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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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House of Dark Shadows: The Craziest Vampire Movie You’ve Never Seen

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This article contains House of Dark Shadows spoilers.

In 1970 House of Dark Shadows flipped the vampire subgenre on its head. While certainly a B-horror in the Hammer mold, this chiller wasn’t satisfied with one bloodsucker, or even two. Instead Dark Shadows would turn nearly its whole cast into the ravenous undead, indiscriminately slaughtering beloved heroes and heroines, not caring for a second that they were also the stars of a daytime soap opera—one that was appointment TV for millions of kids across America.

Clearly it was a different time. And therein lies its charm.

When the television series Dark Shadows premiered in 1966, it wasn’t an instant pop culture phenomenon. Creator Dan Curtis was savvy enough to see the appeal in a daytime melodrama draped in a Gothic aesthetic, but he didn’t yet have the necessary hook for his central character as she stepped off a train in New England. Sure, mysterious Victoria Winters (Alexandria Isles) would meet the Collins family, who more or less ruled over the town of Collinsport from their ancestral home of Collinwood, but the reason to stick around only came about a year into the series’ original run.

That eureka moment turned out to be the dapper and effortlessly suave Jonathan Frid. Cast as Barnabas Collins, the Canadian theater actor was initially hired for a single storyline (a set number of episodes) as the heavy: Barnabas was an ancient and forgotten vampire, who’d been buried alive like the family’s dirty little secret after a curse condemned him to drink blood in 1795. Now he was out and wreaking havoc by feasting on the locals and obsessing over Maggie Evans (Kathryn Leigh Scott), whom he was convinced was the reincarnation of his lost love Josette—a fiancée who threw herself off a cliff in the 18th century rather than become Barnabas’ corpse bride.

It was morbid, obviously, but also romantic at a time when vampires were defined by the coldness of Christopher Lee or the goofiness of Scooby-Doo. Instead here was the most pitiable of creatures, one who doesn’t wish to be a vampire, and through impeccable manners and courtesies revealed a soft love for the Collins family, even when he preyed on them. Rather than create a great villain, Curtis inadvertently invented a tragic hero who audiences flocked to, both the typical daytime target demographic and also, surprisingly, kids and teenagers, who’d rush home from school to be lost in a melancholy land of eternal loves, ancient curses, and of course fangs.

Thus Dark Shadows became a blender for all things Gothic. Following in the success of Barnabas’ introduction, the series would go on to add ghosts, werewolves, séances, multiple stints of time travel, and one particularly devilish 18th century witch named Angelique (Lara Parker). It also appropriated every classic horror trope from Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, the Brontë sisters, and Edgar Allan Poe, and synthesized them for an audience that was now consuming it along with kid-friendly board games and trading cards.

So why not a movie, too? As early as 1968, Curtis began pursuing the idea of making a Dark Shadows movie, even while the series was still going. Eventually, House of Dark Shadows was the result. Released 50 years ago this week, this toothy amusement was the chance to do everything Curtis wanted with the series, but was prohibited from by Broadcast Standards and Practices censorship, budget constraints… and maybe even audiences’ good taste.

“Blood flows,” actor Roger Davis observed in The Dark Shadows Companion: The 25th Anniversary, which was edited by Scott. “It’s not like the serial. You have a few dabs of blood and the network brass have apoplexy. TV does a mock-up on life. This is in living color. And the vampires really bite.”

Whereas Dark Shadows, the television show, was appointment TV for those still in middle school, House of Dark Shadows was aimed directly at the drive-in crowd with its emphasis on blood gushing from neck wounds and stakes violently going into almost every character’s heart. As Scott’s book surmised, the film was “entirely the child of its creator,” who would at last have his evil Barnabas. And at a glance, it is an American riff on what had already become kitsch by 1970 thanks to Hammer Film Productions’ seemingly endless line of Dracula movies, plus the knockoffs.

And to be sure, House of Dark Shadows is in many ways a Dracula movie. It’s also insight into how Curtis originally viewed the Barnabas character before Frid went on a charm offensive. Playing almost like a CliffNotes version of Barnabas’ first several storylines on the show, the vampire is awakened during the film’s opening moments because of the foolishness of groundskeeper Willie Loomis (John Karlen). Barnabas then forces poor old Willie to become his living slave and creates a fictitious narrative about being a distant cousin descended from the original Barnabas Collins, whom family lore claims sailed away to London in 1795, never to be heard from again.

