#fuck eric heisserer

[lilisouless]

I will forever hold that Nina did nothing wrong (okay maybe walking straight into that cell but otherwise did nothing wrong)

[bitchthefuck1]

Okay maybe I'm being a hater but this quote from Eric Heisserer about the changes they made to Wesper feels low-key homophobic to me

[xalonelydreamerx]

I think I'm gonna write an analysis as soon as I finish rereading the trilogy but yeah s2 was fucking terrible.

I've seen many people saying they're happy about Alina, and while yes, I'm glad she didn't lose her powers and didn't end up with Mal, there are so much bigger problems with this season

Aside the costume still looking bad, pacing being all over the place because there are simply too many characters and the annoying repentance of the flashbacks, Alina comes as extremely annoying, stuck up, tone deaf and overall a bitch.

Unlike some, I do love book!Alina because she's a very flawed character but lots of her mistakes actually do make sense if you're able to let go of the grudge that comes from reading a YA 2010 book.

Show! Alina was intentionally supposed to be portrayed as strong, bold, confident and smart since s1. She's not supposed to be naive, ignorant, selfish and emotional like book!Alina but somehow she ends up coming across as so much worse.

The Darkling is no better. He comes off as extremely pathetic. He already was in s1, but I was hoping he was gonna have an arc in this season and become more like his canon self. Sadly, that wasn't meant to be.

Show!Darkling has no personality other than wanting Alina in such a desperate way that is hard to look at. I know the girlies gash over him being a ✨ simp ✨ but there's a difference between pathetic (affectionate) and pathetic (degoratory). He wants to keep the grisha safe but even that a aspect suffers from a very detrimental alteration they did on the show which I will now mention.

Apparently, grisha aren't the oppressed group we know in canon. On no, the season hits you with the hammer about how it's the fold and everything that happened in s1 that made everybody turn against grisha. Not that they've been capturing them, enslaving them and burning them for hundred of years, na-ah.

I have no comment on the crows since I hardly ever cared for them. Some scenes were good, but they suffered with how much the story was rushed.

The ending was shit, because while it's cool that alina kept her powers and an arc of her becoming basically a new antagonist is interesting on paper, it doesn't work here because it wasn't built up well and as I mentioned Alina came off as incredible unlikable and darklina was extremely one-sided.

The script was very poor and this isn't a hate towards the actors because they don't really have any control of it.

While I'll continue shipping darklina they were both done very dirty because they were ooc since the first season and the second one reduced them both to something beyond recognition.

[steve-needs-a-hug]

"Streaming is a challenge to serialized storytelling in that it looks at 'content' often with a different agenda and uses metrics that can take a creative issue and exacerbate it. Like in broadcast, if viewership and thus ad revenue has slightly declined, the show will ned to find a way to make their 22 or 13 episodes on a proportionally smaller budget. What is not done is reduce episode order. But if a streaming series underperforms or doesn't meet expectations, an the streamer doesn't cancel it outright, the go-to budget reduction idea is to reduce episode order for the next season. When you just have 8 episodes and continue to deal with notes to compress, pace up, or omit for what you'd scripted for a longer season, reducing further to six or four episodes is exhausting.

This happens due to a slide in autonomy from what the showrunner position has been. What the chatter on the picket lines revealed to us is that most showrunners today don't get to see their own show's budget, and thus don't get the freedom to make budgetary decisions that could better protect the story they're telling. More and more, showrunners not at a legacy network aren't the final say or at times even involved in hiring key roles. I don't have any ideas that aren't already in contract language, I just see how the job on this side has gotten harder and there isn't much of a way for us to make it easier for each other like we could with having writers on set or in post production, because the streaming model has made that impossible."

- Eric Heisserer, creator, screenwriter, and executive producer of Netflix's Shadow & Bone in a Q&A about the potential future of the show

(Shadow & Bone was abruptly canceled by Netflix after 2 widely successful seasons.)

[no-1-rosalind-lang-apologist]

I really don’t care how many hours they talked about the changes they made. The changes were still horrible. Things happen in six of crows in the order that they happen for a reason. Especially as it pertains to kaz and inej, themes, situations, and phrases resurface again and again, giving them chances to grow and creating this really beautiful, complex relationship. And rather than respecting that and I don’t know,,, making minor tweaks to the timeline to space out the character development they just,,, completely pulverized it.

They completely mischaracterized all of the crows to the extent that most of them are no longer the same character as they were in the books. To the extent that the messages being portrayed are fundamentally different from the messages and themes of the books.

And no. Pekka Rollins isn’t supposed to know who the fuck they are. He’s supposed to look at kaz and be slightly terrified because he can tell that kaz hates him and kaz is terrifying. But he doesn’t acknowledge him as a real threat because he sees kaz as an inexperienced child trying to be something he’s not until the finale of crooked kingdom. Kaz isn’t Pekka Rollins’s mortal enemy. The feeling isn’t mutual and making it mutual completely mischaracterizes the entire situation.

