#heightened emotions and etc i guess but the cut did not serve it well

[coricomile]

Beyond the annoyance that someone as cunning as Ming didn't have at least the millions he's earned as a model/actor squirreled away somewhere outside of his "family" account, beyond the annoyance that surprise!baby was suddenly a plot point- used as actual leverage by Tong multiple times and to present May as a person that's providing an heir instead of an entire person herself that doesn't deserve to be dicked over by Tong- and that Ming's mom flips her standpoint and assistance depending on what the plot needs her to, that First Born Son Mike doesn't have access to a substantial inheritance of his own, that even after Joe had his "fuck off, im not an answering machine" moment to Tong-

The narrative has been pounding it in at every turn possible: Ming's love will always cost Joe his life, even if Ming is doing everything "right."

Joe wasn't even a stand in this time, and presenting it that way via memory clips about Tong in the beginning was cheap. This time, it was 100% Ming and Joe on the same page on who was who to whom, and that was exhausting enough. Joe even said it himself. It was no longer about Tong. Joe is bone tired of this.

But something that's been glossed over this whole time is that Joe has a death wish.

Regardless of how much Wut and (new) Mom and Sol and the stunt team and even Ming have shown that he is loved, that he was and still is important, he always chooses the worst direction to go in because he cannot and will not accept it. There was 0 reasons to take the fall for Tong, and every reason not to, and there is a point where "but he's a good guy!" stops and "he wants everything to finally be over" starts, and Joe has been in camp 2 since before his first death.

[nestofstraightlines]

The Dæmon-Cages

I went to a preview screening of episode six of His Dark Materials,’ The Daemon Cages’, followed by a Q&A with the senior creative last night.

I’m not even going to give broad expectation spoilers for the episode above the cut (I’ll include a bit right at the end under the cut just giving a broad overview of whether I liked it or not).

As for the Q&A, it was very interesting.

The team were asked several questions (by a very positive audience) about themes and research; things like ‘how did you decide which of the many themes to focus on? Did you go back to the inspirational material of the books such as Milton and Blake?’ and I would characterise the answers as a slightly defensive ‘we just went back to the book’.

Call it confirmation bias, but for me that tallies with what I’ve perceived of the writing/creating flaws of the series.

Because what does that mean?

I’ve been going back to the book for 22 years now and unpacking more depths and more angles. It really did feel like there was a rejection from Thorne and series Exec Producer Jane Trantor that adaptation would involve unpacking something and repacking it into your own storytelling form.

Their tone was much more enthusiastic when it came to discussing detail: they talked about wanting to know exactly what every moment of Lyra’s day at Jordan would be, what she would do for breakfast etc. And that’s got merits; it can suggest nice images (I’m guessing this is where the idea of Roger bringing Lyra breakfast every morning comes from).

But for me, in general, it’s an approach that fits badly with Pullman as a source material. Pullman writes intuitively, discovering the story as he writes is.

At one point in Northern Lights he uses the metaphor for reading the Alethiometer that it is like climbing down a ladder in the dark, and trusting that, though you can’t see the next step, it is there. I believe that he was describing his writing process there too.

He writes indirectly, using negative space to let the reader infer a fact or an idea. For example, with daemons. We are told a little and shown a lot. Pullman is showing himself the story too.

I don’t believe Pullman knew when he was writing Northern Lights what Lyra would do for her breakfast every morning. But if the story had wanted to contain a scene set during her breakfast, he would have known.

And okay, different writing processes, whatever. But actually it is fundamental to the text and I think where the problems have crept in.

Genre storytelling can be broken up into two rough camps: character-led and ideas-led. The senior creatives of this programme, almost inevitably coming from a British TV background, fall into the wrong one - character-led.

Now both camps contain both things: if I call a story idea/s-led it’s not saying its characters aren’t important and good or vice versa. It’s about which is the ultimate point o fthe story.

For instance, Harry Potter is, for me, character-led. Its fantasy trappings are rather unpacked or picturesque dressing used to heighten basically mundane human interpersonal drama. Yeah, it’s good versus evil, acceptance versus discrimination, but those topics aren’t explored, they’re not a priority, they’re a situation to throw the characters into.

Where Thorne has worked in genre shows before, the same can be said. There is a specific situation, even a mission statement, but these are not shows constructed around telling an idea as story, but rather focusing on interpersonal drama. The premises are settings, real or imagined, which are already neatly packaged for the audience. They’re not about inventing fantasy, they are about using it to tell small-scale human dramas. Events serve nothing larger than character and relationship drama.

