#but they demonstrate a lot of connection throughout the series and i absolutely can picture them having a conversation about it | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

fermented-writers-block · 6 years ago

Text

Why I think the actual Angel is Noelle Holiday

After nine months of research, procrastination, and working out the kinks, here’s a little theory of mine that’s been floating around in my head ever since the end of last November about Noelle Holiday and her potential role in the future of the series. It’s a bit of a long read, but I hope you’ll be willing to indulge me and give this crazy theory a chance.

As a forewarning, the following points I will be bringing up are simply too hefty to make a TLDR for, and it’s quite a long read, but trust me, you’re going to want to read through all of it for it to make sense in the end

Part 1: The Possible Evolution of the Delta Rune

First off, I’d like to look at the Delta Rune itself and a few easily overlooked key lines Gerson says about it:

That emblem actually predates written history.

The original meaning has been lost to time…

All we know is that the triangles symbolize us monsters below, and the winged circle above symbolizes…

Somethin' else.

The meaning and design of symbols can change over time, and it’s likely the same has happened to the way the Delta Rune is currently interpreted compared to when it first came into existence. For example, take a look at these variations of the Delta Rune:

Of these variations of the Delta Rune, these may be some of the oldest or closest iterations of the symbol to the original design, especially the ones from the intro cutscene and Gerson’s shop. The former is presumably from long before the Human-Monster War and thus the oldest version, and with Gerson’s apparent age and how he implies that he studies history, it is likely that the variation in his shop is also as close as can be to the original.

As for how these particular iterations of the Delta Rune fit into my theory, look at the design and positioning of the wings in these probably older iterations compared to likely more modern interpretations:

On the more recent interpretations, the base of the wings are placed around the same level as the center of the circle, and the wings themselves are mostly realistically designed. However, on the older interpretations, the wings are more simplified and stylized with more of an explicit arc to them, and the ‘feathers’ are more blocky with visible and sometimes significant spaces in between. Now keep that in mind when looking at these pictures:

Taking this into account, I think it is possible that - through the help of time and redesigns becoming successively more stylized - what was originally supposed to be a reindeer with antlers slowly got distorted and misremembered as a ‘winged circle.”

And maybe, something like this might even apply to Deltarune’s version of the Delta Rune as well given how several of the depictions of the Angel throughout the game look like the transition point between the older and newer designs, what with the ‘feathers’ being much rounder and closer together while still on an arc-based stylized design instead of a realistic wing-like design:

Part 2: The Origins of Modern Christmas

Now, with that established, let’s take a closer look at Noelle and her family.

Besides the obvious exception of Lancer, she has the most dialogue of all the NPCs, gets two entire scenes to herself in the hospital with her dad and outside her house to flesh out her character and crush on Susie compared to several other NPCs getting only a few lines of dialogue at most, and it is absolutely required to talk to her at the beginning of the game in order to even progress and end up in the Dark World.

As many other posts than mine have demonstrated, this suspicious level of detail has led a lot of people to theorize that Noelle will be an important character and that she might even be playable later on, a theory which has certainly been helped by Toby Fox’s original concept art of “THE FUN GANG” showing that her character has been in development for a LONG time - perhaps even from when work on Deltarune was just beginning - and that she may have been designed as a main character from the start.

However, much like how the potential origins of Undertale’s Delta Rune point towards the importance of reindeer in the series, I believe the deeper origins behind the names of the Holiday family similarly point towards Noelle’s true role in Deltarune.

Obviously, the name Rudy is a clear reference to the famous Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, and Dess is most likely a reference to how Christmas is celebrated in the month of December. However, as Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer was created in 1939 for the Montgomery Ward department store chain, he is actually a relatively new addition to the list of Santa’s reindeer, whom in of themselves are early 19th Century additions to the image of Santa Claus - a figure tracing back to the 4th Century Christian bishop Saint Nicholas.

And on Jesus’ birth being on the 25th of December for Dess’ name, from what I’ve gathered with my google-fu, the event may have actually taken place less on December 25 and more during the fall or spring due to mentions of shepherds tending to their sheep in the scripture as well as from several attempts to connect the Star of Bethlehem with recorded astronomical events.

In fact, it seems likely that - in the 4th Century - the church might have actually chosen the date either because of coming to the conclusion that Jesus’ conception took place on the spring solstice - aka March 25, nine months before December 25 - or because they wanted to increase the popularity of Christianity through adopting and appropriating pagan winter solstice festivals like the Yule and Saturnalia holidays around the same time of year.

On the flipside, Noelle is a name that has a particularly distinct connection to Christmas; specifically, to the one for whom the holiday is named for in the first place rather than a recent secular addition or the general time in which said holiday is celebrated.

From what I’ve seen, Noelle as a name traces back to the French word ‘noel,’ which - alongside referring to Christmas carols - is a variant form of the word ‘Nael.’ This form comes from the noun use of the Latin adjective natalis, meaning of, or belonging to, one’s birth. The noun use (from natalis dies, day of birth) denoted a birthday, an anniversary, a commemorative festival, hence in ecclesiastical Latin the festival of the nativity of Christ, Christmas.

Basically, out of all the names of the Holiday family, Noelle’s is the one that most directly ties into the actual origins of Christmas in how the name’s origins heavily revolve around the birth of Jesus Christ, a major religious figure who was to be a sacrifice for humanity’s sins and to provide a way into heaven.

Considering Toby Fox’s attention to hidden details and deeper meanings and how angels are heavily associated with and are depicted in Christianity - particularly in relation to Jesus - there may be further significance to Toby picking a name that’s typically given to girls born around or on Christmas day. After all, even if it may or may not be the actual day of Jesus’ birth, it is widely celebrated and recognized as such.

However, as you’ll see at the end, I think there’s even another layer of meaning to Noelle Holiday’s name than just this one.

Part 3: Reindeer in Undertale

On a slightly different topic, while it’s hard to ignore how more prominently featured Christmas iconography and figures in the foreground of the series - what with the introduction of the Holiday family as well as several jokes about “Krismas” and Santa Claus in Deltarune, I believe it may also be important to pay attention to Undertale’s fair share of Christmas-themed details.

Namely, in how a significant amount of them owe their existence to one specific minor character; aka the rather unusually designed Gyftrot.

In contrast to the handful of implications that Asgore is the Underground’s Santa only being implicitly hinted at through extended dialogue and checking his bureau, Snowdin’s tradition of putting presents under decorated trees is blatantly and conspicuously out in the open.

And as Gift Bear explains if you talk to them, said tradition originated not with wherever Asgore’s Santa outfit and apparent moonlighting came from, but rather came about in the first place as a way to make Gyftrot feel better after some teens decorated his horns.

As to why I am calling Gyftrot unusually designed, it is because of his rounded head and sideways mouth - a trait only seen elsewhere in the DT Extraction Machine, Photoshop Flowey, and Sans’ Gaster Blasters.

Of all the conversations and theories I’ve seen about this strange detail, most people were only able to come up with the explanation that Toby simply liked the design and reused it for Gyftrot just for fun without any deeper meaning to it, or that Toby unintentionally gave it to Gyftrot while making Undertale.

However, a third explanation I found is that Gyftrot’s design may actually be foreshadowing for what Photoshop Flowey’s appearance looks like, what with how Gyftrot actually seems to have a second pair of eyes at the base of his antlers, and how one of the decorations he spawns with is a picture between his four eyes in a very similar position to the television screen on Photoshop Flowey.

To my knowledge, this explanation and comparison has only been made in conjunction by two people, with user u/Peridotthepie providing the explanation and and user u/pleasespellicup providing the following picture in the linked post.

While I can’t see any other possible parallels between the two to fully call this foreshadowing - especially with how the picture decoration isn’t guaranteed to show up on every playthrough and how obscure it is - I’d like to propose the idea that the DT Extraction Machine (and perhaps the Gaster Blasters by extension) may very well be based on Gyftrot or a relative with a similar design in-universe.

After all, not even boss monsters leave behind anything more than a pile of dust when they die, not even a goat-like skull that could be used as a reference, whereas Gyftrot is a living, walking example of such a design, complete with what even seems to be a SOUL-shaped hole in his mouth.

Not only that, but given how attentive to detail and deeper meanings Toby has shown himself to be as well as the increased prominence and importance of reindeer/Christmas themes in general for Deltarune, I find it incredibly unlikely that this design choice was made just for fun or as an accident.

On a bit of a side note, it is interesting that we first learned of the name “Rudy” in a post from September 17, 2017 on Undertale’s 2nd anniversary and alarm clock app.

Considering the apparent parallels between Undertale and Deltarune - for example, the potential connection between Susie and the ‘Suzy’ character mentioned by Clam Girl, who appears to have ties to Gaster - and the implications of the dialogue in that post, it’s likely that Undertale Rudy is also a reindeer just like his counterpart, and I would not be surprised if he was also related to Gyftrot as well.

As for what the exact deeper meaning or in-universe explanation behind Gyftrot could be, it’s too early to tell, but I have the feeling that it likely ties heavily into Noelle’s circumstances in Deltarune and some of the effects of the DT Extraction Machine on Undertale’s plot as detailed below.

Part 4: Determining Other Connections

To explain what I’m talking about, let’s take a closer look at a few key lab entries by Alphys, starting with this one:

ENTRY NUMBER 5: I've done it. Using the blueprints, I've extracted it from the human SOULs. I believe this is what gives their SOULs the strength to persist after death. The will to keep living... The resolve to change fate. Let's call this power... "Determination."*

While not explicitly confirmed, from the name and surrounding context, it is likely that the blueprints Alphys used were for the DT Extraction Machine and that DT stands for Determination, though it is unknown whether Alphys built the machine from the blueprints or if it was already constructed and she merely used the blueprints to operate it.

Either way, as we all know, things went horribly wrong from there. Alphys had accidentally turned those who had “fallen down” into the Amalgamates, created Flowey from the flower whose seeds Asriel had brought from the surface, and fell into a nervous downward spiral while wracked with guilt.

Now, I want to focus on just how the Amalgamates had been created, particularly with these entries:

ENTRY NUMBER 6: ASGORE asked everyone outside the city for monsters that had "fallen down." Their bodies came in today. They're still comatose... And soon, they'll all turn into dust. But what happens if I inject "determination" into them? If their SOULS persist after they perish, then... Freedom might be closer than we all thought.

ENTRY NUMBER 12: nothing is happening. i don't know what to do. i'll just keep injecting everything with "determination." i want this to work.

ENTRY NUMBER 17: monsters' physical forms can't handle "determination" like humans can. with too much determination, our bodies begin to break down. everyone's melted together…

Here, I’d like to draw your attention to a few things. Given the surrounding context, “falling down” seems to be a condition - one that potentially originates from age, injury, or some kind of illness - involving or causes monsters to enter a comatose state and eventually die.

And in Entry 17, there is the interesting wording of the line “with too much determination, our bodies begin to break down.” From how it’s phrased, it seems that, instead of melting from any amount of Determination in their systems whatsoever, monsters can handle Determination without having to fear of their bodies breaking down, though obviously there’s a cap to how much they are able to handle.

As for why I’m making this particular distinction, it’s because of Noelle’s situation with her father and how it may proceed beyond Chapter 1 in the future.

With the implication that Undertale Rudy had passed away a while ago, Deltarune Rudy’s conversations with and about Noelle, and Deltarune’s apparent theme of choices not mattering - or at least, not in the long run - it seems pretty likely that DR Rudy is suffering from a case of the foreboding coughs of death and that he may even “fall down” later on.

As such, it wouldn’t be surprising if his condition keeps worsening all the way until he ends up on his deathbed/in a coma/legitimately dead no matter what the doctors or Noelle and such do to help, and neither would it be surprising for her to be seriously affected and react in a severe way as a result.

I mean, Rudy openly talks about how everything scares her, even ironically Santa Claus, and as the classroom scene demonstrates, she has trouble mustering up the courage and confidence to assert herself to the point where even Alphys asks her to speak up.

Considering that her father openly talks about how defenseless she is and how he worries about not being able to protect her from his hospital bed, his death/apparently inevitable upcoming death would no doubt drastically impact her, especially if she attempted as much as she could to stop it to no avail.

Sometimes, one can be driven to desperation to do crazy things as a result of love and worry, and Noelle may very well do the same out of love for her father. If at least some of Undertale’s rules about SOULS and monsters also apply to the world of Deltarune, then there may only be one way - or at the very least, what she feels might be the only option left - in the end for Noelle to potentially give her father the strength to persist and the will to keep living, perhaps even after death.

Or in other words, potentially through extracting enough Determination from a human SOUL to inject into and potentially save her father/bring him back to life.

If the SOUL we the players control is or is close enough to a human SOUL to work, no other human characters/SOULS pop up later, and Noelle somehow finds out about the power of Determination and becomes resolved to use it, then there may be few - if any - things we will be able to do to dissuade her from going after Kris/wherever the SOUL we control goes.

Now, this is where what I think could be the second meaning behind Noelle’s name points would come into play, and in quite an important way.

For those that don’t know, if you enter Susie, Kris, or Noelle as the creator’s name in Deltarune’s introduction, you get the interesting following response:

“YOU ARE ABOUT TO MEET SOMEONE VERY, VERY WONDERFUL.”

With how anagrams appear to be a major theme of Deltarune in both a naming and worldbuilding sense, it's rather curious that of these three names, only two make any actually sensible anagrams. Kris and Susie can be turned into "risk" and "issue,” but Noelle oddly appears to buck the trend.

However, I think the answer for this ties back to Lab Entry 17. You see, in toxicology research terms, Alphys had injected more than “the highest dose at which there was not an observed toxic or adverse effect.”

Interestingly, this level of dosage is known as the No Observable Adverse Effect Level, or the term NOAEL for short. And sometimes, when describing and looking for an effect in general than just specifically adverse ones, the term used in toxicology reports is the No Observable Effect Level, or NOEL.

Basically, if Noelle hopes to save her father, she needs to make sure to not inject too much or too little Determination. Otherwise, she’d go below the NOEL, where Ruby would simply not have enough strength to keep living, or above the NOAEL, where Rudy would seem to be fine for a while at first before inevitably melting down.

And with that, Noelle’s strangely un-anagramable name can be reconciled with Kris and Susie’s, all three names relating to terms often used to describe something problematic in a scientific way.

In fact, one could even say that the terms their names correspond to sound like they would fit very well in a lab or experiment report, perhaps one involving interesting increases in darkness, like an imbalance in Dark Fountains…

Part 5: Conclusions

Of course, I do realize that that last bit is quite a stretch to suggest, even in comparison to the rest of my theory and particularly the latter half of the above section. As of now, there’s no real way of telling how these details actually connect in this way or if they really even connect to each other in the first place, let alone if they even operate on similar enough rules like my theory presumes.

Heck, with the shortage of clear definitive details about W.D. Gaster, the apparent differences between the worlds of Deltarune and Undertale, and how things may change or have already changed in development in between games and chapters, it’s entirely possible that the series will take a very different direction than the one laid out here.

Perhaps we haven’t even heard of the character who is the actual Angel and everything we’ve seen so far are just red herrings. Maybe Ralsei’s legend will be revealed to have been falsified and he and/or Asriel will turn out to be the Angel like commonly theorized. For all we know, the world of Deltarune might not even precede OR succeed Undertale’s, and it’ll turn out that both worlds are derived from a third, unaltered world/timeline.

But whatever it may be, at the point we currently are at now, I find that my most likely candidate for the Angel is Noelle Holiday. On their own, the details supporting my theory would be easy to disregard and aur tenuous at best when taken by themselves, but when taken together as a whole, it’s hard to deny that they VERY much look like they start to frame a pretty concerning picture about the exact role of reindeer across the entire series.

