#i couldn't say it more clearly

[uniiiquehecrt]

Voice actors are NOT the same as actors.

It takes a specific kind of skill-set and training to be able to warp and meld the voice. It takes a certain kind of talent and dedication to hone that talent into the ability to meld the voice and invoke emotion with one's voice alone. Actors are used to using their voice secondarily to their body language and their facial expressions. It's all mirrored back on camera. They do have nuance. But it's a different kind of nuance and a different kind of training to produce that nuance.

Voice actors might get their likeness transposed on their character's design, and maybe their mannerisms might seep into the character's animation. But when it's all said and done: their presence is in their voice. They are bringing a character to life, showing that emotion in their voice, trying to keep a specific accent, drawl, pitch, tone in that voice and keep it consistent for their recording sessions.

The voice actor is like a classically trained musician who can play first chair in a competitive, world-renown orchestra. The actor (who fills the voice actor's role) is like a moot who played violin in beginner and intermediate high school orchestra and thinks they can get into Juilliard with that 2-4 years of experience.

This doesn't mean that the HS orchestra moot can't play. They can even be really good at it. Maybe they won competitions and sat first chair. But they are not in the same league as the person who's been training their whole lives and lives and breathes to hone their craft using the instrument and all of the training they've ever acquired to perfect it. They are not meant for the same roles. They are not in the same caliber. You do not hire the HS equivalent when you want to play complex music in a competitive orchestra.

Actors are not the same as voice actors.

And furthermore, actors - especially big name actors - taking the roles of animated characters for big budget films or TV pilots makes no sense anyways when - at least in the case of TV pilots - there's not a point to hiring a big budget actors anyways. That money could be used elsewhere (like paying your animators), and the talent that is brought onto the screen for X character could then be hired on to voice said character no recasting required.

I wouldn't say voice acting as a profession is in danger exactly, but it's certainly being disrespected and overlooked for celebrity clout, and this has ALWAYS been an issue. Shoot, even Robin Williams knew that much - which is why he tried so hard not to be used as a marketing chess piece for Aladdin and got royally pissed off when it happened anyways. People shouldn't go to any movie (but especially not animated films) because "oh famous actor is in it". People should go because it's a good movie and the voice acting is good.

People who honest to god think that voice actors are replaceable because "oh well anyone can voice act" or "I like xyz celebrity so naturally it'll be good" ... Honestly I just wish you'd reassess your priorities because you're missing the point and are part of the problem.

Voice Actors ≠ Actors.

[maxwell-grant]

So yesterday was my birthday and I invited a friend over to watch some movies we’d been each putting off. He showed me They Live, which I’d somehow never seen, for the first time, and I repaid the favor by breaking his brain with Speed Racer and letting him see how everyone ever was 100% wrong about that movie at release and it is in fact the best thing ever, but in regards to They Live:

I expected a good time and had a really great one. I knew about it’s central alien allegory, and how it’s been co-opted by anti-semitic memes and right-wingers who think they’re being cute. I knew it inspired dialogue in Duke Nukem, I knew it was a John Carpenter film starring Roddy Piper with Keith David in it, and that was it. I was blissfully unaware of everything else, including the fact that it somehow winds up being a spiritual successor of “The Challenge of the Beyond”, the pulp writer round robin exercise nowadays most famous for it’s H.P Lovecraft - Robert E.Howard parts.

There’s a post on it that floats around regularly and I’ll link here for better explanation, but in short: Lovecraft’s section of this story had the protagonist George faint from terror constantly and go mad after turning into a giant alien centipede, which was followed by Robert E.Howard immediately retconning said madness in his opening line and having the character embrace his new life as a horrid centipede beast in a new planet and go on a conquering rampage of “titanic adventure” as George the Centipede Barbarian. I bring up George the Centipede Barbarian not because it’s funny, but because They Live intentionally pulled off a very similar kind of brutal tonal dissonance.

They Live is very comparable to The Thing in the sense that it is a 50s concept told through 80s filmmaking and distorted accordingly, to the extent that the black and white parts are not just colored differently, but shot differently from the rest of the film in a way that’s far more reminiscent of 50s horror films. Our protagonist is an 80s meathead cowboy who lives in a struggling urban landscape with mysteries and horrors he never quite understood but continue to plague him and those around him, and he has a moment of truth when he puts on magical sunglasses and finds out that he’s been living in a Twilight Zone episode the whole time, and so has everyone. The black and white allegorical terrors won and have been running everything all along, and that is the point the episode should end with our protagonist horrified and broken, “wouldn’t that be fucked up / doesn’t this remind you of something / these horrors are real” message conveyed, episode over.

