#i don't know why i bother trying to do stupid stuff like 'convey plots and information'

[jourke-rourke]

i am DONE it is done i am finished. shoutout to ryo for having perhaps the best subplot (or honestly more just 'plot') out of the entire core cast. love me a villain arc done well. anyways i'm gonna go crawl into a hole now, do not perceive me for at least seven business years

[lies]

Spoilers and commentary from my latest rewatch below a cut.

I think this is my favorite Villeneuve movie of the ones I've seen (all his movies starting with Sicario).

There's a thing that I'm very sensitive to with sci-fi movies, dating to my childhood growing up reading hard sci-fi. I'm very unforgiving of stupid stuff that doesn't make sense. Noisy space, crowded orbits, gravity and inertia effects that don't remotely try to be believable... Certain kinds of space opera or whimsical fun I'm okay with; I love Buckaroo Banzai, Space Sweepers, and The Fifth Element (for example) even though they require me to turn off my believability sensors. But if a movie expects me to take it seriously as sci-fi it has to try not be stupid. And there are a lot of sci-fi movies that expect me to take them seriously that fail that test.

Which is fine; not every movie has to be for me.

Arrival is totally for me.

It does have some things that threaten to pull me out of the story. But I let those go because I'm emotionally invested. The big plot twist really works; Louise's depression at the beginning of the movie doesn't have to be a result of the sequence of events we've seen, but it makes sense that it would be. Rewatching the movie knowing what's really going on doesn't diminish the impact.

Villeneuve is so good at minimal storytelling. He does the "show me 2+2 but not 4" thing. He'll leave out the idiot lecture and trust me to understand, and he's so good at conveying mood that I know exactly what to feel even if all the pieces aren't laid out neatly in front of me.

There are some weaker parts of the movie. Ian's characterization suffers from a lack of detail, and the kooky-soldiers subplot is like stick figures. But I'm cool with saving that time for Louise's story, because Amy Adams' performance is so good. I'm still bummed she didn't get a Best Actress nomination.

One weird thing I noticed on my latest rewatch: When they have the montage narrated by Ian to cover the month or so when they're first making progress with heptapod language, I can see why it helps the pace of the movie, but I'm bothered that it doesn't really make sense. Where is that narration coming from? Ian delivers it in present tense, but who is he talking to? Why is this documentary being made? Who is it for? Some kind of government briefing? Some sort of personal log? Villeneuve expects the audience to recognize the format and not worry about it. Which is okay, I guess, though it bugs me that an explanation isn't even suggested.

I spent a lot of time on this rewatch thinking through the implications of the movie's big idea: how knowing heptapod language rewires Louise's brain to allow her to experience time the way they do. It seems especially significant given that the emotional climax of the movie is Louise's choice to have Hannah despite knowing the future.

Which is a) really cool in how it is depicted: not by showing us the events (like Louise and Ian's breakup) actually happening, but by seeing the effects. Louise realizes "why my husband left me" as she's talking to Ian after her last visit to the shell. Hannah has the conversation with Louise about why her father left, and how he doesn't look at her the same way any more. But also b) super interesting in terms of the implication of the heptapod concept of time on the narrative stakes of the story.

What I mean is: The climax of the story is Louise's choice to have Hannah despite knowing the future. The moment in which she makes that choice is literally the last shot of the film. Except that according to heptapod cosmology she doesn't make a choice at all.

In heptapod cosmology causality doesn't exist. There are no choices. There is just one timeline, one sequence of events, with past, present, and future all existing whole and complete. Louise gets Shang's private number and learns his wife's dying words from him so she can call him 18 months previously and convince him to stand down. The heptapods come back and deliver their language to humanity thousands of years in the past so humanity can help them in the future. Those events are immutable. They always happen, and always did happen.

That immediately raises the question of free will. If Louise, having seen the future, chooses to try to prevent that future from happening, what is the result? Does she follow a different branch in the multiverse to a different future? Or does it turn out that her action to prevent the future actually ends up creating the exact future she already saw? (There are other ways to try to resolve this issue, but those are the big ones.)

In the first of those scenarios free will is preserved, but at the cost of foreknowledge; Louise can't act on the basis of knowing future events without changing those events. In the second scenario foreknowledge is preserved, but at the cost of free will. Louise doesn't actually have a choice to make, because she's already made it as part of the playing out of the singular timeline. It might look and feel like a choice from a linear-time perspective, but only from that perspective.

On this rewatch I was thinking through the implications of this, and it struck me that Ian really is wrong to blame Louise. He thinks she made the wrong choice having Hannah. But from Louise's heptapod-language-informed perspective, there was no alternative. She chose life for Hannah, even a tragically short life, but only in the sense that she always had and always would make that choice in the singular timeline that heptapod language revealed to her.

