#gratuitous murder: the movie

[dazed-by-days]

jst watched nbk & i get why e and d treated that movie like the bible now

[allgirlsareprincesses]

Choosing the Beast: Modern Folklore Heroines Embrace the Animal Husband

“I choose the bear.” The refrain rang out across the web, with many a woman nodding in agreement or at least understanding, and certain men huffing with indignant outrage. Just a meme, really, but did it speak to a deeper truth? Is it merely age-old mistrust of patriarchy talking, or a true desire for the beastly, the wild, the untame?

I’m no sociologist, of course, but I have noticed an emerging trend in fem-gaze media that seems to reflect this view. In movies like I Am Dragon (2015) and recent shows like My Lady Jane and The Acolyte, the heroine chooses the beast, loving her animal husband in his wild form rather than requiring him to transform back into a mundane man to earn her affection. This is such a departure from the typical folktale pattern that it’s difficult to even find an historic example where this occurs.

Commonly thought to reveal the desire to tame a dangerous mate in a patriarchal society, most animal husband tales (ATU 425a) feature a hero who ultimately transforms permanently into a human. This is viewed not only as freeing him from the maddening effect of his wild form, but also saving his bride from committing the sin of bestiality. In these tales, the animal mate’s transformation is necessary for the salvation of both.

Is the modern heroine then damned by choosing her husband’s beastly form? Or does she actually free them both from the yoke of patriarchal expectations?

Bathing: Discovering the Wild Masculine

The first motif that stands out in these modern screen examples is bathing. In animal spouse tales, there is often a dynamic of the hunter and the hunted, and thus a moment when the hunter comes upon their would-be lover unawares. Perhaps they find the animal spouse sleeping, or they cast a light on them unexpectedly, see them without their animal skin or disguise, and so on. And of course, they often come upon the lover at their bath.

There is an implied eroticism in this discovery, finding one’s quarry not only undressed, but also in the most private of activities. Water of course symbolizes fertility, but bathing is also purifying, symbolically washing away all that might make a mate undesirable. And this, perhaps, is the reason that historically this motif is used almost exclusively for animal brides, not animal husbands.

For the animal husband, he either actively chooses to reveal himself to the bride (perhaps on their wedding night), or she violently strips away his disguise, often armed with “flame and steel” like Psyche and her many avatars. Animal brides on the other hand are nearly always discovered at a body of water, bathing. The hunter will then capture her either by stealing her animal skin or cloak, or by placing his own clothing on her. What does it mean, then, when it is the husband who is discovered bathing in a body of water, held as an erotic object in the feminine gaze?

In The Acolyte, Osha follows Qimir to a pool where he slowly undresses, in full knowledge that she is watching. On the shore, she steals his lightsaber, just like the hunter who steals the animal skin, symbolically claiming him. When he emerges, Qimir dons new clothes, as if acknowledging that he is a different person than before he entered the water, almost purified in a way. Osha is forced to confront that there is more to the murderer in the mask than she realized.

Similarly, in My Lady Jane, our heroine goes looking for Guildford just before sunrise on their ill-fated wedding night, only to discover him bathing in the stables. The scene is gratuitously filmed from Jane’s (very horny) perspective, flipping the script on the countless scenes in screen history shot with the masculine gaze. Immediately after she discovers and confronts him, Guildford transforms against his will into a horse, and Jane realizes that he is an Ethian, a creature she has been taught is demonic and unnatural.

And in I Am Dragon, Mira makes several discoveries in quick succession: first, she deduces that Arman is actually the dragon. In the next moment, she slips from the island’s peak and falls, saved only when Arman transforms at the last moment and breaks her fall with his dragon form. The water begins to wash over his unconscious body, and at first Mira thinks that she will allow him to drown. But the sight of Arman in his human form after he rescued her, worried over by his animal familiar, stirs her to pity and she wraps him in a sail and drags him to safety. In this way, she clothes him, claiming him as her own.

Each of these heroines discovered a new aspect of her husband at the bath, finding him unexpectedly alluring, and ultimately choosing to begrudgingly claim him. Each animal husband tried to wash away his beastly form, to separate himself from the wild masculine. These men feel a sense of disassociation from a part of themselves, but now that their brides have discovered it, there will be no more hiding. Further, the bride now holds the power in the relationship, evidenced by how her husband needs her: Qimir needs Osha to be his apprentice, Guildford needs Jane to help him “break the curse,” and Arman needs Mira to heal him from his wounds.

Playing House: The Half-Husband

The second feature of these stories is a period of domesticity for the couple. For a brief time after the husband’s beastly nature is revealed, the lovers “play house” like children. While sexual tension is present, they typically do not consummate their union during this time, but instead cook, eat, rest, and care for one another. What’s more, they ignore or even attempt to actively destroy the husband’s animal form. They deny that this is part of him and therefore part of their relationship.

In I Am Dragon, Mira heals Arman, and wakes the next morning to find he has left food for her (dragonfruit, appropriately). Together they begin building a home out of shipwreck debris they find scattered around the island. A cheery montage shows them decorating a living space, choosing clothes, playing music, and dancing. But the specter of Arman’s monstrous form lurks on the edge of their idyllic life. Mira has nightmares, and tells Arman how much she fears “the dragon,” notably not referring to them as the same person. And eventually, it emerges that Mira has been planning to escape, rejecting Arman’s dragon form entirely.

After he sheds the helmet and robes of The Stranger, Qimir turns his attention to caring for Osha: he heals her, lets her sleep in his bed, provides clothes, and cooks for her. In turn, after some lightsaber-wielding, Osha becomes more comfortable in his home and accepts the food he offers, eventually even trying on his helmet. Later, they bicker amiably on their way to Brendok, like an old married couple on a road trip. When not facing down Jedi, Qimir leaves his menacing persona behind and transforms into an empathetic, protective, and alluring partner.

Jane Grey, meanwhile, finds herself using her honeymoon sequestered away in a private cottage to try to cure Guildford of his Ethianism. With her knowledge of medicine, she concocts various potions and magical cures, but none of them succeed. Guildford often checks in on her after these disappointments, making sure she’s getting enough sleep and taking care of herself. It’s also clear that they’ve been regularly dining together when Jane suddenly dashes off to rescue her friend. Guildford follows her and the two protect one another, followed by an almost-tryst. Even when they move into the palace, their day-to-day (or rather night-to-night) life is one of comfortable domesticity, although they continue to deny Guildford’s horse form.

In each of these cases (although less so in The Acolyte without Season 2 to continue the story), playing house can only last for so long while the husband’s animal nature is denied. There is a part of him that is suppressed, rejected, and this leads to him being incomplete, a half-husband. Each hero is unable or unwilling to accept and celebrate his whole self with his bride. Eventually, it is that denial that leads to a rift between the couple, which can only be healed not with the transformation of the husband, but with the embrace of his animal form.

Enforcing Patriarchy: The Rival

Each of these relationships exists in direct opposition to the dominant culture in the story: Arman as the Dragon is the literal enemy of Mira’s people, Qimir as Sith is the enemy of Osha’s Jedi masters, and in My Lady Jane, intermarriage between humans and Ethians is punishable by death. By choosing to stay with their animal husbands, even for a brief time, our heroines are openly defying the patriarchal norms of their societies. But no oppressive society is about to take that transgression lying down. In each story, a rival emerges to enforce the patriarchal order, kill the beastly husband, and retrieve the bride.

In I Am Dragon, Mira’s betrothed and descendent of the dragon-slayer, Igor, journeys to rescue her from the dragon. Over the course of the story, it becomes clear that Igor cares nothing for Mira herself, and merely feels entitled to her as his bride. Dragon-slaying is his heritage, so he must find her, kill the dragon, and take his place as the hero of his people. Even the marriage ceremony illustrates his ownership of her: he takes hold of a rope tied to her boat and reels her in, thus binding her to the patriarchal order. Contrast that to Arman, who offers her the power of flight, a symbol for freedom.

In Osha’s case, Qimir’s rival for her loyalty is clearly Master Sol, who wants to keep his former pupil dependent on him and the Jedi. Sol takes patronizing fatherliness to an extreme, constantly rescuing Osha rather than letting her stand for herself, teaching her to deny her feelings and instincts, and lying to her to “protect” her. The Jedi refuse to allow that there might be any other way to access the Force than their own, thus invading the home of the Brendok witches and ultimately orphaning the twins. Sol continues to press this dominance to the end, challenging Qimir and insisting to Osha that his own lies were justified.

In My Lady Jane, there are two rivals, both women. Lady Frances attempts throughout the show to dominate her daughters and crush their wills, forcing them into unwanted marriages, applying political pressure, and even counseling Jane to abandon Guildford to save herself. The other rival is Mary Tudor, who is determined not only to emulate her father’s violent, oppressive, and misogynistic reign, but to crush anyone she considers “unnatural” or who poses a threat to her rule. These characters stand as clear examples of how women can enforce patriarchy, too.

In each story, there is a moment when the rival briefly recaptures or “rescues” the bride from her beastly husband, bringing her to a moment of decision: will she stay within the bounds of patriarchy like a good little girl? Or will she make an act of defiance to choose her own path?

Marriage: Choosing the Beast

The bride’s choice will ultimately decide not only her fate, but that of her mate as well. As an independent character, the wild masculine is deeply wounded, separated from himself and thus from his bride. He longs to transform not into a greater, more whole person, but into a lesser, half-person. Alone, without the embrace of his anima, he cannot see the value of his beastly form. Instead of healing, he faces annihilation.

As a part of the bride’s psyche, the beastly husband represents her innermost desires, the truth of her heart, and a spirit freed from the expectations of her society. He is her animus, her missing wild masculine. If she transforms him into a man, then she will tame his wild nature, bringing him to heel under the boot of the patriarchy. Choosing the human form and rejecting the beast means rejecting her own psychological needs. It would be just another form of psychic dismemberment.

Fortunately and unusually, each of these modern brides chooses her beastly husband without demanding he transform. When Osha finally agrees to become Qimir’s apprentice, she takes his hand under the willow tree, clasping the newly-bled lightsaber between them. A few scenes later, this wedding imagery is repeated when they hold hands over the saber again, this time looking into a sunrise/set. Notably, at the moment they “marry” under the willow tree, Qimir is wearing his beastly helmet with rows of menacing, wolfish teeth. He has not come to the light side or shed his Dark Side persona, but Osha has embraced him anyway without fear. And while they might not both be healed (yet), they are more whole together than they were apart.

When her efforts to cure Guildford of his Ethianism repeatedly fail, Jane begins to suspect that his “condition” cannot be cured at all. But listening to her Ethian friends Susanna and Archer finally convinces her that the truth is Guildford doesn’t NEED to be healed - being an Ethian is who he is, and it’s nothing to fear. Unfortunately, Guildford still associates his beastly form with his mother’s death, so he is unable to accept it as Jane encourages, and flees. After a near-death experience, he uses his equine speed to return to the castle just as Jane is deposed and captured. As our heroes battle toward the end, Guildford comes to learn that there are many other proud Ethians, and that his family loves and accepts him in any form.

Still, he’s unable to transform at will, and when Mary captures him and sentences both husband and wife to death, it seems their story may end in tragedy. But as Guildford has been struggling to accept himself, Jane too has been battling with her own conscience. Does she renounce Guildford to save herself? Use her wits to kill the guard and escape? Bend to her mother’s manipulation? Jane confronts each temptation, and ultimately chooses to face death rather than betray Guildford or herself. But when her Ethian friends (the wild instinct) appear to disrupt the execution, our heroine seizes the opportunity to rescue Guildford. Unable to free him from the burning pyre, she confesses her love for him, and they kiss amid the flames.

Fire is often a herald of transformation, burning away illusions to reveal the truth. And when Jane and Guildford exchange their vows in this symbolic marriage ceremony, Guildford’s fears and illusions are finally burned away. Now that his bride has accepted his beastly form, he can accept it too, and so he at last transforms at will into a horse so that they can escape. Their story ends with them married and whole before the sunrise.

Among our modern heroines, Mira is the boldest in her embrace of the beastly husband. Offered yet again as a bride to Igor, she realizes that this is not what she wants, and casts off the tether from her boat. She declares “I love the Dragon!” using the name of her husband’s animal form rather than his human name. Then, she sings the song that will call the dragon to her, and he appears to carry her away again.

But their story is not over yet! Earlier in the story, Arman told Mira of how he loses control when in dragon form, and that dragons are compelled to reproduce by burning maidens to death and retrieving their offspring from the ashes. Returning to the island with her a second time, the dragon drops her on the altar and prepares to spew fire, but Mira lunges up and kisses him. This act of love, even when he is a monster, stuns the beastly husband. Again, Mira declares her love and kneels before him, saying she does not wish to be parted. We might expect the animal husband to transform in this moment, but instead he lays his fearsome head in her lap as a lover. Their story ends with a child and a flight in the sky, silhouetted by the sun just like the other couples.

Each bride, when confronted with the option to return to the patriarchal limits of her childhood, chose instead an act of love and acceptance for her wild masculine. This embrace helped the beastly husband to accept his whole self, and he is healed without having to cut off the wild parts of himself.

What Does It Mean?

Again, this story is so rare in world folklore that it’s difficult to even find examples. On fleeting occasions that the woman chooses an untransformed beast, it is presented as a cautionary tale. These women are framed as a danger to the community for their bestial impulses and abandonment of the social order, much like witches who were said to consort with the devil. It was certainly never presented as a happy ending, insofar as we can tell from written accounts.

So what does the emergence of this tale mean for our culture? I would argue that this is just the latest step in our ongoing reckoning with historic gender roles, as well as renegotiating with other forms of systemic oppression. People of all genders are pressured to reject a part of ourselves, cutting us off from our own truth and desires that run counter to the enforced social order. We must not challenge patriarchy, must not embrace different gender expressions, must not blur established hierarchies of power, must not find joy and power in our identities, and so on.

This enforced denial does tremendous damage to everyone caught in the system, and so through story, we dream our way to escape. We dream of embracing the dark, wild parts of ourselves, of flying free on a spaceship or a dragon or enchanted horseback, and of being totally loved for who we are.

It’s clear patriarchy is still fighting back against this emancipation of the wild feminine and wild masculine, given that both The Acolyte and My Lady Jane were canceled not long after their release. In the case of The Acolyte in particular, there was a sustained campaign from its announcement to harass and silence the creators. Demoralizing as this phenomenon may be, it’s important to remember WHO ultimately owns these stories:

“Fanfiction is a way of the culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of owned by the folk.

-Henry Jenkins, NYT 1997

Ah, an oldie-but-goodie. But Dr. Jenkins is right. Corporations may greenlight, film, release, and then cancel these stories, but ultimately they belong to the people. We take from these tales what speaks to us, leave what does not, and then retell them ourselves in fanfiction, in art inspired by the stories, and in lessons we pass on to our friends and families. If the embrace of the wild masculine speaks to you, let the story take root in your own life. Do you know someone who needs to be embraced, just as they are? Do you need to accept the parts of yourself that society tells you to hate? Do you want to be free, healed, and whole?

If so, then let these stories show you how, and tell more like them. Embrace the beast, and find your joy.

Sources:

Beauty and the Beast Tales From Around the World by Heidi Anne Heiner

In Search of the Swan Maiden: A Narrative on Folklore and Gender by Barbara Fass Leavy

And a relevant song for you, as a treat:

Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph.D.

[knightsickness]

I love it when you talk about movies 🖤 What are the best ones you watched recently?

yayy thank you ^^ here are some ive really liked in the past couple of months

wishing stairs 2003 - most recent film i watched korean ghost/slasher set in an all-girls arts boarding school. the dormitory stairs have 28 steps but sometimes when you count them there are 29. any wish made on the 29th step comes true regardless of who has to die to ensure it

to die for 1995 - mockumentary about small-town weathergirl nicole kidman killing people in her nowhere-town as part of her scheme to achieve petty fame. if you like drop dead gorgeous 1999 at all you’ll like this kidman soo good in it + theres a gratuitous cronenberg cameo

psychic vision jaganrei 1988 - most underrated film on here noo one has seen this. japanese found footage/mockumentary about an idol performing a song her producers gave her not knowing the girl they aren’t crediting for it killed herself. some genuinely fun and creepy ghost stuff + i say as generally a found footage disliker uses the format well

the house of yes 1997 - guy brings his girlfriend home to meet his insular wealthy family, including his unstable twin sister hes been in an incestuous relationship with since childhood. she likes to roleplay jfk’s assassination with him. offputting dark comedy suspense movie

the substance 2024 - if youre on tumblr youve already heard people rave about the substance its fun i really liked it 👍

charade 1963 - audrey hepburn returns from a ski holiday and finds her husband has been murdered + a group of men who think she has the money her husband stole from them chasing her. witty intensely charming genuinely unpredictable probably my favourite audrey

[physalian]

Writing Tone in Fiction (Or, Pacing your Story, Part 2)

See this post all about pacing and as the two go hand-in-hand. If you read that, I may repeat myself a little here. Tone, and how abruptly you change it, how radically you change it, and how you break it whether on purpose or on accident says a lot about your experience as a writer, and how well you planned out your plot.

**Trigger warning for mentions of mature themes**

What is Tone?