And honestly, I would prefer the crows to have had absolutely zero character development in the show than whatever the fuck that was. They could have literally just had them do bs find the object side quests and used the time to contextualize their relationships with each other. Have kaz and inej steal the dekappel together. Have kaz get inej out of the menagerie. Show the window scene. Have Jesper drop out of school and join the dregs. Show wylans backstory and how he joined the dregs. Show inej recruiting Nina. Explain why matthias volunteered to fight in the hellshow. Because character development is important. But half baked characters doing random shit due to their badly explained trauma isn’t.

On why Certain Events for the Crows were adapted for SAB Season 2

Spoilers for SAB S2 below and an interview from Eric Heiserrer:

The link is above but the pertinent question that gets answered (brilliantly, imo) is this: why did they choose to adapt so many elements of 'Crooked Kingdom'?

Heisserer explained that using the storyline was "the result of hundreds of hours of discussion with the writer's room," and was not a decision they came to lightly.

"I don't think I can really properly encapsulate all those hours of intense discussion and debate," he said. "But I can give you the highlights, which is that we knew that they needed to face the consequences of betraying Pekka Rollins in Season 1 and we also knew that they'd be in trouble with Dreesen [Sean Gilder], and so all of that sort of gave us the ingredients going into Season 2 of the type of consequences they had to face.

"For the kind of stories that we explored that pitted Kaz against Pekka Rollins, what we discovered after a lot of trial and error was we were essentially just treading water. We were sort of just running in place for those characters, because we were worried about changing something later on that got us too late to, or too early, in their development.

"We also realized that holding them in place so that they were essentially on pause to jump into a Six of Crows storyline meant that the characters didn't grow at all. There were no arcs and our poor actors would be like, 'Why? I'm the same person I am at the end of the season and at the start,' and you never want to hear that."

He went on: "When we realized that we did need to pay off something and advance the story with Pekka and Kaz, and have it mean something—and we also had to explore for a thematic unity Kaz's trauma [and] his back story, which is also deeply tied to Pekka— it felt the best for us to use a canonical story that happens in Crooked Kingdom.

"But we only made that move after we knew what we were going to do in both the Crows and Crooked Kingdom stories, were we to ever get the privilege to explore those."

It may not have been a decision the writers came to easily, but they have already thought of how it could shape the characters' future in the franchise.

Heisserer admitted: "There was, of course, the little small panic in the back of our brains of 'will we ever get to Crooked Kingdom? Maybe, maybe not.' So, this may be our one go to explore that.

"But if we do get there, oh my god, The Wrath of Kahn level [story of] Pekka out of Hellgate [prison] and on a f****** bender to kill all the Crows is going to be amazing."

[crimeronan]

i see a lot of people apprehensive about how the crows will be integrated into the ravka storyline and i will tell u why i am not worried at all. it is because when i watched season one with a few partners and friends who haven't read the books, one asked, "omg, what is inej and alina's relationship like in the books??" and was FLABBERGASTED when i said they've never met in the canon.

"WHAT. BUT. BUT IT'S EVERYTHING????"

the show is absolutely going to make mincemeat of the canon crows timeline and transpose important book moments to earlier in the series and forge relationships that are different or nonexistent in the book canon. but this is Exciting As Hell 2 me. because eric heisserer and leigh bardugo both have intimate understandings of these characters and their themes and what makes important, compelling, well-constructed television.

there's every chance that i'll HATE what's done with the crows this season and i'll eat these words. but in the meantime. seeing zoya and inej together in the trailer?? knowing how isolated and lonely both are in the canon?? knowing how they hail from the same cultural background and both have extremely different experiences with prejudice and assimilation?? I'M SO EXCITED I COULD FUCKING CRYYYY HOLY SHIT YES YES YES ❗️❗️❗️❗️❗️

[cleolinda]

Creepypasta: The Dionaea House (2004-2006)

I wanted to post a few of my favorite creepypasta/Weird Internet Fiction stories this month, so of course one of the first I looked up was "The Dionaea House." Dated somewhere back around 2004-2006, it's one of the earliest entries in the genre; I’m not sure how many people know about it now, but Back in the Day, it was one of the creepypasta classics. Then, while researching all this, I discovered to my utter astonishment that it was written by Eric Heisserer—who wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Arrival and is currently best known here, I'd bet, as the show runner of Netflix’s Shadow and Bone.

