#dang. she was like The Teen Movie Girl Protagonist.

[foxgloveinspace]

I just realized that my phone Home Screen has kinda become like my bedroom walls when I was a teenager, cause I would put pictures and lyrics and so much stuff on the wall when I was teen and while I have stuff there now, it’s all stuff I know I’ll like to look at for a long time, and now my phone has the pics of the obsession of the week.

[annymation]

What things annoyed and infuriated you the most in Wish 2023 (or Canon!Wish)?

OOOOH BOY! You just gave me permission to open a whole can of worms! Let's gooo!

Okay so here's a list:

I don't like how weak the reveal of what Magnifico actually does is. Asha finds out that he doesn't grant all the wishes, awesome, that would be a cool reveal, except, it's not a reveal, she freakin KNEW THIS! Asha herself said to a kid "It could be you someday" COULD! Asha, you said COULD, as in, there's the POSSIBILITY he'll grant that kid's wish, not a certainty! Not to mention if he only grants ONE wish per month then OF FREAKING COURSE not all wishes are granted. Okay, case in point, there's no grand reveal that the king is doing something no one knew, Asha apparently just forgot how their kingdom works.

Now hear me out, I am NOT one of those people that says Magnifico is a hero and Asha is a villain, I wanna make this clear, because although I find people who legit think like that kinda funny and I reblog their takes from time to time, I also find it frustrating that Disney managed to make a STRAIGHT, WHITE, MAN, IN A POSITION OF POWER, MORE LIKABLE THAN THEIR SECOND BLACK PROTAGONIST! ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? IT'S SO EASY TO MAKE US HATE HIM!!!-ahem- But, although Magnifico is the most likable character in the movie, I do not see him as a hero, no no no, keeping the wishes away from the people of Rosas is bad, pretending that he'd grant Sabino's wish only to say SIKE was bad, saying he'd never grant Asha family's wishes was bad. So, am I saying Magnifico is a villain?... No. That's topic number 2, Magnifico wasn't a villain, he was a jerk. A jerk does not a villain make. I didn't feel threatened by that man for not a single minute, and that's including when he was possessed by the evil book, speaking of which.

That dang book both ruined and saved the movie honestly, because yeah, although it's a stupid way to make Magnifico an actual villain, but in a way that makes us sympathize with him since he's not in his right mind, and the last thing you want is for the audience to feel bad for your villain... Well, there's exceptions of course, but that's a whole other subject. But even though the book caused all this damage, it also gave us King unhinged, campy, straight up evil, fruity, voiced by Chris Pine having the time of his life Magnifico, and I loved every second of it, I ate possessed Magnifico up, I was living for every cringe cliche evil dialogue that came out of him, like hell yeah, that's what I've been waiting for, that's what it's all about WOOOOOO!!! I loved him so much I just copy pasted his personality into the Magnifico in my rewrite, although, my version is actually willing to kill teens, while Canon Mag seemed more hesitant for some reason, my headcanon is that Magnifico was fighting the curse deep down, and that's why his magic actually didn't hurt anyone, so... That's sad, hope he breaks out of the mirror and kills them all Idk

We're on topic 4 and this is not even half of my problems oh my... Anyway, Asha is boring. And I mean like, in a way that feels intentional, how did they do it? It's fascinating how she has nothing going for her, she doesn't stand out, doesn't have any internal conflicts at the start of the movie, something ALL Disney princesses have: Belle doesn't fit in with her village, Mulan struggles to make her family proud, Mirabel struggles to make her family proud x10.000, Moana wants to explore the sea but can't, Ariel wants to explore the land but can't, Jasmine wants to get out of the castle but can't, Cinderella is a victim of domestic abuse, ya'll get the idea, all these girls get their struggles that make them compelling, what's Asha's struggle that has been with her for most of her life?... Uh... Her grandpa, this dude we just met and seems pretty happy... Doesn't have his wish granted yet... Ok, what else? Oh yeah everyone in town seems to love her and dance along with her to show tourists how cool the kingdom is... Uhum... So yeah she has no compelling struggles that hook us with her from the start, and the conflict she DOES get, as I explained before, feels underwhelming.

The setting, oh the setting. Like, don't get me wrong, the architecture is pretty, but nothing about it screams SPAIN to me, where is the cultural food? Where are the bulls? Where's the stuff we associate with the Iberian Peninsula? They did such a good job in Encanto, what the heck happened? Oh and did I mention that most of the animals that appear in the forest are not even native to the Iberian Peninsula, there would be no racoons in a medieval setting there, considering they're an invasive species that was brought there from North America, something that, I assume, wouldn't be possible back then, as I don't think the americas were even discovered yet, but anyway, there they are, racoons hanging upside down from their tails, something they can't even do. Sorry for expecting biology accuracy from my disney movie guys, but you can't just make Encanto, that was freaking amazing with it's inclusion of so many gorgeous latin American animals, and then do whatever Wish is, like bruh where were the Lynxes??? They're an endangered species there, Disney could've raised awareness!!!

The music...

Valentino was absurdly annoying, and it would be SO EASY to make a baby goat cute! Baby. Goats. Are. Cute. SO WHY DID YOU MAKE HIM UNFUNNY GOAT THAT MAKES BUTT JOKES???

Characters were unmemorable, Asha's mom didn't do anything, Sabino, whose supposed to be the backbone of the story, is barely a character, and again, it's not like Disney hasn't made likable elderly people before, Moana's grandma, Mama Coco, but my guy Sabino was just... There.

Aaaand I probably could go on and on but I can't think of anything else, feel free to share your own problems with the movie yall.

[jq37]

So, Jumanji by way of Last Action Hero. Ok, Never Stop Blowing Up. I'm in for the ride. They managed to put together a great table for this one. I'm delighted they got Rekha back in the Dome. It's exciting to see Alex Song-Xia again. Izzy is always a treat. I'll never say no to more Jacob Wysocki. And of course Ally and Ify are always strong performers. We're in for a good season.

What a crazy start! I'm so glad I watched Last Action Hero a few weeks ago in prep because those vibes are very apparent (in addition to Jumanji 2 of course, but I'd already seen that).

A quick rundown of everything going on:

Ally Beardsley as Russell Feeld as Jennifer Drips

INSANE swings from Ally right out the gate. I love that Izzy was both in character thirsting over Russell and out of character being like, "Pull it back." Also, I think they're the only one playing a girl movie character so that's interesting. This season is gonna be such a trip pronoun-wise. Wonder what direction Ally wants to go with that.

Ify Nwadiwe

as Wendell Morris as Vic Ethanol

I was STUNNED to hear Wendell's voice come out of Ify's body. I didn't know he had an Urkel-esque bone in his jacked as hell self. And I assumed that once the PCs turned to their MCs (movie characters) they'd use their MC voice but nope. It seems like he's still doing the Wendell voice which is wild. I love a sweet nerd so Wendell is one of my early faves for sure. Very much the vibes on the main character from Jumanji 2 turning into the Rock. Also, Vic Ethanol is my fave expy name.

Isabella Roland

as Paula Donvalson as Jack Manhattan

Izzy had, by far, my favorite movie bit with her and Brennan walking into that chicken bit which was golden. Sometimes a bit drags on too long but they drove that to the exact funniest point and then left it there. Chef's kiss, no notes. Very much looking forward to seeing this very tightly wound mom in this unhinged setting.