Bringing back the “original” Barnabas’ family jewels to ingratiate himself, the Barnabas of 1970 is free to attend family gatherings, fix up an old ruined house on the estate, and even feed on cousin Carolyn (Nancy Barrett), a dear relative who becomes a dead ringer for Lucy Westenra in Bram Stoker’s famed novel. Even so, Carolyn cannot displace Maggie (still Scott) in Barnabas’ eyes, who he is sure is the reincarnation of Josette.

It very much has the narrative beats of a traditional vampire movie, but the charm that lingers a half-century later comes in part from seeing these actors, who are intimately familiar with their characters, going through the paces with better production values. That quality also manifests in Curtis’ sense of atmosphere, now liberated from the stage-bound quality of daytime drawing room drama. I would even argue House of Dark Shadows is one of the more satisfyingly atmospheric vampire movies to come out of the 1970s.

Curtis filmed in the upstate New York’s Tarrytown area, mostly on the actual Gothic Lyndhurst Estate, built in the 1830s, and shot much of the exteriors in the legendary Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Whereas Hammer films tended to rely increasingly on sets during this period, and most B horror movies had no budget for evocative locations, House of Dark Shadows was filming its sequences in between tours of the Lyndhurst Mansion and in the same atmospheric cemetery that helped birth the myth of a Headless Horseman.

Regarding the filming location, screenwriter Sam Hall remarked, “It’s a wild house. I’d hate like hell to live in it.”

This is only accentuated by the fact Curtis knows how to drain a spooky location dry. Images like vampire Carolyn standing in a window, draped in white, beckoning her lover to become one of the damned is a better use of Lucy iconography than any Dracula movie made before House of Dark Shadows. And the film’s ending sequence reaches an operatic opulence rarely seen, even in vampire cheapies. Barnabas, bathed in a blue light and shrouded in inexplicable fog in the interior of his decrepit home, beckons Maggie, now in a wedding dress, toward him as the famous melody of Josette’s music box twinkles, only now in a weeping minor key.

The corruption of that wistful melody is intriguing. An original part of the Dark Shadows television series, Josette’s music box, and Frid’s soliloquies about it, is what first gave Barnabas his soul, distinguishing him from the general depravity of other pop culture vampires. One could even say Barnabas is the first significantly sympathetic male vampire in fiction. In House of Dark Shadows, he has a more sinister mean streak, but the pathos remains.

Hence why the film plays at times like a gonzo delight. It may feature the original, more wicked Barnabas, but it is still derived from the genteel series, and many of those elements carry over. Take Dr. Julia Hoffman (Grayson Hall) spending half the movie trying to cure Barnabas, a subplot that eventually ends happily for the pair on the show, but less so here. It’s soapy pulp, yet it’s given as much stone-faced gravity as the Collinsport Police Department unquestioningly agreeing to patrol around town with standard issue police crucifixes. One might ask if they keep silver bullets in every squad car too?

The overall effect is bizarre, but endearingly so. It’s also fairly influential, as confirmed by what happened after Dan Curtis dropped Barnabas in favor of another vampire.

Dark Shadows’ Witch Was As Influential As Its Vampire

By Tony Sokol

Movies

Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the Seduction of Old School Movie Magic

By David Crow

In 1974, following Dark Shadows’ cancellation, Curtis wrote and directed a Dracula TV movie for CBS that within its opening titles billed itself as “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Far removed from Stoker’s novel, the little remembered television film nonetheless starred Jack Palance as the vampire, and introduced several significant elements to the story by overtly making Dracula an undead version of historical figure Vlad the Impaler (which he is not in the novel) and turning Lucy into the reincarnation of his great lost love.

Curtis was in essence trying to recast Dracula as Barnabas Collins. Like House of Dark Shadows, Curtis even sought to build a Gothic atmosphere by filming in real locations, albeit now Eastern Europe. The result was effective in those scenes, even if the rest of the movie failed in no small part because Palance could never wear the tragic cloak so well as Frid.

In spite of its shortcomings, many have fairly speculated on whether Curtis’ Dracula influenced James V. Hart, the screenwriter of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Hart was certainly more successful at turning Dracula into a lovelorn prince, and Coppola made that idea permanent in the pop culture imagination. Yet, at the end of the day, they were still remaking the pop culture image of Dracula so as to be closer in line with Barnabas Collins, instead of the other way around.