Except our protagonist is an 80s meathead cowboy, so instead of surrendering to the horrors after finding out everything is a monstrous lie, he fights back with a shotgun and a bag of one-liners. Dude just immediately, like not even 10 minutes after he first puts on the glasses, starts blasting alien cops and bankers and spaceships. I really did not think that “bubblegum” one-liner happened that early in the movie. This dissonance would have been wonderful regardless but it helps that it’s done so intentionally.

I really didn’t expect that the movie was this 100% completely blatantly unsubtle about the true nature of the alien ghouls as bloodsucking capitalists. It’s not some veiled allegory that can be left to interpretation, the movie tells you repeteadly and explicitly what it is about. The film tells you that the aliens are weaponizing communist paranoia to gain control over cops, preceding a line “We'll do anything to be rich” and then a description of them as “They are free enterprisers. Earth is just another developing planet, their third world” is actual dialogue from the film and that’s just before we learn the aliens all wear expensive watches, that most of the cops going around brutally gunning down the resistance are humans who sold out, and get scenes of the aliens and humans standing around in suits congratulating each other on profit margins. I don’t meant this as an insult but it’s frankly cartoonish in how unsubtle it is, it’s insulting that John Carpenter even had to set the record straight with Yes This Was About Capitalism and Reagan and Yuppie Bloodsuckers You Stupid Fucks like the movie isn’t hammering the point constantly.

If you haven’t watched it, did anyone ever tell you that the inciting incident of the movie is the protagonist being radicalized by police brutality? Yeah, funny, nobody ever talks about what happens in the movie before George puts on the sunglasses. The first 20 or so minutes are about the protagonist, George Nada, arriving in the city and struggling to find a job or place to stay and being offered one by Keith David’s character Frank, who takes him to a homeless community. They have a handful of dialogues together where Frank repeteadly expresses a cynical viewpoint towards life under You-Know-What, over opportunities turning into traps and steel mills giving themselves raises by screwing workers over, and George brushes him off stating he still believes in America, he still believes in getting a fair shot.

George is quickly and immediately reduced to horrified bystander as the police storms his community and destroys their church and goes around beating up them up and evicting tents by bulldozer, while George runs around trying to help and save at least one of them. The next time we see him, he puts on the sunglasses and learns the awful truth and starts his rampage (framed in no uncertain terms as an act of revolution) by doing, what else, shooting cops. Or, well, aliens who approach him as cops and tell him that, now that he sees them, they can work out a deal to profit together if he just goes quietly. The movie makes it as obvious as it could possibly make it.

So yeah, watch They Live, it’s Duke Nukem vs The Twilight Zone’s Episode on Capitalism (with Extended “Guys Being Dudes” Action, I’m glad I didn’t know about that alleyway fight scene beforehand). Also watch Speed Racer, it’s glorious, and it has the exact same villains. Had a really great time yesterday with both.

[yuichiroswife]

{ Just got back into the swing of writing again on another blog only to find out my grandma is in the hospital for heart issues. First it was my grandpa and now it's my grandma. I'm honestly starting to believe that things really can just keep getting worse instead of better cause nothing ever seems to get better over here. }

[wonder-worker]

"The feast of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist being appointed as the day upon which the coronation of the king [Edward V] would take place without fail, all both hoped for and expected a season of prosperity for the kingdom."

-Excerpt from the Croyland Continuator / David Horspool, "Richard III: A Ruler and Reputation"

Even though Edward IV’s death was unexpected, after twelve years of peace there need not have been too much of a sense of foreboding about the succession. The great dynastic wound from which the Wars of the Roses had grown had not so much been healed as cauterized by the extinction of the House of Lancaster. There was no rush for London, as had happened in earlier, disputed successions. The royal party didn’t set out from Ludlow for ten days after hearing the news of Edward IV’s death, while Richard took his time, too. And the new king had [his mother the dowager queen and] two uncles to support him: his mother’s brother, the sophisticated, cultured, highly experienced Earl Rivers; and his father’s, the loyal and reliable Duke of Gloucester, to whom Edward IV had entrusted unprecedented power and vital military command.

... [Richard of Gloucester] had achieved his goal by a mixture of luck and ruthlessness, and if he made it appear, or even believed himself, that destiny played a part, this only made him a man in step with his times. Modern historians have no time for destiny, but sometimes the more ‘structuralist’ interpretations of the events surrounding the usurpation can come close to it. When we read that ‘the chances of preserving an unchallenged succession were . . . weakened by the estrangement of many of the rank-and-file nobility from . . . high politics, which was partly a consequence of the Wars of the Roses and partly of Edward IV’s own policies’, it is hard not to conclude that an unforeseeable turn of events is being recast as a predictable one. But without one overriding factor – the actions of Richard, Duke of Gloucester after he took the decision to make himself King Richard III – none of this could have happened. That is, when the same author concedes ‘Nor can we discount Richard’s own forceful character’, he is pitching it rather low*.