Rekha Shankar

as Usha Rao as G13

Something I really respect is building a character who is specifically bad at the main thing they have to do and a woman who barely has grasped the concept of phones having to be the hacker is so funny. Rekha, you've done it again. I didn't notice until it was pointed out on Twitter but one of the fave movies listed on her card is literally the first movie ever made (The Horse in Motion). And her immediate 1 when trying to do hacker stuff is a portent of more hilarity to come I'm sure. Love to have her back in the dome.

Alex Song-Xia

as Liv Skyler as Kingskin

Also, love to have Alex back in the dome! I loved them in Mentopolis and they picked such a fun dichotomy of characters to inhabit in a teen girl who's giving me Vanessa from In the Heights with a little compulsive shoplifting plus truly just Kingpin from Marvel. I found her really endearing and she was also one of my faves.

Jacob Wysocki

as Andy 'Dang' Litefoot as Greg Stocks

I'm not as familiar with Jacob as I think some others are but he matched the table's energy right away. I would think the aliens thing was a weird swing except that there's someone in one of my games who has a very similar deal (their PC not the actual person lol) so it's kind of like yeah, that's a normal thing for a PC to believe. Maybe it's because I just binged all of The Bear but he kind of reminds me of a more assertive Fak. And it's a very funny contrast to a suave James Bond-type (also, Stocks/Bond. Ha).

So it looks like we have Fast and Furious, Die Hard, and James Bond. Kingskin is Kingpin from Spiderman and maybe just repping mobster flicks in general. G13 also seems to be a generic hacker. And Jennifer Drips is a generic femme fatale.

I think it's interesting that everyone seems to be a protagonist except for Kingskin who is an obvious baddie (unless he comes from a Breaking Bad type world where it's bad guys all the way down and no real heroes).

Also, I'm curious about how they'll cross over with each other. In Last Action Hero, it was kind of implied that many action movie scenarios take place in a shared universe (which is why you had Arnold in the same police station as a talking cartoon cat and other archetypes waiting to get paired up with their wacky mismatched sidekicks). Could be something like that, but we'll see.

Anyway, yeah! I wasn't sure how this season was gonna look but I'm VERY down for it now that it's started. Oh! And the animatics???? Amazing! D20 just keeps outdoing itself!

[tricktster]

the twilight series suddenly makes 100% more sense if you read them under a specific premise that, i contend, is heavily supported by the text:

Much like Amy’s diary in Gone Girl, the books in the Twilight Saga are verbatim reproductions of in-universe diary entries carefully and deliberately created and curated by badass unreliable narrator Bella Swan as a means to achieve immortality.

Prerequisite assumptions:

1) Bella actively and persistently wants to become a vampire, both diagetically and (I contend) non-diagetically. The average vampire novel format often fails to capture realistic human behavior in one highly specific area: the protagonists are frequently mortals who grapple with the choice of whether to become a vampire. This is stupid, because being a vampire would obviously be dope as hell; particularly in the Twilight Universe, where vampires are not required to take a human life to survive, and indeed, have the capacity to live full and rewarding lives while integrated* into the human community.

(*integrated-ish; see Assumption 6)

2. There are too many coincidences for Bella to have encountered the Cullens by sheer chance, only to be the ONE person that Edward can’t live without (due largely to the novelty factor of not being able to read her ding-dang thoughts.)

3. Diagetically, the Volturi don’t even know Bella’s psyonic gifts until New Moon, but we also know that the Volturi scour the globe for recruits to enlist into the protection of their governing body.

4. Nobody wants to be a voiceless cog in a bureaucracy.

5. Nobody, and especially nobody in high school, wants to be a high school student forever.

6. Vampires in twilight are, as a group, cartoonishly terrible at disguising their true nature.

7. Forks is a backwater town approximately 3.5 hours away from the biotech hub of Seattle.

7. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney can eat my farts and they deserve to be preserved in this snapshot of an innocent author’s mind slowly unraveling.

Proposed timeline:

In 1993, there is a key system meltdown at a improvised biohacking startup in Seattle, rendering all innovative genetic modification experiments into a puddle of brown sludge that nobody can figure out how to dispose of per Federal regs, since they don’t even know what it is.

The broke founder of the startup, who for the purposes of this timeline I will call Jeff Bezos because that’s who it was, eventually grows tired of all the discussion about what to do, and just pops it in a barrel, drives a few hours out of town, and dumps it in a pond.

Bella Swan, a small child, is hanging out at a park with her family friend Jacob Black (and a ton of his friends) when they all decide to wade in a slightly murky pond. Thereafter, they are transformed.

Bella grows up as a normal, highly powerful mutant with a +20 to deception checks and wisdom saves. She lives in Arizona, but up until 2002, summers in Forks. While in Forks, she picks up on the local lore about a family of vampires who don’t eat people.

Because Forks (population: 17 + Charlie’s mustache) is boring, Bella bones up on the only interesting thing about it, i.e. Vampire Hometown baybeeeee.

In 2000, George W. Bush gets elected president, and his evangelical politics and general bumbling ineptitude informs Bella’s opinions on authoritative governmental entities.

In 2001, the Cullens make their intention to move back to Forks known, but they take a while because they need to pack all their stupid graduation hats and volvos, etc.

Later in 2001, a psychic Volturi scout rolls through Forks to ensure that nobody within living memory recalls the Cullens, and notices an anomaly in the psychic field.

The scout goes to confront Bella about joining the Volturi, and Bella immediately clocks him as a vampire, because vampires in the Twilight Universe fucking suck at looking/acting human. This leaves the scout in a bind: she’s too valuable to kill, but she’s a pre-teen, and therefore too young to be transformed per Volturi authority.

The scout warns her he’ll have to kill her if she discusses the existence of vampires with any human. He then tells her he’ll be back in five years, and begins to sweet talk her on how good life will be when she’s a vampire, beautiful, immortal, powerful, etc. Bella asks if she has to kill, and dude says “nah, actually there’s a bunch of vegetarian vampires who are moving back here soon. Fucking nerds, but otherwise they’re doing well.” Bella is all about becoming a vampire, because Bella is a rational actor.

Bella moves to Arizona, and as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are unjustifiedly initiated, she recognizes that while she DOES want to be a vampire, she does NOT want to be a foot soldier in any war that she can’t support. She needs a plan.

In 2004, Bella is watching her step-dad’s minor league baseball game when it occurs to her. On her own, she’s a target for the Volturi, but if she had some people to watch her back, she might be okay. Of course, nobody fucks with the Volturi on behalf of some rando human. She’ll need to con her way into a coven who’ll have her back and also give her that +10 to constitution via vampiric transformation, which she desperately wants because she’s a rational actor. And where are the non-volturi vampires that might have her back? Fucking Forks.

Bella moves to Forks in 2004, and upon seeing the Cullens, she immediately clocks them as vampires even though they left their “we’re all vampires” booty shorts at home, because, as previously discussed, vampires in the Twilight Universe fucking suck at looking/acting human.

Bella notes that all the vampires but one are paired off in heterosexual bliss, and takes note of the straggler as a potential vehicle to vampyrdom.

Bella figures out that Eddie can read everyone’s mind but hers, because Edward Cullen fucking sucks at looking/acting like a human who can’t read minds. Bella further observes that Eddie has a huge undead boner for her.

She’s found her mark. Now she just needs to convince him that she’s better off as part of the coven than on her own. Problem: Eddie’s a self-pitying insufferably guilt-striken perpetual adolescent who keeps himself busy by feeling sorry for himself because he’s a vampire, angst angst angst etc etc. Also, I think he’s Catholic, so add some more guilt in. She’ll have to win him over by convincing him that they’re destined to be soulmates.

