#go go (co) connect!!

[nenoname]

still love how the book starts out with stan beating up the statue and taking ford's discarded one dollar bills and then ends with stan completely destroying bill and ripping up money just to spite him

[soulmvtes]

sitting at the window of a beautiful sunlit cafe drinking yorkshire tea in front of a tree whose leaves are turning brown and orange after a long week... i am soo back

[millidew]

sometimes a family is you, your girlfriend, her husband who's also your boyfriend, your mutual son and his electric rat, a mr. mime, and a baby

[intuitive-revelations]

It's one thing adding Classic Who (!!!) and the other spin-offs given all of New Who is already on iPlayer, but adding audio descriptions and sign language to apparently everything is wild!

I assume this implies the same things are going to be on Disney+ internationally too? Would make sense to apply the same work on both platforms.

(Although assuming they brought all the features on there too, I assume they'd do sign language again, for both BSL and ASL? I've never used Disney+ so no idea what accessibility options look like on there.)

[slavhew]

best part about watching a movie is making an au with your (and friend's) ocs

reference imagesssss

[raiiny-bay]

before & after :-)

[dailykugisaki]

Day 331 | id in alt

Kugisaki looking for curse bindings on people my beloved.

[dervampireprince]

I just rewatched moonknight and your audios are literally the only thing keeping me alive in that somewhat dead fandom THANK YOU 😭😭🙏

i do feel adrift making moon knight stuff still so thank you

[lord-squiggletits]

I'm not normally a "fuck canon" kind of person but it's still wild to me that JRO said via word of god that Pharma's red rust plague wasn't designed for Tarn. Like what the fuck. Tarn trapped Pharma into a blackmail deal to give him free tcogs for his transformation addiction and Pharma designs a plague that activates on transformation and you're gonna try to tell me that Tarn wasn't in Pharma's mind when he made it like that? How can you NOT write that into your plot when the connection is so obviously there? I guess it would've meant writing Pharma as more of a vengeful mech seeking punishment for his captor and not as an insane selfish doctor, and I guess that just wasn't what we were after.

[mishkakagehishka]

Feminism lost its teeth since capitalism and the patriarchy co-opted it let's be real. But nobody wants to think about how being a feminist (and feeling """morally superior""") is much easier when you can say every choice you make is a feminist choice bc you're a woman than if you actually had to change your lifestyle in a way that goes against society and its expectations/norms to actually fight against the patriarchy.

[rinmemesuoka]

Kabru's Tormentous Nightmare has been keeping me entertained for days tbh. Wow it's such a positive change for your stifling helicopter mom to be making connections and building relationships with people her own age, maybe now she--hm? huh? what do you mean it's captain mithrun.

[all-this-happened-more-or-less]

If I had a nickel…

[jq37]

Please let us know if you solve this mystery!

OK! It’s the end of the year so let me compile everything I was able to come up with (with the help of everyone I dragged into this–you know who you are and thank you and I’m sorry). 

To anyone who’s just seeing this and doesn’t have context, in November, right before the movie Wish came out, I made a longish post questioning who Allison Moore was (which, incidentally, is the first post that comes up when you Google “Allison Moore Disney”).

The reason I was curious about who this random writer is is because she’s credited as one of the co-writers of Wish, Disney’s 100th Anniversary Feature Film BUT she has no obvious experience writing for animation, children, or fantasy when everyone else on the main team has credits on stuff like Frozen and Encanto. I thought it was bizarre that there would be someone so green on a project so big so I went digging. 

Here’s what I learned:

(1) Moore wasn’t originally announced as being attached to the project. Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee, and Fawn Veersunthorn were all mentioned when the project was officially announced in Sept 2022 (for example). Moore was not. And you’d think they’d mention the *co-writer*, right? You don’t start to see her name until a year later in Sept 2023 when the trailer dropped (for example). So it seems like she was brought onto the project later. Of course, this could just be a normal quirk of the industry or something I’m misinterpreting, but I think it’s worth mentioning. 