I would even argue that Coppola’s film is closer in tone with Dark Shadows, at least in its romantic moments, than Tim Burton’s big budget Dark Shadows movie was in 2012. Burton of course attempted to avoid some of the mistakes of House of Dark Shadows, namely by keeping Barnabas as the good guy who is trying to save his family instead of ultimately destroying them, as well as retaining the other fan favorite character, the witchy Angelique (who like all other non-vampire elements was omitted from House of Dark Shadows). But Burton also played her and the whole concept as pure camp, making the Collins’ a subject of ridicule, and their problems a punchline.

Admittedly, there is something faintly camp about the 1960s daytime series and its ‘70s drive-in remake; plots turn on ludicrous developments like Julia falling in love with Barnabas, and then intentionally sabotaging his vampire cure when she realizes he loves a younger woman. But they were sold with absolute sincerity, and in the case of Frid, a palatable conviction.

House of Dark Shadows continues that conviction, no matter how batshit things become. Thus the ending where, accepting he’ll never be cured, Barnabas transforms family patriarch Roger Collins (Louis Edmonds) and even the film’s version of Van Helsing (Thayer David) into vampires. And we get to a finale so madcap that it turns “Renfield” into the last remaining hero. Madness, indeed.

Ironically, House of Dark Shadows was blamed by some for the eventual death of the series. Every character in the film, including Barnabas, had to be written out of the show, for some weeks at a time, so the actors could go shoot a movie upstate (another reason Angelique and other significant characters were left out). This correlated with some of the series’ weaker storylines that lost audiences’ attention.

Additionally, it’s believed parents who went with their children to see the movie in October 1970 were appalled by the amount of blood and sensual subtext in the film. As a result, some may have forbidden their kids from watching the series further… with the show getting cancelled in April 1971.

“The TV ratings fell after the movie,” Scott’s The Dark Shadows Companion revealed. “It has been suggested by some that House of Dark Shadows led to the series’ eventual demise. Perhaps it was the audience’s reaction to seeing their hero Barnabas in an evil light. Perhaps it was because parents attended House of Dark Shadows with their children and, seeing the amount of blood spilled across the screen, discouraged their children’s choice of television viewing material.”

Star Frid was even more unsparing in his final analysis.

“[The film] lacked the charm and naivete of the soap opera,” Frid said. “Every once in a while the show coalesced into a Brigadoonish never-never-land. It wasn’t necessary to bring the rest of the world into Dark Shadows, which is what the film did.”

Nevertheless, both the series and movie left a few marks on the throat of pop culture. The series certainly paved the way for more multidimensional portraits of vampires to be explored, opening the door for, yes, the Coppola Dracula movie, but also Anne Rice and True Blood. In fact, even if House of Dark Shadows might’ve been considered too brutal by parents in 1970, decades of pop culture refinement would find a way to make the sympathetic vampire archetype much more tolerable when instead of drinking from his cousin, he sparkled in the daylight and told his prey they needed to wait until marriage.

Without Barnabas, his series, and his slice of bananas role is House of Dark Shadows, we may never have gotten Lestat, Edward Cullen, or Gary Oldman’s Dracula. At least not as how we know them. Fifty years on, that’s a bloody good legacy for a daytime drama and a B-movie you’ve never seen.

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gusogames-blog · 6 years ago

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Red Dead Redmeption 2: Big, But Why?

Red Dead Redemption 2 marks one of the most detailed and massive open world games to date. It’s also incredibly divisive. Its deliberate pace, dated controls, and dense menus hold many players back from truly enjoying the game. I would posit that the game suffers from a disparity between its form versus its function. Generally speaking in storytelling, the saying goes, “Form form follows function.” That’s to say whatever the purpose of your story is should be supported by the form your story takes. I first learned this from a film instructor in college. The concept boils down to figuring out what best fits your story and what will best magnify it. I learned it about film, but it works for any storytelling media.

When playing Red Dead Redemption 2 or RDR2 for brevity, I often found myself feeling like what I was doing wasn’t fun. Nothing about the situations spelled out that they wouldn’t or couldn’t be fun. Yet, here I was halfway bored a lot of time. The Function of RDR2 is to tell the story of Arthur Morgan, illuminate the pitfalls of being a career criminal, and the cycle of bandit-tude and critiquing the idea of an honorable thief, among other things. I think largely it was successful in terms of its story. However the form that the story took held it back from affecting its audience as much as it could. Being an open world, the game had to allow for huge breaks in the story, traveling through the world and finding a way to continue the story outside of the main missions. RDR 2 isn’t particularly good at any of those things. The story of the game doesn’t really benefit from being an open world game.