I mean, even if stuff like Determination turn out to not exist - or at least, don’t work the same way they do in Undertale at all - in Deltarune, the following general sequence of events seem likely to happen for me; that Rudy might get worse to the point of almost dying/actually dying, that Noelle might turn to something just as equally rather dangerous or desperate as extracting Determination in order to save/bring back her father, and that what she does may involve/cause her to somehow become the Angel.

Besides, like we can see from the introduction to Deltarune Chapter 1, it would be much like Toby to play with our expectations from Undertale and set us up to suspect that Ralsei or Asriel may be the Angel while he sets up the real Angel elsewhere.

After all, just about every good magic trick and literature twist relies on the art of misdirection at least in some part, subtly distracting the audience while the real clues are being built up in plain sight.

Like, for example, using the power of fluffy boys to deflect attention from the reindeer in the background.

#deltarune #undertale #deltarune theory #deltarune noelle #noelle holiday #delta rune #the angel #aka: toby’s bamboozled us again folks

99 notes · View notes

vrainsrewatch · 5 years ago

Text

episode 9 thoughts

revolver vs playmaker round 1 hype! i somehow took another 19 screenshots this episode, even though it was mostly dueling. i guess these are just getting longer as the plot picks up, lol.

so first off:

this line, plus the little montage that follows it, i love. i love how they demonstrate what is going on in his head without telling us straight up yet. i love the air of mystery vrains managed to keep for it’s first season. we didn’t learn about our protag’s backstory until episode 20 or so. that’s so cool!

but yeah, yeah, mr. emissary of revenge.

i’ll talk a bit more about yusaku later. this is our first full episode with revolver, so he’ll be what i talk a lot about for this one. first off,

this line makes me laugh so much now that i know what’s to come. yeah, you didn’t care who he was at first, but later on you care so much that you risk eeeeeeeverything because of it, you absolute fool. i love you.

he also brings up the ignis, to yusaku’s surprise.

more so he acquired it and gave up trying to figure out what it is. again, i love the mystery here. how this line gets you questioning what is it? what do you know? and for me, originally, it also had me wondering are you really the bad guy here?

i love that shit. arc v has some amazing foreshadowing, but i feel like nobody really talks about how vrains actually had some and some really cool set ups, too. i don’t think it tops a5′s, no matter how... ridiculous, we’ll say, it got at the end, but this sets up the 43 reveal really nicely, because he doesn’t really explain anything else other than ignis bad here lol.

this also sets up revolver as a character pretty well, and also i did kind of laugh bc it sets up the rest of vrains, as well. everything in this show is so high stakes lol. a lot of people complained that it made some of the death scenes feel cheap, because every fuckin duel was life or death, and while i agree to an extent, it also is kinda cool when you think about how yusaku’s perspective on dueling was only challenged once, and that happened in the first 10 episodes lmao. dueling really is life or death in vrains, and i like that it doesn’t try and prove yusaku wrong for the most part on that.

moving onto everyone’s favorite meme speech:

i know people meme this to death, but i think it’s a good look at who revolver is, and sparks the beginnings of why part of the fandom thinks him an anti hero. because what he’s saying isn’t... it isn’t an evil thing to say, he’s even saying he wants people to wake up so they don’t destroy themselves and the world they’ve built, but i digress on the anti hero thing.

for another thing, though, we don’t really know right now that AI can have free will. i talked about it in my episode 1 thoughts, but vrains is a series that asks a lot of questions regarding free will, and what it means to be a human -- or to be real. revolver talks about breathing and having a heartbeat, but does that mean you don’t have emotions? your own thoughts and feelings? does that mean you can’t connect to others? revolver thinks yes, because he’s been conditioned to think of the ignis as evil and world destroying. had ai not gone off the deep end after s2, i think he would’ve come to accept that free will means that you can choose for yourself whether you’re good or bad, or whether you want to do good or bad things.

the other thing that’s interesting here is him referencing fake bonds. i think he’s talking about the KOH lackeys that they utilize throughout this season. they don’t really understand, they don’t believe in his cause, they just think he’s cool or they’re doing something cool or whatever. it’s a fairly thoughtless existence, and revolver recognizes it for what it is.

it also calls to question his relationship with his father -- the internet world is fiction. yes, the KOH were able to recreate his father’s brain into LV. but he’s essentially a dead man in the real world. he obviously understands this well, considering he’s the one that takes care of his father irl. i wonder if he holds some resentment, since it really seemed like he didn’t get to spend much time with his father until he was recreated in LV.

also, he apologizes here. you could not think much of it, but because i’m me, and clearly i like thinking way too much about everyone in this show, i’m going to do just that.

this is a stark contrast from the finale of s2, where revolver has completely lost himself and doesn’t care about anything else but fulfilling his father’s wish. it’s also a stark contrast to how he thinks of playmaker after he says his three things speech and revolver starts putting the pieces together on his identity.

he’s enjoying himself a little here,

but ultimately, he doesn’t care who he’s dueling. he himself doesn’t ever go after anyone he deems unnecessary -- hence the amount of lackeys. watching him lose himself this season all over again is going to be fun, lmao.

anyways, though,

honestly, much as i loved s3, i missed ai’s little quips like this lol. vrains has such a serious tone to it, which i love, but i also love these quick little moments of fun.

as a filthy shipper, i could go on and on about this, but i won’t. all i’ll say is i love how they are two sides of the same coin, and i love how vrains paints that picture here for us.

all we really know about yusaku so far is

1) he’s awful with people/doesn’t care about making friends 2) he’s got a strong, but self centered, sense of justice and 3) he will fulfill his mission at all costs

the reason all the revolver vs playmaker duels were so enjoyable for me, at least, was because of how determined they both were. i love a5, it was my second fave series for a long time, but reiji vs yuya never felt like this. i haven’t watched zexal yet (i know, shame me), but in 5ds, jack vs yusei had a bit of this, but they were friends at their core. best friends. and gx was a mess with the rivalries, lol, so we won’t go there. anyways, my point here is that i really, really missed that. these two felt like actual rivals.

anyways, though, then we get this:

to which ai asks how long have you been able to do this? and after a quick shot of yusaku during the lost incident, he says:

this is the biggest thing i wish they hadn’t dropped or just starting ignoring for the most part in vrains. was this why yusaku was the sixth child??? i know takeru doesn’t really have this, or at least not that i remember, but do any of the other children? spectre could sense when earth was erased -- is that because earth was born from him, or is it because of link sense to some degree? or is the LI why yusaku developed link sense? if that’s the case, what made him different? ryoken’s interference?

and speaking of ryoken when it comes to link sense,

is that where his ability to control datastorms comes from??? i know he does one single thing with the storms in s2, but is that like, it? do we ever get to hear about why he can do this? i don’t remember oof. you’d think for how much i write about him, i would know this off hand lol. but seriously, i wonder if his influence in the LI caused yusaku to gain his link sense, and if it somehow effected him, too. that would’ve been so cool to see as a mini arc, or plot point, in s2, but kmoney had to shill a certain deck LOL (i kid i love takeru a lot)

moving on again, though,

if this was how this card worked in the TCG i’d actually still have it in my rokket deck, probs LOL

i love how vrains uses the link summoning chants as a way to get into character’s heads. not as hype as other summoning chants from other series or even vrains, but i really like them.

this is obviously a reference to stardust road. it’s subtle, but it’s there, and that’s so nifty. i didn’t even realize until i was rewatching this episode today that it was a reference to stardust road, or could at least be taken that way.

also,

this. this is so funny to me. ai is so offended that revolver somehow ripped this program. also, does this imply that windy, too, ripped ai’s program? or that he gave it to windy, back before he went all corrupt-y?

then there’s more duel stuff, but this is getting really long again, so i’ll stop myself there lol. i’ll probably watch another episode or two later since it looks my tentative plans have been cancelled lol. that’s fine by me tho, i’m sleepy, and there’s nothing more relaxing then getting to watch my favorite show~

#vrains #episode 9

15 notes · View notes

kaibutsushidousha · 6 years ago

Note

What are your thoughts on Hakuno Kishinami? And you do prefer the make version or the female version? P.S. I love your blog💖

I prefer the female Hakuno (the canon Hakuno, thank you Last Encore). Anyways, I like Hakuno a lot, specially after CCC. My second favorite Type-Moon protagonist after Shirou.

Notes: This post will not contain Extella series content because I barely remember anything from Extella and never played Link. I also won’t contain any Last Encore content because Deadface is an entirely different character and I already talked about him.

Hakuno is, on many levels, not what I expected. After we’re treated to the death of the other protagonist in the prologue, we’re introduced to Hakuno as the character we choose the gender and name for. That combined with their extremely bland (although very cute/handsome) design gave me the impression of a blank slate self-insert protagonist, which is something I already commented a few times to be something I detest. When your character’s default name is an anagram for “your name is blank”(kimi no na hakushi), that’s not a good way to start. Well, Hakuno had their own dialogue/inner monologue, at least it couldn’t be as bad as Fujimaru.

Hakuno is introduced as an amnesiac Master with no noticeable talents, no ties to any other character or any wish they knew of. They decide to fight just out of the possibility that they would discover their identity along the way. Nothing interesting was done with them until the first week ends on the reveal that the loser of the Grail War die for real. It was a really trivial and obvious twist but for Hakuno’s character this changes everything.

Week 2 is where Hakuno really starts to shine as a character. Hakuno is very afraid of death but they are also (initially) just as afraid of killing. Partially because they are too good natured to casually murder someone (at first), but moreso because their lack of memories cause them to fear the possibility that the goal they forgot is not really worth taking someone’s life for it. Luckily for them, their opponent here is Sir Dan Blackmore, an old man with an already fully realized and not much else to look forward to, and most importantly a fellow kind man with experience in having to take other people’s lives. In that harsh situation, Dan advises Hakuno to try to find purpose in every battle they fight and every sacrifice they make. This is advice is pretty much the cornerstone that built Hakuno’s character.

Week 3 is another “easier” case because Alice is a cyberghost, so she wouldn’t be alive even if she won the Grail War, but Week 4 is huge to Hakuno’s for two very game-changing reasons. First is that, regardless of your choice, Hakuno’s opponent would be the first time they would knowingly kill a young living person with a long and possibly bright future ahead of them. The other big thing is the discovery that Hakuno is just a NPC that joined the War by an error.

The latter is really major because it changed everything about how Hakuno saw their situation. They could go on up until now because they believed they would remember they had a purpose that would make all the blood in their hands meaningful, but now they know that they got nothing and they were nothing. No memories and no objective. Every life they took were, by their own admission, much more valuable than their own and they needed to take even more of those to survive. Ironically enough, this very blood in their hands was one what gave them the will to keep going. Hakuno is very afraid of death, but they are even more afraid of a meaningless death, and dying without ever accomplishing anything would be giving meaningless deaths to their victims. Well, that and their experiences with their Servant giving some substance to their short life.

By the second half of /EXTRA, Hakuno’s character is already fully established and doesn’t really changes much throughout the rest of the game. Their feelings about their identity are organized and their hesitation is gone. They are terrifyingly determined to survive, to the point they can now fight and kill without questioning the morality and the consequences of their actions. But of course, that doesn’t make them blind either. There’s always full acknowledgement despite the lack of hesitation. Due to Hakuno’s lack of connection to the world, they care for the small connections they built throughout the game a lot more than they care about the full-on world war that’s defining Rin and Leo’s grand motivations. Everything Hakuno does is entirely about Hakuno and what Hakuno likes.

Hakuno summoned their Servant without a catalyst, meaning they were summoning out of compatibility, and what they got from this was either a tyrant who could only think of what she loved, a Counter Guardian who was able learn to kill without hesitation out of need, or an outright monster who sees human life in a very different way than humans do. They are all anti-heroes and that’s not without reason. Hakuno is very good natured and sympathetic, but can’t really be called a perfectly good person and doesn’t consider themself one either. In fact, Hakuno straight up calls themself evil at one point in CCC. They are a dangerous hero I could see and enjoy as a villain in some future story.

Hakuno was an amazingly enjoyable protagonist to follow and very easily one of the highest points of both /EXTRA and CCC. Not only for their compelling determination and fascinatingly questionable morality but also for their general personality too. From their bland design and blank slate nature, I expected them to have the “generic everyman” personality, especially considering Shirou and Shiki Toono also had the “generic everyman" personality underneath their trauma, but Hakuno turned out to be much more of a silly weirdo compared to them, bringing us narration gems like “Rin went from comatose to bitch in three seconds flat” or “This were I would love to call this goddess a giant hag, but I would rather not die immediately”. Easily the goofiest Type-Moon protagonist until Fujimaru decided skydrop for no reason to impress a goddess with a wrestling move.

That said, as amazing of a protagonist as Hakuno is, their character really doesn’t fit the story of Fate/EXTRA and I think the game’s biggest narrative problems trace back to Hakuno. Fate/EXTRA is a game very big on world building. There’s really a lot going on in the background with Rin, Leo and even Twice, but we never get a real close look to that world because we’re stuck in Hakuno’s perspective and Hakuno really doesn’t care about the big picture of the world they’re in. I don’t dislike that they live only for what they directly interacted with, but it really clashes with the backstory the game is trying to tell.

CCC doesn’t add much of anything new to Hakuno’s character but really makes the best of use of their established traits, reinforcing everything I liked about them while taking away what I disliked. The dungeon progression being about invanding other characters’ mental worlds does a great job in both exploring and showing the limits of Hakuno’s willingness to harm others for their goals. Their unstoppable drive to avoid a meaningless death gets full and amazing display in the interlude between chapter 4 and 5. Their silly nature is perfectly at home with the heavily comedic tone of the first half of the game. And most importantly, since CCC’s backstory is the OG /EXTRA game, we don’t have Hakuno ignoring the background in this one.

But the best trait CCC expands upon is their self-awareness, resulting into some points in the game, in their conversations with Sakura, where Hakuno presents a really well done character study on themself, tying up how they are just a nameless, pastless and futureless human who can’t fight for anything larger than themselves to how unstoppable they are. All Hakuno has is the present and their simple and real connections to the people they like, so all they can do is fighting for those people. And, fortunately for the world, their favorite type of person are the people who face any and all adversities to make others around them feel better.

I really like this establishing of Hakuno’s type, not only because it fits all 3 of the Extra Servants and Sakura (and Nightingale, but Nightingale’s role in CCC is a topic for another day), but because if really fits their story and good nature. Hakuno appreciates people capable of self-sacrifice because that’s something they don’t feel very able to do, especially in the OG Fate/EXTRA, and most of all, Hakuno appreciates kindness because that’s something their circumstances never allowed them to perform, except for the one time they saved Rin or Rani. This probably means a lot to Hakuno, since Hakuno is a very kind-hearted person who considers themself evil for doing the only thing they could to survive.

Ideally I would add an extra paragraph about Eliza’s character arc because that’s Hakuno at their best, but I couldn’t find any good place to fit and this part would be better off in an Eliza ask, so that’s pretty much all about Hakuno. For my tl;dr conclusion, I’ll go with a CCC quote that best demonstrates both Hakuno’s silly personality, self-awareness, and unstoppablenss all in one line: “Going back to search around the abandoned school or exploring the Labyrinth at this point would be insane. Luckily, I am not exactly sane.”

Thank you very much for the ask (and sorry for taking 5 months to respond, you asked my while I was still early in my CCC playthrough). I love this absolute mad(wo)man.

#fate extra #fate extra ccc #kishinami hakuno

83 notes · View notes

echodrops · 7 years ago

Text

Why Do Certain Ships Become So Popular? (And Why Should Writers Rethink When They Do?) - Part 3

<- Start at Part 1 for best understanding

<- And here’s Part 2 if you need it!