(2) Moore seems to have a lot more credits in stage writing than she does in screenwriting. I wasn’t able to 100% confirm it until recently (I’ll get to that in a second) but she’s written a bunch of plays and it seems like this is where she has most of her bona fides. 

“Allison is the recipient of two Jerome Fellowships, two McKnight Advancement Grants and the Bush Artist Fellowship.”

That sounds fancy. But it still doesn’t say “Top Choice for Disney Anniversary Movie” to me. That’s not a statement on writing quality. I haven’t read/seen any of her plays. It’s about the subject matter. Look at some of these synopses:

None of that really screams Disney. Which isn’t to say people can’t have range. George Miller wrote all the Mad Maxes but also Babe and both Happy Feet. But if I was hiring someone for a really big project, I wouldn’t want that project to be their first attempt at expanding into that genre. 

(3) This isn’t actually inherently important but she was on an episode of Nailed it. That’s where this picture comes from:

She won the first round and the game ended in a three way tie for the first time in the show’s history. 

The only reason this is noteworthy in the larger scale of things is that, until very recently, this was one of only two places online you could see Allison Moore talking. The other is this very short interview on the red carpet during the premiere. 

There’s nothing in that interview that explains anything. It’s mainly her talking about how it was fun working on the movie and how good the movie is. 

Honestly, good for her for not being Extremely Online, but it really felt like I could get a bit of a handle on everyone else who’d worked on this project in a high profile way but not her. Which is part of why I started down this rabbit hole to begin with. There was nothing to show where she might have had a connection or an interest or anything that would connect the dots. 

For reference, Fawn (who was one of the Directors and story writers) has the kind of resume that I was expecting Moore to have when I initially Googled her:

Smaller jobs on other kids/animated movies (Hop, The Lorax, Despicable Me 2), some storyboard or art work on other Disney stuff (Frozen, Moana, Zootopia, Ralph), and then a big break (Raya and Wish). Based on my understanding of the industry (and I know a fair bit because it’s one I’m interested in professionally) that’s a very typical track to get to the writing side of animation.  

A couple of people speculated that Moore got onto the project in a mentorship capacity. Now, I’m a Black woman who writes fiction professionally when I’m not on this hellsite (affectionate) with the rest of y’all. That means I have firsthand experience with what mentorship looks like in writing–both official Diversity and Inclusion type mentorship and more organic “Let me take you under my wing” type mentorship. I have *never* seen anyone get a job this high profile at the jump just due to mentorship alone. Going from zero to Disney’s 100th anniversary is kinda insane. This wasn’t some B project or something. It was a Big Deal Project. And this is Disney so they could have hired basically anyone they wanted. So you have to assume this was an active decision someone made and not just a thing that happened for lack of options. But in all my searching, Moore wasn’t mentioned except to just say she wrote the screenplay with Jennifer Lee. It was just the baking show and the Youtube clip.

Until today.

(4) I’m going to preface this by saying this doesn’t actually answer the question in a big AHA! way, but it is the only interview I’ve seen about Wish from Moore besides the red carpet clip.

On December 15th, Moore gave this interview with the San Antonio Current.

I stumbled across it while searching for a different piece of information and eagerly clicked to see what she had to say after three weeks of silence after the movie dropped on November 22.

Here are some highlights:

-In high school she was a theater kid and thought she wanted to pursue acting. 

-I college she did playwriting and eventually she got her MFA from Iowa (which has a weirdly great MFA program btw, and also, this interview is how I confirmed she was the playwright Allison).

-When she started on the theater track at her college, she told them she was a playwright so she could study that too even though she’d never written a play before. So it sounds like Wish isn’t the first time she’s just jumped into a new thing without experience. You have to respect the hustle.