Years ago, the story was at dionaea-house.com (now offline), and it was the kind of thing you'd stumble across somehow—maybe on a friend's recommendation, maybe from a forum discussion—and then lose yourself in for a whole afternoon. It starts out as the story of a fictionalized Eric posting the emails of an old buddy, Mark, who's trying to figure out why their friend Drew... snapped. And "Eric" is posting these emails because Mark now has disappeared. And before too long... someone else has to pick up the story. Because it turns out that, at the heart of the mystery, there is a house, and going to that house is a mistake. I would describe it a little like House of Leaves, except also smelling like cake, and projecting out to multiple locations rather than pulling you into one infinite labyrinth. Also, a shit ton easier to read.

Relatively speaking, at least. "The Dionaea House" started out as “emails” posted on a blog at that original URL [unofficial mirror], then spun out into a Blogspot, an AIM chat, two separate Livejournals, and multiple commenters interacting on them. Some of them seem to be strangers walking in off the street, as it were, but the trick is, we don’t know which commenters are part of the story, which gives the “flesh puppet” comments, for example, a weird jolt of realism:

(I would like to think “TELL THE HOUSE TO FUCK OFF” is one of the in-story commenters, honestly; I like to think this is who I’d be in a horror story.)

So while "The Dionaea House" doesn't have the single-minded realism of "Ted the Caver," the blog-and-comment format—a found document subgenre for the 21st century—also allows for multiple perspectives. (I’ve lost count of the number of protagonists the house consumes, but it’s at least three, maybe four.) Tumblr is currently in year two of the Dracula Daily read-along, and I’ve always argued that Dracula was a techno-thriller for the nineteenth century: correspondence, newspaper articles, diaries, and even audio journaling on a phonograph. Emails, blogs, chats, phone messages, comments, and an article about the murder-suicide that starts the story—“The Dionaea House” is pretty much in the same multi-perspective, multimedia genre. Unlike Stoker’s bound novel, however, “The Dionaea House” wanders the physical space of the internet, and it trusts that either you'll see that the story has a new branch, or you won't, and that's okay.

In fact, I'm not sure if Eric Heisserer didn't know how to bring the story to a conclusion, or he got busy and couldn't keep going—or maybe there is an ending and I just never found it. (The Loreen Mathers blog doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me and seems like one giant loose end, although the mention of engineer-occultist Jack Parsons adds a new dimension at the last minute.) But as with "Ted the Caver," the lack of a concrete ending makes sense for a shaggy dog story like this, as frustrating as it might be. Maybe Loreen got got, just like everyone else! Isn’t “disappearing before explaining what the hell she’s talking about” exactly what that would look like? We don’t know! If there's a scary house and you manage to burn it down to the ground in a complex denouement, that's a story. If there's a scary house out there, somewhere, and we'll never know how it came to be or what happened to the people who tried to take it on—that's a creepypasta. That’s a legend.

[manikas-whims]

Things we can still get in a possible SoC Spin-off

now that i'm done ranting about the things that annoyed me, lets talk about this.

1: Some light on Inej's backstory, the abuse and exploitation she suffered, her own struggles with touch, her vulnerable side, her fun side especially when she's around Jesper and Nina, her fears and how she rises above them. According to this article by tvguide, showrunner Eric Heisserer states that a script has already been written about her incorporation back into the Dregs. Let's just hope they stop reducing Inej's personality to a mere “knife wife” and “girlboss” , and address her actual depth.

2: Tante Heleen's return! Since we never actually see her body onscreen and her death is merely mentioned twice and shrugged off, I'm hoping she's alive and that the production team is keeping her for the spin-off. She's an integral part of Inej's character arc.

3: The Dregs. I wanna see Rotty, Specht, Anika, Pim, Per Haskell, Big Bolliger and the rest of the bunch. Also Dime Lions, Razorgulls, The Liddies, and other prominent gangs. And a shot of the entire Merchant Council would be nice.

4: Since Inej will return and Matthias is still in Hellgate, we'll get the entire Hellgate breakout and Ice Court Heist. (I'm assuming during Matthias's breakout, Pekka Rollins will also manage to escape from Hellgate 🤔) So we can still have the entire book 1 ending at Vellgeluk where Wylan's face has been tailored and Inej gets captured by Van Eck.

5: Crooked Kingdom plotline till they rescue Inej— Kaz throwing off a rapist from the lighthouse after gaining intel, Kaz threatening a little girl, Jesper and Wylan going to receive Colm Fahey and the whole “people pointing guns at each other is basically a handshake” 😂, Nina's struggles with Parem and Matthias trying his best to be there for her, the iconic Kanej reunion at Goedmedbridge,..

I'm not sure how they'll proceed after retrieving Inej, because alot has already been adapted in this season of SaB. But we'll still have the showdown against Van Eck. Not sure what they'll replace the plague thing with but we'll see..