“Tone” is the maturity of the work, signaling whether or not your characters have to censor themselves for young readers. It’s also restricted by the genre, whether this is a comedy and what kind – slapstick or gross-out humor – or a scary movie about ghosts, but not graphic body horror. It sets expectations about the amount and degree of romance readers can expect, if the scene will fade to black before anything happens or if you’re in for a raunchy sex scene, or somewhere in the middle. It also helps audiences gauge whether or not characters can die in this universe, and how graphically if they do beyond Disney’s tried and true “villain falling ambiguously from a tall height” deaths.

OSP recently did a piece on Tone Armor, a device similar to but less obvious than Plot Armor where the established tone means that, no matter how dire the circumstances, your hero won’t actually die, the world won’t actually end, and a happily ever after is on the horizon. Red also discussed what happens when you break your established tone with the shocking death or mistreatment of a character, but more on that later.

How to Decide Your Tone

Depending on your genre and intended audience, content for younger readers demand quite a bit of censorship (though can get away with many, many things worse than death). In the US at least, movies go through the MPAA rating system to determine what’s permitted by the rating given – how many swear words, whether you can show blood, topless women, graphic assault, graphic violence, if and how characters can be killed or how gummy and resistant to damage their bodies are.

If you’re writing for children, you both have less freedom to write violent carnage, and more freedom to get really creative within the limits of your tone box. I can expect the kid protagonists of my fantasy adventure to murder countless monsters that dissolve into gold dust, not bloody carcasses. I can expect the villain to perhaps die from a stab wound, but probably not get decapitated, disemboweled, or drawn and quartered, at least, not ‘on screen’.

If you’re writing for adults, adults do still expect a warning for how graphic anything can be, whether that’s sex scenes, fight scenes, murders, assaults, bloody battles, garish injuries, dead pets, dead children, etc.

Unless you’re already planning to break your tone, you need to know fairly early on whereabouts you want to set those expectations. If none of the characters even allude to sex and you write in a graphic assault, your audience is going to be pissed, and horrified. If none of your characters even allude to sex, and you hint that one was assaulted off-screen, you will still upset your audience if you don’t give them time to prepare for the possibility.

You can soften the violence and graphic content you’ve previously established and few might complain about it not being gritty enough, but going the other direction puts you in a very precarious position. Choosing more mature themes will inevitably alienate younger readers, those with triggers, and those that just want to have a lighthearted good time. The trade off? You’ll invite readers with a work that’s exactly what they’re looking for.

Establishing a Tone

I’m writing this post today because I finally sat down to watch Game of Thrones. One can’t avoid spoilers for a series as massive as that, so I was prepared for the graphic violence, all the gratuitous sex, the infamous Red Wedding, murdered kids, horribly bloody battles, and the like. GoT, the TV adaptation at least as I can’t speak to the books, establishes exactly what to expect in the very first scene: Three people happen upon the site of a graphic mass murder, limbs and body parts strewn everywhere, kids among them, who come back to life as ice zombies to kill them.

That episode continues with a beheading, incest, more incest, attempted child murder via defenestration, a brother selling his little sister into marriage, rampant nudity, and… I’m sure I missed something.

**Spoiler Alert for Season 4**

What I was not at all prepared for was the graphic death of Oberyn Martell (Pedro Pascal). It’s quick, it’s violent, it’s graphic and gruesome and incredibly well-acted… it was also far more horrifying than the Red Wedding, at least to me. Murder is murder but the way this character went out almost had me quit watching right then and there. Google at your leisure.

It wasn’t necessarily outside the realm of possibility, but most everyone else died via stabbing, arrows, beheading, burning, falling, eaten by wolves, crushed, etc. This was deeply unsettling, particularly because it’s live action, not a cartoon like Invincible.

It did its job, and it’s the only moment to feature in nightmares and make me lose my appetite, so… well done? In the following Previouslies (correct me on the actual word) they don’t even show it, cutting around the actual moment because it’s just that horrible.

This was four seasons into an eight season show and nothing like it had happened before. In a tone already as dark and explicit as TV can get, poor Oberyn pushed it over the edge entirely. It broke the established tone.

Amazon’s The Boys treads the same very thin line, only these people have superpowers for a whole new level of deeply disturbed body horror.

So, when you’re establishing a tone in the realm of “less graphic than Game of Thrones but still terrible,” you can go one of two ways: Horrify your audience straight out of the gate, or slowly creep up to it with allusions and hints until they’re fully prepared for it when it hits.

If your characters have free reign of every swear in the dictionary, start with the “f*cks” and “sh*ts” as quickly as you can as part of their vocabulary, whether you intend to use the words sparingly or after every other word in their dialogue.

If you’re writing a multi-series work that intends to ramp up the rating as it goes, you don’t have to cold open with a murder, but establishing that characters do at least die in this world is a start. Establish that assault happens in the background, that killing happens, or animal cruelty. Your readers with triggers will thank you for it and read something else.

Unless you intend to shatter the tone and shock your audience with it later.

Breaking Tone via Killing Characters

The most effective tonal breakage I can think of that wasn’t even graphic, just dark and incredibly well done: Disney’s animated Mulan. The movie had been your standard Disney musical complete with grand animation for its sing-along song. Soldiers singing, dancing, laughing as they march off to war, all for a girl worth fighting—

The singing stops. The score stops. Their smiles drop. Cut to the scene before them that has murdered this Disney musical in cold blood and it’s a decimated battlefield, the snow-covered and burned bodies of their far better trained and more competent fellow soldiers, and the love interest’s father.

Mulan only briefly reprises one track in the climax, but otherwise, this happy-go-lucky sing-along has rudely and horrifyingly become a war movie. It’s still Disney, so it doesn’t get violent or graphic, but they shattered the tone in glorious fashion.

Breaking tone happens all the time, for minor events and major character deaths. It doesn’t become an issue of “you just alienated your audience” unless the tonal breakage is the aforementioned sudden graphic assault or other sensitive triggers.

Major character deaths are a whole separate monster to tackle and I’d like to, but for today’s purposes I’m talking about killing major characters when the possibility of any of our heroes dying was never established.

For anyone who never read Lord of the Rings and didn’t know the curse of anyone played by Sean Bean, losing Gandalf to another ambiguous high fall was one thing, but Boromir straight up dies in battle. Sure the story is surrounded by death and darkness but you expect heroes in a world like this to have some pretty hefty plot armor – and Boromir had so much room left to grow. In the grand scheme of the story, though, Boromir’s death was as far from shock value fodder as possible.

Sirius Black is another heartbreaking loss, but not entirely outside the realm of possibility – killing off Ron or Hermione would have been. Any mentor figure is automatically doomed with rare exception, especially ones in fatherly roles.

Bianca di Angelo is a different matter. She’s not the first death mentioned in Percy Jackson but she’s a brand new character and despite all the dangers the heroes have already been through and the warnings from the prophecy, actually killing her off for good broke the tone. Suddenly this war was real and there were lasting consequences.

Game of Thrones’ “Red Wedding” didn’t just shock audiences because a bunch of people died, it was which people that died. Robb Stark, eldest son and heir to Sean Bean (so of course he’s dead) and one of the siblings of the “hero” family had been leading a war effort to rescue and then avenge his father. He gets betrayed and murdered, along with his mother and a fair chunk of his army, caught by surprise at a wedding, because he broke an oath and married for love instead.

I knew of the scene and knew that Catelyn Stark was there just from the one time I’d seen the clip years ago, and as it got closer I worried it was Robb’s wedding, but I still wasn’t prepared for the death of the hero of the show. Jon’s off in the north doing his own thing and so is Danaerys. This was the bright-eyed usurper, the avenger, the never-lost-a-battle upstart. No author would ever kill that hero.

They’d established that anyone can die, similar to the Walking Dead in some ways, but this was a whole new level of boldness, killing off Robb. At the time of this post, I haven’t seen past season 4, but I know more deaths are coming.

Deciding to murder your hero, in any other story, would not go over well with your audience. Killing any major character is a decision that should be made with a deep understanding of the consequences or else you end up like Walking Dead after they killed Carl for shock value and never recovered their audience viewership.

—

It’s not just dead protagonists, it can be worldly tragedies, the heroes actually losing a battle, or the war, a uniquely horrifying monster or cryptid or villainous act. Or it can be a character beginning to contemplate self-harm and possibly attempting to end their own lives. It can be the reveal of an abusive relative, or an incestuous relationship. It can be mental health problems, sudden and un-curable disease and disability.

It can be less-dire things too, but I’m not much for writing comedy.

Tone, like pacing, doesn’t have to remain consistent throughout the entire story. If it’s a lighthearted comedy, let it stay a lighthearted comedy if you want to. You can change tone progressively, with hints and near-misses, or drop a bomb on your audience with a big reveal. What you do and how you implement it is entirely dependant on the story you’re writing.

Most audiences expect a book that isn’t written for elementary schoolers to mature over time and most genres come with set understandings. But hey, I hear Animorphs can get incredibly dark with a bunch of mature themes.

In general, killing a character just for shock value is rarely worth it in the long run. In general, writing in triggering subjects without warning to an audience that wasn’t prepared for it also isn’t worth it in the long run — save it for a different book.

If fanfiction authors leave author’s notes everywhere warning about the subject matter ahead, published authors can do the same, in my opinion. Content warnings should be a thing and it doesn’t have to spoil the surprise. Include it as a forward to your book, letting potential readers know that such and such work they’re considering spending real money on contains mentions of, or explicit depictions of, any and all mature and sensitive themes. You never know who’s out there picking up your book expecting a good time. Do right by them and give a little heads up and you might gain a fan you wouldn’t have otherwise.

[b-skarsgard]

He shot the indie action film “Boy Kills World,” in which he stars as a brutal, mute fighter who’s got some serious John Wick-style moves, right before “The Crow,” so he was already packing on a lot of muscle. He kept up the same protein-packed, restricted diet and workout plan to stay in top shape heading into “The Crow.”

“I’d take Bill out to dinner. I’d always just order for him because I knew what he was eating,” “The Crow” director Rupert Sanders told Variety at the New York premiere Tuesday night. “It’s basically steak tartare and raw eggs. He was in the gym a lot. He ate very healthily and put us all to shame when we were eating burgers and hot dogs and working late at night in the Czech summer.”

“I’d already been training for quite a while. Me and my trainer kept adding a little bit of weight onto what I’d already be, but I didn’t want to be too big either,” Skarsgard said. “It was a tricky one, because they wanted the Crow to be ripped, but the character Eric shouldn’t be. I didn’t feel like the character should be thin, but you can’t afford to split it into six months, the ‘Raging Bull’ kind of way. So we did a lot of weight training and ate a lot of protein.”

One intense scene has Skarsgard’s Crow infiltrate an opera house and slaughter dozens of henchmen to reach the man who orchestrated his murder. Sanders called the sequence the “craziest day on set.”

“There was a lot of complex stunt work, and Bill did so much of it himself,” he said. “As you can see, he’s an incredibly physical person. His body in the movie is incredible. When he’s on, he’s a real machine of destruction, but also he played these incredible moments of softness and empathy, which really just give the action sequences a lot more of an emotional connection, which is why I think people are really responding to them. They’re not just gratuitous violence. You really feel that you’re in there with the character.”

Once filming was over, Skarsgard celebrated the end of his diet with a beer.

“I really loved what I was eating, so I didn’t feel like I had to cheat,” he said. “I didn’t eat sugar, but I’m not a big sweet guy. I guess my biggest cheat would be an alcoholic beer. I celebrated after the shoot.”

read more at the link

[inamindfarfaraway]

Duke Thomas: Another story I’ve heard about myself, this one happened while I was in We Are Robin. Remember that? All the cool kids would take to the streets in masks, fighting crime, saving lives, being like “Hell yeah, we're all Robin!”. And there was this guy I knew who had a twelve-year-old son. His name is Batman and his son’s name is Robin. Robin had been fighting crime for two years longer than me, but he’s three years younger and spent most of his childhood in a murder cult, so it pretty much evens out as to who is behind who in life. And Robin was an asshole. So is Batman, but that's less noteworthy because he's always been like that. But Robin used to be nice. My friends and I, we admire him. We love the idea of him. We love what he represents. It's just an unfortunate fact that this child, when you meet him in person, is gratuitously mean. He'd be like "Desist, you impostors! I am the only real Robin! You are disgraces to all you hold dear!" and cut us with his steel sword.

And one day he decided to leave town for most of a year, which you should never do if you're an asshole. And at this time, Batman had amnesia; he had died for a minute fighting the Joker and got his brain repaired by magic and forgot who he was, forgot that he was Batman; so he was leading a happy, normal life for a bit. And everyone in We Are Robin noticed that Batman and Robin were gone, and we all got up individually and thought, ‘Okay, let's get into the Batcave and destroy the place.’ We wanted to do this not because it was easy, but because it was hard. Breaking into the Batcave is one of those things that's so awesome that you're basically obligated to do it if you can, and being both teenagers and the kind of people to become a street gang of volunteer vigilantes, we thought we had a shot. And we did! Oracle let us right in because she too knows that Batman and Robin are assholes and thought it would be hilarious. And she was right. She's very clever like that. She did a wonderful job, turned off the alarms, opened the gates, edited the security footage, kept the Bats away from the cave all night. I should mention that she was an adult, so our actions were her responsibility.

I walked into this party. More kids than I even knew the movement had were there and everyone was drinking like it was the end of the world. People were drinking like it was the civil war and a doctor was coming to saw our legs off. It was totally unsupervised. We were like dogs without horses, we were running wild. I walked down, I walked through to the display area. They had a giant penny from an adventure. One dude took a running start and threw his body into the giant penny and knocked it over. Another kid sat on the Batcomputer keyboard and took a shit on it. So the party was going great.

I'm standing in the Batcave, and I'm holding a red cup; you’ve seen movies. And I'm standing there and I'm holding a red cup and I'm starting to black out, and I guess someone said, like, “Something, something, Superman”. And in a brilliant moment of word association, I yelled, “FUCK METROPOLIS! FUCK METROPOLIS!" And everyone else joined in. A hundred drunk children dressed in unofficial Robin gear yelling, “FUCK METROPOLIS!”. With the confidence of people who’ve seen death and aren't afraid of it anymore; you know that, like, ‘It doesn’t matter if I survive, what matters is that it needs to be done!’ confidence. The reason someone had said, “Something, something, Superman” was because Superman was there. He had heard us with his super hearing. So the Man of Steel himself flew into the cave and got to the main area and looked out over a sea of drunk toddlers yelling, “FUCK METROPOLIS!” in his face. But he was almost impressed. He was like “Wow”.

Then he leaned into his Justice League communicator and asked, “Oracle, what the heck?”

And my friend Dax - who invented his own grappling hook guns, this man is a genius - he grabbed a smoke bomb, threw it on the ground and yelled, “Scatter!” And everyone ran in different directions. We all ran in different directions. It was like that scene in Ratatouille when the humans come in the kitchen and all the rats go in different ways. We all ran in different directions. I ran across a bridge and I jumped over the Batmobile and I slid down a banister and now I'm running along the underground river and there was this big pitch-black passage in the rock and I thought, ‘I've never gone somewhere that dark before’. And then I woke up at home.

The next day, I went on patrol, because that's what we did back then. And I'm walking into an alleyway and who do I see but Nightwing? And he says to me, “Are you aware that the Batcave was infiltrated last night?”

And I said, “No.” You know, like a liar.

"Oracle, Red Robin and I are investigating it, but we could use We Are Robin’s help.” And he didn’t approve of us at all. He would never have acknowledged us as heroes, let alone asked us for help, unless he felt utterly desperate. “This wasn’t just a thief or a spy. It was a villain with a personal vendetta sending a message of malice and disrespect. They bypassed the security flawlessly, but caused obvious damage inside. They knocked over the giant penny. They took a shit on the Batcomputer. But the worst thing,” he says, “the worst thing is that they stole a photo of Robin II.” Robin II, the one after Nightwing and before Red Robin, was murdered by the Joker when he was fifteen. This is Nightwing’s dead little brother. So he’s trying to stay calm in front of me, but he’s freaking out about it.

And I had a thought that Batman, for comparison, was having around the same time about a life of courage and altruism: did I do that?

I figured, no. I wouldn't have done that. But I was never sure.

Until a year later. Relax. I'm playing video games with this guy named Jason, who also used to be a Robin. A year later, the movement’s kinda died down. We're playing video games for a couple hours, and then Jason says to me, “Hey, come here. I want to show you something”, and he takes me into his bedroom and then he takes me into a side room off of his bedroom - never a good thing to have. He shows me a tiny room that is covered wall-to-wall in stolen photos and belongings of the second Robin from different Batcave break-ins over the years. Mementos of a murdered child superhero taken from his family.

And I said, “Why? Why do you do this?”

And Jason said, “Because it's the one thing they can't replace.”

That's the end of that story, but how fucked up is that, right? That's crazy. So I don't drink anymore.

[52stations]

ive always said that in order to create an enjoyable and varied filmography for the humble completionist the actor must tick a few specific boxes, as follows. list is gender neutral but women generally seem to score lower because hollywood is corrupt and anti-lesbian. ahem

• obviously a same sex kiss. ideally there should be at least one in every decade of the actor’s career

• role where they wear glasses

• role with drastically different haircut. im talking wigs, im talking early career bad dye job, whatever it takes

• misjudged and baffling accent

• murderer

• bitchy waiter or retail employee

• gratuitous whump movie or guest role on medical drama

• sexy period piece or anything with elaborate costumes

• horror or thriller movie with beautiful lighting, to showcase screaming talents

• movie where the actor inexplicably has to care for a child, animal, or ailing friend, even better if they’re a parent

• made for tv film thats surprisingly enjoyable but you will never ever ever be able to convince your friends to watch it

• baffling children’s film that feels like a money laundering operation

[teaboot]

What is your most recent favorite show/movie/book? What is your most recent favorite treat for yourself?

hooooooo dear.