I will qualify that with the fact that Arthur’s character is explored in the open world pretty well. You see how he interacts with strangers, animals, etc. The world itself feels alive and massive. Yet somehow stilted by your lack of choices. Arthur always says what he does, save for a few choices. Your options in combat are limited. You follow the objectives of the missions to a tee. The game feels very funneled most of the time. It forces you into things which is a detriment to its story. For a game about the west’s dying freedom it actually makes quite a bit of sense.

Yet the issue with the story is that The Dutch Vanderlinde gang isn’t always in the shit. They start out in a rough spot, but you never get a feeling that they’re being closed in on. There’s a constant sense of the gang always seconds away from being caught almost all the time. Every big crime the game commits to starts out okay then goes wrong. That can describe almost every mission. The game has a big problem with letting the player have agency. Stealth missions always turn into shootouts. Arthur is always forced to fight. And that’s part of the strange part of this game. Inside Arthur’s journal you see a man who is deeply conflicted about his actions. An element of his character that doesn’t come to a head nearly as fast as you may expect.

He puts up with so much of Dutch basically shit talking him because the story demands it. And another issue with the game is the fact that the gang always needs money for this and that yet if you explore the game a bit and find some treasure, you’re carrying around thousands of dollars at any given time. It’s completely ignored. And that’s essentially what all the problems in this game boil down to. The game ignores the world and sometimes even the player.

The issue with this in terms of form vs function is that there are hidden functions of the story which are unclear to the player. A lot of people will say that a big aspect of the game and the story is that the world doesn’t care about you. The world doesn’t care about your morals or motives or desire to have snappy controls. It’s about what the world is. It’s a slow cruel world. The player is constantly belabored by the desired of the creators to have the world be “authentic” and deliberate. The story of the game suffers so much because of this. All of the characters of the game are fascinating and well-written. The world is exceptionally detailed. The story is impactful and intriguing, not to mention a great companion piece to the original Red Dead Redemption. Yet something along the way was lost in translation.

Compared to other open world games of recent times, RDR2 feels like a game made as an open world out of obligation, not to serve the story. Whereas games like the Witcher 3 take the world and make it packed to the gills with impactful and thoughtful content that informs Geralt’s character and story, Red Dead Redemption 2 fills its vast world with fairly samey tasks to complete for minor aesthetic changes or stat buffs and a few missions where Arthur helps someone. (Which are pretty interesting honestly.) Whereas a game like Metal Gear Solid V dialed in its controls and options in combat to really make you feel like Snake and pushed the series to a new territory (minus the missing third act train wreck), RDR2 decides instead to give the player few options and force them into gunfights and chases over and over because that’s a commentary on the cyclic nature of violence and crime. Maybe?

I think that the story of this game would have been more effective as a short-form, tight game with small open areas. The whole story felt like it was dragging because it constantly made us see how big the world was. You ride from on end of the map to the other and back a lot. And those horse rides, house only a small amount of interesting dialogue or gameplay. In general the game loves to make you do things the long way. It’s strange that this game is so clearly inspired by films and filmmaking, yet it lacks a clear understanding of editing and in particular cutting. So much of this game takes away from the story because it's too long or unimportant, yet still present. The job of an editor is to find the story and try to form everything around it, and RDR2 often loses the story because it just has too much fat left untrimmed.

There’s a certain magic in this game that comes through the cracks every once in a while. The epilogue of the game feels better than the main game because it isn’t afraid to condense time for example. However, these moments are surrounded by a sense of duty to a function of story that weighs down the whole game as a result. Yet despite all this, in technical achievement, and in story overall, Red Dead Redemption 2 is a good game. I just wish it was better.

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thewadapan · 6 years ago

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Are You Happy: one year later

Today marks the first anniversary of Are You Happy, a dumb web series I made in a terrible bit of animation software. In celebration, I’m... un-unlisting the series and writing a post to pat myself on the back. Huh.

Normally I wouldn’t bother with this kind of thing, but I think my own general appraisal of this series has shifted somewhat since I put it out into the world. I’ve yet to receive any feedback of any kind from the internet at large, but a few friends of mine have ended up watching it at various points - the last of whom suggested that I should “totally” make the videos public. Well, fine, now I totally have.