In Pullman’s His Dark Materials, character and relationship drama are a but not the greatest priority of the series, they are in service to broader ideas and themes.

That’s the other camp of genre fiction, where the fantasy is not a static setting used to heighten charater stuff, but an active agent used to tell a particular story.

Calling this camp ideas-led sounds like its an inherently grand sort of a category, and His Dark Materials is of course an example that is grand and important and epic and so on. But for a show to be ideas-focused, it doesn’t have to be a Big Important Theme with Big Important Execution.

Some ideas are ‘what is it to be human?’, some ideas are simply ‘whodunnit?’ or ‘what if a monster got into your house?’

Anyway.

Pullman’s HDM is ideas-led. He creates a world (and later worlds) of things we need to pay attention to. This is not Harry Potter – school, castle, wizards, you pretty much got it – this is unconstructed fantasy. And it’s not constructed for picturesque ends either. Pullman isn’t inventing this stuff because it’s independently cool or pleasing or whatever, or at least not only that. He is creating it to express a set of ideas through the medium of a story.

So story and world are perfectly bound together. And he understands the difference between convincing a reader and making your world CinemaSins-proof. It’s a story, not a world.

The series is over-invested in the details; over-invested in the tools, and misses what they are used to build in the book/s. Sometimes it even breaks what they are meant to build.

I think the failure of daemons is the biggest casualty of this.

At the screening the creatives talked about the challenge there, the unprecedented challenge of making a show in which every human character is accompanied by a unique CGI creation. They mentioned the impossible budget challenge this presented as well as the challenges in visual storytelling and presentation. I.e. even if one can afford to put a whole crowds of daemons in every wide shot it looks impossibly cluttered and like Doctor Doolittle.

And yes, of course, but it baffles – and frankly annoys – me that the imagination seemed to stop there. Or rather, the understanding of storytelling stopped there.

They talked about having spitballed pragmatic adjustments to daemons, such as making them be semi-invisible, flicking in and out of visibility. But in the end they ‘wanted to stay true to the book/s’. Again, I think we’re looking at a profound lack of understanding of what ‘true to the book’ even means.

Creatives more suited to the material would have found creativity borne of limitation. They would have had a deep and confident enough understanding of the idea they were dealing with to find the solutions from within their own storytelling field, to create daemons for screen in a way which worked.

It feels like this teams’ reaction to the challenge has been ‘to do our best and tell people they don’t understaaand it’s haaard when they complain we haven’t got it right’.

I’m sorry if that sounds harsh. But they took on this challenge and there’s a little hubris in that. I’m not sure what made them feel they were the people for the job here, but they’ve failed to convince me of that fact.

People have been telling fantastical and profound stories on screen for a long time before CGI became so photorealistic. And I think CGI has both a limiting effect on the imagination, and it encourages directors and writers with a limited sense of visual storytelling to imagine that they are equipped to deal with stories that they perhaps aren’t, because they can unthinkingly assign fantasy ideas to the ‘literalist CGI’ box.

I just get the feeling that none of the head creatives, as a mix of character-focused storytellers and details-people, really get what daemons are in a storytelling sense.

They mentioned that when they had conversations with Pullman, he advised them not to focus on daemons, that he novel included them only when they were important. And that’s true, and I can’t put words in Pullman’s mouth, but it’s my belief the TV series team misunderstood what he was getting at, and I’m basing that on stuff Pullman has said elsewhere (such as in his essays and speeches collected in Daemon voices) as well as my own reading of the book/s.

Daemons don’t appear important but the story is carefully constructed, without ever seeming to be on the surface, to explore the idea of the daemon.

It’s a practical issue too. You employ people to write and direct this stuff who are used to stories made up of human characters interacting in rooms, and they’re going to lack experience in showing stuff which is vital to this story, which includes the relationship between the human heroine and her shape-shifting animal-shaped companion, a giant talking polar bear, a city in the Aurora Boreales, fights with demons during a hot-air balloon fight and so on.

A lot of the stuff that matter in HDM isn’t just mundane drama in fantastical settings. The most vital emotional scenes include a girl interaction with a giant talking solar bear; the threat tot he bond between a person and their shape-shifting soul-manifestation etc

 The human/daemon relationship is like a lot of things at different times and in different ways: human/animal, siblings, friends, parent/child etc. But it’s not a mundane human relationship clothed in light fantasy disguise. It's an idea and thus needs careful building for screen just as it did on the page.

Russell Dodgson, the head of VFX on behalf of Framestore for the series, talked about how fans always focus on daemons while there are so many more ideas in the book. ‘People love talking animals, I guess.’ He joked.

