#hyper sprinkles and we quote

[royalstarstorm]

NO BECAUSE IF I WERE IN THE EPISODE COBS WOULD HAVE ACCEPTED HIS FATE HAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHA

FUCK YOU COBS YO ASS IS MINEEEEEEE

[and-we-quote-osc]

The Canon Human Gijinkas of The Contestants (PT 1)

1.) Hyper Sprinkles

2.) Buldak 2x

3.) Matcha Mochi

Matcha is the shortest!

[neptunechromo]

(If your requests are open) Can you please draw Buldak 2x and/or Hyper Sprinkles in their canonical human versions?

Buldak2x Has octopus tentacles for hair and an octopus form

here are the hyper spinklez >.<!!

[artfulanimal]

What would (some of) the cast of And We Quote look like if they were in objectified?

More information about each character on @and-we-quote-osc

(Buldak2x/Pasta would be some type of octopus creature, Hyper Sprinkles would be a dragon type creature so you don't need to think much about them.)

Only able to do 5 characters before school but enjoy your objectified-ified ocs 👍👍👍

[papapascal]

Classroom Crush (Pedro Pascal)

The strap of my bag is practically creating an imprint on my shoulder from how tight I was pulling on it, but also because it’s holding two textbooks, a laptop, and a few folders for my classes today. One of my scheduled classes always gets me feeling giddy and nervous all at the same time. Every Tuesday and Friday I attend the same classroom for two different courses, both of them obviously taught by the same Professor.

Today is Friday, and that means I’ll be there for my Feminist Theory class. History has become my passion, but even more now since the man who teaches them is pretty easy on the eyes. There’s nothing more attractive than a man teaching a women’s history class and knows exactly what he’s talking about. Our class is mostly made up of women, and a few men sprinkled about. Let’s just say this Professor has our undivided attention. Half is looks, half is his exuberant personality, which just makes information absorption a lot easier.

“Are you ready for class?” My best friend appears beside me as I’m in route to class, and the smirk on her face was evident that she was teasing me. She knows I have a crush. “You’ve got this little pep in your step. It’s actually quite adorable. Professor Pascal would be flattered to know how excited you are for his class.” She then gives out a laugh at the way I tensed up and focused on how I was walking so I wouldn’t have that ‘pep’ in my step.

Great, now I’m going to be hyper aware of how I’m walking to his class from now on.

“Oh, shut up!” I grumble.

We turn the corner to head down a hallway when we hear music. It gets louder the closer we get to his classroom.

“Is that—“ F/N begins but pauses to listen closer. “Is that Beyoncé?”

We step into the classroom, following behind other students. They start laughing, and I couldn’t figure out why because they were blocking my view, but when they disperse to head up the stairs to their seat, I see it. Our Professor is dancing. Terribly. And every time Beyoncé asks ‘Who runs the world?’ he’d shout ‘GIRLS’.

F/N began to laugh. I cracked an amused grin.

“What is happening!?” F/N asks loud enough so she can be heard over the music.

“Good afternoon, ladies!” Professor Pascal greets us, ignoring F/N’s question and slightly out of breath.

Behind him is a large screen that has a quote pulled up: There is no limit to what we, as women, can accomplish - Michelle Obama.

Once everyone is seated he uses a small black remote that turns the music off. He perches himself on his stool. He looks very sophisticated for someone who was just dancing to a Beyoncé track—a brown cardigan, a white t-shirt underneath, green, baggy pants, and black, shiny shoes. He’s also wearing a pair of black, bulky glasses on his face. His hair looked groomed but also like he just crawled out of bed. It’s hard to explain, but it looked perfect on him.

“Wow, I’m going to be feeling this in the morning,” he jokes before taking a deep breath. “Don’t question it if I end up laying on the floor in the middle of class.”

Everyone gives out a laugh in unison.

“You’re getting too old, Mr. Pascal,” one of the men in the front says.

Professor Pascal shoots him a glare as his hand reaches back and rubs his lower back. “Fuck you.”

We all laugh again.

“Good afternoon, class! Today is March first, which means for the next thirty days we will be celebrating Women’s History Month, although, we should be celebrating our women and appreciating our women everyday!”

Simultaneously, we’re all clapping.

“Lucky for us though, we get to do just that, even when it isn’t March. There’s people in this world that don’t understand why we devote an entire month to women. I would simply ask them, why not? One day isn’t enough to teach the countless accomplishments women have made that have greatly impacted our history…our lives…our world…and as individuals.”

I’m mesmerized by the way the words flow through his mouth without a slideshow. He knows what he’s talking about. He’s a proud man who is proud to celebrate women. He recognizes women. There’s nothing better a man can do.

He goes on to tie in the quote on the screen before he jumps into the curriculum. He keeps his voice loud and clear so nothing is unheard or misunderstood. He’s confident in his education. He loves women in a way it’s harder for other men to do the same. And how do you not form a crush on someone like that? He keeps my faith in humanity alive.

I enjoy the brief moments he lays his beautiful brown eyes on me.

“I’m going to throw another quote at you, because we like quotes in this class. G.D Anderson—feminism isn’t about making women strong…women are already strong.”

There’s a ‘WHOO’ from the back of the classroom.

“It’s about changing the way the world perceives that strength,” he finishes. He’s quiet for a second to allow us to soak in the words before proceeding. “And you know what, I’ll throw another one at you. Melinda Gates—a woman with a voice is, by definition, a strong woman.”

Clapping fills the room.

“We’re going to name off some strong, impactful women. Just throw them at me.”

“Frida Kahlo.”

“Harriet Tubman.”

“Wilma Rudolph.”

“Clara Barton.”

“My mom.”

“Love that answer!” Professor Pascal exclaims, pointing a finger in the direction of a man who said his mom.

“Me!” I answer loud enough.

He claps his hands together. “Yes!” His eyes are wide and practically sparkling. I couldn’t tell if it was just me but he always lights up when I participate. “If I was capable of doing a cartwheel I fucking would!”

“Give it a try,” one of the students call out.

“Alright!” He raises up from the stool, holds his arms up high above his head, and jerks his body to one side, making it seem as if he was actually going to attempt a cartwheel but not. “I’m kidding, I’m kidding!” He chuckles and slides back onto the stool.

“No, try it!” Another student exclaims.

“I think I’ll have bigger issues than a sore back if I attempt it. Knowing me I’d tumble off the stoop here,” he says, hand pointing down to the single stair that creates a step up to the stage-like platform he’s set up on. “I bet you guys would like that, that’s why you want me to do it.”

“Psh, no,” the same guy he cursed out earlier says.

“I’m too old, right, Randy?” Professor Pascal shoots.

I always forget the guy’s name even though him and our Professor always banter during class. They have a great, playful student-teacher relationship. They’re always amusing the rest of the class. Something inside me envies that…

“I mean, you can prove me wrong right now,” Randy says, shrugging.

“There’s nothing wrong with being old, Randy, but if you keep it up you better have quick hands to catch a flying stool. Anyways!” He flashes us a pearly white smile while we all laugh. “We are surrounded by women who are impactful that you forget that you, as an individual and a woman, leave an impact as well. Your actions and voice are just as strong and important.”

He claps his hands together. “Alright, that’s all I’ve got for you guys today! Enjoy your weekend, stay safe, and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“Is there anything you wouldn’t do?” Randy asks.

“Exactly. Go have fun!” Professor Pascal exclaims.

Everyone begins gathering their belongings and filing out of the classroom while he turns the music back on. He’s back to dancing, even a few students joining him while they’re leaving. I giggle while still packing my things, shoving my textbook and unit folder back down into my bag. F/N gives me a little wave as she leaves without me.

All of the seats are empty except where I’m sitting, eventually standing up and slinging my bag over my shoulder.

“I enjoyed your participation today, Y/N.”

I look over to find Professor Pascal approaching me, hands stuffed in his pants and a thoughtful smile on his face to match his kind eyes.

“Oh, yeah, it’s a good class to participate in,” I say, and it’s the truth.

“Gotta keep it lively in here, you know? People should be excited to learn about women. It can’t just be another history class.”

I pull the strap of my bag tight on my shoulder. “You’re doing a great job at it. Probably one of the best classes I’m taking. And really, it all depends on the teacher when it comes to how we absorb the information. You keep it real and exciting,” I say.

He chuckles, and I notice the dimples in his cheeks. They make him appear younger—child-like.

“Well, I don’t want to hold you up any longer. I’m sure you’d like to begin your weekend,” he says.

My brain immediately flipped through anything and everything I could possibly say to get me to stick around a little longer. I’m not quick with thinking when I’m in the presence of someone I believe is attractive—man or woman—but today it’s going at full speed. “Wait, could you maybe help me out with the paper that is due on Monday? I’m almost finished with it, but just need help with a few info pieces.”

“Absolutely!” He perks up and pulls his hands out of his pockets while I scramble to throw my stuff back down into the seat. “What ya got for me?”

I flip the top open on my computer and my paper immediately pops up on the screen since I was working on it earlier during class while he was discussing a topic I’m writing about. “I just need a few more things to back my thesis. Like, I have an idea of something but I don’t know how to incorporate it.”

Professor Pascal sits beside me.

“I wrote down a few potential pieces to add though,” I say as I whip out my unit folder and pull out a loose-leaf piece of paper that had my written ideas and citations scribbled down on it.

He reviewed what I had written down, nodding his head as he read, and I’m assuming liking what I had written. He points out the best ones to back my thesis, and then he’s rattling off more from the top of his head that could strengthen my argument further.

I enjoy being in his presence, especially this close to him. The aroma of his cologne lingers off of him and fills my nose. He smells just as good as he looks. He’s then pointing to something on the screen, but I’m too busy watching his hand to listen to anything he’s saying. There’s a tattoo between the space that separates his thumb and index finger. It looks like a bullseye. Simple, but makes me wonder what the meaning is behind it.

“You still with me, Y/N?”

I snap out of my thoughts the second I hear my name. “Huh?”

He begins laughing at me, eyes scrunched up to reveal crows feet, and his face looking absolutely squish-able. Who knew men could be adorable? “I asked if you were still with me, but I think that ‘huh’ just answered my question!”

“Oh!” My cheeks fill up with heat, so I know they’re tomato red. “I’m sorry, I think I just spaced out a little. Sorry.”

“Here.” His large hand slides the paper in front of him. “Got a pen?”

I reach down into my bag, and my fingertips touch a familiar plastic, and I fish out a pen, handing it to him. He gently takes it from me and begins to scribble down I guess the information I missed. “Apply this to your fifth paragraph.” He writes the number ‘5’ next to what he wrote. “And then this…” he jots down more words, “for your conclusion.” He writes ‘conclusion’ next to that one. “But your paper is phenomenal so far. How you transition between each argument and topic is beautiful.”

I could kiss him right now. I could press my palms against his scruffy cheeks and press my lips against his and just experience the warmth of him, or even his hand against my neck. For someone who is a very proud woman, I’d risk anything to have a chance with him. He’s too professional to sneak around and create a romantic connection with a student like me. He’s older. Way older. It’s unforeseeable to believe he would pursue someone as young as me.

He’s sliding the paper back in front of me. “I enjoy having you in my class,” he says.

We connect eyes, and for a brief moment his eyes flick down to my lips and then back up to my eyes. It could also just be my imagination. I’d be delusional to think he’s attracted to one of his students. It was my imagination.

“Just finish this up on Monday. You can turn it in late, even. A lot of work has gone into this paper, I can tell. Just go enjoy your weekend, okay?” He smiles softly before getting up from the seat.

I close my laptop and slide it into my bag, along with my unit folder that I slid the loose leaf paper into. “So I get special privileges?”

