#i always relate to the side characters whose whole thing is to be Insufferable you know? theyre teenage girls give them a break.

[creekfiend]

watching pride and prejudice with my mom this is her favorite and man I love mr bingley so much. favorite character 💯

do you like to dance mr bingley? why yes it is my favorite thing. besides supper time and when I get my walkies. or when they take me to the dog park

[ganymedesclock]

"Normal looking person has terrifying teeth. bonus points if they have an extending/splitting jaw or retractable teeth or something like that" this seems... oddly specific. how'd you find out you like this?

It was a long process starting at my middle school goth phase where tiny vampire fangs were neat, and then later I was like, "well, that's not very scary is it, it could be scarier" and that graduated to progressively bigger scary teeth until I realized that the average human jaw can only fit so much teeth in it, and then I saw the art of @deadwooddross and it cracked open some brave new frontiers regarding how people can look.

Really in general it seems more specific than it is, it's generally that I think horror mouth is a good concept-

(monkey brain says bared teeth bad? Social repulsion of hunger, humanity's own predatory instincts and the primal hunting behaviors that once fed us, and one need not look any further than modern diet culture to consider that man has a very precarious nature indeed with the hunger that has always defined us? something else entirely? the fine line between the alluring, desirable, or appealing mouth that might yield tender kisses or speak sweet words and the aforementioned primal nature and threat potential of mouths?)

-and then throughout my life, in both consuming and creating art, I'm trying to challenge myself to outgrow the mindset that for something to be good or likable or deserving of patience or attention in any way it has to be the least offensive, prettiest thing- so slapping a horrible unfolding bobbit worm mouth or a leering skull grimace or a great slobbery aperture on a human face is a good challenge to that regard.

Honestly, anon, I think your question is a good one! Like I said, when I first discovered Dross's art, I was really amazed at their monster designs and it got me frustrated with the level of monstrosity in my own art. I was left wondering how someone could come to such wonderfully gross, unsettling, specific concepts. It's been years since then, and I think I can confidently say it's all just a matter of practice and inspiration!

I know we can often think of creativity as something semi-divine, born from the void (or, jokingly, as some like to insinuate, affected by psychoactive substances) and nothing us mere mortals can change- but really it's a lot more of a practical skill. For me, challenging my assumptions and interrogating my thoughts does a lot of the legwork- the important other piece is that this engine of analysis is driven by new ideas being pumped in from the things I consume.

While this has nothing to do with teeth, I remember seeing- incidentally, in a gif, I've never watched the movie and don't really plan to- Moder, the bestial antagonist of a live-action horror movie called The Ritual. Moder is a beautiful monster; she has a really unique design evoking a moose, with a hidden but disconcertingly humanlike face and two dangling arms where her mouth should be. Seeing her in motion struck me all at once that I had never really seen, before then, an ungulate monster. Hoofed creatures are conceptualized with a sort of unthreatening banality; the docile cow, the sweet innocent deer, the sacred unicorn, the majestic but servile horse. Seldom do we get this sort of old-god megafauna feeling cut loose in such a creature, and yet, looking at Moder, why the fuck not? At a point in the movie itself she effortlessly overtakes one of the main characters at a run, her great powerful legs and thrashing hooves causing her to keep pace with him in a moment that seems profoundly effortless before she banks to the side and decides to end the chase.

To bring this back to "why teeth", I think that horror character design is really a case where you just gotta look to your idols, in life and in creative works! Find something that fucks you up, even and ESPECIALLY something that seems stupid, and then gently lie back somewhere comfortable and look at the ceiling, and entertain, "wouldn't it be fucked up if you met a person whose entire face was just a pleasant mask and when they actually ate something their whole head hinged upwards to reveal their real mouth, which is just a gaping, cavernous, tooth-riddled throat?"

And it doesn't necessarily have to be teeth. There's no rule of what's exceptionally scary. For me, I like teeth. Like thinking about them. There's something about teeth and savagery and decorum and speech and the complex dance between them that, at risk of sounding insufferable, is one of the endless interstitial crossroads that make humans human.

Another very dear inspiration of mine is the decorum and presentation of the skeksis from The Dark Crystal- they simultaneously scratch my itch for predatory sophonts whose intelligence doesn't completely cut their instincts and court dramas where the image of high society is used as a contrast to the brutal and often ugly, undignified nature of ambition, pettiness, greed and lust- and they don't just serve up both of those flavors but use them to enrich each other, so that we are watching these vicious hyena birds stalking around, all puffed-up in arrogance, using gilded nail-guard forks and toothpicks, while devouring a horrible vampiric gluttonous feast and snarling at each other as they pass too close like starving wolves about to tear each other to pieces.

So I guess that's the essential linchpin of why I like unfolding or distending mouths, because it also conveys that sort of quality about a character. If your mouth splits like a flower, to a horrible toothy construct useful for mauling and threshing..... it's not going to be very good for speech. Reining it in to a humanlike configuration is stifling, and suppresses the true nature of a very specialized meat grinder, but it allows you to relate to things as something other than threats and prey. A sort of literal and figurative, sympathetic and horrifying, two-faced nature. It also plays to a good old vampire classic, the "game face" where a creature who might look beguiling and beautiful reveals a nasty appetite and a dangerous side, in a very pulpy organic fashion- it's no glamour, it's just cheeks that can retreat and a jawbone that splits.