But this is the most important line in the interview because it’s like, an answer and a non-answer all in one. She’s asked, “How did you go from writing plays to writing for TV and film?”

And her answer is, “I had a whole career writing for theater, and then when my son was born, I realized I needed to make more money, so I started pitching for TV. I worked in television for about a decade. In the midst of working in TV, I continued playwriting. That's how I got on the radar at Disney.”

Which kind of sidesteps the most intriguing part of the question? Like, first of all, it’s not 100% clear if she means her playwriting or her TV writing caught Disney’s attention. I’m guessing playwriting, but I could be wrong. Secondly, who is “Disney” in this situation? A Disney recruiter? A Disney director? Did Jennifer Lee see a production of Slasher: A Horrifying comedy while passing through Texas and think, “Her. I want her to be my co-writer on this children’s film.” And what did she do to impress them so much that they right away put her on the the *Anniversary Project*? Like, I know I keep harping on this but I can’t stress enough how big of a deal this is. It’s hard enough to write for just your average sitcom or little movie. To just jump on something this big is baffling. I obviously don’t expect Disney to be justifying their every hiring decision publicly but, usually, when someone is doing something like this, it’s very obvious why they were chosen and, even with this sliver of explanation, it’s still frustratingly opaque. And with the strange post hoc timing of the interview (seriously, doesn’t promotion usually happen PRE movie release?) It almost reads like an interview that exists because someone realized the lack of any online presence was weird. 

(5) When she was a kid, Allison Moore had a crush on Fox Robin Hood. That’s not at all important to the mystery, that’s just information she volunteered during the interview and that I’m now sharing with you. So when you search her name now, the top results are me wondering who she is, her IMDB, and her talking about how she liked Fox Robin Hood's little hat. Which isn't a LOT of information, but it’s more than we had before and that’s something.  

[uku-lelevillain]

when lockwood and co

meets ghost files

[blackjackkent]

All right. Time to go in and see Malus.

-----

The blood smell is even worse in the surgical theater. The air feels thick with it. Rakha can taste it as she breathes in.

Like the rest of the House of Healing, this place was once fine and has deteriorated terribly. The walls are lined with seating and stairs and balconies of polished wood long since left to rot. The tilework floor is stained with long streaks of dirt and blood. The creeping vines of the curse have broken through the ceiling and walls.

At the very center of the room is a raised platform even more stained with blood than the rest. Four more of the strange, blank nurses stand in a circle around a half-naked body stretched on an examination table. And next to them is a form quite unlike anyone Rakha has ever seen.

A tall, lanky figure - his ears are elven but the rest of his body looks deformed, misshapen. His arms and legs are wrapped and stretched and replaced by tarnished mechanical limbs twice their intended length. His metal "hands" twist, revealing sharp, curved, blade-like fingers. His eyes are covered by a strange goggled mask that gives him the appearance of a staring, gaping madman. Every part of him, every fiber of his clothes, is drenched in blood.

"The objective of the scalpel, sisters," he is crooning softly, somewhere between an academic lecture and a lullaby, "is to soothe, for the scalpel indeed is an extension of Shar. See how the patient reacts when I but stroke the right nerve. Hear its comfort. Hear the very melody of mercy..."

He drops one of his long, taloned claws and drifts the blade eagerly across an open wound in the side of the body stretched before him.

Their victim, it seems, is very much still alive. At the brushing touch of the blade, the broken man squirms and cries out in terror and pain, too weak even to put full voice behind the sound.

"Pray, sister," Malus says. "Show us the extent of your beneficence." He gestures one of the nurses forward.

She steps forward, lifts a rusted-looking scalpel in one hand, and takes an unsteady swing with it down into the victim's midsection. There's a sudden splash of blood. The man whimpers piteously.

"STOP!" Malus snaps. "Stay your hand, for it slaps where it should stroke. We can hardly hear the patient's sighs of solace..." The man's whimpers seem to punctuate this speech.