“If you tell anyone I just might have to kill you,” he jokes. “Now get out. You’ve already wasted thirty minutes of your weekend sitting in my classroom.”

“Alright, alright, I’m getting out!” I pull my bag over my shoulder.

“Git! Git!” He’s waving me out like an old man trying to chase me off his lawn. “Don’t touch that paper until Monday, you hear!?”

I give him a thumbs up while I’m scampering out of his classroom.

[m0th-gh0st]

Can you please draw my girly hyper sprinkles???

Moar information on her @and-we-quote-osc and @andwequotecrew

I almost forgot about this my b

(Edit: forgot some of her face decals my bad!!)

[losergendered]

Hi!! It's 🌖☄️ anon :D may I request the following genders:

a term for gender systems that feel like a night sky full of stars; the bluish darkness of the sky is contrasted by the faint twinkle of minor/hyper specific genders while the more prominent/commonly felt genders represent the moon and golden, brighter looking stars.

a gender related to raven wings, broken angel statues, old & decrepit books, the bones of dead animals, medieval human anatomy books, blood, and disembodied hands.

a gender related to white and red snakes, albino cats, white swiss shepherds, themes of ferality & freedom, bullet holes in metal, and deer ribs.

a gender related to black otter rabbits, leather jackets, cyberpunk aesthetics, the dystopian genre, black & white checkered pattern, silver rings, dog tags.

a gender related to charcoal ice cream, black cats, soot sprites, oreos, pastel star sprinkles, speckled cat paws, and manchester roses.

a gender related to beams of sunlight shining through a forest, daisies, aged botany books, reading/studying by candlelight, and the way bubbles look in the sunlight.

a gender related to bearded vultures, silver full moons, heavy chains, bass guitars, record disks, grunge wallet chains, rock music, and punk patched pants.

a gender related to dew stuck on spider webs, poorly drawn stars, space exploration, and the quote “we come alone and alone we die".

a gender related to paintings of sunflowers, flower moss rugs, clementines, orange poppies, stained glass, and painting on random places.

a gender related to winter, cabincore, snowcats (like snowmen), celestial bodies, the moon and its phases, and the color #191f37.

a gender that's related to unicorns, pastel auroracore, rainbow bubbles, white quartz, Aequorea victoria jellyfish, clear holographic plastic, and has a general feel of whimsy.

a gender related to devil horns, heart shaped lollipops, roller blades, dinosaur keychains, beluga whales, Kuromi, deer antlers, and looking cute but being mischievous.

posted! each is in their own separate post :]

[g-perla]

The ACOTAR Series is a Romantic/Gothic Horror Stage and Only Nesta Got the Memo

Not even SJM knows what’s going on.

Ok, this is going to seem off the rails but bear with me.

So I'm a big fan of Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (top 5 books and all that jazz) and I was thinking about it because it deals with themes of the Other and the supernatural, Nature as Character, the overlap of the animalistic and human, blurring of established binaries...fun, Romantic shit like that. Interestingly, this overlaps with how SJM illustrates her world and characters a lot of the time, hence why I was considering it while working on my Nesta project. I’ve mentioned before that Nesta really gives me Byronic heroine vibes and that’s a character construct of precisely this literary tradition.

I started thinking about Heathcliff and Cathy and how they're ridiculously extra and just feel the most intense emotions towards each other but also towards literally everything (nothing half-assed ever, this is a Romantic novel after all). I then remembered how so many people ship them, but like in earnest, in a totally aspirational way. It's not a #cursed ship to them at all. It's...romantic to them not Romantic. I even read often that people quote it at their weddings, specifically the infamous "two souls" quote.

Then I had an epiphany. I was like "wait, what if SJM is one of those people?? What if she has the energy of a Cathy/Heathcliff earnest shipper and that's why all her ships are messy??" Because if that is the case, my friends, oh boy oh boy would it explain so much. I will post some sections from Wuthering Heights:

Doesn’t the acotar series seem like a 1/50 dilution of that energy?? And that is barely a taste of all the spiciness this book has to offer. To illustrate further: SJM gave us the F/eysand suicide pact and the near-death battlefield Nessian scene. One is certainly more outlandish than the other, but both are the result of intense emotions. To that Emily Brontë raises the following: Heathcliff asking the sexton to dig up Cathy’s grave to see what’s up because her ghost has been haunting him since he personally dug up her grave 18 years prior and she has been haunting him ever since. He later demands to be buried in the same exact grave when he dies so they can decompose together. They both married other people though which only adds to the mess. (I am not lying to you the Romantic tradition really gave us these gems lmao. As an aside, Mary Shelley was also a writer of the Romantic tradition and she confessed her love to husband Percy Bysshe Shelley on her mother’s grave. Her mother was liberal feminist icon Mary Wollstonecraft by the way which only makes this even more amazing. Additionally, biographers believe that the Shelleys also had sex there. Talk about Romantic 😉.)

Then I had ANOTHER thought! (Dangerous)

If we read the series from the point of view of just another YA high fantasy things might get a bit boring because the world-building is honestly lazy and the magic system is pretty soft, which isn’t a pre-requisite in high fantasy (The Lord of the Rings has a soft magic system) but it's not the norm and it doesn't pay off in this series. Not to mention that the plot is pretty lackluster and derivative. To add to that the romantic and sexual relationships are questionable in their healthiness and consequently are the source of much argument in the fandom. 

But, dear reader, if we think about the ACOTAR series as being a sort of thematic and ideological 21st century YA homage to the Romantic tradition of the 19th century (within which Gothic Horror also lives), things get REALLY, REALLY SPICY.

No longer do we just have a romance fantasy with messy, hyper-emotional, animalistic characters who constantly partake in morally grey situations rife with dubious dynamics. No longer does plot really matter. No longer do we require quasi-scientific descriptions of the world and the magical system. No! All that matters now are the characters and the mood. Now we have potential! Add a lot of Nature ambiance: expanses of dark woods, great mountains, the unknowable and sublime energy of the ocean, a violent rainstorm/hurricane/tsunami, an impending snowstorm whose intensity reflects the growing emotional intensity of the characters as the story goes along (I’m looking at you impending snowstorm in acofas that curiously matches the growing complexity of Nesta’s emotional state). Blur the lines between any imaginable category: life and death, human and animal, known and unknown, Self and Other, beautiful and monstrous, good and evil, masculine and feminine, the list goes on. Most importantly make your readers uncomfortable by frustrating their desires to sort things into easy binary categories and don’t apologise for making them question their assumptions about the world, morality, gender, and any other kind of previously constructed Order. 

Basically write the story with Dionysus-in-a-Greek-tragedy energy and bring to us mere mortals artful Chaos.

Once that is done we can have a literal Romantic/Gothic Horror story.  The Acotar series could have been this unapologetically, with the added element of being told through the eyes of the "Cathy" character instead of through the lens of a third person getting second-hand accounts about what went on. This whole series is honestly enough of a chaotic mess of Byronic-like heroes and heroines and cursed familial relationships that it could have been that. That alone is peak entertainment. The problem, however, and the main reason why I can’t really say that this series truly delivered this wackiness is that SJM committed the act of not fully committing to the bit (very un-Romantic of her, I know). Now, I am not saying that SJM actually intended this. I’m just saying it really could have accidentally been this genius with some tweaks. Unfortunately, she made the crucial mistake of trying to justify too much, trying to make things too neat, too tidy, too sensical (in other words: the reason we really can’t have nice things). 

I could end this here, lamenting the potential of what SJM had set-up for us were it not for one element, one gift:

Nesta 

OHOHOHO DO THINGS GET GOOD HERE SO BUCKLE UP

Most of the characters refuse to fully commit to the bit in their desire to satisfy modern sensibilities, by which I of course mean they want ridiculous things like political power, to conquer lands, to be a Girl Boss, to get married, have kids, celebrate holidays, converse about mundane things, be relatable, etc. You know, pretty pedestrian stuff that only requires a bit of genetic luck, a sprinkle of energy, and the right circumstances within the world of Acotar. I would like to reiterate the beginning of this paragraph: most of the characters. 

Let’s say you’re stubborn and you decide to still read the series through the lens of the Romantic/Gothic tradition, what happens then? 

The most hilarious thing (for the Nesta stans that is. The antis would probably hate this)

Nesta, based on what we know about her through Feyre and the limited amount of other scenes, is the only character who really takes the performance seriously. She's the only one that SJM hasn't managed to confine through justification. Nesta just shows up and simply refuses to make sense (her POWER what a queen 👑). She is endlessly fascinating because she just exists in her world on her terms, established categories be damned, and in this manner she frustrates not only the sensibilities of the characters in the stories but those of the reader as well. This double duty is, I suggest, the result of the other characters not fully inhabiting the nebulous world of Romantic characters and thus being a little too plausible and understandable even if they are not justifiable. 

Ok, you may say, but I relate so much to Nesta. I do understand her. I don’t justify all of her actions, but I understand where she is coming from. (You’re not alone, friend. I like to think these things too. Alas, we are but plebs).

To that I reply; Nesta does things, certainly, and we can spend hours trying to explain through extrapolation, educated guesses, and personal experience why she did those things, but the fact is we really don't know why. We are never explicitly told. Our insight into who she is and her motivations comes predominantly from the understanding of her youngest sister and from our own interpretation of the actions she takes. I must make clear that our own interpretations are rooted in pre-established assumptions about what is sensical and orderly in our own world and in our own lives. We cannot interpret with the tools available to us that which may be, by definition, unfathomable. It is simply paradoxical. Nesta, as we currently know her, is a construct derived from a limited number of scenes and our interpretations and projections of these scenes. Even the scenes where we get third person narration don’t explicitly tell us her motivations and her logic. For all we know there really is no comprehensible reason for her actions and that is endlessly amusing to me in how utterly Romantic it is. Acosf may and likely will change this of course, but as it stands, Nesta is a whole Romantic character. Her divisiveness in fandom and in the narrative could be due in part to her refusal to fit the discrete categories available in her world and ours. 

Isn’t that wonderful?

To illustrate this a bit more I will share some details SJM gives us about her/ elements she sets up that fit in with the characteristics of the Romantic tradition (these are not exhaustive by any means):

The absolute pettiness (and extra-ness) of being so angry at her father’s inaction that she is willing to starve to death to see if he does something.

How in Acowae she is described as shifting between emotions as if she were changing clothes and feeling everything too strongly (probably to the point of destruction)

She is constantly being compared to animals, even when she is still human. Granted, SJM compares everyone to animals, but that strengthens the blurring of lines between usually discrete categories. It is still most powerful when used as a comparison when she is human because it dehumanises Nesta.

Often, SJM describes her characters as forces. Forces of nature, for example. Acofas is full of details like this in relation to Nesta. There is a storm brewing leading up to the solstice party and it is in full swing when she arrives at the townhouse. The language used there suggests that Nesta herself may be the storm (against the onslaught of Nesta). It really adds to the Maleficent energy tbh.

She is often associated with death post her transformation

She is Other even to Others. She was Made like Elain, Feyre, and Amren in a sense, but the process of her specific transformation differentiates her greatly from the others. As it is, she doesn’t fit in anywhere

Her intense attachment to her femininity and its expression are at odds with the ideas and assumptions about the performance of womanhood and a woman’s role in her world and even in ours. She is unapologetically feminine in her physical presentation, but her character, her thoughts, and possibly even desires transgress the unwritten rules of acceptable femininity (unfortunately there still are abject expressions of femininity in our ‘”progressive” mileux

She displays in many of her actions a disrespect towards authority and to the status quo. This is particularly notable when her intensely polarised sense of right and wrong is aggravated.