And OK, he was being off-the-cuff and deliberately glib, and in any case he’s not the writer and thereby not responsible for getting the overall imagining of daemons for this series right. But he’s so off the mark here in a way which helpfully sums up the misses of this team.

Daemons are not talking animals in the book and that is what the series has rendered them as through this lack of understanding that they amount to more than an emptily whimsical note.

EXPECTATION SPOILERS FOR THE DAEMON-CAGES:

... Having said all that; a really great episode! Best episode of the series yet.

It benefits from coming from a part of the book which is perfect for an episode of TV: it is very dramatic and climactic, while also being something of a great self-contained story in form. Lyra goes into a situation with very clear parameters of tension, fears, goals and a ticking clock. The production plays on all of those very strongly.

The weakest element of the episode is predictable given what the weakness element of the adaptation has been all along: daemons of course. As with last week my feeling is that while the show is so far from doing justice to certain ideas and moments it might as well be on a different continent, it finds enough strengths in other areas to stop the bottom dropping out of the episode.

The production design is absolutely incredible. It’s the boldest imaginative leap from the book so far. The staging of some of the events plays out differently due to a differently imagined Bolvangar and I adore the new approach. Again, I’ll have more to say when the episode has aired. I can’t wait to get into the detail of this!

[m0chisenpai]

Dinner is Served

Series: American Horror Story

Paring: Michael Langdon x reader

FIRST OF ALL ITS MICHAEL LANGDON WHAT MORE DO I NEED TO SAY? WARNING IF YALL DONT LIKE CLOOD, KNIVES CUTTING, ETC THEN DON’T READ ITS SPOOKY MONTH SO EXPECT THIS FOR THE NEXT FEW WEEKS.

Your arrival to the outpost along with Langdon’s shocked the survivors. Some happy, the others masking their true emotion. The second the pair walked in, the girl without a gas mask questions were thrown at her. 

Was there hope? Was the sanctuary a myth, and just who would be coming with the pair.

Langdon and y/n were in the guest room that was set up. She lied across the bed much like a cat while Langdon got dressed in front of her. He turned to look back at your her dressed in a black slacks and a matching black button down.

“What do you think love?” He asked holding his arms out. She hummed sitting up with her knees tucked beckoning him forward with a sharp nail.  Once he was close enough she trailed her hands up his arms, and shoulders to wind them around his neck.

“I love when you where black.” His lips curled into a smirk she knew to well and was were rewarded with a deep kiss.

Once he pulled away his eyes locked with her crystal blue ones. “Your hungry.”

“Starving.” You whispered with a pout. Her fingers twirled a stray piece of his hair

“Then let us go and attend dinner.”

You entered the dinning room silently. Your heels echoed as you walked toward the empty seat beside Langdon whose eyes devoured the dark victorian dress you wore.

“Thank you for joining us for dinner Ms.Y/L/N.”

“No i must thank you. Your kindness toward our arrival is quite fulfilling” Venable smiled bowing her head a bit at the girls kind words. While everyone silently ate their cubes the girl simply observed.

The survivors eyed the ruby eyed girl once in awhile. She was used to their stares after all who shows up clean after walking through an extremely dangerous radiation field with no gas mask.

The young couple were not too sharp either with her whispering you could hear her loud and clear. Perks of heightened senses.

“She has not eaten a single thing since she arrived, and god look at that skin. Wonder how much she spent on that before everything happened.”

“You know I heard lots about this skin treatment my friends mom got once did. Costed her nearly a fortune-” “Not a dime actually.” Everyone jumped as she looked at them “and before you ask these are my real eyes. the cost? My morality.”

The girl let out a nervous laugh looking at the boy nervously.

“You are joking right? You were probably one of those young teens that were into body modification” Coco asked her eyes crinkled in curiosity.YN raised a brow picking up the dinner knife. She then stood and held up her arm so everyone could see. She then cleanly cut her wrist across ignoring the screams.

“Are you insane!?” “What the hell!?” “I knew she was a fucking psycho!”

And just as they blinked the cut slowly closed itself up and the blood dripping down her arm stopped as well. 

“Like I said. No plastic surgery.” She picked up her dinner napkin wiping up the blood before it could dry up.

Silence fell over the table. It was beginning to make sense. The freezing stone like skin, and when she head brushed hands with a person passing by shivers ran up their spine. Those clear as blue eyes, and the two sets of canine teeth that shined when she smiled.

“So your...inhuman?” Dinah asked. 

“I guess you could say that. I have no heart beat, no puls-” “You’re a zombie?” Timothy’s remark made the girl chuckle shaking her head.