I’m going to end this discussion with a case-in-point comparing the mega-popularity of non-canon ships against semi-canon ships, and then discuss what this all means for writers, and how examining the popularity of ships in media can actually improve the way you write romance plot lines in your own works.

Pictures taken seconds before disaster

Although I’ve been reading My Hero Academia for a while, I haven’t been an active part of the fandom until recently and so there might be meta and other surrounding the series most popular ships that I’m not familiar with. But I want to talk about this series because it’s the absolute perfect model for the points I’ve been making in this whole discussion: shippers target pairs of characters with high emotional energy/tension, and the “canon” ship will always lag behind non-canon ships in popularity when the emotional energy between the romantic leads is not as strong as the tension between the male lead and another character.

My Hero Academia has the somewhat rare situation of having two almost equally popular non-canon ships for its main character: TodoDeku and BakuDeku. Technically, given what I can find using filters on AO3 and Google Trends, TodoDeku is the more popular of the two (at least in the U.S. except in Indiana; I have no idea what’s going on over there, but man they love BakuDeku) by a fair margin...

Which would actually make this a series that disproves the trend--because you can say what you want about Bakugou and his notorious assholeishness, but at the end of the day, I don’t think there are any readers who would really argue that the pair of students with the strongest emotional energy--the greatest degree of push and pull and the most effort, meaning, and time invested in their interactions--is Bakugou and Midoriya.

As I mentioned earlier, it doesn’t matter that much of the emotional energy/tension between these two characters is negative in nature (in fact, for a lot of fans that probably just sweetens the deal because it increases the potential for progress and growth so much)--rather, what matters is the depth and intensity of the emotional interactions between the two characters. There’s certainly no short supply of--at times--almost nonsensically powerful emotions between Bakugou and Midoriya. They’re Extra™ in every meaning of the word, and the manga drums that message in fairly consistently, especially in arcs in which heavily feature the class.

Get out of my school

Bakugou’s inferiority-superiority complex is fixated on Midoriya (whom, deep-down, he recognizes as a “better” hero than himself, despite the fact that everyone is constantly praising him and his powerful quirk), which means that even the most inadvertent of Midoriya’s actions triggers a reaction in Bakugou and Bakugou’s character.

Likewise, many of Midoriya’s significant plots and plot lines are driven by Bakugou--sometimes as a motivating factor (Deku is just as concerned about beating Bakugou as Bakugou is about beating him) and sometimes because the plot, rather hilariously, positions Bakugou in the role of Midoriya’s “damsel” in almost equal (actually it may even be more) proportion to the number of times Uraraka plays that role.

Bakugou and Midoriya’s combined progress is the emotional core of the student/class storyline, and they operate, in some ways, as joint protagonists whose play off each other drives the plot of the early sections of the manga, and whose rivalry fans can readily anticipate continuing to advance the main story in significant and meaningful ways. Bakugou, for example, still has plenty of growth to go through before he can really call himself a hero, and it’s only natural to assume that Midoriya, our premiere hero archetype, is going to be part of that growth--however grudgingly on Bakugou’s part.

Someone who actually ships this pairing (please don’t follow me for BakuDeku content, I got nothing guys!!) could probably go into much more detail on this and find much more support for it as a whole, but I brought it up to demonstrate that, once again, the pattern holds true: the greatest degree of emotional intensity, the core of these characters’ tensions and motivations, is another male character--and, equally on par with the pattern, they become an extremely popular ship.

But if Bakugou and Midoriya are the undisputed kings of emotional interaction energy among the students in My Hero Academia, why is TodoDeku the most popular Midoriya ship?

Well, besides the fact that Bakugou’s a grade-A asshole whose bullying crossed the lines for many fans, you can probably pretty safely blame Kirishima Eijirou.

My sunshine boy, where are the rest of your eyebrows???

In Kirishima’s emotional arc throughout the story, again, few people would argue that there’s any character more central than Bakugou.

This creates a viable ship that--importantly--plays well with others. Pairing Bakugou off with Kirishima leaves the series’ main hero free for shipping with anyone else, whether you prefer the semi-canon Deku/Uraraka or Deku/Literally-anyone-else-I’ve-even-seen-people-who-unironically-ship-him-with-Toga. In fact, this might be a little too much speculation on my part, but I almost feel like the degree of deliberate baiting this ship gets from actual staff (namely the anime and movie teams) is not only a ploy to appeal to female fans, but also an intentional way of deflecting some of the over-investment that’s gone into Bakugou and Midoriya’s storyline. Giving Bakugou someone else to focus on adds more variety to his scenes and provides Uraraka (or anyone else) a little more breathing room to interact with Midoriya.

The official media has to go this hard just so that Uraraka has any reasonable chance with Deku... Also god Bakugou, why are you so ugly in the anime...

Really, what I mean by all this is that part of TodoDeku’s popularity stems from it playing well with KiriBaku. Fans who want Midoriya with Todoroki are happy to ship KiriBaku on the side to get Bakugou out of the way, while even fans who don’t care much about Midoriya or Todoroki are happy to pair them together to free up Bakugou for their preferred Bakugou ship. It’s a symbiotic relationship, so to say, that helps elevate TodoDeku above BakuDeku in terms of popularity, even though without the presence of Kirishima, the stats would probably be skewed the other way.

That’s not to say that TodoDeku isn’t a perfectly valid ship or that it lacks the support or basis that BakuDeku has, because of course it doesn’t. It fits the pattern the same as all the other mega-popular ships do: if I were to ask “Who is the most important fellow student in Todoroki’s story?”, the answer would inevitably be Midoriya.

Todoroki is an ice prince prior to being beaten with the Friendship stick, and his choice to open up to Midoriya in a way that he hadn’t with any of his other classmates becomes the catalyst that allows him to--quite literally--thaw out and begin to have positive experiences with his fellow students.

His fight with Midoriya allows him to remember his resolve and his mother’s words that he has the power to be an individual separate from the looming shadow of his abusive father, which becomes a profound turning point in his character. In his clash with Midoriya, he opens up access to his fire side which he had previously repressed, a move which is tantamount to embracing who he is as a person, bolstering his sense of self-worth and autonomy and helping him to begin moving out from under his father’s thumb. His experience with Midoriya is, in short, utterly life-changing, and Todoroki’s character has never been the same since (for the better)--to the point that characters nowadays are teasing Todoroki about how uptight and icy he used to be.

There’s plenty of, to use the phrase again, emotional energy between Midoriya and Todoroki attracting fan attention and serving as the spark for the mega-popularity of the ship.

Bakugou is the most important fellow student in Midoriya’s storyline. Midoriya is the most important fellow student in Todoroki’s storyline. The interactions of these characters, however you choose to ship, is rich, meaningful, full of intense emotions (positive and negative), and--most importantly--strongly relevant to these characters’ individual arcs and even to the main plot overall.

But where does that leave Deku/Uraraka, the story’s semi-canon pairing and the (highly likely) endgame ship? Why is a pairing in which one of the characters has confirmed feelings for the other so far below non-canon ships in popularity?

Well, the premise holds true here--in reverse.

Say it with me, guys: the “real emotional energy” of Midoriya’s storyline has frustratingly little to do with Uraraka Ochako. She’s just not that important in his story.

The tension of Midoriya’s plot lines consistently has no personal connection to Uraraka, and all his most intense emotions and emotional scenes occur between him and other male characters. The problem I outlined in part two of this essay is in full effect here: female characters, especially in hero stories, are typically positioned in roles outside those which have major plot relevance. Uraraka might be “a hero,” but she’s not “The Hero.” She’s not the deuteragonist. She’s not the villain. She might qualify as a sidekick, except for the fact that the manga consistently prefers to pair Deku up with other male characters--such as Todoroki and Mirio--in the supporting roles. Uraraka, as a girl, simply wasn’t designed to serve in the same plot-mover-and-shaker capacity as the male characters. It’s the classic failure to write romantic female leads whose actions are central to the story, at it again.

I don’t mean that Uraraka has no impact on the plot--she did great against Kurogiri in the USJ arc, for example--nor to suggest that Uraraka isn’t a strong fighter (although of course, as a girl, she’ll never really measure up to the plot’s central males--sorry, can you feel my eyes rolling yet?). Her martial arts skills, clever use of her quirk, and, far more than that, her acumen for understanding people’s feelings mark her as a character with great potential... that’s just never really allowed to shine as much as it could be.

In her under-utilized position, Uraraka has less power and freedom to effect major changes to the main story compared to characters such as Bakugou. So far in the plot, she simply hasn’t occupied a position of importance or even enough individual screen time to put her personal arc in the spotlight heavily, at least in comparison to other characters like Todoroki, who, between himself and his family, now star in two whole arcs of their own. To quote Uraraka’s own bio, she has no “hidden side” or “ulterior motives”--two terms which might as well be synonymous with “fertile ground for creative fans to play with.” Being a simple and straightforward character is not the stuff of fan writer favorites, unfortunately.

More than that, Uraraka’s primary goal is no different than her classmates’--although she started with a somewhat interesting and unique reason for pursuing heroism (to help her parents financially), throughout the course of the series she evolves more into a character who embraces heroism for heroism’s sake. This is billed as progress, because the series comes down hard on those who seek to become heroes for their own gain. The only problem is... half the class at this point wants to become a hero because they believe in the merit of heroism itself. By growing into someone who wants to become a hero to genuinely help people and make a difference in the world, Uraraka actually becomes less unique and therefore more similar to just about everyone else in the class.

As time wears on, this problem of under-investment in Uraraka’s personal emotional journey becomes even more telling, as numerous battles for Uraraka devolve into little more than moments to reflect on her crush on Deku.

These are two separate occasions. Like are you kidding me--

If we were to remove Uraraka’s crush on Midoriya, she’d have absolutely zero tension between herself and other major characters. Literally no deeper emotional investment than “supporting friend.” It’s isn’t bad for a background character--but for what should be the main female character and romantic lead, it’s god awful. If we discount her newfound desire to punch herself in the face for jealous thoughts over Deku, Uraraka’s character hasn’t seen a lick of unique emotional growth since the Sports Festival. Worse, with her repeated entanglements with Toga, who also supposedly has a crush on Deku, I feel as if we’re almost inevitably going to get a chick fight scene in which they squabble over him. PLEASE MISS ME WITH THAT NONSENSE.

I like Uraraka. Or rather, I like what I think Uraraka could be. I want to root for her and I want to be impressed by her. But it’s hard when the writing of the story repeatedly tells me that she is less important than the male characters in her class, and that her own personal journey and motivations as a character could be reduced to “admiring the protagonist” and wanting to be like and be with him.

(“If I push down my feelings instead of accepting them, I can draw out our awkward romantic plotline for at least ten more volumes.”)

Who, at this point, isn’t motivated to greater heights of heroism by Midoriya? Even his role in her life isn’t unique to her... I almost feel bad for Horikoshi, in a way. Using other characters to inform the female lead of her romantic feelings for the hero is a classic trope that indicates a lack of experience writing and developing believable romantic plot lines. I guess when he said he wasn’t good at it, he really wasn’t lying.

The limited popularity of Deku/Uraraka plays word-for-word into the quote that sparked this entire discussion for me:

Many fans, particularly women, are disappointed by the contrived romantic story lines that are appended to ‘buddy’ series and movies in which the real emotional energy is between the heroic male leads (or between hero and villain) (McLelland 2006). [Source]

This is a classic scenario of a semi-canon het ship that, by virtue of its own under-developed female character, will never achieve the same level of support and interest among fanwork-producing members of the fandom as more emotionally invested and intense relationships such as those between the starring male characters. (Of note here: Kacchako’s number of vocal fans isn’t surprising, given that Bakugou’s refusal to treat Uraraka with kid gloves was the most respect the series itself has ever given her...)

All right, all right, I’ll stop. (By the way, if you’re a Deku/Uraraka shipper, more power to you, my friends. I really feel bad that your ship isn’t getting the meaningful development and depth it deserves. There’s nothing wrong with this ship in theory... just in practice. T_T)

SO! FINALLY! AT LAST! Speaking of practice!

What’s the lesson? What is the take-away?

I didn’t write this monster of a rant because I wanted to shit on canon ships, het ships, or (often male) writers failing to write believable women. I didn’t write it to justify my favorite slash ships.

I wrote because as I was mulling over my answers to recent conversations and after I stumbled on the quote I’ve shared repeatedly now, I had a bit of a heart attack.

I’m writer. Many of my friends are writers. I have a Masters degree in creative writing. I took seven years of creative writing in school. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words of both original work and fanfiction.

But never once have I sat down and consciously mapped out the “emotional energy” in my stories. Never once have I spent time actually examining the interactions of pairs of my characters and actively comparing them to really gauge where the core tensions and intensities in my stories really are.

I trusted in the notion that, as the author, I knew my own characters better than anyone else. If I wrote two characters in love, well then, surely it’s because they were meant to be in love.

In today’s discourse, the words “fan entitlement” are increasingly bandied around and often applied when fans get aggressive over their favorite ships not becoming canon. It’s easy to dismiss the frustrations of readers and viewers “as demanding something writers don’t owe them.” But this dismissal hinges on a central notion:

The original writer always knows best.

Whatever story the writers have written--whatever canon romances they have chosen--those are the “right ones,” and fans who piss and moan about that just “aren’t appreciating what they’ve been given.”

This is an easy mindset to understand in the face of fans who take their grievances to the extreme and harass creators. Harassment is obviously never acceptable.

But I don’t feel comfortable with the other side of the spectrum either. Blindly defending canon by completely ignoring cases where the fandom vastly prefers a non-canon ship to any canon alternatives... In the end, isn’t that the same as saying “It’s always the fans who are mistaken, never the authors”? Or, by extension: “As the author of this story, I can do no wrong.”

To me, authors who choose to simply dismiss their fans’ preferences--especially when the fans reject a canon relationship--are doing themselves a terrible disservice.

As a writer, I have never had nor wanted to have the thought that I’m perfect at what I’m doing. I am always keenly aware of the fact that my ability to write is limited. There are always things I felt I could have captured better. And more than that, I’m always trying to grow and improve my writing. I don’t want to be right all the time!

So why should I expect that my planned romances are always right?

Fans are not entitled to the ship they prefer. But if the fans prefer a ship you didn’t intend, that’s a good sign that something has gone wrong, and you might want to rethink the way you write romances, character interactions, character motivations, and potentially female characters in your next project.

A non-canon ship reaching mega-popularity in a fandom should provoke thought--not dismissal--from the series’ writers. And I don’t mean the kind of thought like “Would we have made more money if we’d caved to fan demands?” I mean things like “Where did I go wrong in writing my romance that led the fans to prefer something else? How can I fix that in the future?”

The take-away isn’t “I should give my fans what they want” but “How can I get my fans to want the same things I do?”

In order to align your fandom’s interest with the canon romance you’re writing, the canon main pair has to have meaningful, intense emotional interactions that are entwined with the central plot line or at least their own personal character development arcs--to greater or at least equal extent with any other potential pairing of characters in the story. Your romantic leads need to have interactions that are as compelling, as personal, as plot relevant as the hero and his (or her!) villain. As the hero and his or her sidekick/best friend/brother-or-sister-in-arms. It’s not enough for your main character’s romance to be “pretty interesting”--it’s got to be as interesting as his or her relationship with every other character in the story.

Now of course there are ways around this. A father-and-son story with a romance on the side doesn’t necessarily need to elevate the romance above the father-and-son dynamic. A hero and villain story where the villain is a complete monster that no one in their right mind would ship is probably safe, etc.

But I guess the basic baseline is this: If you’re bothering to write in a romance for your main character... don’t you--shouldn’t you--want it to be as compelling, intense, and believable as the relationships you write for any other characters?