Her self-destructiveness. This is referred to most strongly in Acofas, but I would say she was remarkably blasé about self-preservation in Acowar as well

She is described as intelligent, cunning, ruthless, attractive, and prone to debilitating extremes of emotionality. All of these are characteristics of Byronic heroes, a subtype of the Romantic hero

Here are a bunch of quotes that touch on many of the elements that I have discussed above:

“I looked at my sister, really looked at her, at this woman who couldn’t stomach the sycophants who now surrounded her, who had never spent a day in the forest but had gone into wolf territory...Who had shrouded the loss of our Mother, then our downfall, because the anger had been a lifeline, the cruelty a release. But she had cared--beneath it she had cared, and perhaps loved more fiercely than I could comprehend, more deeply and loyally.” 

--Acotar, emphasis mine, note the strong emotions. This is a recurring element for Nesta.

“Cassian’s face went almost feral. A wolf who had been circling a doe...Only to find a mountain cat wearing its hide instead.” 

--Acomaf, animal comparison

“Nesta is different from most people,” I explained. “She comes across as rigid and vicious, but I think it’s a wall. A shield--like the ones Rhys has in his mind.” “Against what?” “Feeling. I think Nesta feels everything--sees too much; sees and feels it all. And she burns with it. Keeping that wall up helps from being overwhelmed, from caring too greatly.”

--Acomaf, emphasis mine

“I knew that she was different [...] Nesta was different [...] as if the Cauldron in making her...had been forced to give more than it wanted. As if Nesta had fought after she went under, and had decided that if she was to be dragged into hell, she was taking the Cauldron with her.”

--Acomaf, Nesta had her own plans for the Cauldron what a queen

“Something great and terrible.”

--Acowar, referring to her eyes. Oooh, spooky Nesta 👻

“The day she was changed, she...I felt something different with her [...] like looking at a house cat and suddenly finding a panther standing there instead.”

--Acowar, a two in one here: difference + animal comparison. Boy does SJM really go heavy when establishing Nesta as Other.

“‘Not in flesh, not in the thing that prowls beneath our skin and bones...’ Amren’s remarkable eyes narrowed. ‘But...I see the kernel, girl.’ Amren nodded, more to herself than anyone. ‘You did not fit--the mold that they shoved you into. The path you were born upon and forced to walk. You tried, and yet you did not, could not fit. And then the path changed.’ A little nod. ‘I know--what it is to be that way. I remember it, long ago as it was.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’“

--Acowar, show don’t tell gets thrown out the window here, but it is useful for the present purposes

“What if I tell you that the rock and darkness and sea beyond whispered to me, Lord of Bloodshed? How they shuddered in fear, on that island across the sea. How they trembled when she emerged. She took something--something precious. She ripped it out with her teeth. What did you wake that day in Hybern, Prince of Bastards?

What came out was not what went in [...] How lovely she is, new as a fawn and yet ancient as the sea. How she calls to you. A queen as my sister once was. Terrible and proud; beautiful as a winter’s sunrise.”

--Acowar, who knew rocks, darkness, and the sea were such gossips, but look how many connections to nature! To be compared to the sea, a significant example of the sublime, is peak Romanticism. If any of you have read Moby Dick, think about what the ocean and the white whale might have represented there and how that might relate to Nesta.

“I think the power is death--death made flesh.”

--Acowar, Feyre referring to the possible nature of Nesta’s power. Alluding to her powers possibly being related to death is quite significant because that is something most of us cannot comprehend, nor can most of the characters. For Nesta, a “reborn” but very much living character to have death associated with her is a strong blurring of the lines. The case of her being labelled a witch is similarly significant as it solidifies the elements of the supernatural while simultaneously comparing her to pretty much the only exclusively female-coded monster in western pop culture. I will touch more on this when I do my study of Nesta through the framework of Barbara Creed’s Monstrous Feminine.

“I am not like the others.”

--Acowar, we love a self-aware queen.

“Nesta took in his broken body, the pain in Cassian’s eyes, and angled her head.

The movement was not human.

Not fae.

Purely animal.

Purely predator.”

--Acowar

There are a lot more details and quotes that support this interpretation, but I didn’t write them all down in my archived notes. This post is obscenely long, however, so even though there is more to be said, I’ll leave it for another day. If you made it this far you really are an MVP and probably love Nesta to a concerning degree like me. Please rest your eyes if you’re actually reading this 😂

I’d love to read about any other takes and thoughts that might have come to your minds after reading this monstrosity,

G

[hollywoodx4]

You all asked for another set of my trash human Hadestown hot takes so.....

I think maybe I should just start from the beginning and go from there, and sprinkle some details in when I think about them. And since you’ve mentioned before that detail is a good thing, I’m going to try really hard to articulate the 500 versions of “I can’t” and “She did that” and “UM” and “GIRL” Also as always, I apologize, but this is honestly a lot of Eva and Reeve heavy content. I love all of the cast, they are all so phenomenally talented and wonderful, but as usual my mind has chosen to hyper-focus on two things so this is what it is.)

(So. I’m thankful for this platform because before my notes were ALL “Um” and “Girl” and now you guys are motivating me to actually write what I’ve been thinking about non-stop all day on my one hour of sleep. So. Thank you! I went about labeling every song-and I actually end up having thoughts for every one, because I went back and listened through and wrote down what I could remember/the things I thought were relevant for the people that won’t be able to see it outside of the boot that literally everyone but me has at this point).

This is only act I. This is a loooooong hot take. This is a lot of Eva and Reeve specific commentary. This is just a lot of commentary. I think it’d be cool/beneficial/whatever to listen as you read? LOL thanks for coming to my actual, legitimate 5 page essay on Act I.

So. My overarching thought of the night (and, actually, I think I mentioned this when I was there two weeks ago too) is that Eva has been playing an incredibly soft Eurydice lately. Compared to when I was there for previews in April, or even back in August, it seems like each time I’ve gone back she just gets softer and softer, and it’s made me so incredibly happy to see her characterization grow. I do see Eurydice as someone who has been through a lot, and does have that tougher skin, and I think that Eva does a fantastic job in representing that in Any Way the Wind Blows. She keeps her voice strong and consistent, and has this look on her face that’s a cross between worry, wavering confidence, and just this tough shell of a girl who’s trying not to look like she’s given up. And this works so incredibly well when she meets Orpheus. Because I’m telling you, the flip in her demeanor happens in the most noticeably beautiful way during Wedding Song. But first, let’s talk about the fact that I’m not sure who decided that it’d be a good idea that Eva play with fire during this song, and aesthetically it’s just such a MOMENT to see Eurydice looking bored, head down on her arms on the table, eyes wide and uninterested/exhausted/hungry as she runs each of her fingers through the flame (and, at times, pauses to inspect the finger she’s just put into the fire, rub it against another finger or the table, and then begin her game again) I don’t know why this has become one of my favorite things about the staging but? I imagine this being something Eurydice just does sometimes to keep herself from thinking about how hungry she is, and it becomes a habit so that in the iteration where they both make it out of Hadestown and live happily ever after Eurydice just does this one time and makes poor Orpheus jump out of his skin worried that she’s somehow going to send herself back down by doing this. Because they still are walking on eggshells about the fact that they made it out and here she is playing with fire, LITERALLY. Okay, moving on....

So. What I like about Wedding Song live is that her speaking voice just. It’s a bit higher, softer. She still carries the teasing tone, but there’s just this incredulous lift in “is he always like this?” and a lot of laughter in “Oooh, he’s crazy.” and Reeve plays Orpheus so sweet and innocent that you can’t help but feel bad for this bumbling idiot stumbling over himself at this beautiful girl sitting there looking completely cool and collected. But. There’s a beautiful thing about the composition and balance Eva is able to maintain in that you can see that Eurydice is openly intrigued, but keeps herself guarded in a playful sort of way. Almost like she can’t keep herself guarded and wants to let her guard down. Her smile kills me over and over again during this scene. Again, Eva’s Eurydice has turned into quite the small, beautiful romantic and I just am so in love with everything that she has subtly changed and morphed, the girl is an absolute QUEEN.

Also, I can’t go any further without saying a big THANKS to Eva for making me cry the SECOND I heard her start to sing Any Way the Wind Blows and just continue that train all night long. What a fucking night.

Okay, so my favorite thing about Epic I is the sheer power that small boy Orpheus has in singing his la laas for the first time. I remember distinctly having the most goosebumps the first time I witnessed this back in April, and every single time it just. Leaves me breathless. And I think now that it’s been a few times, the goosebumps come from knowing how significant this melody will be throughout the show. But Reeve’s facial expressions as he sings them? Make you believe that la is the most important syllable in the dictionary. He closes his eyes and just feels the music and plays his guitar and he is just so phenomenally talented that WOW. Also my favorite small part of this song is that during my favorite line “with them the cycle of the seed and the sickle, etc.” he spins in circles while playing and singing and just. It’s the smallest amount of choreography that feels the most necessary, as if it’s Orpheus becoming so enraptured with the music that he has to move! And it’s in the middle of the tables that are in the “bar,” with the workers and Eurydice looking on and watching him tell this tale. It all feels so incredibly genuine-it makes you believe that Orpheus singing to the workers is something they’ve witnessed, almost something they look forward to when they come to the bar. I think it has to do with the fact that they’re all just watching him, intrigued but also settled in? As if this is routine, this is comfort, his songs are meant for them and for this little community he has. Even when he plays the first note of the Epic they’ve settled in and are sitting up watching him and listening intently. It gives his character a lot of soft power and dynamic without having to say anything, establishing him as an integral part of this life without so much as a word.

Uhhh Living it Up On Top is just my most favorite feel-good bop. Why? Because of the ensamble. Watching them dance is a blessing. It honestly feels like watching a fucking family reunion freestyle dance party every single time. You can physically see and feel how close this cast is; they make faces at each other, they laugh, and also this instrumental break included the Eva Noblezada booty drop which is EVERYTHING. And she also did a full leg extension kick this time which. Girl. Save some talent and cuteness for everyone else. I also find it extremely appropriate that during all of this kickass dancing and partying our boy Orpheus in all of his gangly, limbly qualities can be found sort of flitting around the stage, taking Persephone’s coat, then Eurydice’s, then putting things away and moving around giving out the cups to toast- like. It’s lowkey established in this scene that he’s 10/10 not the cool and effortless one in this relationship and is the cute small boy child. And I don’t know if that’s because I think that Eva’s really cool and charismatic and Reeve is a bit more shy in a crowd situation, but that’s 100% how this comes off to me/how I perceive the characterization and I’m here for it. And when the line “to the patroness of all of this, Persephone” came up Reeve was like 10 octaves higher than the cast recording, all squeaky and flustered. And then between that and his next line, he took a breath and smiled the big stupid baby Orpheus smile that makes him so charming-if you weren’t rooting for him before now you’re messed, but after the smile? And the high-toned, flustered rambling toast? Makes it impossible not to love him. (Also “to the world we dream about…” is my most favorite Hadestown quote so. I choked because every time I hear it, especially as genuine and sweet as Reeve says it as he looks out at the crowd, and then at the audience, is just. It makes you feel the reality that this show crosses with its messages and its story as a whole). And then after they drink their toast they all sputter and cough, and then the ending when they all sing “HOW ARE WE LIVING IT” it literally is so powerful and dynamic, I love this ensemble so fucking much. Their energy truly fuels the show. We are blessed.