I’ve rewatched the series a handful of times since its release and have come to the conclusion that it’s a pretty mixed bag. I’ve come to like many of the individual episodes a lot more, but as a whole the series doesn’t come together for me. In this post, I’m gonna build on what I wrote in the original commentary by briefly shooting through the episodes one by one.

As the first episode of the series, “I Hate You” is pretty much just me getting to grips with the program. I like the way Chris storms out, gets as far as the elevator before he starts feeling bad, and comes back - only to find that, naturally, Samir also left. Back towards the tail end of secondary school, my friends and I got in the habit of just hanging around in classrooms outside of classes - the teachers weren’t technically supposed to let us do that, I think, but they did. I figure that’s what Chris and Samir are doing here - just standing about in a quiet spot. Chris does something annoying, Samir slaps him... business as usual for these two.

Anyway, I showed that first episode to one of my friends, and he helped me out with “The Meaning of Life” by offering a Genghis Khan quote and sitting around as I made it. Plotagon has relatively few options for direct interaction between characters, and I immediately pegged the “slap” action as the funniest of these. It’s even funnier when combined with a sharp cut and a scare chord.

Back in school, we had these two acronyms: WALT and WILF. These stood for “What Are (We) Learning Today” and “What I’m Looking For” and were used by our teachers to lay out the objectives for each class. I guess it seemed funny to me to go completely in the opposite direction for “What are we Learning Today?” - it’s the student who has to try and poke the teacher into giving the class any kind of information whatsoever - but the execution’s poor. This episode is funnier if you imagine the five preceding minutes of silence, during which Mr. Hernandez is having a completely undetectable internal meltdown.

I knew that the stuff I was making would be quote-unquote “in continuity” - but I wasn’t particularly expecting it to “have continuity”. That changed with “Why Nobody Likes You”, which establishes that Lizzie and Chris are friends of a sort. I like to imagine that Lizzie is one of just two people Chris ever talks to (the other being Samir), and that the only reason they interact at all is because they happen to be the only people catching their particular bus. They really have nothing in common, and struggle to hold an actual conversation - although I figure that’s mostly Chris’s fault.

A fair bit of time has probably passed in-universe between the first and second times Mr. Hernandez and Santa meet on-screen. In “A Bad Teacher”, Santa seems a little more chill - rather than sitting at a distance on the bench, he’s standing. Perhaps Mr. Hernandez just treated him to a coffee, or something, and they’ve just exited the shop. Whatever. I’ve suffered my fair share of bad teachers, and one of the things they all have in common is that they’re completely oblivious to the fact that they’re bad. It’s like... bad students exist, but if (as a teacher) you honestly think your entire class consists of bad students, that’s the point where you should realise that you’re the problem. I think that tendency to place the blame on the students is the kind of thing that leads to whole-class detentions, which are a hallmark of bad teachers.

I’d originally pegged “White-Hat Hacking” as my least-favourite episode - for reasons outside of my control, it’s the first to break the one-minute mark - but upon subsequent rewatches I’ve come to feel more positively about it. Jessica’s line about V for Vendetta and zip bombs always takes me off guard, and I like the way Detective Raymond describes himself as “the smartest and most controversial detective”. It’s also funny to me going back to the source file and seeing a ton of lines marked “JESSICA (flirty)” and a single line marked “JESSICA (surprised)”.

My opinion on “The Faculty Bathroom” hasn’t really changed. As far as self-contained concepts in this series go, “insecure teacher talks to himself while on a smoke break, then dies in a fire” is easily the strongest.

Of all the episodes, I think “Nobody to Talk To” is probably the most forgettable. It opens with Chris, who’s lamenting the destruction of the school (mostly because it means he's even more bored than usual). There’s a medal hanging above his bedside table - I like to think that he bought it himself, only to find that he couldn’t think of something to get inscribed on it. Maybe it just says “CHRIS”. Anyway, the rest of the episode is a soliloquy from Lizzie - I’m not sure how exactly the idea of her being a well-connected anarchist came about, and the way that aspect of her character is introduced here feels a little jarring in retrospect. Still, I guess this episode does slightly redeem itself with a surprise appearance from Detective Raymond.

I’m gonna have to take a few paragraphs to talk about “Ever Get Tired of Movies?” - there’s a lot that I failed to cover in the original commentary. In terms of sound design, it’s probably one of the most ambitious episodes - all the sound effects come from the TV, so there’s nothing in the way of ambient music - but I’m not convinced that having the movie drown out the dialogue at the beginning was a good choice. I still love that Katia and Philippe’s colour schemes each match those of their sides of the room; I didn’t design the characters that way!

