another friend she needs a husband.  A partner.  Someone legally bound to be there during the chemo.”

The main character’s single status is treated by everyone as sad, pathetic, something that needs to change as soon as humanly possible.  They are aggressively cruel to her about her single status.  Her mother says things to her like, “I care about you.”  And characters are always observing that she seems sad.  I can credit the Film with these expressions coming out of a sincere place.  But because it simultaneously always plays those moments for laughs, there’s an element of meanness to it.  

“YOU SEEM SO SAD, HAHAHA!!!!”

Look, I’m not saying the movie doesn’t have a point.  I think human connection is really important.  Caring for other people and having people who care about you is important.  But this movie and all of its characters treat romantic relationships as if they are the only type of relationship worth pursuing.  What if this movie ended with them just being friends?  Would that have been so bad?

Also, nearly all of the other romantic relationships in this movie are a fucking disaster --- and again, they are played for laughs.  The main character’s sister is trapped in a marriage where she and her husband are living separate lives with different priorities and values; her brother has gotten engaged to a woman after three months of dating who HAHA he doesn’t even seem to know very well; and her mom is single and maybe possibly is projecting her own fears and loneliness even though that’s never actually acknowledged in any way?  

I don’t know guys, but I think a rom-com should leave you feeling optimistic about love.  I mean, what the fuck else is the point?

NEGLIGENT TREATMENT OF SERIOUS FIREWORK INJURIES

Look, I don’t want to get into the weeds here, but in the pursuit of cheap laughs, this movie absurdly treats some pretty serious injuries lightly and it’s weird and it doesn’t work and I honestly don’t know why this movie is what it is.  It should be called Holidate: a movie in search of a tone.  

CLOSING ARGUMENTS

A good rom-com requires several things to be truly successful: 1) a fun, engaging premise; 2) believable characters that you care about and want to end up together; and 3) a good feeling at the end that leaves you optimistic and warm and fuzzy.  This movie may succeed in being occasionally funny (I guess, if that’s your sort of thing, it’s not mine, I just thought it was weird and gross, and I don’t fucking know), but it fails on 2/3 of those requirements.  

Not to mention, WHAT A FUCKING WASTE OF KRISTIN CHENOWETH.  

In conclusion, your honor and gentlepeople of the jury:

THIS MOVIE IS A FUCKING MESS AND IT SHOULD LEAVE SINGLE PEOPLE ALONE.  

[iamanartichoke]

This is neither eloquent nor organized. I’m very frustrated and I just need to get things off my chest. 

Please do not reblog this post. 

Cut for anti-Ragnarok discourse, pro-Ragnarok discourse, the Ragnarok discourse war, mention of Thorki, and general venting. 

I’m not using tags bc I don’t want this post to show up in them. Very sorry and if any of these things is one of your blacklists, please keep scrolling.

Yesterday, I read a fic.

I was wandering through some of the Thorki content on twitter, and followed a link to one of the big bang fics, bc it was a human AU and das my jam.

I didn’t recognize the author’s name. The fic was extremely well-written, though: lots of feels, beautiful narration, a sweet ending balanced with a lot of sadness. It was one of those fics that gave me a lump in my throat.

I was only going to leave kudos, but then I figured I’d take the extra five seconds and leave a comment, bc we all know how much authors like comments. I mean, I’d rather someone leave a comment than kudos, especially if the fic really affected them.I get it and I gotchu, fam. 

Anyway, so I left a comment and proceeded to click on the author’s profile to see what else they’ve written. As you do.

I recognized their AO3 icon, even though I didn’t recognize the name. I’d seen them around on some Ragnarok wank on tumblr. I went to double-check, and it was the same user, and also they’d blocked me.

I do not know this person. I have never spoken to this person. Yet they’ve gone out of their way to block me, most likely bc I associate with the anti-Ragnarok crowd. This happens to me a lot. I’ve even had a couple of former mutuals unfollow and block me (without saying anything to me) and those felt like punches to the gut.

I understand not wanting to see content that you don’t like or that upsets you. Everyone has the right to block whomever they wish. But I can’t deny that getting blocked like that – by someone I don’t know, let alone interact with – fucking hurts. I know it’s not that deep but I can admit it. It’s a shitty feeling and it’s hard not to take it personally.

It’s not really about this particular person at all, although it’s a shame bc they’re a good writer I probably would have followed otherwise. But this entire anti/pro Ragnarok war has gone so far and it’s exhausting. I stayed pretty neutral for as long as I could. 

And here’s the thing. My observations, both from being neutral and also being someone who, despite often being quietly blocked, tends to fly under the radar are this:

The majority of the negativity comes from the pro side.

Look, I side with and agree with the anti side on this one. I can admit, however, that sometimes it gets tiresome to see posts get turned into Ragnarok criticism or tiresome to see more posts on my dash about this that or another thing that sucks about Ragnarok and why. It, like anything, can be tiring.

But I also see that the anti side largely does its best to keep to itself. The pro side complained about the Ragnarok tags, so the anti side made an anti tag, and the pros still come into it to complain. The anti side will post their discussions and criticisms and they largely just circulate within the same group of people. The discussions are almost always criticisms on the source material (ie, the film) and not about anyone who enjoys it.

Now, maybe I don’t see everything. Though I don’t think I’m biased just bc I agree with the anti side – in fact, it was these attributes that made me take a closer look at what they were saying bc maybe they had a point after all. I don’t follow every anti Ragnarok user, but I do follow a lot. I can’t say personal attacks and whatever never happen - but, I hardly ever see them.

That’s not the case with the pro side. I don’t think I follow many from that side, but I see so much negativity from them. It’s like this kind of underhanded negativity that I’m not quite sure how to explain. It’s tonal negativity. 

I mean, sometimes it’s blatant. Name-calling (Loki stans, lackeys, pathetic, delusional, and racist come to mind) is an example. But more than that, there’s this collective tone among the pro side that smacks of condescension and I can’t stand it.

They make fun of the “dissertations” that have been written.

They always include an “lol” or laugh emoji or something to express that they’re not the ones taking this seriously.

They fall back on saying they don’t care about a two-year-old movie.

They’re laughing and making fun and at the same time acting like they’re so above it all.

They want us to just shut up already.

What it comes down to is this: it’s not just a matter of being able to agree to disagree because the pro side actively acts offended that the antis are even having these critical discussions, even if the antis have gone out of their way to not involve the rest of the fandom at all.

(Again, this is not every pro person, but the majority. Tone does matter online, and the overall tone of the pro side is not positive. I say this from a mostly neutral place.)

And here’s a thing about “oh my god, it came out two years ago, get over it!” Yeah, it came out two years ago. So fucking what? You guys are still engaging with it, via fics and headcanons and art. How old the movie is doesn’t matter when you’re having fun with it, but when someone wants to engage with it in a (valid) critical way that you don’t like? No. That’s unacceptable. That’s pathetic. That’s being a lackey. Get over it.

Even writing this, I know that things are much worse for others than they are for me. I get stealth blocked; others are called out by name in public posts, receive anon hate, and are actively targeted.

It’s just, this shit is so fucking toxic to this fandom and it honestly needs to stop. Both sides need to not only stop engaging one another, but also stop acknowledging one another. We get it: you either like the movie or you don’t.

Let people do their own thing. Don’t be fucking obnoxious. If you disagree and genuinely want to talk about it, then try to remember there’s a person on the other side of the screen and be civil. If you disagree and don’t want to talk about it, then just fucking don’t.

If you see a post you disagree with, scroll past. And, yes, block the person if you need to (and sometimes it might be me that needs blocking and I recognize my hurt feelings are my own personal problem, not whoever else’s).

There are a lot of movies in the MCU that are not perfect. (Btw, it baffles me a little to get hated on for my stance on Ragnarok, when I am so much more vocal [and emotionally invested] in hating the Russos and IW/Endgame – but, whatever.) There are a lot of interpretations of characters that are different. There are a lot of people who project their own identity or issues or whatever onto any particular character that resonates (and that’s okay!) and there are a lot of people who don’t project but still identify with a particular character (and that’s okay, too).

Stop judging whether someone is a “real” fan of a character/franchise or not. Just because someone isn’t engaging with the source material in the way you are, and just because they don’t see it in the same way that you do, does not make them wrong. (Yes, this applies to the pro side, too. None of them are wrong or less valid for enjoying and even stanning the movie.) It doesn’t make anyone better than anyone else here. 

Acting otherwise is honestly going to kill this fandom. Because it bleeds over. Fics will have less readers, bc they don’t want to interact with something posted by someone they dislike (or who blocked them). There’s less sharing of things like art and headcanons and content. People unfollow and block each other, people are having to watch what they say, people are losing friends (and potential friends) bc they may be a great person but they don’t agree with you about fucking Ragnarok.

I came to tumblr bc it was the only place where not only could I find other people who loved Loki as much as I did, but it was the only place where I could express that. Express it in fic, in headcanons, in meta. Being creative and starting dialogues and just interacting. I wish we could get that vibe back.

I wish none of this bothered me so much.

[arecomicsevengood]

Quarantine Movies, Part 3

OLD BOYFRIENDS (1979) dir. Joan Tewkesbury

Not often I watch a movie and feel like “What the fuck is happening?” but I did with this one, written by Paul Schrader and directed by the screenwriter of Nashville. Talia Shire stars as a woman getting back in touch with her old boyfriends. She’s… recovering from a nervous breakdown? Sort of out for revenge? One ex hooks up with her again, and then, once abandoned, hires a private detective to track her down. A little boring at first, and then becomes baffling for most of its middle. John Belushi’s in it, playing a kind of pathetic schlub that feels convincingly like “the real Belushi” to me in the sense of me finding it uncomfortable to watch. I think maybe the film can be understood as a take on feminine psychosis in contrast to the masculine psychosis found in Schrader’s Taxi Driver screenplay. The psychosis here being this lack of self-knowledge that leads to manipulating people ostensibly towards the end of finding love.

KLUTE (1971) dir. Alan Pakula

Feel like I got the impression this movie was a joke from somewhere? Some Murphy Brown reference or something, playing to consensus of losers. (Edit: The joke’s in Wet Hot American Summer, but doesn’t really contain a value judgment about the movie.) It’s not great by any means but it’s not particularly tawdry given the subject matter. It is confusing that the movie is mostly about Jane Fonda’s call girl character, but the movie is named after Donald Sutherland’s character, who’s a detective. Maybe the joke was always just that people thought Jane Fonda played Klute. Movie digs into the sex worker’s psychology in a way that feels contemporary, except contemporary discourse doesn’t really allow for psychological insight, in favor of empty gestures towards representation. Sutherland’s out to solve a mystery, Fonda falls in love with him: I really did think this was smart in depicting a relationship where person was uncomfortable with the act of falling in love as running counter to their techniques of emotional distancing, except, I guess, for the fact that this is depicted in scenes of Fonda talking to her therapist that spell out what’s happening rather than depict this in a more organic way. But that it feels sort of shoehorned in is cool because the movie then largely has this mystery narrative it’s about. It is a little dull and could stand to be shorter, though the musical score does some nice grooves with dissonant elements on top, vaguely Morricone-style, though of course he’s got a deep body of work.

EYES OF LAURA MARS (1978) dir. Irvin Kershner

Criterion’s description of this chracterizes it as an “American giallo,” which seems about right. About a woman (Faye Dunaway) who takes violent/erotic photographs (shot by Helmut Newton) that coexist in both advertising and art gallery contexts. She starts having psychic visions of murder, the police are investigating her because some murders seem modeled after her photos, although that is not the case with any of the murders she has visions of, which then start to involve people she knows. So, like a giallo, there’s a lot happening, an interest in lurid style, and a disinterest in internal consistency as things ratchet up, and the twist ending (that the cop she started dating has multiple personality disorder) falls within that pattern as well. Not as good as the best Italian giallo, (which would I guess be Argento’s TENEBRE) or for that matter, the slasher movie HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME, which is an American movie insane enough to exist in the same conversation.

THE GETAWAY (1972) dir. Sam Peckinpah

Steve McQueen gets out of prison and is immediately set up by the prison official, who his girlfriend (Ali MacGraw) slept with, to rob a bank. He gets double-crossed, and then goes on the lam with his girlfriend. While in the past I sometimes feel like I am listing the names of the actors as endorsements, I’m not really doing this with the cast of this movie or Old Boyfriends. Good action sequences and suspenseful moments. Feel like the iconic images in this are McQueen with a shotgun, blowing up cop cars. Peckinpah directs from a Walter Hill screenplay adapting a Jim Thompson novel. This predates Walter Hill directing movies for himself, but it’s interesting how much more flash there is to the action here than there is in The Driver, you can sort of detect certain elements as being Hill’s interest (like the suspense of being pursued) and other stuff being Peckinpah, like the baroque explosions of violence. I like all of it.

KATE PLAYS CHRISTINE (2016) dir. Robert Greene

This isn’t very good. One half adaptation of the Christine Chubbuck story with a documentary about Kate Lyn Sheil. Sheil’s good in other things, this feels like a failed experiment. Weirdly this came out at pretty much exactly the same time as a movie about Chubbuck starring Rebecca Hall? The Rebecca Hall movie’s pretty great, and is an interesting performance, I would be interested in watching a conversation between the two actresses.

BRINGING OUT THE DEAD (1998) dir. Martin Scorses

A rewatch. Nicolas Cage plays an ambulance driver, Scorsese directs from a Paul Schrader screenplay. I like Nicolas Cage a lot, I like the cinematography in this one. I knew I would enjoy this, didn’t remember John Goodman being in it, Mary Beth Hurt is really good in it, mentioned her being good in Light Sleeper too, didn’t realize she’s Paul Schrader’s wife. Insanely hectic energy, shot through with hallucinatory holy light. Patricia Arquette is probably the weakest link in the cast, though it is her different energy that enables her to seem like a potentially redemptive figure for Nicolas Cage.

RAGING BULL (1980) dir. Martin Scorsese

This one’s a classic, but I didn’t like it the first time I saw it, over fifteen years ago, I think on account of being hungry at the time. Still, probably not my favorite Scorsese. The dialogue is interesting, due to De Niro’s character having a high level of aggression and paranoia, where pretty much everything that gets said to him he responds “Why do you say that?” which lends short scenes this circular quality. This reveals his character, in an efficient way, even though it makes the scenes feel insane and somewhat circular.

HOPSCOTCH (1980) dir. Ronald Neame

I liked this one a lot when I saw it years ago, didn’t really know the director’s pedigree came from doing Alec Guiness comedies. I don’t normally rewatch movie but my memories of this were very pleasant in a way suggesting it would be comforting. Walter Matthau plays a spy who is retiring but who gets everyone mad at him, which makes this kind of Prisoner-adjacent. He runs around, being the smartest guy in the room, having fun at being able to outsmart intelligent agencies. All of the globe-trotting of a James Bond kind of thing, but with none of the bloodshed. No one dies in this, uptight people just get mad at Walter Matthau being cool.

NIGHTFALL (1956) dir. Jacques Tourneur

Tourneur directed the original Cat People, which I love, and Out Of The Past, a classic noir I was not fond of when I saw it in college. This one’s good too, adapting a David Goodis novel. I know Goodis from a piece in Jesse Pearson’s magazine Apology, that makes the case he’s the best writer of crime fiction, on a sentence level. The dialogue’s good in this, but there’s also a cool structure: Following different characters, with it being fairly unclear what their relationship is to one another for a while, some flashbacks reveal things. The characters in this are pretty likable, Anne Bancroft is the female lead and the romance is believable. She plays a model, it’sf ascinating to watch movies made by a studio and realize they have the same woman designing gowns for all of them. Like they have the glamour provided in-house because it’s recognized that’s part of what people go to the movies for, but the the films don’t become ads for the designer or anything, like the way Jean Paul Gaultier’s designs function in The Fifth Element or something. Theme song is sung by Al Hibbler, who cut a LP with Roland Kirk.

5 AGAINST THE HOUSE (1955) dir. Phil Karlson

Criterion Channel has a collection of noir films Columbia put out, this is one of them, with a pretty good-sounding premise: Kim Novak is a part of a group of college friends that set out to rob a casino, but one of the group’s PTSD sabotages it. It ends up not really working as a heist film, for a number of reasons, one is that the “perfect crime” they engineer is not that intricate, the other, more important element is the characters are unbearably smug in a way that makes them really hard to deal with. Novak’s good in it, but no one else is: While the men are supposed to be funny, but aren’t, Novak sort of just has to be beautiful. She sings songs in this, and maybe there’s a voice double, but it seems she has a good singing voice. You can probably skip this one.

THE BIG HEAT (1953) dir. Fritz Lang

Not as masterful as the films Lang made in Germany, but still really good. A cop investigating a murder quickly gathers that a conspiracy is afoot, people make mysterious phone calls immediately after he interviews them, he gets his life destroyed, but keeps going. Gloria Grahame (who’s also in Nicholas Ray’s amazing In A Lonely Place) is great as a gangster’s party-girl-who-loves-money girlfriend who has her beauty and then her life taken away from her. There is an element of feeling like you’re seeing cliches be run through their paces, but I don’t mind, given the pacing. It’s mean enough you don’t know how dark it’s going to get. Jocelyn Brando, Marlon’s sister who also appears in Nightfall, gets a nice role in this.