OOOOHKAY CHILDREN BUCKLE UP FOR ME BEING DECEASED. Because All I’ve Ever Known? Um Eva, what the fuck? In a good way. In the way that the second she started singing I started crying immediately. Because I’ll say it again, she’s just become so soft and romantic that I can’t even handle it. The distinct memory I have from this song (where I literally almost hit my cousin because I went from heart-eyed staring with no breathing and my head in my hands like the stupid hopeless baby lesbian that I am to breathing everything in all at once and coughing a BIG cough of just. Literally just love.) During “You take me in your arms, and suddenly there’s sunlight all around me” Orpheus holds Eurydice with her back to him, and she opens her arms and sings about the sunlight. And I fucking SWEAR TO GOD the smile on her face. Like. Big, wide, eyes closed, you’d 100% fall in love with her the second you saw it too. I don’t know how you couldn’t. She just looks so incredibly happy and peaceful and this is the moment she completely drops her guard (although I’ll say that I believe a lot of it is dropped earlier along. But this moment is a transcendental experience) OH ALSO during the violin instrumental she literally does this like. Handstand split Over Reeve’s head that is so poetically beautiful (that entire choreography is, like. It really just makes the love feel so incredibly palpable, and the fact that this is the turning point of moments where suddenly there are NO MOMENTS where they’re not all over each other is just. It’s a moment.) And then they kiss and it’s flawless and I sob profusely at how beautifully done this entire choreography/moment/existence of two souls happens.

Way Down Hadestown also includes two of my favorite moments; Amber Gray dancing with her body at a 90 degree angle, head looking at the floor, and Orpheus and Eurydice peacing out and sitting to the side sharing a bar stool unable to keep themselves away from each other. Which. Is everything to the point where I literally told my cousin to watch them during this song. Because. His ear kisses (which. I hyperventilated about for like 3 paragraphs back in the beginning of October) are SO MUCH (so tender. So soft. The brushing back of the hair over her ears and the soft spoken words and the head on her head make me want to careen into an abyss and fall in love immediately) but I love them with all of my heart, he is so soft and gentle and it literally feels like such a moment being intruded upon that this is the way these two characters were meant to be played and I will accept nothing else. Also, Eva’s little minor chord, jazzy vocal moment during the last “way down under the GROOOOOOOUND is so beautifully done, I can’t believe she exists and just acts like it’s not a big deal that she can just. Be that good. And I also love the way that this moment is staged; Hades and Persephone are standing on the center turntable, and at those last few “way down, Hadestown, way down under the ground” after “kind of makes you wonder how it feels,” right when it kicks back into the faster tempo the turntable starts to descend. And there’s some fog, and they all stand and watch them go under the ground, and when Eurydice sings the last “way down under…she moves closer to the now hole in the ground and looks deeper, as if she’s so curious as to what is going on.

A Gathering Storm/Epic II I just like that in the OBC recording, Eurydice sounds kind of salty when she says “well, until someone brings the world back into tune, this is how it is.” But I think that it’s perceived more as a kind of matter-of-fact thing, as if watching Persephone descend has brought her back into her shell a little bit, set off some anxieties. She shrugs her shoulders and looks complacent, as if to tell him without as many words that she’s done this before, this is old news, this is going to happen. And when he says “he came for her too soon,” it’s rushed and quiet, but frantic, as if the entire weight of the situation immediately has been cast on his shoulders. And for the most part, that’s all I’ve got for him. The real superstar in this scene is the fucking imagery used to introduce the workers, and the symbolism of the workers AS THE WALL.  So, when he says “With a million hands, he built a wall” the workers ascend from the center turntable in that really tight knit formation we’ve all seen pictures of and it’s just. Watching them in their uniforms come up as he’s talking about this big, brilliant wall and the workers begin to move in unison, then begin their chanting???? The lighting changes, the entire feel changes just based on the workers chanting and really having this ferociously unified choreography. And the most intense facial expressions ever. And they move from the center turntable to the outsides, and then fucking Hades and Persephone come up when the transition happens to Chant and it’s. All you need to completely transform a set is the lighting change, the workers, and the turntable. It’s the most incredible thing to witness this and feel like you’re in a completely different place.

Also, I just always feel for Eurydice in this moment. Because. She’s trying so hard to communicate with Orpheus, who’s standing at the bar stool they’d had their moment at during Way Down Hadestown writing this song, and you can see that she’s trying to be supportive but when she says “is he always like this?” it’s just. Exhaustion. And she says it so much more quiet and defeated than she does on the OBC. It’s heartbreaking. Because at the same point you’re watching Orpheus struggle to write this song, closing his eyes and tapping his feet and just trying to feel and let that feeling translate him into the rest of this song but it just won’t come, and you can see his growing frustration in his furrowed brow and his closed eyes. What I noticed is that during Eva’s little solos “Trying to trust that the song he’s working on is gonna shelter us…” / “I’m trying to believe that the song he’s working on is gonna harbor me from the wind” She hasn’t gone up on the last little phrase like she does on the OBC, which is one of the things I find to be so powerful on the OBC. And it’s still beautiful, but I’m wondering why she’s seemingly been choosing to go down instead of have that little moment of vocal power. OH ALSO. When she says “Give that back! It’s everything we have!” Her voice was BROKEN. And by that I mean she sounded so worried and devastated that. It just. Her voice was cracking as she pleaded for the fates to leave her alone and it was so immensely wonderful, but heartbreaking. Because as she struggles with the fates and their winds, and they rip her possessions from her one by one, she shrinks further into herself as she tries to buck up and continue fighting. But you can see as each thing gets taken (her backpack, her coat, etc) she grows more and more devastated and frightened. And then when they take her jacket, and she has nothing left, and she sings “SHEEEELTER US, HAAAARBOR ME!” She’s on her knees with her head in her hands, rocking back and forth and it is torturous to witness because you just want to cry for her. And Eva’s such a fucking powerhouse that you can feel the raw emotion, the fear and the devastation, and it just consumes. It’s amazing to be broken by Eva Noblezada over and over again, and that’s what she does this entire show. She is phenomenal.

Hey, Little Songbird is a song I don’t really have a lot of notes for. But the one note I do have is that Patrick Page makes everyone so in awe and also slightly frightened or incredibly woke (the amount of small whispers in the audience that compare him to a certain man of political power are to be expected, but always are significant) He also just. Skeeves me out so much in this song, and Eurydice is so broken already that it’s kind of like. She’s resigned and having trouble making sense out of anything that life has just thrown at her, and she keeps going to hold herself because she’s cold and hungry and tortured, and she just. Honestly, she makes the choice seem like one that Eurydice had to make because she looks so lost and hungry and upset and unable to hold herself up anymore that the choice doesn’t seem like a misguided one.

When the Chips are Down If I could have as much talent in my body as these girls have in their pinky finger I’d be set for life. Also, now’s a good time to mention that I had the extreme pleasure of seeing Jessie Shelton step in as a fate and it just. It was a wonderful experience, that girl is incredible. I saw her in August as Eurydice and she did a fantastic job (my only note back then had been that her chemistry with Reeve hadn’t been as strong, but I loved what she did with Eurydice-making her more badass and thick-skinned and over-it and also I genuinely don’t think that the Reeve-Eva chemistry can be matched.) But the flawless nature of these three souls singing together and just. Being the shit-eating-grin, fun to fuck you up, take no prisoners voices inside of your head? It just furthers the interpretation that they are the voices in your head amplified, because while they’re sort of doing their mockery of Eurydice/pushing her for her choice/etc. she covers her ears at one point they’re taunting her and it just. It feels to me as they’re pushing her around that they’re the personification of the battle inside of her heart as well, and she can’t escape the turmoil.

Gone, I’m Gone Me crying because I knew Wait for Me was coming so I was digging through my bag for my tissues and gently laying some on my cousin’s lap. (she hadn’t done a full listen-through of Hadestown before either, so I just. Gently prepared her for what was to come without saying a single word.

Wait for Me Okay, how detailed can I go? I don’t know how to fully capture the immense, all-encompassing, my heart is literally stopped inside of my chest but also full-on beating heavy as possible feeling. The second the first notes started the tears started pouring. I have such a fond memory of seeing this for the first time that every time afterward, I just. MY body kicks into this mode of complete and utter captivation. I’m also an empath so getting to experience a room full of people on the edge of their seats, dead silence, utter captivation and zero breath…..I will never forget this feeling. When I saw Hadestown back in April while it was still in previews, this song was given a 3 minute standing ovation��.everyone was just struck and unable to handle the raw emotion. And it still rings true to this day-I was clutching my tissue with such force, watching the lights swing and the workers and their lamps through my tears. The most powerful moment is when the workers come out with their headlamps, and it gets dark-you wonder where you’re being transported to next. It’s a tethering atmosphere. And then, when they plug the lamps in and send them up? When the lamps begin swinging and their lights swing over the audience, casting this brilliant movement and shadow into the air? It holds so much mystery and hope and it gives off this incredible, indescribable power. And the power of the chorus singing along with him? It doesn’t feel like they’re the workers singing along. It feels like Orpheus’s love is so strong and so powerful that the workers are actually just his voice amplifying and exploding and CAREENING AND CREATING ALL OF THIS FUCKING POWER FROM HIS SONG AND HIS LOVE. And also, during the la la las around 1:40 on the OBC recording, when it gets soft and quiet, that’s when the lamps go up into the air, and there’s a rumbling and some fog and the set sort of opens up to reveal sections of bright lights that glow warm, and red. He’s opening the fucking stone wall with his song, people, and it’s the most brilliantly moving staging I have ever seen. Again, you don’t need one million props to captivate an audience. It’s the way the story is told and the music is composed and everything working together. I love this. I love that nothing distracts from the moment, that the las and the workers elevating his voice and the movement of the set and the lights and the fog all come together as one coherent set piece instead of parts of a working machine. It feels so natural that you believe that Orpheus is actually opening the wall with his voice. This piece of theatre is so transcendental that you forget that you’re not actually there. Props to Reeve Carney for existing because the way he performs this song is just so captivating and pure, and you can see the desperation in his eyes but you can also hear it in his voice; it’s more strained (not in a bad or unhealthy way at all, I just mean that it’s like. The culmination of his efforts from the Epic and how hard he was concentrating have elevated his power and he’s just fully unleashing it) You can physically see what I believe-that this strain, this hurt and this hope and this desperation are what lead him to opening the wall. He was able to do it because as he was singing, he was clearly just hurt and so damn determined that he just. He had this red-cheeked, hard-lipped expression while he sang and his body (which I lovingly describe as gangly and limbly) is just. In a power stance. Like. You fully believe in the power of this man during this song, he gives it everything and he is a good portion of the reason it carries its power so immensely through the audience. There’s not a dry eye in the house after. And what I love is the collective, disbelieving mumblings of “oh my god” or “wow” or “he’s incredible” that echo through the room as the applause happens (and lingers, and lingers, until Why We Build the Wall cues us to take a fucking breath) (and the subsequent chatter of people basically asking if what they just watched was real, unable to not mention it during intermission).

Why We Build the Wall This is another one of my all-time favorite Hadestown songs. It just hits so hard. And for a while in the very beginning, I wondered why they didn’t end Act I with Wait for Me. I understand now. I don’t think I fully appreciated this song during my first few listen-throughs, and possibly not even after the first time I saw it. I think that this song deserves to be there because while Wait for Me has a lot of emotional lift and power and just pure mass to it, Why We Build the Wall holds its power differently. It makes the audience kind of shift in their seats, come back to the world we are in, kind of step back from the beautiful show of powerful love and hope and dedication that is Wait for Me and remember that oh, this is what’s going on on the other side. This is the man that’s trying to take everything away from Orpheus. And Patrick Page is such a gently commanding presence during this song-he is strong, and powerful, but in a way that feels scarily easy to him; like he is so confident in his power that it translates to this easy, call-and-response conversation because he knows his workers have no choice but to answer him and to appease him. Also the workers? In this song? Are a sheer force of nature. They look to the audience as they respond to each phrase Hades sings with these set-in-stone, serious, hardened expressions that match each other, and are perfectly in-synch. That’s what terrifies me about the Workers, is that they are so in tune to each other that it truly is like watching a wall, or a well-oiled machine. They do such a beautiful job in creating this sense of unease that this song was absolutely meant to be the ending of act I; they drive you to tears and ferocious emotion with Wait for Me, but they keep you unsettled and uncomfortable and stirred by Why We Build the Wall. And that, my friends, is why this musical was nominated for and won so many Tony’s. Because of it’s ability to make you feel, to ponder and to talk and to interpret. This show is so unique, and wonderful, and full of incredible things that I am always just in awe of it every time I see it.