In the last commentary, I mistakenly said that I’d forgotten to use Ms. Green - when in fact, I’d used her as the reporter in this episode. I repurposed Plotagon’s “convention booth” scene as the newsroom, which works surprisingly well - combined with Ms. Green’s dialogue, which was intended to sound entirely unlike that of an actual reporter, the overall effect is one of a really incompetent production team on the show. This is entirely accurate: the production team consists of me.

Katia and Philippe have an odd role in the narrative - they’re basically an atomic unit from a completely different story. Of the teens in the series, Philippe is the only one who’s happy with where his life is; Katia is suffering from existential boredom. I think, in showing a failure in communication between these two, the episode fails to properly communicate what’s going on to the audience: Philippe is usually content just to do the same stuff over and over - watching movies, as it may be - but that doesn’t mean that he dislikes new things, only that he’s not the sort to actively seek them out. So the conflict is that Katia is doing the same stuff because she wants Philippe to be happy, while Philippe is fully expecting Katia to be pushing for new things - which she finally does here, when she suggests breaking Lizzie out of jail. Another aspect of this dynamic which I think is unclear is the fact that Philippe’s happy to do pretty much anything - including literal crime - but draws the line at taking off his sunglasses. Katia’s presumably been trying to get him to do so for months; her narrativist instincts are telling her that he must be hiding something. I figure he’s not - he just really likes his sunglasses.

Anyway, enough of that. “The Easy Way” is another fairly-forgettable plot-centric episode - but I like the way it handles the third and final appearance of Santa, who at first glance seems to have no reason to be at the office. The reveal that the whole thing’s been a distraction for the breakout is probably the closest the series comes to ever having a plot twist - I think it sits very well in the series as a whole, which (for technical reasons) never shows the big, important moments on-screen. I’m pretty proud of Santa’s monologue, which I wrote myself as a bookend to his opening quote, and the little glimpses of his history given within. I also like the moment towards the middle of the episode, where Detective Raymond - having been left to his own devices - wonders aloud “how can one man be so based”, right after threatening a teenager with torture and right before getting duped by a homeless man in a Santa suit.

Getting four characters into a single scene was a real challenge, let me tell ya, but I think “The Agenda (Part 1)” pulls it off decently enough. It offers some decent closure for the minor characters: Katia and Philippe get their adventure; Jessica’s mad hacks keep the cops off their backs. I think Lizzie’s “true power of love” realisation is a sincere one, but she won’t get her closure until a little later. Her expression upon seeing Chris again strikes me as similarly sincere. By this point, I’m banking on the audience having forgotten about Samir - so Lizzie’s actual goal here should come as something of a surprise.

In “The Agenda (Part 2)”, the penultimate episode, the series comes full circle. There isn’t really much to say about this one; the way Chris and Samir make up is pretty much the same as the way they fell out in the first place. Lizzie is just a facilitator here - she’s still planning to leave, but this time has decided that she doesn’t want to leave Chris entirely on his own.

Finally, in “The Agenda (Part III)”, we end up back at the bus stop, where Lizzie talks to Literally The Devil - who turns out to be a much better conversational partner than Chris ever was. This episode tries to strike a balance between jokes and introspection, but I don’t really think that it properly achieves either. Still, Lizzie’s shift to optimistic nihilism here feels like a good conclusion to her arc within the series.

It’s obvious that I was writing Are You Happy by the seat of my pants. While this lead to a pretty unpredictable plot, it lead to fairly poor economy of narrative. Although many of the characters get rudimentary arcs of their own, there isn’t a clear throughline which connects them all - I didn’t know what I wanted to say with this series, and so it ended up saying pretty much nothing.

On the other hand, this is just fifteen minutes of content - and I think it packs a lot of individually-quite-good snippets into that runtime. Usually, when I’m writing something, I hit a point where it starts to be a chore; that wasn’t really the case with Are You Happy, thanks to the fast turnaround provided by Plotagon and - perhaps more importantly - the fact that I didn’t need to worry about writing full descriptive prose.