MURDER BY CONTRACT (1958) dir. Irving Lerner

Oh, this one rules! Although I knew none of the people involved in it, everybody’s great. It feels slow as you watch it, it’s deliberately paced and seems to appreciate every scene on its own terms as a point of interest, rather than rushing through a plot. The score seems like it’s very close to just one instrumental piece, being used over and over again. About a dude, (who’s also in Kubrick’s The Killing, it turns out) becoming a professional hitman, and then flying out to California for a bigger job, where he has two people minding him. The hitman’s psychosis is not over the top, he just seems very self-contained, in a way that gets a lot of (almost) comedic mileage out of his interaction with other people

INVENTION FOR DESTRUCTION (1958) dir. Marel Zeman

This movie looks REAL weird and I have no idea how they got the effect? The degree of artificiality is highly distracting, in a way I don’t have a problem with in Guy Maddin or whoever. The whole thing sort of looks like the portraits of people that run in The Wall Street Journal? There are lines on EVERYTHING, like the sets are being made in this patterned way to replace color values. Everything looks artificial, but also collaged together. “Freely adapted” from Jules Verne, this involves boats, explosions, heists, etc. but all done in this sort of deep-focus theatrical staging that seems to combine animation and live action but in a way I can’t work out but also isn’t enveloping or convincing.

MAY FOOLS (1980) dir. Louis Malle.

I like a lot of Louis Malle, this seems vaguely like a deep cut, as I believe it’s unavailable on DVD. It takes place in France during the May ’68 protests, but is about a family getting together for a funeral/reading of a will. It’s suffused with weird free-flowing sexual energy, like everyone’s down to commit incest? Sort of in the name of revolution, but understandable as a movie in terms of being very french, and maybe something of a light comedy. (While Murmur Of The Heart also has incest in it, and is not a comedy, it’s very French.) People flirt with each other a lot, this is a pleasant watch if you are under quarantine and are fantasizing about casual sex or the overthrowing of the political class.

MON ONCLE D’AMERIQUE (1980) dir. Alain Resnais

This, too, is very French. The spine of the movie is Henri Laborit lecturing, lending the film an essayistic aspect, illustrated with footage of lab rats, but also footage of people wearing mouse heads and human clothes, the best parts. The guy’s theories seem agreeable to me but I don’t know what other people think about them. They’re illustrated by the fictional life stories of three characters, whose lives intersect eventually in their adulthood, though the film starts with them as children. Resnais is interesting, I’ve seen very few of his films but they’re all radically unique, though united by this intellectual edge.

FUGITIVE KIND (1960) dir. Sidney Lumet

Lumet also had a long and varied career, but I essentially view him as a highly-skilled journeyman, I guess due to snobbish bias gleaned from secondhand takes. I’ll watch pretty much any of his movies though, and so I watched this Tennessee Williams adaptation. Not sure I’d seen Marlon Brando in anything before, though I thought it was funny to say I possessed “the raw sexuality of a young Marlon Brando” in college. This whole movie is about how hot Brando is, and how all women want to fuck him and how all the men resent him. You would think the heterosexual male default would be to not notice how hot a dude is, but Brando is both physically ripped but with a feminine face that makes me “get it.” There’s a poetry to his sensitivity, but also an element of threat to how basically everyone who gets along with him is at odds with the racist, patriarchal, and parochial attitudes of the small towns he travels through.

MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS (1974) dir. Sidney Lumer

This is an Agatha Christie adaptation, where Hercule Poirot is played by Albert Finney, amongst a large cast of huge stars who are both hamming it up and not really doing anything. After watching two movies with Natasha Richardson, was nice to see her mom Vanessa Redgrave in something, though it’s a small part. The ending, where the detective works out that everyone schemed to commit the murder together and then decides that he will let them all get away with it, is fun, though by and large the “comedy” here feels a bit dated. This kinda feels like something that you would’ve seen already after having caught bits and pieces of it on basic cable growing up.

[backtozeon]

Dear Fans of Watchmen, Hello there. My name is Damon Lindelof and I am a writer. I am also the unscrupulous bastard currently defiling something that you love. But that’s not all that I am. I am a twelve-year old boy being handed the first two issues by my father. “You’re not ready for this,” he growls with a glint of mischief in his eye. My parents have recently divorced and he has gone rogue, so there I am in my bed, flashlight beam illuminating pages, watching the Comedian fall again and again and again. The old man was wrong. I am ready for this. Because this was written just for me. I am thirty-eight. A man offers me the opportunity to adapt Watchmen for television. The filmed adaptation came out less than a year ago, but that doesn’t matter. I tell him I am not interested and that perhaps he should let sleeping dogs lie with hopes they will eventually be run over by a car tire, bursting their stomachs. He does not get the reference. I am watching my father haggle with a man in a wheelchair. I am fifteen years old and we are at a comic book convention in New York City, long before attending a comic book convention was something anyone wanting to ever have sex with another person would admit to. I definitely want to have sex with another person. My father finally harangues the merchant down to thirty dollars for a guaranteed authentic screenplay of Watchmen, soon to be a major motion picture! Now, he reads aloud from the script as “The Watchmen” battle terrorists at The Statue of Liberty. Something is wrong. The old man’s brow furrows, scanning the text in a mixture of disappointment and rage, a child who has just been told that Santa didn’t bring him presents this year, then robbed the house and beat up his parents. “What the fuck is this?” my father mutters. It is the first time he swears in front of me. Another man offers me the opportunity to adapt Watchmen for television. I am forty now. I tell him someone else asked me to do this a year ago and I declined. He inquires as to why I said no. I tell him that Alan Moore has been consistently explicit in stating that Watchmen was written for a very specific medium and that medium is comics, comics that would be ruined should they be translated into moving images. The Another Man pauses for a moment, then responds – “Who’s Alan Moore?” I am twenty-three and living in Los Angeles. My father flies out from New Jersey for my birthday and gives me a present, a new edition of the “graphic novel” that is Watchmen. He explains to me that this is the publisher’s way of retaining the rights to the characters. He tells me that Dan and Adrian and Jon and Walter and Laurie are all serfs, working the land for a Feudal Lord that will never grant them freedom. My father is more than a little drunk.. More so, he is a hypocrite for buying me the new edition. “I know, I know…” he says, that same mischievous glint from years ago obscured by now thicker lenses, “But it’s so goddamned good.” Yet Another Man offers me the opportunity to adapt Watchmen for television. “Just a pilot,” he says, “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” I am forty-three now and I am thinking about something I read about Orthodox Judaism. While most religions are cultivated by evangelizing and conversion, Orthodox Judaism doesn’t solicit. If someone from another faith wishes to become an Orthodox Jew, they are rejected. If they are stubborn enough to ask again, they are denied even more harshly. But should they have the audacity to ask a third time? The door cracks open. And if they’re willing to invest an immense amount of time and effort and sacrifice and faith, they are embraced into the fold. Why am I thinking about this? I have said no to Watchmen twice now. This makes me Orthodox Judaism. I crack the door. And now I’m a hypocrite too. I am standing over my father’s hospital bed. I am twenty-nine, the last age at which I will consider myself “young.” The breathing tube was removed two hours ago and they said he wouldn’t last longer than fifteen minutes. It’s a cliché. I’m living a trope. He is unconscious and unable to impart final wisdom nor tell me he was proud all along, even though he never said it out loud. There is no beeping machine showing his weakening heartrate. My father is beyond machines. I hold his cool hand and try not to pray to God because he detested the very idea of God so instead I pray to his gods. I pray to Cthulhu. I pray to 42, the Eternal Cosmic Number. I pray to Dr. Manhattan, far away in a galaxy less complicated than this one. The television is on and the Lakers win the championship. My father never cared about basketball. He didn’t even know the rules. When he dies, I finally understand that I don’t know the rules either. No one does. I am forty-five and I am writing a letter to the fans. The fans of Watchmen. It’s unnecessarily wordy and an exercise in oversharing, but nothing gets people on your side more than telling them about the moment your father died. Sharing such intimate details with strangers feels needy and pathetic and exploitative and yucky and necessary and freeing. I am also looking for an elegant way to escape from this device of quantum observance, a device appropriated from Mr. Moore so that I can speak to those fans from the bottom of my cold, thieving heart. Perhaps I could switch from referring to them in the third person and shift into the second, thus bringing them closer to the first? Would that be amenable to you? First and foremost, if you are angry that I’m working on Watchmen, I am sorry. You may be thinking I can’t be that sorry or I wouldn’t be doing it. I concede the point, but I hope it doesn’t invalidate the apology, which I offer with sincerity and respect. Respect. That’s second and twicemost. I have an immense amount of respect for Alan Moore. He is an extraordinary talent of mythic proportion. I wrote him a letter, parts of which are not dissimilar to this one, because I owed him an explanation as to why I’m defying his wishes and to humbly ask him not to place a curse on me because he knows magic and apparently, he can do that. His response, or whether he responded at all, is between he and I. Suffice to say, even before I sent it, Mr. Moore had made it abundantly clear that he doesn’t want anyone to “adapt” his work. To do so is hubris. Worse yet, it’s unethical. There are a million ways to rationalize unethical behavior – I could argue that Mr. Moore’s partner, the brilliant artist, Dave Gibbons, is equally entitled to authorize access to his masterwork and that he has been kind enough to offer us his blessing to do so. Or I could offer that Mr. Moore cut his veined teeth on the creations of others; Batman, Superman, Captain Britain, Marvelman (he’ll never be “Miracleman” to me), Swamp Thing and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, not to mention The Charlton characters upon whom his Watchmen characters are based… So am I not allowed to do the same? No. I am not. I am not allowed. And yet… I am compelled. I am compelled despite the inevitable pushback and hatred I will understandably receive for taking on this particular project. This ire will be maximally painful because of its source. That source being you. The true fans. I once said that if one were a true fan of something, they weren’t allowed to hate it. A prominent writer took me to task for such heresy, arguing that just because one was the creator of a show, this did not permit them to pick and choose who was and wasn’t a fan of it. The writer went on to win a Pulitzer for television criticism. I went on to get snubbed by the Razzies for Prometheus. As such, I concede this point, too. After all, even the most fervent lifelong fan of, oh, let’s say the New York Jets, is allowed to shout at the top of his lungs, “YOU SUCK OH MY GOD YOU SUUUUUUUUUCKIII II” and do so while wearing a replica Namath Jersey he purchased for an ungodly sum of money that may or may not have constituted his entire first paycheck on Nash Bridges. But the point. The point is, you love Watchmen. That gives you the right to hate it, too. Because no matter what… You’re still true fans. But to quote the immortal P.W. Herman… “I know you are… But what am IT’ What am I? I’m a true fan, too. And I’m not the only one. What I love most about television is that the finished product is a result not of singular vision, but the collective experience of many brilliant minds. I have the pleasure of sitting in a Writers Room each and every day that is as diverse and combative as any I’ve ever been a part of. In that room, Hetero White Men like myself are in the minority and as Watchmen is (incorrectly) assumed to be solely our domain, understanding its potential through the perspectives of women, people of color and the LGBTQ community has been as eye-opening as it has been exhilarating. We’ve committed to doing the same in front of and behind the camera. And every single person involved with this show absolutely adores Watchmen. But in the spirit of complete honesty, we also sorta want to… uh… Disrupt it? Except I hate that word because now it’s not disruptive anymore. And how can I present as punk rock when I’m now cozy in bed, spooning with Warner Brothers, HBO and DC? Truth be told, everyone there, particularly Geoff Johns (who is as true fan as it gets) has been extraordinarily supportive. Sure, it’s fun to kick around the comic corporate overlords for exploiting writers and artists, but we all know what happened to Jack Kirby and we’re still first in line for every Marvel film. So… how do we answer the challenge of when it is appropriate to appropriate? Which brings us to the most important part. Maybe the only part that really matters. Our creative intentions. We have no desire to “adapt” the twelve issues Mr. Moore and Mr. Gibbons created thirty years ago. Those issues are sacred ground and they will not be retread nor recreated nor reproduced nor rebooted. They will, however be remixed. Because the bass lines in those familiar tracks are just too good and we’d be fools not to sample them. Those original twelve issues are our Old Testament. When the New Testament came along, it did not erase what came before it. Creation. The Garden of Eden. Abraham and Isaac. The Flood. It all happened. And so it will be with Watchmen. The Comedian died. Dan and Laurie fell in love. Ozymandias saved the world and Dr. Manhattan left it just after blowing Rorschach to pieces in the bitter cold of Antarctica. To be clear. Watchmen is canon. Just the way Mr. Moore wrote it, the way Mr. Gibbons drew it and the way the brilliant John Higgins colored it. But we are not making a “sequel” either. This story will be set in the world its creators painstakingly built… but in the tradition of the work that inspired it, this new story must be original. It has to vibrate with the seismic unpredictability of its own tectonic plates. It must ask new questions and explore the world through a fresh lens. Most importantly, it must be contemporary. The Old Testament was specific to the Eighties of Reagan and Thatcher and Gorbachev… ours needs to resonate with the frequency of Trump and May and Putin and the horse that he rides around on, shirtless. And speaking of Horsemen, The End of The World is off the table (THE LEFTOVERS! NOW STREAMING ON HBO GO!) which means the heroes and villains — as if the two are distinguishable — are playing for different stakes entirely. The tone will be fresh and nasty and electric and absurd. Many describe Watchmen as “dark,” but I’ve always loved its humor -worshipping at the altar of the genre whilst simultaneously trolling it. As such… Some of the characters will be unknown. New faces. New masks to cover them. We also intend to revisit the past century of Costumed Adventuring through a surprising, yet familiar set of eyes… and it is here where we’ll be taking our greatest risks. Risk is imperative. I need the feeling in my stomach before I leap from a great height without knowing the depth of the water below. If my body should shatter upon impact, at least it was in pursuit of glory. And let’s be honest… Isn’t there a small part of you that wants to see me explode like a fleshy watermelon? But hopefully, there’s also a part that wants to experience something sort of amazing. As for what I want? I want your validation. I also want not to want it. I’ve given up the opioid highs of Twitter, but continue to score my methadone in the threads of Reddit and the hot takes of morning-after recappers. I’ll be reading and watching and listening to what you have to say because even though I wish I didn’t… I deeply care about what you think. Which brings us, Thank God, to the end of the missive. Endings. I’m GREAT at them. A wise, blue man once said that nothing ever ends. But maybe he wasn’t wise. Maybe he was just scared and alone and sad that he would outlive everything and everyone he ever loved. So I hope this isn’t the last time we correspond, fellow fans… after all, it’s just a pilot and we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. But maybe… if everything works out the way I hope it does… and if you’re willing to give me a chance, it’s not the end at all… It’s the beginning? With Respectful Hubris, -Damon

[hellzyeahthewebwieldingavenger]

Infinity Thoughts

 So I have something of a tradition of reading comics that will in some way tie into upcoming Marvel live action films. To this end with Avengers: Endgame approaching I read through, among other things, the TPBs ‘Avengers vs. Thanos’. ‘Rebirth of Thanos’, ‘Infinity Gauntlet’ and ‘Infinity’ volumes 1-2.

For the most part I rather enjoyed them. My respect for Jim Stalin grew and I’d argue Infinity Gauntlet may well be Marvel’s finest ever crossover event story of all time...Then I got to Infinity.

Hooooooooo-boy.

This was a lame story.

To be crystal clear the trades I read through collected the main issues of the event plus the tie-in issues of Avengers and New Avengers. Since all were written by Jonathan Hickman the tie-ins are actually essential to the reading experience and I was never exactly lost reading the story. There was a brief but well done reference to the Guardians of the Galaxy tie in issues that weren’t collected but that was it.

You know how I said my respect for Stalin grew through reading this stuff? Ell my respect for Hickman sunk...even lower than it already was.

First off reading Infinity seems to have been a waste of time for my personal purposes. Whilst I do not know what Endgame has in store Infinity War took precious little from this story. It just borrowed 4/5 of Thanos’ inner circle of henchmen (Corvus Glaive, Prixima Midnight, Ebony Maw) and also the Outriders, those four limbed footsoldiers Thanos uses to invade Wakanda. Speakin of which the mere idea of Thanos invading Wakanda was also borrowed from this story but it plays out drastically differently.

That’s not really a problem with the story just a personal complaint I had.

On the flipside something I can’t really complain about but will point to as a problem is that to follow the main story of Infinity you HAD to pick up the tie-ins I mentioned. A well written event shouldn’t price gouge you like that. Noticeably Infinity Gauntlet didn’t. Reading all 6 issues was a satisfying experience unto itself, I never felt like I was missing anything.

But saying Stalin is a better cosmic writer than Hickman would be redundant.

Another problem I discovered after the fact with this story was how the first 15 pages of Infinity #1 are literally just reprints of New Avengers #6 and the Free Comic book day Infinity issue. So 15/54 pages were stuff you’d either read before or could read for free.

This isn’t even getting into the writing problems in general. First of all Hickman had this insufferable habit of within issues themselves having like chapter breaks in the for of entirely blank pages with a grey title and symbol at the top. So you know...nice that you are paying for nearly blank pages amidst your £4+ comic books.

Second of all Hickman has this habit of like throwing meaningless lore at you.

In Infinity #1 for example he throws at you the brief backstory of this planet you have never seen before nor will see again as though it means something, complete with flashbacks and exposition about this planet’s great champion who’s already dead courtesy of the guy delivering the narration. And when I say it’s meaningless lore I mean Hickman has the guy say “Whatever happened to your proud champion to won the Water Wars and untied the tribes by defeating the Great Beast of Pol?”

Like...who gives a shit no one knows where or what Pol is or what the Water Wars were. The best part is that this is all adding up to this planet giving Thanos’ henchmen a tribute of several dead people.

Basically it stretched out 11 pages with meaningless lore to communicate Thanos is bad, Thanos has bad henchmen, Thanos’ demands defeated planets pay him tribute in dead people. Seems like you could accomplish that in maybe 4 pages at a push, especially for a villain everyone knows about already.

What makes this all the more confusing is that Thanos isn’t even really the central plot or threat in the story. This is in spite of being on the covers, mentioned in the solicits, the story’s name referencing stories that explicitly involve him and the story frankly existing because of his post-credits scene in Avengers 2012.

The story’s central conceit I guess is that it’s a war on two fronts.