Carry-Over notes: I skipped around a lot of my notes from the night of the show just because I couldn’t fit the less articulate with my actual thoughts post-show. I listened to the entirety of Act I while doing this, and took notes to the best of my ability and what I could remember.

·        Eva Noblezada is such a soft human being, she is a treasure to this earth and I fully support everything she’s done with Eurydice thus far; soft doesn’t mean weak, and she translates that really well to the way she chooses to carry her. She is a strong woman, but she is so fucking in love that she is also so soft and pure. But you still wouldn’t fuck her up ever

·        A good chunk of my notes from that night are about how Reeve singing the la laas in Epic I is a transcending experience, and how his soft and genuine and gentle expression made me break down immediately, and it can be felt in your soul.

·        I also mention about 100 times that Reeve is 10/10 the only boy who has my heart because he is so artistically passionate and just really really fucking good at what he does (and so, so soft especially in the Orphrydice moments and what I’m calling his making Orpheus canonically obsessed with kissing Eurydice’s ear/side of cheek/neck it is THE SOFTEST MOST PURE THING)

So sorry. This is the longest of ramblings. But you asked for details and honestly I’m really excited to be able to have these long ass notes to save and keep with my playbills to show in the future with my kids or the patrons of the Broadway themed café I want to open when I’m a mid 40s lesbian with a wife and maybe some adopted kids.

[hypeathon]

RWBY & Cinematography, Part 1 - Establishing Techniques

Animation has for a long time now struggled to crawl out of the stigma of appealing only to a younger audience. Combine that with internet animation in particular being very young compared to other film-making mediums, and you have projects within the platform that need to go through much trouble to make a name for themselves. RWBY is no exception to this, as from the beginning it has faced a lot of harsh ridicule by critics who are fans of anime, the very medium the web-series takes direct inspiration from. And despite having a growing fanbase and the production having come a long way in just five years, there are some aspects of the show that even much of its fans have neglected to refer to. If there’s one growing part of RWBY’s presentation that especially deserves mention. it would be the cinematography.

As stated previously, RWBY has always been inspired by and even aimed to emulate anime. As a cultural medium of entertainment, anime has been the pigeon-holed for its various tropes. The tsundere archetype, beach and hot spring scenes, shonen training arcs, transfer student character introductions, etc. And while the dismissal of seeing some the same tropes in many titles every season, every year is understandable, anime as a visual-storytelling medium has been cultivating itself for the past 60 years. With that much time, many names who have taken the positions of directors and storyboard artists in their careers alone have developed recognizable cinematic techniques. One example is Osamu Dezaki. Most may not have even heard of him due to his passing in 2011 or his works due to how old they are. But one may faintly recognize his techniques he pioneered that are casually sprinkled in many anime. Take the “postcard memories” technique for instance, a way of freeze-framing a shot into a hyper-detailed, sketchy still. It’s something meant to make the subject of such shots feel especially tense, mesmerizing or impactful and it can be seen in various works that some fans today have been exposed to like Sailor Moon, Kill la Kill, & One Piece.

And Dezaki is just one name that uses certain techniques to create a vision in anime titles. There are many others who have gone to either provide storyboards for or direct some shows and films well-known within anime fandom to this day. With Takuya Igarashi, the director of Ouran High School Host Club, Soul Eater, Star Driver, Captain Earth and Bungo Stray Dogs, his works commonly have vivid colors and lighting through windows and characters on symmetrically-opposed sides to convey the contextual mood. Then there’s Shigeru Yamauchi, the director of Casshern Sins, Dream Eater Merry, A Town Where You Live, the 8th, 10th, & 12th Dragon Ball Z films, Digimon: The Golden Digimentals, and a storyboard artist of episodes of many, many anime. Yamauchi is especially known for having whole scenes depict close-up shots of a character’s face or showing half of their bodies and having settings be done in a specific, sometimes monochromatic color schemes that feels like something out of a painting. There’s also Naoko Yamada, a name from studio Kyoto Animation who has developed a resume of directing shows and films like K-ON, Tamako Market & A Silent Voice that, despite them mostly having a moe vibe through the character designs, are deceptively-enriched in scenes shifting from bright, pastel colors to more dull colors to provide atmospheric moods and having characters express themselves not through their faces but other ways such as their legs.

There are far too many names to point to, but even ones who have yet to direct a whole anime, manage to apply their cinematic ideas into episodes of anime. Even something like Dragon Ball Super, a recent installment of a popular shonen franchise that’s often dismissed for having characters mindlessly flying and throwing beam blasts and fists, can be known for having episodes with competent stage direction depending on who is working on it.    

With all of that said, it’s worth bearing in mind that RWBY, like the many anime it takes inspiration from, could also be credible for having and applying cinematic techniques. But this wasn’t always the case. Back in volumes 1 & 2, the process for storyboards would be led by Patrick Rodriguez, who is known for designing various characters in the show like Ironwood, Amber, & Tyrian, with the rest of the team consisting on Miles Luna & Kerry Shawcross, the writer and director of the show respectively and the animators. The problem however was that even with the storyboard team set up this way, scheduling was very tight, to the point where there was either little time or no time to make the boards for the show. Although the first two volumes were not entirely void of enticing shots, this led to needing to resort to basic camera shots and on few occasions, incomprehensible ones. By volume 3 however, this process changed. Among the many changes in the production pipeline, one of them was the overhaul of the storyboard team to be led by Joe MacDonald, an animator during volume 2 who had nearly 30 years of experience in the creative entertainment industry, with a newly established team consisting specifically of storyboard artist. The second was introducing a complimentary camera & layout team, also led by Joe MacDonald with some of the storyboard artists overlapping. Finally, the third was creating a camera bible. To quote from one of the storyboard and layout artist, Rachel Doda, in the volume 3 audio commentary:

“It was mentioned earlier too in some other commentary, but we originally created like a camera bible or at least tried to create like, stage direction in terms of just… hey! Ya know, If it’s a shot of Ozpin, it has to be kind of stagnant because he’s the most level-headed. And if it’s a shot of Ironwood, usually, they just, ya know, it has to be like he’s in power. So the camera has to be low to the ground. Then, ya know, just like all the characters themselves. Qrow has a little hitch to stuff.”  

Since volume 3, the camera served as was a big way to help express the position or mindset of various characters. Take the character, James Ironwood as referred to earlier. Compare most of his shots in volume 2 to his shots in volume 3 & 4, and the differences in his scenes will feel more apparent. Camera manages to communicate when he feels it’s important to be authoritative and when to be more reasonably submissive. And that’s the key word: “communicate.” If Rachel Doda’s words as quoted are of any indication, then multiple elements in cinematography such as lighting, color, transitions, framing, staging, & character posture could be at play to sell and help deeply interpret meaning behind character’s thoughts and intentions.

In the case of volume 3 where this major shift in the show’s direction began, there are several scenes that became very striking to this day. One of the biggest examples is this shot of Pyrrha witnessing the Fall Maiden, Amber in a comatose state in chapter 6. When watching it the first time, one may think that match-cutting from Pyrrha turning away to showing Cinder at the stadium is simply meant to indicate that Cinder is Amber’s assailant. But there’s also a matter of Pyrrha feeling bound to take a risk of having her destiny be Amber’s and not hers compared to Cinder who wants nothing more than to become the very thing the former hesitates to be. Pyrrha feels she can’t avoid any of this and is thus overwhelmed as shown in chapter 8 when she can no longer even attain peace of mind from a simple leaf falling towards her in a burning sunset, all of which from that point on referred to the Fall Maiden in her mind.  

Though as much as volume 3 had its strong sense of visual direction, RWBY’s fourth volume arguably pushed the direction further through a variety of ways. While it has been criticized for spreading its story too thin by jumping between multiple plot points, some scenes in plot points tied to certain characters can contain some strong cinematography. Take for instance Cinder’s training scene in chapter 11, which by itself doesn’t seem to say much. But think about the Grimm she fought. They were a bunch of Beowulves and a Beringel, which are the same creatures of Grimm that Ruby Rose fought in the character short. Although Ruby takes longer to defeat her foes than Cinder, the former is shot to end her fight triumphantly while the latter is shown exhausted and has to catch her breath after her bout. All of this can be interpreted as an inadvertent way of presenting how even more salt is poured to Cinder’s wounds.

Another example in volume 4 are scenes of Weiss in the Schnee mansion in chapters 2 & 11. When comparing side-by-side, the shots themselves are practically the same but with three key differences. The first is the lighting, the second is Weiss’s facial expressions and body language, and the third is the fact Klein is accompanying her in the same shots in chapter 11. These shots show very effectively-opposite meanings with Weiss’s character who is first seen feeling lonely and submissive despite being in a fancy, spacious, brightly-lit home only to be feeling more defiant and at-ease when she has Klein to help her escape the home we learn she hates.

It’s this use to linking shots in different episodes that also sheds light to the context of the song “Mirror, Mirror”, which frankly never made much contextual sense up until this point. How can someone who carries pride in her family name be the loneliest of them all as the lyrics go? Well, this visual direction sums up why. Her father and his business-oriented ambitions created a growing rift in her family and she needs someone she can trust to be empathetic towards what she’s feeling. This is also why she felt hurt when she found out Whitley never really intended to look out for her. Combine these moments with shots of her witnessing the Atlas ships passing by her window in chapters 1 & 7, only to finally manage to leave in one by chapter 12, and you have a phase of Weiss’s character story packed with meaning.

There’s also quite a few cinematic techniques regarding Qrow in volume 4. One of the biggest cases is the use of a low light by his side with whoever he talks to about Salem. In times where connection to other Kingdoms in the World of Remnant are cut-off, Qrow welcomes or advises cooperation with other characters out of necessity. Warm lights such as lamps and campfires help illustrate this. With Qrow and Raven in chapter 4, the lamp on the table is closer to the former than the latter who only wants specific information and will otherwise walk away (or make a portal in her case) towards the darker side of the Tavern. And then there’s chapter 8, where Qrow informs team RNJR with as much information about everything to do with Salem and the fall of Beacon as possible, leading to well-presented shots of Jaune stepping briefly outside of the campfire due to his anger and wavering trust. Even this shot where he bluntly referred to Qrow’s motives as using his teammates as bait is framed to show his stance on who he was looking out for and who he wasn’t. Most interestingly though, is this shot here of Qrow framed to be surrounded by the campfire as he describes his semblance. While the cinematic techniques in some scenes can be admittedly up for debate, this shot was actually confirmed by Kerry Shawcross in the volume 4 director’s audio commentary to have been drawn by Rachel Doda and was highly approved after going through every department in the production.

“We uh, the shot inside the fire, was definitely one of the shots that we had uh, Rachel had the idea to do while we were boarding, Rachel Doda. And uh, I told her, “absolutely draw that! I make no promises that’s going to make it all the way through. But every next department after that I explained the shot and it was like, “no, we should do that!” Um, so yeah, it was one of those things where it was like, it was just such a beautiful shot that everyone wanted to make it happen and everyone went out of their way to make it happen.”