In a sense Arrival is structured as a story about someone who learns to speak heptapod, but told by and for people who don't speak heptapod. The film's dramatic arc, leading up to the key moment when Louise chooses to have a child she knows to be doomed, is based on a lie, the lie that she actually makes a choice.

Except for this: I've watched this movie something like 5 or 6 times now. I'll probably watch it again. In choosing to rewatch it, and in finding it emotionally satisfying even though I know how it ends, I'm playing out a heptapod-cosmology scenario myself. If rewatching a beloved movie can be satisfying even though I know what will happen, then there can be emotional significance in Louise choosing life for Hannah, even if Louise always only ever made that choice the one way.

Side note: If Hannah dies in a preventable accident rather than from an incurable disease the issue gets more complicated. In "Story of Your Life" (the story Arrival was based on), Ted Chiang embraced that complexity; Louise's daughter dies at 25 in a rock-climbing accident, and Louise doesn't use her foreknowledge to try to prevent it. I respect that storytelling choice. But movies don't have the space that novellas do to explore complex ideas, so I guess I forgive the screenplay for changing that, even though it bugs me a little to see the puppet strings.

Despite knowing the journey and where it leads, I embrace it. And I welcome every moment of it.

Arrival (2016) dir. Denis Villeneuve

[kuvvydraws]

I'm not sure if you've answered this question already, but I'm honestly very curious- why do you write fanfiction? I certainly enjoy it as much as you and have written a few things of my own, but I know it can be quite a personal topic for many writers. If it's too personal for you, don't feel any pressure to answer, but it's always interesting to see the writer's perspective outside of the story they've written :). I hope you understand what I'm trying to say-

Hey!

I actually enjoy the words and the rush your brain gets when they join without effort to create a reality.

Now, let me break that down XD

I've always had a book in my hands as far as my memory goes. My dad used to read to me when I was very little and from the second I could do it on my own, that was the best thing ever (yes, that means when I was punished for doing some shit, my books were taken away and I had to sneak them into my schoolbag and read in class like a heathen).

Not only I enjoyed books but I always found myself wanting to partake in the stories, and my brain was always running with the words and the scenes. (I discovered during my teenage years that brains have different ways to process thoughts and mine did it in words, so writing just sort of came naturally to me at that point in my life).

I discovered ffnet when I was 12, I think, but I had tried my hand at original works (that is, about five or six starts of different novels that never saw the light) and some "fanfiction" (about Nightmare Before Christmas because I had a big ass crush on Jack and I unassumingly created my first xReader ever) without knowing what the hell I was doing.

I just knew I wanted to write stuff and I did as much.

The thing is, I introduced one of my friends, who also loved to read and write, to ffnet, and we started writing together. The first thing we wrote was a Sesshomaru x OC fic, the second one was a Sasori x OC fic, and we dipped out toes into some Kuroshitsuji x OC...... all of them handwritten stories we promised we would type in a computer eventually (we didn't, they were horrible [I still have the notebooks we used for each of them and they are cringey as fuck]).

But we wrote for ourselves and we were happy like that.

So we were rampant and wild and having the best time. Back then I still wrote in Spanish (because I hardly knew any English and I didn't care for it), and I remember mixing Spain's Spanish with the ones from South America because obviously the percentage of writers in ffnet who used a different "dialect" Spanish was huge if you compare a single, tiny country with a whole continent.

At the same time I wrote with my friend, I wrote for myself. Naruto, Kuroshitsuji, Bleach, Hetalia.... And I met so many people, nice people, who loved my works (they were random fics, all of them x OC because I didn't know x Reader ones were a thing -they weren't at that time, and x Reader are harder to write in Spanish because all the words and pronouns are gendered one way or another-) and I got so much enjoyment from sharing them.

The thing about books I love the most is the fact that you can convey so many emotions with a few symbols, and you can create worlds out of ink and you can change views and inspire others. So, if none of my dumbass teenage novels were to roam the word, I still could share, in a free, open and fast way, my words with others.

Again, I was going to write them with or without posting them because I found -and still find- great pleasure when a scene creates itself in your brain and all you have to do to make it real is to write it down. (Sometimes my brain still does this and even when I'm daydreaming, my imagination is "written, described and dialogued" as if someone was reading a novel out loud. It makes writing so much easier).

And then I got hate.

I somehow had managed to miss all of the fandom drama that's so toxic in the internet because I didn't bother to interact with anyone in the fandoms beyond the reviews they left in my fics, and ffnet has a -sort of- specific search engine to help you find whatever you want, so I could never willingly find the "problematic stuff" because I was literally not trying to find it.