Edward IV had not left behind a factional fault line waiting to be shaken apart. Richard of Gloucester’s decision to usurp was a political earthquake that could not have been forecast on 9 April, when Edward died. After all, Simon Stallworth did not even anticipate it on 21 June, the day before Richard went public. We should be wary of allowing hindsight to give us more clairvoyance than the well-informed contemporary who had no idea ‘what schall happyne’. This is not to argue that Richard’s will alone allowed him to take the Crown. Clearly, the circumstances of a minority, the existence of powerful magnates with access to private forces, and the reasonably recent examples of resorts to violence and deposition of kings, made Richard’s path a more conceivable one. But Richard’s own tactics, his arrest of Rivers, Vaughan and Grey, the rounding up of Hastings and the bishops, relied on surprise. If men as close as these to the workings of high politics at a delicate juncture had no inkling of what might happen, the least historians can do is to reflect that uncertainty [...].

(*The author who Horspool is referencing and disagreeing with is Charles Ross)

[dazais-guardian-angel]

Can someone please draw this...

...to look just like this.... :' )

are you a "you might not see a great difference between good and evil, but saving others will make your world a little more beautiful"

or a

"even if you are nothing more than a pattern on the surface of raw power, you are you; because all humans, all lives, and the bodies and brains comprising them, are nothing more than patterns; beautiful patterns, etched into this physical world"

type of wise older male figure who realizes everything they should have said long ago only on their deathbed, and encourages the lost boy protagonist who questions their humanity to live, with words that will be the most uniquely validating and comforting to them?

[fideidefenswhore]

The appearance of Halley's Comet, first observed streaking across the sky in August [1532], was the occasion for much muttering and comment. For Anne the omen seemed favorable, as on the morning of Sunday 1 September [1532] in Windsor Castle and with de la Pommeraye as the guest of honour, Henry ennobled her as Marquis of Pembroke in her own right [...]. Anne's grant followed the same format as for the creation of male peers and closely resembled the one Francis [I] made to his sister Marguerite in 1517, which Anne had witnessed. As Duke of Berry, Marguerite had become male in terms of status, entitled to the traditional rights and privileges ascribed to the male siblings of the king. [...] As a marquis, Anne could sit in the House of Lords, and the title would automatically descend to her offspring even if illegitimately conceived.*

Hunting the Falcon: Henry VIII, Anne Boleyn, and The Marriage That Shook Europe, John Guy & Julia Fox

*"Whether the omission of the customary words 'lawfully begotten' in the Latin text of the patent was a drafting error will never be known. Nobody noticed at the time."

[lisbonsteresa]

you ever just

[magnoliamyrrh]

its been insane witnessing the full force of propaganda and american imperialism with my own two eyes as an adult these past few years. obviously ive known abt it plenty and seen it before, but witnessing it at this age with this much force is... dystopian and crazy

[peachypinkygloss]

Uff *correction: Park Jimin is both masculine and feminine man 😭😭

uuuum correction 🤓☝️

uuffff 🙄🙄 unfollow me because you gotta learn some respect before you can have any type of conversation with me. so, respectfully, stfu. buh-bye <3

[agnesmontague]

.

[hellohoihey]

I love being obsessed with things. Like I'll come up with the weirdest scenarios for said thing to come into conversation, but whenever I find out someone else knows and likes that thing we'll talk about it for five sentences max.

[murasakiirohana]

//you know, I really do want to expand my comfort zone in regards to who I interact with when it comes to Ino. I get too stuck in the, ‘well, if she met that person, she’d probably die’ in regards to naru characters that aren’t kon.oha allies and the like so I make it hard for myself to think outside of the box and I want to figure out how to fix that. Not sure how, but I do definitely want to have more of a variety of interactions going on for her, ya know?

[justabunchofdragons]

also the feeling of winning a politically based argument with my dad is soooo fucking good

[kareenvorbarra]

getting WAY too worked up about other people’s incorrect sexuality headcanons for qt characters....the problem is i know i’m right 

[beesarthur]

ok friends, how do i make my way into the one career i was born to (continuity checker for a long-running tv show)???

[fitzhastoomanysideblogs]

It really sucks having to be bored out of my mind every single day because I have no friends, no job, no way of even accepting money so even if I did get a job I couldn't be paid, nobody to look forward to talking to and nobody who actually enjoys my presence so I'm completely alone and all I have to do is be on my phone, be on my laptop, stare at the wall or the ceiling or take a nap.

I don't even really have a reason to look at my phone anymore and haven't in years because, again, I have nobody to talk to or look forward to talking to and nobody who actively wants to talk to me so all I do is open tumblr and scroll for a few minutes before closing it, and I avoid instagram to the best of my ability so I'm not tempted to contact my fp or think about them or anything