One of strongest cases of visual techniques applied though was in the forest scene in chapter 2. Here, we see Jaune, an often talkative character in previous volumes, be unusually silent and uttering only shouts and out-of-breath exhales as he trains through Pyrrha’s recording. He is mostly alone in the dark forest with shades of dark blue and green and bright, blueish lights illuminating his armor. Most fans who see this scene are struck by the music and Pyrrha’s words and Jaune’s determined, yet saddened facial expressions. Alone, those aspects are effective at the scene being a tearjerker. But there’s one other element, a visual one that can add a whole level of meaning: the fireflies.

In Japan, fireflies are theoretically that of Hitodama or “human souls” drifting in the night when away from their bodies. If we were to apply this motion to the forest scene in chapter 2, then the fireflies could be visually representative of the lives lost in Shion village. Thus what Jaune could’ve felt was not sadness for not being able to stop Pyrrha, but for being unable to do anything about tragedy of the villagers. Now to some, such an interpretation may be considered reading a little too much. While that response is fair, bear in mind that the villages seen in volume 4, Shion, Higanbana, Oniyuri and Kuroyuri are all named after flowers with specific meanings in Japanese, the matter of fireflies being that of human souls may not be that unlikely.

“I’m just tired of losing everything.” - Jaune Arc

If there’s any set of scenes that are arguably as striking in visual direction as in chapter 2, if not more-so, it would be in scenes of Ren and Nora in chapters 10 & 12. There’s the matter of how the reveal of Ren’s semblance after cutting from the shot of the lotus flower is representative of how a real lotus flower can bloom after being submerged in mud. There’s also the shots of Nora desperately holding on to Ren’s hand, one of which is out of fear of being left alone when they were kids while the other is to prevent Ren from risking being killed due to anger and reckless abandon. But probably the most powerful moment of stage direction is of this moment here.

That there concisely explains what Nora means to Ren. Bear in mind, Ren is a very quiet, calm & collected character. He’s the opposite of Nora in that regard, who wears her enthusiasm on her sleeve and openly express how much she enjoys Ren’s company. But up until this point, we hardly seen Ren’s perspective about Nora other than the occasional subtle smile at her antics. It’s not until the scene underneath the house in chapter 12 that we see what Ren sees when Nora is deeply saddened to the point of being in tears, something viewers have never seen her current express before. In his mind, Ren briefly sees the same frightened girl who he first met and swore that they would keep each other safe. He is all Nora has and if he realizes that if he gets himself recklessly killed, then she’ll be alone all over again. And that’s the last thing Ren wants to happen.  

Even after all of this is said and done, there’s still more examples of scenes with visual direction to be unpacked and interpreted in volume 4 alone. But those can be talked more depth another time as they help compliment scenes in the focus of the next subject to be talked about in part 2.

[karanguni]

Yuletide Recs

I am supremely, supremely late to the game, but here we go! I was incredibly spoiled this year by five (!!!) full-length fics in the main collection. Each and every single one of them was tailored to my letter, and so I am just a bundle of much exclamation and throwing up of hands in the air in glee. Going chronologically: Machineries of Empire - Mirror, Mirror E, 10K, Kujen/Istradez, incest, mpreg, and a few more warnings that you should read if you click through 10,000 WORDS OF KUJEN FUCKING UP ISTRADEZ TO MAKE MIKODEZ CRAZY. I’m not sure I need to say more, yes? Kujen, in possession of a sick and twisted mind, goes forth and does what he does best. This one is a little hard to pick up if you don’t know the Machineries canon, but that just makes picking up the Machineries canon a good idea, eh? Rush (2013) - What Still Remains E, 4K, James Hunt/Niki Lauda Besides the fact that I’ve hit the porn lottery this year (including, in this fic, some incredibly lap sitting by someone who gives not a single fuck that he’s never sat on anyone’s lap before), this fic brings Niki Lauda so wonderfully to life in all his high-competent, super-prickly, but baseline-emotional glory. Then throws James Hunt at him. If you like reading about F1 drivers who will fight through anything, including catastrophic accidents and wayward rivals, this is for you. The Left Hand of Darkness - Mirage and Memory M, 1K, Ashe/Therem This was my year for tragic incest, emphasis on the “tragic” for the two marvellous Left Hand fics I received. This is one canon where fix-it never quite worked for me: part of Estraven’s draw as a character is that he is fatally doomed, and that works on a lot of levels - not the least of which his personal life. This fic demonstrates the terrible and icy slide down the road of good intentions: good people in pain, and in love, can make bad choices. Machineries of Empire - Hell of a Spread M, 3K, Istradez/Mikodez Holy hell, this fic. The language is smoking. The worldbuild is a rollercoaster ride down the tunnels of galactic sci-fi. Even if you don’t know the fandom, I’d recommend reading it just for the lushness of the prose and the sharpness of the character voices. Then add on the chocolate sprinkles of a hyper-competent Istradez chasing after a hyper-competent Mikodez who can never reciprocate and… This is so good. So, so good. The Left Hand of Darkness - A Profound Hurt T, 2K, Ashe/Therem And now the flip side of the coin: this Left Hand fic delves into the other rippled side-effects that Therem had on the lives of the others around him. His relationship with Ashe is still strained, but - as the author quotes - this is a profound hurt arising from a profound love. A sympathetic and Gethen-embedded look into the Osborthe clan and the family Therem leaves behind. — ( Recs for other fic ) If you read something you think I should read, comment! Or just glee with me. SO MUCH GLEE.

comments Comment on DW: http://ift.tt/2Cwpkqq

[and-we-quote-osc]

I might turn these into stickers and/or make more!

(Art style practice!)

[makingscipub]

An iconography of truth

With all the talk about post-truth and post-facts swirling around me, I thought I had to write something about all this, about how utterly important it is to stand up for facts, truth, evidence, expertise, sincerity, honesty, dignity, integrity, fairness, justice…., however hard that might be in the political, economic, social, cultural, intellectual and academic contexts in which we might find ourselves.

To get my mind into gear I made the mistake of looking up truth on Wikipedia (on 16 March, 2017); and then, just out of curiosity, I also looked at German Wahrheit and French vérité, because it suddenly struck me how very different the three words were. It turns out that truth seems to be derived from Old English trīewth, trēowth, meaning faithfulness or constancy; Wahrheit comes from Middle/Old High German wärheit, meaning trust or consent; and vérité has its roots in Latin veritas meaning true or real nature, reality. This was interesting in itself, insofar as faithfulness, trust and reality all have something to do with truth, at least semantically.

What I had not expected when clicking on truth on Wikipedia was how totally overwhelmed I would be with information (21 pages for truth, 28 for Wahrheit, 21 for vérité)! Somebody sometime somewhere will have to sit down and do a proper comparative analysis of these ‘key words’ of our time from a lexicographical or philosophical perspective (and one might want to include other languages too).

While letting all these words flow over me, I clung on to the illustrations, sprinkled amongst the words, like life rafts. From this activity emerged this blog post, which, in the end, is not about truth or post-truth, but about what I call an iconography of truth and post-truth in three European cultural and linguistic contexts.

Truth

The English entry starts with a brief conceptual overview of ‘truth’ which goes directly into medias res, mentioning Heidegger, Peirce, and Nietzsche on the first page – all major contributors to theories of truth, but slightly overwhelming to read about. This short overview introduction is illustrated with three images: a painting where Time slays Falsehood and rescues Truth (the slayer and slayee are male, truth is female, and like many images of ‘truth’, naked). The image has the subtitle ‘Time saving truth from falsehood and envy, François Lemoyne, 1737’. The reader is also confronted with a bas relief of ‘Truth [the Roman Goddess of Truth], holding a mirror and a serpent (1896) [by] Olin Levi Warner, Library of Congress Tomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C.’ (see left); and the final image is a photo of a stone head that is ‘An angel carrying the banner of “Truth”, Roslin, Midlothian’.

The entry contains a long list of theories of truth, one of which is ‘coherence theory’. This is illustrated with the statue of ‘Walter Seymour Allward’s Veritas (Truth) outside Supreme Court of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada’.

Under ‘notable views’ – ‘ancient history’ we find a striking painting of ‘La Verité “Truth” by Jules Joseph Lefebvre’ (also used in the French entry; see below). And finally, under ‘modern age’, we find a famous portrait of Immanuel Kant (see below). So we have a nice mixture of UK, French, US, Canadian and German images of ‘truth’. I liked that.

Wahrheit

The German entry on Wikipedia is big. It even contains a table of all the theories of truth that have been put forward over time. But the only images it includes are a picture of a bust of Aristotle entitled: ‘Aristoteles formulierte das Grundprinzip der Korrespondenztheorie’ (Aristotle formulates the axiom of correspondence theory); a painting by ‘Nikolai Nikolajewitsch Ge: Was ist Wahrheit (1890): Pontius Pilatus zu Jesus; Joh 18,38’ (this painting depicts a famous scene from the New Testament where Pilate asks Christ: What is truth?); and, finally, a visualisation of spheres of truth according to the Catholic Church!

So, what we have here is lots of words, an Aristotle and two theological images. NO image of Kant! That is rather strange! (see right; taken from the English entry)

Vérité

If the German entry on truth is as dry as chalk, the French entry is like a mature cheese, really worth tasting. The first picture that hits you in the eye when opening that entry is ‘La Vérité, abstraction personnifiée, toile de Jules Joseph Lefebvre’, which we had already encountered at the end of the English article. The painting depicts a naked young woman holding aloft a globe that is glowing with light (see right).

But there is more. Quine and nominalism of all things are illustrated with ‘La Verité’ (1901) a rather beguiling family portrait of naked truth by Merson, a, to my mind, relatively unknown painter. The section on verification, falsification, Kuhn and paradigms is surprisingly adorned with a fragment of the frontispiece of the famous Encyclopédie edited by Diderot and d’Alembert. In this engraving Truth is, of course, radiating light and Reason and Philosophy tear off its veil. This representation of truth and the enlightenment was painted by Charles-Nicolas Cochin and engraved by Benoît-Louis Prévost in 1772.

A section on truth in philosophy is preceded by the painting of Pilate and Christ which we already encountered in Wahrheit, but it also contains a fresco depicting Plato and Aristotle by the Italian high renaissaince painter Raphael, a painting of Augustine by the Italian early renaissance painter Botticelli, and a statue of Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci.

Early modern philosophy is, of course, illustrated with a portrait of the most famous French philosopher René Descartes, but also Spinoza, and modern philosophy gets Bertrand Russell and… Martin Heidegger. In the photo, Heidegger is grinning; probably because his picture was chosen instead of one of Michel Foucault, for example, or Jacques Derrida.

With Heidegger, we are on the threshold of postmodernism, which some regard as an ingredient in the conceptual primordial soup from which post-truth emerged. So what about post-truth? I wondered whether the three entries for that concept would be as different as the ones for truth? Let’s have a look.

The English entry (11 pages), entitled ‘post-truth politics’ contains only one image, of a Vote Leave poster with a misleading claim about the EU membership fee. The German entry (13 pages) entitled ‘postfaktische Politik’ only has that one image (‘post-Wahrheit’ is not a real thing in German; it mostly exists as a translation of post-truth). But the FRENCH entry on ‘ère post-vérité’ (37 pages), ooh la la! We get a veritable smorgasbord of images and representations!

Post-Truth/post-vérité

The article initially surveys the political scene in the US and in the UK and sets the concept in some historical context. The first image we see is a caricature of the humourist Stephen Colbert, author of the 2005 concept of ‘truthiness’ (interestingly mentioned by Sheila Jasanoff in her 2015 article on ‘serviceable truths’ – that would be another topic!), illustrating the emerging power of conspiracy theories.

This is followed by a photo of a protest of a 9/11 truth movement, as well as Colin Powell delivering the ‘truth’ about weapons of mass destruction in 2003. The next two photos are of Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, side by side.