Okay, so my favourite comfort movie is Six Underground. It's a simple plot with endearing characters, found family, car chases, gratuitous violence, kicky tunes, and [spoiler] that I find cathartic. It's enjoyable, funny, and relaxing, with the perfect balance of clever and low brain work. Is it a master class of deep introspective cinema? No. But it *is*, in my opinion, the perfect action comedy.

My favourite book.... is... difficult. I don't think I could pick one. Inkdeath, the Pentagon chronicles, Eragon... hoo, and Leven Thumps, Cirque du Freak, Class A, the Alex Ryder series, Legend of Drizzt, the mortal instruments series, the Hell's Paradise manga, Fullmetal Alchemist manga, any Goosebumps book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the Percy Jackson series.... all happy memories, almost all on my bookshelf. Haven't read most since I was in school, though.

Favourite TV series... I'd have to say Elementary, Bones (until they jump the shark... if you know, you know), Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, Horrible History, Museum Mysteries, Midsommar Murders, The Twilight Zone of all eras, Poirot, aaaand... hell, most docuseries not written by crackpots.

And internet series and channels weren't mentioned but I'm throwing in Casual Geographic, Some More News, Ryan George, The Watcher, Buzzfeed Unsolved Supernatural, Game Changer, and MBMBaM.

Most recent indulgence was Garlic Bread ♡

[clownboy-yeehonk]

You know what? I don't even care if Barbie IS a man hating movie. Like it legit is not, I don't think it is a movie about hating men.

But even if it WAS, who cares?!?! How many supposedly great movies hate women? No women, women as sex objects alone, gratuitous nudity, objectification, horrifically graphic rape scenes that women are collectively told that were being too sensitive about. Movies that hate women kill them, beat them, brutalized them in high definition. And barbie is evil bc...Ken's kinda dumb? He doesn't have a job? Or house?

Women fear getting raped and murdered. Men, apparently, fear being ignored and not taken seriously. Like THATS hate to them. Making fun of men who play guitar at us and explain the godfather and Snyder cut to us like we're children (which are universal experiences based on the cackling laughter I heard in the theater) is hate.

It's a movie about women and the experience of girlhood and womanhood and they can't STAND that it's not about them.

[ginger375]

Do you know what it means to be loved by Death?

The episode titles in this show are staking me right in the heart. Random thoughts:

“Paris sucks.” Haha, Daniel wins.

Armand and Louis are an old married couple.

Louis doing photography makes my heart happy… mostly because I did darkroom photography in uni and utterly adored the practice.

Real Rashid is back!

Daniel doesn’t look too impressed with the meet-cute story. Armand’s hat looks huge on him, no wonder Louis thought he looked like a boy.

The Theatre des Vampires is incredible, I’d go in a heartbeat. I’d literally be one of the groupies reciting the lines in the crowd.

Santiago, you dramatic bitch.

This whole scene with the young woman being killed on stage…this is so much better than how it went in the movie. Nice to see the lack of gratuitous nudity for once. Love the mixed reaction from the crowd at first.

Oh, snap Lestat portrait! Daniel is correct, the whole vampire world is a telenovela.

Ooooooooh, Armand flashback? Devil’s Minion time?

There’s imaginary Lestat! Wondering when he’d show up.

Vampire Motorcycle Club!

Armand and Louis flirting while rich people get murdered in the background was *chef’s kiss*

Glad we’re finally getting into the meat of their time in Paris. Very curious to see how the show handles the rest.

I would watch him rip people’s throats out on stage every night if I could.

[sevicia]

Sick of not living my truth because other people choose to be weird about it. I love gratuitous gore. I think all horror movies need more blood in them. I find it hard to get invested when there's no good kills. Murder is fun all the time but torture is better. All torture is porn to me... and so on and so forth, etc. While "this is meaningless" "this is stupid" "it's lazy" "it's lame", and "why would anyone even want to watch this?" are all valid feelings to have, I think it's also valid for me to want to throw you into a wood chipper. Get well soon.

[karatekels]

TIGmas Day #2 - Saturnalia

This fic is for @cortmac1989, who has asked for Valek romancing Reader at a Christmas masquerade! I’ve taken a bit of liberty with the request to stretch it out a bit longer – hope you don’t mind and that you all enjoy!

TW: Stalking; Voyeurism; Blood-drinking (due to vampirism); confession under duress (mesmerization); dark, rough sex; References to violence and murder; Gratuitously going against the lore (or lack thereof) of vampirism from the book/movie to fit my own agenda

---

Saturnalia

---

Valek’s POV:

He takes care to press down with every step, ensuring that a footprint is left behind in the snow. It was important to never give the humans a reason to suspect he was anything more.

Jan Valek had always embraced the winter months; the loss of hours of sunlight giving him the opportunity to surround himself with people going about their lives as usual beneath the blanket of darkness. Christmas was quickly approaching, and Valek always found himself wistfully thinking back to his human life at this time of year. His family, their traditions, all long dead… watching people all around him, bright and alive and happily thinking of their loved ones could make him feel either moved or horribly depressed.

Tonight it has him feeling empty.

He makes to leave, to return home and to his lonely, meaningless existence, when something suddenly catches his attention: an intoxicating scent on the wind that washes away all traces of his melancholia.

Curious and almost unable to help himself, he tracks the scent. He knows that the aroma belongs to a human, but he can’t remember the last time he was so tempted by the bloodlust, feeling his canines start to lengthen and sharpen as his mouth waters. He pauses in his search of the source of the appealing scent, getting himself under control – he was able to relatively blend in with the humans when his vampiric instincts lay dormant, his features only revealing their true form when he was making use of his abilities to fight or feed. There would be time for that, once he had isolated the victim…

Nicking his tongue on a still-sharpened fang, he lets his own vampiric blood flow into his mouth, helping to distract him from the scent until he is able to continue his pursuit. Eventually, he comes across a small group of people bundled up for the weather and chatting amongst themselves. One woman, the source of his temptation, stands slightly apart from the crowd, watching the others talk with a slight smile rather than participating in the conversation.

“Everyone is coming on Friday night! No excuses!” one woman’s voice drowns out the others, resulting in a cacophony of whoops and groans from the others.

“Do we have to wear a mask?” someone complains, murmurs of agreement echoing him. “Halloween was months ago!”

“Yes!” the woman insists. “It’s going to be a fancy Winter Solstice masquerade, and you’re all cooperating. We haven’t all gotten together in years, and this will be fun!”

“Your version of ‘fun’ is very different from the rest of ours, Roberta,” another person chimes in, and the woman, Roberta apparently, scowls at the group.

“We will have my family’s manor to ourselves, with full access to their liquor cabinet. Am I really asking for so much here?”

A hush falls over the group for a brief moment.

“Masquerade ball it is!”

“Great idea, Roberta!”

“Can’t wait for Friday!”

Roberta smirks, pleased that the group has been won over, but Valek finds his gaze drawn to you, the wallflower, as you roll your eyes at your friends.

“Hey, how did you get Y/N to agree to come? There’s no way alcohol would be enough to win her over!” someone asks with a laugh, and you jump as you become the new topic of conversation. Roberta throws a friendly arm around your shoulder, pulling you closer.

“She’s staying with me while she’s here; she has to!” the woman announces smugly, and you give a bashful, reluctant smile.

“Plus, she described it to me like a Saturnalia celebration, so I’ll just hide in the corner and observe from a safe distance,” you add, your smile fading as no one recognizes the word or asks about it. Valek himself is surprised that you’ve mentioned the ancient Roman festival – it has no current cultural relevance that he’s aware of.

“Ugh! No nerd stuff, please!” someone chides you, and you scowl. “You’re supposed to be taking a break from all that, Y/N!”

“And you will not be hiding in a corner during my party!” Roberta insists. “Hopefully you and Michael will hit it off before then so that he can help you have some fun!” she winks roguishly at you, and Valek hears your heartbeat speed up as you blush.

“You’re going out with Michael?” someone asks excitedly, and the other women in the group burst into giggles.

“Roberta–” you hiss at her, yanking yourself out of her grip. “I’m not talking about this. I’ll see the rest of you on Friday!” you snarl, stomping off down the snow-covered street, clearly upset.

Valek ghosts after you, staying in the shadows. Perhaps the opportunity to feed will present itself to him – he wants to savour you, just the once, and if he wasn’t rushed at the thought of being discovered, there was less chance for an… accident.

“Y/N, wait up!” Roberta calls, jogging to catch up with you. You reluctantly stop to wait for her, tapping your foot impatiently. Valek takes the opportunity to move to the other side of the hedges that line the sidewalk you were on, allowing him to eavesdrop and watch you through the snow-covered pines without being spotted himself.

“I can’t believe you,” you grumble as she approaches, and from what he can see, the woman has the grace to look abashed.

“I’m sorry, okay? I wasn’t thinking,” she says, and you two set off down the path together.

“Why are you insistent that I go out with him while I’m here?” you ask quietly after a minute or two of walking in silence, and your friend peeks over at you, concern in her eyes.

“I just… I worry that you’re alone, Y/N,” she admits. “Your parents have been gone for a few years now, you’re away from your hometown and busy with school, and I know you’re not the most social person… I just want you to be taken care of, hun.”

You let out a deep sigh, your breath coming out in a spiraling, misty cloud.

“I’m fine by myself, Bob,” you tell her, and both your mouths twist into a smile at what Valek presumes is a nickname. “I appreciate your concern, but trying to force the issue isn’t going to get me into a relationship that lasts. The right person will show up when it’s time; I don’t want to rush it.”

“I get it, I get it. I won’t do it again, I promise. Just please give Michael a chance? For me?” she asks you hopefully, and you roll your eyes.

“Fine,” you give in with a reluctant smile. “But just a quick cup of coffee – I don’t want to be stuck at a restaurant for hours if this goes south.”

Your friend nods, a wide smile on her face, and skips off ahead of you, whooping into the night.

So, he wasn’t the only one that felt alone during this time of year, Valek muses to himself as he follows the pair of you to the elegant manor house where you’ll be staying. It was unfortunate, but truly made you the ideal ‘victim,’ loathe as he was to use that word. But you had no family, you were here for a short period of time… it would be easy to make you disappear in the event that he got carried away.

He doesn’t think he will – sure, your blood was inviting, but he finds himself equally, if not more so, interested in your brain.

---

One Day Later…

Reader’s POV:

You force yourself out of Roberta’s home, bundled up against the cold. You really don’t want to go on this stupid date, but you had promised, and you didn’t want to be rude to Michael.

You stifle a yawn as you make your way to the coffee shop, grateful that you’d at least be able to wake yourself up a bit with a nice, hot beverage. You hadn’t slept well the night before, and as twilight turns to dusk the darkness isn’t helping with your fatigue. Still, it’s a beautiful, clear night, the snow still thick on the ground and the treetops, so you do your best to enjoy it. Perhaps Michael would be late, and you could take some time to yourself; your journal and a bag of poetry were in your bag.

Unfortunately, you see him waiting for you outside the coffee shop as you approach, and he gives you a beaming smile that you do your best to return. No time to enjoy the night on your own, then.

Michael wraps you up in a friendly hug as he greets you, the embrace lasting slightly longer than you are comfortable with. You two weren’t complete strangers; he’d been a year above you in high school and you had seen each other at the few social events you had attended with your friends in the years since.

Once you grab your drinks you decide to make your way to the nearby park, making small talk along the way. Michael is… fine. He’s friendly, not leering overtly as he checks you out (you’re grateful again for the cold weather and the layers of clothing it affords you), and he even offered to pay for your coffee, but there’s just… nothing between you. You feel no spark, no real interest towards him, and every attempt you’ve made to tell him about your hobbies and interests he couldn’t be bothered to indulge you, always steering the conversation back to himself.

You’re disappointed, but not surprised. Like you had said to Roberta yesterday, you aren’t going to hit it off with someone by being set up with someone else. You’re old-fashioned, romantic, reserved, with a bunch of interests that people rarely wanted to hear about. Finding someone that you would connect with would be like finding a needle in a haystack, especially in this tiny town.

You sigh internally, trying to turn your attention back to Michael instead of counting down the minutes until you can go home.

---

You manage to make it an hour and a half before you start laying it on thick with the exaggerated yawns, and Michael eventually takes the hint, walking you to the entrance of the park.

“I hope I’ll see you at Roberta’s party on Friday,” Michael asks with a boyish grin. “I’ll be the one in the mask!”

You let out a genuine laugh for the first time that evening. “Yes, I’ll be there – she’s insisted on it!” you reply wryly, avoiding the subject of seeing him there. You’re bad at rejecting people – you hate disappointing anyone, for any reason – and are hoping that you can just go your separate ways without having to formally announce it.

Fortunately, Michael just wishes you a good evening with another hug that you force yourself to return before he turns to head home. You frown at his back. It’s not like you need him to walk you home – or even want him to – but the gesture would have been appreciated. Letting out the sigh you’d been keeping inside all evening, you turn to head back home.

“Excuse me,” comes a smooth, deep voice behind you that makes you jump; you hadn’t heard anyone coming up behind you. Turning around, you’re taken aback by the massive man that stands just a few feet from you. He must be nearly six and a half feet tall, with long, pitch-black hair that flows to his shoulders, blending in with his dark clothing. In contrast, his skin is incredibly pale, and his eyes were a piercing blue-grey that you can’t look away from.

You take a reflexive step backwards and bite back a gasp, and the man tracks the gesture before taking a few steps back. You feel guilty immediately – he seems polite, and you hope your jumpiness didn’t offend him.

“I apologize; I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he says gently. “I merely wanted to ask if this was yours.”

He holds up a book which you immediately recognize as your poetry collection; it must have fallen out of your bag somewhere.

“Oh, yes! Thank you so much!” you exclaim with a smile, accepting the book from his gloved hand and returning it to your bag. “How did you know it was mine?” you ask, looking up at him.

“Nobody else is here. Someone was just leaving as I arrived, but he did not seem like the type to read poetry.”

You bite your lip to keep from laughing – no, Michael was definitely not the literary type. This man, on the other hand…

“He’s not – not for my lack of trying, anyway,” you say with a wistful sigh. “I’m Y/N, by the way,” you introduce yourself, extending a mittened hand to him.

“John,” he returns, taking your hand in his large one to shake it. Your skin never touches his, but you feel a thrill of electricity race from your palm up your arm, making you tingle.

“It’s so nice to meet you,” you breathe, finding yourself reluctant to step back from his personal space.

“And you,” he replies, not taking his eyes off of yours as if considering something. Your heart is thumping like mad, and you’re glad there’s no way he can hear it.

“So, the not-poet is a friend of yours, then?” John asks with an amused smirk.

“Who?” you ask, momentarily confused. This man’s presence is very overwhelming, and you find it hard to focus on anything else. “Oh, him! No, not really,” you say, rushing to get the words out. “We haven’t seen each other in years and were just catching up.”

“That makes a bit more sense,” he replies, and you cock your head at him inquisitively. “Someone closer to you should have the decency to walk you home, especially so late at night.”

You feel yourself flush, and hope that he attributes it to the cold.

“I don’t mind,” you say shyly, unable to look him in the eye as you speak. “It’s let me talk to you.”

Braving a look up at his face, you see him smiling down at you, his blue eyes glittering like the snow under the lights that line the sidewalk.

“May I walk you home, then?” he asks quietly, seeming nervous himself. “Provided that I would not be imposing.”

“You’re not imposing!” you say quickly, hoping that you’re not coming across as too eager. John merely grins at you before asking you to lead the way.

You slowly make your way back to Roberta’s home, trying not to shuffle your feet, but you can’t help it – you don’t want this walk to end. You and John talk about literature the way that you haven’t been able to with anyone outside of a college lecture hall, and it feels wonderful. John is knowledgeable, opinionated and thoughtful, and you’re both firing off questions one after the other. You can’t remember the last time you’ve felt so comfortable with a stranger; he doesn’t even feel like a stranger!

All too soon, you make your way to the front gate to Roberta’s home, turning to John with a sigh.

“This is me,” you inform him reluctantly, trying not to let your disappointment show. “Thank you so much, for giving me my book, and walking me home.”

“It was my pleasure, Y/N,” he replies warmly, before giving you that look again that has you desperately wanting to know what he’s thinking. “Have a good evening.”

“You too, John,” you say, giving him a timid smile. “I’m really glad that I met you.”

You fight the urge to look over your shoulder to see if John is still there, forcing yourself to walk up the driveway and to the large, ornate front door. The moment you close the door behind you, you press your nose to the glass of the window to check, but you can’t see him standing there. Turning, you lean your back against the door with a sigh.

What an absolute dream…

An encounter with someone like that, even just a one-off as this was – and your heart twinges at the thought of not seeing him again – made you believe that your approach to romance was correct. Why settle for just anyone when you now had evidence that someone like that existed?

“You look like you had fun.”

You jump, a guilty smile spreading across your face as Roberta enters from another room with a smug expression.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” you lie flatly, and the woman rolls her eyes.

“Oh please, you look positively smitten. I’ll admit, I didn’t think things would go quite this well when I set you two up!”

