#emerals

[orlaite]

THE RED SHOES (1948) dir. Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger

[may12324]

Been thoroughly enjoying long live evil ❤️

[womenshockeydaily]

Emerging from the void to bring you this important update

[somerandomrecluse]

BLACK NARCISSUS (1947)

Dir. Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell

[weirdlookindog]

Emeric Timar (1898–1950) - Esmeralda, Quasimodo & Frollo

frontispiece for Victor Hugo's 'Notre-Dame de Paris', 1942

[retrogamingblog2]

Pokemon Laboratory Capsules made by 3DLynks

[silverscreencaps]

The Red Shoes (1948) dir. Emeric Pressburger, Michael Powell

[bishie-in-tamriel]

~𝘈 𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵 𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘥 𝘢𝘥𝘷𝘪𝘴𝘰𝘳~

[classicfilmblr]

Marius Goring as Conductor 71 A Matter of Life and Death (1946) dir. Emeric Pressburger, Michael Powell

[gacougnol]

Émeric Feher

Nu féminin assis

c. 1940

[blacknarcissus]

“Time rushes by, life rushes by, love rushes by, but the red shoes dance on…”

The Red Shoes (1948), dir. Emeric Pressburger & Michael Powell

[orlaite]

You cannot have it both ways. The dancer who relies upon the doubtful comforts of human love will never be a great dancer. THE RED SHOES (1948)

[incorrectdragonage]

(investigating the missing women in Kirkwall) Hawke: Are you sure there's not some sex angle we should be considering? Emeric: (sarcastically) Good point. Kirkwall is famed for its occult sex-murder rites. We'll get on it immediately. Hawke: It doesn't have to be murder. It can just be sex. Emeric: Actually it does have to be murder. This is a murder investigation.

[solstice-sims]

She a train wreck, I love to watch her derail I told her say less, Guess Ima see you in hell

Collab with @wasntbuilt on Simsta <3 Emeric and Rome really be beefing in the dms everyday tho

[sarahreesbrennan]

Another Interesting Spoilery Evil Question

To directly answer the question before I start rambling, the Cobra’s body’s physical age is 24.

(You can stop reading here if you like. This gets very long!)

When Marius meets the Cobra (chapter 18 epigraph from Time of Iron) he correctly identifies him as Marius’s own age at the time - 18.

At the time of the book all the physical bodies’ ages are as follows.

Marius - 24

The Cobra - 24

Rahela - 24

Octavian - 24

(Pio and Nemeth, Octavian’s advisers, are in their early 40s and late 50s respectively - they’re Octavian’s dad’s people and that is part of why they are so stressed. Their king died young, Octavian became king in his teens and it has been an uneasy court ever since.)

Emer - 23

Key - 20

Lia - 19

Rae and Eric in our world were both 4 years younger than their bodies in this world (so they would both be 20 if the story hadn’t happened to them). For the moment we’ll leave aside Key, who had another life too, in a different way. (He was a little kid, but old enough to walk after his father, in the epigraph from Time of Iron in chapter 15.)

I do age shenanigans for two reasons.

—One is that age in fiction and reality is weird, and I wanted to portray that. If I had a crush on Mr Darcy when I was 7, is that okay? If I had a crush on Mr Darcy when aged 41, is that okay? Mr Darcy’s always in his late twenties: Elizabeth Bennet will never be older than 21, but she seemed so glamorous and all-knowing to me when I was a kid.

And if you walk into a story, when in their character development do you find them? Would we like Darcy when he’s sneering at Elizabeth at a ball? Who is it that we love and when?

Plenty of adult women fancied Edward Cullen, perpetually a teen (or was he? Fantasy and horror also open up the possibility of immortality - but in a way, all fictional characters are immortal. Holden Caulfield isn’t growing up any more than Edward Cullen is. And like fictional characters and immortals, the dead aren’t getting any older either—I think often of Anne Rice, author of the Vampire Chronicles, who wrote the doomed child vampire Claudia after losing her own daughter Michele as a child. Death, immortality, fiction and the overlap!) When I read or watched stories in which characters were in different/changed bodies they usually seemed younger - often their younger selves, or a younger/cuter body (Peggy Sue Got Married, Scarlet Heart). (Exceptions exist of course, e.g. Howl’s Moving Castle.) And I like magic losing something, costing you something, plus I’m a contrarian. So I wanted them older.

—The other is that LONG LIVE EVIL is a story about trauma, which often arrests your age in your mind. The period in which you were enduring the horrors is a blank in which you couldn’t develop normally, or in which you had plenty of experiences but few of them match with your peers’.