“No” She held her hand up stopping another flood of questions “while I do love where this conversation is leading Im rather hungry.” She looked over at Michael who simply nodded picking up his own knife. He then carefully cut across holding out the empty cups ice filled with the dark red liquid. 

The guests watched nearly getting sick to their stomaches when the girl took the cup he held out to her and held it to her lips slowly downing it. Once finished she licked the remaining liquid off her lips setting down her cup.

“Are you just going to ignore that psycho just drank a persons blood and cut her wrist an we watched it close up in front of us!?” Coco screamed at Venable who calmly looked at the blonde.

“Langdon informed me of her aliment. Ms.L/N is the supernatural being known as a vampire. Hence why she was able to walk through the radiation without a mask to protect herself.” 

“A vampire?” Emily asked clearly in disbelief.

“Im sure any sane living mortal would not down a cup of a mans blood. Especially not for survival reasons” Y/N chided while she circled the rim of the cup with her nail.

“Her status will not affect any of you. She is here to assist me in this process of choosing who will be admitted into the sanctuary” Langdon stood holding her hand in his “excuse us”

While the two walked out Y/N looked over her shoulder. Each of he survivors felt a shiver crawl down their spine as she slowly turned don her heel exiting the dinner room.

[wildwoodgoddess]

Okay, we need to talk about John...

Absolutely full respect and compassion to everyone who felt triggered by what John did to Sherlock in TLD. I can understand why you’re upset and why you are wondering if John is still a good guy or if he crossed a line that can’t be uncrossed. 

Below the cut, I’m going to take a look at it from a literary, story-telling perspective, so if that’s going to be too spoilery, too triggering, or too infuriating for you, might want to skip this one. 

I’m approaching this strictly as story. Story is there to help us make sense of the real world, to serve as an emotional release, to inspire, to warn, to help us explore ideas, etc. 

But it is not supposed to be the same as real life. Story is better structured, more purposeful, and more deliberate than real life. It’s also more heightened and larger-than-life. 

So none of the below is meant to be taken as justification of real-life violence. This is story. 

I can’t tell you for sure why Moffat chose to have John beat up on Sherlock. And I’m not going to say it was necessarily the right choice—it's art. Declaring an artistic choice to be right or wrong is very subjective and I’m not asking anyone to like the choice he made. 

But I do have some guesses based on literary devices and structure of why he went that direction, so I thought I’d share those with you—and then you can feel about it as you wish. 

First, story structure: 

I’ve discussed story structure in relation to Sherlock before, on my website, and I don’t think I’ve ever transferred those meta to Tumblr yet. 

But basically, there is a set structure to telling a story that most filmmakers (and Sherlock episodes are approached as films) use because it works the best for the audience. And because Sherlock episodes contain an ongoing story arc, we can also apply that same structure to the show as a whole, with S4 (instead of S5) bringing this story arc to a close. 

You can read my meta on that here (I assumed a 5-series arc instead of 4), but the relevant part for TLD is that we’re well past the half-way point, which was the vow Sherlock made at the wedding. 

That greater commitment he made must be tested, and immediately after, he was plunged into more complications and higher stakes. 

At some point in all this testing and higher tension, the hero breaks or seems to have completely failed. This is called the Dark Moment, or Major Setback, or other similar term. 

The dark moment or major setback began with John rejecting Sherlock. I believe it culminated in John beating the crap out of Sherlock, and then saying goodbye at the hospital. 

The dark moment is, as it says on the tin, the bleakest, lowest point in the story. And the deeper you make that abyss, the more rewarding the story will be when the hero finally succeeds. 

One of my favorite writing teachers has the mantra “How can you make this matter MORE?” So many writers tend to pull back, to go easy on their characters. That lowers the tension of the story, it makes the story less impactful. A good story—no matter if it is a quiet, slice-of-life story or a high-octane adventure story—pushes its characters to the breaking point. 

What is the one thing this character would never do, think, or say? Put them into a position where they must do, say, or think exactly that. —Another common advice from the same writing teacher. 

Basically, the Dark Moment should be as dark as you can possibly go within the plausibility of your story. There’s a 10 Commandments of Storytelling list from the author of The Princess Bride going around, and one of the commandments is pretty much exactly this. 

Because this is ultimately a relationship story between John and Sherlock (and it is—whether or not that relationship becomes romantic or not, the structure is exactly the same), at the Major Setback, they had to “break up.” I warned about this in my meta and here on Tumblr. 

And it had to be John walking away. Utterly rejecting Sherlock. That’s how a romance structure works. It’s not meant to be realistic, necessarily. It’s meant to show how the hero and the love interest transcend all odds to find their way back to each other. 