If you want fans to love the love you’re written into your stories, you’ve got to give that love the same attention and effort as everything else in your plot.

How do you do this? What actual actions can you take in your writing to apply this idea? I don’t have a definitive answer that will magically make everyone’s romances perfect, and really, none of this is particularly revolutionary, but I think these are all good reminders that even when we’re writing our own original stories, there’s stuff we can do to check if we’re “doing it right”:

Make a single chart of all major character interactions in your story, especially those which provoke strong emotional responses in your characters and those which are relevant to the story’s main plot. You can mark positive emotional interactions in one color, negative emotional interactions in another. Do something to indicate the level of intensity for these interactions. Then, step back and look at the big picture. Which characters really have the most interactions? The most intense interactions? The most plot relevant interactions? If the canon romance you’re planning doesn’t have as many, as much intensity, or as much plot relevance as the relationship between your main lead and another character, think about how you can change that.

Ask yourself the important questions: Where is the real emotional energy in my story? Which characters have the most tension (positive or negative)? Which characters promote the most growth in each other through their interactions? Which characters are the real “movers and shakers” of the main plots? How do interactions with other characters help to advance Character B’s individual character growth? Spend time consciously thinking about the flow and cores of emotion in your story. Who really makes the biggest difference in your hero’s life?

Remove the romance and look at the story again. If romance is not the main point of your story, go back to your character interaction chart and remove all the romance and romantically-led plot points. What does the interaction chart look like now? Do your romantic leads still have compelling interactions even with the romance removed? Do they still motivate and help each other grow as characters even if they’re not romantic partners? Are their remaining actions relevant to the main plot? And, most importantly: with the romance removed, do they still have intensity? Are they still part of the story’s “emotional core”? Is there still as much or more energy between them than between the main character and others? If the answer is no, that’s a good sign that you can probably develop your romantic lead and his/her relationship to the hero more fully--or better integrate it into the main story and their personal stories--in order to improve the depth and quality of their relationship in the eyes of fans.

Take another look at your female characters. Even if you’re a female writer yourself, that doesn’t mean you automatically write great women. In fact, we’re often so conditioned to see males as the drivers of narratives that even series by female authors, with female protagonists sometimes fall into the trap of having a male character doing all the real heavy-lifting in the plot. Check your girls again. Do they have as much meaningful influence on the main plot as your male characters? Do they have as much meaningful influence on other characters’ personal arcs? If you remove all the romance, do they still have these influences? Are your female characters allowed to have as much diversity in their emotional interactions with others as your male characters are? Do the intensities of these women’s feelings match the intensities of the men’s feelings, even (especially) when romance is removed from the equation?

And I’m sure there are many more things you can try along the same lines.

Really, the idea I want other writers--professional, amateur original writers, or even just fan writers--to take away from this is the notion that we should never rest on our laurels and assume we know what’s what. We should never just expect our fans to agree with us as writers.

And, more than that, when the fans prefer something other than what we intended, we should always, always use that gap as motivation to rethink our writing, to discover where we might have fumbled in our plotting and character creation.

Fans don’t (usually) ship randomly. Most of the time, there’s a logic and pattern to this “madness.” If a non-canon ship becomes mega-popular, it’s usually because the fans saw something the creators missed.

And that is always--always--an opportunity to reflect and grow for future projects.

PHEW. I’M DONE! I did it! Man, this was such a labor of love... I hope some people actually read it...

809 notes · View notes

keithxhappiness · 6 years ago

Text

Voltron S8 Review (SPOILERS)

SPOILERS AHEAD FOR VOLTRON SEASON 8 PEOPLE!

OK, so I just finished Voltron Season 8. I had to watch it a day late because I went to see Into the Spiderverse (which was REVOLUTIONARY btw, I highly recommend seeing and supporting it!)

One of my biggest fears about watching it late was that something would be spoiled for me by twitter/tumblr/youtube, and although I got through it without any spoilers, I did see some general negativity surrounding the finale, without really knowing why though.

But after finishing it, I took a look at some of the comments to try to decipher what it was that made people think it was so terrible! So, here are my thoughts on the finale itself, and on peoples’ thoughts about the finale:

First, I would just like to say thank you to Voltron.

I have never been one for shipping battles, and I was never concerned with all of the controversy surrounding the political statements that could be made through the show.

My main focus was the story, and my connection to the characters, particularly Keith. No, not just because I think he’s insanely attractive.

Because, he reminds me of myself…I also struggle with trusting other people, and I often think I can do everything myself or that it would be easier if I took control of the situation. I’m not patient enough to give others a chance, which is something I recognize and am working to change.

So, Keith’s development embodies my own objectives. Which is part of the reason why I love him (the other being how HOT he is).

Keith aside, everything in this season was meant to display the core idea of this story: strength through unity. It is something I hope to truly experience one day, and I think it has been demonstrated beautifully throughout the show.

It is obvious to me that a lot of effort, thought, and work has been put into animating and producing this series, something that I am angered to see not appreciated enough.

Even when you don’t enjoy certain aspects of the story, there is NO DOUBT that the creators deserve respect. Respect needs to accompany criticism of the series, or else how can you possibly expect the creators to respect your criticisms?

So, to everyone who worked on Voltron, from the seeds of its creation to its conclusion, thank you, from the bottom of my heart, and I wish you the best in all your future endeavours.

I can’t wait to see what you come up with next :)

I guess I shall split this next part of the review into things I didn’t particularly like, and things that I liked.

Starting with the things I personally didn’t enjoy (and some other commentary):

a) Allura and Lance:

Ah yes, the dreaded Allurance. Although I said that I wasn’t heavily involved in shipping in this show, I was unfortunately all too aware of the war waged within the fandom, which frankly, was more chaotic than the war in the show itself :’)

Other than Lotura, I didn’t ship anyone with anyone else, personally. And I understood the resistance to Allura and Lance becoming a couple. I didn’t feel any chemistry between the two of them, and particularly for Allura, I only felt that she saw Lance as her family, just as she saw all the others.

Like, when he confessed to loving her in Episode 1, I felt that her reaction was something akin to “UM, cool, cool. Same here." However, there is no denying that the seeds for this union were planted from the start of the show. It would be foolish to think that this wasn’t their plan all along, really.

But somehow, it just didn’t click. I can’t wrap my head around why, though! For me, I think that I prefer the idea of two characters coming together as friends, and then romantically, if they’ve been helping one another overcome some emotional trauma. You could argue that Lance was doing that for Allura, but it didn’t really happen until this specific season, and so, it didn’t quite establish the strength of their bond in time for their romance to feel like anything but just something that happened.

ALL THAT SAID, their scenes together were still very cute…and the Altean markings she left behind on his face BROKE ME. If only the strength of their union, and their mutual love for eachother, was established a little earlier - season 6, maybe - it may have felt more right.

And when she left him behind, I expected MORE from him, resistance-wise. I didn’t like that he just…let her go, after a few tears and a kiss. I wanted him to pull her back, to offer himself instead, or to see him destroyed when they were returned to their reality.

But, I’ve never experienced this type of loss before. And, maybe, deep-down, he knew that he could do nothing to stop her. I just…wanted to see more from him.

Even when she had absorbed the entity. His role was too, too passive. A few times, he’d go “Allura, um, I don’t think this is safe…maybe we should think about this…” and Allura would respond with “No, shut up I know what im doing”, and Lance would just shut up. I wanted him to pull her and shake her and force her to come to her senses!

b) Allura’s death:

I am really sad to say that I knew this was coming.

I can’t believe the leaks were real. I guess they didn’t technically spoil anything because there was also doubt surrounding their authenticity.

And even knowing that it would happen, I AM NOT OKAY WITH IT.

I am happy that they established very early in this season the lengths to which Allura would go to stop Honerva. It was always clear that she was ready to sacrifice herself. Even when she was saying her goodbyes, she seemed to already have come to terms with the fact that her path was ending.

But, that doesn’t mean I’m happy with it.

You know, it’s interesting, I always say that I hate “happy” endings. I prefer my endings to be bitter sweet - like green tea lemonade. So, for everyone to get what they want — that to me is just too good to be true, and bothers me, because real life does not have a neat little ending like that.

So, I knew the ending had to be enveloped in some amount of loss. But for Allura to lose her life, after all that she’s lost, I had hoped she would get to keep her future.

Even without her past, that she could move forward and forge a new world for her people, and get to see that world with her own eyes. IF ANYONE deserved this, it would be Allura.

And like other people, I was really mad that she never had an opportunity to say goodbye to Coran, who was essentially her father figure, or to her own father’s soul.

So, in short, I didn’t want the “death” of the show to be Allura’s….but we don’t always get what we want…

c) Honerva:

I hated her, and not just because she was the antagonist.

The hilarious thing was that Season 8 had the exact same plot as Into the Spider-verse :’) And I still don’t understand why anyONE, crazy, evil, or otherwise, thinks that it’ll be a good idea to travel between REALITIES to find another version of your lost family.

I guess IT’S TRUE that people would do anything for their family, but it seems ridiculous to me that they wouldn’t consider the possible consequences for themselves as well their own world. It’s like time-travel. You just don’t mess with that shit.

But I also hated her as the antagonist. Her objective to me was just not compelling enough…I didn’t really feel her love for Lotor or for Zarkon. I just felt that she was cray cray.

For example, consider Castlevania: a show that excellently protrays the antagonist (Dracula’s) loss. You see why Dracula loved his family, the kind of (immortal) life he could have had.

But other than a few scenes when they were in her consciousness, I just didn’t really believe in her love.

I didn’t want to see her reunited with anyone. I just wanted her to chill out and leave my babies alone.

I also didn’t like how easy it was for Allura to sway her at the end. She seemed so weak-minded and stupid, despite having all the power that she did.

WHY DID ORIANDE EVEN CONSIDER HER WORTHY?!?!?!?!

d) Some other things:

I wasn’t a huge fan of the amount of action comprising this season. I mean, not that it’s the show’s fault - this is a space opera about giant mechs, so obviously, there are going to be space and mech battles.

But I guess I prefer ground/hand-to-hand combat. It’s hard for me to follow mech fights, and I just like sword fights. This is a matter of personal preference, though.

BUT, I will say that because there were SO MANY Robeast/mech fights, there wasn’t as much time for character-character interaction.

So, that made me sad.

So many opportunities gone - opportunities for James/Acxa and Keith to interact (esp after the Ezor/Zethrid conflict), etc.

This season was really flashy, and while I like flashy, as I said before, I also value the emotional connections between the characters a lot and wish that a greater emphasis could have been placed on them.

Things I liked:

Keith being a fearless leader

Krolia NOT dying - thank goodness for that, that was really worrying me

When Keith made his speech in EP1, and Krolia and Kolivan were smiling proudly :))

Matt (sad to see his ponytail go, but he still cayuuuute)

Lotor, all of the little Lotor scenes (AH, I JUST WANT TO ADOPT HIM AND RAISE HIM WITH LOVE) - saddened not to have seen him returned :((

The pictures at the end - happy to see everyone happy and thriving!

AND EVERYTHING ELSE NOT MENTIONED!

All in all, I think it is absolutely absurd (in the Snape voice) not to watch the season just because you heard some negative things. Don’t be as easily swayed as the Alteans were. Watch it yourself, think for yourself, and form your own opinion. Regardless of what you didn’t like, you can’t deny that this show has been a wild, beautiful ride. PEACE.

#vld s8 spoilers #vld s8 #vlds8 #vld keith

2 notes · View notes

wallpapernifty · 5 years ago

Text

10 Top Risks Of Attending Trendy Teenage Wallpaper | Trendy Teenage Wallpaper

From House Beautiful

10 trendy lock screen wallpapers simple pink #lockscreenwa .. | trendy teenage wallpaper

When Kelly Finley created her Atramentous Girl Magic dollhouse for House Beautiful’s Dollhouse Beautiful series, she included an clear wallpaper featuring able atramentous women through history. The cardboard came from Haitian architectonics close Yaël & Valérie, a aggregation with a accomplishments as absorbing as its designs.

“I began to draw the things I saw about me growing up in Haiti,” recalls architect Valérie Louis of the ancestry of her architectonics business. “I came to the ability that none of these visuals were reflected in wallpapers or fabrics.”

Pin de Claudia Beltran en Frases | Fondos de pantalla de iphone .. | trendy teenage wallpaper

So she created her own, founding Yaël & Valérie, a architectonics aggregation called for herself and her boyish daughter, and aggressive and run by women in Haiti.

“Our designs are based on Haiti’s culture,” explains Louis. “We were absolutely afar from the world, so we had to actualize our own identity: the Haitian identity. That’s why we accept our own art, architecture, language, gastronomy, dance, music.” It’s that “magical world” that Louis endeavors to appearance through her work.

Cute trendy summer backgrounds | Cute summer wallpapers, Cute .. | trendy teenage wallpaper

The aggregation makes wallpapers and fabrics, which it sells by the yard, as able-bodied as home accessories and appliance it articles in baby factories in Haiti endemic by changeable designers. “We assignment actual carefully with our artist community,” says Louis. “They accord me a lot of account in agreement of collections and accessories—we alike accept some collections called afterwards them.”

Every account begins with a hand-drawn account by Louis, which she may ally with colors or patterns apparent about her home country. The consistent adornment is both claimed and universal, a bond best apparent in Yaël & Valérie’s aboriginal collection. The band appearance notable women throughout history—from African queens to Haitian attrition fighters and American protesters. “I accomplished in creating my aboriginal accumulating [which spotlit women through history] that the challenges of all the women that I acquainted affiliated to were my own,” says Louis.

VSCO Wallpaper Love | Fondos de pantalla de iphone, Ideas de .. | trendy teenage wallpaper

That abstraction has connected to acquaint the company’s work, alike back the designs are beneath obvious. “It’s a apple appearance through the feminine lenses of my babe Yaël and myself,” explains Louis. Yaël gives final signoff on every design. Says mom, “She’s aloof 16, but she has such an eye for detail.”

Story continues

Trendy wallpaper iphone cute vintage Ideas #vintage #wallpaper .. | trendy teenage wallpaper

Follow House Beautiful on Instagram.

You Might Also Like

Trendy Cute Lock Screen Wallpapers Pink Ideas #screen | Iphone .. | trendy teenage wallpaper

10 Top Risks Of Attending Trendy Teenage Wallpaper | Trendy Teenage Wallpaper – trendy teenage wallpaper | Welcome in order to our weblog, in this particular occasion I’ll demonstrate regarding keyword. And today, this can be a primary photograph:

Trendy quotes tumblr aesthetic wallpaper 10+ Ideas – #Aesthetic .. | trendy teenage wallpaper

Think about impression previously mentioned? is which awesome???. if you’re more dedicated and so, I’l l teach you a few photograph once more below:

So, if you wish to obtain all these wonderful shots related to (10 Top Risks Of Attending Trendy Teenage Wallpaper | Trendy Teenage Wallpaper), just click save button to download the shots to your pc. There’re prepared for download, if you like and want to get it, simply click save logo on the web page, and it will be immediately downloaded in your pc.} Lastly if you want to secure unique and latest image related with (10 Top Risks Of Attending Trendy Teenage Wallpaper | Trendy Teenage Wallpaper), please follow us on google plus or book mark this blog, we attempt our best to give you regular up-date with all new and fresh pictures. Hope you love keeping here. For most upgrades and latest news about (10 Top Risks Of Attending Trendy Teenage Wallpaper | Trendy Teenage Wallpaper) pics, please kindly follow us on twitter, path, Instagram and google plus, or you mark this page on book mark area, We try to present you up-date periodically with all new and fresh pics, like your browsing, and find the right for you.