Captain America leads most of the Avengers into space to join the Kree, Shi’ar, Skrulls, Annihilus and other alien races in a war against the army of the Builders. Meanwhile the remaining heroes (including Iron Man and the Illuminati) have to contend with Thanos who has invaded Earth looking for the sole remaining Infinity Gem and the last of his children, the half-Inhuman Thane.*

Essentially in spite of the advertisement Thanos is really just one of two antagonists in this story. And frankly clearly the one Hickman is less interested in compared to the Builders, whom shockingly, just so happen to be his own creations.

What follows is essentially a cosmic war story all about military strategy and game theory and so on, with very smart people doing very smart things.

Now in fairness conceptually this isn’t a bad idea whatsoever.

So what if Thanos is just one of two antagonistic forces. So what if it’s a war story. Those are ideas that can be done great right?

Yep...except...they aren’t.

Let’s talk about Thanos first.

His central motivation to kill his half Inhuman son is contrived and whilst it COULD have worked it just doesn’t.

As the lead in issues to Infinity Gauntlet make clear with Nebula, who claimed to be Thanos’ granddaughter, Thanos finds the idea of reproducing an affront to his nihilistic beliefs.

Thnos of course is in love with Death. As in he sees Death as a woman he’d like to make out with. To this end he committed his life to mass slaughter to win her love.

Thus entirely logically his creator Jim Stalin established that Thanos would not seek to have any offspring because, duh, if your goal is to kill as many people as possible you aren’t going to create MORE life.

So on the most basic of levels, Thanos even having any children seems out of character.

But it could have worked because the story does establish Thanos has killed his other children too. So it is entirely possible to argue that Thanos, whilst no celibate, made a point of killing his off spring to balance the scales, possibly even seeing his kids as mistakes of his youth before he’d entirely committed himself to Death.

Except the story doesn’t say anything like that. Thanos simply states the idea of Thane existing keeps him awake at night. In other words one of the 2 central antagonists has at best vague motivations.

To make matters worse Thanos is defeated via a total dues ex machina. Basically Thane undergoes a mutation as a result of Black Bolt unleashing a Terrigen mist throughout Earth, this causes him to inadvertently and instantly murder everyone within a certain radius by waving his left hand. He can only control this with the help of a containment suit one of Thanos’ inner circle, Ebony Maw provides. Maw acts as a kind of evil mentor/advisor to Thane, think Wormtongue from the Two Towers but more powerful and sinister, but we’ll get to him in a minute.

Anyway Thane is captured by Maw and presented to Thanos and whilst Thanos and his last surviving inner circle (they’re called the Black Order btw) Proxima Midnight are beating the shit out of the Avengers. Maw then says some shit about wanting to see if Thane has evolved and how he’s the only one who can beat Thanos. So Thane waves his right  hand and encases Thanos and Proxima in a great big amber cube.

Oh and this comes out of exactly nowhere!

That’s the resolution to the final issue by the way. THAT is how this 2 volume event friggin ends. Pathetic.

More pathetic even than the already pretty pathetic motives and characterization given over to Ebony Maw and the entirety of the Black Order.

Look, the idea of Thanos having an elite entourage as opposed to just hordes of gneric nameless thralls** is a good one.

The idea of them worshipping him and/or Death is fine.

But beyond their looks we get little characterization from any of them. Glaive and Midnight are offhandily established as married. Black Dwarf is just a big dumb warrior thug. We get a mini-monologue about Supergiant’s childhood and why she follows Thanos in the pages just prior to hear death towards the end of the story. And Ebony Maw...nothing. We have no reason for why he acts against his master or what the fuck his agenda is.

What little we know of the Black Order comes from I kid you not a mini Marvel Handbook segment randomly inserted into the story that gives you like a short paragraph on each member and their abilities.

So you know...literally telling us instead of showing us who these people are and to boot it’s not even actually part of the story.

Then the story has the audacity to say that Thane, Hickman’s new underdeveloped character has and will become even worse than his Dad. His Dad who I will remind you literally caused universal genocide when he snapped his fingers and killed half the universe’s population...and THEN murdered all the cosmic beings. Oh but Thane is worse because he...can trap people in amber...?????

There is also precious little characterization or development lent to Thanos in the entire story, whereas the events its trading off of (Infinity Gauntlet, etc) absolutely did. Here Thanos is the big bad villain and little else. He isn’t even the biggest threat nor does he comprise the majority of the panel time.

That distinction goes to the Builders.

Oh lord...the builders. Who also count among their ranks the Gardners known as the Ex Nihili, the Alephs robot soldiers and exist in the superflow of the multiverse having created the Starbrand and other cosmic tools to shape the evolution of species across the universe.

Did any of that sound bland, boring, meaningless and simply pretentious mastabatory science fiction talk?

Well that’s only because it is.

Marvel has a robust cosmic lore to them. The first generation of that was really installed by Lee and Steve Ditko in Doctor Strange and to a much greater extent Lee and Jack Kirby in Thor, Fantastic Four, Avengers and other titles. That’s where we of course get guys like Galactus.

The second generation I’d argue was Jim Stalin who set up Thanos, Drax the Destroyer Adam Warlock, the Infinity Gems and also Chris Claremont along with his collaborators who birthed the Phoenix Force and the Shi’ar and so on.

The third generation was Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning and Keith Giffen. These guys added a few things to Marvel Cosmic but really their forte was more adopting stuff already in the Marvel universe and expanding it or using it in interesting ways. The best examples of this being their Magnum Opus, Annihilation which made Annihilus a Big Bad for the Marvel Universe, and ESTABLISHING the Guardians of the Galaxy that the movies took inspiration from. Whilst they didn’t necessarily create any of the Guardians they were the guys who essentially made them the space Avengers.

Hickman is essentially the headliner for the fourth generation and by far and away the most creative.

And by creative I mean he is very good at dreaming up ideas. He’s a classic ‘Big Concepts’ science fiction writer.

Where he falls down is in executing said concepts.

Whilst the past generation of Marvel Cosmic creators vacillated between going for something sweepingly epic or else fun and bombastic or something in between, Hickman’s work is devoid of the fun bombast of a Silver dude riding a surfboard in space but is also if anything trying way too hard to be ‘Epic Cosmic’ than anything the older creators did. And they at least were doing it at a different time when standards for comics were different.

Let’s take the Galactus Trilogy and Infinity Gauntlet as an example. In the 1960s presenting us a science fiction comic book antagonist who was an allegory for God was really impressive and him engaging in a debate with the Watcher about the nature of humanity was deep stuff.***

Similarly the Infinity Gauntlet was concerned with the burden of Godhood and acted as something of a bizarre love story between Thanos and death, the ultimate character study of the Mad Titan.

Hickman in Infinity though mostly just throws Big Science Fiction Concepts (tm) at you and expects you to be impressed by their mere existence, as though ‘the Avengers fight a big space war’ is something to be impressed by in 2013 when we’ve had how many stories like that?

Worse his Big Concepts aren’t just expected to be impressive via their mere existence but are also just...rather dull. There is little personality to the boringly named Builders and only slightly more in the pretentiously named Ex Nihili (Hickman loves throwing around very impressive big nonsense words for his science fiction crap, God forbid they be something simple and/or silly but memorable like ‘Galactus’, ‘the Infinity Gauntlet’, ‘Annihilus’, etc). The Gardners/Ex Nihili kind of look interesting but the Builders themselves are just the most boringly designed aliens ever.

When you see the Watchers or the Celestials you BUY that they are the oldest race in the universe, you buy they are cosmic beings on a higher plane than mere mortals. The Builders are just grey vaguely buggish dudes. Their footsoldiers the Alephs are worse. They’re generic Terminator rip off robots.

The art throughout the story looks pretty but it’s design sense is lame at best and it has the eternal problem of so many 2000s/early 2010s comics that the art looks beautiful panel to panel but is also stiff and looks like a series of very pretty portraits that lack life or the illusion of movement. Comic book art shouldn’t be  a series if paintings next to one another conveying the highlights of a scene but an organic flow from one panel to the next creating the illusion of movement. Want to see this done well in a big event story? Check out Mike Zeck on Secret Wars or Perez/Lim on Infinity Gauntlet. Or hell anything Ron Frenz draws.

Okay, they look boring, they sound boring, their concepts aren’t used that effectively BUT...surely the Builders storyline has merit? Surely this cosmic war story is at least a good war story.

Well...yes and no.

The military strategy used in the story is pretty realistic and well thought out, speaking as someone who isn’t familiar with military strategy history or stories rooted in that stuff.

If nothing else the core concept of Thanos attacking Earth whilst the Avengers are off fighting on another front and the X-Men are divided (because of Schism) is basic and interesting use of strategy.

And the space warfare for the most part seemed reminiscent of Star Trek, speaking as someone who’s got novice knowledge at best of that franchise.

Here is the problem though...it’s also painfully dull for anyone who isn’t hyper into that stuff.

Which would be fine...if the story was solely contained within the main Infinity book.

I’ve long defended Secret Wars 1984 on the grounds that as it’s own mini-series it wasn’t obliged to follow thematic conventions or writing conventions of the solo or team titles, it could be it’s own sandbox. So if it wanted to be a light war story/series of fun action set pieces, fine.

So if Infinity wanted to be an Avengers space military strategy comic book for 6 issues okay fine. Except it wasn’t, it roped in Avengers and New Avengers into it too.

And at that point the tie-ins at the very least needed to have something more. You know like...personality.

The single biggest problem with pretty much any Hickman story I’ve read is that far too often the characters talk stiffly and unrealistically, with a coldness to them, a functionality. There is precious little personality or emotion to them. Even when the art is showing us emotion you simply see it as opposed to actually connecting with it.

There are only the briefest of smatterings of truly emotional or personable moments in the entire story and as a consequence they kind of stick out like a sore thumb. Smasher and Cannonball hooking up (out of nowhere in the story like there was no inclination they had the hots for one another earlier) and Sunspot quipping about it is the most human moment in the entire story closely followed by Manifold expressing exhaustion over constantly fighting.

The closest thing to a charismatic character in the entire story is friggin Maximus the Mad!

How do you do that in a story with Captain America, Captain Marvel, Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Hawkeye, Black Panther, Reed Richards, Namor and friggin Thanos!!!!

All this and the story exists for anything but a genuine creative drive. It exists because

a)      Marvel needed to make bank off of Thanos’ cameo in Avengers 2012

b)      Marvel needed to remind people Thanos exists after his cameo

c)       Marvel needed to workshop some possible concepts for the then inevitable Thanos movie on the horizon

d)      Marvel needed to amp up the Inhumans via their stupid cloud unleashed in this story so they could begin their dastardly master plan to supplant the X-Men with them

 Ugh. I recommend you simply skip this story wholesale.

*The other 5 Infinity Gems were destroyed

 **By the way in Stalin’s stories Thanos’ armies comprised of a diverse group of alien baddies. Here...there are different kinds of aliens but they seem to be a few species who all look the same. Hardly what Stalin and other artists rendered, which gave you an idea of the scope of Thanos’ travels.

If we’re going to be paying more money for comics nowdays could they maybe put in at minimum the same effort as cheaper comics from 40 years ago!

 ***The Watchers and Celestials by the way, Jack Kirby creations, get supplanted by Hickman as the oldest and most powerful race in the universe for the sake of his boringly named ‘Builders’

[kiruuuuu]

Well, I hope this one helps a bit, @finest-trashbag? 💝 :) Here’s some more Montagne/Bandit in which we’re approaching the comfort part of this wild ride. We’re not entirely there yet - but we will be. (Rating T, hurt/comfort, ~5.3k words)

The other parts of Protection Mountain can be found via tags or here on my Masterpost! (Mobile version here)

.

It’s a mockery and yet he can’t bring himself to tear down the curtain, expose the farce for what it is, leave this pitiful excuse of a play. He can’t. Not when it involves gentle hands cupping his face, stroking his body, carding through his hair. Even in his dream he’s aware of it being no more than an illusion and yet he soaks in the affectionate gestures, echoes of words spoken once upon a time surrounding him together with the non-corporeal feeling of bliss. He loves and he’s loved, two things impossible to dream of in his younger days, then something he took for granted and now something he misses fiercely.

When he wakes up, there are tears in his eyes. It takes a few deep, shuddery inhales to return to the reality of a deserted hotel room, to become aware of his icy feet, the large mattress which is entirely too big for one person alone, his belongings carelessly strewn about on every horizontal surface. If it was a smoking room, he’d have gone through a pack a day probably but everyone noticed his attempts at quitting and so he’s not even granted this small comfort. He feels as if he’s underwater, days have bled together, sleepless nights blurred his perception and left him lost; sounds are muted and breathing seems impossible.

At least he didn’t dream of death again. Not his own, that would’ve been a consolation. No. Not his own.

The fact that he slept at all is a small miracle in itself and can be ascribed to the t-shirt he’s wearing, a piece of fabric he stuffed into his bag without thinking, stole without thinking twice about it and put on the previous evening. It smells heavenly, even now its scent is noticeable whenever he moves and so he pulls the collar over his nose and breathes in, curls up into a ball and wraps his cold hands around his even colder ankles while he thinks of the past. It’s the one thing keeping him sane these days whereas a month (or two?) ago, his future promised hope and stability. He doesn’t like thinking about the future now. Not at all.

He tries, but he can’t get hard. Not even with the familiar smell in his nose, definitely not with the window he left open during the night, still letting in freezing air, not with the help of pictures and videos on his phone. Not even those of him. Especially not those.

Eventually, he gets up because he’s shivering too much, accepting that he’s not even granted this bit of solace though he knows he’d feel worse afterwards, looking for a warm body to hold on to, missing the hands which caressed him in his dreams but are nowhere to be found now. He dresses carelessly, skips the shower and breakfast and gets on the tram taking him to where his love lies bleeding out.

.

There’s too much wrong with him and so Bandit doesn’t like looking in his direction. Instead, he inspects the blanket, the bed frame, the entirety of the room except for its occupant even though he could probably draw it in his sleep by now but at least none of it needs as many crutches to exist as the man before him. He’s fidgeting and probably radiating awkwardness, the underlying wish to be elsewhere though everything he’s ever cared for is right there, close enough to touch, to kiss, to hold on to. He does neither of these things. He feels guilty.

“Did you cancel the appointment?”, Montagne asks quietly after a prolonged silence which was thick enough to be tangible.

“Yes”, Bandit says and inspects the way the sheets are rumpled in great detail.

Another short pause. “You didn’t cancel it.”

“No”, Bandit says and follows the folds with his eyes, carefully thinking about nothing.

“Are you going to? Because if not, I’ll call them. They should give the date to someone who’s actually going to turn up.”

“So you really would stand me up at our wedding?” As soon as he’s spoken the words, he presses his lips together and buries his fingernails in his palm until the physical pain distracts him from the other, dull, omnipresent one. When Montagne sighs and reaches up to touch him, he ducks away and feels pathetic; his own pride won’t allow him to be this weak and vulnerable and so he leaves without another word, striding past everything and everyone until he’s in front of the main doors, wondering what else he’s supposed to do the whole day if not this. It’s all he does. It’s all he can do.

Strings hold him back, almost stretched taut, and so he remains where he is to breathe a bit of fresh air and hopefully reset his emotions. He’s quick to irritate these days, though his rage often tilts over into pure desperation and it’s not something he cares for. Ultimately, he tries to remain as neutral as possible, not to swing into any extreme as his emotional dial seems to need some calibrating. He bums a cigarette off of someone who also doesn’t look like she should be smoking and allows the quiet feelings of resentment, largely towards himself, but also… just a tiny bit…

When he returns, sinks into the chair which constitutes the middle of his universe, Montagne’s expression has softened and yet he can’t bring himself to do more than glance at it. “Give me your hand, Dom”, he demands and uncurls his own fingers.

Bandit studies the windowsill. He’s lucky he didn’t wear the t-shirt or else the smell of smoke would’ve ruin its calming effect. He wonders how Blitz is doing. He should probably call Six and give her an update. He doesn’t move.

“Mon amour. Please.”

Reluctantly, he lifts his arm and places his hand in Montagne’s, almost expecting it to be cool to the touch, as if he really was… gone and the silhouette before him no more than an afterimage burnt into his retina. But it’s warm. His loose grip tightens and a thumb strokes over the back of his hand. Some of the tension in his limbs eases up. Only some, but it’s a start.

“I don’t want you to spend your whole day in here. It’s Berlin, don’t you have people to visit? Places to see? You can watch films in the cinema and tell me about them later. I don’t want you to stay here all the time.”

“Do you not want to see me?” It’s unfair and both of them know it is, so Montagne drops the topic as he did so many already, discards them as unfruitful, as leading to unwarranted accusations. The list keeps growing. Bandit is unbearable and unable to change it.

“There’s something else”, Montagne valiantly tries again and he deserves a medal for putting up with any of this, if Bandit is honest. He’s in pain, not able to walk or even stand on his own and yet he hasn’t sent Bandit away once. It’ll only be a matter of time until he does. “I’ve spoken to Olivier.”

“Have you now?” His gaze drops to the sterile floor with the irregular pattern.

“I’d like you to apologise to him.”

When he withdraws his hand, Montagne tries to hold on it but Bandit shakes him off. “No.”

“You hurt him and who knows what you would’ve done had Elias not been there. And you blamed him for something which was entirely my own, personal choice.”

“And what a fucking braindead choice it was”, Bandit spits out before he can stop himself, his sharp tone of voice biting against Montagne’s calm one.

“So you’d rather he was dead?”

“Yes. If it meant I wouldn’t have to see you like this, yes. If it meant I wouldn’t have had to go through that entire fucking ordeal, yes.”