Malus turns slightly. His eyes are hidden by the goggles, but his gaze has clearly fixed on Rakha as she enters the room.

"Perhaps it is our unexpected audience that makes you quiver..." he purrs. "Come - step forward!" He gestures again with his strange mechanical hand, this time to Rakha, gesturing her towards the dais. "You are no sister, but that matters none. Every student is welcome!"

Rakha's mouth has gone very dry. She doesn't move.

She is remembering, suddenly, the flickering set of images which the noblestalk provided to her in the depths of the Underdark. The only clear memory she has ever attained of her past before the nautiloid.

Rakha and Sceleritas, side by side at a vivisection table. Blood spatters across her hand as she severs capillaries one by one, delicate, careful. The search for perfection in agony. She shoves Sceleritas's face into the corpse as he clips the aorta, killing her victim too quickly. Another failure. Another not-quite-perfect death...

The blood pulse thumps in her head and her vision blurs. Yes, growls the beast in her head. This man understands. He knows... everything that we once knew...

"A student. Yes," she hears herself say, her mouth moving without her volition. "Do please... enlighten me..."

"Absence..." one of the nurses murmurs vaguely.

"Absence," Malus agrees with a sort of casually manic satisfaction. "No other word captures the heart of Shar so very perfectly... it is the scalpel-led journey that leads from pain to peace..."

As if to punctuate his words, he turns and swings two sharp blows with the knives of his hand, puncturing into both of the restrained man's eyes. The man screams weakly and spasms on the bed as a new river of blood pours out onto the soaked wooden floor.

"Hells," Wyll hisses under his breath. "Only a monster would inflict misery and call it medicine."

Malus looks down at the bleeding, shivering man before him and smiles, pleased. "See? What is the light of eyes but the cancer that causes one to witness the laceration of being? If light is the symptom, then darkness is the cure, for in light there is presence, but in darkness there is absence."

"In light is presence, in darkness absence," all the nurses intone together in unison.

Malus turns back towards Rakha. That unsettling smile still touches his lips. "But you... look how the succor of Shar eludes you!" he cries. "See how painfully present you remain. We do not wish to see you suffer so..." He takes a step forward on his long, gangly, metallic legs, his smile widening. "Let us cure you..."

Rakha's head has begun to ache. Her vision is whiting out at the corners and the beast is roaring in her head with sudden eagerness - and with anger. In her own voice it cries out within her, echoing down from that memory of the long-ago vivisection.

No. He does not understand after all. He has it wrong. There is no peace to be found in this slow torture. One kills to see the body twist and writhe and bleed and pass out of the world in unpeaceful agony, with no answers, no closure, and no serenity.

Kill him. He insults his craft.

She shakes her head sharply, trying to clear it of these thoughts. Malus is monstrous, yes, but Wyll would find these thoughts in her head equally so.

And yet this is who she once was, isn't it? Another killer, another cutter and slicer of flesh. They are two monsters staring each other down over this brutalized half-corpse, each only differing in the philosophy behind their blades - Malus and the beast, with Rakha as she is now caught between them like a struggling fish on a hook.

She clamps her jaw down tightly and tries, desperately, to focus.

[INVESTIGATION] Examine the sisters and their implements.

Narrator: The sisters' blades are bloodied and dully. Only the most measured hand could make a clean incision.

Pitiful, murmurs the beast. This is not perfection. This is amateur. Slipshod. Pathetic.

"Their blades are uneven," she says abruptly. "Efficient surgery will require further training." There is a plan forming in the back of her mind - and she cringes inwardly even as she thinks of it, because it is the beast's plan and not hers. It smells of viscera.

Malus tilts his head thoughtfully. "Their incisions are, as yet, still streaked with imperfection - that much I must concede," he says, with the air of a man discussing the weather. "How to steady their hands, I wonder..."

Rakha's harsh, off-kilter gaze bores into him. [PERSUASION] "Why not have them hone their skills on each other?"