You open your mouth before snapping it shut again, weighing your options. Telling Roberta that your good mood was from spending time with anyone other than Michael would beget a hundred more questions that you didn’t want to answer. A large part of you wants to keep John a secret, keep tonight something that belongs only to the two of you.

You hide a smile behind a feigned yawn, moving towards the stairs and the privacy of the guest room you were staying in.

“I’m not talking about this right now. Goodnight, Bob.”

“Sweet dreams,” the woman replies, her tone thick with implications. “I plan to see this romance for myself on Friday night!”

---

Friday Evening…

Valek’s POV:

He feels he’s making a mistake, but he just can’t help himself.

Entering a venue amongst a large group of people, their inhibitions lowered as they celebrate, their collective blood pumping in their veins, and your mouth-watering scent among them… For all his centuries as a vampire, Valek finds himself doubting his self-control.

He’s been taking precautions, to be sure – feeding far more than usual in the days leading up to tonight, the Winter Solstice. Tempting as you are, he finds he no longer wants to feed on you – he doesn’t think of himself as worthy.

He remembers that quote about the flower by Osho – about not picking a flower that you love, as it then ceases to be – and finds it appropriate for you. As much as he wants to take you, consume you, that would deprive the world of the beauty and life that you bring into it, should he get carried away.

Despite that, he’s going to see you tonight; he can’t bring himself to stay away.

You’ve made him feel nearly alive again, ever since your meeting a few nights ago. He’s been plagued by desires; for your blood, yes, but also for more of your conversation, your smile, your essence…

He has been tempting fate these past few evenings, needing to be close to you and content to just watch from a distance as you appear at one of the manor’s windows or walk into town with your friend. He doesn’t let himself approach the home, not wanting to torment himself, even as you sleep. Instead, he has left deep red roses on the doorstep every night for you to find in the morning. Somehow, you rightly knew that they were intended for you.

He adjusts the cuffs of his blazer, still unaccustomed to this type of modern clothing. He’s chosen a black three-piece suit and tie, his shirt a deep blue that matches his mask, his hair down, and finds himself feeling only mildly foolish. Based on the conversations he’d overheard when he had first spotted you, he assumes that this is customary.

Valek is not sure what he wants from tonight beyond getting close to you – again, this all seems like a risky endeavour – but he hopes that one night will be enough to tide him over for eternity.

It would have to be.

He makes his way to the party, the path to the manor familiar to him by now, and joins the throng of people. It doesn’t take him long to find you by scent alone, avoiding attention and standing off to the side, his wallflower. You’re wearing a floor-length, strapless blue dress and a swirling mask of blue, white and gold, your hair in an elegant twist that emphasizes your graceful neck.

Tonight will be difficult.

 ---

Reader’s POV:

You watch the party from a respectable distance – it’s truly a sight to behold, but not really something you want to partake in yourself. You promised Roberta you would stay downstairs and in the ballroom until at least midnight, but you’re finding it difficult to keep that promise, and it’s only just past 10.

“I did not take you for someone that would attend this sort of bacchanalia, Y/N.”

The voice sends shivers down your spine, your memories and dreams over the past few days not doing it justice. Your heart immediately begins hammering away as you turn to face him, and he is utterly resplendent in blue and black – your costumes compliment each other.

“John!” you exclaim, trying to keep the overwhelming joy you’re feeling inside. “I was coerced into coming. What’s your excuse?” you ask, curious, and he smiles secretively as he holds out a glass of wine to you. He is wearing gloves, even indoors, but you don’t comment on it as you accept the beverage. Your mouth is suddenly very dry, and you take a healthy sip of the wine, feeling warm.

“I’m quite certain that the entire town was invited. I recognized the address as your own and found it difficult to believe that you would be hosting something like this; I should have known subterfuge would be involved.”

You giggle, the wine going right to your head. “This is my friend’s parents’ place; I’m staying with her while I’m in town. She demanded I stay down here until at least midnight as a lodging fee.”

“You’ll have to introduce me to her at some point tonight. I have to thank you for ensuring your attendance,” he teases in his deep, smooth voice that has your cheeks flaming beneath your mask. “You are dazzling.”

You try not to hyperventilate, pressing yourself against the wall for support.

“So do you!” you reply quickly, trying to recover. “You look…” Stunning? Gorgeous? Delicious? Like a dark prince straight from my indecent fantasies?

“…noble! Plus, we match!” you tack on hastily, trying to move right past your corniness.

John doesn’t seem to mind, giving you a dashing smile that has you nearly swooning. Instead, you quickly finish the rest of your wine, needing the courage to continue having a conversation with this unattainable entity. Your talk quickly returns to your passionate discussion of literature, and you find yourself relaxing in John’s presence, almost unaware of the party surrounding you.

Looking back up at John – you find your eyes need to take frequent breaks from gawking at him to allow you to maintain some degree of focus – you see that he is looking at you with an amused expression.

“What?”

“You’re practically dancing,” he comments, and for the first time you notice that you are indeed swaying to the music, an orchestral version of one of your favourite pop songs. “Would you like to?” he asks, and you immediately start to panic.

“No!” you cry out before it occurs to you how the rejection might be taken. “Not because you asked, I mean; I just can’t dance.”

“Nonsense,” he counters immediately, stepping closer to you and making you tilt your head nearly all the way back in order to keep looking up at his handsome face. “It’s all in the leading. May I?” he asks, extending a hand towards you. You bite your lip, setting your empty glass down on a nearby table before placing your hand into his much larger one, your fingertips tingly as they brush against the supple leather of his glove. That same feeling of electricity shoots up your arm and nearly has you letting out a moan; the alcohol clearly isn’t helping you keep your composure.

John leads you towards the edge of the dance floor, then turns and wraps an arm around your waist, pulling you closer but not flush against him. He raises his other hand, still holding yours, then moves his gaze pointedly to your left shoulder, your arm still nervously pressed against your side. You slowly lift your hand up between your bodies, placing it on his broad shoulder, and he gives you a pleased smile. He guides you through the slow dance, his palm pressing yours in a way that somehow has you moving the right way.

“Wow, you were right!” you exclaim in surprise, hardly able to believe it. “It’s all in the leading.”

“You are also a very good partner,” John croons down at you, his eyes twinkling beneath his mask. “Very responsive…”

His words have you blushing and feeling nearly dizzy as you sway to the music under his guidance. You could happily get lost in this moment, in his blue, blue eyes forever…

But after a few songs, you’re feeling overwhelmed and need a break; it’s almost hard for you to breathe. Reluctantly, you remove your hand from his shoulder, and he respectfully releases you.

“I’m going to go get some water if I can, provided Roberta hasn’t replaced it all with vodka. Can I get you anything to drink?” you offer with a smile, wanting to do something, anything for him. John’s lips twitch in amusement, but he declines your offer, and you move through the crowd, trying not to stumble in your haste to get to the refreshment table and back to him as quickly as possible.

You gulp down the cool water greedily, still feeling so warm all over. You’re desperate to return to John – you feel a tangible ache at being apart from him, and while you’re not sure that it’s a good or healthy thing, it’s not something you’re willing to endure any longer than you have to.

“I’ve been looking for you.”

Whirling around, you’re disappointed to see not John, but Michael, his black and gold costume a bit too ostentatious for your liking. But you suppose you’re being a bit unfair; there was nothing this man could do to hold a candle to John in your eyes.

“Good evening, Michael. Enjoying the party?” you ask politely, even as your eyes scan the ballroom for John – he’s not where you left him.

“I am now. Would you like to dance?”

You hesitate before giving your answer. You really don’t want to give Michael the time of day, but you’re not comfortable with rejecting him, especially surrounded by people you both knew. And even without alcohol, him possibly seeing you with John, or any other factors, men could be unpredictable when they were jealous or rejected. You look for John somewhat desperately one last time, hoping he’ll come save you, but he is nowhere to be found.

“Okay,” you agree noncommittally, unable to feign even a shred of enthusiasm. Unlike John, Michael pulls you tightly against him as he dances with you, his hips chasing yours in a way that makes you feel dirty and uncomfortable. You try to step away after the song ends, but he tightens his grip on you, giving you a pleading expression, and you resign yourself to another dance. He isn’t even bothering to try to speak with you, content to occupy your body rather than your mind, and you’re not upset about it as it allows you to keep your thoughts on John.

You manage to talk Michael out of asking for a third dance, but he doesn’t get the hint, attaching himself to your side as you move through the ballroom, still looking for John. He was so tall, so impressive, so utterly impossible to miss, that you’ve all but accepted that he’s left the party. You hope he hadn’t seen you dancing with Michael and gotten the wrong impression…

The large clock chimes twelve times, and you’ve never been more grateful for the sound. You’ve held up your end of the bargain to Roberta, and are now free to leave the party, and without John’s presence, there’s nothing to keep you here.

You fake a yawn, trying to look at Michael with an apologetic expression that you know rings hollow.

“Oh, I didn’t realize it had gotten so late. I’m exhausted,” you say. Michael looks pleased to hear this information, and the hair on the back of your neck stands on end at his expression.

“Would you like me to walk you to your room?” he purrs, and you suppress a shudder, certain that he will misinterpret it.

“Oh, no thank you,” you say clearly. “It was wonderful to see you again, Michael. Have a good night.”

You move past him without another word, not wanting this conversation to go on any longer, and hurry to the staircase and your bedroom. You slip inside and immediately take your mask off, feeling dejected. John’s presence at the party had been such a wonderful surprise, but his disappearance has left you feeling hollow and surprisingly upset.

There’s a knock at the door and you reluctantly open it, expecting Roberta to be chastising you. Instead, John’s tall form looms in the doorway, his dark mask still concealing his face. You briefly stop breathing, your heart thudding against your ribs.

“John!” you cry, the joy evident in your voice. “What are you doing here?”

“I saw you leave after speaking with that man from the park, and you looked upset. Are you alright?”

“I –” you start to say, but you pause, wanting to choose your words carefully. Were you alright? Probably not, considering you were head over heels for a mystery man you barely knew.

“I thought you had left, and I didn’t want Michael bothering me anymore,” you tell him instead, keeping things vague. “Where did you go? I was kind of hoping you would come rescue me.”

“Well, that wouldn’t have been proper.”

“Regardless, it would have been appreciated.”

John opens his mouth to continue your banter but freezes, his head turning to the stairs. After a moment, you hear the footsteps that had undoubtedly caught his attention; he must have excellent hearing. Feeling brazen, especially seeing as you don’t know if or when you would see him again, you take John’s hand and tug him inside, closing the door and turning out the light. You press your ear against the door, listening to the approaching footsteps. John watches you, an amused smirk on his face, and you glare at him in the silence. Eventually, the footsteps retreat, and after a moment or two of waiting, you conclude that Michael has gone, flicking the light back on with a sigh.

“You know, you could consider telling the man you are not interested,” John suggests with amusement. You growl at him.

“I shouldn’t have to outright reject him to keep him from trying to follow me to my bedroom,” you snarl, and he raises an eyebrow at you. “Plus, men aren’t always the most accepting of a rejection.”

John is visibly upset by the implications of your words, and something about his slight shift in demeanour has you feeling wary.

“Are you suggesting that someone hurt you as a result of you rejecting them?” he hisses, the sound making you shudder.

“It was a long time ago, and it wasn’t that bad,” you reply quickly, wanting him to settle down. “Loads of my friends have experienced way worse! It’s fine, John, really,” you add, trying to reassure him. His jaw is still clenched, but he takes a deep breath, clearly trying to calm down.

“Why would anyone respond with such anger?” he asks, sounding appalled. Perhaps the culture where he was from was vastly different from America.

“Most people only want to hear what they want to hear,” you say with a shrug. “No one is interested in honesty. I mean, I think I prefer the truth, but even I lie to people if the need arises – I’ve accepted that it’s necessary.”

“Do you mean you would always prefer the truth?” he asks, his eyes locking with yours with a serious expression.

“Yes.”

“In every circumstance?” he presses, clearly fishing for something. It has you feeling nervous.

“Yes, I think so,” you breathe, your eyes at his back as he walks across the room to look out your window. After what feels like an eternity, he turns back to you.

“I have not been honest with you, Y/N,” he confesses, looking deeply into your eyes with a pained expression, and you immediately feel yourself choke up. Of course this wasn’t real; there’s no way that somebody like him could truly exist.

Best get the truth out of him now, then, so that you could move on. You can already feel tears pricking your eyes, so immediately affected by his deception.

“W-What do you mean, John?” you ask in a weak, timid voice, and he takes a deep breath before responding.

“My name is not John,” he begins, and you tense up, the blood in your veins turning to ice. “I am Jan Valek, the first and oldest vampire.”

Neither of you blink or say anything for a long moment, your eyes locked. Finally, you let out a breathless, slightly hysterical laugh, the alcohol burning away your nerves.

“T-That’s a good one!” you giggle, unable to contain yourself, and John surveys you with a mildly irritated expression.

“I could prove it to you, if you’d like,” he offers.

“Oh by all means, go ahead!” you agree, beginning to laugh harder.

In a movement far too quick for you to see, he closes the distance between you, taking you in his arms and lowering his head to the side of your neck for a long moment, inhaling deeply. Your laughter dies in your throat immediately. He releases you, taking a step back before reaching up to pull away his mask. Blue veins beneath his pale skin are now prominent around his eyes, and he opens his mouth, revealing a rapidly growing set of sharp fangs.

You scream, stumbling backwards, but then he is on you once more, covering your mouth and nose with a gloved hand and lowering you to the ground gently.

“Calm down, Y/N,” he commands you, a strange light shining in his eyes, and against all rational thought you feel your body start to relax, your heartbeat returning to normal.

“That’s good,” he murmurs approvingly. “Speak quietly,” he adds, his eyes doing the glowing thing again, and you feel the scream you had been building up fade away. He removes his hand from your face, and you wrench yourself out of his grip, scampering back and away from him.

“What…” you begin, clearing your throat as your voice comes out hoarse and soft. “What did you just do?” you demand, the alcohol helping you push past your fear into anger.

“Mesmerization – it’s a sort of hypnosis,” John – Valek, apparently – explains, his voice calm.

“You hypnotized me?!” you hiss, injecting as much venom into your voice as possible since you are unable to yell at him.

“I didn’t want you to draw anyone’s attention, Y/N, I apologize,” the vampire offers, somehow sounding both sincere and unrepentant.

“Why? Are you going to kill me?” you ask him, whimpering at the thought. Strangely, the thought doesn’t upset you as much as the fact that he has been lying to you.

“No.” His reply is forceful and immediate; he looks anguished at the mere suggestion.

“Then what do you want?!” you cry out as loudly as you can, tears streaking down your face. You’re very aware of how the cut of your dress and your updo leave your neck completely exposed, and you pull your hair out of its twist to fall past your shoulders, concealing you. You know that it’s a completely pointless gesture, but you can’t help yourself, the instinct to cover yourself overwhelming.

Valek watches you with a pained, sad expression.

“It is not your blood that I desire, but your heart,” he confesses, longing and desire filling his eyes. “When I first came upon you, I did want to feed on you. Your scent is… intoxicating,” he groans slightly, his eyes rolling back into his head. Goosebumps erupt over your body as pure, primal terror courses through you.

“But as I heard you speak, as I watched you, as I spoke to you myself, you captivated me,” he continues, as though he hadn’t just admitted to wanting to drink your blood. “I have never been drawn to another as I have been drawn to you, Y/N. I have lived over seven hundred years, and in you I find a kindred spirit for the first time; you make me feel alive in ways I long thought were impossible. I have never wanted another the way that I want you, and I know that I will never find another like you as long as I live. I would happily spend the remainder of my existence by your side, and you would be the only thing in this world that I would cherish.”

There is a prolonged silence between you as you struggle to think of something, anything to say in response. Eventually, you give up.

“What am I supposed to say to that?” you ask, your voice slightly hysterical. How could you believe any of this?

“Do you desire me in the same way? As a confidante, a partner, a lover?” he asks bluntly. “Please, beloved, tell the truth,” he adds, and you feel the mesmerization at work once more. You’re upset that he’s controlling you with his strange magical abilities, but the urge to answer builds within you, creating a pressure so great that you are quickly forced to respond.

“Yes,” you moan out the truth, the intense feeling immediately dissipating as the words leave your lips. “You have been everything I have waited for, everything that I hoped a soulmate could be.”

The look he gives you is that of a man seeing the sun for the first time, awe and euphoria practically pouring out of him.

“But this is too much!” you continue, brushing aside the guilt that makes your heart clench as you watch his own break at your words. “You wanted to hurt me, to kill me! You’re not even human! And you lied to me – how am I meant to trust anything you say, to trust you with my life, when I’m… I’m so scared of you right now!” you sob hysterically, wrapping your arms around your knees. “I don’t want to feel this way for you, I don’t want to love you!”

You force yourself to look back up at him, scared at what your rejection might cause him to do. He is frozen in his crouched position on the floor across from you, eerily still, an expression of pure agony on his face. His eyes flit to yours, and then he nods, standing up in a flash of movement that causes you to let out a strangled yelp. He lifts you to your feet before you can protest, his movements gentle and controlled, and you find yourself trembling in his grip.

“Sleep, beloved,” he murmurs, and your eyelids immediately feel heavy. He guides you to your bed, helping you onto it but making no move to join you. You know that you should feel upset, angry, terrified – who knew what the extent of his strangely hypnotic powers were? – but you find yourself trusting him against your better judgement. He covers you with the blanket, looming over you, and you close your eyes – it’s too difficult to look at him right now. Still, you feel a tear escape and trail down your cheek at the mess of emotions that would be overwhelming you right now if you weren’t so tired.