Plotagon provided a huge amount of great background music - seeing as I didn’t go into detail in the last commentary, here’s a breakdown of which pieces I used:

“cruising rap battle” is something of a leitmotif for Chris, appearing during “I Hate You”, “The Agenda (Part 2)” and his scene in “Nobody to Talk To”

Lizzie, meanwhile, has “hideout”, which appears during “Why Nobody Likes You”, her scene in “Nobody to Talk To”, and the final scene in “The Agenda (Part 1)”

Santa naturally has “jingle bells” for all three of his appearances

I guess you could say that “happy music (care free)” from “What are we Learning Today?” is technically a Mr. Hernandez song, but I’d consider this to be more true of “sentimental” which plays throughout “The Faculty Bathroom”

Detective Raymond’s theme is “Detective Noir background”, which appears during the endings of “White-Hat Hacking” and “Nobody to Talk To”

Jessica gets two songs - “pirate ditty” and “suspenseful”, appearing in “White-Hat Hacking” and “The Easy Way” respectively

Katia and Philippe technically get “zombie theme” and “news intro” in “Ever Get Tired of Movies?”, but that’s just the stuff that plays from the TV - it’s not until “The Agenda (Part 1)” that they get “anticipating”, which I consider to be theirs

Fitting neatly with the vague stabs at liminality present in “The Agenda (Part III)”, Literally The Devil gets “muzak”: elevator music

Other bits of music include “lounge” in the actual elevator in “I Hate You” and “french bistro” for the cafe in “The Meaning of Life”

Upon booting up Plotagon, I was greeted with the disconcerting news that it’s being discontinued on desktop at the end of next month - ostensibly so the developers can focus on mobile platforms, although I can’t help but notice that this announcement was shortly followed by a flash sale on their “Plotagon Studio” subscription service for desktop: just $49.99 monthly, or $499.99 annually! Yeah, uhh, I’m good. This is pretty disappointing, but not entirely surprising - I’ve always kinda felt like the software was about to disappear in a poof of smoke, and now it kinda has.

However, I was also greeted with some good news: apparently, it turns out that I’d previously revisited the program all the way back on the 21st of September last year, to start work on a sequel to Are You Happy. Although I knew that I’d made vague plans to do so, I’d completely forgotten that I’d actually gone ahead and produced any new material! The sequel will likely share a portion of its cast with the original series, but based on what I’ve currently got it’ll probably end up dealing with pretty different themes.

With any luck, the application will continue to work offline past that date - but just in case it doesn’t, I’m going to try and accelerate production on the sequel. Don’t get your hopes up. If I can’t finish it, or I’m not happy with it, I’ll still try and put it out - but it’ll be more as a “bonus feature” than as a fully-fledged instalment in the continuity. More importantly, as is the case with everything made in Plotagon, I can’t promise it’ll be good - I can only promise that I’ll have fun making it.

#Plotagon #animation #web series #Are You Happy #The Wadapan #31/05/2019

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peppermint-shamrock · 8 years ago

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Fic Recs

So there’s an event going on called “Fic Rec Days”, I thought I would do my best to participate. To be entirely honest, I don’t read that much fanfiction these days, as I prefer writing it. Still, I tried to put together a list of fics to recommend! (No particular order).

Worst Case Scenario

Author: Xparrot

Fandom: YGO DM

Summary: An experiment gone awry sends Kaiba through time to unexpected, unacceptable future.

Pairings: None, really. Slight implication that Jou and Mai got together but Mai is never mentioned by name.

My thoughts: Man does this fic have some unfortunate implications for the ending of DSOD. It was written more than 10 years ago but it’s eerie how little would have to be changed to make this be set post-DSOD - Mokuba’s plea for assurance going unanswered seems all the more ominous when I think about this fic.

The story is fairly straightforward, Kaiba accidentally travels to 30 years in the future, finds he can’t get back, and that things have changed for the worse. The twist was pretty obvious from early on (at least for me...and I’ve probably spoiled it for you just with explaining my thoughts on it...not really any way to express that without giving it away though). There’s some humor, and some emotional/angsty parts, and overall things are resolved fairly easily. It’s enjoyable, but like I said, the real draw of it for me now is juxtaposing it with DSOD.

Violin

Author: HakureiRyuu

Fandom: YGO DM

Summary: A few drumbeats accentuated the lyrics, and as the second verse flowed into the chorus, the violin began its soft melody again, a different tune this time. It actually seemed a bit more confident, more willing to take the spotlight, and Anzu found herself encouraging the little instrument. It was so easily overlooked, its quiet little melody overshadowed by the louder instruments, but beautiful all the same...Oh my god... With all the subtlety of a ton of bricks, the realization hit her.She wasn't thinking about the violin at all.