Thanks for visiting our site, contentabove (10 Top Risks Of Attending Trendy Teenage Wallpaper | Trendy Teenage Wallpaper) published . Today we’re excited to declare that we have discovered an incrediblyinteresting contentto be discussed, that is (10 Top Risks Of Attending Trendy Teenage Wallpaper | Trendy Teenage Wallpaper) Most people attempting to find info about(10 Top Risks Of Attending Trendy Teenage Wallpaper | Trendy Teenage Wallpaper) and of course one of them is you, is not it?

Trendy hair quotes tumblr god 10+ Ideas #hair #quotes | Cute .. | trendy teenage wallpaper

Pin de Barbie en Wallpapers | Fondos de pantalla cute, Fondos de .. | trendy teenage wallpaper

Screen savers iphone quotes wallpapers 10+ Trendy Ideas .. | trendy teenage wallpaper

The post 10 Top Risks Of Attending Trendy Teenage Wallpaper | Trendy Teenage Wallpaper appeared first on Wallpaper Nifty.

from Wallpaper Nifty https://www.flowernifty.com/10-top-risks-of-attending-trendy-teenage-wallpaper-trendy-teenage-wallpaper/

#cool wallpaper #aesthetic trendy teenage wallpaper #cute trendy wallpapers #cute trendy wallpapers f

0 notes

aion-rsa · 4 years ago

Text

How Love, Victor Accurately Portrays The American LGBTQ Experience

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This article contains spoilers for Love, Victor season 2.

When it was announced that the iconic 2018 rom-com Love, Simon would receive a spinoff TV series, many worried it wouldn’t be able to find its own unique portrayal of sexual orientation awakening. In the hands of thoughtful showrunners Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger and the endearing lead performance from Michael Cimino, Love, Victor is able to cast a wide net of LGBTQ perspectives for the audience to learn and connect to.

That’s why Hulu’s teen romance series has developed a niche, but rabid fanbase in the past year. As an audience, getting to follow along with Victor Salazar (the aforementioned Cimino) on his journey has been an honest and raw reflection of so many viewers’ experiences with their own sexuality. With the second season having premiered on June 11, excitement has been building to see where the title character goes now that he has a boyfriend and has come out of the closet to his family.

No piece of media can ever be an all-encompassing overview of one group’s experience, but this show has really turned into a unique survey of the gay landscape, from sexual questioning, to sexual awakening, self-acceptance, and finally learning to live in a world where others don’t respond well to you being your true self.

There are many stereotypes in media about what it means to be gay, and too often they depict a white, upper-middle class character with family and friends who have no qualms about queerness. The happy-go-lucky approach does not show outsiders just how tumultuous and heartbreaking it often is to grapple with being non-straight. Love, Victor engages the viewer and invites them to learn about a wide variety of LGBTQ struggles. Victor is Latino, lower-middle class, Catholic, and dealing with the upsides and downsides of being a gay man who skews more masculine than feminine.

Victor has internalized homophobia throughout the first season, taking awhile to figure out that it is indeed okay to like men, no matter what his conservative Latinx parents have taught him in the past. When he reveals his sexuality to his mom and dad in the second season, the audience is treated to the juxtaposition of the parents’ differing reactions. Victor’s father has an easy time putting his love for his son ahead of his ingrained value system; Victor’s mother has a much harder time grappling with whether to put her religion or her son first, but the payoff in that journey is something to behold (and will make you cry). This decision from the writers gives the show a way to relate to the widest array of watchers in the target audience, and shows that love can trump bigotry if you have a decent heart and adore your family.

Arguably the most tasteful analysis the show pulls off is its depiction of the limbo you are placed in as a gay person, particularly a gay man, where you are stuck between two different worlds based off of your gender expressions. Victor is traditionally masculine, one of the stars of his high school basketball team, yet his teammates feel uncomfortable with him in the locker room. For those who think this type of homophobia is an outdated trope, take a peek at any of the comments on social media at the beginning of Pride celebrations when any male sports teams lend their support to the equality movement. To a sizable portion of the population, being gay is still synonamous with being less masculine, and Victor feels the pain of his being outcasted from the guys he hoops with in a very raw way.

He then quits the team in the third episode of the second season, only to be poked fun of for being a “former, straight-acting jock” by his boyfriend’s gay friends. In one of the most revelatory lines in the whole series, Victor asks his teammate Andrew (played by Mason Gooding), an eventual ally, what is the perfect amount of gay to satisfy everyone? Too gay to play sports and not gay enough to hang out with more traditionally queer folk, where exactly is he supposed to turn to find his true family? This question is the most daring one that Love, Victor asks of its audience. The show expects you to examine your own opinions on gender norms and expressions regardless of sexual orientation, and teaches everyone that there is no one way to structure your identity. Victor as a character is a canvas for a myriad of interests and personalities, demonstrating the diversity of the Western LGBTQ+ experience.

This variety is also dissected in what is likely to be the most controversial storyline of the latter half of season 2, when new character Rahim (played by Anthony Keyvan), a closeted classmate of Victor’s, reaches out for some support. As Victor’s relationship with Benji (played by George Sear) starts to go awry, Rahim becomes a confidant, a close friend, and possibly something much more than that. The love triangle that develops as the finale closes will irk many viewers, but that might be in line with the writers’ intentions.

Benji represents many of the privileges that exist in pop culture with gay men: white, rich, and possessing socially liberal parents, he doesn’t fully understand many of the hardships in Victor’s life. On the other hand, Rahim is an Iranian Muslim, with enough flamboyance to match well with much of Victor’s traditional machismo. They are kindred spirits in many ways, and all of their different gayness meshes in a way that is aptly described by Rahim as “magical”. Comparing and contrasting a mixed race relationship (white person with a racial-minority person) with one where both parties are non-white gives the audience a lot to chew on. All of the intricacies of race, gender expression, and sexuality intertwine when Victor and Rahim are together, forcing the narrative to dig deeper and making the show something truly special.

The sheer amount of side characters and the short runtime (each episode clocks in at around 30 minutes each) leaves some stories feeling a little rushed, which would be one of the only flaws in the show’s exploration of teenage sexuality. With the time that is given, you don’t always get the full picture on the peripheral of the main plot, but relationships like Victor and his best friend, Felix, and the bond that he shares with his ex-girlfriend, Mia, are also valuable to the portrayal of a gay man’s inner circle.

Victor and Felix (played by Anthony Turpel) are a beacon of hope that a gay man and straight man can remain as tight after the coming out process as they were before. There is no sexual tension and absolutely no insecurities from Felix that Victor may come on to him; the latter issue is one of the preeminent reasons so many queer people have for holding off on being themselves, as they don’t want their friends to view them any differently than before (I, for instance, had an aunt who dropped one of her longest friendships when she found out the woman was a lesbian). They talk about their sex lives, go to each other for relationship advice, and just have a whole lot of fun; they’re bros (or bone brothers, according to Felix). Victor and Felix do not represent the majority of gay/straight friends, rather they portray the idyllic potential of this scenario in a world that will hopefully become fully comfortable with it some day soon.

As the first season came to a close, Mia (played by Rachel Hilson) is heartbroken after Victor cheats on her in the process of figuring out his sexuality and the showing of her forgiveness in the second season is one of the highlights of the series. Gay men keeping their friendships with ex-girlfriends after coming out is a common stereotype, but it’s rarely shown with such tenderness as in this series. The Victor/Mia bond demonstrates the ways platonic love can be so powerful it can confuse those engaged in it. This makes figuring out one’s sexuality even more confusing for many in the LGBTQ community, and the interpretation of this trope is very warm as seen in these two characters.

When making a TV show that represents a group of people who have been traditionally discriminated against, it is not enough for the characters to simply exist; these folks need to be a reflection of the society that they are fictionalizing. Unfortunately, depictions of the LGBTQ community on screen have long been restricted to one-dimensional sidekicks (the Gay Best Friend trope, examined perfectly here by The Take) and cheap stereotypes (Carol on Friends was used to insult Ross’s masculinity, insinuating that he turned her lesbian because he wasn’t man enough for her).

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

In Love, Victor, the core discussion around how masculinity, conservative social norms, and the gay experience can merge into one lifestyle is extremely compelling for a myriad of reasons, not the least being that parents of children who look, act, and behave just like Victor can see how normal all of this is. Being gay is so much more than who you are attracted too; sexuality relates to every sector of a person’s life and how they are perceived by the society around them. No other show on TV right now can claim to be as aware of all of these topics, all while making you laugh, cry, and think. Victor says in the second episode of season 2 that he hopes to inspire someone else to be themselves one day; he’s surely already done that tenfold.

All 10 episodes of Love, Victor season 2 are available to stream on Hulu now.

The post How Love, Victor Accurately Portrays The American LGBTQ Experience appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3gvFrsC