[foolgobi65]

Mahabharata (any characters or pairing) + college au + meet messy + “alexa, play wonderwall.” (at this point im just picking things at random lol)

play wonderwall : you’ll see lol  basically used this as an excuse to write a version of the scene u and i both acknowledge as our favorite. the single most iconic scene in the entire epic, bar none. for our sake, i really hope that you like it!! also the “meet messy” is basically random people in the crowd meeting this trainwreck of a family in all of its glory. also i think rhea’s modern au krishna goes by shyam yadav??? i tried to use a different first name at least but none of them sounded as nice so i gave up lol sorry rhea. 

--

“Are you fucking kidding me?” 

It seems like the entire university is gathered on the front lawn to watch the swearing-in ceremony of new Union President Dharamraj Kuru after what many reported to be the nastiest student election season perhaps ever seen. Jarasandha Magadh, after years of refusing to graduate, had at the last minute been put in the hospital and, apparently, sustained injuries so extensive that it had effectively argued that his already completed coursework should be all that was counted when factoring in his final mark. 

“Especially given said student’s...extensive history...with this institution,” Shyam had apparently said when arguing Jarasandha’s case to University Administration, Jarasandha himself completely unaware and apparently furious when he was brought out of his medically induced coma. 

Jarasandha’s party’s hastily promoted candidate Sahadeva was wildly acknowledged to be weak, young, and meant to be nothing more than a rubber stamp on business as usual. Dharamraj, whose upstart campaign effectively communicated how poorly “business as usual” had treated the student body, was suddenly flooded with factions of students seeking an alliance so that their respective organizations might be allocated larger portions of the budget everyone assumed Dharamraj would soon control. 

Everyone was right. Dharamraj won in a landslide, and now here everybody is, watching him deliver his maiden speech as their new President. 

“Shisupal,” Dharamraj sighs, “what exactly is your problem?” 

“My problem,” Shisupal shrieks, walking up to the dais from where Dharamraj stands, surrounded by his friends, family, and his girlfriend Yagna. “You’re asking me what my problem is, Brother?” 

“Brother?” someone in the crowd asks, too low to be heard at the front. 

“I think they’re related on their mother’s side,” someone else responds. “Both their mothers are sisters, but Pritha was adopted out to a friend of her father so was never close to her biological siblings.” 

“Jesus,” another laughs, “are they all just cousins?” 

A wide assortment of Kurus stand on stage, jubilant after so many years of them trying and failing to win elections at the university their fathers had once ruled. Yagna, from a prominent family herself, at Dharamraj’s side. Shyam Yadav, whose sister Subhadra is in love with Dhananjaya and whose father was like a brother to Pritha when she was lonely in Kuntibhoj and Vasudev not imprisoned with his wife. 

Yes, they really are all just cousins. 

Vrikodara steps in front of Dharamraj, arms crossed and looming nearly half a metre taller than Shishupal. Yet, Shishupal is not cowed -- though many men more intelligent than he would have been. 

“I’m not afraid of you, asshole. Everyone knows you’re just the gun in Dharamraj’s hand, and your brother is a pacifist. You won’t touch me.” 

“You would be surprised,” Dharamraj says mildly, smiling slightly as the crowd laughs at the thought of violence from the slightly frail Dharma, always seen in the library or sitting under the tree outside it, smoking cigarettes as he argues with professors twice his age about obscure legalities and wins. 

“You wouldn’t hurt a fly,” Shishupal spits, “you’re too much of a coward to hit a person when they know it’s coming. That’s why you’re just stabbing us in the back, selling us out on the first day when we put our reputations on the line to back you for President.” 

“Shisupal!” Vrikodara roars, Dhananjaya striding to stand next to him, Suyodhana and Radheya on either flank despite what is rumored to be their own tensions with Pandu’s sons. The family is closing ranks at this attack from one their own, it seems, but then what is University politics if not a way for people to find some entertainment from other people’s drama. 

“What,” Shishupal retorts, “you expect us all to shut up while you commit to sinking half of the budget into that wastrel’s pathetic fund? You plan on just giving our money away to anyone who spins a sad life story and begs for cash?” 

Well, University politics is about this too -- the eternal question of which students should be helped, and how much. The fund in question is the brainchild of Shyam, a way for individuals to apply for rapid monetary relief in response to uncontrollable circumstances, and be granted what they need with almost no questions asked. 

“Shisupal,” Dhananjaya steps forward, sensitive as always when his best (and only) friend’s name is brought up. “We’ve let you get away with more than we should because you happen to be our mother’s nephew. If you continue to embarrass us in public it won’t end well.” Shishupal laughs. “For you or for me? As far as I can see, you’ve all been duped by that street-trash pretending to be Vasudev Yadav’s son.” 

Dhananjaya glares. “Uncle Vasudev is more our mother’s brother than your mother is her sister. Slander his name at your own risk.” Again, Shishupal refuses to cower despite what the crowd acknowledges as fierce odds -- Dhananjaya doesn’t actually attend the University, only visits frequently from the Indian Air Force Academy to spend time with Shyam, and his brothers sometimes as well. The man is licensed to shoot a gun, for god’s sake, but Shishupal continues to stand firm. 

“Even now, you’re all standing in front of him,” Shishupal taunts, “Dancing to his tune and protecting his reputation when you know as well as I where he came from. He didn’t even speak English until he left that shithole after killing his own uncle, and you idiots are planning to sink my money into his scheme? Not on my watch.” 