Pairings: Peachshipping

My thoughts: This is a lovely fic about Anzu realizing that she’s in love with Yuugi. It’s beautifully written and flows really well, incorporating Anzu’s thoughts about the music she’s listening to with her thoughts about Yuugi, with some nice little flashbacks, both about things that happened in the series, as well as other things, like Anzu’s dream to become a dancer being sparked by an opera. I like it because it focuses on that period of confusion between when she realizes it and when she accepts it - it’s not an immediate thing. Which I think reflects how it would take Anzu to realize this.

Brief Interviews with Best Friends

Author: jkateel

Fandom: YGO DM

Summary: After Doma, the U.S. Navy conducts interviews with Jounouchi, Honda, Anzu and Kaiba in regards to Yuugi Mutou. All reports and information should be treated as classified material.

Pairings: none

My thoughts: This is the funniest fic. Well, Anzu’s chapter isn’t quite so funny as the others, but overall it’s pretty funny. Jounouchi wants food, Honda goes on a rant about Americans being rude, Kaiba is completely uncooperative (the top of the “brief” says “Who the hell let a teenager have their own company?”), and they make the mistake of trying to intimidate poor Yuugi.

The Right Present

Author: kajoqixuye

Fandom: YGO S0

Summary: It's Christmas time at Domino High, and Yugi's thinking of getting a present for Anzu. But another classmate has plans involving Anzu and Christmas…and Yugi's not part of them. When he tricks Yugi (and beats him up, of course), it's up to Yugi's other self to set things right…and get revenge. Oneshot.

Pairings: Peachshipping

My thoughts: Great characterization in this fic, and I love the game that Atem plays with the bad guy - it’s reminiscent of the talent show ep. And I’m always one for cute peachshipping moments!

Sight the King

Author: olesia.love

Fandom: YGO S0

Summary: After Yuugi wakes up at the scene of a crime with blood on his hands and a voice in his head, there's only one thing he can do: Run.

Pairings: Puzzleshipping

My thoughts: This is probably one of the best puzzleshipping fics out there. It’s done really well, and doesn’t suffer from the usual tropes that plague puzzle fics - Yuugi is quite capable here. There is smut in one of the chapters, but this author actually follows fanfiction.net rules about that and it’s blocked out. It’s very compelling, I love the plot - it’s not just romance. There are a few things that don’t really do it for me (the last few chapters were weird, it felt like the conflict had already been resolved so this new one didn’t need to be there, but it’s a minor complaint). And Jounouchi dies early on :(

Identity Theft

Author: My Misguided Fairytale

Fandom: YGO DM

Summary: Was it really only a change of clothes that made him either the Lord of a manor or a penniless vagrant? / Regency Era England AU

Pairings: Encourageshipping

My thoughts: This is the best. Yuugi and Atem swap places, Anzu is confused and mad at everyone. All ends in a confession of desire. It’s great. Please read it. Also one of the few encourageshipping fics aside from my own where it’s actually all three of them (although it’s still mostly focused on Anzu with both of the boys, there’s attraction acknowledged between the boys as well - not that I mind just Anzu with the two boys, but I prefer all three of them together).

(æ)mæth

Author: Kim Chang-Ra

Fandom: YGO ARC V

Summary: Hokuto has been sealed into a card. Yaiba is still recovering from his loss to Isao. And Masumi, left with Akaba Himika's unsettling revelations of interdimensional invaders, is starting to have nightmares.

Pairings: None

My thoughts: I LOVE THIS FIC. It’s honestly my favorite, the most compelling fanfiction I have ever read. And not just because it’s focused on my favorite, often-ignored, minor character (Masumi). It’s just so well written. I’ve rarely seen someone attempt to write duels, let alone write them so well. This is also the fic that changed my mind on OCs in fanfic - the author does them so well, gets you very invested in his OCs, and incorporates them well enough into the fic that they don’t take over but that they feel relevant. I feel more than anything that it really captures the heart of YGO, with its’ themes, tone, and plot twists.

I just really, really love it.

I also suggest you check these cool people out:

@starmiracle (FFN link), who writes lots of lovely peachshipping, revolutionshipping, and encourageshipping!

@reijiakabutt (AO3 link), who writes great stories for Arc V, and who made me ship robustshipping.

@homura-bakura (AO3 link), who writes SO MUCH great stuff, for all the YGO.

#fanfiction #ficrecdays #long post

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