6: Wylan's backstory! Aside from Inej, we also have Wylan's heart wrenching backstory and we'll witness it all. His early life, the moment he lost his mother and his world became gray, his escape from the men who try to kill him, his realization that they were sent by his own father, his struggles with it all, his conflict with being a good person and working with criminals, his reunion with his very alive mother and Jesper being there for him, and so much more..

7: Kuwei! I'm a big fan of this sassy boy. He absolutely hates having to be with Crows and he chooses not to use their language simply so he can avoid conversations with them 😭 We'll see him cause conflict in Wesper's relationship but also slowly accepting and being thankful of the Crows. And I really hope, the show adds a sort of camaraderie between him and Wylan too. But despite it all, I still wanna see Wylan threaten to drown him 😆

8: The Bathroom Scene ♡ If we take into consideration the wound cleaning moment in season 2 of SaB, its a lot different from the bathroom scene. For starters, they're on Black Veil and not an actual bathroom, and Kaz didn't actually tie any bandages for her. Most importantly, the neck kiss didn't happen. So bathroom scene can still happen and it can serve as a beautiful callback and a parallel to this scene in season 2.

9: Kaz can still find Inej's parents, meet them and well, gift her a ship. Wylan and Jesper can still have their happily ever after, living at the Van Eck Mansion.

10: Since they've made so many changes to the source, can they fucking not kill off Matthias and let him and Nina have their happily ever after too? Like they can act as delegates for Ravka and Fjerda 🤔 Or they can help Hanne claim the Fjerdan throne 🤔 Anything aside from killing him off please.

if you guys have something to add or correct me on, please do so in replies/reblogs ☺

[a-library-ghost]

agree!! imo Netflix is exacting revenge on writers and producers and crew who participated and negotiated in the writers strike. it’s the only explanation— albeit a disgusting one— esp after baiting the fandom for nearly a year.

They've not only had the SoC script, they even had one for Demon in the Wood

How do you plan on two spinoffs and cancel everything???

I'm saying this again

Netflix doesn't even WANT successful shows that have a bit of effort and skill put into them cause they don't want to pay for it

They rather produce trash and hope it takes off instead of investing into things that are actually promising and full of potential and have ppl who care, working on it

They all and we deserve better

Let's get them a new home!

[tryingforthedelicatehopeofitall]

Eric Heisserer shared this and ugh I am crying again ;_;

fuck. and i cannot stress this enough ~ "fuck … (netflix), bro.". … we almost had it all and they had to go and ruin it. …

[scentedmiracleobject]

Shadow and Bone showrunner Eric Heisserer confirms scripts for a Six of Crows show are already finished. 

 "We've written all eight scripts for that. It's the best writing my team has done."

I found this on Twitter and this made me think:

How can you fuck up the writing for an existing show, then promise everyone  that the writing is at its best for a non-existing one? 

Why would anyone trust your words? when you just proved you can’t write for jack shit

[heydragonfly]

watching the Shadow and Bone show right after The Last of Us is so funny because like, you have these two adaptions. one of them is one of the most faithful, loving adaptions ever made with many one-to-one recreations from the original game, from beginning to end. and then you have Show-Runner Eric Heisserer’s Collage Corner featuring so many different plotlines stitched together that it had me consistently questioning whether or not I read this book series in the first place.

and you know what! they both fuck! on completely different ends of a spectrum, but both fuck nonetheless!

[bitchthefuck1]

ironically i barely remember the jurda parem plotline from the books (i havent read them in a few years) but what i do remember is the character development and plotlines. this show is a joke

It's almost like that was what made the story good...

[lover-of-trash-and-people]

what if we are just clowning in the clownverse hoping for a kaz-darkling interaction (showdown?) and they give us... nothing

[desidarling123]

So. Eric posted to Reddit, soundly condemned what happened, apologized to Amita and promised changes going forward.

People can feel free to nitpick his response to take the most unforgiving interpretations of it if they'd like, but as a desi woman I, personally, never wanna hear the phrase 'Amita Suman's stunt double' or 'brownface' ever again.

Also -- and this is directed both at desi ppl and the non-desi people who clambered onto this issue to get the performative activism brownie points -- if you took this debacle as an opportunity to hurl racist and/or queerphobic slurs or messages at Jessie Mei Li or anyone else who dared to voice a dissenting opinion (often including other desi folks)-- shame on you.

Being desi and being upset about this issue doesn't given you a free pass to be racist/sexist/queerphobic/generally a condescending asshole to anyone else. Some of the stuff I heard was floating around Twitter made me physically sick. Do better.

[eggsaladstain]

netflix i am begging you to give us multiple seasons of shadow and bone and if that happens eric heisserer i am begging you to include this scene between wylan and jesper from six of crows:

Wylan gestured to the guards. “Is it safe to leave them, you know—”

“Alive? I’m not big on killing unconscious men.”

“We could wake them up.”

PLEASE

they’re SO fucking funny together