The hate comment I got was anonymous and very specific about everything that was wrong in a particular fic I had just updated -from plot and characterization to grammar and continuity-, and later on I discovered it came from a couple of authors who shared an account and who I admired greatly for their works. Turns out they were out for blood and hating on every fic that had updated that week and that had any members of their OTP shipped with some other character. (It was a Hetalia fanfic, I was writing SpUK and they were pro FrUk, if anyone is interested).

I was contacted by some other authors asking about this because they had gone through the very same thing -same specific hate, same hate comment- and I remember not giving a fuck.

I was 16 when I got the hate, writing for fun and trying to find a way to go through my shitty highschool days without falling into the black out of depression that haunted me. I remember not wanting to write anything anymore, leaving a fic I was very invested in writing to gather dust and rot in the forgotten folders of my computer because every time I tried to get on with it and progress, it felt wrong.

That thing I said about words just happening? It stopped. My brain was silent as a grave and trying to get my words out became painful. I remember struggling to even write regular project for my school.

I kept reading, of course -it was my only comfort and I really, really didn't want to give up on it-, but I abandoned the fandoms I enjoyed so much before. My new focus became the sci-fi, and I remember being hooked on Predator. Imagine my joy when I discovered there were thousands of works from that fandom! I was extasic.

Problem? They were written in English.

I didn't know shit about English besides being a language I was supposed to handle in school, memorize the unreasonably spelt words that were pronounced illogically regarding the fucking spelling and the stupid ass irregular verbs.

But I learnt English because I wanted a hot piece of alien ass XD

Back to the topic of fanfics, I still roamed ffnet, keeping 15 tabs open and reading until 5 am... But now there was a world of possiblities in front of me because of course everyone on this goddamn Earth writes in English.

So, for the next years I did that, and my words didn't come. It was fine, tho, because I had so many new things to read.

It wasn't until fall of 2018 that I dabbed into the idea of maybe considering to perhaps give writing a try again????? I was neck deep into Undertale -still am, I'm a shameless skeleton fucker and there's no cure for that shit- and its many AU's and somehow I had managed to avoid fandom wars again, so my brain started toying with words... The same way it worked with novels: I got myself into the fics other people wrote (this is so much easier to do with x Reader fics, and I'm so happy about that and the massive boom they had just when Undertale came out, you can't even understand it).

So I kept doing my shit and daydreaming about skeletons and ribs and ecto-stuff for a very long time. It was kinda reassuring and nice to see other writers projecting on their x Readers so much because that's what I had done before.

And then Good Omens happened.

As I've said before, I actually discovered Gomens back in 2012 and it is, to the date, the worst translation to Spanish I've seen in my entire life to this date. And, despite it, I fell in love with it.

Now, barely in 2019, my dad gets Amazon Prime and the first thing he fucking sees is the font of Gomens on the screen. I had fangirled hard about Gomens in book version, so much and so annoyingly that I wouldn't leave my dad alone until he gave it a chance. It's the only book my father hasn't finished because the translation is that bad. He hates it.

Yet.

The particular font they use for the show is the same from the book's title. My dad of course recognized it immediately and knew I would want in on the news.

I confess I watched Gomens the show at least seven times before giving it a break because I liked it so much and the novel was so fucking good and it's honest to God the best adaptation I've ever seen to the screen. It's so good I'm fucking sure I was crying actual tears after watching it for the first time because my dreams and all the feelings that book had given me over the years and the many re-reads were "true" and so well done and it reached deep into my heart.

And then, for the first time in six years, my words came back.

Another thing Good Omens has given me, I have to say.

I don't know if I can stress this enough, but just imagine spending six years of radio silence, sending longing stares to the void and hoping to see something yours returning back, something you've lost and you're not sure you're getting back, something you think you don't need or want but that would be nice to have again. If only. You can live without that something, and no one but you cares about it, and it's not that big of a deal and-

Then you see a spark in the dark.

My words came back.

They weren't in Spanish, and it was hard to manage them at first, only being able to listen to them in short bursts over long periods of time.

But they were my words and they were back.

Writing is still hard, and I have a lot of work to do to improve my skills, to get them not only back but to refine them because I'm not writing in my native language and all I know is what I've learnt from other authors and their knowledge. I project a lot on my projects -I don't intend to stop because it's such a relief, the biggest scape from reality I get by doing so; it helps me deal with my problems, it gives me a break and a way to take a breath when I can't keep going...

Fanfics are where I can say what I want to say to the world in the most honest way, and that allows me to be me, and to express myself and indulge in the fantasies I dream about without having to force myself to think of them over and over and over. I can just sit back and enjoy content I know I like without being judged for it.

I can fucking make that content, too.

Writing feels like home, even if sometimes I still struggle, if I can't find my words or the expression is not quite like that in English, or if I can't find the words or if I'm suffering a block... because there's nothing scarier and more free than a blank page ready to be written.