What does a vampire used to having complete insight into everyone’s mind but his crush’s want? A method to know what she really thinks of him. Bella begins writing a “diary” knowing that there’s no way in hell Eddie won’t sneak in and read it. So she Gone Girls it, and begins to lay a trap to lure him in. That first diary? Twilight.

This was just in the movie but a stoner chases her around with a worm on a stick. Nothing to do with this theory, I just like that part of the movie. Where’s my spinoff about that guy?

Eddie won’t give Bella what she wants (eternal life) by the end of book 1, even though she asks him to EXTREMELY POLITELY. Time to hit the diary with some more promises of undying love.

Bella reconnects with her old friend Jacob and the rest of the Mutated By Jeff Bezos Boys. Alas, they cannot turn her into a physically powerful sexy immortal with a bite, so she’s still stuck with plan A) win over a whole family of vampires with big Mormon energy. It’s the long con.

Edward’s angst abruptly takes a swing towards terminal. He’s absolutely your classic sadboy, perhaps because Bella now has one (1) friend that he knows about.

When Eddie begins to drift away on account of Angst, Bella conjurs up a secondary love interest who, coincidentally, is ALSO a sexy supernatural entity, and is much less coincidentally just Jacob.

We should establish here that Edward is like a 107 year old white dude and so even though Diary!Bella pretends not to see it, Metatextual Frame Story!Bella knows that dude is super racist.

Jacob Black is three things: 1. Like Bella, a mutant (although one with shapeshifting abilities), 2.one of Bella’s oldest and most trusted confidants, and 3. down to clown on an elderly teenage vampire who keeps stereotyping him. Sure, says Jacob, I’ll take the form of a werewolf. He seriously thinks we’re all just beastmen, huh? Hey look at me now, I’m Regis Philbin because this is 2005 and Who Wants to be a Millionaire is still sort of relevant. Sick.

Edward does not like that Bella has one (1) other friend. Bella and Jacob plot to use this to their advantage and lure Edward back on the wings of jealousy.

Eddie gets himself into trouble on account of Angst and poor communication, so Bella has to go rescue him from himself/the Volturi.

Aro finally meets her and gets to test her powers, which impress him. Now she’s back on the fucking radar.

I forget everything that happens in Eclipse, so i have chosen to omit that part.

Eventually she extracts a quid pro quo from Eddie; i’ll marry you if you turn me into a dracula.

We don’t really call ourselves that, Wet Blanket Cullen replies, entirely earnestly.

Bella gets married at 18 in 2006, and Eddie starts to backtrack his promise about changing her. This won’t stand.

Well, look, he’s an elderly guilty catholic/mormon teen who probably still uses super racist terms, but she’s stuck on honeymoon island, he has certain angles that work for him, and seriously what are they gonna do but fuck? Bella’s alternative is listening to her “husband” drone on about his interests, which are almost certainly Car, How Do I Post a Minion Picture on Facebook, and Licorice Used To Be a Lot Cheaper in the Good Old Days.

Whoops a fetus.

Bella recognizes that she’s GOT to have this baby: time’s running out, and Bella knows that at least two of the Vamps in her coven will cut ties if she terminates or otherwise fails to carry this baby to term because of the conservative religious subtext. She’s going to have to stick it out for 9 months, even though it’s a risky call.

Bella gets what she wants after giving birth. “My time as a human is over, but I've never felt more alive. I was born to be a vampire.” That’s a direct quote. Except now she’s got a (pretty cute and easy) baby that she desperately wants to protect from Turning Into A Vaguely Religious Cullen Dressed Head To Toe In Cream Colored Wool.

Bella decides to fake her own death and escape with the kid and Jake so they can form i guess a detective agency. Bella will get “killed” by the Volturi, move to Sydney, and open up shop, and Jake will take the kid after her a few months later.

They’re gonna need a reason why Jake gets the kid though, and there’s only one reason to do anything amongst the Cullens: a heterosexual love interest with a super problematic age gap.

Jesus, Jake sighs, is Eddie really going to believe I’m in romantic love with your actual infant? Does he really think that little of me?

Yup.

Bella tries to draw the Volturi’s attention.

Works too well.

The Cullens call up all their vague acquaintances, who are at least kind of fun. Particularly that one dude who keeps getting angry about British conduct during the American Revolution.

Well, fuck, now the Volturi are bringing an army to fight their ragtag army of Vampires Who Are Cool And Interesting Enough That We Can Safely Presume They Are All Definitely Gay. Bella can’t let those guys die, they’re the first actually compelling vampires she’s ever talked to.

Bella saves the day because she’s OP.

All the Cool Vamps start packing up to leave and Bellz almost goes with them, but the Cullens would just keep sending missionaries after her if they knew.

Bella finishes her fourth journal with the vague warning that the Volturi are still out there somewhere and they miiiight just try and get her.

Two days later, she stages a scuffle and gets the fork out of Fucks. Her journals are the only clue.

Sirius Black and baby nessie follow once edward has stopped sobbing into his cream colored sweater and moved on to Extended Power Pouting.

Bella recruits her own army of fledglings.

Bella stages a coup against the Volturi and succeeds.

Bella sits on the iron throne with a hot lady vampire on each knee and they all kiss and stuff.

Nessie I guess forms a post punk band?

Edward dies from aspiration of a brussel sprout that he ate because he just wanted to feel something.

Charlie and Billy get married.

Charlie’s mustache develops a cult instagram following, providing them with a modest retirement income.

Jacob shapeshifts into Bill Murray and is always crashing weddings.

Bella’s stepdad is off in the B plot this whole time winning the world series with the help of a kooky angel.

There. Fixed. My soul is at rest.

[qk1]

gonna post a dang dream cause it was dang weird and I want a link to send

    it was in the form of like, a movie? main character is me but is blonde girl, looking like stock 30-something protagonist chick from an apatow movie. but this is some sort of drama. i can't tell whats going on specifically because the dialogue makes no sense. i am arguing in a room with some other girls, ones older, scolding me i think. i get my things and go.

     i get in my car, but where i was parked was in some grass. while driving into the road, i realize its a much steeper dropoff onto the road than i thought, and it bottoms out and damages my car. brand new car all fucked up. im mad but oh well, i drive on.

     seems the movie keeps switching genres because now its like a dumb 2000s era college comedy where i keep getting into small accidents as im driving. more and more of the car gets damaged. but like, damaged as in gets hit and falls off completely.

     eventually i am driving what is basically a car frame with just wheels, engine, and a couple body panels left (which is funny because that joke doesnt work anymore since nowadays cars dont have frames like that, theyre unibodies, so fuck you dream). i am super pissed off cause there goes my new car, and its all because hundreds of stupid people keep crashing into me.

     im driving out in the woods and its getting dark. now the genre switches to horror as i am forced to abandon whats left of my car, on a dark country road in the woods. the last guy i crash into is one last jock from the comedy who is trying to apologize to me stupidly when he gets utterly gored from behind by some mchael myers killer dude.

     so obviously i take off running. i try to stay on the road but it turns into trail anf then just into forest. i am gradually less aware of my surroundings until im not even sure why im running and i end up on a train.

     there are a couple people on the train, presumably the party i boarded with, but i don't know them. i try to warn them qbout the guy chasing me but they just laugh. then he shows up and kills another person.

     he manages to hit me a couple times, and now im like the car from earlier, pieces of me coming off. but its just cosmetic damage this time, for lack of a better phrase. little bits of flesh here and there.

     i get hit on the head and i think im fine. but when i examine the damage, a piece of my skull, between my temple and forehead, comes off in my hand, sticky strands of blood and meninges detatching as i pull.

     i escape enough to lock myself in a dark-ish bathroom with one other person. i can see enough that i can tell its in a home, not a train. theres a full size tub and a pedestal sink. the other person is pacing back and forth, gesticulating and rambling.

     shes explaining some barely comprehensible paranoid delusion about how dreams, ones with a series of scenarios like I'm having, are some kind of matrix prison thing. our souls or consciousness or whatever are forced to jump from one body/reality to the next while the body is perpetually sleeping, somnambulantly performing menial tasks necessary for the prison to function.

     the dreams act as instructions for the body. like, in the dream im, say, taking a food item out of a fridge, but in physical reality, my sleeping enslaved body is doing some job that requires bending over, opening a container, and taking a thing out to put into some other container.

     but are the dreams just post hoc rationalizations for the otherwise incomprehensible tasks my body is forced to perform, unbeknownst to me, beyond my control?