Her mouth is operating without her. This is the beast speaking, the past version of herself that exists only in that single fragmented memory, reawoken by the familiarity of this blood-soaked room.

And Malus drinks every word down eagerly. "Yessss..." he hisses, his smile never shifting. "For are we not all in need of a cure?"

He draws back, lifts both grotesque hands in the air, and calls out to the nurses. "The scalpel does not discriminate! Let each and every one of you partake in its soothing journey! Absence, sisters! Acquaint yourselves!"

It's incredible, the alacrity with which the sisters obey.

Within moments they have cut each other apart. Four fresh corpses lie stretched on the floor, and Rakha sways dizzily as the beast feeds on the sight with eager hunger.

"It is a proud moment," Malus says dreamily, "when one sees one's teachings so lovingly taken to heart."

He turns slowly towards Rakha and flexes the mechanical joints of his piercing fingers. "You are to be commended for their graduation," he murmurs. "Rewarded with the promised cure. Come... I will acquaint you with the Lady's dark-fingered embrace..."

Rakha tips her head to one side and the beast's strange, feral smile tugs at her lips. For a moment she is aware of no one else but herself and Malus - of his madness and her own. [PERSUASION] "I would rather acquaint myself," she says, her voice calm and flat. "If you show me how."

(A/N: Slight artistic license - Rakha had a [BARD] persuasion option here instead, but it was much more verbose and performative and not Rakha-ish. This is the actual fallback dialogue line that is normally offered if you don't have a class-specific option.)

A long silence. Then Malus smiles again.

"Your diligence is exemplary..." he murmurs. "Very well. Your own scalpel will you be. Observe - then succeed me, into the succor of Shar!" His voice lifts in a sudden fanatical yelp--

And then without the slightest hesitation, he sinks one of his blades directly through his eye and into his brain. His body topples over backwards with a heavy, clattering thump and is still.

-----

Silence.

Rakha sinks slowly to her knees, staring at the sudden pile of corpses which has taken over the dais. She is trembling all over. The beast purrs in her head, sated, satisfied.

"What... in all the hells... was that?" Wyll asks faintly.

She jumps. She'd half-forgotten that he was there, or any of the others. "I... I don't know," she mutters. "I hardly knew what I was saying."

"An efficient resolution," Lae'zel says, just the slightest bit dryly. "Though I would not have objected to a fight."

"It is as I have already said," Minthara says, quiet and disdainful. "The Sharran philosophy is selfish, self-indulgent. This was a foolish performance, and Rakha put an end to it." She fixes Wyll with a pointed glance. "Or do you wish to say she has erred in securing that abomination's death?"

"No...ooo," Wyll says cautiously. "He had to be dealt with, that's certain. I'm just surprised, that's all."

He knows, of course. He was the only person to whom she explained the memory that the noblestalk gave her. He knows this echoed something terrible in her, and that she gave that echo voice, even if the cause was good. He is kind enough not to say anything, but he knows, all the same.

She hates it, all of it. And she hates that he knows, most of all.

[charmac]

Hi! Do you have any thoughts on Mac and Mrs. Mac’s relationship? I find the whole McDonald family dynamic so interesting, but especially after season 16/frank shoots every member of the gang I’ve been fascinated by those two. You always have such impressive, well thought out answers!

Thank you!

I do have a lot of of thoughts regarding Mac's upbringing, especially in terms of his relationships with his family and how they clearly affect his current-day relationships and misconceptions of love, but I'm not sure I've really fleshed that out so, great question.

First of all, I have a gripe with Frank Shoots Every Member of the Gang, as it really insanely retcons Luther's age. Mac Kills His Dad established that he was 59 at the time, which would have made him a teen when he had Mac. Shoots establishes that Luther's dad served in WWII and wrote him letters during that time, which means he had to have been born before 1945, and would have been at youngest in his 30s when Mac was born. It's not like it's a huge issue, but it does change some previously-thought dynamics. (Though, the fact that they weren't younger-cast in A Sunny Christmas does better-align with the idea that they were in their 30s when they had Mac.)