“Be at peace, my treasure,” he coos softly as you drift off. “I wish for nothing more than your happiness.”

---

The next few days are hard and lonely. You had steadfastly rejected Roberta’s invitation to spend Christmas and New Year’s Eve at a nearby ski lodge with your other friends, desperately needing to be alone. You’re grateful for the time to yourself – you know you wouldn’t be able to hide the turmoil of your emotions from anybody. You had initially wanted to get a flight back to school when you woke up the day after the party, wanting to be away from this place and anything that made you think of him, but a snowstorm had grounded all flights.

You’ve been too scared to leave the house, afraid of running into him despite knowing that he wouldn’t need to lie in wait for you in town if he wanted to see you. Regardless, you’re grateful for the fully stocked fridge and pantry – there was no reason you would have to leave the little bubble of safety you had encased yourself in.

You yawn once again despite it being the middle of the day, rubbing your eyes sleepily. The days since the masquerade have been devastating – you’ve floated around in a fog, confused and heartbroken and exhausted. You can’t get Valek out of your head; you dream of him, you think you see him in the shadowy corners of the manor… you recognize the symptoms of lovesickness and heartbreak from your favourite old romance novels, but you never expected that the pain could be quite so intense.

You’ve taken to jotting your thoughts and feelings down in your journal, just needing to get them out of your head – this isn’t exactly the sort of thing that you can talk to Roberta about. A shame, really; she’d been wanting for you to have a love life for years now, and now that you actually have a situation you can’t even come to her with it.

You wander around the manor, eventually ending up in the ballroom – you hadn’t been able to bring yourself to visit it since the night of the masquerade. You wrap your arms around your body comfortingly – the large, open space is incredibly drafty and cold when not filled with people. Your eyes instinctively move to the wall on the far side of the room where the two of you had stood, and you again feel overwhelmed by your emotions. You miss him terribly; not just his presence, but the way he made you feel worthwhile, hopeful for the first time in a long time.

But, as much as your heart aches with regret, you can’t stop the shiver of fear that runs through you at the thought. Valek was a vampire, immortal, lethal; he had wanted to kill you before you had even met!

You force yourself to head back to your room, the ballroom bringing up too much for you to handle just now. It’s dark again already, and you turn the bedroom light on as you enter. Your eyes flit to your journal, still laid open on your desk, bits and pieces of your handwriting jumping off the page at you.

… It isn’t only the feelings he sparks in me, but their depth; I never would have believed such intense emotion existed, let alone that it could be felt so much, and for so long…

… I haven’t had a restful sleep since that night, and it’s starting to affect even my waking life. I see him in every shadow, anticipate him around every corner; he has consumed me entirely, and I fear that it will go on forever…

You grimace down at your messy cursive, feeling pathetic. Who’s to say that he had even been genuine about his feelings for you in the first place? You could be mourning the loss of a relationship that he never even wanted.

You turn to sit on your bed, and as you do you notice that your book of poetry is open on your bedside table, a deep red rose placed along the spine as a bookmark. You freeze. You had buried that book in your luggage the morning after the party, and tossed the roses away immediately afterwards, not wanting to see anything to do with him, and you have been alone in the house for days now. Against your better judgement, you pick up the book, moving the rose to rest on the table and reading the poem on the open page.

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience, your eyes have their silence: in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me though i have closed myself as fingers, you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens (touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly, as when the heart of this flower imagines the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility: whose texture compels me with the colour of its countries, rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens; only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses) nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

You find yourself tearing up as you read the poem with fresh eyes, Valek’s choice both beautiful and heart-wrenching. You’re still unsure if you can believe his feelings to be genuine, but if they are, you both share the same intense angst of an unrequited love. You take a deep breath, bracing yourself as you prepare to confront him.

“Valek?” you call out, your quiet voice still echoing through the silent old house. It was the first time you had said his real name; you haven’t allowed yourself to since learning it.

There’s a light breeze behind you and when you turn, Jan Valek is standing in the middle of your bedroom. Your heart races immediately, both in fear and longing, and you’re unable to tell whether you want to run into his arms or to run away. You survey each other in silence for a long moment, and then he finally opens his mouth to speak.

“Don’t!” you growl out, your voice not betraying any of the nervousness and fear you’re currently feeling. His mouth snaps shut.

“Don’t even think about trying your mesmerizing hocus pocus on me, Jan Valek!” you snarl, and he presses his lips into a thin line; you think he may be trying to keep himself from laughing, which only fuels your anger.

“Who the hell do you think you are? You follow me around because you want to… kill me, or eat me, or whatever, you spy on me, you hyponotize me into confessing that I’m in love with you, you break in, you read my journal, you go through my things!” you pause mid-rant to catch your breath, angrily tossing the book of poetry at him, and he lets it smack him in the chest, remaining perfectly still. “How am I meant to feel about all of this, Valek?! I’m scared, I’m angry, I haven’t slept in days, I don’t even feel like a person anymore! You’ve ruined me!” you sob, unable to look him in the eye, instead staring at the ground in front of his feet.

“But I don’t need to tell you any of that; God knows you’ve been watching me suffer this whole time,” you whisper softly, your anger completely drained from you and replaced with a painful emptiness. You hear a sharp intake of breath that makes you look up at him through your tears; he looks completely devastated.

“So what do you want?” you ask, bracing yourself for the answer, be it in the form of words or his fangs piercing your flesh. “Why are you here?” you demand, crossing your arms in front of you.

“I could not bring myself to stay away,” he admits in a quiet, pained voice, looking at the ground just as you had during your own little speech. “At first I was merely being selfish, needing to see you again. Then, I saw you suffering as I have been, and I needed to know that you would pull out of it, that you would be alright. But it has been days, and you are in such pain… I do not know what I can do to make it stop, but I will do anything you ask; I cannot bear knowing of your heartache any longer.”

Your heartbreak takes on an entirely different level of hurt as you watch this giant, otherworldly man come undone at witnessing your suffering. So much of your soul longs for Valek, your love for him rivaling all other emotions, and you find yourself needing to ease his pain, so intertwined with your own. But how to do it?

“Give me a minute,” you tell him quietly when he looks like he’s becoming agitated with your lack of response, “I’m trying to think.” He nods, seeming relieved that you’re planning on answering him at all.

You force yourself to confront all of the negative feelings that this man – for he was still a man, at least in some regard – to try to figure out where they were coming from and how they could be rectified. There was just so much that was completely unknown to you: who he was, what he was, what he wanted with you… perhaps getting some answers would help clarify things for you.

“You forced me to tell you the truth,” you remind him bitterly, and his mouth twists into a grimace. He certainly seems to regret his actions. “Will you do the same for me? Answer my questions honestly, no matter what?”

He nods immediately, the corners of his mouth turning up in a small smile. “I will never lie to you again, dear one. Ask me anything, and I will tell you true. And if at the end you wish to be rid of me, I will never bother you again.”

Your heart twinges painfully at the mere thought of never seeing him again, but you push your feelings down for the moment, giving him a nod.

“Sit first, please,” he implores you, gesturing to your bed. “You are exhausted, beloved.” You move back, taking a seat on the edge of the bed, not wanting to get too comfortable and fall asleep. Now that Valek is here, much of the pain you had been enduring had gone away, being replaced with overwhelming fatigue.

“What about you?” you ask, crossing your legs under yourself.

“I do not tire as you do; my kind has no need for sleep.”

“Well, sit for my sake then, if you would. Looking up at you will hurt my neck after awhile.”

Amused, he looks around the room at his various seating options, then neglects them all in favour of kneeling on the carpet before you, looking up at you with pure devotion.

“V-Valek,” you stammer, peering down at him. “I meant in a chair…”

“I am where I wish to be, Y/N. Now please, what answers are you wanting to hear?” he insists, gazing up at you expectantly.

You decide to start with some of the safer, less personal questions – namely, the ones about vampirism.

“So… you’re a vampire,” you begin hesitantly, worrying your lower lip between your teeth.

“I am,” he answers, smiling at you indulgently.

“Does that mean that you kill people regularly?” You hold your breath, bracing yourself for the answer.

“Not regularly,” he clarifies. “I have killed vampire Slayers who attempted to kill me and mine, mostly.”

“There are vampire slayers?” you interrupt him, incredulous.

“Yes, they are a part of the Catholic Church.”

You blink down at him, stunned as you process that piece of information. “That’s… er… alright.”

“I do not make a habit of killing humans, Y/N,” he continues, returning to your initial question. “I have, on occasion, gone too far while feeding, and lost myself to the moment, but not for many years. It is largely an issue of self-restraint, and I have had centuries to develop that.”

You mull this information over.

“So you don’t normally kill people to feed on them?”

“Rarely, and never intentionally.”

“And how often do you feed?”

“Every week or so.”

“And do your… victims know about it?”

Valek looks away from you with a contrite expression. You wait him out for a long moment, staring down at the top of his head, but he doesn’t respond.

“You promised,” you remind him, and he looks back at you, ashamed.

“They do not,” he admits, and you find yourself reflexively leaning away from him. His eyes track your movement with an unhappy expression. “Please, may I explain to you why?”

You nod; if he’s willing to give you the truth, the least you can do is listen to it.

“Once we have fed, it is common practice to coat the wound in our saliva. It seals the wound and expedites healing. By morning, they will have a faint bruise, and the area may feel tender for a day or two, but nothing more. I typically mesmerize the victim to sleep beforehand; they never realize anything has happened.”

“You mesmerized me to sleep,” you point out with a cold expression. “Did you feed on me?”

“No, beloved, I assure you. I knew from the first minutes of our conversation that I would never in good conscience feed on you,” he reveals, sincerity ringing in every word. “Without your permission, that is.”

“Why would someone give permission to be fed on?” you ask, confused. “What good does it do them?”

“Companionship between vampires and humans is not unheard of, romantic or otherwise, though I have no personal experience with that sort of thing,” Valek says, and your heart skips a beat. “Some humans offer themselves to be fed on in place of unwitting victims, believing it to be easier on their conscience for befriending one of my kind.”

He rests his head on your mattress next to your legs, looking up at you with a scorching gaze that has your knees going weak. “I have also been told that the sensation of being fed on is nothing short of ecstasy.”

Your mouth goes dry, and you busy yourself by adjusting your position – namely so that you can clench your legs together, darkly seductive images coming to mind. Perhaps Valek’s vampirism was yet another reason you had been drawn to him, your sexual fantasies far less innocent than your relative inexperience would suggest.

“Regardless,” you say, trying to get back on track – or at least away from the current topic. “Just because you heal someone up afterwards and they never know about it doesn’t justify feeding on them without their knowledge.”

“I agree with you; my reasons are entirely selfish,” Valek concedes, looking regretful once more. “But think of how you responded when I showed you what I am; how you are still afraid of me now.”

You swallow, thinking back to the primal fear that flowed through you as you had seen his true form for the first time.

“I do not enjoy being a monster, Y/N,” Valek admits, his voice filled with anguish. “I do not want to cause harm to humans, to see their fear and revulsion in their eyes. Not even if I can compel them to forget it by morning.”

You pity him, seeing the toll that the centuries of suffering he has endured has taken on him. It wasn’t his choice to be a vampire, you presume, and watching others be terrified of you for doing what was necessary to stay alive must be intolerable. Perhaps there is some logic to his approach…

You pester him with further questions, each of his answers only bringing up more questions. He tells you about his abilities – you grill him particularly aggressively about mesmerization – and how many of his kind there are, which prompts questions about how someone is Turned into a vampire. The interrogation goes on for ages, and you find yourself fighting your fatigue more and more as the night stretches on.

“You said that you were the first vampire the other day - How did you become a vampire if no one was around to bite you?” you ask, immediately feeling horribly guilty as the question has him nearly cringing. “I’m sorry! You don’t have to tell me.”

He looks back up at you appreciatively, slowly lifting a gloved hand to yours, stroking the back of your hand. You snatch up one of his fingers, giving it a squeeze with a shy smile, and his gaze softens at the gesture.

“I said that I would tell you the truth, my treasure, and I will. But thank you for your grace, Y/N,” Valek coos, and you feel yourself blush. He summarizes the brutal and unjust exorcism gone wrong, and you feel a vicious rage building within you that you haven’t experienced before.

“That’s horrific,” you hiss, nearly shaking in your anger. Valek reaches up without having to look, reclaiming your hand once more.

“Do not be angry, beloved – it was very long ago, and I have made peace with it.”

“How?!” you ask incredulously. “What could possibly help you get over something like that?”

“It enabled me to meet you.”

His tone is casual, as though it should be obvious that knowing you was worth torture and a warped, twisted life of immortality, though he can’t bring himself to look into your eyes. You’re sure he can hear the way your heart is hammering under your ribs.

“Valek… you can’t mean that.”

He smoothly gets to his feet, turning to look down at you with reverence. “I do mean it, little one,” he croons. “I may have accepted this existence centuries ago, but I have never been grateful for it until I met you. My heart no longer beats, but I feel as though it could for you, Y/N. I desire you in any and every capacity you would allow me to have you, my love."

The confession is everything you dreamed of hearing one day, and so much more.

“The other vampires that you mentioned before, the ones that were involved romantically with humans… how did those relationships end?” you ask hesitantly, and Valek’s eyes light up at the implication that you aren’t completely shutting down the idea of being with him.

“Some go their separate ways, some live out their partner’s mortal life with them, and others go on forever, the vampire Turning the human,” he explains, laying out your options. “I would never Turn you unless it was something that you wanted, Y/N,” he assures you. “I will be with you until your dying breath if you permit it, be that as a mortal or a vampire.”

You’re not sure when you moved off the bed, but you find yourself slowly closing the distance between you until you’re nearly in his arms.

“You are mesmerizing me, Jan Valek,” you accuse, looking up at him with unbridled longing. “You have to be. This can’t be real.”

“I assure you that you have the same hold on me, my treasure,” Valek purrs, his presence seeming to surround you, though he makes no move to touch you, as though worried the gesture might scare you away. “You have me completely at your mercy, Y/N. I will give you anything, you need only to ask.”

“I… I want everything that you are, Valek,” you confess, feeling as though a weight has been lifted from your shoulders the moment you get the words out. “I love you; I need you.”

Valek slowly reaches for you, drawing you close to him with an arm around your waist, his other hand gently brushing a loose lock of hair behind your ear before cradling the side of your face.

“Kiss me,” you beg in a whisper, and he immediately obliges, bending to capture your lips with his own. The tingling sensation that had raced through you when your hand had touched his gloved one in the past pales in comparison to the sheer electricity that courses through you as your lips meet. Your desire fully overwhelms you as you throw yourself at him, leaping into his arms to twine your arms around his neck, your bodies flush with one another as you kiss him with everything you’ve got.

Valek seems briefly taken aback by your ferocity; it takes him a moment before he lifts you right off your feet, holding you against him with ease as you devour one another. His lips are surprisingly soft and warm, and incredibly inviting – you find yourself getting dizzy. Valek lowers you back to the ground, trying to break the kiss, but you cling to him; he ends up having to forcefully pull you off of him.

“You stopped breathing, beloved,” he explains with a chuckle when you pout at him, not even aware of your body frantically trying to catch its breath. You blush, horribly embarrassed, and he scoops you up, carrying you to the bed and sitting you down on it, moving to stand back from you, intent on waiting for you to calm down.

“That’s hardly my fault,” you say huffily, staring up at him with dark, hooded eyes, and he smirks down at you in a way that has your whole body trembling with need. “Please don’t stop!”

Valek has you on your back on the bed quicker than you can blink, looming over you with his larger form but pointedly not touching you. Impatiently, you reach up to pull him down but he thwarts your attempts, gathering your wrists and pinning them over your head gently with one hand. Such a little act of dominance has your eyes rolling into the back of your head, completely ready and willing to give yourself to him in any way he wants. 

“Tell me what you need, my heart. I want to taste your desire in your words,” he purrs, lowering his body closer to yours but remaining just out of reach.

He makes you want to let go and lose control and just feel, and you tell him as much, shamelessly begging him to take you and do all the darkly romantic, sensual things you didn’t think you’d ever be able to bring yourself to ask for. The heated look he gives you assures you that he will give you them all and nearly has you delirious with lust.

He moves agonizingly slowly, his hands controlled and precise as he undresses you. Every inch of your flesh exposed to his gaze is looked upon with adoration and awe, and he doesn’t stop to give into his burning desire to touch you until he has fully divested you of your clothes, relying on every shred of patience he’s developed during the course of his existence. Having not had his centuries of experience, you eagerly try to push his heavy coat off his shoulders, your fingers moving to the buttons on his shirt as he chuckles and moves to help you take off his coat.

“Patience, my dear,” Valek croons, taking hold of your hands once more as you squirm underneath him, chilly and impatient and desperate for his touch. “I fully intend to savour every moment of this as I make you mine.”

“But I want to see you!” you whine, pouting up at him and batting your eyes. He looks down at your naked form, desperate with need for him, and the pale blue veins around his eyes start to appear as he gives into his carnal desires. He licks his lips, and you see his fangs sharpening in his mouth.

“Fuck,” you moan wantonly as his vampiric side comes out. Instead of the fear that you had felt the first time you had seen him in this form, now it only sends a thrill through you; somehow, you want him even more because of the danger he poses. Valek, however, misunderstands and immediately moves to soothe you.