#aion-rsa #Den of Geek

1 note · View note

tinymixtapes · 6 years ago

Text

Feature: Favorite 25 Films of 2018

Once upon a time, Derek Smith wrote: “2017 was a year endured rather than lived.” But all due respect to the past, because here we are creeping into this new 2019 and things are so much better than we thought they’d be! True, the year probably felt like 37 years or whatever removed from Rick Deckard’s squared-off tie and malfunctioning memory. And truth be told, the political crisis unfolding in the gray hallways might seem more honest if it resembled the light-starved, gnarled noir of Blade Runner. At least Schwarzenegger and The Running Man promised that 2019’s only choice would be “hard time or prime time,” even if its presentation of a neon capital, corporate-owned world seemed, you know, subtle. And for all the (dead) kids in cages and bodies bleeding out on street corners here and abroad, Michael Bay and The Island had a perfectly-drooped Buscemi diagnosing our humanist crisis: “I mean, you’re not human. I mean, you’re human, but you’re not real. You’re not a real person, like me.” A lot of people were told they weren’t humans in 2018. This isn’t a writerly evasion or poetic epithet designed to elicit righteous ire/compel you to read another year-end list. Because what else could you call the concentrated attempt by some humans to discourage the freedoms of other humans? Our narrative didn’t turn science-fiction to let us off the hook: these non-humans weren’t clones or replicants or estranged Atlantean denizens returning to claim their kingly right. They just weren’t human enough (or the right kind of human) to matter in the eyes of louder, more powerful humans. All of our past’s proposed images of our worst futures pale in comparison to this denial of basic humanity that we see out our windows. It is unsurprising, then, that cinema, our most volatile cultural mirror, began to show the stretch and strain in its images of our species. But what is surprising is that cinema in 2018 retained nuance and compassion as it mediated the cruelties and depravities of its age. Unlike this slab of prose, movies in 2018 moved beyond mediating good and evil in simple, monolithic terms. They attempted to sketch the boundaries of real freedom in an unjust world (BlaKkKlansman). They investigated, more acutely than ever before, the responsibilities of what it meant to keep (Shirkers) and tell (Madeline’s Madeline) another human’s story (If Beale Street Could Talk), especially in remembrance (Roma). They presented distorted genealogies (Hereditary) and fisheye-lens histories (The Favourite) to track the human body’s motion (Suspiria) in and out of comradeship (Support the Girls) and trauma (Burning). In 2018, we hurled our betrayed humanities up against foreign corpses (Zama), scorched country (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs), alien twins (Annihilation), and incongruent voices (Sorry to Bother You). We began to see, in everything, something like a way through the darkness. Why else keep watching the past (The Other Side of the Wind) if not to plot something we’d never imagined before (The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl)? Our moving images in 2018 proposed that real love (Eighth Grade) and genuine care (Lazzaro Felice) could stretch impossibly across time to add up to a life steeped in both nuance and compassion (Won’t You Be My Neighbor?). Our love would not look the same (Leave No Trace) nor could it resound in strictly-feasible tones (Mandy), but we would recognize its absence; we could see that sometimes humanness looks like something we’ve never seen before (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse). More than anything, as one derelict theory proposed, “Through the negative you could see the real, inner, demonic quality of the light.” In laying the responsibilities of the filmmaker and artist at the feet of a murderer, The House That Jack Built came perilously close to endorsing our worst demons. Those demons shook and raged and hissed at us, urging us to give in to despair and make a world in their image. How did we let it stand? Thomas Merton was a central figure in a figurative, feral lens for our year, and he wrote that “despair is the absolute extreme of self-love.” To levy our humanity so close to inhumanness, suggesting that our better angels are distortions, is dangerous. To know, as these 25 films know, that there can be nothing without despair until there is love is to actually be human. To look, as we did, through our ruinous year and resist the despairs of all our oppressors and lowest urges, to shout, in image and montage and light and shadow, that this is how I deny you is to attain, beyond our humanity and into the future, a new kind of prayer. –Frank Falisi --- 25 Roma Dir. Alfonso Cuarón [Netflix] Roma was Alfonso Cuarón’s excursion into simplicity, a self-imposed challenge that drew back from his earlier, more extravagant films. Cuarón told his simple allegory in a monochrome treatment, but while wearing multiple hats — he also produced, shot, and edited the film. The choice to go black and white not only focused the elements of filmmaking to its barest essentials, but it also emphasized its nostalgic underpinnings. Though it made use of elaborate staging for its more chaotic events, Roma paradoxically found fascination in the quotidian and the mundane. The film was dedicated to the maid that the Cuarón’s family employed when he was a child — realized as the previously unknown Yalitza Aparicio, who brought an indelible humanity to her role — but the story itself was secondary. It was presented more as a series of tableaus, culminating in a climactic sequence at the beach. Here, Cuarón’s camera lingered, unedited, in a harrowing scene that illustrated Aparicio’s undying devotion to the family and revealed the film’s true heart. –Tristan Kneschke --- 24 Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Dir. Morgan Neville [Focus Features] With no dirt to dig up on his subject, director Morgan Neville tended to accent the blue-tinged notes heard throughout the Neighborhood in his Fred Rogers documentary. The director’s seamless cardigan scene-weaving stitched together instances of cluster chords and doubting puppets into a portrait of vulnerability that reinforced one of Rogers’s core motifs: It takes a person, not a hero, to protect children. Not a pie-in-the-face kind of guy, we watched Fred McFeely Rogers ponder in the tall grass in between changing shoes and tackling hard topics like grief, death, and terrorism. Demonstrations of his honesty, inclusivity, kindness, patience, listening skills, and unconditional love revealed the subject as the archetype for a timeless paternal figure. Although his ministry athwart sensationalism took place in the era of broadcast television, we imagined that any younger generation in the history of the world could connect with and feel empowered by his carefully worded and well-tempered mission. –Rick Weaver --- 23 Leave No Trace Dir. Debra Granik [Bleecker Street] Few directors are as curious about or sensitive to alternative modes of existence as Debra Granik, who followed Winter’s Bone and the documentary Stray Dog with this tale of a father and daughter willfully attempting to live off the grid in the present-day Pacific Northwest. Leave No Trace was quiet and deliberate, but not remotely uneventful: Granik showed Will (Ben Foster) and Tom (Thomasin Harcourt McKenzie) moving through a handful of makeshift, scrappy, and industrialized communities. With minimal embellishments, Granik made each change of scenery feel at once seismic and utterly authentic. Moreover, she guided her two lead actors through agonizing psychological arcs without a whiff of cliché, as a daughter gradually discovered that her life and well-being will be enriched by community, while her PTSD-afflicted father confronted the fact that he can’t abide by the obligations and niceties of modern civilization. Granik’s film had a Bressonian bleakness, but it was entirely heartfelt and so convincing in its particulars that it couldn’t help but realign our sense of the world. –Christopher Gray --- 22 Support the Girls Dir. Andrew Bujalski [Magnolia Pictures] Your workdays don’t end with you back home ready to decompress; they are your back-home and your decompress. Maybe you slept or something like that (scrolled? drank? had a crisis?), but you aren’t really awake till the first table is seated, and you better leave everything else at the door (lol). Your customers are guests, your wage is nil, and your smile is forced by uninvisible hands. Your coworkers are either No Face or your own flesh and blood, the only ones keeping your head from falling off and bursting into flame at the foot of the heat lamp. They get it! They get you. Or they get the gist, which is about as much of you as you get anyway. Because if you actually stopped to think about… No need to pretend: You hate this place, and you find yourself doing anything for it, for each other, because you all know the conditions are absolutely fucked and fuck that. Your favorite regular is here; you’re in a good mood for some reason. You act certifiable, you scream, you screw your head back on. The POS is down. You’re short. You make it. Your coworker says, “[That manager] can suck my dick.” Or, “I am going to murder this couple.” Or, “Y’all come back now!” You loved her for that. This movie loved her for that, through all of it, and it loved you too. A double whammy: Regina Hall et al. returned the workday to life itself and transformed working class unity into grace (laughter), something we could use. You have nothing to lose. –Pat Beane --- 21 Eighth Grade Dir. Bo Burnham [A24] In an interview with NPR, former YouTube star Bo Burnham said he wanted to make a story about the internet and how it feels to be alive right now. OK, sure, he succeeded in doing that by having 13-year-old Kayla Day (Elsie Fisher) create and upload vlog entries on how to best navigate the social anxieties of being a young teen. However, by the end of the film, what this angle really emphasized with great nuance (perhaps unintentionally?) is that children of every generation — regardless of the gap — suffer from the same anxieties, sexual insecurities, and self-blame. Identity has always been a fluid performance; the internet has simply made it more permanent. To star a young girl currently living the same age IRL that she portrays brilliantly in the film is in large part what made Eighth Grade not only one of our favorite films of 2018, but also one of the most genuine coming-of-age films, period. This casting decision made it impossible for Burnham to project his experiences and memories onto the story, which fortunately meant it was not biographical or about nostalgia. Rather, Eighth Grade was simply a present-day story about a complex experience that has always transcended the outlets through which they’ve been mediated. –NB [pagebreak] 20 Suspiria Dir. Luca Guadagnino [Produzioni Atlas Consorziate] In 1980, during Italy’s “years of lead,” Bologna Station, built in neoclassical style during the Fascist era, was bombed by neofascist terrorists — 85 died. Today, despite the coffee-drinking herds pouring through it, the station retains a bleak and melancholy atmosphere. Luca Guadagnino captured something of this in his remake of Suspiria. Set in the German Autumn of 1977 (the release date of the original), the poisonous and paranoid atmosphere of Cold War Berlin, when Leftists turned to violence in the face of failed denazification and a conservative establishment, bubbled in the background. To its cold occult decadence, the film added stylized and unforgettable body horror. The whole built to an over-the-top conclusion, which was perfect both as a nod to the campiness of the original (and the giallo genre) and because Guadagnino’s deft melding of physical and emotional horror was a slow-burn that demanded combustion. It was a wyrd companion piece to surreal works grappling and playing with similar legacies, from Bruce LaBruce’s The Raspberry Reich (a.k.a. The Revolution Is My Boyfriend) to Syberberg’s Hitler: A Film From Germany. The personal was also political: the original was a masterpiece of style and ambiance marred by subtle misogyny, but in Guadagnino’s vision, this became an exploration of the fraught heat and darkness of dynamics between women in their exercise of power and community. Dakota Johnson lacked fire in the belly, as did Thom Yorke’s anaemic soundtrack, but a subplot some thought needless served up the film’s most appalling moment: a sickening portrayal of the pain of lost love regained, then once more ripped away with casual malice. This was more than a memorial suspiria; it was a wholly worthy rebirth of the Mater Suspiriorum. –Rowan Savage --- 19 Lazzaro Felice Dir. Alice Rohrwacher [Netflix] Alice Rohrwacher’s third feature, the Cannes-celebrated Lazzaro Felice (Happy as Lazzaro), was built on the many tensions it engendered &mdash namely, between a humanistic premise and the layers of dejection it was buried underneath, the timeless aspirations of a fable and a cynically bitter view of modernity, and the rustic realism of its form and the story’s fantastic detours. The film followed the threadline that, like the wolf, men will exploit men in all spaces, times, levels, and situations: A Marquise keeps a group of peasants working for her in near slavery; they in turn abuse and overwork the titular Lazzaro, a young peasant whose innocence and goodness paint him into the archetype of the “holy fool.” He roams through the story in a perplexity recalling the Christ-like dispossessed of classic Italian cinema. His mission on this earth, it would seem, is to prove that even the lowest of the low, the wicked and the perverse, are capable of gestures of kindness. How enduring, truthful, and integral these were to their characters, to the essence of their humanity, was something Lazzaro must discover at his own expense, paying ever higher costs in this beguiling yet disturbingly recognizable modern parable. –jrodriguez6 --- 18 Night Is Short, Walk On Girl Dir. Masaaki Yuasa [Toho] You wake up after a long night out. You aren’t hungover at all — it’s a miracle, truly a miracle. What do you remember from last night? Not names, certainly. Maybe not even places. It’s all like a strange fairytale, one of glowing neon and drinks that tasted better because you didn’t pay for them, of hilarious characters and absurd triumphs. Did that bouncer really let you in, even though you were $9 short of cover? You feel fantastic. This feeling was alive in Night Is Short, Walk On Girl: an insensible, overwhelmingly jubilant, and optimistic perspective on “a night on the town.” Pulling trade tactics from films like Amélie, El Futuro, and A Town Called Panic, the movie was full of humor, bliss, and no pulled punches (friendship punches or not) when it came to devilish winks. With not a single frame lacking in humor or joy, the film left us feeling like hangovers are something we’ve never experienced, like each night is full of mystery and romance, like our next big moment is waiting just around the corner. Perhaps we’ll make this a big weekend — go out on Friday and Saturday? — who knows… –Lijah Fosl --- 17 If Beale Street Could Talk Dir. Barry Jenkins [Annapurna] Barry Jenkins’s adaptation of James Baldwin’s 1974 novel was perhaps the most aesthetically accomplished and jaw-droppingly beautiful American film in years. It’s difficult to avoid hyperbole or rampant name-checking when confronted with an opening crane shot and a sumptuous autumnal wardrobe straight out of Douglas Sirk, or with a bracingly musical, time-shifting sense of montage that conjured numerous titans of contemporary Asian cinema, or with a swelling score by Nicholas Britell that exquisitely captured the film’s oscillating currents of unabashed romanticism and great melancholy. Despite the film’s sweeping, sexy, earnest depiction of the bond between pregnant teenage shopgirl Tish (KiKi Layne) and Fonny (Stephan James), a sculptor in jail accused of rape, Jenkins’s adaptation was clear-eyed and anguished about how they have to navigate lives of subjugation, a theme brought to the fore in alternately haunted and agonized performances by Brian Tyree Henry and Regina King. As such, Jenkins remade Baldwin in his image, trying with all his might to conquer fury with love. –Christopher Gray --- 16 Burning Dir. Lee Chang-dong [CGV] Deep under the delicate melodrama of a love triangle, the noir-ish mystery of a disappearing woman, and the moody male rivalry that plays out in its final act, Burning was charged with the same currents that power our defining social divisions: rural against urban, men against women, working class against dubious wealth, connected against isolated. Director Lee Chang-dong’s comeback thriller was a Trojan horse stocked heavy with political anguish, a dense, angular ballet of themes erupting just out of sight under a sensitive character drama that forced three young people of clashing identity and privilege into a pressured environment of overlapping interests and dark secrets. What stood out about Burning was how it probed not these ideological struggles themselves, but the existential uncertainty they inspire, as well as the insidious psychological toll they take on the individual. In all its discomfort and beauty — aided by subtle performances and distinctive cinematography — Burning served as both a careful portrait of a quietly revolutionizing South Korea and an uneasy study of the antagonisms and paranoia gradually tyrannizing the youth of today’s globally tainted age. –Colin Fitzgerald --- 15 Madeline’s Madeline Dir. Josephine Decker [Oscilloscope] From the very start, Madeline, and by extension the audience, was told that performance is not identity, that the emotions an actor renders are borrowed from someone else. This warning was not heeded. We met the eponymous 16-year-old (Helena Howard) as she shuffled through roles: a cat, an actress, a daughter, a sea turtle, an assailant, a pig on the run, a prisoner, a confused young woman of mixed race. Some of these identities played out on the stage of her experimental performance troupe, managed by maternal — and directorial — surrogate Evangeline (Molly Parker), though they inevitably bled through to her “real” life and back onto the stage, forming a tight, indiscernible tangle as this feedback loop began to dominate the production. Driven by the tension between the neurotic, controlling impulses of her mother Regina (Miranda July) and the haphazard psychic excavation spearheaded by Evangeline, the film, cut to the rhythms of a psychological thriller and as improvised as the troupe’s performances, unreeled with disorienting, balletic, colorful, and oftentimes invasive cinematography. Madeline’s Madeline was a complex film of blurred and appropriated identities, one concerned, reflexively (as it is in some sense a retelling of how Decker and Howard came to collaborate and make this very film), with self-authorship, self-ownership, and the power dynamics inherent in representation. “I’m really interested in people who are out of control of their circumstances,” stated Evangeline at a dinner party. But what do we owe these lenders of emotion and what does it mean to tell a story that is not ours? As we move through psychic strata leaving our own fingerprints everywhere, inhabit or direct bodies that look and experience differently than our own, what are our responsibilities? Where is the ethic of storytelling? Of course, no film could satisfactorily answer such questions, but Madeline’s Madeline grappled with them in a dense, dizzying, hyper-expressive, sometimes frustrating, and self-castigating manner that spoke to the immense trust between actor and director. –Cynocephalus --- 14 Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Dir. Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey & Rodney Rothman [Sony Pictures Releasing] In an arena that seems to be getting more overstuffed with each passing year, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse surprised us just by being the most fun superhero movie we’ve seen in ages. From the second it revved its engines, Into the Spider-Verse hit a breakneck speed as exhilarating as a web-slinging joyride through the city, its mesmerizing 2D/3D graphics illustrating each thought, sound effect, and surreal set piece with an eye-popping neon panache. Each character was sketched with just the right mix of sympathy and self-awareness, whether it was our immediately relatable hero Miles Morales, the cynical, sweatpant-clad Peter B. Parker, or the wounded, monstrously gargantuan Kingpin. Even down to the music, Into the Spider-Verse kept its pace relentlessly fresh, washing us in waves of Swae Lee and Juice WRLD as we journeyed across alternate Spider-Man histories and dimensions in search of a way to once again save the world from destruction. It all somehow added up to a movie as unexpected and experimental as it was unabashedly pop — a classic, trope-skidding superhero tale that you’ve got to see to believe. –Sam Goldner --- 13 BlacKkKlansman Dir. Spike Lee [Focus Features] In BlacKkKlansman, Ron Stallworth (John David Washington) was a man caught between two worlds. Too black to be taken seriously as a police officer, too loyal to his duties as a police officer to be taken seriously as a proponent of Black Power. Naturally, Stallworth did what anyone would do in this situation: become the first black detective in Colorado Springs, infiltrate his local Ku Klux Klan chapter by posing as a disgruntled white supremacist on the phone, enlist his Jewish colleague (Adam Driver) to pose as him at Klan meetings, catfish David Duke himself, and foil a deadly bomb plot. The KKK, as portrayed in this Spike Lee Joint, could be best described as a gang of bumbling idiots. Just literal morons who blow themselves up. If the events of the film weren’t based on a true story, they would seem almost too absurd to be true. As racism today threatens to tear the country apart from the inside, BlacKkKlansman did all it could to call out white supremacists and serve them a modicum of justice. But the film also recognized just how dangerous the ideas of these people can be and how imperative it is to keep fighting to bring them down. –Jeremy Klein --- 12 Annihilation Dir. Alex Garland [Paramount/Netflix] There is a common fundamental misconception that Nirvana is either a place, like Heaven, or a state or period, like Peace. In reality, Nirvana means something like “blowing out” or “extinguishing.” Attaining Nirvana, then, isn’t an attainment at all, because it isn’t a summit or a destination or really even a “thing.” It is not, however, synonymous with Annihilation, but just as Gravity housed symbols that could be appreciated as “Buddhist,” Annihilation beckoned us into life’s terrifying glimmer of impartial consequence so that we could assess our way out of it. In The Shimmer, karma accrued, leaving behind not moral threads, but matter in forms as disparate as flowering corpses and a bear made of screams. Locating Buddhist imagery in film is often a sign of clumsy analysis, but witnessing these women worn by this violence of culmination grapple with their own threads of being was like witnessing a hierophany, a horrifying refraction of sacred DNA in a profane plane. It’s enough of a reminder of why we even started making existential art. Awfulness irrupted through Annihilation in that old-school religious studies sense, because it refracted what many of us associate with being human: self-destruction. And whether or not we could explain what we saw when we faced ourselves in that lighthouse, we left changed in a way that only prayer or film could catalyze. –Jazz Scott --- 11 You Were Never Really Here Dir. Lynne Ramsay [Amazon] Adapting a book by Jonathan Ames, writer/director Lynne Ramsay upends the thriller/character study by making a brilliant film about violence without showing the actual violence onscreen. It was a choice born of necessity — the filmmaker didn’t feel comfortable shooting action sequences — but it was completely within the spirit of this bold and haunting look at a man (Joaquin Phoenix) whose sole gift of violence and pain followed him like a heavy shadow. By focusing more on the consequences of violence that weighed deeply on him as he navigated a path of righteousness, Ramsay depicted a compromised world, shattered long ago by a trauma that reverberated louder with every new transgression. The film was angry, mournful, and frightening, but it also pierced through the oppressive darkness without sugarcoating the ordeal. Propelled by Jonny Greenwood’s incredible score, You Were Never Really Here was a gorgeous movie that waded into bleak territory without feeling like tragedy porn, a beautiful tale — even amongst the grotesque — about the inherent need for salvation that drives us forward. –Neurotic Monkey [pagebreak] 10 Hereditary Dir. Ari Aster [A24] Hereditary, the first feature from writer-director Ari Aster was more than just the spiritual descendant of The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, and Psycho. It was not just the latest addition to the A24 family of slow-building, well-crafted horror films. Hereditary was about the unavoidable legacies that our families leave us, and for this it bore an uncanny resemblance to the bleak family dramas of Bergman or Haneke. Annie (played by Toni Collette in a career performance) said and did unforgivable things to her son and husband (Alex Wolff and Gabriel Byrne), and we squirmed. First out of angst, then disgust, and finally fear. And after being emotionally worn down with 90 minutes of this, the film fully committed to its supernatural heritage and delivered some of the best frights of the year. We loved it because it was an assured first step from a new director and a further commitment to excellence from an exciting young distribution company. We loved it because if the first two-thirds were painful to watch, then the last third offered us the voyeuristic release of a horror film. But most of all, we loved it because it married the visceral and the cerebral, giving birth to an unholy experience that stuck with us, like a tick. –Jeff Miller --- 09 The Ballad of Buster Scruggs Dir. Ethan Coen & Joel Coen [Annapurna] The last two decades have had their share, but 2018 was a proper trifecta of spirited, inventive Westerns. Audiard’s Sister’s Brothers was the bitter pill rendered unexpectedly sweeter; Damsel was a triumphant anti-romance (a nice thematic companion piece to 2015’s Slow West); and this anthology gave us a perfectly-blended fun, dark, and heartbreaking (namely the beautiful, merciless “Meal Ticket” segment) genre classic. The tone shifted wildly, well heralded by the eponymous opening tale (cartoonishly musical and silly, but cleverly undermined with graphic violence and grim meta-commentary). We had our requisite rich characterization native to a Coen Bros. film, with strong turns from Zoe Kazan, Stephen Root (natch), Harry Melling, Grainger (“DOG HOLES!”) Hines, and Chelcie Ross, for a start (Brendan Gleeson almost does “The Unfortunate Rake” as well as Ian McShane, but not quite). But there was also a curious, world-weary current fusing the episodes, one of exhausted sadness and a dread-dodging sort of hindsight. Life and its lore as a turgid tangle we’re a little too anxious to leave behind. A long goodbye to the “the meanness in the used to be.” –Willcoma --- 08 The Other Side of the Wind Dir. Orson Welles [Netflix] For all the excitement that it stirred, there was a fear among cinephiles that Orson Welles’s final film, completed 33 years after his death, wouldn’t live up to the story of its own production. These fears were unfounded. Suffused with moments of staggering brilliance, The Other Side of the Wind was a dense, multivalent, sometimes maddening film, one that we are lucky to have in any form. Much like Henri-George’s Clouzot’s Le Prisonniere (and its ill-fated precursor Inferno), The Other Side of the Wind evidenced a master filmmaker pushing himself in his late period to fully explore the visual representation of aberrant psychology through abstraction, deconstruction, and exaggeration. Both Clouzot and Welles amplified color to impressionistic, oversaturated heights, but whereas Clouzot’s experimentation was primarily formal, Welles upended narrative, creating a mise en abyme that was at once hagiography and self-assassination. Even what was clearly intended as pastiche (Hannaford’s film, also titled The Other Side of the Wind, was essentially the De Düva of Antonioni’s then-recent work) was utterly riveting, with balletic mise-en-scène that presaged and rivaled the best of Brian De Palma and Dario Argento. Most impressive, however, was the juxtaposition of the aggressively stylized film-within-the-film and the faux-vérité surrounding it — Hannaford’s film was all propulsive jump-cuts on action in a self-consciously auteurist mode, while the frame story comprised a messy collage of film stocks, focal lengths, and framing styles meant to suggest a polyphony of perspectives, or perhaps a fracturing of one’s psyche; editor Bob Murawski, working from Welles’s extensive notes and workprint, sutured it all into a kinetic rhythm both jarring and cohesive. This was absolutely essential viewing, an invigorating testament to the medium itself and a reminder of how much further it can still go. –Christopher Bruno --- 07 Shirkers Dir. Sandi Tan [Netflix] Shirkers was, among other things, a portrait of young creativity, folklore, fragile egos, self-discovery, DIY practices, and the cultural impact that a film can have on a country. The documentary told the story of Sandi Tan, a Singaporean teenager who set out to make the country’s first notable road movie in 1992. With the help of the “established” Western director Georges Cardona, a gang of dreamy-eyed college kids put their lives on hold for the film (also named Shrikers) in an attempt to write their country’s film history. However, in the final stages of the process, the footage disappeared with Cardona. What followed was a decades-long search for a rebellious movie that was supposed to blow Singapore wide open, its creator, and the man plagued with an imperialistic obsession for fame. It was a real-life story that could only happen in a movie. –Sam Tornow --- 06 Zama Dir. Lucrecia Martel [Strand Releasing] Look: Don Diego de Zama has come unstitched in time. He stands at the edge of earth and sea. Waves are undertow, proof that the future is unfolding somewhere. But time has ripped itself up and away from him. He turns from the waves and walks up the shore, still in frame. He pauses, walks back, trapped. He is not entitled to languish; his days are spent running ruined bureaucracies. He appeals to a succession of fat governors to be sent away or home or anywhere else. But he is here. He is casually cruel and pathetically hopeful that he will be rendered reverence. He will not be. Lucrecia Martel, the master, adapted the fevered anti-history of Antonio Di Benedetto’s prose into transformative euphoria. Her cinematography was for freeing bodies. Zama didn’t represent colonialism so much as it canceled the notion that belonging has a place anymore. By pinning her hero to the same useless hope as he decayed through the years, Martel created a world of unwavering indigenous bodies and mocking llamas. She papered over Zama like an unmoved fungus, reducing him back to ephemera to be fertilized. She said no to his hopes. The corregidor, the man who can’t be king, remained in frame. –Frank Falisi --- 05 The House That Jack Built Dir. Lars von Trier [IFC] Lars von Trier’s movies are not easy to watch, but past the gruesome violence, the fucked-up interpersonal relationships, and the heady themes, there’s always something there. Case in point: The House That Jack Built, a pitch-black film in which a serial killer explains five “incidents” from his life to a mysterious companion. And unsurprisingly, with its aggressive depictions of the macabre, the film enjoyed about as divisive a public response as Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring did at its riotous 1913 premiere. At Cannes, von Trier’s film reportedly moved over 100 people to walk out; yet, when it ended, it was met with thunderous applause and, indeed, a standing ovation from those who remained. Yes, it was shockingly violent, but it was also incredibly funny, and as its protagonists traveled through their Dantean hellscape, they offered profound and unique meditations on art, time, and history. In other words, the film’s brutality was in service of something, not just an end in itself. Today, people are obsessed with talking about how everyone should and should not behave, what people should and should not think and say. But they’re far less interested in examining the pathological reasons why we have those urges to say or do the “wrong” thing in the first place. Some would argue that this is the exact reason art exists, to examine ourselves at a deeper level. And this film asked big questions: Can destruction be art? Can murder? Is depicting something the same as validating it? If you don’t want to subject yourself to this movie, my opinion is that that’s exactly why you should watch it. If you get through it, you may learn something about yourself. I did. Lars von Trier isn’t afraid to channel and complicate humankind’s darkest, most sadistic desires, and that’s a good thing. In fact, isn’t that one of the essential roles of the artist? –Adam Rothbarth --- 04 Mandy Dir. Panos Cosmatos [RLJE] Words like psychedelic, hallucinogenic, revenge, rage, and insane got tossed around liberally by those attempting to summarize Mandy, the sophomore directorial effort by Panos Cosmatos (Beyond the Black Rainbow) starring Nicolas Cage in all his nouveau-shamanic glory and then some. But those were understatements. Mandy was a maximalist assault, a new death yarn whose title screen didn’t even arrive until an hour and 15 minutes in, when protagonist Red went hunting for Lysergicenobites and Jesus freaks. Like antagonist Jeremiah Sand, Cosmatos, Cage, cinematographer Benjamin Loeb, and late scorer Jóhann Jóhannsson all weaponized complete sensory overload to mesmerize and capture their audience. But unlike the Mandy character, we could hardly muster a laugh past “Erik Estrada from CHiPs” — we merely watched in wide-eyed, slack-jawed awe at the un(adulte)rated, undefinable phantasmagoria — the bathroom scene, the chainsaw scene. OK, so maybe that wasn’t what Roger Ebert had in mind when he rightly called Nicolas Cage one of the greatest actors of his generation, but then Ebert probably also wouldn’t have imagined the actor spending two nights in his underwear, tied to a fence in a Belgian forest to prep for a scene (apparently, yes, that happened). That’s the point, though. The hype was realer than real. Mandy was a masterpiece beyond what any of us could ever have imagined. –Samuel Diamond --- 03 Sorry to Bother You Dir. Boots Riley [Annapurna] Every day, they take a little bit more. For months, we’ve heard about how Amazon runs its warehouses like sweatshops. A couple weeks ago, it was Facebook selling your private messages. If WorryFree were to step forward tomorrow with a unique, 21st-century approach to living debt-free, would any of us be surprised? For all its detours into the surreal and the absurd, Sorry to Bother You never felt that far removed from the world we inhabit. The questions it asked and dilemmas it presented touched on everything from the changing face of corporate power in the age of tech startups, the challenges of navigating predominantly white spaces for non-whites, and the complicity of individuals in larger systems of oppression. Moving through the world today is an act of gliding from one outrage to the next, and Riley shares our outrage, but he coupled it here with a sense of playfulness and hope that rendered Sorry to Bother You one of the most important films of 2018. –Joe Hemmerling --- 02 The Favourite Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos [Fox Searchlight] Early on, Duchess Sarah admonished her lover, Queen Anne, that love has its limits — to which the queen replied, “Well it shouldn’t.” The story proceeded through a delicious series of political and bedroom maneuvers to prove the queen utterly and tragically wrong. Yorgos Lanthimos has always taken a perverse glee in sticking his movie knife into the banal, received wisdom of Western right-thinking. His trajectory from Dogtooth forward had increasingly tightened the thumbscrews on his audience; The Killing of a Sacred Deer was as muscle-bound and torturous to watch as it was incisive. But The Favourite turned that sensibility inside out, exploding with bright and colorful production design, brilliantly mining 18th-century courtly fashions for visual comedy. Rouged, powdered, and highly wiggy men ponced about like overbred poodles through all the absurd ornamentation, as a raging battle of wills played out among the film’s three towering female protagonists. The script was nastier than Dynasty and invented a patois of 18th-century Queen’s English and contemporary colloquialisms that somehow felt organic, but it had a Shakespearean heft at its core that played out in a perfectly odd and dissonant finale. –Water --- 01 First Reformed Dir. Paul Schrader [A24] 2018 was filled with days when hopping from one social media platform or news network to the next resembled a modern-day Stations of the Cross, with each subsequent click offering something that was somehow more terrifying, depressing, and enraging than the last. With the massive sprawl of readily available information, staying informed was more effortless than ever, yet it could easily, almost imperceptibly, transform from a desire to remain dutifully cognizant of our ever-shifting global landscape into a form of unabated and isolating self-flagellation. In Paul Schrader’s First Reformed, it was this hyper-awareness of earthly perils that plagued Michael (Philip Ettinger), a young environmental activist who believed it immoral for his pregnant wife Mary (Amanda Seyfried) to bring a child into this crumbling world, when he desperately met with Ethan Hawke’s already jaded, world-weary Reverend Toller for counsel. Despite telltale signs of suicidal thinking, Toller found their discussion not troubling, but “invigorating.” And when Michael blew off his head with a shotgun, the good reverend reacted not with sorrow or regret, but by taking on Michael’s all-too-real concerns of potential global disaster, bearing them like a cross upon his shoulders as he confronted the duplicitous evils that have infiltrated both his tiny, sparsely attended church and the superchurch that funds the relic he was keeping alive after 250 years. In this year’s cinema, there was perhaps no greater metaphor for the failure of American institutions to serve the public in any meaningful way (as many have slowly been reduced to thinly veiled money-laundering schemes for the wealthy) than the fact that Toller was stuck in a historically famous church with a broken organ, forced to hawk cheap souvenirs merely to keep the doors open. First Reformed deftly tackled this notion of the individual vs. implacable global forces, with an acute focus on the unsettling merging of ecclesiastical forces with those of an unbridled and amoral capitalist system. Schrader’s ascetic vision, informed most explicitly by Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, and Yasujiro Ozu, offered the perfect aesthetic framework through which traditional systems of belief could collide haphazardly with the ruthlessly unfeeling, profit-hungry, hyper-modern business models that dominate both corporate and institutional cultures. Schrader’s camera was almost exclusively immobile, yet this stillness presented a deeply perceptive gaze and compositions as stark as the cold New England winter. It was a vision of the world as unwavering as that of Toller, who lived a life virtually sealed off from the real world, indulging himself with the sort of small rituals we all tend to hold onto to provide a semblance of order and meaning in an increasingly chaotic world. But for all of Toller’s pain (often self-inflicted), First Reformed offered a vision of grace and tenderness in the heavily symbolic Mary, who prevented the film from tipping into the complete and utter despair that Toller found himself in. In one of the year’s most remarkable sequences, Mary arrived at Toller’s office and together performed a ritual that she often did with her now-deceased husband. As she laid on top of the priest, making as much body-to-body contact as possible and matching his breathing patterns, the two achieved a temporary sense of communal transcendence, slowly rising from the floor as they began to travel over vast mountains and beautiful oceanside vistas. But Toller’s thoughts couldn’t remain fixed on utopic ideals for long before visions of city life and landfills of untold sizes took over. Such incessant and uneasy wavering between hope and despair, sensuality and violence, love and rage, faith in the future and the fatalistic acceptance of our environment’s demise filled First Reformed, which stands as the most eloquent yet soul-shattering microcosm of the world that we saw all year. –Derek Smith http://j.mp/2H7Z1Nd