     I brush off their schizophrenic conspiracy yheory and leave the dark bathroom, abandoning my plan to assess my damage in the mirror. im sure its fine

     i walk out and im in an apartment. but its somehow mine? and im hosting a party? but i dont know the place or the people so i guess it's still movie mode. im hungry as hell and all the fast food burgers somebody bought got eaten. i go to the fridge and try to microwave some white castle burgers.

     but then everyone is leaving and i have to go with them? for some reason? and this is now like, a lame teens dramedy? like, juno or something? i hate it still? i grab the obly thing in the fridge left and leave with them. we're out in a neighborhood street as the sun is coming up.

     its the old abandoned neighborhood trope again. this neighborhood is tree lined and was probably pretty, but recently abandoned but there must have been a storm. everything is wet leaves and branches broken off the trees strewn about, clogging the road.

     i still have this weed in my hands and im idly picking out stems as we walk. but as i pick i come to realize its just about all stems and either i dropped the flowers or there never was any real weed in it. and im finding inchworms.

     i freak out and drop all of it as i realize all the "stems" in my hands are inchworms or some other kind of caterpillar/worm. i try to point out how weird this is but i look up and whoever i was walking with are all gone. im looking around for people and i just see wet broken branches and dead houses.

     i notice a big arm-width, 12 foot or so branch is kinda moving. i look closer and its not a branch, its also a worm thing, with that same dry caterpillar texture. freaks me out. but im thinking i must be seeing things, it looked just like a branch a second ago. i look closer at the end of it and i can see its dead-eyed bug face turn toward me.

     but for slme reason, maybe because of the fear and panic im feeling, i can see far too much detail (this high-res sharp detail thing happens a lot in my dreams). its face, and all its alien bug features, seem to be segmented, or a lattice of some kind, made up of little spider-like eyes. but the eyes start squirming, like im seeing the tips of larvae in a beehive.

     and from these little orifices out pop, one by one, those little stem-like inchworms, the worm was worms all along, all the way down, its all bugs and crawly and wet leaves and dry wiggling worms and i wake up

[fidelishaereticus]

some thoughts on Labyrinth

OK so after having re-watched this movie for the first time in a while I want to take a moment to appreciate how fucking subtle & brilliant the main themes of Labyrinth are?? 

I mean...there are Some Flaws, like: mildly clunky script writing in places and: a teen actor struggling to pull off mildly clunky script writing (seriously scenes where you’re talking to yourself and trying to make it sound “naturalistic” are The Hardest Thing, to write or act). And they pull some very Unsubtle tropes (see: Hoggle’s whole character arc, very obvious & predictable, but cute as heck so also excellent) H O W E V E R: When it comes to the core concepts & themes of the movie, the the things it’s really about? After all these years it is still somehow refreshingly nuanced. Shit, it does such a damn good job with its ambiguities. The balance it strikes between both critiquing and uplifting the ways in which Sarah engages with fiction, suggesting a compromise without spelling it out? The way the goblin king is both imaginary and real, both someone she created and an independent power beyond her control? How the whole thing is about negotiating imaginative agency? How on some level Sarah is both the protagonist and the antagonist? How you can take it as literal or allegorical or both? And how dang subtle Sarah’s ���romantic” interest Jareth is?* How the movie portrays all of these these things very powerfully without being obnoxiously sledgehammer-y about it? This shit right here. THIS IS WHAT I ASPIRE TO in Cardhouse and the Cage (also one of the few stories i know of that deals with the same themes in a structurally comparable way).

So this has probably all already been said 100 times but, to venture a bit into my personal analysis...

the movie opens with the problem: the dissonance between the reality and fantasy, how being a highly imaginative person in the real world is Hard and not infrequently Problematic, for yourself and those around you. But instead of asking us to condemn Sarah for her romanticism a la “silly girl with her head in the clouds needs to come down to earth,” we are invited to take her fantasies dead-seriously. We are invited, through the stunning artistry of the film, to enjoy her fantasies, to (implicitly) understand why they are so critical to her personhood, and at the same time struggle alongside her to reconcile all of that with the demands of mundane reality. This is not so original, of course: many fictions do this. What’s remarkable is that the film *engages fully* with the problem it raises in such a satisfying, and yet unconstricting manner. Often stories like this conclude with a cop-out where the themes are dropped or ‘reconciled’ with a trite oversimplification, which can result in a very dissonant ‘whiplash’ sort of ending to the story where the main character Sadly Must Return To Reality for unjustified reasons, or an unsatisfying ‘moral’ about the importance of Putting Away Childish Fancy. Labyrinth builds up its themes deliberately and carries them through to the end: it demonstrates the problem and then shows how Sarah triumphs conceptually over her current dilemma in a meaningful and direct manner. But the sledgehammer never hits too hard. It leaves room for interpretation, for thematic personalization on the part of the audience. And most importantly, at no point does the narrative come out with a decisive: “THIS is the Wrong And Bad way to do fiction; HERE is a guidebook for the the Good And Right way to do it.” And god,,,i appreciate that so much. The closest it comes A Directive is the repeated “you have no power over me,” which i’ve always personally interpreted as “remember kids! you have wild fantasies; wild fantasies don’t have you.” But it’s a flexible guideline. It is about agency and empowerment. It’s a reminder that you have control over how you engage with fiction. If how you’ve been engaging with fiction isn’t working for you anymore, you have the power to re-negotiate the relationship. You can keep what you love and discard what has become toxic. 

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*I mean, the fact that he’s sexy is absolutely Not Subtle. But with the exception of the hallucination sequence, Sarah demonstrates zero interest in that sexiness. Which is appropriate---she’s a kid & she’s single-mindedly focused on getting her brother back. But that’s only on one level. On a slightly more meta (& open-to-interpretation) level, when you think about the extent to which her imagination invoked and actively impacts the goblin king and everything about him (how on the outermost level of meta she literally created him) its like,,,,oh. Oh. He is Her Problematic Fave(TM). He doesn’t just happen to look like that. He is the (dubiously) living embodiment of her enthralment with All Things Fantastical and she’s fighting that the whole time, because now it’s threatening something in her Real Life to a point where she’s Not OK With It. I’ve seen people on this site applaud the film for making Jareth such a Clear & Inexcusable Antagonist, but I think that’s a wildly inaccurate. That he exists is neither good nor bad. He’s a fairy! He’s blue and orange. He’s only debatably real. It’s how you deal with him that matters.

[sharksfood]

so this thought just came into my head and i want to explore it.

in my life i’ve only seen 3 films so far that i read as books before they became movies. im not counting comic books/graphic novels that became movies bcs thats a little different, books that became tv shows, or plays that became movies. but its interesting to think about that.

i didnt read harry potter until well after the films (all of them lmao) were released, i’ve never read how to train your dragon, i’ve never read the hobbit/lotr, the animated alice in wonderland came out in the 50s, i have only recently read the last unicorn, i read World War Z after the movie came out (and ive never seen all of the movie), and i read the neverending story when i was cast in the play.

the books that i read before they came out in film are; The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, Warm Bodies, and Goosebumps.