“It is alright, Y/N, just the similarities between bloodlust and my lust for you that bring this side out of me. I can stop if you are frightened, but I assure you that I am still in control of myself.”

“I’m not!” you pant, unsuccessfully trying to squirm out of his grip and pounce on him. “Please, Valek, I’m not scared of you doing anything except stopping.”

He leans down to kiss you once again to silence your complaints, and you happily oblige him, letting him kiss you into submission, his dark hair falling around you like a curtain. Still with his lips on yours, Valek tears his gloves off to reveal his long, slender fingers and sharp nails, running them lightly up your sides and making you arch up off the bed with a wail, your cries swallowed by his mouth.

He releases your lips, allowing you to catch your breath while he lays kisses all over your face as though he wants to claim every inch of you. You hope he does; you’re already all his.

“Your skin tastes of sunshine,” he murmurs seductively, his lips moving lightly down your neck to one of your shoulders, then slowly making their way along your collarbone to the other. “I would bask in your warmth forever if you would let me, beloved.”

“I will, I do,” you moan, reaching between you to try to finish taking off his shirt. A loud, purring rumble emanates from within him as your fingers stroke his bare chest, giving you a fluttering sense of pride. Feeling more confident, you slide your hands up along his neck to hold his face, tilting it upwards so that his eyes meet yours. He cocks his head at you with an inquisitive expression.

“You know that I love your old-fashioned approach to romance, Valek,” you tell him seriously, “and we will have my entire lifetime – if not forever – to take things slow. But I need to be yours right now. And I don’t want you to be gentle; show me that you desire me the way I do you – don’t hold back.”

He gives you a nearly feral look, his hands curling into fists as he tries to control himself; somehow, you are able to sense the energy he’s fighting to keep inside of him instead of tearing into something.

“You wish for a taste of darkness, beloved?” he asks, pulling off his shirt and tossing it to the side. You gawk at his broad, pale chest, trying not to drool, and lick your lips. Valek hisses at the action, adjusting himself over his pants. You sit up, your hands moving to his belt; this time, he doesn’t stop you.

“I wish for a taste of you, Valek,” you tell him in a fierce whisper, looking up at him as you remove his belt and move to the button of his pants. “If being rough with me will make you feel half as good as I know it’ll make me feel, then yes, please. Claim me, my love. Make all of me yours.”

He pins you back against the sheets with a growl, his sharp nails drawing teasing patterns across your breasts, your nipples peaking as if to demand more of the rough treatment. You arch your back, thrusting your breasts into his hands with a needy cry. Valek is utterly merciless in his torment, bringing you to the threshold between pleasure and pain and keeping you there. You are practically vibrating with need as one of his hands trails down your torso to your thighs, parting them with ease. One long finger slips between your slick folds, grazing your clit, and you shriek, bucking your hips towards him. You hear him snicker softly against your chest, his lips and tongue continuing to tease your breasts as his hands move lower.

“You are otherworldly when you are giving into sin, Y/N,” he croons, his fingers insistent as they explore your entrance, slick with your arousal. You let out a whimper that he swallows into his mouth, his fingers working at your clit and not relenting until you’re on the precipice of orgasm before he backs off, only to repeat the action, edging you over and over until you’re nearly delirious. And still, all you want is more.

“Please!” you manage to beg him, your hands guiding his face to your neck, wordlessly trying to convey what you want. You’re losing all sense of lucidity, clinging desperately to your sanity as he brings you so close to the edge. Valek turns his head to the side, his tongue reaching out to lick the outer shell of your ear and making you shiver.

“Please what, my sweet? I want to hear you say it,” he whispers, and you can tell he is enjoying prolonging your torture.

“Bite me! Feed on me!” you demand shamelessly, your eyes shut tight as you try to focus on the feeling of his mouth on your skin, seeking any indication that he will give this to you. “Make me scream for you.”

You hear him inhale deeply, his nose lightly running up and down the side of your neck, and you turn your head to the side to give him better access. His fingers have stopped their endless teasing of your swollen clit, but you are still trembling in anticipation. You feel his tongue dart out and give your sensitive flesh a sinful lick, making you gasp for breath.

Finally, you feel him bite you, the only pain being a slight sting that only adds to the overwhelming pleasure that courses through you. You’re not even sure that ecstasy was an accurate enough description for this feeling coursing through your veins – the pleasure is absolutely indescribable. Your eyes roll back in your head, the parts of your body not currently pinned in place by his body thrashing out of your control as you come violently. You hear yourself distantly shrieking in rapture, moaning and whimpering his name, babbling for more as he feeds on you, his fingers relentless at your clit and drawing out your climax – or maybe he was just making you orgasm again and again without interruption.

Eventually, he ends his torment, licking your wound to seal it before lifting his head from your neck, traces of blood on his lips. He stares down at you with a satiated expression, trying to remove his hand from between your clenched thighs, still spasming and out of your control. You’re sure that your inner thighs will be bruised from how you had squeezed them against his firm hand, and the idea only adds to your bliss. He leans down to kiss you but hesitates, unsure of your willingness to taste your own blood. You’re able to gather enough strength and lucidity to force yourself to sit up and kiss him, pulling him down to lay on top of you. There is a slight metallic taste to his lips, but it is largely overshadowed by the intoxicating taste of Valek, an indescribable flavour that you’re sure you’ll never get enough of.

“Finally satisfied, my little temptress?” Valek asks teasingly against your lips, your body completely relaxed beneath him.

“Nearly,” you hum through a yawn, blindly reaching to remove his pants once more. He groans, rolling over with you and cradling you on top of his chest.

“You are exhausted, beloved,” he points out, stroking your hair affectionately. “There will be time enough for that later.” Stubbornly, you ignore him, pushing yourself up onto your knees and tugging his pants down his legs, trying and failing to dodge his hands as they snatch up your wrists.

“Valek!” you whine, pouting down at him. His lips quirk into a smile at your persistence, and you narrow your eyes at him before throwing one leg over him and straddling his narrow waist, inches away from where you really want to be. Valek stills, transfixed, and you slowly bend down until your face is right above his, feeling decidedly naughty.

“I believe we agreed that you would be rough with me, my love,” you murmur, one hand drawing teasing patterns across his bare chest. “I hope you don’t think I’m so delicate that I’ve already had enough of you tonight. I need you to defile me, inside and out.” You grind yourself against his firm abdominal muscles, and he growls. You decide to try the innocent approach next to get him to give in.

“Please?” you ask, batting your eyelashes down at him with the most innocent expression you can muster, and he lets out a wild snarl, rolling you onto your back again and tearing off the rest of his clothes hastily before positioning himself between your legs. You can’t see his cock, pressed against him as you are, but you can certainly feel it, the silky hard length rubbing against your thighs enticingly. Eagerly, you wrap your legs around his waist, trying to line him up with your entrance by feel alone.

“You will be my undoing, my treasure,” he tells you, his blue eyes locked with yours, and you wrap your arms around his neck, pulling him towards you until your foreheads touch.

“And you will be my forever, Valek,” you reply, kissing him passionately. He thrusts into your wet heat in one fluid movement that has your toes curling and sets about claiming you yet again; you have only so much time before the sunrise.

---

[FYI: The poem Valek chose for her is “Somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond” by E.E. Cummings]

Hope you all enjoyed! Day #3's fic is looking to be more depraved than this one, if all goes according to plan... 👁️👄👁️ (It's a carry-over from Dark Desires October I didn't get to; sue me!)

[liesmyth]

do you have any book recommendations? anything like the locked tomb or just fantasy/science fiction in general? :)

Hi anon I LOVE GIVING BOOK RECS!

Unfortunately I haven’t found anything quite like TLT, but when you break it into main themes some other series come close. So, if you liked The Locked Tomb for…

Morally ambiguous lesbians and oppressive empires? Try The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson. I love Baru as a character and I love and what the book does with themes of cultural assimilation and how the road to a righteous goal is paved with moral compromises until you’re not sure you’re still on the right path. Content warning for institutional homophobia, which affects the plot and the main character. It’s never gratuitous, but it’s pretty much the opposite of TLT under that point of view so heads up.

Unique worldbuilding, queer characters, distinctive sense of place in a land that was once Earth? Try The Fifth Season by NK Jemisin. This isn’t to everybody’s tastes (usually people love it or hate it) but it does some VERY cool things with scifi and deservedly won a Hugo.

Intricate worldbuilding, necromancy, gothic vibes? Try The Bone Orchard by Sara Mueller. This definitely hits the same “confused and confusing female main character who doesn’t know her own mind” vibes as HtN, which can be good or bad depending on your tastes, but the necromancy bits are fantastic.

Oppressive planetary empires and queer characters? Try A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. This too is about cultural assimilation and has a main murder mystery plot. Space opera about a young diplomat in a precarious position who is sort of sharing her mind space with someone else. Bonus: fun scifi worldbuilding based on some lesser-known historical empires.

Other SFF I read or reread in 2022

City of Stairs by Robert Jackson Bennett for worldbuilding, shady empires, female MC, urban fantasy vibes with a strong sense of place and a murder mystery thrown in for flavour.

Deeplight by Frances Hardinge. YA fantasy with horror vibes that I very much enjoyed as an adult not usually keen on YA. There are scary eldritch gods, toxic relationships with a hopeful ending, excellent fantasy worldbuilding, a really solid sense of civilization (especially the Deaf culture of the divers that is really interwoven in the setting). Sea monsters! Secrets! Street urchins! This is one of my all-time favourites.

The Scholomance series by Naomi Novik, starting with A Deadly Education; the third book came out two weeks after Nona and it gave me emotional whiplash, because (spoiler!) the angry goth girl gets to be happy in this one! YA, very vivid very fun worldbuilding, spunky teenage heroine with a cynical disposition and death powers.

Obligatory rec for Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell just because it’s one of those books that make me feel like I’m a richer person for having read them. It’s an impressive alternate history fantasy, the writing is masterful, the fae villain is unsettling and inhumanly evil, the mundane villains (pettiness, spite, centuries-old institutions) provide excellent dramatic irony. Everyone is insufferable in a petty way that’s also endlessly entertaining, and the two titular characters are absolutely obsessed with each other. The prose is a pastiche and tremendously well written. My only nitpick is that there are way too many men. I get why, given the setting the premise and the characters, and I loved the book, but since this rec originated with an ask about TLT I feel like I have to clarify that the gender ratio is pretty much the polar opposite.

My Heart Is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones if you like spunky teenage girl protagonists, poetically described gore, critique of colonialism and indigenous displacement. This is a horror thriller not a sff, sent in the contemporary US, and it’s basically a love letter to the horror movie genre + Native American folk legends. Reccing it anyway because YMMV but to to me it really hit some of the spots that HtN does. (Content warning for off-screen CSA)

The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch. Speculative fiction thriller, lots of jumping between alternate timelines and wondering what exactly is going on. It’s not flawless but it’s unabashedly weird in a very fun, very unique way that I really appreciated.

Under the Pendulum Sun by Jeannette Ng. Unique worldbuilding, distinct narrative voices, gothic vibes, weird religious imagery. Fantasy historical fiction about cruel inhuman fae, the worldbuilding is brilliant and very vivid (and what an aesthetic it is!), the story is fucked up in a delicious way, and the prose is a delightful Brontë pastiche. Content warnings for consensual sibling incest and Christian missionaries on a mission of “civilization” through faith (it’s not portrayed in a positive way but the colonialism is definitely there).

[I only flagged content warnings that aren't canon-typical for TLT, but definitely more apply. If you need clarification on a specific book HMU]

[physalian]

On Fight Scenes (Or, getting creative with your magic system)

This is coming from a reader’s perspective, not a writer’s, in what I like to see and what my thought process was when writing my fight scenes—I hate these things and can’t call myself any authority on the matter. They’re tedious and translating what’s in my head onto page is always frustrating.

This is also for fantasy and sci-fi: Fight scenes that have some magical or technological element to them, not a straight-up action story with two dudes punching each other. This includes anything from fights in Harry Potter to battling a Xenomorph to bending in ATLA to a throwdown between superheroes.

Side note: I really, truly hate “two dudes punching each other”.

—

I have a friend who loves comics, specifically DC Comics, and watches all the DCAU films. When we lived together, I often watched a lot with them. My favorite remains Constantine: City of Demons because unlike literally every other DCAU movie, it doesn’t drop the ball in the third act and devolve into a stakes-less fistfight. This dude faces *consequences*.

I’m not a comics (like actual, paper comic books) fan, but without fail, every time the setup is good, the characters are good, the first 2/3s are good with pacing and usually a mystery and passable character development like Batman: Under the Red Hood…. The last 15 minutes or so always abandon what had been a good plot for just superheroes punching each other and I get so bored. I’m invested and then they rarely deliver any payoff.

But I do like Constantine. Dude needs a nap.

Point is: On top of those fight scenes not really mattering, by the nature of what comic books are in that they can never stray too far from the status quo, or if they do, it doesn’t stay that way for long, the people who made these characters don’t get all that creative with their powers.

I think, actually, I liked Constantine so much because his stuff is rated R and it doesn’t shy away from the more realistic effects of living in a superhero society… without being gratuitous like The Boys.

I just get bored. The fight stops when the plot says so. Knockouts are arbitrary, power scaling is arbitrary. Someone can get thrown through a wall and walk it off but the villain or their buddy can come up behind them and hit them really hard on the head and that’s enough.

Anime is its own thing and would take far too much time to address here but I do want to talk about My Hero Academia real quick, following up on a previous post about tournament arcs.

Season 2 of the show has three main arcs: The tournament in the first half, and the Stain fight/final exams in the second.

For a while, the show actually seemed to take injuries rather seriously (for shonen, at least), and got insanely creative with characters’ very niche powers. In season 1, their teacher, Aizawa, gets pretty brutally beaten by a horde of villains and his powers are permanently impacted by his recovery—he can’t use them for as long as he used to, and he has a new scar.

Midoriya, too, whose powers break his bones on the regular, has consequences for overusing them, like his hands and forearms not healing properly despite superpowered medical intervention.

Power scaling, too, was fantastic…. Until the Stain fight.

I will never understand the thought process behind this logic:

“Hey let’s show how powerful Todoroki is by having him manifest an entire glacier in about 3 seconds!” *9 episodes later* “Hey let’s make this fight with a dude who only has various blades to work with super tense by making Todoroki completely nerfed in a legit life or death situation!”

Buddy couldn’t take two seconds to yell at his friends to get the fuck out of the way? Was he worried about damage to the buildings? I feel like nepotism could have spared him from some consequences if breaking a few windows meant him not getting murdered. It wasn’t like he had daddy issues over his ice powers.

The rest of the show (until I DNFed) had similar issues. Powers were as competent as the plot allowed at any given moment, which I guess is the nature of shonen, but if you’re going to go out of your way to establish realistic rules and consequences really early on, breaking them willy-nilly because it looks cool later is annoying.

Which is applicable across all fantasy sub-genres: Consistency.

I might not be the best at writing the step-by-step choreography, but damn it if I don’t know how to make sure I’m not opening up plot holes in how much damage my characters take and dish out.

—

So. How I approach fight scenes as told by Eternal Night and my sci-fi WIP.

Before anything else, establish a reason that this has to be a fight, that it has to happen now, and what’s happening beneath the combat to keep the story progressing. The plot will not stop just for fisticuffs.

A magic system is only as cool as what its characters cannot do with it, and breaking those limits ruins the magic system.

Make sure this is a fight that can only happen in this story, taking full advantage of the various powers/abilities/magic system rules, if this is meant to be flashy and grand.

Eternal Night is about vampires, thus my vampires, being immortal, can take a lot of hits and not suffer long-term consequences compared to a mortal. I adhere to a lot of classic vampire lore while also making up my own rules. They don’t have super speed, super strength, or compulsion, they just have a lot of experience and know how to use their weapons well, and can essentially go at 100% without mortal limitations of fatigue.

Basically: My vampires are only as strong as a mortal in absolute life-or-death situations, but that’s also dependent on how strong they were in life. Somebody who was a couch potato isn’t going to be as strong as a bodybuilder, and that carries over. I don’t have “younger/older vampires are supernaturally stronger” rules.

They have the same immortality risks as most versions: Stakes, beheadings, sunlight. Anything else is survivable.

Simple magic systems tend to be the most robust because there’s less rules available to risk breaking or forgetting (why ATLA's bending feels so real).

So when I was writing ENNS’s big fight, on top of making sure they weren’t all gods with their weapons—they missed shots, got tired, made bad calls—priority one was making sure I kept killing blows consistent, and when they’re temporarily “dead,” that the timing of when they revive isn’t determined by the plot.

Meaning: If I have a vampire who, idk, gets stabbed by a regular sword and it “kills” them, they have to stay “dead” for whatever amount of time I’d previously established and not wake them up early to participate in the plot again. Those are my rules and I have to work with them.

And in that way, yes the choreography is frustrating, but even if it’s an average description of a fight, I will appreciate that the writer respects their own rules and still be entertained.

With that, in the sci-fi WIP I had incredibly complex and diverse magic systems, 3 complete and unique practices split between two characters. One of which was incredibly OP.

This was a very reluctant OP character who wouldn’t use the full extent of his powers even to save his own life, often to the ire of his team who suffers the consequences of unnecessarily complicated battles when he could one-shot the enemy but chooses not to.