There’s emotion in his words, so much Montagne senses he’s not just saying it in anger, no, he actually means it – or at least part of it, or thinks he means it. Montagne, too, withdraws his arm now. “You’re better than that, Dom”, he tells him.

“I’m really not.” And this finally gives him the courage to leave, to change the scenery if only for one day.

.

The centre of Berlin never seems to exude the same magic for him as it does for the endless waves of tourists. He rarely comes here though of course he’s intimately familiar with all the relevant buildings, has fed sparrows on the broad street Unter den Linden, walked past the Holocaust Memorial and the Museum Island countless times, seen the Reichstag so much he’s sick of it. It’s mostly just crowded and loud and holds no appeal yet he finds himself on one of the many bridges over the Spree regardless, eating sunflower seeds and spitting the shells over the railing he’s leaning on. He’s in the vicinity of the GDR museum, a horribly nostalgic exhibition which largely glosses over the unsavoury details.

Bandit thinks it’s an ugly city but it’s his, he knows all the shortcuts and small streets none of the tourists ever take, has discovered a wide range of excellent restaurants in the formerly infamous part of the city called Kreuzberg, manages to overlook the sights in favour of the down-to-earth people who don’t mince their words. Being surrounded chiefly by German speakers has become an oddity, something he missed without even realising, and standing still in one spot allows him to eavesdrop on various conversations, couples planning on where to go next, people describing horrendous or amazing experiences on their phones, others talking about mundane things.

He’s lost all perspective. At this point, he doesn’t know what constitutes normal, whether he’s dressed strangely or only feels that way, whether he sticks out like a sore thumb or not. He’s unsure how someone in his situation should behave but also unwilling to ask, he’d rather not admit to Blitz that he decided over Montagne’s head, that he’s unable to find the words to say to Montagne in order to make everything better. To make everything go back to the way it used to be. He feels alien, like an impostor, definitely like he doesn’t deserve any of what he ever received from Montagne. If he could go back in time, he’d refuse his jacket. He wouldn’t sink into his hugs until his pulse stopped racing. He’d stay away and ensure Montagne would be happier that way.

If he doesn’t hear a familiar voice any time soon, he’s going to go insane.

“Hey. Are you alright? Did something happen?”

“Do I really call so rarely that you immediately assume it’s an emergency?”, he asks, vaguely offended and yet simply hearing Blitz on the other end does wonders for his urge to throw himself off the bridge (which is extremely low, he’d only end up soaked) or start a fight with other pedestrians.

“This is literally the first time you called me in months, Dom.”

“Fair enough. How are things at the base?”

“No, no, I asked first. How are you doing?”

He clenches his teeth. “I bet you all miss me horribly.”

Blitz pauses, but one of the reasons why Bandit values him so much is the fact that he doesn’t pry, instead begins replying to his question as if it was completely normal. He even manages to sound natural as he recounts some of the more entertaining episodes Bandit missed and it only takes them a few minutes until they actually conduct something which could be confused with a proper conversation. It turns out a few people do miss Bandit, Rook especially who’s apparently worried sick but has been told to give Bandit some space instead of bombarding him with endless messages. He even snatches Blitz’ phone from him for a moment but quite obviously has been instructed to keep it light as he merely gushes over the fact that he made the world’s best milkshake the other day. Despite knowing they’re both deeply concerned, the display they put on purely for his sake is heartwarming. He even catches himself smiling.

Eventually, the stream of stories dies down and Blitz seems to struggle for a moment before he suggests: “Listen, if you’ve got some time on your hands, why not go visit our boys? Last I heard they still go drinking every Friday at the usual place.”

Bandit’s smile dies down slowly as he ponders the prospect. “They’re not really my scene”, he responds but both of them know he’s saying something different, means to say: When you’re not there. Blitz effortlessly slides into most social groups whereas Bandit is a wilful square peg, his sarcasm and cynicism balanced out by Blitz’ mocking – they’re a good team, but on his own he often feels… incompatible.

“Bullshit. You hung out with Tom in your spare time even.”

Yeah, because we fucked, Bandit is tempted to shoot back but bites his tongue at the last second. Blitz already knows more about his love life than he needs to. “Yeah, you’re right. I should go visit them or else I won’t hear the end of it next time.”

“I think it’s a good idea. Say hi to them from me!”

“I’ll tell them you called them a bunch of incompetent bastards and refused to even show your face”, Bandit replies and hangs up, though he doesn’t miss the laugh on Blitz’ end.

.

Regardless of his confident words, worry eats at him the whole train ride. When he returned from undercover, he was treated differently than before – somehow seemed to hold a higher rank with all the downsides accompanying it. People mouthed off less which in his book means they didn’t see him as an equal anymore, they respectfully stepped around instead of playfully tackled him and showed less of an inclination to fight back, be it about insults or pranks.

Maybe he simply perceived the situation wrong, however. Maybe he just came back as a snarling, rabid wolf who intimidated people by taking jokes a tad too far, purposefully tried to make everyone in his vicinity uncomfortable and showcased humour so dark even the professionals shied away from it. Not Blitz though. He pushed back, ridiculed where it was necessary and warranted, knocked him down a peg whenever he deserved it. Their friendship could’ve gone two ways: horribly awry or developing into mutual respect and he’s glad it turned out to be the latter. By his side, he became accepted again.

Now he fears something similar might happen. They don’t know many details about Rainbow apart from its existence and might display vague hero worship or, worse, try to suck up to him. It’s the one thing he doesn’t need right now, all he wants is a relaxed evening to take his mind off the whole fucking car crash he caused somehow. Just one evening. A brief respite.

The streets he traverses are so familiar and strange at the same time, some houses freshly painted, others vacated, stores changed and asphalt renewed. He stops once he spots the pub, the name forever ingrained in his mind as the one place where it was always safe to get drunk, speak his mind and mess with the other patrons. They never let on they were GSG9 for safety reasons but there was no doubt most regulars guessed something along those lines as they either provoked them in misguided arrogance, flirted with danger or gave them a break. They’re welcome here.

He has to force himself to keep walking but his autopilot takes over at some point, carries him to the door, makes him enter and head for the usual table. As soon as he spots an entire row of familiar faces, he feels his anxiousness spike but it all subsides when Stefan, seated closest to the edge of the table, looks up at him and says: “Well fuck me sideways.”

Bandit just grins while most chatter suddenly dies down and he’s confronted with surprised as well as cheerful expressions. “Long time, no see”, he greets them and laughs when Stefan jumps up to slap his back.

.

It turns out all his worries were unfounded. He’s gladly accepted back, introduced to a few newcomers whose eyes widen when they catch his name (and isn’t that a satisfying feeling), and informed about the whereabouts of others not currently present. It’s almost like sliding into a hot bathtub, soothing for his nerves and allowing him to switch off for the moment, cease to censor himself and garner both scandalised as well as genuine laughs with his dry comments. He makes up a few stories about Rainbow and mixes them with truth, then watches in amusement as his (former) colleagues try to figure out which is which and lets them persuade him to drink a few beers with them. He’s been almost entirely abstinent so he figures a few won’t hurt – besides, he missed the taste of German beer horribly.

He’s brought up to speed on questionable regulations, personal matters, issues in Germany he missed, gets elbowed in the side, agrees to a few bets and wins them all, steals someone’s glass while they’re not looking and confirms a few stories the newcomers have heard about him yet refuse to believe they’re true. As for the topic of his presence, he stays vague and earns understanding nods as well as a few ludicrous speculations he neither confirms nor denies. He should’ve really done this sooner, he realises, he’s slowly returning to his normal self and it’s terrifying how far away from okay he was just this morning.

When some of them take a smoke break, he joins them but doesn’t partake, merely enjoys their company as they’re the ones with whom he hung out often. Tom lingers when they head back inside and so Bandit stays as well until they’re the only two left. “How long are you in Berlin for?”, Tom asks while lighting his second cigarette. He’s slim but strong, an incredibly fast runner and adept at anything stealthy which to Bandit was such a turn on that he jumped at the first opportunity to fuck him – about a week after they met. Neither of them likes to dawdle.

“Probably a bit longer”, he answers and is fully aware of why Tom wants to know.

“I’m off tomorrow. Next week Wednesday, too.” They look at each other in the cold light of the street lamp next to them. “If you want, you can come to my place later.”

Bandit pictures it. Tom is loud and insatiable, would probably rip off his clothes before they’ve even made it through the door and ride him breathless – he can see it clearly in his mind, no obstruction or blurriness. They’d both enjoy it and Tom would let him leave if he wanted to, not follow up if Bandit gave no indication of wanting it. There are no strings attached, it’d be easy and clean, he’d be able to get off which he hasn’t managed in a while. Tom is good in bed and, above all, familiar. Reassuring. A warm body to keep him company.

Never before has an idea seemed less appealing to Bandit. Not for a single second does he genuinely consider the offer and if he’s honest, the thought of letting any other man touch him in that way is distasteful. Even just picturing it makes him cringe vaguely, wish for Montagne, wish for his solid body at Bandit’s back, wish for his strong arms around him. “No”, he answers and plucks the cigarette out of Tom’s mouth to take a drag, “I have someone.”

“Me too”, comes the amused reply, startling a chuckle out of him.

“You piece of shit.”

They exchange a grin. “Nah, she doesn’t mind. I hit the jackpot with her because we both find it hot when the other one sleeps around.”

“Mine isn’t like that. At all.” He returns the cancer stick and smiles when Tom’s lips happen to touch his fingers. At some point, this would’ve been enough for him to drag him away. Now it’s just a little ticklish. “I’ve asked him to marry me, actually.”

A chortle. “Are you serious? Did he say yes?”

“Not yet. But he will.”

“I really can’t picture you as a married man, Dom, not in the slightest. What, are you telling me you’ve gone soft? Enjoy missionary? Cuddle the whole day? Buy him flowers?”

Bandit’s mouth curls into a smile. He has no trouble imagining his life while married to Montagne, no trouble at all. “That’s a good idea actually. I should get him some.”

Tom barks out a disbelieving laugh which Bandit doesn’t even take personally. “Never thought you’d end up this fucking whipped one day, dude.”

And as he searches for a proper comeback, he realises one thing which he somehow… lost track of these days, a fact so immovable and ubiquitous he looked right through it. Lacking it, at times even forgetting it with all its consequences was what made him insufferable – but talking about Montagne to someone unrelated put it back in perspective, drags him back to the ground, reassures him more than friendly words ever could. “I’m not whipped”, he corrects politely and without any offence taken, “just hopelessly in love.”

.

When he returns to the hotel later, he stumbles into Lion on the way to his room, the other man visibly calmer than the previous times they met, though his expression turns to stone nonetheless as soon as he spots Bandit approaching him. “Gilles said I should apologise to you”, he announces a little too loudly.

Lion suddenly looks pained. “Oh please no.”

“I don’t know what should surprise me more – the fact that you’re passing up a chance to see me grovel before you, or that you said please.”

“He’s obsessed with the idea that just because we both like him, we should be best friends. I’ll tell him you were full of remorse and you do the same and we’ll never talk about it, alright?”

This is pretty much the best case scenario, so Bandit just nods. “Sure. Whatever you say. You know, we should actually talk to each other and be nice in front of him so he stops nagging. And maybe even make plans together but then go to two different places because – no offence – I’d rather saw my arm off than spend an evening with you.”

“Likewise.” Lion pauses and squints at him more closely. “Are you drunk?”

“A tiny bit”, Bandit slurs which seems to be all the info Lion needed. “And so fucking in love like you wouldn’t believe. Have you ever been in love? It’s like that. Only ten times better. A hundred. I love him so much.” Maybe he’s a tad drunker than he thought, going by Lion’s vaguely pitying expression.

“Great for you but I really don’t need to hear this.”

“I’m going to marry him, you know. In four months.” He holds up three fingers and then remembers to whom he’s talking. “Oh shit. Don’t tell anyone. It’s supposed to be a secret.”

“As far as I know, he declined”, Lion instantly rains on his parade. Ice cold.

“Listen”, Bandit whispers, “he’s gonna change his mind, alright? I know he will.”

The Frenchman shakes his head. “I don’t think so. It’s to do with his ex-wife. But you should talk to him, not me. Especially not while drunk.”

“Yes. Okay. Whatever you say.” He stumbles off, realises he’s heading in the wrong direction and turns on his heel to wobble past Lion once more. “Why are you even up at this hour?”, he wants to know but doesn’t stop walking to hear his reply because it doesn’t really interest him.

He half misses the response, only hears keep an eye on and forgets about it immediately.

.

When he bursts into Montagne’s hospital room the next morning, he and his flowers are met with a curious glance. “I brought you hyacinths!”, he announces proudly and shoves the bouquet under Montagne’s nose.

“Those are hydrangeas”, his lover corrects him gently but accepts his offering awkwardly, looking around for a vase or something similar before simply standing the flowers up in his glass of water. “They’re lovely. Thank you.”

“You’re lovely”, Bandit shoots back and drags the chair closer to Montagne before sitting down. “How do you feel today?”

“Definitely not as good as you look.” He reaches out and this time, Bandit allows him to put his hand on his cheek, even leans into the touch with a sigh. They exchange a smile when Bandit takes his hand and holds it in his, massages Montagne’s palm and revels in the warmth of the soft skin. Montagne still looks brittle, pale and noticeably thinner, constantly exhausted and fragile but it doesn’t matter. He’ll get better in time. “What happened?”, he inquires quietly, visibly confused yet pleased at the crass change in Bandit’s behaviour.

“First of all, I’m sorry. I – I didn’t expect you to say no, I’ll be honest, but you’re not really in any condition to make this type of decision right now, so we’ll just… we can talk about it when you’ve recovered. Alright? You don’t need this kind of pressure right now.” It’s surprising how easily the words leave his lips but seeing Montagne smile for the second time ever since they were reunited helps ground him immensely.

“Sounds surprisingly reasonable”, Montagne agrees with a certain glint in his eye at which Bandit’s narrow.

“I thought of it myself”, he clarifies quickly and earns a soft laugh.

“That’s good.”

“And I’m sorry for pushing the issue. And for holding a grudge over it.” Montagne’s features are still expectant. “And for going over your head. And all the other… illegal stuff.”

“Well, it’s good to know that you’d be able to help should I ever need a different identity, but I’m frankly still frightened by how easily you obtained everything you had to. You probably could’ve stolen my ID out of my wallet without me noticing.”

Despite his casual tone of voice, Bandit understands where he’s going with this. “I’m not gonna do anything like this ever again. I promise. It was invasive. And wrong.”

Montagne nods and it’s at this point that Bandit realises he’s still angry. Furious, even. “I’m glad you realise this. I don’t want to need to worry about the security of my identity if I can help it.” Regardless, he’s tightly holding on to Bandit’s hand now and lowering his voice: “I thought I was losing you, Dom. You wouldn’t look at me. You wouldn’t listen. You wouldn’t even let me touch you. I was scared. Even now, I’m scared for you.”

He can’t even pretend it’s unwarranted as he did indeed feel like he used to on particularly bad days, he realises now in hindsight. Nightmares, a general lack of concern for his own well-being, the omnipresent frost in his bones. It’s a testament to how much his life has improved by Montagne’s side that instead of reverting to seriously self-destructive behaviours, he contacted Blitz, followed advice, took a step back and reconsidered. Not what he would’ve done a few years ago. “I’m not the one in hospital”, he still protests weakly.

“No, but I eat and sleep regularly.”

Fair point. He draws a deep breath and looks up again, didn’t even notice he averted his gaze and now finds a mixture of compassion and sorrow in Montagne’s. “It was hell”, he admits and earns a nod. “It still is, a bit.”

“Yes. It is. And I don’t think you’ve even begun processing that I’m not dead, you still look like you lost me. It’s alright. I’m alive.”

Maybe that’s it. His brain melted together the grief of the early days when he knew nothing, the impotent rage, his powerlessness and now the fear of rejection into a terrifying vortex out of which he still hasn’t escaped. He looks at his lover and tries to convince himself that it’ll all be fine but largely fails. Doubts and anxiety eat at him, unchanged, so when Montagne pulls at him, he gives in.

It’s an awkward shuffling and pushing but eventually, Bandit manages to fit onto the bed next to his lover, rest his head on his shoulder and tentatively put an arm around his waist while trying not to touch any of the bandages. The effect is almost instant, Montagne’s proximity cures his fractured soul and when a hand begins stroking over his side, he relaxes fully against the once invulnerable-seeming body with a final sigh. Montagne is radiating heat as well as tranquillity, his regular breaths raising and lowering Bandit’s arm, his hand stroking away some of his fears.

“I’m so shit at this”, Bandit murmurs against fabric which will be his next target to steal and wear until its scent has been lost, “you’re feeling fucking awful and yet I’m the one who needs reassurance.”

“I’d rather expend the energy to reassure you than have you forge my signature again”, Montagne replies into his hair followed by an amused huff. “It’s excusable though. I’m busy not dying whereas you have nothing to do other than let your thoughts spiral.”

Bandit hums in vague agreement and allows his eyes to fall shut. He wasn’t even aware of how viciously he missed touching his lover, being touched in return, rest by his side. And cuddling, he supposes.

“Have you spoken with Olivier?”

He nods with a clear conscience because it’s true, he did talk to him. If what he says next is untrue, well, it cancels each other out. Right? “I gave him a speech and he hated every second of it.”

“That’s odd. He told me you kept it brief.” Oh shit. Montagne quite tangibly enjoys Bandit’s sputtering for a few seconds and then kisses his forehead. “You two are more alike than you think. But I get the message, I won’t forcibly try to make you interact again.”

It’s a relief to hear, even if Bandit has to admit that dealing with the Frenchman has become less annoying over time. They’re on the same page, stuck in an unfortunate situation and probably should try to make the best out of it. Bandit nuzzles Montagne’s jaw and says: “I take it back, by the way. What I said. I wouldn’t sacrifice a life for this. Not even his.”