“No,” a voice comes from the back of the group on the dais, “there’s no need to make that face. I can fight my own battles, Dhananjaya. Especially against an absolute clown, like Shishupal.”  

“A clown,” Shishupal shouts, “you’re calling me a clown?” 

Shyam rolls his eyes, having pushed his way to the front. Behind him Vrikodara is grinding his teeth, Dhananjaya’s fingers hovering at his own waist as if wishing for a gun. 

“Well I could have called you a motherfucker,” Shyam shrugs, “but I’m quite fond of your mother. In fact, she was the one who’s begged me to forgive you every time you’ve done something like this.” 

Shishupal snarls. “My mother doesn’t beg, street-trash, and she certainly wouldn’t lower herself to beg from you. People like you are only demanded from.” 

Shyam shrugs again. “Suit yourself. But consider this your last warning -- say another word, and I won’t let you go like I did before.” 

“Before? Before?” For some reason, Shyam’s threat has only made Shishupal angrier, face turning purple where it was red. “Before, as in that time last year, when you stole my wife from the wedding hall at gunpoint. Is that what you mean by before?” 

The crowd goes still at the reminder of the biggest controversy to rock their collective social circle. 

Shyam raises an eyebrow. “The whole point of that was that she wasn’t your wife when we left.” His lip curls in a sneer of his own, eyes suddenly cold. “You were treating her so poorly that she asked what to her was a complete stranger to kidnap her on her wedding day. I wouldn’t talk so loudly about before.” 

Nearly a year ago, Shishupal was to be married to Rukmini Bhoja after years of forcing her to stand attendance at his side during all campus events, despite her not actually being enrolled as a student. Both of their families were rich, well connected, and sought increased prestige through connection with the other. It was, people remarked, on paper the perfect match. 

Of course, Rukmini was intelligent, witty, kind, and one of the most beautiful women most people had ever seen. Shishupal passed classes off of sheer intimidation, threw rocks at the college cats, and supplemented these qualities with his insistence on growing a patchy, horrible, beard and kept his oily, stringy hair long. Worse, there were rumors that Shishupal was even meaner drunk than he was sober, and that once Rukmini had been seen walking away from him clutching her arm and had returned with a scarf wrapped around her shoulders to cover where otherwise might have been a visible pattern of bruises. 

The wedding, everyone had agreed, was to be a tragedy, and would only serve to make Shishupal even more insufferable. When the nightly news had aired the extraordinary report of a young woman staging her own kidnapping, apparently begging one of the groom’s family connections to attend her wedding and hold a gun to her head as they walked out, it was widely agreed to be answer to their prayers, and above all a job very well done by the erstwhile bride to be. When it was revealed that the “kidnapper” was Shyam, well, that just made the whole thing even funnier. 

When classes restarted, Shishupal prowled with a whole new look -- clean-shaven, and short hair. Rukmini Bhoja was noticeably absent from campus events, but a few months in Shyam had been seen getting off the bus at the station near campus and kissing someone who looked just like Rukmini goodbye. 

It seems the rumors about that last bit had found Shishupal too. “Stranger,” he scoffs. “Is that what we’re calling it these days?” 

Shyam’s entire body, always loose, always slightly in motion, goes completely stiff. More than Dhananjaya, more than Vrikodara, it is Shyam who now suddenly looks like an apex predator. The crowd, not even the one facing Shyam directly, finds itself taking a step back. 

“What exactly is it that we’re calling,” Shyam asks softly -- sound only heard because it’s being picked up by the microphone on the podium awaiting the rest of Dharamraj’s long-forgotten speech. 

Shishupal rolls his eyes, sneering. “I’m glad that bitch made such a spectacle of herself when calling off the wedding. I wouldn’t have wanted to marry a whore, you know. Why take seven rounds to get something she sells, no?” He smirks, as the entire group on the dais -- the whole horrible writhing mass of Kurus and their assorted friends and family -- advance as one. “Or, I guess she was the one who was buying,” Shishupal laughs, looking at Shyam who appears to be frozen in place, his face a perfect picture of overwhelming rage. “She paid you to take her, didn’t she? Poor bitch didn’t even think you’d fuck her for fr--” 

“SHUT THE FUCK UP, YOU SON OF A BITCH!” 

Shishupal’s eyes immediately roll up into his skull, as a result of Shyam Yadav’s fist colliding with Shishupal’s jaw. No one bothers to catch the body. 

Silence reigns for entire minutes as everyone watches Shishupal, crumpled on the ground. Watches Shyam Yadav, standing over him wild-eyed, with his right hand still in a fist.

“Oh Alexa,” a gentle female voice calls out from the crowd. Everyone turns to stare, open-mouthed, at Rukmini Bhoja standing in the front row, absolutely grinning at this turn of events. She gazes back at them, turning towards Shyam again and laughs. “Alexa this is so sad. Play ‘Mmm Whatcha Say.” 

[harry-lloyd]

In many ways, the horrible wig was the best thing to happen to Harry Lloyd.

The shock of platinum blonde hair, slashed to a sensible bob at his shoulders like a high-fashion Legolas, was the coif that tied Lloyd’s indelible, insufferable Game of Thrones character together: Viserys Targaryen, the petulant narcissist whose play for the Iron Throne melts along with the rest of him under a pot of molten metal poured over his head, one of the show’s first and most iconic gruesome death scenes.