0 notes

findandselect-blog · 8 years ago

Text

Fine Art Tips with Ramey Dixon on Colour In Your Life has been published on Find and Select Business Reviews

New Post has been published on http://www.findandselect.com/tips/fine-art-tips-with-ramey-dixon-on-colour-in-your-life.html

Fine Art Tips with Ramey Dixon on Colour In Your Life

G'day viewers, my name's Graeme Stevenson, and I'd like to invite you to come on a journey of creativity and learning and adventure through he series Colour In Your Life.

There's an artist in every family throughout the world.

Lots of times there's an artist deep down inside all of us as well.

So grab your kids, your brothers, your sisters, your aunties, uncles and mums and dads and come and see how some of the best artists do what they do.

(Music Plays) (Graeme) Well hi viewers, and welcome back to Colour In Your Life.

Well we are in Los Angeles, California, today in the United States, and we are with a very, very talented abstract artist, Mr Ramey Dixon.

How are you, buddy? (Ramey) It's good to see you, Graeme.

(Graeme) Great to be on the show.

Now Ramey's a fantastic man with a great ability.

He's literally come through some quite difficult positions in his life to get where he is these days.

And initially started out working with a company that did Faux finishes, which is basically putting you know, like pictures and pictorials onto walls, and lots of different things like that.

But art really in a sense probably saved your life a lot hasn't it? (Ramey) It really has, yeah.

(Graeme) And you've come to a position now were you've started to become quite a well known abstract artist in the LA area.

Tell me why did you moved into abstractionism and what brought you to it? (Ramey) For me it's, actually it's a portal for my feelings to be expressed on a canvas basically.

You know what's going on with me on the inside based on what you see here.

A lot of my stuff is very emotional and different energies that come out depending on what colors I use or the depth of I use.

(Graeme) Lots of, lots of quite large pieces as well, I mean you work really large with what you do.

You know, what are some of the influences? I mean as you were saying, it's about the portal of expression for who you are.

Does this deem back to some of those difficult times that you were having years ago? Is that what what you tap into to get that out? (Ramey) That and today, what I feel – both will come out depending on what's going on, cause for me it never goes away – the life that I had before.

But the new life, it comes out as well.

It depends on what, what I've tapped into at the moment.

(Graeme) Cool, cool, cool.

And part of the journey, I mean Ramey has basically met up with a fantastic woman called Anna Sloor as well, has really become a great influence in your life also.

So that's a really good place.

I mean this is what art can do for you on many, many occasions, is it brings the best out in human being, and I think it's brought the best out in both of you as well hasn't it? (Ramey) Yeah.

(Graeme) That's amazing.

Dick Blick, who's one of the largest art retailers in the United States, has very generously sponsored you for today, which is pretty cool.

(Ramey) Yes.

(Graeme) So we just wanted to put – and it takes a lot of these big companies to step forward and be part and parcel of what Colour In Your Life is doing.

So we have to thank Dick Blick for that for a start.

I'm going to be talking to Ramey today as he goes through.

These are very physical pieces it's the best way I can describe them.

He really throws his emotions in to these abstract paintings and you're going to see some really, really cool stuff as we go along today, plus some of the other pieces that he's done over the years as he's been doing this.

But I'm going to get out of the shot as I always do, and I'm going to let this young man demonstrate what he does, and this is going to be a fun day so lets get stuck into it.

(Graeme) Okay Ramey, lets start one of these amazing pieces of yours.