“Good.” Another kiss. “I’m proud of you.”

“Do you still -” He hesitates, unsure of how to ask for what he wants to know. Needs to know. “I mean… am I – are you still…”

When Montagne fortunately catches on before he has to outright say it, his arm around Bandit tightens involuntarily. “Of course, Dom, how could you even ask? Of course I love you. I’m so glad you’re here by my side, it helps me immensely. Thank you for staying.” He’s getting choked up again though for entirely different reasons than the last time he was here, so he just snuggles closer and melts against Montagne’s side with a contented sigh. Like this, he can almost forget about the sterile room and the faint antiseptic smell; it’s easy to imagine they’re back in their flat, enjoying a lazy morning before eating breakfast together – and Bandit notices he’s actually quite hungry.

“How did you even decide to bring me flowers?”, Montagne mumbles, audibly sleepy as well now and resting his head on Bandit’s.

A smile pulls at his lips. “I’ll tell you later. For now, let’s just stay like this a bit.”

[badacts]

whither shall i follow

this is the complete piece i wrote for @thezinezone ‘s STRANGE CONSTELLATIONS, a trc zine all about the gangsey. i loved writing for it - keeping under the max word count was the hardest part! the final zine is beautiful so consider getting a copy and supporting a great cause

It’s Gansey’s yearning for ostensibly normal post-graduation rites of passage that’s to blame. Well, that, and Henry’s need to encourage every bad idea any of them have ever had.

“You’re already going on a road trip,” Ronan bitches, slinging an oddly malformed duffle bag into the trunk of his car. “This is a waste of time.”

“Your oh-so-valuable time,” Blue says, with slightly less bite than she might have used a year previous. So, no actual hate, but a decent seeming of it. She is wearing knee-length khaki shorts, like a spectacularly unsexy version of Indiana Jones, and an oversized ACDC t-shirt with the sleeves ripped off.

Gansey is currently unloading a bargain box of twelve white candles into the Pig. Watching this, Adam says, “Isn’t the point of camping having a campfire?”

“The point of camping is pissing in the woods,” Henry chirps from the front seat of the BMW. He claimed it upon arrival, with a grand cry of ‘shotgun!’ despite that none of them cared to compete with him for it, and has been doing something with his phone ever since. Selfies, Adam suspects.

“These aren’t intended to replace a campfire,” Gansey explains. “They’re for the seance.”

There’s a brief moment of silence. Even Henry looks up, expression shifting from ‘smize’.

“You lived with a dead guy once,” Ronan says eventually. He doesn’t continue, but he doesn’t really need to.

Gansey looks perturbed by their reactions, almost affronted. “It’s a thing.”

“Ineloquent,” Henry comments. Whether it’s a criticism is debatable, considering the growing delight on his face.

“Camping in the woods, marshmallows, figuring out which tent Henry is going to sleep in, amateurish communication with spirits - they’re all part of the experience.”

“Obviously, I’ll be sleeping in your tent,” Henry says. He’s not wrong - it is obvious. “Blue requires my body heat, and Ronan might dream a murderer or attempt to hold my hand in his sleep.”

“In your dreams,” Ronan replies from where he’s retreated to the driver’s seat of the BMW. There’s the distinct sound of someone being hit, and a squawk.

“Yes, it is a thing. From Cabin in the Woods,” Blue tells Gansey.

“Wrong Turn,” Ronan contributes.

“Blair Witch Project.”

“Cabin Fever.”

“Do all those movies contain seances?” Adam interjects.

“Don’t ask me,” Ronan replies. Adam can’t hear the shrug, but he knows it happens anyway. “I haven’t seen any of them.”

“My point is that you should not base your ideas of typical teenage experiences on films where most of the teenagers involved end up brutally murdered,” Blue continues. “Plus, you know. Our lives thus far.”

“This is not like that,” Gansey says. “That was magic. This is teenage incompetence, and the worst that will come of it is irresponsible fire management involving the candles.”

Even Adam makes a disgusted sound at that. There’s rustling from the front of the BMW, and then Gansey is at once attacked with a still-laced sneaker and a hat last seen perched on Henry’s hair. The hat falls short, but the shoe bounces off Gansey’s left thigh when he moves into its path trying to evade it.

“When we get murdered in the woods, it’s your fault,” Blue intones, for a moment sounding just like Maura.

The fact of the matter is that most of the area within a few hours drive of Henrietta has felt the imprint of, at the very least, Gansey’s feet in his previous explorations. Instead of putting him off of his idea of camping, this has just imbued him with the impression that he knows of all the best camping areas, even if he has never personally stayed at one.

Adam sleeps most of the drive once he’s tuned out the sound of Henry and Ronan’s bickering, stretched awkwardly across the back seat of the BMW, and only wakes when the engine turns off.

“C’mon Parrish,” Ronan chides, twisted around so that he can shake Adam’s ankle. Like most things about him, it’s a study in contrasts - brisk voice, soft expression. “Wakey wakey.”

“I am awake,” Adam replies, which is at least seventy percent true. “We here?”

“No, we’re on the side of the road, I just had to make a quick stop to bury Cheng’s body. Yeah, we’re here.”

“You can’t kill him. Can you imagine how much Blue and Gansey would bitch about it?” Adam peels his face off of the interior of the car. He might have drooled on it, but if so it’s not the first time.

“It truly hurts me that that is your only concern,” Henry says from somewhere outside the car.

“Yeah, I bet your heart is breaking, you annoying fucker,” Ronan replies, which means that his irritation has crossed over from his normal levels to whichever Henry seems capable of inciting. Adam deals with this by pushing himself out of the car and into the great outdoors, ignoring it entirely.

Blue is allowing Gansey to help her into her backpack over by the Pig. The gracious nature of it is new, but when he watches it Adam can just about imagine Blue in her thirties acting just the same way. Occasionally, anyway. He doubts she’ll ever change that much.

“Cute,” Ronan commentates, seemingly oblivious to the fact he is putting Adam’s pack over one of his shoulders even as he says it. “We walking, or what?”

“It’s an hour hike,” Gansey says, shouldering his own pack, as though he hasn’t already told them it’s an hour hike multiple times. They’ve walked far further without half as much organisation, which Adam assumes is ‘part of the experience’ also. Gansey is, as ever, a gleaming example to hikers everywhere, down to his well-broken-in boots and his precise understanding of hike planning. “Is everyone ready?”

“Yes mother,” Blue replies, elbowing him in the ribs and ignoring that Henry is still fighting with his own pack over by the BMW. “Lead the way.”

The area Gansey has selected for them to camp in is, admittedly, quite lovely. It’s not Cabeswater - nothing else is - but the grass is long and rich-smelling, and there’s a tiny stream curving around the edge of the clearing on three sides, murmuring sweetly to itself.

The tents are quickly raised side-by-side and then abandoned in favour of establishing a fire pit. By the time they’ve collectively gathered stones, wood and Ronan’s obviously-dreamed lighter, the shadows are stretching long. Blue is allowed the honour of lighting the fire, though Adam is the one who nurses it into something other than a pathetic smoke trail.

“Dinner,” Gansey announces with obvious relish once they’re seated, and produces five packages of freeze-dried meals. “Would you like beef stroganoff or beef stroganoff?”

“Were they having a sale?” Henry asks, accepting his gingerly.

“I thought it would be the one least likely to look edible,” Gansey replies. “I was curious.”

“Not curious enough to investigate the multitude of other options, I suppose.”

“Mostly I thought it would be easier to prepare them together,” Gansey admits. “Blue?”

Blue was apparently in charge of carrying the cooker, and Henry the metal pot. True to Gansey’s prediction, the resultant brown sludge they cook looks utterly disgusting, though the smell is surprisingly inviting. It’s only when they go to serve it that they find that, while Adam brought the tin bowls, Ronan didn’t bring the cutlery. They eat with their fingers instead, Adam’s turning pink with the heat of it and his mouth.

Gansey also has all the necessary ingredients for s’mores, which they blacken in the fire a few times before Adam gives up and uses the cooker instead. Gansey eschews that in favour of sugar-charcoal, even when Henry Googles and recites statistics of charcoal as a carcinogen. Blue puts him in a chocolate-smeared headlock to stop him, and his phone nearly falls into the fire.

It’s full dark when Gansey, his contacts exchanged for glasses glinting in the light, starts to drift a bit. There’s a quietude in him now that isn’t emptiness, but instead something bigger. Like Cabeswater is living inside of him, a complicated and immense kind of peace, and even as that calls to the like in each of them, the rest of them have to act as the anchors to hold Gansey here.

It’s not so bad, really. All it takes is Henry elbowing him and passing him a candle to bring him back.

“It’s time,” he says, all delight, as Henry gives the rest of them candles too. “Should I refer to the WikiHow page for seances, do you think?”

“Please do,” Henry replies, passing Adam his candle. It’s a chunky, inelegant thing with a crooked wick, and it smells like a caricature of vanilla.

Blue squints at Adam for a moment, and then snatches the candle from his hands. “Not you.”

“Excuse me?”

“She’s right,” Gansey mutters after a moment, brow furrowing. “We don’t any of your actual magic involved in our pseudo-magical ritual. Scram.”

“By that logic, Ronan shouldn’t be involved either,” Adam points out, though he does scram.

“He’s awake, it’s fine,” Henry replies. “Lynch, no magic for the next ten minutes.”

“No problem,” Ronan says lazily, still lying beside the fire. “I’m not holding any candles.”

“They go at the cardinal points,” Gansey says, and then produces a compass so he can place them correctly. Then he extracts a large bag of salt from his bag, holding it aloft. “Henry, pour this in a circle around us, if you will. Be careful not to leave any gaps.”

“This is beginning to sound suspiciously like one of movies you mentioned earlier,” Henry says to Ronan, though he does as bid anyway.

Once the salt is poured in a vague oval shape, the candles are placed and lit, and the others sit in their Gansey-assigned places, the ceremony can apparently begin. Adam settles in the mouth of one of the tents, watching them thrown into relief by the campfire in the centre of the circle, Blue’s face painted gold and the line of Ronan’s spine a silhouette.

“Oh! We need an offering,” Gansey says. “I hope you all brought something suitable?”

Thus begins a ten minute debate on what can be classified as suitable. In the end, they have a handful of wildflowers (Gansey), a collection of pennies (Henry), a tin cup of water from the stream (Blue), and a stick of gum as well as an empty wrapper (Ronan, obviously). His assertion that Noah would have loved it is the only thing that stops Gansey from sending him out of the circle to hunt for something ghosts would like better.

They deposits the offerings in the stream-washed pot, and then resettle, reaching out to join hands. Gansey prompts, “Henry?”

Henry takes over without pause, all ringmaster-grandeur. “Welcome, kind spirits, inside our circle. We’ve gathered here to commune with you in the hope that you’ll show us a sign of your presence. Please, speak with us.”

In the following silence, there’s an unmistakable sense of actual expectancy from the four of them in their flesh-and-salt circle. Even when you’re performing a WikiHow seance, it’s hard to remove the idea that it really might work when you’ve seen real magic.

There’s nothing. Adam listens, hears nothing, and then looks into the fire to the things he can always see if he looks long enough.

“Is anyone with us?” Blue asks. The shapes in the flames brighten in response to her voice, but Adam blinks them away.

“That was boring,” Ronan says after approximately two minutes of absolutely nothing happening.

“That was perfect,” Gansey crows.

“We really should have brought an Ouija board,” Henry muses. “For maximum effect.”

“The maximum effect of nothing fucking happening?”

“Let’s end the ritual,” Blue says sternly. “In case.”

“Thank you for your presence,” Gansey says. “Go in peace.”

It’s probably Adam’s imagination that the fire ripples just a little bit with Gansey’s words, like someone has just moved past it. No one else notices it, anyway.

Adam jerks awake because Ronan does, because it’s impossible not to pressed this close and because by now it’s habit.

“It’s okay,” Adam is already mumbling, and then jerks again when Ronan, sounding much more alert than he does, demands, “Did you hear that?”

Adam listens. There’s a rustling outside of the suddenly-very-flimsy tent walls, and for a moment he enters the pleasant fantasy that it might just be the wind before he realises that there is no wind. Instead, it’s the sound of something moving nearby - something large.

“It’s probably just a bear,” he says, though quietly.

There’s not much light in the tent, but he can see that Ronan’s eyes are wide as he hisses, “I can’t believe you can say ‘just a bear’.”

Instead of continuing that...potential argument, Adam pushes himself up, rustling free of the sleeping back and groping for the flashlight by the tent door.

“Adam.”

It’s said in his ear, breathless and half-whispered. Literally breathless - there’s no warmth of exhaled air.

Also, it’s his deaf ear.

The strangeness of it is compounded when Gansey says from outside the tent, the kind of calm that just barely covers for alarm, “Ronan, Adam. Get up. Slowly.”

Adam unzips the tent door and slides free, feeling the intensity of Ronan’s movement behind him as he follows. It’s black outside besides the very faint glow of a few embers and the stars overhead, and Adam can only tell where Gansey is because of the sound of his quickened breath.

“Look,” Gansey whispers, and Adam nearly says at what when he sees what Gansey means.

It’s dark. There’s no explanation behind the two matching pinpricks of red-orange light at a edge of the clearing just beyond the edge of the trees. Eyes, set higher that they would be on any normal-height human.

Ronan mutters a curse, clearly seeing it too. Henry, despite having seen Cabeswater bleed to death, says, “Mothman?” in a voice that trembles but still has a tracery of humour in it, because that’s just who he is.

“What do we do?” Blue asks. Adam can’t tell where she is in the dark.

“Running water,” the voice in his ear whispers again. There’s a echo of command there, and also sudden and welcome familiarity.

“Across the stream,” Adam tells the others. “Backwards. No sudden movements.”

It’s only the star-shine that means they can find the stream at all, nevermind backwards and too frightened to look away from the eyes. There’s no doubting that’s what they are, despite the fact they don’t blink - behind them, there’s intent, alien and only barely readable as that at all. Adam’s bare feet slip in carefully, the water surprisingly deep but the bottom firm enough to hold his weight. The other four do the same, hissing at the cold of it.

“Now what?” Ronan asks, his hand finding Adam’s.

“Cross it. Get to the other side,” Adam says, with sudden surety. “I don’t think it can follow-”

It happens very quickly. Blue, off to Adam’s left, draws in a quick breath and stumbles over something on the streambed, falling backwards in the stream with a splash and a sharp, “Fuck!” There’s a soundless moment where nothing happens, and then there’s a long lowing noise like a big animal dying.

“Fuck,” Ronan echoes, and jerks in Blue’s direction to pull her free of the water even as he shoves Gansey up onto the bank.

Adam, torch in hand, flips the switch. The beam of it falls directly on the - thing as it bounds across the clearing, strides too long and shambling, like the body can’t quite keep up with the intent of whatever is inside of it. It’s all fur and stench, the awful smell of death. Henry makes a low, sick sound, dragging Adam back over the stones along with him. They fall back onto the bank together, scrabbling up onto the grass.

For a moment, Adam doubts. The thing is so tall it looks like it could simply step across the water. There’s no explanation for the way it halts at the far edge of the stream and looks down at the water, close enough they can see every falling-apart inch of its hide. It looks like it crawled from a grave. Maybe it did.

It makes that noise again, a gentle and carrying threat. Adam’s heart is beating so hard he thinks he could drop dead, half-tangled in Henry and aware there’s no outrunning the thing if the voice is wrong.

His flashlight goes out. Blue shrieks, and there’s a flash of bright white like lightning from their side of the stream to the other, illuminating the thing for a split second before it makes impact. There’s a rush of noise and movement, retreating, and then the flashlight comes back to life. There’s nothing there.

“...is it gone?” Henry hisses, pushing himself up from his elbows. “What did you do, Parrish?”

“Nothing,” Adam replies, distracted by covering each inch of darkness with the beam of his flashlight looking for movement. There’s nothing, besides what looks like a few gobbets of meat on the ground and impressions of distorted footprints. “It wasn’t me.”

“Christ fucking alive,” Ronan says. “Was that…?”

“Noah?” Blue whispers.

There’s no wind, no voice murmuring in either of Adam’s ears. But on the other side of the stream, the fire, just embers, flickers back to life.

[survivormontenegro]

Episode 15 (Finale): “I COULD LITERALLY WIN A TUMBLR SURVIVOR SEASON WHAT IS THIS LIFE” - Ali

Did that vote make me a villain? Cuz I don't think I can avoid that anymore. But did it screw my chances of winning? Did it add to my resume? Did it make sense? Who do I work with next? Do people understand that Ali is gonna win this game? Is Ali gonna win another immunity challenge? Can I get him voted off or is it smarter to get him to vote with me, because its Benj and I and we need one more. I have more questions after last night than I started, but knowing that Benj was going to vote Jones I didn't think I had much of a choice.

JONES WHEN U SEE THIS ILY IM SO SORRY :((((((

breakdown.

Seamus enjoyed seeing me suffer with maths and black rotating puzzle

Ok so Ali won immunity so cant use idol on himself so im in the F4 hehe (unless hes seriously been playing me this entire time LMAO)

My 0 votes will prob be ruined tho but oh well still a huge improvement from 20 in kili

honestly think im losing in any F3 scenario ugh im gonna be a 2 time ftc loser LOL kinda iconic tho

regardless this has been one of the most fun games ive ever played hehe

I am trying my best to stay safe this round. I think it would be crazy for them to let me make it to F4, not that I think I am gonna win, but the momentum is definitely with Ali, Tom, and Jason, and I seem like the logical vote.