After that we get into more philosophical discussions. We are told that the concept of post-truth is impossible to define, accompanied by a picture of Pilatus asking Christ about the meaning of truth (which we encountered in Wahrheit and vérité).

In a section on truth and politics we find a portrait of Benjamin Constant who invoked the ‘right to lie’ as early as 1797. A section on truth and journalism is illustrated with a portrait of the famous German sociologist Max Weber who famously talked in 1919 about the way journalists always have to work under time and production pressure. An abstract image of the internet illustrates the rise of fact-checking in the digital age, quoting the French political journalist Thomas Legrand. A section on truth and fact contains a portrait of Hannah Arendt who, famously, distinguished between truth of facts and truth of reason.

We then get a section on the banalisation of lies (I like that phrase), which contains the Vote Leave campaign photo that is used in the English and German entries but over and above that we get a rather lovely engraving of Pinocchio by Enrico Mazzanti!

In a segment on the primacy of emotion over reason and the merging of fiction and reality, we are shown a photo of Paris Hilton. This is followed by an overview of conspiracy theories, accompanied by an image of the attack on the twin towers. After sections on the influence of social media networks, the loss of authority of mainstream media, on ‘info-obesity’ and hacking (‘piratage informatique’), we are confronted with a photo of Noam Chomsky, author of the famous 1988 treatise on manufacturing consent which has certainly come into fashion again. This is followed by an infographic representing threats to openness and democracy.

The entry also contains a long section on conceptual precursors to post-truth, starting with a photo of the seminal book The medium is the message by Marshall McLuhan. I won’t go through that section in detail, but just mention the photos of people included: Régis Debray, Nicholas Carr, Jacques Ellul, François Jost, Mike Godwin, Mark Zuckerberg, Etienne Klein and Google…. And that is NOT all. There is much more – on filter bubbles, hyper-connectivity, hyper-fragmentation etc.

I’ll only pick out two more images, one illuminating a section on divergences in thinking about post-truth and one elucidating a section on fascism. The first image is supposed to illustrate how Andrew Calcutt, castigating postmodern thinkers for their contribution to the post-truth world we live in, reignites an old debate about the relativisation of truth. This is a caricature which appeared in the satirical journal Le Grélot (19 December 1897) during the Dreyfus Affair. It represents truth emerging from a pit or well holding aloft a glowing orb of light (similar to the truth by Lefebvre, but of course, in a pit!), helped by some intellectuals such as Émile Zola, while others try to prevent this from happening (I think). The subtitle to the image says: “The truth would disappear today because it would be relativised to excess, since the most antagonistic positions could be considered by the press and intellectuals as relevant as the others”. (By the way, the Roman goddess of truth, Veritas was believed to hide in the bottom of a holy well because she was so elusive).

The last illustration I want to mention is entitled: “Symbole du bullshit selon Pascal Engel, le joueur de flûte de Hamelin” (the symbol of bullshit, according to [the French philosopher] Pascal Engel, is the Pied Piper of Hamelin). As in the case of the banalisation of lies illustrated by an old engraving of Pinocchio, the wikipedians have chosen an old and evocative engraving to make their point about bullshit in the sense popularised by the philosopher Harry Frankfurter. Post-truth certainly fits in well between the banalisation of lies and the spread of bullshit.

Conclusions

What have I learned from surfing the images in the three Wikipedia entries on ‘truth’? While being quite overwhelmed by all the erudition I encountered, this also made me feel quite humble and, in a sense, quite proud. Words like truth and post-truth are thrown around nowadays with great abandon and cynicism, all the while forgetting the philosophical, cultural, artistic, scientific, political, linguistic…. ‘knowledge-work’ that has gone into thinking and writing about these issues for centuries, if not millennia. We need to take care of these concepts. We need to cherish and defend them from erosion, as much as we do paintings and antiquities. We also need to learn about them from each other across interconnected and overlapping languages and cultures.

  Featured image: Photo taken near Nottingham station; a billboard depicting three Nottingham-based writers and what they have to say about truth. All other images Wikimedia Commons.

The post An iconography of truth appeared first on Making Science Public.

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[thedeadshotnetwork]

The Keurig contretemps The year was 1974. Diehard Republican partisans who supported President Nixon until the end were livid at The Washington Post 's relentless coverage of the Watergate scandal. Republican Sen. Bob Dole had said the paper's treatment of the president amounted to a "barrage of unfounded and unsubstantiated allegations" — that the Post was archliberal Sen. George McGovern's "partner-in-mud-slinging." Former Nixon aide Charles Colson called Post executive editor Ben Bradlee "the self-appointed leader of … the tiny fringe of arrogant elitists who infect the healthy mainstream of American journalism with their own peculiar view of the world." Inspired by such rhetoric, many rank-and-file Republicans across the country were furious that the manufacturers of newly popular Mr. Coffee machines continued to advertise in the Post . They smashed their coffeemakers with sledgehammers. They ceremoniously threw them out of high apartment-building windows. Okay, I'm kidding (about the Mr. Coffee protests; the Dole and Colson quotes are real). It would have occurred to vanishingly few people in 1974 to destroy or otherwise prematurely discard popular home appliances because of an ideological grudge. People were less rich and genuinely thriftier back then, and the profusion of electronic devices and technological conveniences that we enjoy today simply didn't exist in 1974. In the opposite-of-halcyon days of 2017, though, we are hardly surprised to see a bunch of angry white Trumpkins mutilating their Keurig machines with hammers and golf clubs because the company briefly pulled ads from Fox News' Hannity . Instead, the coffeemaker smashing was all seemingly normal — just another instance of our culture's increasingly politicized approach to department stores, consumer goods, fast food, and just about everything else that used to be nonideological, neutral, and fun. Without question, hyper-politicized consumerism is a sad and stupid spectacle. But on the list of "What's the world coming to?" things we should be worried about, it's awfully low. Here's why. 1. It's a sign of affluence . Most of President Trump's fanbase is financially just fine . They can smash Keurig machines because they can afford to do so without thinking twice about the cost of buying a new machine. Bully for them. I'm 41 years old. Not only can I remember a time when coffee wasn't an uppity consumer good, I remember when most kitchens didn't have enough counterspace to accommodate a burly Keurig machine. America's already great! 2. We have so many choices ! Coincidentally, my six-year-old Keurig machine broke at the same time this media flare-up occurred. A trip to Crate and Barrel reminded me anew of the sheer variety of machines that brew coffee. (No offense to Keurig, but I went with an astonishingly cheap and handy AeroPress.) 3. In combination with social media, it ventilates psychic steam . People are unusually angry about politics these days. With a Twitter account and a ball-peen hammer, a nobody from Nowhere, U.S.A., can feel like he's being heard. In fact, he is being heard. Big businesses are reflexively inclined to tamp down political flare-ups. The CEO of Keurig apologized to Sean Hannity, and the Fox News Channel host subsequently told his viewers they were free to no longer hate the company, blaming the episode on the liberal watchdog Media Matters for America for fostering a misunderstanding. 4. It's good for people to be able to pick their niche . In the immediate wake of the Keurig contretemps, both Hannity and the oleaginous Donald Trump Jr. endorsed the pro-Trump Black Rifle Coffee Company, which was founded by a conservative veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. When Starbucks announced in February that it would hire 10,000 refugees by 2022 in response to the Trump administration's travel ban, Black Rifle countered that it would hire 10,000 veterans. A company blogger posted: "Hipsterbucks brews burnt, bulls— coffee and they add a bunch of sugar, foam, cream and sprinkle a side of other bulls— on the top to mask the taste of S—" The existence of an option like Black Rifle Coffee adds to our country's sum total of happiness and consumer satisfaction. It diminishes the possibility that a popular and ubiquitous brand like Starbucks will suffocate the market. It's also not my thing. If you're reading this, it's probably not your thing, either. But, like it or not, it's usually a good thing that Somebody Else's Thing exists. Which leads me to my fifth and final point. 5. The midcentury highpoint of American consensus culture was overrated. I'm second to no one in my concern over the virality of fake news and everyone being entitled to their own facts. Yet I'm also forced to admit that this phenomenon is a concomitant result of something I'm generally happy about — and that's the fragmentation of American mass culture. As a young music consumer, I chafed at having to listen to the same dumbass Boston and Foreigner songs on classic-rock radio. Now I have Spotify, and I still have to pinch myself that such a service exists. But I can't rightly celebrate my enlightened habits and tastes without admitting that someone else is going to splinter off into a darker, stupider corner of niche consumption. So go ahead and smash you coffeemaker. And then buy a new one. If you lived next to me, I'd probably hate your guts. Lucky for both me and you, you don't . On balance, I couldn't be happier. November 15, 2017 at 12:14PM

[trendingnewsb]

6 Ways Movies Fool You Into Ignoring Bad Reviews

Terrible movies will always exist. They’re one of those unavoidable annoyances, like stubbing your toe or getting picked last during an orgy. Unfortunately, even when knowingly faced with a dud, studios still have to pretend they’re sitting on the Holy Grail of eye-blasting family entertainment — at least for the duration of the marketing.

So how does one polish a brawny turd in an age when resources like Rotten Tomatoes have made the average moviegoer hyper-aware of mediocrity? It’s not easy. And in a way, the ability to spin a piece of terrible entertainment as the next big Star War is an art in itself. Only instead of ink and light, these modern-day Rembrandts (had Rembrandt gone to Emerson and was nicknamed “The Donk”) are painting with beautiful lies.

6

Shitty Films Have Used “Joke” Reviews In Their Ads

Film studios want nothing more than the power to write their own reviews … something Sony actually got caught doing back in 2001, when it was revealed that fake quotes from a nonexistent critic named David Manning were used to praise masterpieces like The Animal and Hollow Man — the latter film featuring invisible gorillas and Kevin Bacon’s CGI dick muscles.

It was a ruse that would end up costing the studio over a million dollars in lawsuits, and so no other studio attempted such a blatant teabagging of the public’s trust. Instead, they did find a way to more gently dab our foreheads with technically-legal jest: They use fake critics under the excuse of “humor.”

Take the recent Lynchian abomination that was Nine Lives, a film about a rich and powerful Kevin Spacey being turned into a cat via Christopher Walken voodoo. The movie features all the things we’ve come to expect from a children’s film, such as existential torture, a cat getting drunk, and a fucking suicide fakeout. Needless to say, critics weren’t on board with it. And so TV spots opted to sprinkle the feline romp with hilarious joke reviews from places like “Vanity Fur,” “Meowsweek,” and the “Catfington Post.”

It’s exactly the kind of incredible wordplay you’d expect from this film about cat possession. And while there’s nothing wrong with including bullshit pun reviews as a joke, when you watch the ad in real time, it becomes apparent that chucklefuckery wasn’t the only motivation.

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That’s right, each “review” flashed on screen for a nano-second while the voiceover quoted the fake praise without any context. Meaning that unless you paused your television, most people watching had no idea it wasn’t really a quote from Vanity Fair. But if anyone calls them out on their colossal horseshit (like right now), the producers are able to shrug and say it was all in good fun. It must be a coincidence that the only other film to use this technique was the exhausting Vampire’s Suck — a spoof “comedy” which, according to ads, were given standing ovations by such critics as “Hugh Jass” and “Oliver Klozoffe.” Jesus, you guys, could you at least think of bad vampire puns for your terrible film, like David Edelstake or Gene Siskill? It would have only taken a minute.

5

Studios Use (Misquoted) Reviews From Total Randos On The Internet

If incredulously scrolling Rotten Tomatoes fan reviews have taught me anything, it’s that audiences tend to be way more forgiving of shitty movies than critics. You could argue that critics are heartless pedants soured by their own career failures, or maybe accept that it’s possible to enjoy a film that also happens to be garbage. There are no villains here, but the important takeaway is that critics are hired and respected because most of them are able to judge a film from an objective perspective. This is why studios put their quotes on posters and trailers instead of those of some random jerk on Twitter, right?