Goosebumps kind of fits but it was made into a tv series first, and im not sure if i read the books or saw the shows first. i did both, i know that much.

I read Warm Bodies only bcs I wanted to see the movie but thought the book would be cool to read (its amazing and has a completely different feel from the movie), and Lion Witch Wardrobe was bcs my dad read it to me when I was younger. That and The Magician’s Nephew are the only Narnia books ive ever read.

I was going to try and read Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children before the movie came out, but that work out for me.

if you want to count comics and graphic novels, then the list gets bigger. but comics already have the characters drawn out, so unlike books, you dont have an idea in your head on what the character looks like. that is so often changed in film, plus you loose so much detail and nuance when you go book to screenplay to film (this is also true with comics, but its still different)

However, and the biggest reason as to why I’m thinking about this, two movies will be coming out in the next few years, and both of them are based on my favorite books of all time (aside from the alice books of course). 

The first is Captain Underpants! I know that this is a book series with words and pictures, so technically its a graphic novel series, but they’re kids books! and those tend to have an awful lot of pictures. This series was my FAVORITE (other than the alice books) as a kid!! they were fun, hilarious, relatable, and just all around super great. So when i saw the trailer for the animated film that’s coming out this year based on the series i was ECSTATIC!! Were it live-action i would be bummed out since kids picture books usually fair better when animated (im not a fan of the diary of a wimpy kid movies....) but this animation is handled a lot like The Peanuts movie. The animation look like a color and 3D version of the exact art style!! its wonderful and im SO EXCITED

The other one, and this i am VERY VERY nervous about, is Ready Player One. that is my favorite sci-fi novel ever. i often say its my favorite book ever bc it deserves more love! and i do so much love it. ive reread it i dont even know how many times. and what do you know, they’re making it into a movie!! when i heard about this i had so many mixed feelings, and most of it has to do with the style of the book and the characters.

-Ready Player One Spoilers-

In Ready Player One the protagonist starts out as a dirt poor, fat, unattractive teen boy, and later he gets more physically fit/healthy and rich. he claims to still be unattractive at this point (mostly bcs he jues doesnt like how he looks and he looses all his body hair). this is very important to the character! i’m afraid that in this movie hollywood will do as they always do and make him a skinny conventionally attractive teen from the get-go. people will probably pull the Holes excuse of “the filmmakers didnt want to make the actor gain a bunch of weight and then loose it all” BULLSHIT they can cast a fat actor! and through his training and as they film the movie he can loose some weight or they can use movie magic (like when they made chris evans a scrawny little thing). its not that hard, people.

Another character, and this was super important to me and was a big subplot, is that Wade best friend, Aech, whom he only knows through the game (OASIS) plays as a white, straight, guy avatar, but they’re actually a black lesbian named Helen. And she plays this avatar to protect herself and to get a job and be taken seriously within OASIS. is super sad she has to do this, but its a big part of her character. she’s also fat as well, and im REALLY worried that in the movie she’s going to be a skinny straight white girl.

Two other characters who have important characteristics are Art3mis (Samantha) and the creator of OASIS James Halliday. Art3mis is Wade later love interest and GF. She is notable bcs her avatar is just like her, a chubby girl with black hair, but sans her port-wine birthmark. I know they’ll keep her birthmark, since its an intimate reveal, but they’ll probably make her skinny and i hate it. Now it’s only half canon in the books, but i’ve chosen to go with it, but at one point Wade talks about James Halliday’s childhood and his personality and all that, and mentions that he might have been autistic. Now, since it’s only he “might have been” in the books, the filmmakers will probably not make him autistic. That’s fucking sad to me, I mean, it would be amazing!! This character is one of the smartest, most famous, most prolific video game programmers/designers in history!! And he’s autistic! That is some wonderful representation and the filmmakers should jump on that opportunity. It’ll inspire so many autistic people who have a passion for video games to pursue their dreams. But, i have a hunch they wont go with it.

Two other characters, Daito and Shoto, are Japanese young guys who claim to be brothers (and their characters are) but are just friends in the real world. My initial hunch was that the filmmakers would keep them Japanese, but given the recent whitewashing of important Japanese characters, I have my doubts.

My few other concerns are that this movie won’t have 80s pop culture as the main style and focus of the era they book is set in, not to mention OASIS and most of people’s interests. It’s incredibly important to the novel, but so many dystopian movies choose to go with gritty, futuristic, edgy stuff. The other concern is how they will handle the real life vs OASIS look, since over half of the book takes place inside a VR video game. I’ve seen news that they are utilizing VR technology, but i havent read too much. I’m wondering if they’ll animate all of OASIS and the avatars and action and anything in the video game! That would be awesome.

So these are all my thoughts. I havent looks at who they’ve cast yet, so I’m going to do that right now. I do know that Steven Spielberg is directing it, which could be fantastic or terrible. Okay, cast time.

------

So the IMDB doesnt say who is cast as Daito and Shoto, but Wikipedia says that Win Morisaki of PrizmaX will play him, which is great! I hope that’s what happens.

Art3mis/Samantha will be played by Olivia Cooke, who in my opinion is way too old. She’s older than me! The character’s age (i think) isnt mentioned in the book, but she’s got to be 17-20, and Olivia Cooke looks older than that. She’s also not chubby, but hey, maybe they’ll fit that. She also doesnt have the birthmark, but that’s gonna be makeup. (wouldve been cool if they found an actress with a port-wine stain on her face...)

Parzival/Wade will be played by Ty Sheridan. He was Cyclops in X-Men Apocalypse. He’s the right age, but way too fit and attractive. DAMN IT Well, I guess there’s always makeup and special effects, but i’m 80% sure now they wont make Wade fat.....

Aech/Helen will be played by Lena Waithe who is almost PERFECT. She’s much older than Aech, who is around 18, but like Samantha i imagine they’ll have make up and acting to cover it. My biggest concern is that she’s not fat like Aech, which means they’ll use a body suit or effects or Lena will gain weight, or they wont do anything.....

T.J. Miller will be playing I-r0k, who is another OASIS player and a bigtime douchebag jerk. This is perfect. We don’t know his age, or really anything other than his personality and avatar, and T.J. Miller is hilarious so this/ll be great.

Mark Rylance will be playing James Halliday, witch is fine by me. He’s not quite what I imagined, but thats what makeup and wigs are for. He’s worked a lot with Steven Spielberg, so that makes sense as to why he’s cast here. I just hope he can portray an autistic character well and with respect.... (would be better if he IS autistic but ya know.....)

Simon Pegg will be playing Ogden Morrow, the co-creator of OASIS, and thats perfect. No complaints.

Nolan Sorrento (the antagonist of the book and head of operations at Innovative Online Industries) will be played by Ben Mendelsohn, who was Director Krennic in Rouge One. He is much older and not quite and slimy as I imagined him, but this can totally work. I pictured Nolan Sorrento as Andrew Scott in my head, since he seems like the perfect evil, charismatic, slimy, attractive but ugly inside business man.

----

So, after looking at the current casting choices im a little let down, but still excited! I’ll have to wait patienly for the trailer, since this thing is coming out in 2018. Dang, this turned into a Ready Player One post, but its been on my mind recently.