The splashy HBO production was the biggest job the young actor had ever landed, and as a character with an unmistakable, unforgettable look, to boot— the better to sear into TV fans’ consciousness.

Blessedly, that unmistakable, unforgettable look in no way actually resembled him, a then-27-year-old rising star with short, dark brown hair and alabaster complexion. He played one of the most memorable characters in recent TV history on possibly the last truly massive global TV phenomenon, yet, by the grace of a wig, he was still unrecognizable.

“I kind of loved that,” Lloyd tells The Daily Beast over Zoom from the loft study in his North London home. “And I kind of loved that he died. He had this lovely arc, and he still has his place in this enormous and infamous canon.”

Given how vivid that arc is in Thrones lore, it’s almost startling to remember that he was only on five episodes of the show.

“I had my go,” he says. “I got in early and I got out early. And he didn’t look like me, which, number one, is good because he is a little shit. And so I was happy to not have people throwing stuff at me in the streets. But number two, and I didn’t notice at the time, but it has since become the biggest show on TV. It doesn’t make me worry about being typecast so much.”

In the years since becoming a scalded puddle of boiling jewels and flesh, Lloyd has been able to shapeshift through an impressive résumé of prestige TV series and award-nominated films—Manhattan, Wolf Hall, Counterpart, Legion, The Theory of Everything—relieved of the kind of limitations actors who play little shits in garish white wigs on TV’s biggest show typically shoulder.

The occasion for our conversation is yet another transformation, as Bernard Marx in Brave New World, the splashy adaptation of Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian sci-fi novel. The series is the marquee original offering for Wednesday’s launch of the new Peacock streaming service, casting Downton Abbey alum Jessica Brown Findlay and Han Solo himself, Alden Ehrenreich, alongside Lloyd in an updated take on the classic work.

Brave New World thwarts the idea of a restrictive, Orwellian dystopia with one in which society is instead forced into surrendering their inhibitions. “Welcome to New London,” a prologue explains. “We have three rules. No privacy. No family. No monogamy. Everyone is very happy.”

The new series boasts modernized flourishes when it comes to style—if there had been this much sex in Huxley’s book, we would have paid far more attention to it in high school—and sensibility; some of the problematically racist and misogynistic themes and plot points have been corrected.

Lloyd’s Bernard is an upper echelon member of society, called an Alpha-Plus, whose job is to maintain social order. Throughout the series, he experiences a crisis of conscience, an existential awakening at odds with the blissful stasis he’s meant to both control and enjoy.

If a narrow escape from typecasting and a career playing snooty, megalomaniacal manchildren has meant a diverse array of opportunity for Lloyd, then Brave New World marks more new territory: It’s his first outright leading role.

Lloyd had never read Huxley’s book before being cast, but was impressed by the ambition of the script, “almost like a mega tentpole movie in scale” but esoteric and satirical at the same time. “I was like, this has the whole package if they can shoot this, but I don’t think they can.”

It took one day on set for him to catch wise to the technical prowess at play. “I was like, wow, this really is a brave new world,” he says.

Don’t worry. He promptly scoffed at himself and rolled his eyes.

It is one of the best opening lines to a profile that I’ve read, from a 2011 feature on Lloyd that ran in Britain’s The Independent: “There was a time when Harry Lloyd worried that he was forever going to be typecast—as a woman.”

It was in reference to Lloyd’s days as a student at Eton College, where the young teen’s voice had not yet broken and he was cast as women in a slew of all-male Shakespeare productions.

Here we were prepping to engage with Lloyd about the perils of typecasting following his Thrones stint, ignorant of the fact that he had already confronted the issue decades earlier.

Lloyd laughs good-naturedly when the era of fake bras and bonnets is brought up.

“I hated it,” he says. Just when he had vowed never to agree to it again, in his last year at school he was asked to play Rosalind in As You Like It, by all counts a fantastic leading part. He nailed it, and earned raves. “At an all-boys boarding school, it took balls to put on tights, as it was.” A perfectly-earned smirk at his own joke follows.

The truth is that being typecast or pigeon-holed is a stressor that followed Lloyd, who grew up in London with parents who worked in the book industry. “Sometimes it’s just the face you have at a certain age…” he says.

His first major role came at age 15 in the BBC’s 1999 adaptation of David Copperfield, opposite Daniel Radcliffe. (Adding another fascinating layer to the trivia: Lloyd himself is the great-great-great grandson of Charles Dickens.) One of his first jobs after that was playing a bullying prefect in the series Goodbye, Mr. Chips.

“I guess that’s what I looked like, and I did that a couple of times,” he says. “Then I was like, I don’t really want to just be that guy. He’s a bit of a dick. And then I think next up I played the murderer in some procedural police thing, some young kid that’s gone sideways.”

Each time he felt a box starting to close its sides around him, he actively sought out something different. Having Great Expectations, in which he played Herbert Pocket, “the loveliest, most benign chap you’d ever meet,” air months after his Thrones debut was key. But he can’t refute that, with or without a platinum wig, there’s something about the way he looks that telegraphs a certain kind of sinister character.

“If I turn up in a murder thing, it’s often me who’s done it,” he says, grinning. “I don’t want to give anything away from the stuff I’ve been in. But I don’t know, there’s something about my face that is like, ‘He could do it.’”