With that, there are some things I would like to say about the game. I'm actually pretty proud of the way I played. I know it wasn't the most graceful, or the most honest or loyal. I votes out Alex when he really trusted me. I flopped on Jules to win my way back in with that side. I stuck by Mo, but ultimately let him go when I had no choice, and then I did the same thing but more dramatically with Jones. I helped idol out the power player Mitch, but my strongest attribute was creating tight relationships with people who always felt they need to get that extra vote, Tom, Ali, Benj, Alex, Jones, Mo. The closeness has always made me less of a target, I hope not because they think I'm not a threat, but rather because they think I might be that swing vote for them. I feel like I have largely been the only one to make real decisions in this game except for Mitch, because Benj followed whoever told him to vote what, and Tom and Jason only make decisions because they just need to target whoever targets them. Ali and I are suppose to be in a secret bond, but the only time we vote together is when I switch and vote with him (Alex and Jones). I was the flip vote with Jason on Jules. I helped make the decision to vote out Mitch. I told Ali that I think it needs to be Jason this time. If I make it through this that would be soooo freakin fun. If I don't I worked my magic to try to get the target off of me, and so far I think the vote is Jason v Benj (sorry Benj that I had to convince Jason that I could work with him in the case that he idols). The biggest kink to that game is Ali winning those immunities, because truly I think the F5 would have been so different. Him winning rn changes everything and I can truly see the chinks in my strategy and gameplay now. I'm a mess, but I'm a calculating emotional mess, so hey points for me right?

okay so Jason left, which is really good news. He was clearly a major threat, and I acheived my goal (admittedly with no contribution to Mitch going) of Mitch, Jones & Jason being three boots in order.

So I'm in the final four with Caeleb, Benj and Tom. AND TOM IS NOW TARGETTING ME THAT MUPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPET. I saw this coming, I knew he would, he thinks he is gonna pull a fast one on me, but little does he know Benj is the KINGEST KING, and we've been allies since the first round.

So I really REALLY wanna win final four immunity, because it might be the Final Immunity and I am cautiously optimistic that if I can just make FTC, I can win this whole thing. If I win immunity, I'm voting out Caeleb with Benj and Tom, who will... kicking and screaming have to vote with me ajkdslfa.

I think no matter what, I'll be able to go to firemaking this round at worst, since I think Benj is firmly in my corner. And I've been dominant in challenges thus far, and could hopefully continue to do so? We will see ahh.

I just desperately want to win immunity this round, because then I can vote Caeleb out and drag Tom to F3. mwahahahahahahahahahaha. HE WILL HAVE TO SIT WITH ME IN A FINAL THREE, like it or not!

I'm literally so close to FTC this is gonna drive me insane. If its a F3, I think I'm literally a challenge away from winning this season, I could truly SCREAM hnnnnnnnnnngh.

There's so much riding on this next immunity challenge. Like so much. And i just realized that I have no won immunity since Merge and everyone else left has, so umm here's hoping.

I WON FINAL IMMUNITY OH MY GOD. i literally.. my heart was pump pumping so fast, when Caeleb won the first two rounds I literally was gonna throw up/throw something/throw a fit.

But HNNNGH I won (and I filmed my reaction, which I'll upload), and I need to vote off Caeleb in my opinion. Benj is a king, but he hasn't done as much as me in this game, and Tom is solidly getting third place I think at this stage, so I think I have a great shot.

IM SO CLOSE ASKLDFAF. I COULD LITERALLY WIN A TUMBLR SURVIVOR SEASON WHAT IS THIS LIFE.

I know that this game is an emotional mess. And HELL I have been an emotional mess. But this I think is the first time that I'm actually angry. 6 immunity wins? Are you fucking kidding me? What the hell? I coulda made it to FTC, and like I'm not done yet I'll keep fighting so hopefully I can make it. But in normal circumstances I would be there. I just. Am so. Livid. There's no strategy involved when you can't vote someone out consistently. Now I have to fight tooth and nail just to have a shot and go against the freakin contender to win. Like its so disheartening, and Ali is a sweet guy sure, but he hasn't even made half the moves I have. His biggest move and most unexpected? Voting out Julia. If I get my chance to make it to FTC I'll have a lot to say, but I don't think its looking up for me at this point.

this is the worst video i've ever filmed nobody watch this

I CANT BELIEVE I MADE F3 AGAIN!!!!!

WOWOWOWOW

and with Ali our day 1 duo actually did it WTF?

Tom king too the anzacs made it

I know im losing but its been SO FUN!!

Good memories only

Okay so... FTC was yesterday, and I kind of want to do a final wrap up confessional, just to kind of bring some personal closure.

So it seems unless a lot shifts, that I am decisively going to win this game. I'm so unbelievably excited, I've literally only ever come second in survivor games, so to have finally snatched the win genuinely means a lot. It shows me that 2019 truly has been a year of real emotional growth for me, and the personal roadblocks I've put in front of myself that have cost me games in the past, have been lifted and I have my act together much much more.

FTC was... just such a weird experience yesterday, I always get dragged at FTCs, particularly live ones. I've only done two ever (Athena: All Stars and BB Pokemon: Orre) and both times, not a single juror spoke positively about my game that was present. To have jurors come on, and say that I unequivocally played the best was such a bizarre experience, but I love all the jurors so much and their high estimation of me is genuinely so flattering.

With that said, FTC was also a really rough experience. I love Benj and Tom with my full heart, and watching Tom get relentlessly told he was rude was tricky because I know how good of a guy he really is, and how well he meant with everyone. Benj was rough because... it seems I just outplayed him, and him mentioning our duo in his opening statement when I didn't at all... was really rough because I felt partly at fault for his dragging. I just love both of them, so it was hard.

I also feel bad for what I was like in confessionals this season, from memory at some point, I went in on JJ, Mo and Caeleb in confessionals, and while I apologised for all, I still feel awful that I let myself get so worked up in this game to sort of snap at them? Like Mo is a genuine friend of mine, so the fact that he wrote like... a sentence and I got so pressed is really stupid, I love Mo so much and hope I can make it up to him. Caeleb I got so mad at after the Jones' idol play for literally no reason... like he outplayed me that round, and its so pathetic that I got mad at him for that. I think Caeleb played a PHENOMENAL game, and did so well.

If I had to predict the POTS of the season, I would say my top three would be Jones, Caeleb and Mitch. Jones is... Jones, she is so likable and has such charisma and hold over people, and her idol play was arguably the most impressive move of the season. Caeleb was someone I underestimated to such at the start of merge, but he played such an impressive middle game, and would've had my vote if I was voted out at F3. Mitch it sounds like was hated by the jury, but I think he played amazingly? Like he has been a target since F20, his name was thrown out so many times, and I just think he did so good? I lowkey think he would be my player of the season to be honest.

I wanna talk about the other jurors particularly that I haven't really referenced in this. Alex is someone I somehow feel most guilty about voting out? He is just such a genuinely good guy, and I think I had this preconceived notion of him as like a gamebot, when he is just so wholesome, I can't wait for him to return, and make single digits. scratch that, I can't wait for him to return and WIN.

I also wanna talk about Jules. I am such a Jules warrior? Like... such a Jules warrior? They were such a pleasure to work with, and I just love them so much. I did them dirty by not idoling them/telling them they were going, but they are someone I have SO much time, love and respect for.

Who else, omg JASON! He was the perfect final juror for yesterday's FTC, someone who went easy on Tom who needed that, and just... is such a wholesome good guy, I love Jason.

Anyway, this is already really, really long so I need to wrap this up. I just want to say how happy this season has made me, and how much of a pleasure its been apart of. I joined the ORG community right before a lot of messy personal stuff came my way, and a lot of my org memories are tied to that. I used to let my personal drama get itself interwoven in my games, and I would just be so emotional. To have a game where I could play hard, cracked and WELL, and just have fun has been such a pleasure, and Im so emo about it.

I just wanna thank the hosts again too, I literally am a full on Asya, Drew, Johnny and Seamus WARRIOR, I love all four of them for hosting my favourite org experience EVER, its been amazing. I've been such a crackhead, was the only OG Budva Tumblr Survior newbie to make merge, spammed my host chat with an unbelievable number of messages, been AWFUL at the bridge idol hunt system yet ended up with two idols, been a crackhead (bears repeating because of how much of a mess i was), its been... a time KLADSF

But yes. I just have had a phenomenal time, crackheads are gonna crackhead and this brit is joining the tumblr survivor royal family, and I truly could not be more excited.

[punkscowardschampions]

Grace & Janis

Little Twin Times

Grace: It's not too late to change your mind! Get dad to bring you xxx Grace: 👍💜💭 Janis: Nah, you're all good, I'm going out to play footie with lads from down the road after tea Janis: You having fun? Grace: 😮😈 WHICH LADS??! Grace: of course! it's the best! 🙌 Name a film and we've got it ready to watch Grace: her mum ordered from the posh bakery too Grace: They've got each of our names iced on so you've gotta come Janis: You know, they live in the farmhouse one along if you keep going down the lane, renovated all fancy, like but they're actually alright Janis: shit at football though 😉 Janis: s'alright, you eat mine Janis: think they use too much cream, s'not as good as Da's stuff Janis: got any horrors? Grace: EW JANIS THOSE BOYS ARE GROSS DON'T PLAY WITH THEM Grace: they always shout stuff at us they think they're so 💪😎 Grace: You always say that! You'd eat custard tarts every day and never try anything new ever! Grace: 🙄 Grace: OBVIOUSLY WE'RE NOT AMATEURS Grace: the cinema room has everything it's like being out at the poshest one you can imagine 😍 Janis: Only 'cos you act like such a drip whenever you see a boy Janis: If you shouted back instead of going all giggly and red maybe they'd not take the piss, ey? 🙄 Janis: I would if I was faced with all that pastry and cream...tastes like fusty old tissue paper 🤢 Janis: At least that'll be a laugh then Janis: Her house smells like an old lady's handbag though 😂 Grace: OMG I DO NOT! Grace: what would you know anyway you're too busy trying to BE like a gross boy to get a boyfriend Grace: such a 👽 weirdo for a sister, how and why Grace: AGAIN DUH! It is such a laugh and you're missing it Grace: for football 🙄 Grace: RUDE JAN-JAN IT DOES NOT Grace: you're just jealous of how cool her house is Janis: Yes you do, you all just nudge each other and laugh like a bunch of loonies Janis: LOL and what would you do with a boyfriend, gracie? you can't even talk to one nevermind anything else Janis: for you, maybe, i'm good where i am tah 👌 Janis: why would i be jealous of having a too large tv in a too small room and calling it a cinema Janis: they ain't even got that much money, we've probably got more, they're just snobby twats about it Janis: how cool, so cool, woooow Grace: DO NOT Grace: I can't believe you've already forgotten that Jake and two of his friends are all fighting over who gets to be my boyfriend rn so Grace: I'm gonna be a great girlfriend like in all the films excuse you Grace: ugh you're the snobby one thinking we're richer than everyone and talking about how much money everyone's got all the time Grace: what am I gonna do with you? 🙄 Janis: how buzzin you must be Janis: doesn't mean you'll know what to do Janis: s'the stuff that happens after the happily ever after you need to know, graciekins Janis: only cos she's a show-off when she's got no right to Janis: always bragging that one Janis: you just don't like it 'cos you're up her hole, like 😂 Grace: I will too! I've practiced kissing loads Grace: Just because you don't have a clue don't tell me I don't Grace: You're the showoff always trying to beat the boys ugh Grace: just brush your hair, put some gloss on and come over Grace: you'll see she is cool and you're just being salty as usual Janis: yeah, we've seen the gloss on the oranges, its manky Janis: at least eat them when you've frenched them Janis: there's no trying involved, i'm just better than all the boys 😏 Janis: no thanks, i've got plans, like i said Janis: if she's so cool why you ignoring her rn hmm Grace: YOU'RE MANKY I don't even use 🍊 thanks Grace: You think as much of yourself as the boys do it's cringey Grace: and im not even ignoring her she's setting the spa up Grace: nobody's allowed to see what's she's done until she's done it so you're wrong again there Janis: Well all the others have got fellas rn or experience under their belt so don't think they're still getting in 'practice' like its a shitty teen movie 😂 Busted Janis: soz, I'll develop an eating disorder and self-esteem issues asap Janis: oh wait, no, fuck that i'm great Janis: don't hate cos u ain't Janis: better get ur surprised face ready now, you're a shitty actress, like LiLo bad post-all the drugs Grace: It's likely you, J, you've gotten really embarrassing lately 😂 make sense why you don't wanna come out. gotta stay in with the fruit bowl Grace: Don't even joke Kirsty Dixon from number 22 had to go to the hospital loads in the summer it's so serious Grace: you're the hater on me and my friends, read the chat back if you don't believe Janis: Whatever you say, Graciepoo Janis: So? She's still a lame bitch Janis: or you gonna be her best friend now too? Janis: Last I remember, it was your pals calling her names Janis: but now she's in the hospital, you all wanna send her flowers Janis: just not chocolates, she'll be raging, like Grace: YOU'RE SO RUDE AND SOOO WRONG Grace: i know you're blinded by your jealousy but it's sad how much you have no idea what you're talking about Grace: cute but still cringey of course Janis: lol jealous of what? Grace: me having friends and you being the lone loser Janis: 😂 no Janis: firstly, your 'friends', you can keep 'em, there's a reason they were free to let you tag along and be their bitch Janis: secondly, i'm happy being alone, you're the one begging me to come hang, so nice one there 👍 Grace: I'M TRYING TO BE NICE Grace: won't next time, bitch Janis: please don't 😂 Grace: laugh it up all you want you were the one tagging along with us for ages Grace: you're not too good, you're too much of a freak now that's all Janis: yeah because wittle baby gracie doesn't want to do anything on her own Janis: don't cry about it now 😂 Grace: no i didnt want my sister to be an antisocial weirdo Grace: makes me look bad too Janis: Literally going out after tea, did you not hear? Janis: You wanna control WHO I'm friends with Janis: I've got friends, I don't want your hand-me-downs Grace: those creepy boys who want to look at you in your shorts aren't your friends saddo Janis: Your mind, Gracie 🙄 Honestly Janis: lads don't care about things like that, they wanna play footie Janis: and I have plenty of other people I hang with, not everyone wants to be in a sad lil gang Grace: now who's being a baby 😂 lads always think about stuff like that Grace: 🙄 you only think its a gang because you've made yourself unwanted Grace: whatever Jan-Jan i've got fun to have Grace: be boring Janis: They really don't, they think you're mental Janis: also a right slag 😂 Janis: sure you do 😏 laters! Grace: at least they think of me you're furniture Grace: I've got plenty of time and chances to change their mind but you're always gonna be blah Janis: lol yeah, so much chance, when i'm the one that gets to chat with them every day on the pitch and you just stand there staring and dribbling, not the ball, like 😂 Grace: 🙄 so jealous at least they know me and my friends are interested they all think you play for the other team Janis: so? I'm not the slag, I'm NOT interested Janis: how lame Grace: i'm no slag either Grace: you're just being too judgey and weird to know the difference Janis: whatever you say 👌 not me you've gotta convince otherwise, is it Grace: thank god for that 😂 Janis: eurgh don't be disgusting Janis: now who's the freak Grace: EWW THAT'S YOUR MIND I MEANT YOU'VE BEEN HIT IN THE HEAD BY THE BALL TOO MANY TIMES TO HAVE A CLUE ABOUT ANYTHING Grace: 👽 Grace: so gross Janis: no you didn't Janis: you're a shit liar Janis: why would you even say something like that Janis: you're messed up, grace Grace: WHY WOULD YOU WEIRDO Janis: I didn't Janis: you're always like this Janis: you're so fucking creepy Grace: I am not Grace: you're the gross creep Janis: get your own comebacks Janis: this is why i don't want to hang with you Janis: you're so boring Grace: get a life and stop being so disgusting all the time Grace: it's not cool its just gross Janis: I've got one Janis: and it isn't yours to ruin with your lameness Janis: ✌ Grace: I can't ruin what doesn't exist Grace: can't compete with how much of a loser you are anyway Janis: stop trying then Janis: weirdo 😂 Grace: 🙄 pathetic Janis: Oh, FYI, you forgot your jammies Janis: Rio's dropping them in so you better run unless you want her to come in and show you up for being a fake little bitch Grace: No I didn't we've all got matching here already Grace: I'm doing fine get over it Janis: That's literally the most hilarious thing I've ever heard Janis: Hope you're snapping pictures so we've all got something to laugh at Janis: 'Course you are, remember to let Jake know the # Janis: so sexy 😂 Grace: You're so obsessed it's embarrassing Grace: leave me alone Janis: I'll remember that when you're pestering me later Janis: Thanks for putting in writing Grace: Don't flatter yourself that I care Janis: So blatant Janis: N'awwwwh Grace: so annoying 🙄 Grace: go away Janis: go soak your manky feet Grace: go lose on the pitch you try hard bitch Janis: me? LOL ok Janis: trying so hard to be white and likable Janis: of which, you are neither Grace: Plenty of people like me as I am thanks Janis: oh, and who are you today? 😂 Janis: you haven't got a clue Janis: faker than your brands Grace: and you do? 😂 trying so hard to be a badass all of a sudden Grace: everyone's laughing at you Grace: not me Janis: By everyone you mean your sad little friends Janis: who no one but you gives a shit about Janis: be more mad 'cos I've ditched you FINALLY Janis: and I can actually enjoy myself Grace: go and do it then Grace: you'd have to stop talking rubbish at me first Janis: do you see me there rn? Janis: I already am Janis: laughing at you takes no time outta my day Grace: 😂 Grace: like i said, obsessed Grace: nothing better to do than be this lame Janis: like i said, bad actress Janis: i still, unfortunately, have to share a room with you, remember? i've heard you crying Janis: 😂 Grace: not everything is about you Grace: nothing is pretty much Janis: Why'd you go crying to mum about me then Janis: Now I've gotta be nicer to you Janis: What a drag Grace: you're a drag Grace: and a worse actress than you think i am Janis: I'm not pretending otherwise Janis: Its impossible to be nice to you, faking it or otherwise Grace: can't be harder than dealing with being around you Grace: too cringey for words Janis: Aww Jan-Jan please come Janis: PLEEEEEEEEEEASE ITS SO MUCH FUN Janis: now that's cringe Janis: 👍💜💭 Grace: not sorry for trying to get you to keep your invite Grace: you said you'd come and the girls were expecting you Grace: some of them wanted you to be there, because they feel sorry for you or whatever Janis: I don't recall that coming from my mouth Janis: more like YOU said I would Janis: boohoo Janis: the ONLY person who gives a shit is you Grace: blah Grace: bored of you thinking you know everything about me Grace: if you don't care then leave me alone like I already told you to do Janis: how could i not? EVERYONE knows you, right gracie? Janis: ur as transparent as a window and as shallow as a puddle Janis: doesn't take a genius babe 😂 Janis: i'm having fun, fuck off yourself if you can't deal Grace: 😂😂😂 Grace: your definition of fun is so sad Grace: I'm off to have some for real Grace: bye Janis: enjoy your spa and matching jimmies Janis: you wild one 😂

[somanysoundtracks]

“Justice League” thoughts

It’s all right. It’s better than “Man of Steel” and “Batman v Superman”, but those are admittedly low bars. It is not better than “Wonder Woman”. Spoilage below because... well... there’s a thing that’s not REALLY a spoiler but it really sort of is and it’s hard to talk about a good chunk of the film without talking about it?