If you read through all of this, good job! let me know what you think! i probably dont talk about Ready Player One very often but thats bcs i dont know anyone in real life (other than my dad) who has read this book, and the online fandom seems nonexistent. Who knows?

But yeah, I guess I made this post bcs I wasn’t able to share the collective nervousness, complaints, and excitement of Harry Potter or LotR or Percy Jackson fans when their fav books became movies.

[fairymascot]

Some of you were kind enough to enable me, and so, here it is. Almost 2,600 words of everything wrong with Makoto Shinkai's 'Your Name', because gosh diddly dang it am I tired of seeing it heaped with baseless praise. This analysis contains spoilers for the whole movie, so read at your own risk! Stashing it under cut for length. Everything Wrong with 'Your Name': A Really Long Chunk of Media Analysis

'Your Name' is a top-grossing, critically acclaimed anime feature by Makoto Shinkai. It is, in short, about a teen girl from a small south-of-nowhere town and a teen guy from Tokyo, who mysteriously find themselves spending entire days in each other's bodies. They fall in love, as every guy and girl are meant to do, and it is then revealed that (1) the boy lives three years in the future, (2) the girl's town is to be unexpectedly destroyed by a stray chunk of comet, and so the guy goes back in time through her body to save her and the people of her town. They meet like a decade later and presumably get married and live happily ever after, the end.

This movie, with its gorgeous animation, artistic directing and beautiful original soundtrack by popular band Radwimps, was quick to achieve immense commercial and critical success. So just what is it that's wrong with it? Boy. Where do I begin.

It's phenomenally lazy in its writing.

The movie opens with intersecting inner monologues by the two main characters, in which they very melodramatically narrate the gaping void in their hearts without each other, and establish the fact that they are soulmates. Yes, five seconds in we are told are plainly told by the characters that they are soulmates, without knowing who they are or what kind of dynamic they have. This is a very convenient move: instead of having to go through the effort of selling us on their romance through the story, the writer just tells us from the get-go we have to be invested in it.

Unsurprisingly, at no point does the movie back this up with actual development.

By the nature of this story, the main pairing cannot interact. It's very on the nose with its star-crossed lovers thing. Their only way of getting to know each other is through memos they leave on each other's phones while in their bodies, and through how their surroundings treat them. Since they spend a couple days in each other's bodies per week, and only leave one memo a day -- usually a summary of what they did while in each other's bodies, to provide a reference for when they change back -- there is no real back-and-forth interaction even over text.

What I'm saying is this story is selling us an epic romance between two people who have never spoken once in their lives. It does this exclusively through cheap, external narrative stunts: first the monologues in the beginning, and then, around a third of the way in, through a supporting character telling the main boy that he's acting like he's in love with someone, which of course instantly opens his eyes to his feelings that the writer spent absolutely no time trying to actually develop. Oldest trick in the book.

The two of them interact for a single, two-minute scene, fifteen minutes or so before the movie ends. When the girl's town is about to be destroyed by the comet, through the magic of love and God-knows-what, their timelines briefly manage to intersect and allow them to interact. This hugely crucial moment in is written in the shallowest, most unsatisfying manner imaginable: in the story's biggest and only chance to sell the viewers on the depth of their supposed love, it offers us a stock guy-on-girl anime interaction, stuffed so full of stereotypes you could fill a bingo card with it: the girl cries emotionally at the sight of him, she blushes and huffily calls him a pervert and an idiot, she bashfully asks him if she looks pretty and then gets huffy, again, over his unenthusiastic response. The guy, like every main character in a romance anime, offers nothing but lukewarm, inane reactions, despite the fact he just spent half the movie scrambling to save this girl's life and finally gets to meet her against all odds. Not a word of real substance or emotional value is spoken between them, but the scene is framed oh so very prettily, with the sunset fading in the background accompanied by swelling violin music. So of course, we're supposed to be deeply touched.

Yeah, no.

It's so mind-numbingly stereotypical in its handling of gender and romance, you'd think it was written fifty years ago.

Instead of giving the characters actually unique and compelling personalities, the guy and girl's personalities can be aptly summed up as 'guy' and 'girl'. The guy is rough around the edges, quick to anger, loud and brash, physically strong, likes sports, incapable of doing anything too intricate or gentle with his hands. The girl is sensitive, emotional and highly concerned with others' view of her, gets self-conscious easily, good at sewing, and dreams of living a stylish life in Tokyo where she can go to cute cafes. There is not one, single aspect to these characters that betrays the generic societal expectations of what 'a guy' and 'a girl' are like.

Aha! But make no mistake. It's necessary for them to have these exact personalities, because 90% of the humor in this movie hinges on gender essentialist jokes. The whole first half of the film, where it's still light-hearted before gearing into melodrama mode, carries the punchline: 'Look! A girl acting like a boy! A boy acting like a girl! How wild is this, you guys?!' To name some of the fresh and inventive jokes it provides us with: the boy, when in the girl's body, cannot put her hair in the right hairdo; he sits open-legged; he gets into fights; he makes her suddenly excellent at sports, which earns her a long list of female admirers, much to her dismay. The girl, when in the boy's body, initially refers to herself in an inappropriately feminine manner; she acts timid and delicate; one of the guy's friends comments 'don't you think he's kind of cute today' while blushing, which of course gets him a weird look from his other friend, because what the hell dude, that’s, like, gay.

There's a lot that can be done with body-swapping narratives, especially when the swap is with a member of the opposite sex. It can be used as a tool for some incredibly interesting psychological exploration, as well as delving into potentially queer themes. The female protagonist herself even declares at the beginning of the movie that she wishes she could be a guy, but you know, not in a weird way, or anything. The movie isn't interested in that, of course, because it's very important for it to be about a boy and a girl who are very cis and straight and who fall in love in the most banal way possible. Which is fine, I mean, that's the standard, but couldn't it be a little less offensive about it?

The thing about this movie is that while it attempts to pass itself off as a dual protagonist movie, that's really not the case. Once the plot gets rolling and there's a comet to be stopped, the female character is taken completely out of the picture for maybe a third of the movie, now in the role of a helpless damsel for the guy to rescue. She is not active in any way; she does not contribute to the plot, despite it revolving around saving her hometown. The guy searches, researches, travels physically as well as metaphysically, plans, warns, blows shit up, evacuates, She only does one, single thing, at the very end, which is speak to the town's mayor -- her father -- to convince him of the coming danger. And that's not even shown on-screen.

Oh, yes, and a running gag throughout the movie is: every single time the boy wakes up in the girl's body, he spends a good fifteen minutes fondling her breasts. He even comments, at some point, that 'doing this is bad for her', before happily continuing on. The girl finds out about it -- through her sister commenting on it, of course, not like they guy would come clean -- and confronts him about it during their single shared scene (where she blushes and calls him a pervert), at which he lies and states that it was only the one time, and she forgives him and lets it go. Because that's how you treat the love of your life, folks!

Nothing about the plot makes any goddamn fucking sense.

The ultimate reveal of the film is that the guy and the girl began swapping bodies for the purpose of saving the town from the comet. It's revealed, in addition, that the girl's mother and grandmother went through similar body-swapping experiences in their youth -- except they never led to anything, and were written off as 'dreams'.

Let's go over this again. Some cosmic force of the universe wanted to save the townspeople from death by a meteor crash, and its way of doing so was... to have a certain family of women swap bodies with random big-city men from the not-distant future, over the course of fifty-odd years?

What?

Why?