After he had finished filming his part on Thrones and the series was about to come out, he was cast in the buzzy West End production of the Tony-winning play The Little Dog Laughed.

If you’re familiar with the work, a satire about Hollywood illusion (and delusion) in which an acerbic, big-wig agent crisis manages her rising-star client’s pesky “recurring case of homosexuality,” you understand why it’s a fairly hilarious, if sobering, project to be involved in just as an actor’s own fame and industry profile is about to skyrocket.

“Because I was about to be on Game of Thrones, I thought, this is the time for me to get an American agent,” he recalls. “And so the American agents, when they were in London, would come and see me in this play, which basically looks at agenting and their ways with quite a big, angry magnifying glass. They would come backstage and say, ‘Look, I am not like that…’” He laughs. “It was always quite a funny way to start the proceedings.”

Having starred in episodes of Dr. Who and played Charles Xavier in Legion, not to mention his connection to Thrones, Lloyd has had his taste of the particular brand of rabid, Comic-Con fandom. Though he prefers to classify himself as “adjacent-adjacent” to that world.

While there are certainly those who will know right away that he was a Targaryen, what he gets more of is a “Wait, how do I know you?” awkward conversation. “Genuinely, people are like, ‘Hey, did I go to school with you?’ I’m at that level of renown. You can’t quite place why you might recognize me.”

Asked how life under the coronavirus shutdown has been, Lloyd is very British about the months spent with his wife and their almost-2-year-old. “We’ve done alright,” he says. “We learned how to finally kind of plan our fridge. And now we know how to do our shopping tactically. We cooked some good stuff.”

For fear of sounding “solipsistic,” to use a word employed often in Brave New World, he identifies the extended time home with typical feelings actors have throughout their career.

“You have accelerated times in your life when things happen like a dream,” he says. “Things are so fast and our whole world’s rebuilt entirely every time you get a job. And then is the come-down and the fallout.”

He remembers that feeling from when he was doing plays: the energy and pace of putting on the show, and then a few weeks after it ends there’s a massive crash.

“It feels a bit like you’re in lockdown. You stare around on a Tuesday afternoon. You don’t want to watch anything. You don’t know what to do or who to call, and you kind of lose your style. There’s been a bit of that.”

Just when things got to the point that he felt like he might lose his mind, he was contracted to record an audiobook. So for a couple of days a week, he would sit up in his “sweatbox made out of duvets” and read Great Expectations aloud for Penguin. “That saved me for sure.”

On the subject of works by his great-great-great grandfather, Lloyd used to be at a loss for what to do when people brought it up. Often they would say, “Congratulations!” on the relation, as if he had accomplished something himself by being born into Charles Dickens’ lineage. “But these days, I’ll take it, I’ve decided. ‘Yeah, thank you so much.’ It’s a nice thing to celebrate.”

The 150th anniversary of Dickens’ death was in June. There had been plans for a commemoration ceremony at Westminster Abbey that, because of the shutdown, became a Zoom event instead.

“I don’t know how many people’s deaths get a 150th anniversary,” he says. “The fact that I have any kind of personal connection with that is very much secondary. But something that I’m very proud of.”

At risk of belaboring the point, we ask if working on any of the Dickens adaptations he’s starred in on TV or recording this audiobook makes Lloyd feel any sort of profound or poignant connection to him.

He laughs. “I can’t point to a physical sensation like hairs in the back of my neck standing. ‘I feel him. It’s me and Chucky D in the room right now.’”

[mst3kproject]

1109: Yongary: Monster from the Deep

 The first time I saw Yongary was when I was on a Kaiju Eiga binge over Christmas break one year.  It was on YouTube, with the sound removed for copyright infringement, and no subtitles.  At the time, this didn’t bother me much.  I thought I’d seen enough weird monster movies that I could guess what was going on from the visuals.  It turned out I really couldn’t.  Even now that I’ve seen it with sound, I’m still not sure what happened in this movie.

Korea’s top astronaut has just gotten married when he’s called off to a space emergency – somebody is testing bombs in the middle east and they need a guy in space to watch it.  The bombing causes earthquakes that cross the globe until they reach Korea, where the ground cracks open to reveal, what else? An oddly rubbery and humanoid monster!  Yongary proceeds to devastate the land, as oddly rubbery and humanoid monsters do, feeding on oil and taking an occasional nap, until the astronaut’s very much younger brother (I think) Icho and future brother-in-law (again, I think) Ilo discover its one weakness: itching powder.

So yeah, there’s a lot to unpack here.

If Yongary has a visual aesthetic, it’s empty pockets and boundless enthusiasm.  The production appears to have had very little money and they spread it very thin, resulting in effects that are shoddy and unconvincing across the board… and yet, the people who created them went all-out, absolutely determined to wring every last jeon out of their budget.  The monster suit never looks like anything but a monster suit, but they never shy away from showing it.  The model cities are large and elaborate, even as they lack detail or realistic lighting. Shots showing earth from space look like a seventh grade science fair project.  The matte shots are bad.  The itch ray is just light reflected onto things with a mirror.  It all looks terrible, but their hearts were in it.

Unfortunately, not half so much effort appears to have gone into the script, which wanders from character to character in a series of events that are connected only by the monster, and sometimes only barely.  A number of things are set up as if they’re going to be very important and then are simply dropped, leaving the impression that they were only there to fill time.