Internal limits tend to be stronger than external ones if you have an OP character, because they’re more believably toggled on and off without breaking the lore.

Even with OP character stubbornly making life harder for himself, he was still OP. He had two different magic systems at his disposal, and beyond his internal limits, they had two very easily exploitable external limits.

Magic system A was tied to a physical artifact he had on his person. If he got separated from it, he couldn’t use it. A is also a lot harder to use if B is also busted.

Magic system B was counteracted easily by users of Magic system A, and by the enemy military who’d developed weapons specifically to nullify those powers, and that weapon was everywhere.

Which meant my fights concerning OP character were rarely “why doesn’t he insta-kill them” it was “oh shit, he can’t insta-kill them, now he has to be clever to get out of this alive”.

One of my favorite fights was at the tail end of Book 2 where he was stuck with two of his non-powered teammates, on a ship dead in the water being overrun by the enemy. The ship had no power, the radios were dead, and the engines were fried.

He had already been sick for half the book and physically and mentally exhausted, and when the enemy arrived, they nullified the rest of his powers. All he had was Magic System A, but in his condition, it was like being asked to do long division on paper by hand, because his calculator was broken.

Dude was not having a good time.

Which meant he was basically useless, with two of his basically useless teammates, who all had to work together to get creative and clever with the tools that they had, on a ship they all knew like the backs of their hands.

So many things they would not have had to do in any other situation, with stakes so much higher because OP was powerless. The characters came first, not their powers, which I think is the most crucial ingredient to any fight you want people to keep talking about for years to come.

—

I can’t tell you how to choreograph your scenes, but I do think that why they’re fighting matters far more than what they’re fighting about, and especially in fantasy: What’s the point of writing magic if you don’t take full advantage of your magical characters?

[leconcombrerit]

You know how seeing someone get gutted I a movie doesn't feel as bad as, say, ripping off an earring or bending a finger till it breaks?

Cause I think that's what made episode five much harder to watch than the others. I for one had to take breaks. I can't relate to being chased in the woods, but I can relate to bullying (sadly). It's comparable with how viewers are more inclined to forgive mass murder than shooting a puppy or cheating.

That being said, I rarely react that way when bullying is depicted in series. It's not like it's a rare occurrence. But it really hit home in DFF. Superbly executed. It wasn't over the top nor downplayed as comical ; it was just the right level of subtlety, manipulation, group behavior, gratuitous cruelty and childishness.

Looking back, Por's death doesn't feel as sad. I will have to rewatch episodes one to four to see if he truly, truly had regrets about whatever the fuck it is they did. Also after what ep five subjected me to it might feel a little cathartic.

[grigori77]

Movies of 2024 - My Summer Rundown (Part 2)

10.  BOY KILLS WORLD – Turns out this was a really GREAT SUMMER for action cinema, and the first genre entry here is EXACTLY what you’d expect from the true master of anarchic movie mayhem, Sam Raimi, here producing the feature debut of ambitious young German visual effects artist-turned writer-director Moritz Mohr.  The newcomer’s crazy PERFECTLY compliments our veteran’s crazy, because this is like if The Raid movies had been made by Don Coscarelli (see John Dies At the End for reference) – basically a geeky love letter to classic 90s 16-bit beat-‘em-up video games, it follows the bizarre misadventures of Bill Skarsgard’s “the Boy”, a traumatised deaf-mute orphan raised and trained to become a lethal living weapon by a mysterious (and genuinely WEIRD) jungle shaman (The Raid’s own Yayan Ruhian) in order to avenge his family’s brutal murder at the hands of the Van Der Kroys, the bloodthirsty organised crime family holding their dystopian city under a cruel thumb of violent oppression.  The film has been described as a “fever dream”, and honestly that’s a pretty accurate assessment – this is a COMPLETELY FUCKING MENTAL film, frequently spiralling off on surreal flights of fancy as its already pretty bonkers plot starts to unravel in truly WEIRD directions, but thankfully this adds to the unique charm a lot more than it ever threatens to alienate the viewer, sticking to JUST the right side of satirical parody while delivering a consistently winning line of jet black comedy.  Besides, the MAIN attraction here is EXACTLY what most viewers come to this kind of film for, and Mohr EASILY delivers in this venue – the action sequences are INCREDIBLE, flawlessly executed even as they frequently become as downright INSANE as every other aspect of the film, and without pulling ANY punches to deliver some of the year’s most gratuitously GRAPHIC blood-and-guts.  Skarsgard is, like always, thoroughly BRILLIANT throughout, effortlessly proving what an incredibly expressive physical actor he can be since he never speaks a word throughout the entire film … but that doesn’t mean the Boy doesn’t get his point across just fine, the film delivering a pretty ingenious conceit by having him speak to us through his “inner monologue”, using the announcer voice from his favourite arcade game when he was a child (voice actor extraordinaire H. Jon Benjamin, star of Archer, Bob’s Burgers and Dr Katz, Professional Therapist).  Then there’s the top-notch supporting cast, featuring the likes of Michelle Dockery, Stranger Things’ Brett Gelman, Sharlto Copley and Famke Jansen as the uniformly despicable Van Der Kroys, Jessica Rothe (Happy Death Day and its sequel) as their lethal enforcer June 27, and Andrew Koji (Warrior, Snake Eyes, Bullet Train) as Basho, the affable oddball resistance fighter the Boy befriends and enlists into his crusade along with Benny (the Old Spice Man himself, Isaiah Mustafa), a mighty warrior with a thick beard and moustache who provides some of the film’s biggest belly-laughs (for reasons it’s best for you to find out for yourselves, trust me).  Relentlessly ridiculous, unflinchingly messy and frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious, this is definitely one of the year’s most unapologetically ODD films, but also definitely one of the most FUN too, as well as a spectacular showcase for the talents of a VERY fresh new filmmaking talent who is doubtless destined for great things in the future.  Just be forewarned, it definitely AIN’T one for the faint-of-heart or weak-of-stomach …

9.  THE MINISTRY OF UNGENTLEMANLY WARFARE – Once again Hollywood is making it ABUNDANTLY clear they just DON’T LIKE Guy Ritchie any more, and I have NO IDEA WHY … despite 2020’s The Gentleman becoming a modest box office hit and signifying what many considered a triumphant return to form for the man who brought us the likes of Snatch, RocknRolla and the Sherlock Holmes movies (although personally I never thought he actually really fell off, despite what Swept Away and Aladdin might have made us think), his subsequent releases all got largely BURIED online – granted, some of it was down to COVID, but even after everything started to get back to normal the inexplicably disrespectful treatment continued, with Wrath of Man and The Covenant, both impressively well-executed and evocative cinematic features in their own rights, getting released straight to streaming with frustratingly little fanfare to drum up the attention they clearly deserved.  At least this one made it into theatres, but with a lacklustre advertising campaign and stiff competition from much more high profile fare it sank like a stone, almost like Lionsgate didn’t even WANT IT to succeed.  Even worse, for some unbelievably stupid reason it didn’t even RELEASE

in the UK, meaning I had to wait until it subsequently hit Amazon for me to finally get to check it out.  The most frustrating part, though, is that the critics CLEARLY feel the same as I do about the film we actually received – this is a TOP DRAWER piece of work, further proof that Ritchie never actually LOST a step, another genuine belter of a flick which takes a brilliant premise and crafts an offbeat and deliciously entertaining cinematic caper than really deserved to be seen by a really big audience on a proper big screen.  Taken from Winston Churchill’s declassified WWII files, it follows the true life exploits of special forces commando Gus March-Phillips (Henry Cavill) as he put together a covert team in order to execute a highly classified raid on a German U-boat outfitting operation in the hopes of crippling the subs long enough to help bring the Americans into the War.  The only problem?  March-Phillips was a disgraced loose-cannon, a fiercely independent troublemaker with a reputation for going off-mission and a major dislike of authority figures … he was also the original inspiration for James Bond, then mid-ranking SOE-officer Ian Fleming using him as the basis for the mercurial protagonist of his best-selling spy novels (and the rest, of course, is history).  Needless to say, it looks like this will be the closest Cavill’s ever gonna get to actually playing Bond, and he really sank his teeth into this opportunity, clearly having the time of his life investing the character with his trademark twinkle and roguish charm (as well as an amusing appreciation for fine men’s fashions); he’s the ironclad backbone of the film, driving the action and story with typical aplomb, and is ably supported by a winningly motley collection of misanthropes, the gang of miscreants March-Phillips put together to execute Operation Postmaster brought to life in pitch-perfect performances from Alan Ritchson (Reacher), Alex Pettyfer, Eiza Gonzalez, Henry Golding and more, while there’s an enjoyably NASTY turn from Inglourious Basterds’ Til Schweiger as the film’s dastardly big bad, SS Commandant Heinrich Luhr, and Ritchie regular Cary Elwes brings his classic stiff-upper-lip to bear as the operation’s top CO, Brigadier Colin Gubbins, while an all-but-unrecognisable Rory Kinnear portrays a suitably gruff Winston Churchill.  Ultimately, Ritchie delivers an enjoyably fiendish heist movie masquerading as a war flick, the plot snaking with crafty glee through a series of expertly executed set-pieces and ingenious little twists before finally landing a brilliantly cathartic climax which pays winning respect to the real life heroes that inspired the film, along with one of the greatest espionage thriller franchises OF ALL TIME.  That alone should have won this movie some respect, at least enough to raise its profile, and it’s a criminal shame it’s been treated with SUCH glaring disrespect.  Here’s hoping it earns the cult classic status it deserves, that might redress SOME of the balance …

8.  THE FALL GUY – Stuntman-turned-director David Leitch’s latest film (following on from well-deserved previous successes co-helming the first John Wick film before striking out on his own with Atomic Blonde, Deadpool 2, Hobbs & Shaw and Bullet Train) is not only a genuinely EXTRAORDINARY big screen adaptation of one of the classic old school action adventure TV shows I grew up watching (alongside Knight Rider, The A-Team and Airwolf), but also raises one of the great unanswered questions of cinema – why isn’t there an Academy Award for stunts?  Anyway … turns out that Ken, in last-year’s runaway hit Barbie, wasn’t the only role that Ryan Gosling was born to play – he’s equally perfect for the role of Colt Seavers, the seasoned “unsung hero” who makes all those action hero movie stars look so awesome, at least until an on-set accident left him with a near career-ending back injury which forced him into semi-retirement.  He’s brought back into the game, however, when the action movie star he used to double for, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), disappears midway through the production of the debut directorial feature of his former lover, camera-operator Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt).  On paper he’s here to fill in for Ryder, but he’s really been brought in to find the missing star before the studio gets wise and shuts down production, but as he delves into what turns out to be a pretty tangled mystery it becomes clear that Colt might not really be the right man for the job … unfortunately he’s all they got … Gosling may be a master of understated performance, but as I’ve learned over the years (particularly from the criminally underappreciated The Nice Guys) he’s ALSO a master of comedic acting, and he’s really firing on all cylinders for this one, frequently damn near stealing the show from a high class cast who are nonetheless all equal to the task.  Blunt is, as always, as flawlessly charming as she is STUNNINGLY beautiful, while Taylor-Johnson is clearly really enjoying playing a supreme douchebag of a preening self-promoting prima donna, Ted Lasso’s Hannah Waddington frequently walks off with her scenes as supremely oily producer Gail Meyer, and Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Stephanie Hsu and the great Winston Duke both hold their own admirably as Ryder’s put-upon personal assistant Alma and Colt’s long-suffering best friend, stunt coordinator Dan Tucker.  Needless to say, Leitch has long since proven that he is a MASTER of on-screen mayhem, effortlessly ushering in some of the very best action sequences we’re going to see in the cinema this year, but he also once again proves he’s ALSO a master of big screen comedy, bringing the pitch perfect screenplay from Drew Pearce (who previously wrote Hobbs & Shaw, as well as Iron Man 3 and his own directorial debut Hotel Artemis) to effervescent primary-coloured life as a gleefully anarchic and thoroughly irreverent celebration of action cinema excess and the gruelling hard work that it takes to actually make it all possible, all done with barely ANY digital trickery at all.  All round, then, this was some of the most fun I’ve had at the cinema this year (so far), and once again, it really does raise that all-time great question – why isn’t there an Oscar for stunt work?  Gods know this one would definitely have been a shoe-in next Awards season …

7.  MARS EXPRESS – My animated feature of the summer is a pretty singular work which came out of leftfield and really took me by surprise, a science fiction murder mystery thriller of rare vision, inventiveness and beauty which is tempered with a fascinating and more than a little troubling thematic message which raises far more questions than it answers.  Marking the feature debut of French writer-director Jeremie Perin (Crisis Jung, Lastman), it chronicles the investigation of two very unusual private investigators – world weary former soldiers Aline Ruby (Lea Drucker of Fox’s War of the Worlds TV series) and Carlos Rivera (The Crimson Rivers’ Daniel Njo Lobe), the latter of whom is now a kind of simulant android whose recorded consciousness was uploaded into an robotic body after he was killed in action – on a colonised Mars as they hunt for the cause of a supposedly harmless robot’s sudden malfunction and subsequent violent rampage.  As they tumble deeper down an alarmingly perilous rabbit hole, they uncover a terrifying clandestine conspiracy involving corporate malfeasance which may include their sometimes employer, tech billionaire Chris Royjacker (the great Mathieu Almaric), rogue AI and a looming technological revolution which could spell disaster for the Red Planet … this is a genuinely INTRIGUING film, Perin and co-writer Laurent Sarfati (who previously worked with him on Lastman) weaving a seductively labyrinthine detective story which works magnificently well as an ingenious sci-fi take on the classic Noir formula, but also delivers an equally fascinating Philip K. Dick-esque treatise on the potential dangers of the unchecked development of artificial intelligence and far more fundamentally challenging questions about what it really means to be alive, and to be human.  It’s also genuinely THRILLING, propelling the story at a furious pace generously peppered with a string of intensely full-blooded action sequences, as well as a genuinely GORGEOUS work of animated art, the exquisite mixture of 2D and digital animation (looking like a slicker version of Titmouse’s work on Scavengers Reign) rivalling some of the best anime I’ve seen but nonetheless somehow carrying a conspicuously FRENCH vibe.  Altogether this is a magnificent achievement for an up-and-coming filmmaking talent whose work I will DEFINITELY be keeping an eye out for the future, as well as a BREATHTAKING masterpiece of this cinematic artform.  I highly recommend hunting it down.

6.  TWISTERS – Back in 1996, Jan de Bont’s man-against-nature action thriller Twister turned out to be one of the most undeniably enjoyable summer blockbusters of the 90s, and it’s one of those rare CGI-heavy features from the fledgling digital days that STILL holds up impressively well today.  It also DEFINITELY worked perfectly well on its own merits, with no need for a sequel and CERTAINLY not a remake … so when it was announced that there was going to be one after all, like many I was suitably dubious.  I mean the story was told perfectly well in the original, there’s nothing new that could really be said in a follow-up, right?  Turns out there actually IS, though, and I’m pleased to report that Minari director Lee Isaac Chung’s new film lives up to its predecessor in fine style, thanks in no small part to him and screenwriter Mark L Smith (The Revenant, Overlord and The Midnight Sky) clearly taking the lessons of the 1996 film very much to heart and bringing us a fresh serving of everything that worked so well last time round while carving impressive fresh ground for a genuinely rewarding original story moving forward.  That being said, the greatest strength of the original wasn’t the effects anyway – it was the wonderfully well-rounded, fully-realised characters we followed into the film’s myriad dangers, and this one definitely pulls off the same feat, introducing a new generation of tornado chasers out to pioneer new scientific tech and hopefully save the lives of people living in the strife-torn environs of America’s Tornado Alley.  Glen Powell (hot off major career-making turns in Top Gun: Maverick and Hit Man) may be the heavyweight star power in this particular cast, and he’s definitely great, scene-stealing fun as Tyler Owens, the self-proclaimed “Tornado Wrangler” of YouTube, but the true heart of the film is Daisy Edgar-Jones (Fresh, Where the Crawdads Sing, Normal People) as meteorologist Kate Carter, who’s looking for redemption for past mistakes which led to the deaths of most of her old storm-chasing team, while Anthony Ramos (Hamilton and In the Heights) is certainly the soul as Javi, Kate’s former colleague who’s looking to help her realise her goal through his new tech venture Storm Par; there’s also hefty support from the likes of Brandon Perea (Nope), Sasha Lane (American Honey, Daniel Isn’t Real), David Corenswet (soon to be the new Superman in James Gunn’s DCU reboot) and even my girl Katy O’Brian (Love Lies Bleeding, Z Nation, The Mandalorian)!  They’re all just as fleshed out as Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt’s crew were back in the day, a compelling collection of lovable misfits we’re happy to go on this crazy death-defying adventure with, which of course does SO MUCH of the heavy lifting with regards to the tension-building because we get so deeply invested in them all.  That being said, the film definitely doesn’t scrimp on spectacle, the visual effects work having improved SIGNIFICANTLY on what was already impressively high quality work back in ’96, leading to some truly TERRIFYING set-pieces that would definitely surprise anyone who only knows Chung for his critically acclaimed and award-winning dramatic work (but less for anyone familiar with his work on The Mandalorian), which means I am VERY curious to see what he’ll deliver this Christmas on the highly anticipated Star Wars-based Skeleton Crew TV series.  This is a far cry from just pure by-the-numbers summer blockbuster fare, then, a heavyweight event pic with a surprising amount of substance and a hefty dose of proper FEELS to go with all that adrenaline and eye candy, and it’s MORE THAN worthy successor to an already rightly beloved classic.