Let's start with the time discrepancy. Why is it there? Oh, the answer is simple: so you can have the motif of 'love that crosses time and space' reappear in the movie over and over again, lest the audience forgets how epic this romance is. But otherwise? Absolutely no reason. Because, you see, while you could say that the boy could use his knowledge from the future to save the town in time... he doesn't. It's only until after the girl's timeline in the past reaches the point where she and her entire town are killed that the guy discovers it in his timeline, and to save her, he has to go back in time -- not just by his definition of time, but by her definition of time as well. So if the guy was going to find out about the destruction after the fact and go back in time anyway... what narrative purpose does the time gap even possess? None. None at all.

Continuing: why did they choose to mention this has been a thing for generations? It raises more questions than it answers. It didn't take long for the main characters to realize the body swapping isn't just some weird dream, seeing as it left a very real imprint on their real lives and was acknowledged repeatedly by everyone around them. How in the world would the generations before them somehow manage to overlook this? And what would even be the point of warning the town of an up and coming comet fifty years in advance, when there's no way to prove it or any chance anyone would believe it? Yet even so-- if that's truly the method the universe has its eyes set on, why did it just give up on the girl's grandmother and mother, content to bring them closer to annihilation while waiting for the next generation to be born? What are the logistics of any of this?

Then, of course, you have the biggest question of all: How is a seventeen year old Tokyo boy with no special skills equipped to deal with a meteor strike? If we're really meant to accept he was chosen for a higher purpose, wouldn't it make sense to have him be fit to fulfill said purpose? Had the movie waved it all off as some grand cosmic joke or whatever, then sure, it would've still been a total disaster, but at least we would've had one less point to critically analyze it from. But if we're to consider that the whole crux of the story, supposedly, is to keep the comet from wiping out the town, the whole thing completely falls apart.

There are a hundred more effective ways they could've gone about this narrative. First of all: there's no reason for the boy to even be involved. I mean-- again, yes, for the star-crossed romance drama. But from a practical storytelling point? The only advantage he has over the girl is the knowledge of the comet's arrival. That's it. So thinking about it logically, this could've been a movie about her and her alone, if she were just granted visions of the future. It sure would've saved a whole lot of mess, confusion, and needless bumbling around.

But since it needs to be about the both of them, for the romance and all, why not make it.... actually about the both of them? Why not make it about the both of them working together to save the town, instead of the girl being completely absent from such a large and critical chunk of the movie dedicated to her own life and home? Or better yet, why not have each one of them work to save the other's timeline? As things are, there's no reason for the girl to even get channeled into the boy's body in the first place. His timeline doesn't need her intervention, and does not benefit from it -- in fact, the central plot would not have suffered in any way if all scenes featuring the girl in the guy's body were cut clean off. Wouldn't this have been a much more compelling, logical story if it were about two individuals who were specifically chosen to intervene with each other's lives due to their individual skillsets and personalities? If they could do something for each other that they couldn't do for themselves, and learn from each other in the process? Wouldn't that have made a lovely movie?

Well, that's not Your Name. Instead, Your Name is a pretentious, overly-budgeted nonsense salad where the head writer seems to have produced the central motifs out of a hat filled with random things he finds cool. No element of the story can be backed up by the plot's actual demands, and a lot of them clash and override each other. The movie tries to incorporate the theme of past lives and reincarnation by alluding to it in dialogues and in the soundtrack's lyrics, for the sole purpose that it sounds epic and full of pathos, even when the body swapping has nothing to actually do with it. It incorporates the theme of star-crossed lovers traveling through time and space, even when, as mentioned, there's no reason for the time gap to be there in the first place. And most prominent and embarrassing of all -- the central motif of names is horribly, laughably forced at every junction. It's as though the idea of 'they fall in love without knowing each other's names' was the original basis for the story, but as it developed the writer realized it makes no sense for them to spend entire days in each other's bodies without finding out their names -- and stubbornly refused to let the motif go, because the feels, you guys. So the two protagonists, having found out each other's names, go on to forget them, recall them, forget them, recall them, and forget them again all in the span of about twenty-five minutes, with no rhyme or reason to it beyond 'this is what would make this particular moment especially dramatic'. It really encapsulates the whole movie's approach to writing: transparently manipulative with no logical backbone, dressed up in as many frills, ribbons and pretty words as possible to tug at the viewers' heartstrings, in the hopes of making them overlook the fact there's absolutely nothing of value underneath.

Well, what can I say. It clearly succeeded. Good on you, Makoto Shinkai.

[sobdasha]

library book haul

these are all many months out of date

Conservation of Shadows, Yoon Ha Lee This sci-fi and fantasy short story collection is Good Shit. Plus it includes my favorite short-story-collection thing, aka Author's Notes on the stories, which enhances the experience even more. So: I tried to read this in the previous batch with Lee's other work, but Lee's work requires your full attention and is not suitable for reading in the breakroom at work, where people come up, see you with a book, turn on the TV, and then proceed to ignore the TV the entire fucking time while they talk excessively loudly with the other people in the breakroom. I've been enjoying the fact that they put a real chair in the department so if I don't work the morning shift I can take my break in the department where the din from the customers is, in fact, quieter. And I don't have to walk to the literal opposite corner of the store, wasting time and chronic pain! Anyway. So I waited until I was on vacation, and had large stretches of quite time, to read this, and it was amazing. I did not do the write-up then because I am lazy. However, I am in the middle of rereading now, and I can tell you that these stories only get better the second time around. I was a little worried it'd be like Shakespeare--you have to read several Shakespeares before you finally get into the Shakespeare zone and can actually, like, read the Shakespeare. These stories, on the other hand, remained accessible and are enhanced by having half a clue where the story will go. I like them all, but some of my top favorites: Ghostweight--Lee says this was the second-hardest story to write because it took months to nail the intro/outro of the story. Well, it pays off. The Bones of Giants--Lee says the fantasy equivalent of mecha is to dig up some giant skeletons and apply necromancy. I'm bad at recognizing "zombie" when you don't use the word "zombie", so like the Abhorsen series I don't really consider this "zombie lit which I would hate." Mostly it's just a little soft and when I'm reading I picture big sweeping landscapes, like a Studio Ghibli film or Breath of the Wild. The Unstrung Zither--Lee just talks about the music stuff, but this one feels to me like Gundam Wing if I'd actually finished watching Gundam Wing because Gundam Wing had turned out to actually be anywhere near as interesting as the quantum versions of it I'd imagined. (Thanks to Lee's other stories, I'm now using "quantum" instead of "noodle incident".) Well, now I no longer feel any need to actually go back and watch Gundam Wing. Cool! It's occurring to me that Lee's works mostly fall into the category of: soft; this is the literal cost of genocide and occupation; and both at once. It's a hell of a lot better than ~the glory of war~. Anyway as I said it's all good.

Always Coming Home, Ursula K. Le Guin I actually quit reading this one pretty early on. Not exactly a quit, though. I wasn't in the right mindset; I just couldn't get through it and realized what I was in fact craving was Adventure. So I went on to reread The Prydain Chronicles instead and I'll pick this up again sometime later when I am in the mood for something quiet, reflective, domestic, and not big on plot.

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Last Interviews, ed. David Streitfeld This was interesting! Although I always have mixed feelings when I'm reading about authors talking about the craft. IDK I think it's a me-thing. Like, I pick up this essay expecting the author to tell me what works for them, and then I get annoyed because I decided the author was telling me "this is the only way" when that's bs and now I want to rebel??? Or maybe because Le Guin talked about how even a novel ought to be poetry and as someone who understands the theory of meter but has been flunking everything related to meter or stress since grade school in the practical sense, I find that idea Highly Overrated. I honestly don't remember what else was in here, because I waited for many months to do this write-up. I didn't actually hate reading this though so.