The Plot: It felt like the film was split into three major acts: set-up, gathering the team/Superman, and the final battle. The third act is where most of the good stuff at least feels like it is. Like I felt genuinely entertained by that point. The best parts are where everyone is gathered together, rather than the solo moments, or even the one on one moments, by and large... at least the ones where Batman is one of the one on ones. And it’s not really Ben Affleck’s fault (unless he was creatively involved there), although his delivery at times felt a bit... wooden? All the actors did a pretty great job in this film. I think they just had bad dialogue. And if you can sell me on the ‘these people work well as a team and I like watching them be a team’, I think the goal of the ‘team movie’ has been accomplished. I came out of this movie thinking ‘okay, I would like to see these characters do more things together’. That is not how I came out of “Man of Steel” or “Batman v Superman”.

Just add more women to the team. Seriously.

My best synopsis of the film is that it is riddled with relatively tiny plot holes, but overall works as a team building story. The problem is when you look at the plot holes. For instance: a big place this story falls apart is the ‘Superman was so awesome and now the world is mourning him and his death makes everything bad now.’ We did get to see some slomo Supes saving people in BvS, but it still felt like the movie was telling more than showing us that Supes was some kind of messiah whom everyone most a lot of people loved, and there really was no reckoning for all the terrible stuff that happened in “Man of Steel” to offset that. So the people REALLY loving Supes: ...sure, okay, we’ll let that one pass for now. Lots of people mourning him. Okay, sure. One follows the other.

It’s the ‘Superman is dead and now everything is bad as a result’ thing that really brings this train to a halt. There’s a montage of ‘bad stuff happening’ and the only part I remember is what is very likely supposed to be a hate crime, with the implication/narration that this is another example of ‘What happens now that Superman isn’t here’. And it’s like... no. Uh... that’s racism. Like, Superman did not end crime. I don’t recall one point in “Man of Steel” or BvS where he was giving any talks on tolerance or teaching classes on cross-cultural relationships or dealing with America’s prison overpopulation issues or hunger or poverty or gang warfare or attempted genocides or sex trafficking or corrupt government officials in America or very many other forms of crime. Saying ‘we live in a more violent/angry/dangerous world’ is meaningless without anything to compare it to. When this continuity’s Superman was alive, the world was not so improved that his absence suddenly meant that things were a heck of a lot worse. Are they at least somewhat worse? Sure. Superman did stuff when he was around. Is it doomsday now that he’s gone? No.

This wouldn’t be such a problem if another plot thread that probably got dropped was that the/a mother box(?) activated when Superman died. I believe that Steppenwolf calls Superman ‘Kryptonian’ during the end battle. Putting aside the fact that this makes no sense because Steppenwolf hasn’t been on Earth in around 5000 years and therefore should have no idea who or what Superman is and Superman’s powers are because he’s on Earth, so Steppenwolf has no reason to believe that this is how Kryptonians who have never been on Earth or exposed to a yellow sun are so how he knows Superman is Kryptonian unless he’s very familiar with Kryptonian symbology is... ennn. My point is: why would the Mother Box know or care that Superman is gone? The world was not a paradise with Superman in it. It is not a hellscape without Superman. I get that you need to answer the question of why the magic creation boxes activated now rather than any other time, but ‘Because Superman is dead’ is a really stupid reason and is never explained. You just have to believe that Superman is so important that the Mother Boxes only activated when he was dead. I guess.

I mean you could have had them activate because Cyborg’s dad was using one of them to experiment and save his son’s life, which used their creative powers and had it send a signal to the other two. Just sayin. I’m not sure why they summoned Steppenwolf, if that’s what happened. I’m not sure what he’s doing or where he’s hanging out when the Mother Box on Themyscira activates. Maybe he’s just floating in space in his giant spaceship with his fleet? A better creative team might have had Steppenwolf on some dung detail mission assigned by Darkseid as part of his 5000-year punishment for getting kicked off of Earth when they detect the Mother Box activation, then teleport to the spot to deal with it. Although if Steppenwolf knows where Earth is, and he had access to his army, and a teleportation device (which is apparently not the Mother Box now)... why didn’t he just go back to Earth to look for the Mother Boxes 5000 years ago (or however long ago)? Has he been spending all that time recovering? I mean the idea of him being on some low-level detail and detecting the activation still sort of works, if that’s the case, but I don’t understand why Darkseid didn’t come in with more forces to take over the Earth himself where Steppenwolf failed all those centuries ago. Or send one of his other lackeys. The point is: Steppenwolf + army of parademons failing to take Earth over and the Mother Boxes being taken doesn’t seem like enough to stop Apokalips from trying again (particularly if the magic world-destruction/domination boxes were lost/taken). Or a couple more times. That was just one of Apokalips’ warriors and one army. They’re a whole planet of fighters, who basically just like fighting and conquering.

Why does Steppenwolf call Earth ‘home’? He wasn’t born there. He never lived there, as far as I can tell, although he seems to have led a war campaign there some time ago? He doesn’t even want to stay there and wants to go back to Apokalips, which sounds far more like a ‘home’ he misses than Earth.

A better plot might have been that a coalition of Earth’s fighters fought back against Steppenwolf’s invasion, kicking them off of Earth, and that coalition was so powerful that Steppenwolf and Darkseid and everyone else decided to just go focus on New Genesis or somewhere else for the time being. However, one of Steppenwolf’s soldiers maybe leaves behind a Mother Box on accident. Which gets discovered centuries later and used by Dr. Stone to help his son. The newly activated Mother Box scans its environment and sends a distress signal to the nearest Apokalips ship - which happens to be one of Steppenwolf’s fleet ships. Steppenwolf reads the data from the Mother Box, and notes that the Earth is even more pathetic than it used to be. It’s no longer an Age of Heroes, but an age of infighting and weakness, and one of their best champions was just killed. Maybe it’s time to go back and give it another shot. Maybe he asks Darkseid for another chance to take it over. Maybe he just goes on his own volition. So he shows up, maybe fights and overpowers the Amazons and the Atlanteans, and thinks ‘Yeah, this is way easier. I’m finishing what I started.’

BUT ANYWAY... hey, remember that bonfire that Hippolyta set? That Diana had to learn about on television at least several hours after it was set? I get it, Hippolyta knows next to nothing about the outside world, still. But why is she so sure that Diana would see it? Because she just... believes? Because the gods would make sure? Why not just ask one of the gods to deliver a message to Diana –cough-Hermes-cough-? For that matter, why does the bonfire signal ‘invasion’? Who were they signaling beforehand for ‘invasion’? Shouldn’t it just mean ‘trouble’, ‘send help’? Did Diana let the Amazons know that she dealt with the problem post-the climax? Or are the Amazons still like GEE I SURE HOPE THAT LITTLE OLD INVASION ISSUE GOT DEALT WITH! Maybe one of the gods popped by to say ‘Hello! So, this team dealt with Steppenwolf and now he’s not an issue :D’ Yeah the gods are like... mostly dead or something but... I just kept wondering. Plus, the gods might be gone or just not talking, btu surely some of their servants stuck around? No one’s got a pair of flying sandals or magic parchment or something to send to Diana saying YO, THE EVIL MAGIC BOX TURNED ON AND A GIANT CGI DUDE SHOWED UP WITH AN INVADING PARADEMON ARMY? No? Okay.

Jason Momoa as Aquaman...

Oh, right I need to say something, don’t I. I mean he was great. He was funny. And... very pretty. Like, this is underwater royalty? Heck yeah, I believe that. He’s got the muscles and the charisma and attitude to prove it. It also really reminded me of “Stargate: Atlantis”. He really channeled his old Ronan Dex. Sigh. Am I ever forgetting almost every single piece of coverage for him as Aquaman ignoring that time he was literally on a show called “Stargate: Atlantis” for four seasons where he played one of the main cast members and had far more lines and screentime than he did on certain other shows about thrones? No. Not yet.

There was a mini plothole where Aquaman saves a sailor during a bad storm and finds some weird green substance on his hands afterward. We never learn if this is blood or related to the parademons or something. He just goes back to Atlantis for no apparent reason. I thought he was going to ask about the green stuff but that didn’t happen. Or investigate the ship. Or something. I also really liked Mera. Her powers were cool. I wish she more involved in the film. I would really like to see an Aquaman-centered film, now, though. Mera’s boobhole costume was stupid. But, well. I really liked the other Atlantian armor, though.

Wonder Woman was great. She had a lot of badass moments (except for that shot of her standing on a statue in platform heels… sigh…). Except for her introduction, which was a cool fight scene and her saving people, she spent a lot of time trying to talk through problems and help the team come together. Although that disappeared when Clark was revived and I kept thinking ‘So Diana, you going to start telling him what happened, or explain what’s going on? Maybe say that Martha and Lois are safe and the world needs him and everything’s going to be fine? No? Just gonna stand there with three weirdly-dressed strangers and stare at him while he’s shirtless. All right then.’ I also liked the Amazons by and large (except for the stupid costumes). The scene where they were on horseback with the Mother Box was pretty badass. Also, remember that time Cyborg was talking to Diana via computer and Diana was like ‘If wanted to attack you, I would have done it at the lake’ and I was just like yeeeeeeeeees.

(Photoshop by @jarmainedesign of a panel from “Trinity #6″ by Francis Manapul)

Ezra Miller was great. I really liked Flash’s story. Yeah, he had a lot of quippy, sometimes overly awkward dialogue, but he was funny. He was fun to watch. You really wanted him to succeed. And his interactions with his dad were very good. I like that he was trying to make friends with everyone. Unfortunately I don’t have a ton to say about him... He actually has one of the only one-on-one with Batman moments I like, which is when they first fight Steppenwolf. “Just save one”. That was a really nice little scene there. Clark spotting Barry while he was running was... so creepy. And so drawn out. I kept thinking RUN BARRY RUN! I’m not really a fan of all the slomo, but I feel like it was used well during that scene (save for Clark’s creepy eye tricks), because you were really invested in the outcome and Barry surviving it.

Total tangent, but I find it oddly comical that no one has repaired the Superman statue yet. All these giant Superman memorials and naw, we’re just gonna leave his severed head on the ground. Cause.

Ray Fisher was great. He sold the role. I loved every scene he was in. I really would have loved more of him, and I like that Diana and Barry were Cyborg’s stronger connections. The design of his whole metal body was a bit odd. I’m used to the “Teen Titans” cartoon version, where he’s bulkier, not the sort of odd-looking CGI metal skeleton. Every time he wasn’t in a sweatshirt and sweatpants was a bit eh for a bit until other heroes showed up so his CGI wasn’t so cringy.

Also I’m not sure why Barry and Victor were assigned literal graveyard detail. What was Diana doing? What was Aquaman doing? Bruce is literally just sitting on somewhere, I guess investigating. It was a nice one-on-one friendship forming moment, but... really? The two college/high school(?) heroes? You assign them to unbury a body?

By and large I liked Superman. Henry Cavill was great, probably because this time around he wasn’t giving overly dramatic monologues or dealing with overly dramatized issues. Mostly he was just fighting or interacting with lots of people, or saving people, which worked. I was prepared for the badly CGI’d mustache. It actually wasn’t that big of a deal. There are only like... 2-3 scenes where it’s sort of an issue? But they’re not THAT long. This Superman cracked jokes that weren’t really problematic (although the ‘okay I’d rather be dead’ one was... eh...) and felt... like Superman. Even if he did have a tendency to randomly go and deal with other things at the worst times. (Although where did Lois find that shirt when they went back to the house? They didn’t have a car and presumably Martha took all the stuff with her when she left. And the house hasn’t been sold yet, so… Also, do those cops know Clark’s secret identity now? Admittedly they’d have to know who Lois Lane is or do a really solid Google search for ‘Clark’ but…)

And now we come back to the ‘Superman dying is why things are so bad now’ problem because... Batman. The reason for Bats starting a fight with Supes in BvS is really stupid. And yeah, maybe Bruce in this continuity did make Superman a lot weaker during the Doomsday fight because of that stupid fight they had beforehand. But in no way, shape, or form, did Bruce bring about Supes’ death. Some guilt getting in the way of that makes sense because... Bruce. But... not to the extent it does in the film. This is why the scene where Diana calls out Bruce’s guilt complex re: Superman dying didn’t really work for me. It felt like a long time running around the point that Bruce eventually gets to, which boils down to: we’re facing an opponent we haven’t been able to defeat. Superman could really help us defeat this opponent, and that is why we need to bring him back. Dealing with Bruce’s guilt is a secondary concern. A better scene would have been ‘hey, we need more people, and we could bring Superman back. Why not do that to help deal with Steppenwolf’ and Diana stepping in quietly and saying, ‘This is ridiculous. And you need to tell me that this crazy scheme isn’t just you feeling guilty for killing him.’ Or her just stepping aside and saying ‘It’s good to bring him back to help, but Bruce… how are you dealing with things, emotionally?’ (I don’t know, I’m not a script writer paid by Warner Bros. and DC). It would keep up this weird dramatic tension they had without being kind of random.

I also don’t understand how Batman knew that the parademons fed on fear at the beginning of the film. Spinning off of that... why do the parademons explode when caught? And why do they leave burn marks of three squares to refer to the Mother Boxes? Did Steppenwolf’s power come from the Mother Boxes? Is that some sort of signature? Why is there a mural of the mother boxes in a random shack in some random fishing village somewhere? Wouldn’t that make the fisherfolk a target?

This is probably the most trusting version of Bruce Wayne I have ever seen. He is very casual about sharing his secret identity, to the point where he doesn’t give a shit if Aquaman calls him ‘Batman’ while wandering through a relatively busy town (maybe they have no Internet/phone service there). He reveals himself to Barry, brings everyone back to his batcave... isn’t bothered that Cyborg can hack into his system...

The fight in the sewer was pretty good. The group wandering around, helping each other, Cyborg taking over the Nightcrawler… That was all good. What happened to Barry’s leg after the fight in the Gotham sewer? He’s injured. We see it. He shouts in pain. It doesn’t look good. I thought we were going to get some mini plot thread about him turning into a parademon or something, or Bruce and Diana fussing over him or… I don’t know. But the next time we see him after this, he’s fine. There’s no mention of it. Even him saying ‘I heal fast’ or ‘I guess that wasn’t poisonous’ would work. Nope. We don’t even see him repairing his costume. Or Alfred or Bruce or Cyborg repairing his costume. And how did Aquaman know to show up there? Understanding water and all that is one thing, but there’s a lot of water on the planet. He seems to not know all that much about Batman, let alone anyone else on the team, so him guessing that Bruce would be in Gotham, somewhere, at that particular time, particularly in that particular spot, seems a bit much. I suppose he might have somehow managed to track Steppenwolf. But we never get that explanation. Yeah, it’s badass that he showed up to help… a little… at that moment, and then joined the team, but… why? Also he didn’t seem to be doing much. Like the water was held back slightly, but not all that much? I mean it looked cool but just seemed ineffective.

So between the time Steppenwolf teleports away from Metropolis with the Mother Box to the time the team locates and then arrives on scene… Steppenwolf really didn’t just… finish Armageddon? Really? Unity didn’t just… happen? How long did it take him to teleport to that random village, plug the third box in, and start the process? We also never see Steppenwolf turn people into parademons. None of the Amazons in the beginning of the invasion. None of the Atlantians. None of the people he captures for questioning. None of the people in that village he was occupying. Nope. Not that I wanted it. The film just made a sort of big deal about where parademons come from and then… nothing ever came of it? I think maybe the story we got about the parademons was between so many hands that none of them ultimately every agreed about it. Because they apparently form from really terrified enemies of Steppenwolf, but then they for whatever reason, with no apparent signal, explode, and leave burn marks in the shape of three boxes. Why? Who knows.

The end fight was pretty good. It was enjoyable to watch. Seeing everyone come together was cool. I’m not sure why everyone was talking about moving quickly when they arrived on scene, and then they just watched Batman go, and kept watching and not doing anything, even just like… going after Steppenwolf and the Unity. But whatever. I could definitely watch Aquaman skysurfing a parademon more often. That was cool. Superman showing up was good (although that Alfred scene in the trailer was cut), but it was really weird when he randomly disappeared to go help the escapees. I’m conflicted on that because it’s one of the few moments in the film outside of Diana’s introduction and the sewer fight where the heroes worry about civilians. And I like that they are worried about actually saving people. But it felt like they had Clark leave because Henry Cavill had some other obligation to deal with and all the other actors had already shot the rest of the scene. Or this was just a scene added later because one of the creatives said ‘Hey, we want more Superman, more quips, and maybe we should have the heroes actually saving people during the climax?’