5.  FURIOSA – 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road was not only one of the greatest films of the last decade, but was also the undeniable MASTERPIECE of director George Miller’s career, even managing to (almost) eclipse his classic FIRST sequel, The Road Warrior.  It was a triumph of visual storytelling, two hours of furious all-action mayhem with barely any digital trickery in evidence, and brought us one of the greatest female protagonists of all time in the irrepressible warrior woman who managed to overshadow Max Rockatansky himself – Imperator Furiosa, perfectly brought to life by an ON FIRE Charlize Theron.  It was, quite simply, A PERFECT FILM.  So did it really NEED a prequel, chronicling the story of what led such a badass lady to undertake the gruelling crusade of that most exceptional of cinematic extravaganzas?  Honestly?  Not really.  But does that matter?  No, not at all.  As soon as Miller started touting this as a project those of us who flipped out SO HARD over Fury Road IMMEDIATELY started frothing at the mouth at the possibilities … it was just that the more pragmatic among us were also a little worried that he might not be able to capture lightning in a bottle all over again.  Well, we never should have doubted him, Miller was definitely equal to the task – Furiosa may not be QUITE as good as the film it chronologically precedes, but as an origin story it is MAGNIFICENT, a sprawling, gruelling, exhausting post-apocalyptic action epic that definitely does flawless justice to such an incredibly strong character.  I don’t want to give too much away plot-wise, it’s better to just jump in and ABSORB it all, suffice to say that this does indeed reveal how the child Furiosa was stolen from her seemingly idyllic life in an oasis in the middle of the radioactive Australian wasteland, dragged out into the middle of a brutally hostile desert filled with warfare, insanity and SERIOUSLY POWERFUL VEHICLES and forced to forge herself into an indomitable, merciless and uncompromising living weapon in order to survive, thrive and find her way back to her long lost Green Place.   Anya Taylor-Joy is a fine choice indeed for a more youthful Furiosa, subtly nuanced and filled with simmering intensity buried under a haughty mask of righteous untouchability,

but she doesn’t even TURN UP until the midway point of the film, the lion’s share of the work to establish her unbreakable character through her lost childhood ultimately going to The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart’s Ayla Browne (who previously performed for Miller on Three Thousand Years of Longing), and she is nothing less than a TOTAL FUCKING REVELATION in the role.  Chris Hemsworth frequently steals the film as the best villain the franchise has EVER HAD (and that says a lot in a series that includes Hugh Keys-Byrne’s Toecutter), self-aggrandising preening peacock Dementus, who gleefully tips from adorably camp to chillingly monstrous to pompously flamboyant at the drop of a hat, effortlessly holding court over the likes of Nathan Jones’ spectacularly ridiculous Rictus Erectus and Romper Stomper’s Lachy Hulme as a more youthful incarnation of his tyrannical father Immortan Joe, while The Musketeers’ Tom Burke is equal parts heroic and stoic as Praetorian Jack, the doughty War Rig commander who takes Furiosa on as his protégé, and model-turned actress Charlee Fraser (Anyone But You) rules over the opening scenes as her ferociously protective mother, Mary Jabassa.  Miller delivers in fine style on the action like always, the War Rig chase in particular sure to go down as the year’s most memorable action sequence, and once again there’s a pleasing reliance on physical stunt-work, practical sets and good old fashioned elbow grease over CGI throughout that does its predecessor proud.  That being said, this one is NOT a breakneck movie-long chase, its more leisurely, sometime quite introspective pace instead going a long way to let the story breathe and the peerless world-building develop, although there is still a characteristic relentlessness to the tale which means that, despite its two-and-a-half-hour runtime it never feels overlong or outstays its welcome.  Then again, it once again deploys Fury Road’s secret weapon – another throbbing, propulsively atmospheric score from Tom Holkenborg – to create another very pleasurable ride through the irradiated hellscape of Miller’s Outback.  I for one would be very pleased to return to it someday …

4.  KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES – Matt Reeves is a tough act to follow, even before The Batman he was already blowing us away with his star-making directorial breakthrough helming Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and its follow-up War For the Planet of the Apes.  The conclusion of that latter film put a very definitive exclamation point on the franchise as a whole, making ANY attempts to continue the saga a tough prospect indeed, and something that even a seasoned filmmaker might balk at.  But when I heard the proposed new trilogy, set hundreds of years after the events of War, would be directed by Wes Ball, I breathed a big sigh of relief – he did an INCREDIBLE job with the sci-fi trilogy adapting YA novelist James Dashner’s popular Maze Runner series, so I knew the saga was in very good hands indeed.  Having come up in visual effects, Ball’s always maintained a very strong balance between physical and digital filmmaking, so he was certainly up to the challenge of bringing a new generation of photorealistic, vitally ALIVE super-intelligent talking apes to the big screen, as well as putting his flesh-and-blood actors through their paces with similar skill and flair.  Most important, though, this film introduces a new lead protagonist who’s definitely got what it takes to succeed Andy Serkis’ mesmerizing Caesar in a new story, Owen Teague (It, I See You, Inherit the Viper, Black Mirror) thoroughly impressing in his first lead role as Noa, an uncertain young chimpanzee from an isolated tribal clan forced to grow up fast when his people are stolen in one terrifying night by masked ape raiders, leaving him to follow their trail with only intellectual orangutan Raka (The Orville’s Peter Macon) and an unusually smart “echo” (basically what humans have become since they lost their speech and intelligence) named Mae (The Witcher’s Freya Allan) to count as allies.  Macon is a thoroughly endearing presence throughout, while Allan delivers a fascinatingly complex performance that fuels many of the film’s most interesting twists (although I’m sure you can spot one or two coming ahead of time); and then there’s Kevin Durand, who’s clearly having a whale of a time getting his teeth into a rewardingly robust screen villain in the form of Proximus Caesar, an ambitious bonobo warlord who’s using a corrupted version of his namesake’s teachings to build a tyrannical empire of oppressed apes – he’s not quite as compelling an antagonist as Toby Kebbell’s Koba, but he serves most admirably indeed here.  Altogether, this film definitely had A LOT of heavy lifting to do to even APPROACH the heights of Reeves’ tenure on the franchise, and Ball and screenwriter Josh Friedman (War of the Wolds, Terminator: Dark Fate, Avatar: The Way of Water) have risen to the task in fine style, delivering a thrilling, affecting and inventive epic action adventure which skilfully builds on the framework provided by the previous trilogy while courageously forging ahead into the future, leaving room to venture forward into exciting further instalments.  Ultimately this isn’t QUITE as good as Dawn or even War, but with this the saga remains as rewarding, compelling and majestic as ever before, and I see great things indeed in its future.  I can’t wait for whatever comes next …

3.  A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE – It’s interesting, most of the time when you get a really great movie that becomes a big hit and spawns a franchise, THE LAST THING it needs is a prequel, and oftentimes when it DOES happen it feels like a shoehorned mess or even a total disrespectful retcon (they can’t ALL be Furiosa, after all).  A Quiet Place was never one of those – right from the start it was clear that how it all began was going to be JUST as interesting as where the original story was going, a fact which was DEFINITELY reinforced when Part Two dropped that TERRIFYING flashback cold open.  So when this finally arrived I was FIRST in my local queue, raring to go and so unswervingly excited that anything less than amazing was liable to be a disappointment.  Thankfully it turned out to be EVERYTHING I was hoping for – this is a super trim 99 minutes of knuckle-whitening terror with a (by now, not really all that) surprising amount of emotional power packed in, one of those films that brings you to tears when it’s not scaring the living bejeezuz out of you, just like the first two.  Lupita Nyong’o is a breath of fresh air as our new lead protagonist, Samira, a world-weary young New Yorker who’s been beaten down by a life of tragedy and chronic pain from the very same kind of advanced cancer that killed her beloved father, only to find a reason to stay alive (at least for a few more days) when the sound-seeking murder-beasts crash-land in the middle of the loudest city in the world and instantly go apeshit from all the noise.  Stranger Things’ Joseph Quinn, meanwhile, puts us through the emotional wringer right from his entrance as Eric, a timid Brit law student whose anxiety is going THROUGH THE ROOF as this all goes off around him, forced to find inner reserves of courage he never knew he had after he latches onto Sam as she makes her way across the city in search of the last slice she’ll ever be able to get from her favourite Harlem pizzeria.  There are equally heartfelt turns from Alex Wolff (Hereditary, Jumanji, Pig) as Reuben, Sam’s put-upon hospice nurse, and Djimon Hounsou, showing how his character started his own apocalyptic struggle as Part Two’s Henri, but perhaps the biggest stars of this film are, unsurprisingly, Nico and Schnitzel, a pair of tuxedo cats who perfectly portrayed the role of Frodo, Sam’s service cat, who’s probably THE MOST CHILLED-OUT feline I have EVER SEEN in a movie, and definitely one of the cutest.  Ultimately this is an absolute TRIUMPH for its breakout writer-director, Michael Sarnoski, whose INSANELY impressive feature debut Pig already made him one to watch back in 2021, and he definitely did the original property justice while carving his own equally impressive path in the franchise.  The end result, then, is a welcome addition to an already INCREDIBLE horror movie series, and definitely a strong contender for the genre’s movie of the year.

2.  DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE – Damn … if ever there was a movie that I really can’t say much of ANYTHING about for fear of dropping spoilers, even if most of the fandom has already gone to see it … this is an IMPORTANT MOVIE, maybe the most important of the year, because the MCU has been on the rocks of late, despite Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 going a long way to setting its fortunes back on the right track (but then that one has very much been considered a BLIP, really), and this one looks to have SINGLEHANDEDLY knocked the whole mess back on the right track while simultaneously mercilessly ripping the piss out of the whole debacle.  No, I mean IT REALLY DOES, there isn’t A SINGLE STONE that the Merc With a Mouth leaves unturned in his quest for meta-fuelled irreverence here (except maybe that dead Celestial poking out of the Pacific that nobody seems to be talking about after Eternals … or maybe I missed a joke somewhere).  Anyway, this is EVERY BIT as good as James Gunn’s third and final feature for the franchise, as well as another SUPER-solid entry in what was already Fox’s now expired X-Verse’s most popular series, but most importantly it’s also an EXTREMELY successful bridging film between that and the flagging Marvel Cinematic Universe, the perfect way to bring Mutantkind into the franchise with the least amount of fuss.  That being said, the BIG attraction here is, of course, getting to see two of Marvel’s biggest heavyweights going head-to-head in one movie, and of course beating seven shades of shit out of each other while they’re at it.  If you will … yeah, if you haven’t seen it yet and don’t want to get spoiled, you really should jump off at this point and just GO SEE IT while they’re still milking it for every cent they can in theatres, safe in the knowledge that it’s a fucking AWESOME movie and you won’t be disappointed.  Now SHOO!!!  Be off with you … okay, still here?  Right, then, watch me try to be as spoiler-light as I can moving forward … as much as Wade Wilson and Logan may be the very EPITOME of chalk-and-cheese onscreen, behind the scenes Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman have got on like a house on fire for a while now, ever since the former started lovingly teasing the latter in the first Deadpool movie and started his long-running campaign to lure the original Marvel Movie superstar into a big screen team-up, so it comes as NO SURPRISE that they’re both clearly having the time of their lives working together now.  Their chemistry in this is OFF THE CHARTS, the pair trading razor sharp quips, dirty looks and well-deserved face-punches with gleeful abandon from their first scene together RIGHT to the end, while the incredibly strong screenplay from Reynolds, series regulars Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, Robot Chicken’s Zeb Wells and the film’s director Shawn Levy (who previously worked with Reynolds on Free Guy and The Adam Project, as well as Jackman on Real Steel) definitely gives them a really big Multiversal playground to let loose in, all while doing a really beautiful job of taking the baggage that the current condition of the MCU property’s left the franchise in and stuffing it all into what’s always been a much more stable if also far less RESPECTFUL cinematic sandbox.  There are easter eggs galore, both overt and a whole lot more subtle

throughout, especially during an extended sojourn into the Void (the TVA’s pruning dumping ground) which not only introduces a few fun new faces (including at least one X-Men franchise missed opportunity AS WELL as the VERY welcome return of my very favourite Marvel mutant of them all – so nice to see you back, Laura!  Sure hope you get to stick around for more) but also a bunch of fan favourites from across Fox’s Marvel pantheon, and as far as I’m concerned there ain’t a single bum note in the entire symphony here!  Certainly this is BY FAR the funniest Deadpool movie so far (which is saying something), but that’s not really surprising since Shawn Levy has consistently proven to be one of the VERY BEST cinematic comedy directors out there (especially with his consistently high quality Night At the Museum series), so this is just another day at the office for him, and he definitely delivered something TRULY SPECIAL here.  This is THE MOST I have laughed at the cinema so far this year, but thankfully like its predecessors it’s also got plenty of feels on offer too, meaning that it definitely fits in JUST FINE with the best that its new peers in the MCU have to offer.  Topping this off with a selection of genuinely BRILLIANT inspired soundtrack needle-drops (particularly in the thoroughly irreverent and MASSIVELY disrespectful opening title sequence which sees Wade mercilessly desecrating one of Marvel’s most sacred cows) and a genuinely moving closing credits farewell homage to Fox’s Marvel legacy, the filmmakers have done their material so very proud as well as opened the door to so much fresh possibility in the Marvel Cinematic Universe going forward, and I for one hope this is a sign that things really are FINALLY back on the right track for the series.  Now if they could just get that Blade reboot out of Development Hell (wink wink) …

1.  ALIEN: ROMULUS – Ultimately landing JUST BEHIND a certain other major genre heavyweight entry on my list for the year so far, my (current) number TWO science-fiction film of the year is also easily one of the SCARIEST movies I’ve seen so far this year.  It’s also a very interesting and IMPORTANT film in that it goes A LONG WAY to knocking yet another major cinematic franchise back on track after spending a long while spiralling further and further out of true alignment.  Okay, I admit it, I LIKE Prometheus a whole lot as an actual FILM, but even I can admit that IN UNIVERSE its attempts to connect with Ridley Scott’s own original masterpiece and James Cameron’s (even better) follow-up were clunky at best and downright EMBARRASSING at worst (and in the end, the less said about Alien: Covenant the better, really).  So I guess it’s actually A GOOD THING that Scott took a step back into more of a producing role to allow somebody else to take the reins of this sort-of soft reboot, and it turns out that Fede Alvarez, writer-director of the first Evil Dead remake and Don’t Breathe (as well as the CRIMINALLY underrated The Girl In the Spider’s Web), was the PERFECT CHOICE for this job.  Fitting in somewhere between the events of Alien and Aliens, Romulus sees the dastardly Weyland Yutani Corporation find the blasted remains of the Nostromo floating in deep space, as well as traces of the original xenomorph itself, which they then transport to the film’s eponymous space station, in the orbit of the colony world of Jackson’s Star, in the hopes of exploiting the organism’s unique properties for their own gains.  Something clearly goes HORRIBLY WRONG in the interim, because when a gang of opportunistic young colonists, looking for a chance to jump ship to a freer life in another system outside of Corporate control, sneak onto the station in the hopes of scavenging some cryogenic resources for the journey, they find it derelict and ravaged by some kind of horrific disaster.  Then their poking around sets loose some of the fruits of the scientists’ biological labours, and before they know it they’re neck-deep in facehuggers and more than a few of their bigger brethren too …

Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla, Civil War, Bad Times At the El Royale) makes for a surprisingly robust action heroine in the classic Ripley mould as Rain, her diminutive size belying her character’s feisty determination and wily resourcefulness; Archie Renaux (Shadow & Bone) and Isabel Merced (Sicario: Day of the Soldado, Dora & the City of Gold, Turtles All the Way Down) are both extremely likeable as Tyler and Kay, respectively Rain’s ex-boyfriend and best friend, while Spike Fearn (Tell Me Everything) is kind of a prick as their cocky cousin Bjorn, and newcomer Aileen Wu is standoffish but precocious as talented young pilot Navarro.  The real breakout star of the piece, however, has to be Rye Lane’s David Jonsson, who delivers a spectacularly complex, multifaceted turn as Rain’s adopted brother Andy, a former Weyland-Yutani android dug out of a scrapheap and reprogrammed to protect her by her late father.  They’re all put through hell by the events that unfold within the faltering station, Alvarez turning the screws and fraying our nerves with his characteristic masterful skill as their situations progressively go from bad to worse to truly fucked, all while paying loving homage to the first two movies while also creating something new and fresh for the series if they do decide to move forward from here.  Best of all, though, as he’s always done in the past he largely eschews digital effects, preferring to do as much as he possibly can with physical effects, which makes the impressively icky creature work and seriously NASTY gore all the more delightfully gnarly throughout, with the film’s ONLY bum note being a particularly problematic “resurrection” choice which has already had a great deal made of it in the press, but which I, ultimately, found was actually handled surprisingly well in the end, so that it really didn’t detract very much from my personal enjoyment of the film as a whole.  Rounded off with an evocative and enjoyably old school score from Benjamin Wallfisch (who clearly had a great time channelling both Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner here), this is a rousing success for me, a phenomenal return to form for one of my very favourite sci-fi cinematic franchises and yet another standout offering from one of the very best fresh talents working in horror cinema today.  If he does indeed choose to stick with the property, I think Alvarez could well keep this series fresh and exciting for a fair few years yet.