Cancer did it to me, which wasn’t horrendous as I was in my early 30s and that’s still adult, just meant a bit of ‘oh no I’m not this child’s mother, I’m too young - actually I’m a bit old to be this child’s mother now I think about it, but anyway I don’t claim her’ and the like. But I’ve seen it do the same for people with cancer I befriended or whom I mentor, and it’s a very different proposition if the lost years are 17-21.

It’s not just cancer, I’ve seen bereavement work that way on people, and apparently celebrity works on the mind like trauma and arrests you at the age you became famous in a lot of ways. It’s being taken out of the run of ordinary life, walking through your portal into strangeness.

But in the end most of us wind up with years that feel lost, I think, and playing catch-up is the only way forward.

And allegory remains allegory: if I’m writing a werewolf I’m taking about rage and body horror, sure, but I’m also talking about werewolves.

I was actually confused by this ask at first as I’d written a whole section where Eric says he’s going to die of a heart attack at 20 and Marius is exasperated as Eric is a little young to start lying about his age! But it must have fallen victim to my many cuts - stories transform! - and I can see why, because I don’t think Eric exactly thinks of himself as 20 anymore.

I had some struggles with the age stuff, it’s another layer of complication in a complicated story and there were worries raised that it was unnecessary and might make some characters less appealing but in the end I decided it was necessary to me and let the characters be unappealing, then.

I also enjoy the twisting, fluid ages because they cause conflict, and conflict is story.

Rae uses her new age (and thus doesn’t need to think of her absolutely horrible self worth) to count herself out as a romantic option in Key’s eyes.

She also thinks of the Emperor as in his mid-20s, as he is - after a time skip that happens in the original Time of Iron, years in which Key and Emer were Lia’s servants. She knows about those years, but she doesn’t put it together.

At Eric and Marius’s first meeting 6 years before the events of LONG LIVE EVIL, Eric also hasn’t been in the book that long. He was in a horrifically traumatic survival situation for a large part of the time he was inside, when he approached Marius to blackmail him. That is objectively a deranged thing to do, but Eric is thinking like a terrified 14 year old and also like a Huge Fan of Marius. aka the quintessential white knight, the Last Hope who is reserved and dignified and crucially, 24-28.

That would be the Marius Eric at the time knows when he approaches Marius in the flesh, Marius at 18 and coming off family trauma, friend trauma and quasi-romantic trauma himself. Marius actually DOES go into dissociative states and kill people, Eric was taking a huge risk with his own life that not a single person in the country would have taken. Marius is a Valerius, and they are killers. (The whole court, Marius included, thought Lady Katalin ((Rahela’s mother)) was being very daring by like, touching Marius’s hand when he was 17.)

Eric is acting wild partly because a) he is wild, b) he’s desperate but also crucially c) he’s thinking of Marius as someone that Marius isn’t yet and d) he’s not thinking of things from Marius’s POV, and doesn’t until the events of LONG LIVE EVIL. Their quasi friendship/quasi hostage situation (that the hostage had firmly decided was happening) couldn’t have happened without a perfect storm of weirdness, risks and lack of understanding what the hell was going on.

Marius would not have seen a 14 year old Eric (not a child to him exactly, but squire age rather than knight age) as a criminal threat in the same way as he saw the Cobra, his own age (18, which was definitely very adult, Marius thought at the time). Eric wouldn’t have failed to consider consequences or failed to consider Marius as person rather than character, if he’d actually been 18. But by the time anyone knew better, a status quo was established, and habit is second nature and a stronger nature than the first.

Eric’s plight is horrific initially. But at the same time, Eric is extremely intelligent (both intellectually and emotionally) and able to both cover and play catch-up to this new life, and he can advise Rae with the benefit of his experience - but that doesn’t mean that he didn’t screw up massively when he first came into the book, or that he doesn’t still have many things to work through.

Similarly, Emer is used to Rahela who is quasi older sister and quasi mistress, while Rae is now acting younger. And all of them are dealing with a gross system in which men are seen as in their youthful prime when women the same age are getting long in the tooth and can be traded in for teenagers - so even two people who are the same age aren’t treated as if they’re the same age, if they’re different genders. Age stuff is crunchy!

Also, while Emer thinks of Lia as having all the power due to class, Lia looks on someone who was her glamorous older stepsister’s age mate and went off to the big city years ago rather differently. But then, are adulthood and childhood different worlds? Is being in different social classes being in different worlds?

Can we reach the different universes of other people is something I’m always asking, I think.

THIS IS SO LONG. I AM SO SORRY.

[luckypluckychair]

The Red Shoes | 1948

Director: Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger

Production designer: Hein Heckroth