The Prydain Chronicles, Lloyd Alexander These are Peak comfort food to me. All I want to say this time around is, I should write some fics as Alexander's penance for making Eilonwy Very Cool but mistakenly doing so by making her Not Like Other Girls. (Crying and having feelings is gender-neutral in these books; what's portrayed negatively about Eilonwy through Taran's view, despite the fact that she's objectively better than him lol, is her ~chattering~. Which is annoying because not only does Eilonwy internalize that into putting down non-sword-women for "clucking like hens", Fflewddur chatters at least as much as Eilonwy, if not more, and because he's a guy it's never phrased that way even though we're all aware he's super flighty. I really wish this had been done with more nuance, because Eilonwy also has internalized misogyny about things like dresses and washing your hair and sleeping in a comfortable bed, and Fflewddur again is always the first person to be like "um but I would like to be comfy tonight though.") Anyway I just think that after Taran is king, if he wants to go someplace and keep his hands busy to think, presumably the gardens and fields are enough out of the way that this would make your king difficult to find. So instead, I propose that he goes to the spinning and weaving rooms, because that's literally in the castle, easy to find, he knows how to do that shit, Dwyvach schooled his ass good about how work doesn't have a gender in book 4, and he did enjoy weaving, and as a bonus he can realize that "chattering" is not bad and gossip is a good way to learn things you, as a king, probably need to know about the working of your castle, and Eilonwy can join him for bonding and realize this is not so terrible after all, and we will all value these women who spend a lot of fucking time and effort making sure you can have some goddamn clothes to wear. THE END.

The Last Unicorn, Peter S. Beagle Everybody really loves The Last Unicorn, by which I think they mean the movie? And I thought that I did as well, even though I remembered exactly nothing from it save for the title when we watched it once in either kindergarten or first grade in place of recess for a week because it was, idk, cold?? raining nonstop??? Anyway I always thought that I loved it and then I finally rewatched it as an adult and it was. Not. Great. And then I forgot and watched it again a few years later and was like Nope, still Not For Me. And now, finally, I decided to get off my bum because for me books are almost always better than the movie, and lo and behold, it is. From what I can recall, the movie is the general plot structure of the book portrayed as an Adventure, stripped of the thoughtful, reflective narration and the deeper narrative themes. Which is 100% why that movie appears to me to be some kind of acid trip. I wish I had read this as an early teen, so that I could have absorbed some of Beagle's writing style, his turns of phrase in simile and metaphor. "His scimitar smile laid its cold edge along their throats," etc. He never really makes it seem like Too Much. (Side note, that's something I notice about Yoon Ha Lee too. Very lush and descriptive similes and metaphors, very much get the job done and are not things you have ever heard before. Although Lee's tend to make me stop and go "wait what???", and catch me off guard. I suspect it's a mix of innovation and cultural difference, whereas for Beagle everything sounds so exactly right and smooth and perfect probably because everyone else has been copying off him for years and I'm familiar with diluted versions. Anyway what I'm trying to say is, I got a bit away from that in my writing, but dang I am gonna have to up my game and purple my prose a little bit more because I really love what these guys are doing!)

Trail of Lightning, Rebecca Roanhorse Okay so Ann Leckie recommended this book to me, both in a general sense and also in person. And I looked at the description and thought, "Well, it's not my genre but it probs can't hurt me to pick it up and try." And so I finally did. Reading this was an interesting progression (probably most especially for my roommate who gets my live-reading reactions while she's trying to DnD) of watching me go from: "It's not my genre but it's not like the writing sucks so it's not bad" to "Well it is engaging and I do like garbage loner protagonist is a woman instead; I'm not compelled to buy this but I will read the rest of the series as it comes out from the library" to "Oh snap I love it when the critical reviews of a book were actually recommendations for me to read it" to "*weeping* Kai is a soft good boy and I support Maggie and her Emotional Support Shotgun, I will buy ALL THE BOOKS" At one point there was a perfect place, in the midst of a discussion about how you can like flamethrowers and makeup at the same time, Maggie, just because you don't like makeup, etc, to insert a joke about "it's called flaming gay for a reason". BUT in Rebecca's defense the entire scene was great anyway. The whole book was great. It's great. Read it. Oh speaking of the critical reviews, one of them was like "the protagonist claims to be unable to cook and then a few paragraphs later makes a 5 star meal, so this book is garbage." Lol was the reviewer confused because the word "bread" was used, and believes that bread is an art form unable to be accomplished by mere mortals (which, I mean, is how I feel about the idea of babying a loaf of bread all day)? Because bread only has to be "I made a paste of flour and water" which this. Basically was. Fried in a pan. And then the side dish was a can of beans with a can of chiles thrown in for fancy. This is literally the definition of can't cook, because you can't exactly order takeout on the reservation after the apocalypse when you prefer to live in a trailer in the middle of nowhere. I'm just saying, this scene was perfect. Also this was the point in time where I started summarizing all apocalyptic books as "After the events of the year 2020" to my roommate. It. It continues to hold true. Every year for like the past five years we've been saying maybe next year will be better, but I'm gonna be honest, I'm terrified of what 2021 will bring. One final visual: me, unable to pronounce Navajo words to my roommate when reading select passages, and also not being able to spell them on account of not knowing the names of accents in English: "so it's c-h-apostrophe-i accent aigu cedilla-i cedilla-polish l with a line through it…" (not an actual word, I don't remember the actual words, I returned the book to the library long ago, this is for illustrative purposes of my ignorance only)

To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf I tried to read this because Le Guin praised it a lot in The Last Interviews, and it was on the Wizard's Library shelves and I thought maybe I should broaden my horizons. But I quit early on because I, a disaster of run-on sentences, could not parse half of these and I was not invested and if I don't have to read ~classics~ for literature class it probably won't ever happen. Honestly a lot of the contemporary literature I'm reading is better for me anyway.

Sunlight and Shadow, Cameron Dokey This was also on the Wizard's Library shelves and I like fairytale things in theory and despite reading the wiki summary on various occasions I really don't know anything about the plot of The Magic Flute, which is this a retelling of. This book queerbaited me. It's unfair of romances to always put more chemistry between the people who aren't getting together than who are. In this case, both girls and both boys, who were to pair off into het couples. There's literally an entire chapter of Gayna going from "You've ruined everything!" to "I wish I could hate you!" to "Oh no you're hot!" to "And that doesn't actually make me jealous oh shit!" to "Okay I'll help you" to "Oh no she smiled and my heart skipped a beat huhhh!" about Mina. The word gay is even in her name!!! What is the author doing with her choices??? Seriously what is the author doing with her choices, in the author's note at the end of the book I learned Statos (Monostatos) was originally "evil character just because he's a Moor" so Dokey Fixed It by making him just a guy who wanted Things like the rest of the characters want Things and he just happens to come off as bad because he's not aligned with them and also he's very, very white. Noooooo that's not how you do it, that's not how you fix racism, you redeem him while keeping him black. I also, as a rule, dislike first-person-narration-that-changes-each-chapter, especially when you're not skilled enough/don't care to write in such a way that the narrator can easily be identified, so basically for a long chapter and a half I assumed Lapin was a girl and when the Queen of the Night was like "fuck you, boy!" I assumed it was a sick burn and Lapin just ~wasn't pretty~ but it turns out he was, in fact, a boy. Also for a book that points out that you can be perfectly happy settling with a decent person and marrying your not-soul-mate (Lapin's parents and grandparents), it's awfully insistent that the main characters all be properly paired with soul mates. HM. Basically this is marketed as feminist but I think it fell pretty damn short on that mark.