Oh no. Turns out that’s no longer the case. It seems anyone can be a prestigious movie critic now, even @zoidberg95 talking about the unbridled joy King Arthur brings him. This isn’t an isolated incident by a long shot, as evidenced by the recent pullquote in the trailer for Broken City, a Mark Wahlberg film with a 28 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

Sure, we can all agree that Mark Wahlberg is “bad ass” in the sense that assaulting a middle-aged Vietnamese man is both “bad” and an “ass” thing to do. And sure, there’s nothing technically wrong with giving the man on the street a voice of support. But here’s the thing: According to the source of that quote, he hadn’t seen the film. The studio used a tweet made about an entirely different Mark Wahlberg performance and used it in their ad. And they are somehow allowed to do this as long as they ask the author of the tweet beforehand. That’s it. There are no qualifications or confirmations beyond a polite message and digital contract.

Thanks to the crowdsourcing power of the internet, you can literally find anyone who is into any crazy thing. Studios know this, and are able to make a film seem like it has word-of-mouth appeal by scraping the bottom of the Twitter barrel to find faceless folks saying the right things. Or failing that, they find faceless folks saying the wrong thing and simply make it seem like they said the right thing.

After Batman v. Superman‘s Twitter account told us about the high praises of @raniaresh, someone pointed out that the now-banned account was only an egg icon with the profile: “I did NOT enjoy Batman v Superman.” The tweet was then pulled and replaced with yet another rando with the same basic praise.

Notice how it’s the same reworded “whoa my mind = blown” quote, only now attributed to someone else? Warner Bros. didn’t care where they were getting the quote; they just wanted some vague sentence calling their disjointed film “mind-blowing.” Chances are they tasked some hungover intern to scour social media for any kind of evidence of exploding brains and slap that shit on a promo shot, regardless of who said those words or what context they were said in.

But if you think this dirty process is safe from critics, you are not correct …

4

Advertising Perpetually Cherry-Picks Critic Quotes To Make Them Seem Positive

Writers write a lot of words, and it’s pretty easy to change what those words mean if you only take a few of them. For example, I earlier described the plot of Nine Lives as “rich and powerful,” if you ignore everything around those two adjectives. In the way Rock Bottom can turn Homer Simpson into a pervert, so too can studios make terrible reviews seem complimentary. For example, this glowing phrase about Rock Of Ages from a Guardian reporter …

… was in truth pulled from a one-star review quote: “It’s a very peculiar show indeed, with an unvarying and unpleasant tone of careless sexualisation. Rock’n’roll debauchery is presented as the pure and innocent way of dreamers.”

Seriously, they fucking did that. And the reviewer in question wasn’t too happy about it at all. And amazingly, this isn’t the only time The Guardian‘s deep disdain was twisted into cheerful praise, like a laughing clown puppet made from a child’s corpse. Check out this poster for Legend and its collection of four-star reviews:

Except that Guardian review in the middle? It’s a two-star review they made to look like four stars that had been obstructed. That’s honestly hilarious and brilliant and hard to be mad at, but the act of taking someone’s out-of-context words and slapping them on your poster or DVD case can go from cute trolling to downright infuriating very fast.

For example, the movie Accidental Love (which has a flatlining 6 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) underwent a horrendous production which resulted in a cobbled-together shitcircus disowned by its director. When reviewing it, The AV Club noted that the original version probably wasn’t all that great either, saying “there’s little reason to believe that the ideal, untroubled version of the material would have been a comedic masterstroke.”

And then this:

Yeah, that’s the back of Accidental Love‘s DVD case using The AV Club’s unfavorable description of a (still better) hypothetical movie as their review quote. You can imagine how that kind of insidious tangle of bull angered the original writer … or you can read his response here.

It comes down to this: Never trust a review quoted on a movie’s promotional material. Ever. The only information you’re getting is that those combination of words were somewhere in the writing, but in no way were they necessarily meant to describe the movie being advertised. Which puts a whole new light on posters like this:

3

TV Networks Will Misspell Their Shows’ Names To Avoid Bad Ratings

In the age of streaming, being a TV executive has the life expectancy of a docile classroom hamster. Their entire job can be summed up by a picture of a stargazing dinosaur on a suspiciously bright night. It’s totally understandable that networks would claw and gouge their way to profit in these uncertain times, and yet their sleazy resourcefulness still manages to surprise even me, an undercover diamond thief working the long con as a internet writer who broadcasts his diabolical intent all across the land.

To quickly set this up, you have to understand the Nielsen ratings. Every show undergoes the same measurement using a sample audience being monitored for what TV shows they watch. That data is calculated into a rating for each show, and the ratings are averaged into monthly or quarterly reports. Advertisers then look at these reports and decide what time slots to buy for their sexy burger or cartoon shitting bear commercials. Therefore, a show with a better average will get more money for advertising. With me still? It’s all a big wet fart of intrigue for your average consumer, which means few people pay attention to Nielsen ratings. But once you start to read daily reports on TV industry sites, you’ll start to notice something bizarre in the footnotes:

That’s right, in what seems like playground-level cheating, television networks can deliberately change or misspell their own shows if they anticipate bad ratings for that night. By doing this, that episode won’t be calculated into the shows’ overall averages, and their quarterly ratings won’t go down. And so shows like NBC Nightly News become “NBC Nitely News,” so that marketers don’t pull that sweet, sweet commercial dough.

How could such obvious semantic trickery go unchallenged? Well, it turns out you can do all sorts of amazing hogwash with human language. Ever heard of the show Bull? It’s a CBS courtroom drama co-created by, and inspired by, the life of Dr. Phil which exists for some unimaginable reason. It also airs something called “encore” episodes every now and then.

That’s not just the wording of the article, but the official CBS classification of a repeat episode of Bull. You see, a show’s ratings are calculated based not only on their first run, but also on (typically lower) rerun ratings. But if you call your rerun an “encore” episode, then it doesn’t get categorized with the original episode, thus avoiding a lower score. Yep, apparently you can change the words of things to completely redefine their importance, like calling bags of Funyuns under a co-worker’s desk “diamonds” and then telling everyone you’re a “jewel thief.”

2

When In Doubt, Simply Block Critics From Reviewing It Ahead Of Time

It’s the perfect crime. Critics can’t say your game or movie sucks if they can’t see it. So studios will simply prevent critics from seeing their work before it comes out. It’s like throwing bleach in your date’s eyes so they won’t know how ugly you are. And while sounding excruciatingly transparent, this technique works way more often than you think. It’s called an embargo, and it’s what Ubisoft did before Assassin’s Creed Unity, which ultimately received lukewarm reviews for being breathtakingly glitch-filled. Like, so glitchy it was a work of sinister art — like something the Joker would conjure up.

Ubisoft “How am I supposed to enjoy a carefree romp of clandestine murder after THIS?!”

Unfortunately for gamers, those reviews only came in after the midnight release — as ordered by Ubisoft when they first sent their early copies out. But it could be worse. You could go a step further, like Wild Games Studios did when they trolled through YouTube sticking copyright violations on any video which spoke badly of their new release. Or Sega, which used the same tactic to shut down bad YouTube reviews that didn’t even contain footage from their games.

In the end, this technique usually causes a huge and understandable backlash, on account of YouTubers being wicked blabbermouths about such injustices. But critic embargoes are so common that they’re considered normal. And most often, this isn’t nefarious at all, but rather a measure against premature spoilers or judgments before a film is locked down in post. Only every once in a while is this tool used to cover up true garbage. Pungent, salty garbage — the kind you can taste through your nose. Like, I’m talking alien-chasing-a-school-bus-driven-by-Judd-Hirsch level of garbage here.

Independence Day: Resurgence is a film I happen to enjoy that is also objectively terrible. And 20th Century Fox knew it was terrible, hence their American critic embargo lasted up until the day it was released — causing most audiences to buy a ticket without knowing its quality. Similar measures, which include completely skipping press screenings altogether, have happened for similarly bad work like Alien Vs. Predator and the G.I. Joe films.

Yes, you could argue that these films “weren’t meant for critics,” as a lot of executives often say. But that’s kind of like saying an apartment complex “isn’t meant for safety inspectors” or that your basement “isn’t meant for homicide detectives.” People deserve to know in advance if something sucks. But that doesn’t mean we won’t still enjoy it or flock to see it. And if all else fails, you can always do what China does and completely circumvent the pesky audience altogether …

1

China Will Hold “Ghost Screenings” To Make Films Look More Popular

As previously mentioned, China is quickly becoming the dominating money-maker for blockbusters. So it stands to reason that the country would also become the industry leader for blatantly fudging a movie’s popularity. But instead of relying on embargoes or misleading ads, Chinese studios have taken a much more direct approach: just buying tickets to the movie they made.

The Wall Street Journal “‘Best thing to ever happen to movies!’ raved one translucent women in a bloodstained Victorian wedding dress.”

It’s as brilliant as it is illegal. Instead of pouring money into television spots and bus stop posters, simply use that marketing money to buy out theater showings, and watch the popularity snowball. And to ensure profit, those purchased tickets can then be resold online to discount ticket retailers. It’s like stealing your own car for the insurance, and then selling that stolen car for a second profit.

Unfortunately for those cheating marketers, I wouldn’t be writing about this if people didn’t figure out it was happening. Ghost screenings were recently brought to light thanks to the film Ip Man 3, a martial arts biopic which bafflingly includes Mike Tyson playing an evil property developer who ends up fighting the hero in an epic battle of kung-fu vs. boxing vs. child endangerment.

Pegasus Motion Pictures Why this movie felt the need to artificially inflate its popularity is beyond me.

After the film’s release, a local news site posted screenshots of theater websites claiming to have sold-out screenings for showings that started within ten minutes of each other … in the same auditorium. Meaning that, save for some kind of multiple-dimension scenario caused by Mike Tyson punching time itself, someone was brazenly cheating in the laziest way possible.

When The Wall Street Journal dug deeper, they found it to be a regular (albeit short-term) strategy for film distributors to buy out fake screenings in the hope that sold-out shows would encourage audiences to assume the film is popular and therefore go see it themselves. It’s not very imaginative, but if studios were more creative, they wouldn’t need to do all the bullshit on this list to begin with.

David is a writer and editor for this very website that you currently read. You can follow him on Twitter.

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[roaldsdahl-blog]

Today we learned to code!

Or, sort of - a graduate of English here at Queen’s who is now pursuing a master’s program in computer science gave us a lesson in the basics of HTML and CSS (and a sprinkling of JAVAscript). He did a great job, and I’m feeling (potentially misplaced) confidence with the content. As promised, it has given me more of an idea for my final project:

I’d like to encode a poem (to be determined). I’ll see how much of the original content I can include, in addition to my own connections. My biggest worry is that I’ll have to figure out JAVA, which seems quite daunting.

The side component I’d still like to incorporate is a hyper-awareness of the medium’s form. So my current idea is to give (several?) aspects of the page a destabilizing element; the aspect might move as you hover over it or a floating description box might appear with a quote from a scholar talking about its function, etc. I’ve begun going through past readings for specific quotes I’d like to incorporate, so an example might be that as a user clicks on a new page, a quote from Andrew Piper’s Book Was There, “…today, all is recto,” appears. I’m not yet sure how oblique I’d like the commentary to be. For something like this example, because “recto” is definitely jargon not all would find familiar, some definitional aspect might be necessary to enforce the idea of Borges’ library, that all the answers reside within the text’s interconnected and ever-expansive world. The question remains, then, whether I can practically accomplish these kinds of flourishes.