Also, why did the failed Unity stuff make grass and flowers grow? Sure, it’s a pretty CGI moment from someone writing their resume to work on “Avatar”, but it doesn’t make any sense? I’d ask “why is what Steppenwolf doing bad, if it does that” when you realize that he’d have to destroy and kill everyone on Earth for that to happen. And if Unity is supposed to make Earth like Apokalips, why does it result in that? I actually kept expecting the little girl and her family to keel over and die from like… alien fumes and poisons from the foreign plants. Because Apokalips infecting Earth or something and these are foreign flora. But no. Even a minute of Cyborg saying he reprogrammed it somehow when he was overloading it would have been nice. Is this an avenue he’s going to pursue with his dad, now, and whatever lab is funding them? Bringing life back to areas devastated by human/natural disasters?

For that matter, sure, the heroes are happy to look at it, but maybe go and search for survivors? Make sure the escapees are all right? See if anyone got trapped or needs medical attention? Contact the local authorities so they know what’s going on? At least four of you are American citizens illegally in Russian territory and another one of you is a Greek/British/French(?) citizen illegally in Russian territory so that’s… a problem, to say the least.

And then there’s that corny Lois Lane monologue at the end of the film. I really like that Lois closed out the film. I’m not used to women narrating the ends of films, so it’s a nice change. Makes me remember the badass Maria Hill ending that was cut from “The Avengers”. Unfortunately, the monologue here was really poorly written and vague, about darkness and light. I think it would have been more badass for Lois to be writing about a new case she was working on or something. I basically just tuned her out while watching the stuff on-screen and that’s not great for an end-movie narration.

The race scene between Barry and Clark is cute. And the end credits scene with Luthor and Deathstroke wasn’t bad, either. Deathstroke looks really good. His costume, his make-up, his hair. It looks great.

Overall it was all right. For all the plot holes and non-logic and non-explanation and randomness, I would watch it again, and I’ve only said that about “Wonder Woman” when it comes to live-action DC movies.

[theconservativebrief]

The first 30 seconds of the trailer for Insatiable, a new comedy series coming to Netflix on August 10, introduces the story of a chubby high schooler grappling with bullies, unrequited crushes, and the FOMO that comes from nights spent on the couch eating ice cream.

It’s all a fairly standard setup for what looks to be a show about modern teens — perhaps even one that, like Bo Burnham’s Eighth Grade, is benefitted by the fact that its lead looks more like an average high schooler than the glamorous 20-something stars of shows like Riverdale.

But then the trailer takes a turn. Patty, our main character, gets punched in the face, has her jaw wired shut for months, and thereby loses so much weight that by the time she goes back to school in the fall, she’s a bonafide (thin) hottie. It’s with this newfound power that she can apparently get her revenge on the kids who’d excluded her in the past.

[embedded content]

Because no one has officially reviewed the show yet, the trailer is all that we have to determine what the rest of Insatiable will look like and what themes it will deal with. But based on that one minute and 30 seconds, the reaction has been … not great.

Critics on Twitter and elsewhere have called the premise of the show fatphobic, triggering to people with eating disorders, and a regressive lens through which to view fat people’s stories. The Good Place star Jameela Jamil, who has advocated for body autonomy in the past, tweeted about how there’s a problem with implying that the only way to “win” in life is to diet:

Kids who bully are just miserable, badly raised arseholes. It is not, and should not ever be YOUR problem that they have a problem with you. You don’t have to conform. You don’t have to placate. Revenge isn’t a good use of your time and energy. And starving yourself is

— Jameela Jamil (@jameelajamil) July 20, 2018

Writer Roxane Gay also noted the trailer’s flawed logic that fat women can’t stand up for themselves and must undergo physical trauma to become their best, skinny selves:

Ahhh yes, a fat girl could never stand up for herself while fat and of course she has to be assaulted and have her mouth wired shut before she becomes her best self, her skinny self. Good to know!

— roxane gay (@rgay) July 22, 2018

There’s now even a Change.org petition that, as of publication, has garnered more than 145,000 signatures to stop Netflix from airing the show, on the grounds that releasing it will be damaging to young girls’ self-esteem and cause or trigger eating disorders.

One day after the trailer premiered, on July 20, Insatiable’s writer and producer Lauren Gussis defended the show against critics, writing that the inspiration was based on her own experience with an eating disorder as a teenager, and that comedy is a means of dealing with our vulnerabilities.

Star Debby Ryan, a former Disney Channel actress, took to Instagram to defend the show, writing that it was a satirical look at “how difficult and scary it can be to go to move through the world in a body,” and assured viewers that the humor is “not in the fat-shaming.” Alyssa Milano, who also appears in the trailer, said in a 30-minute Twitter video that she “totally gets” the backlash to the trailer, but hopes people will wait to see the full show before judging it.

This, above all, is what the creators and stars are attempting to communicate. But for people who are so accustomed to seeing their stories told onscreen via the same harmful tropes, the Insatiable trailer could be seen as just another exhausting example of the negative ways TV and movies portray fat people.

To understand why the Insatiable trailer hit such a nerve, you have to look at pop culture’s terrible track record of telling fat people’s stories.

On July 23, artist and writer Kiva Bay asked his Twitter followers to name the fat-hating moment in media that has stuck with them, starting with the scene in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets when Aunt Marge inflates to such great proportions that she literally floats away.

Responses ranged from Bridget Jones being consistently described as fat (in the books, she weighs 130 pounds) to pretty much the entire premise of Pixar’s Wall-E, which depicts a futuristic dystopia in which everyone isn’t just overweight, but share the negative characteristics associated with being overweight: that they are lazy and stupid, and that all they care about is passively consuming whatever’s in front of them.

The problem persists even in media that’s often held up as progressive — many people in the thread called out Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Parks & Recreation’s recurring fat jokes, while others brought up the inherent fatphobia of shows like Gilmore Girls and 30 Rock in which objectively thin main characters have an obsession with unhealthy food.

A 2009 Jezebel piece described the “skinny glutton” phenomenon as “a sure indicator to the audience that these women are Single, Quirky and, (because they’re thin, only gently) Sad” because casting an actually fat actor in the role would, the thinking goes, be too pathetic.

The Insatiable trailer also reprises an especially troubling Hollywood practice: the fat suit. When a character actually is meant to be fat, instead of casting a bigger actor in the role, often a thin actor will wear a fat suit.

We tend to see them used in flashbacks to a time when a now-thin character was fat, like Monica in Friends, Schmidt in New Girl, or Ryan Reynolds in Just Friends. The “humor” comes not only from seeing actors wearing a silly costume, like Eddie Murphy in Norbit or The Nutty Professor, but also from the ability to crack jokes at a past character’s fatness with the knowledge that the present character is laughing now, too.

Few uses of fat suits, however, are more controversial than the 2001 film Shallow Hal, in which Jack Black plays a man who has to be hypnotized to find Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit sexy enough to be his girlfriend. Not only is the entire premise pretty gross, but, as a Telegraph piece noted after comparisons were drawn to the recent Amy Schumer film I Feel Pretty, the movie consistently uses fat bodies as punchlines:

“The camera linger[s] over every dimple and crease on the physical form of Ivy Snitzer, Paltrow’s body double, and contrasting the sight of Paltrow in revealing booty-shorts with a large woman spilling out of her clothes. Jokes are endlessly made about her appetite, while every chair Rosemary sits on appears perilously close to collapsing (it’s a sight-gag that is repeated twice on-screen, along with a deleted scene involving a caved-in bed).”

That contrast — the visual of the character wearing a fat suit versus the character without it — can have the effect of implying that fatness, when constantly compared to the superior thinness, is grotesque and deserves to be laughed at.

That’s the history Insatiable is drawing on when it puts Debby Ryan in a fat suit, regardless of intention.

And there is yet another pattern that Insatiable seems to fall into: the idea that weight loss is the road to happiness. Friends’ Monica and New Girl’s Schmidt are both characters who don’t accomplish their goals until they lose weight. The entire wellness industry is based around this false promise — that losing weight is the key to getting whatever you’ve always wanted, whether that’s love, money, or revenge. (See: Khloe Kardashian’s extremely on-the-nose reality series, Revenge Body.)

In an essay for Medium titled “To the writers of Insatiable,” fat activist and writer Your Fat Friend wrote about the problem with this narrative, pointing out that not only do 97 percent of dieters gain back what little weight they lose (or more), but that weight loss is often the only narrative that fat people get to have.

She continues:

I have never seen a fat life like mine on screen. I have not seen fat people recklessly, happily in love, as I have been. I have not seen thin partners struggle to accept their own attraction to fat people. I have not seen fat people getting promoted, getting fired, working hard, succeeding. I have only seen fat people fail. Anything else, I have learned, is reserved for the penitent thin.

In short, fat characters are defined entirely by their fatness, and only get to become multi-dimensional once they lose the weight. It’s a trope that the Insatiable trailer even touches on in a meta way: When Patty returns to school, newly thin, she muses, “Now I could be the former fatty who turned into a brain, or an athlete, or a princess,” as if these character traits can’t apply to fat people because their main identifier is already “fat.” Until we see the show, it isn’t clear where this strain of self-awareness’s endpoint lies, or how far the series will take its meta-understanding of fat tropes, but it could be a promising sign.

So yes, the Insatiable trailer, as of right now, is still just a trailer; there’s still a whole show to come and be watched and discussed, starting on August 10. But many viewers are worried that the groundwork seems to be laid for a series about the same stories of fat people we’ve seen thousands of times over.

And though its stars and creators promise the show is an empathetic look at the pressures modern teenagers face surrounding body image, well, don’t we already sort of … know them? Above all, what’s necessary is an empathetic look at fat people in general: one that ideally doesn’t involve weight loss — and certainly no fat suit.

Original Source -> Why 150,000 people are calling for Netflix to cancel the teen comedy Insatiable before it debuts

via The Conservative Brief

[lucaumbriel]

The Last Jedi spoilers (and a huge wall of text) under the cut

The opening was way too similar to Empire Strikes Back, the Rebellion, sorry, the “Resistance” has just destroyed the First Order’s big bad weapon, but despite this the bad guys are stronger than ever (no, seriously, they apparently have defacto rule of the Galaxy or something now, because apparently the destruction of one system means the entire Republic is gone somehow) and the good guys are on the run.

Rey is seeking training from Luke, which is also a plot point lifted directly from ESB, but is done in a completely different way so it’s not something I hold against the movie. The training itself, however, is lack luster and feels more like something you’d see stretched out across an entire episodic season crammed into as little screen time as possible between everything else that’s going on. And I really didn’t like how they started going the route of “well, the Jedi need to die, but that doesn’t mean there are not going to be any more force users”, like they were going to have Luke get Rey to gut the tradition and legacy and keep everything else to sort of found a brand new order without any of the “you should fear the dark side because it’s the dark side and don’t ask questions about it because you shouldn’t be asking about that” and the removal of emotions and attachments and so on, and then go right back to “actually, nah, Rey’s gonna tell Luke that the Jedi are cool and that’s gonna change his mind and he’s even gonna acknowledge her as a jedi cause the jedi are cool and we wouldn’t want to stray from that or anything even though Kylo explicitly said he’s not gonna be a sith”. Like, there were so so many other arguments Luke could have used to show how the Jedi are not the undisputed good guys (just look at the people who try to say how “the jedi are the actual bad guys” cause they steal babies and enforce a specific lifestyle and doctrine and anyone who doesn’t agree with everything gets thrown out, instead of just “the Jedi were egotistical, they all died cause Palpy fooled them”, which is the single weakest argument for “the jedi weren’t actually that good” I think I’ve ever seen and that entire scene just feels pathetic and annoying).

Which brings me to the next bit and my major criticism with the movie: they try to do to much. It feels like two or three movies, or most of a Netflix mini-series crammed into two and a half hours. It doesn’t let you really digest anything that’s happening and everything from the subplots to the main plot feels rushed and there are a lot of little things (like the fight between Luke and Kylo) that feel really tacked on despite them actually being pretty important overall to the story. Like, they could have stopped the film at several points (most notably after everyone got in the base), but it’s like they kept coming back with “and one more thing” (the bad guys have a canon that can blast through it, which actually would have made an interesting cliff hanger, if this were the Netflix mini-series it feels like), and then “one more thing!”, and then “one more thing!”

The conflict between Poe and the Admiral feels unnecessary. Yes, Poe was wrong to go behind her back, and more wrong to try and mutiny because the Admiral did actually have a fully fleshed out and usable plan that would have worked perfectly if Poe hadn’t sent Finn and Rose off to infiltrate the flagship and allow the code breaker to betray them for money, but his actions were still justified because instead of explaining the plan to him or anyone else, she intentionally kept him the dark and obfuscated what she had planned for no reason what so ever, seriously, there was no reason she couldn’t say “we’re going to load people in the shuttles, yes, I know they’re shielded and unarmed and will never outrun the destroyers, that’s why I’m going to stay behind and pilot the cruiser, we’re gambling on them not looking for smaller ships, so this should provide a decent distraction, the shuttles will be going to a fortress world were they’ll have enough power to contact our allies”, but no, she never says that, instead she just tells him “trust me” and “hope” and when he finds out about the shuttles she blows him off. Yeah, Poe is a hot head and all, but she’s a shitty leader if she can’t be asses to explain a simple plan to someone who you have no indication of being a defector or spy or anything else. The entire time it feels like either she’s the traitor like Poe thinks, or she’s trying to trick a traitor by using Poe or some shit but there’s no actual payoff to the entire subplot except “Poe was wrong and should have blindly trusted his leader who’s first conversation with him involved her verbally bitch slapping him and acting like he’s been nothing but a detriment to the entire Resistance.”

Over all, the film feels like an action movie, with a lot of space battles, amazingly choreographed fight scenes, lots of big loud energetic moments like them crashing through the casino, it doesn’t feel like a Star Wars movie so much as an abridged season of Clone Wars or Rebels.

Oh, and how can I forget Rey. She continues to be a Mary Sue, never suffering any real complications or failings, even in this film, her absolute biggest fuck up, getting herself captured thinking she can turn Kylo to the light side and together defeat Snoke, results only in Kylo killing his only superior and acquiring supreme control over the First Order, and then she escapes with no real consequences otherwise. And if you say “well putting the immature, hot headed, egotistical, man-child in charge of the First Order instead of the highly powerful, nearly all seeing, calm, collected, and very powerful mastermind who put the First Order together in the first place” a bad outcome from this and something that has in any way actually strengthened the Order, especially since we already see the conflict between Kylo and Hux growing worse and worse with every scene they’re in, then I don’t really know what to tell you except maybe watch the movie again and actually pay attention.

The fight scene between Kylo and Luke was awesome, though, again, very action movie and, like I said above, adds to the list of “they tried to do too much in one movie”. I like that if you pay attention, you can see that it was pretty obvious he was never actually there. Not only “how did he get into a base there’s supposedly only one way out of” but “how did he even get there in the first place?” the only ship we see is the sunken X-Wing that’s probably been there for way too long for it to still be usable, and then not only is he not even scratched by the ATs, he doesn’t even have any dust on him period, he’s using a lightsaber that we just saw sundered, and he’s adamantly refusing to even block Kylo’s attacks. The dice thing, however, was stupid and makes no fucking sense at fucking all. I was waiting for him to say the line, but he never did, you’re supposed to become more powerful that he could ever imagine, damn it.

Luke’s ascension also feels kinda tacked on and forced, epic as it was. Makes me think they were planning to kill each of the main three at the end of their particular movie. We’ll see how that holds up...considering.

Kylo’s continued indecision was good, as was the twist with him killing Snoke and then taking command instead of turning. I also liked the fact that he used his apparent execution of Rey to cover his actual execution of Snoke, which reminded me of the “you will kill Luke Skywalker” thing with Mara Jade in the comics, though I am a little disappointed that after everything from the first film, this is all we get with Snoke unless he revives himself somehow. Which would be stupid, honestly.

The fight scene with the honor guards was awesome, though Rey continues to prove that someone who grew up fighting rats on a farm with a staff is a match for much better trained fighters. I was fine with the scene, up until she and Kylo were both being choked out and she’s the only one who figures out how to escape and then gets to save Kylo. With everything else on top, it just adds to my dislike of her writing as I’ve discussed above. How Kylo finished off the last guard was awesome, though, and everyone in the theater cheered cause it was awesome.

All of this, and any other things I might have forgotten, I still loved this movie and it was great. Great fight scenes. Great space combat. The casino scene with all the aliens was great. Luke was great. Leia was great. That scene between Luke and R2, especially once he played the message, was great. Rey, Finn, Poe, and Rose maybe not great but they were ok. The scenes that reminded me of other movies, comics, TV series were all great (except maybe the elevator scene that paralleled Return’s Luke/Vader scene, that just felt kinda weird). The pieces were all great, it’s the bits between them that are more...eh, and while some of them are necessary, others, like I’ve said, feel tacked on or fall into “and one more thing” near the end.

Overall, I would rate this as one of the better Star Wars movies. It’s better than Empire (the filler of Star Wars), and definitely better than most of Clone “I hate sand”/forced romance Wars. If it had been a mini-series instead of a whole movie or some of its points had been cut from here and put in some EU materials or another movie somewhere, I think it would have come out better because they would have had more time to flesh things out and work with more of the points they raised up instead of it feeling rushed and crammed together. Empire, for its faults, still handles its two plots better than Last Jedi handled it’s three or four.