There was/is always kind of the vibe that when they were together, pre-Luther going to jail, Ms. Mac did really love Luther and vice-versa, and Mac was more kind of like a by-product of unprotected sex more than he was a part of the family. (I mean, they named him after the Hamburger Clown). Luther clearly love(d) him as the idea of having a son, someone who could carry on his bidding and his name, but doesn't love him as the child he actually has. I think Ms. Mac didn't love him as the idea of a son and doesn't love him as the child she has, and never did. BUT she did love Luther, and Mac observed that as a young kid, his parents loving each other but neglecting him. Looking at Christmas, we can kind of assume the order of anything in Mac's childhood home was Ms. Mac > Luther > Mac. So for his early development he was kind of sidelined, saw no love from his parents toward him, but did see love between his parents (in a definitely not healthy way, as it goes).

We know in the deleted scenes of Sunny Christmas that Mac's dad is going to prison probably right after the events of the video tape... I honestly think it's reasonable to assume that Mac's screaming that woke up the residents of the house they were robbing might have been probably was what led to Luther being arrested (with whatever warrants he had hanging over him catching up with him once he had been detained). So, does Ms. Mac blame her son for her husband being locked up for the next 25 years? Probably. She didn't even want him, didn't care for him, and then his obnoxious behaviour was their downfall.

Back to Shoots, I did really like it for what it gave us in terms of (Char)Mac childhood lore. I think it definitely wasn't a shock for them to drop the cigarette lighter line, but it was a hit to the chest for me. Everything I kind of assumed before, re: didn't want or care about having a child equated to strictly-neglectful, Mac clawing for the love he saw his mom give his dad, now with his dad gone even more-so, and being brushed off, now escalated to retaliation in response to Mac failing to be brushed off. Sometimes the dismissive, grunting and not moving from your chair approach just doesn't work on a hyperactive little bastard like Mac, sometimes you have to make him shut up by giving him something else to fuss over. I think Ms. Mac probably hoped that would be what breaks through his skin, makes him realise she doesn't love him, but Mac only sees it as a warning, a pause, a try-again-later, mom's just in a bad mood.

Presently, what we see of Ms. Mac is almost always the same: completely indifferent. Shrug, cough, I don't care at all about you. Mac's a serial killer? Yeah. Mac's dead? Ok. You're gay? Meh. She'll fuck with him though, sure: your dad is actually Dutch. You wanted these letters that meant something to your father? I needed toilet paper. Who cares. She doesn't love him, never has, never will, and Mac has no ability to understand that.

Based on his upbringing and the past 20 years, I think he has a complete misunderstanding (and at this point inability) to recognise and understand what love is, mostly because of his mother. Because she just, doesn't love him, never did, but Mac thinks that parents have to love their children, that's a fact in his mind. If he has a mom and a dad they do love him, they have to, especially when he was a little boy, right? His dad loves him, he's just in jail so he can't show it, but his mom is here. And mom did love dad, he remembers that, he saw it, so he just has to make himself known, she can love him too because she's capable of it and she's his mom. He loves her, he says it over and over, she never says it, but she just doesn't see him because she's busy, working, or making a home for him, or just for some reason she's not paying attention... So love for Mac is fighting neglect, love is refusing to be ignored, love is pestering over and over because if you can get away with your bombardment without a finger being raised, without being scored by a cigarette lighter, they must really want you to continue... they must be waiting for you to really prove yourself before they show or admit their love for you. There are people in his life who have to love him, it's like a law, so they'll admit it as long as you keep asking, keep making yourself known, keep trying to prove yourself... and if it comes to the point where you're getting burned, stop for a minute, take a step back, and reevaluate how (or when) you can try again...