That's a reasonable size chunk of canvas, so how do you normally go about filling that space? (Ramey) Something like this, what I do is I like to actually create a lot of depth and contrast with the paintings that I do.

I actually like to even go bigger than this normally.

This was a good size that I can use for what we're doing right now.

I like to use where I can create a lot of highs and lows and still keep go into the painting on certain levels, you can actually cruise inside if you, if you have the imagination to do that.

(Graeme) Yeah, there's many different parts to your work.

I mean if you look at it particularly as an abstract artist, and there's pictures within pictures when you get close to it.

(Ramey) Right.

(Graeme) And they're pictures that create themselves inherently in the end anyway.

(Ramey) Right.

(Graeme) Absolutely.

So how, so where we start then? (Ramey) Okay, basically I get the canvas wet first.

(Graeme) Okay.

(Ramey) Get a nice layer of water on there, cause when I have to do this all in one shot.

Normally I start with my black and I just paint, repaint.

(Graeme) So you're also a member of the Los Angeles Art Association (Ramey) Yeah.

(Graeme) as well, which from what I know has been around for over ninety years.

(Ramey) Yeah, LA Art Association's actually something I got involved with; this was my first year doing it.

A friend of mine turned me onto the opportunity to do it.

Almost every month you have an opportunity to basically submit for a show, and there's other opportunities that come up as well.

It's a great organisation, been around for a long time.

(Graeme) So you're sort of with this style that you've developed, it really – it comes from the gut.

And the best part about it is I think that there must be just a fantastic sense of enjoyment basically applying the colors down, seeing the paint come onto the canvas.

Not quite sure, and that's the thing about abstract, you're not quite sure what's going to happen sometimes.

(Ramey) Right, yeah, it's a – it gives my spirit an opportunity to sing almost; that's the way I feel.

When I'm coming down the canvas and just blending, blending the colors it's the only time I'm really totally content in the world, I feel like almost is when I'm painting so, (Graeme) That's fantastic.

(Ramey) it's an amazing thing.

(Graeme) Yeah, absolutely.

(Ramey) Yeah, I love it.

What I'm doing right now is I'm trying to create different tones and depth so the painting will actually reveal itself as I put the top coat on later on.

But right now, this is in my option this makes the painting.

The undercoat really makes the painting, if you don't do this right you can spread paint around all day, but if you don't have the right tones, and the right greys, I create all my colors normally by using these Dick Blick paints.

But I want to create something that's going to contrast with the red really well that I'm going to use on the top coat.

But with the blue I would do a different tone, so that's basically how it goes.

I create colors that I want to use based on what the top coat's gonna be.

(Graeme) And they are acrylics that you're using as well.

(Ramey) Yeah, I use all acrylics.

(Graeme) Yeah.

So how do you find the Dick Blick acrylics in comparison to others? (Ramey) They're amazing paints, especially for when I do the under coats.

They blend really, really well; the consistency's great.

They have a lot of pigment (Graeme) Yep.

(Ramey) so you're able to get a lot of depth out of them, which I really like.

(Graeme) I can see by, cause they are big canvases, but this is good exercise for you too I think, (Ramey) Oh, yeah.

(Graeme) cause you're moving around a lot.

(Ramey) This is where I get my workout basically.

Like I said it's when I feel completely connected and content in the world is when I'm doing this.

(Graeme) So you've got two paintings there, Ramey that ones called Dante, the other one's called Just Heaven, it's sort of I think a metaphor or a description of where you've come from and where you are now.

(Ramey) Dante, kind of reminiscing about how things use to be.

Not so much romanising or anything but remembering it, you know and seeing what I need to be grateful for today and what's going on in my life now.

(Graeme) Sure.

(Ramey) Cause like I went through stuff – like everybody does basically but that painting came out from me actually remembering how it was and what it was like.

So it's a very special painting to me.

And as far Just Heaven, this painting represents exactly what's going on today currently in my life and where I want to go.

I'm with an amazing girl, I'm doing what I love, so God's blessed me, and I feel very grateful for it.

(Graeme) Life's pretty good.

(Ramey) Yeah.

(Graeme) Yeah, and you're creating some great works and you know, that's basically what is all about in the end.

(Ramey) Right.

(Graeme) So with the work now, you just really start to just slide your way down the piece keeping the canvas as wet as you can.

So what grabs you to make a decision in a painting? How do you sort of say oh okay, I need to stop and do this now? (Ramey) For me it's, I just feel it – it comes out of the brush.

But as I'm going you know, it's like an instinct in me to know you know, if I need to put a little bit of light dry brush on top of the paint or if I need to keep a wet edge so it's blended or fluid.

It just, it becomes second nature for me basically or, it becomes second nature – that's all there is to it for me.

It's almost like the brush is part of my arm now and it just flows.

It just comes out.

(Graeme) An extension of.

(Ramey) It is an extension of, definitely.

But it's very, very important for me to keep that wet edge, (Graeme) Yep.

(Ramey) cause if I don't have the wet edge, the painting will go sideways in a second.

(Graeme) Yep.

(Ramey) Speaking of that I'm going to grab my bottle real quick and keep it wet.

So with the paint if I keep it fluid, and keep it wet it will blend really, really nice for me.

I like he way these bristles work from the brushes that I get from Blick.

It makes it very easy to create what I'm trying to create here which is a little bit of a metallic look by blending the greys, and the red, and the white.

That's the important thing fore me, cause I want to create almost like a trick of the eye.

Doing the Faux finished background, that was one thing that we did a lot of was we would make things look like things they weren't.

We'd take this wall and make it look like rusted steel.

Or we would take, what else? A piece of masonite board and we'd make it look like oak.

So a lot of that comes out in my style of painting.

So I'm very grateful for the job I used to have, and the things I use to do with it.

(Graeme) You've also got a piece that I really like and it reminds me of a time I went through Arizona, and it's called Metamorphous.

And it looks to me like you've got the desert and then the Monument Valley Monoliths, as you're going and the sky's setting with the night sky coming into it as well.

It's a great piece.

As you were saying before, there are just some things that start to appear in your work.

(Ramey) It's planned and then it's also at the same time it's a blessing when stuff like that just happens with this abstract stuff.

But, cause I can plan, and plan, and plan to do stuff and make things turn out the way I want but, in the end it's whatever the material wants to do, and whatever the universe is working in my corner on the day basically.

(Graeme) Happy brush strokes in the end.

(Ramey) Yes, yes.

(Graeme) Absolutely.

(Ramey) Now what I'm gonna do is go through and I'll start creating some hard lines, some giving it some real definition.

Normally I don't like to use black and white so much.

But I found with these two colors if you mix other colors into em they're fine to work with a lot.

Unless you're using straight black and white, and then they contrast really well.

But for me, the color I love to use is Paynes Grey; I love using Paynes Grey.

So with the Paynes Grey what will end up happening is in the end the red, the contrast between the red and the blue, the blue hue that's inside the Paynes Grey will really pop together, and you'll see them – it'll come alive.

It's a pretty cool little thing, and Paynes Grey is one of the coolest colors in my opinion.

(Graeme) So you really do put down a number of layers really to build up the intensity and depth of the paint as well.

(Ramey) Yes.

What I do is I continue to work it over, and over, and over until basically what happens is I feel that it's ready.

And what I'm trying to do is create different lines and get depth and work these colors on top of each other to bring out different colors, different hues that'll come out, whether it's red, or a little bit of a blue tone or whatever it may be.

But normally I just know when it's right and I just, I stop.

You know, sometimes when I'm painting I think about a friend of mine named – his name was Dominic.

He died of brain cancer but he was an amazing artist.

And so his dad's a great artist too, an amazing illustrator and it's really funny like when I'm working, and I have a brush in my hand sometimes I think about him.

A lot of lost times, you know good times together and it was before I found art you know, I was jealous cause he was always painting and doing different things.

And now I get to do that and it's funny, cause it just seems that he's with me sometimes when I'm doing this.

It's an amazing thing.

(Graeme) That's great.

That's the beauty about art and about creativity is it really can transform your emotional being far more than people would ever, ever think so.

(Ramey) It's the best therapy in the world.

(Graeme) Now you've got a very strong relationship with your Mum and Dad, and your Dad came up with two of the titles for some of the paintings that you've got.

One's called Smoke on the Water, and the other ones called Fire in the Sky.

So sort of knowing your Dad's age group, he was probably a Deep Purple fan at some stage.

(Ramey) It's amazing to have my family in my life on that level with doing art, you know.

They're passionate about it too, and very supportive.

It's a blessing, a lot of people don't have that sometimes when they wanna fill their dreams and goals and try and go out and do something that's against the grain.

I just have a lot of support around me so it makes things a lot easier for me.

(Graeme) Yeah, that's fantastic.

I mean one of the things that makes the journey worthwhile is having those people there.

Even the piece that you've got behind you as well called Embry.

And it looks like a tree, looks like the trunk of a tree as it, as it climbs up.

It's amazing as well.

(Ramey) Thank you.

Thank you, I think my Mum likes that one.

(Graeme) So do we let that dry, or we let it stay wet? (Ramey) I prefer to work on it when it's wet.

(Graeme) Okay.

(Ramey) It just makes things a little bit easier on me.

(Graeme) And we go to the, is it the red? (Ramey) Yeah, we do the top coat which is a heavy body red.

(Graeme) Aha.

(Ramey) It's made by Liquitex.

That's what I like to use; it really just spreads really nice.

Puts a lot of good pigment on the painting, and when you put a clear coat on top of it, it comes alive.

(Graeme) Pops it doesn't it? (Ramey) Yeah.

(Graeme) That's the thing with acrylics is they sort of, once that top coat goes on they go up twenty-five, thirty percent straight away.

(Ramey) Right.

(Graeme) Yeah.

(Ramey) Exactly.

A lot of people don't, don't use a clear coat with their acrylics but for me it really does something to it.

I don't think it's finished until a clear coats on really.

(Graeme) So just up, straight up one side? (Ramey) Straight up one side.

Put a nice amount on there.

(Graeme) Cool.

And you just – spray water of course, you've gotta use water so it dosen't stick too much.

And then (Graeme) You just sort of ride it over the top? (Ramey) Yeah, just barley touching it.

Now I have to do a little bit more.

Still got plenty of paint on there so I can come back through it again and just, just barley graze it across.

(Graeme) See that looks good.

That looks pretty cool.

(Ramey) Now we work it down, just keep coming down.

(Graeme) Yeah, okay.

(Ramey) Lets try it again.

(Ramey) And you almost vibrate the trail across, just barley skimming it, (Graeme) Aha.

(Ramey) and it'll give you some different effects, (Ramey) but it gets a little hairy sometimes.

(Graeme) That looks good.

More paint.

(Ramey) More paint, lots of paint.

(Graeme) More paint.

(Ramey) And you can do different depending on the pressure you put, the angle – you can make it do different things.

Especially, this is wet underneath, very, very wet.

You can get some really cool stuff going on, but for now we're just going to keep it simple, so it's going to look like this pretty much universal now.

(Graeme) So Ramey, some of the artists that have influenced you with your own work, some of the great contemporary, abstract or even past abstract artists? (Ramey) Ah, for me I like, I like to go to LACMA, the museum just right up the street here.

And there's a room there that has like Clyfford Still's, Rothko, Franz Kline – there's even Pollock's in there and different people like that.

Like twentieth century abstract artist you know, expressionists and for me that room it changes a lot but, when I go in there it's just like heaven almost, you know what I mean? To see these people's work cause they're just geniuses, and then there's people like Gerhard Richter, who's unbelievable and I knew nothing about the guy before, but I watched a documentary on him and he's an unbelievable artist for many, many years you know, and people know him now for what he does.

But like what he did way back was even more incredible in my opinion.

Who else is there? There's like, Ed Moses.

I think a couple of people that I know, that I've met through Social Media.

Like a guy, his name is Paul Franko Franklin, I believe he's either New Zealand or Australian, I'm not sure.

But this works amazing.

Another guy, named Jonathan Adolphe, or Adolphie – I don't know exactly how you pronounce it, but he does this stuff on fibreglass resin sheets and it's unbelievable.

And there's amazing artists out there everywhere really.

(Graeme) It's all little bits and pieces of the influence of those people that have brought you to where you are now.

So but you know, you've got your own completely individual style, which is what it's all about too.

(Ramey) Right, it gives me opportunities to kind of express things – to get things out, which is what it's all about for me really.

(Graeme) But each one of those strokes is never the same.

(Ramey) Never.

(Graeme) That's the beauty about it.

(Ramey) Never.

(Graeme) They're all completely different aren't they? (Ramey) That's one thing, I don't think anybody could ever forge (Graeme) Yeah.

(Ramey) my work, you know.

(Graeme) Just about near impossible.

(Ramey) Right, it is, I really enjoy it.

Stressful at times but I really enjoy it.

(Graeme) The right kind of stress.

(Ramey) Alright, the last one, lets see.

(Graeme) The last one: the piece de resistance.

(Ramey) Lets hope that it works out, you know – it's possible.

(Graeme) Here we go.

(Graeme) Voila.

(Ramey) Oh, Voila.

(Graeme) So do you often just walk away, sort of leave them there, sit and watch it? I mean with your work you really can't go back (Ramey) No.

(Graeme) and retouch.

It's like it's it, it's done.

(Ramey) That's it.

I like to do, I mean you can see a painting everywhere in the house, and we'll put it up and we'll just watch it, we'll watch it for a couple of days, maybe a week.

And then I'll get an idea I'll be, I'm gonna try something, you know, and most of the time it doesn't work out, but sometimes it does (Graeme) Yeah.

(Ramey) There was stuff like this I can come back and do something similar you know, again cause I have this technique down, but it's never the same.

Sometimes you, you can really destroy a great painting.

(Graeme) It's instantaneous but that's the genius behind it.

(Ramey) Yeah, it is but I really, really enjoy what I do so.

(Graeme) That's the main thing.

(Graeme) Okay folk, another fantastic day.

Ramey, (Ramey) Graeme.

(Graeme) that was really cool.

(Ramey) Thank you.

(Graeme) Really, really cool.

One of our Los Angeles, great abstract artists.

Now if people want to come and see your work, where do they go to? (Ramey) Just go to ramey dixon dot com.

(Graeme) Okay, go and see Ramey's work.

He's go a whole bunch of really interesting stuff up in there.

And also you wanted to pay creed to the LA Art Association once again as well.

(Ramey) Yes, yes, I definitely appreciate them and the opportunities that they give emerging artists so, it's a great opportunity for people if they get involved.

(Graeme) Absolutely, and it's a great organisation here in Los Angeles.

Also, we'd like to thank Dick Blick.

Dick Blick is one of America's major retail art supply stores, and they have some pretty fantastic stuff in the stores and online.

They've obviously helped you out as well? (Ramey) Oh definitely, definitely.

Amazing materials and they have everything you need at the same place, just straight.

(Graeme) Yeah, I've been into a number of their stores and they're like, just huge.

(Ramey) Yes.

(Graeme) So if you want to get your art supplies go and see Dick Blick as well.

Also you can come and see us at Facebook, and also at YouTube, and you can come and see us obviously at colour in your life dot com dot au.

Come in and look at out gallery as well, we've got some fantastic stuff in there as well.

Hopefully we'll be able to get some of Ramey's work in there too which would be pretty cool.

But we're off again, we've got a couple more people we've got top see in California.

Love America: people are fantastic.

Always, till we see you again – remember: make sure you put some color in your life.

We'll see you later guys.

Bye now.

See you.

(Ramey) See you.

Source: Youtube

#Art #Colour #Dixon #Fine #in #Life #On #Ramey #Tips #with #your

0 notes