What, for example, is the point of the space sequence?  They drag the astronaut (whose name I never caught in the movie, and IMDB is no help) away from his honeymoon to observe this nuclear test.  Some kind of failure on the spaceship, perhaps related to said test, puts him in danger but after much worry he reaches the ground safely.  Wow!  Our hero is a great pilot with nerves of steel!  Surely this will be very important later.  Maybe he will be called to do something dangerous to defeat the monster!  Maybe something he saw from space, while he was out of touch with the ground, will be key to saving the day!

Uh, no.  He’s not even in the rest of the movie, really, and we certainly never hear tell of the space program again.  As far as I can tell, the only purpose to any of this was establishing the nuclear test (because everybody knows those create monsters) and then trying to have some tension before Yongary actually emerges.  The whole sequence was filler.

Then there’s the itching ray, which first appears in the hands of little Icho as he plays a prank on the newlyweds.  Exactly why Ilo has invented an itching ray, I don’t know.  Was it intended to do something else and just ended up being itchy?  When Icho swipes it again to use on Yongary, I figured maybe a souped-up itch ray would turn out to be what kills the monster but again, no.  The itching ray doesn’t even set up anything important. I think it’s foreshadowing that itching is Yongary’s weakness, but the ray has nothing to do with the chemical allergy that brings the monster down, besides manifesting a similar symptom.

The fact that itching appears in the movie in more than one context probably makes it a motif.  Why, out of all the possible themes and symbolism you could put in a movie, the makers of Yongary chose itching, I have no idea.  Perhaps it represents something below the surface trying to break free, like the monster itself?  If that’s the case, then it’s fitting that the source of the itching is always externally imposed: the ray and Yongary’s allergy induce itching, and the nuclear test makes the earth ‘itch’ so that Yongary breaks out.  Whether this means anything deeper than that, I honestly cannot say.

Itching brings us to Icho.  I’m pretty sure Icho is the actual main character of this story.  He’s there at the beginning, he’s there at the end, and he’s the one who realizes what the monster’s weakness is.  He even has a bit of an arc, I guess… he’s nothing but an insufferable brat at the beginning of the film, and while he continues to be bratty throughout he does develop a more mature outlook, coming to understand the need for Yongary’s destruction while still feeling sorry for the monster.

Icho is clearly supposed to have some kind of emotional bond with Yongary, but this is completely one-sided and even less justified than Kenny’s supposed friendship with Gamera.  Whereas Gamera saved Kenny from falling to his death, I don’t think Yongary ever even notices Icho – which is probably all for the best, since Icho is doing things like turning off his food supply and zapping him with itching rays.   Icho’s defense of Yongary is also a little more realistic than Kenny’s of Gamera. He never insists that Yongary is good and gentle, only that the monster didn’t mean to hurt anybody.  This is probably true.  Yongary is not presented as a creature with a personality or intentions, he is merely a force of nature, doing what giant rubber monsters do.  He does not seem capable even of understanding that he is causing suffering.

What’s kind of interesting about this is that it makes it clear that Gamera, rather than Godzilla, was the primary inspiration for Yongary.  The monster emerges as a result of a nuclear bombing that is never mentioned again. It eats oil and is strengthened by fire. Annoying little kids like it for no readily apparent reason.  As an attempt to create a Kaiju franchise in 1967, when the genre was already well-established, it was probably inevitable that Yongary would look like a ripoff of something, but the choice of Gamera for a model seems particularly weird when we consider the ending.  At the end of Gamera, the monster was sent to Mars where he would presumably continue to live without bothering humanity.  This is pretty cool and appeals to children.

In Yongary, the monster dies of internal bleeding while Icho watches.  This doesn’t seem to have bothered Icho but it sure disturbed Jonah and the bots, and once I saw it in a context where I understood what was happening, it made my jaw drop, too.  When I think back on the deaths of monsters in Kaiju Eiga, they tend to be fairly quick affairs: in Godzilla, King of the Monsters, the oxygen-destroyer pretty much instantly skeletonizes things.  Even bad-guy monsters tend to die or be driven off in one final blow or finishing move, as when Gamera throws Gaos into the volcano.  When the monsters visibly suffer, like Gamera with the baby Jiger inside him, or Anguirus when Godzilla rips his tongue out, it’s shocking and unpleasant.  Maybe this is because we think of these movies as being for children, or perhaps it’s the unavoidable anthropomorphic shape of the creature suits.  Whatever the reason, Yongary’s death is a major tonal departure and the ‘happy ending’ that follows it makes it even weirder.

I know basically nothing about the geography of Korea, but people who do have apparently written a great deal about how important the landscape is to Yongary.  According to critic Steve Ryfle, Yongary emerges in the northern part of Korea, near where the Korean Armistice Agreement was signed in 1953 – this makes him perhaps symbolic of aggression from the north, marching inexorably down the peninsula towards Seoul.  Korean critic Kim Songho noted that Yongary destroys the old Seoul Capital building, a symbol of the Japanese occupation of Korea before and during World War II (the building was knocked down in the 90s for this reason).

Using your giant monster to make a political statement, particularly an anti-war or anti-colonial one, is nothing new, but I don’t think the makers of Yongary intended a unified one by this.  The two political messages in the landscape seem opposed to each other: one paints Yongary as a semi-foreign force of aggression, the other as a native being destroying a symbol of foreign aggression.  This isn’t a problem for me, the non-Korean viewer, and the two ideas work fine when they’re each considered in isolation, but they do speak to the overall lack of unity in the script.