Low stakes in a story are boring. We always say we just want them to be happy. And I think that fluffy, happy fic serves a lovely and good purpose. But an actual TV show that lacks the necessary tension and emotional lows and only gives the emotional highs gets boring. 

It’s cliche, but you do need the bad to appreciate the good—in a story. 

I believe Moffat chose to have John beat up Sherlock because it reaches a lower and darker dramatic point than merely having him reject Sherlock or stop talking to him. He rejected and stopped talking to Mary—his “break up” with Sherlock needed to be bigger and worse and more heartbreaking than that because he and Sherlock are the primary relationship in the show. 

Did that HAVE to include violence? Mmm…perhaps not. But other options would have been yelling horrible things at him. Refusing to see him. …I’m not sure what else. 

John refusing to see Sherlock kind of prevents the story moving forward. There needed to be a confrontation. Something utterly rock bottom. That way, the reconciliation would be more powerful. 

Yelling horrible things at Sherlock would not be as visually interesting as having him “yell with his fists.” Moffat is a screenwriter—a visual storyteller. Given the choice, he’s probably going to pick visuals when he can. 

So, they hit rock bottom, but ultimately, John’s better self prevails and there is a beautiful, poignant reconciliation. 

You are not likely to see the beating addressed in any meaningful way in the show because immediately after the Dark Moment comes the Final Push—the all-out last-ditch effort for survival and to, in this case, beat the bad guy.

Working out John’s physical aggression and anger problems is low tension. It doesn’t add to the high stakes and action that is coming in TFP. They are going to have to fight, together, to beat the bad guy in order to earn their happy ending together. 

And I do firmly believe it will be together. Whether that’s romantic together or platonic together, I don’t know. But the story is about the two of them, always, so obviously the story will end with the two of them happy and together. 

But it’s unlikely that the show is going to have them address the beating in any real-life way because it doesn’t fit into this part of the story arc. We got a sense of John’s regret in his interrogation with Lestrade and in his discussion with Sherlock at the end of the episode. I’m pretty sure that’s all we’re going to get.

What About John’s Character? Was this OOC? 

Not at all. The Dr. Watson of ACD is quite a bit different than the John Watson of BBC Sherlock. Our John has always had a simmering anger about him. He’s always been physical—in good ways and bad. He’s always been a man of action, and not so good with spoken words. 

If he was to reach his breaking point, of course it was going to be physical and violent. Again, I’m not saying this is good. It’s not. But he’s never been a saint.

Larger Than Life: 

Another aspect of storytelling is that you need your characters to have a heightened reality, a larger-than-life quality. Ultra realistic, mundane characters are boring. 

But you also need some sense of emotional authenticity in order to make these larger-than-life characters relatable to the audience. 

This plays out in the way you choose to have your characters express their emotions. It’s not that you try to replicate real life, exactly. In a story, you try to grapple honestly with the experience of being human, but you do it in a way that magnifies it, draws attention to it, and creates an emotional response in the viewer. 

In John’s case, the point was to explore the ripping, violent, overwhelming emotions that come with experiencing a tragic loss, especially one that left loose ends and lingering guilt. The beating was a visceral, visual representation of those emotions. Yes, Moffat could have used words, facial expressions, tone, and Martin Freeman would have done a great job with it. 

But a violent confrontation, as awful as it is, represented those deep, wordless emotions far more effectively than dialogue or other non-verbals would have. It’s not meant to be taken as real life. The emotions, yes, absolutely authentic and real. But the violence—it was a way for the audience to visualize those emotions. 

I don’t think they will handle the aftermath of it “realistically” in the show, and I don’t think we are meant to view it “realistically” either.  

I’m sure that’s going to be a controversial idea. And there’s definitely a conversation to be had about how toxic masculinity denies a man any emotional expression other than anger. 

But I really don’t think Moffat chose the beating because he’s a violent person or enjoys violence or feels like that’s the only way for a man to express himself. 

I think it was an artistic choice based on the John Watson they created for this show and based on what would fit the narrative structure and be the best way to visually portray John’s emotions. Whether it was the best artistic choice is a fair debate--I’m not honestly sure I would have made the same creative choice in my writing. I don’t know what I would alternately have done, either.

What I did love, that balanced out all that ugliness, was when John, in the end, managed to express his emotions and grieve in a way that allowed Sherlock to comfort him. That was healing, that was beautiful. And it sent a clear message that violence wasn’t cathartic, it didn’t make anything better. 

What made it better, was love and gentleness, forgiveness.