That lack of unity is probably the biggest single obstacle to enjoying Yongary for what it is, rather than the ironic amusement people like me get out of bad movies.  The jarring ending, the space program that is set up and then not used, and the inconsistent symbolism all make Yongary: Monster from the Deep feel like something assembled from parts rather than being a coherent whole.  All movies are made by committees, but a good movie shouldn’t feel like it was.

[vermontparnasse]

Downton Abbey (good luck narrowing down the list lol), a little life, and Survivor!

downton GODDAMNIT CHELSEA THIS IS GOING TO TAKE ME LIKE 10 HOURS

1. the most ridiculous, outlandish things happen in this show (a woman literally poisons herself with a pie to posthumously frame her husband; a burn victim turns up out of nowhere and claims to be the heir to the estate; an aristocrat has a baby out of wedlock, gives up said baby for adoption in switzerland, changes her mind, takes the baby back, makes the baby live with local farmers, takes the baby back from local farmers and forces them to move away; need i go on?) but god. fucking. forbid. that thomas barrow have a fucking boyfriend, because suddenly we are ALL ABOUT that historical accuracy!2. anna’s rape.  everything about this plotline was terrible but basically, rape as a plot device sucks, but if you’re going to do it then fucking do it; commit and make it ABOUT ANNA, make it about what she’s going through and how she finds healing, not about how her trauma is affecting poor st. bates.  also, this whole thing was so tonally out of place with the show which up until this point had never had any kind of graphic content; there were absolutely no warnings for viewers other than a vague note about the episode being graphic and that was not okay.  as someone who watches corrie pretty religiously i know that itv occasionally puts up hotline numbers after triggering episodes, with a notice like ‘if you’ve been affected by tonight’s episode, you can call this number’ - they should have done something like that, because the amount of viewers who were seriously triggered after just wanting to enjoy their harmless period drama was seriously unacceptable. 3. this show’s lack of awareness of who the ‘good’ characters actually are.  and i don’t mean ‘good’ like complex, well written, etc.; i mean good as in, if these characters were real they would be Good People.  carson and bates, two insufferably sanctimonious characters who treat their coworkers with practiced indifference at best and malice at worst are constantly lauded by the narrative for being Good People because….. ??  lady mary who is written as more and more selfish and petty and uncaring with each successive season is still the character whose happiness we’re meant to root for, because….. ??  meanwhile, thomas and edith, who both did some bad things in the first season but who have shown a lot of growth since then are constantly treated by the narrative like their characters haven’t matured a single day, as though doing one Bad Thing makes you a Bad Person for Life.  that lack of compassion shown to thomas and edith’s humanity - seeing as they’re two characters that viewers are most drawn to, for how flawed they are - really shows that julian fellowes doesn’t know what the fuck he was doing while attempting to depict how these characters related to each other over a ten year period.  while we did see individual character growth, the way the characters related to one another never seemed to change, which was ridiculous. 4. sybil and matthew’s deaths.  i’m grouping them together.  sybil, because killing the show’s most outspoken feminist character in childbirth was fucking terrible, and matthew, because that was one of the stupidest and corniest death scenes ever and the way the show’s quality plummeted in the aftermath was almost painful.  damn you dan stevens for wanting out of your contract, though i can’t say i blame you.5. fellowes dropped the fucking ball with jimmy kent.  in thomas we have a gay character who’s always known exactly who he is and been comfortable with that, which is great, but here we also had a great opportunity to show a different side of being lgbt+ in that period.  why did thomas’s advances scare jimmy so much???  perhaps this is rooted in deep-seeded confusion and doubt and self-loathing and he’s lashing out violently against thomas because he’s afraid of confronting his own sexuality???  perhaps season 4 can be an in-depth exploration of this????  no, he’s just a sort of homophobic dick?  ok.  well, that sucks.

a little life

1. malcolm’s character was tragically under-used.  though it wasn’t a story about the four of them as much as it was just about jude, willem and jb were still distinct and vibrant and memorable and malcolm sadly faded to the background.  add to that the fact that he was one of the two main black characters; i just consistently wished hanya would do a bit more with him.2. caleb.  i’ve said before about this book that it requires a certain level of suspension of disbelief, because as much as it’s ~realistic fiction~ the point is that it isn’t Entirely Realistic.  a hell of a lot of fucked up shit happens in this book.  but i was okay with that because it was all part of the journey that hanya was taking us on?  it wasn’t all believable but she made me believe it.  etc.  anyway, i found caleb to be the one exception.  i didn’t find it even remotely likely that jude would make an exception to his lifelong aversion to opening up to people, only to finally try out a relationship….. with an actual psychopath.  this is the only point in the book where i felt like ‘okay, this is too much.’  i would just edit out caleb’s entire character. 3. i wish there were more female characters.  i’m actually more okay with the lack of female characters here than i usually am (because the whole exploration of how jude relates to the men around him is Entirely The Point), but still.  still.4. spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler i hated the offhand mention of andy dying in the final chapter.  the fact that ALL THESE CHARACTERS DIED YOUNG (minus jb) just seems so unlikely and i hate when major character deaths are mentioned in an offhand way like that.5. in what universe would willem have played odysseus in an iliad/odyssey film adaptation i am sorry but as certified Classics Trash i am here to tell you that willem was born to play achilles wtf.

[bakechochin]

Book Reviews - The Corpse-Rat King

The Corpse-Rat King - Lee Battersby - I first found this book in a Waterstone’s in Brighton, and was fooled enough by the lovely cover and seemingly cool premise to buy it; this proved to be a mistake, as upon reading it I realised that this is the epitome of grimdark fantasy, and I’m not about that life - But let us commence with the good shit: the world in this book is actually alright great, explored through our main character Marius’ own journey and through anecdotal evidence from his previous criminal escapades, and though I was concerned at first that this was going to be nothing but a bleak world of misery and shittiness, as the book goes on we get to see more sides to the world than just the shitty bits -> Admittedly the shittiness of everything is a main underlying feature and is a pretty predominant contributor to the world’s overall vibe (this is grimdark fantasy after all), but it rarely ever gets so oppressive and burdening with its levels of shittiness that it made me want to stop reading -> I was a fan of the elements of world building that I wasn’t quite expecting; few authors would make a brand new card game for their fantasy world (and fewer still could succeed at making said card game novel and interesting), and the ideas of the dead rising again in this book gave me a very strong Gates of the World vibe, which is a very good thing -> Everything involving the dead was interesting and in some cases quite funny; it has the morbid humour attached to it that I’d relate to something like John Dies at the End (the mad king skeleton fused with his horse’s skeleton to create a fucked-up awkwardly-formed skeletal centaur comes to mind) - The quality of the writing is surprisingly good and engaging, from the incredible detailed yet succinct descriptions of city life to the constant imaginative metaphors that paint some really striking pictures; at its best, I can honestly say that the writing in this book is the kind of writing that I aspire to be able to do - The story’s pacing is absolutely fucked; I would say no spoilers but this is pretty much all spoiled already in the blurb (and also I don’t really give any sort of a fuck), so I can say without guilt of spoiling anything that Marius and Gerd are set up as characters, both are taken by the dead, Marius is crowned as king, and then immediately is fucking expelled from the land of the dead with the objective of finding them a new king within, no exaggeration, thirty fucking pages, and then the rest of the story is as slow as all hell, with Marius running away from his responsibilities and basically stumbling across connections to this main overarching plot amidst a long string of unrelated events - And if we’re going over the plot of the book, let’s talk about how fucking contextual and stupid the whole set up is; Marius is taken to the land of the dead due to a stupid misunderstanding (from the fucking dead, mind you - you would have thought that they’d be above shit like that), is given this task of finding a new king because he just so happened to be there (it’s not like he did anything to attract the ire of the dead that they may bequeath this task upon him, and it’s not like they can’t do this shit themselves when it’s proven later on that they can basically appear anywhere), and the entire fucking story is based around Marius running away when he has nothing to gain from doing so and the dead catching up with him is completely inevitable and inescapable - I like the character archetypes far more than I like the characters; as befitting the grimdark fantasy genre, our main character Marius (notice how I hesitate to use the word ‘protagonist’) is for the most part a colossal bellend, whose actions could very well be attributed to him wanting to flee from an unwanted situation, but the fact that he goes about doing so like such an insufferable surly twat taints whatever deeper motivations Battersby was going for with the character, and ‘insufferable surly twat’ becomes his master status -> As a result of this, when Battersby attempts to make the reader feel sorry for Marius’ shitty situation, I have very little pity for him; as far as I’m concerned he’s a total dick whose sadness at being undead stems entirely from the knowledge that he is no longer able to shag all the tavern wenches, and the few times that the book does take a stab at making us feel sorry for him, it falls a bit flat -> As the story goes on and Marius is less of a twat to Gerd it becomes marginally better, but not really enough to forgive how he was at the start of the book -> All the other side characters are alright for the time that they’re around (which is usually brief periods, on account of the setting constantly changing as Marius is on the run), but aren’t really anything too interesting save a couple of specific examples - The ending of this book was not only boring but also anticlimactic; the stuff that is built up throughout the story for Marius to do in order to seek redemption isn’t actually carried out, but the story instead ends with the characters talking about how they’re going to go and do it, meaning there’s no real closure - Whilst I’ll admit that at its best the writing is bloody good, at its worst (for of course there are periods of shoddiness in the writing) it is monotonous or just mind-bogglingly difficult to comprehend; I don’t know if I’m missing anything here, but is the quote, ‘the humour in his voice could have strangled a parrot’ completely fucking nonsensical and stupid? - Something that I really hate about this subgenre of fantasy, and thus this book as the poster child for said subgenre, is that everyone just swears all the goddamn time and seems like a dickhead because of it -> I was talking about this with Mistborn, in that I think that books need a wee bit of invective here and there just to give the dialogue a bit of punch, but this book is at the complete opposite end of the spectrum wherein swearing seems to act as a substitute for fun wit; to quote Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw, ‘[just saying fuck is] not fun; Errol Flynn swinging off of a rope onto a pirate ship is fun, but if the enemy crew just told him to fuck off it’d completely kill the mood’ -> I realise that I’m starting to sound awfully petty regarding my criticisms (and a hypocrite to boot), so let us round off this point by saying that swearing in fantasy literature is best handled by motherfucking Scott Lynch, who understands that vulgarity can and should be fun; ‘bugger me bloody with a boathook’ will always be funnier than all the ‘fucks’ in this book put together - 5/10

I have a load of other book reviews on my blog, check that shit out.