#i had a visceral reaction even though I know they're not really related

[nilla-bear]

S3E9

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/5/2024: INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE (1994)

I'm sorry, but this movie fucking sucks. I hadn't seen it in decades and I thought it was probably "OK"; I devoured the books as a kid and I didn't remember hating the film, but I should have realized that it was a red flag that I didn't love it. I have now discovered that it's bad enough that it failed to thrill me when I was a morose little horror dork who was really the target audience, and as an adult I can hardly stand it.

Daniel Molloy (Christian Slater, dressed up as Art Spiegelman for some reason) interviews for-realsies vampire Louis (Brad Pitt, still looking like he spends a lot of time in the sun) about life with his master Lestat (Tom Cruise, who knows why) and their eternally-childlike daughter Claudia (poor li'l Kirsten Dunst). Suddenly I feel like I don't know what to say about this, as I'm writing, even though I enjoyed the book and also the superior-in-every-single-way TV show. You know. Louis is really sad about being a monster. Lestat is really happy about being a monster. Claudia is really mad about being a monster. They have interpersonal problems. Later they meet some other vampires, and have interpersonal problems with them. At the end Louis is angry with Daniel for not getting the point, but maybe neither did I.

To some degree the problems of the movie are the problems of the book, but on the page they're basically forgivable for various reasons. I'm probably not going to refresh my memory, but as I recall Anne Rise has a way of really drawing you into her world, which is so literally-sensational that it makes up for her boy-crazy humorlessness. Everybody basically has one characteristic, outlined above, but the visceral pleasure of the prose takes over--and to be totally fair, it was novel at the time. It was the vampire story we had all been waiting to hear. (Ok, so the book is from 1978 but it still felt fresh in 1994) But when you port all that to the screen and leave the telling to these actors who are almost universally miscast, it all just lies there, dead.

I thought my hesitation about rewatching this was related to my petty aversion to Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise specifically. I really don't enjoy either of them in general, and I also felt like they were profoundly wrong for the roles; neither of them could be less goth, less tortured, less otherworldly. It feels criminal to fill these classic queer outsider roles with alpha males who seem like they would have beaten up your weird gay friends in high school, and their performances are not remotely good enough to make up for this impression. Kirsten Dunst is perfectly awful but like...you just can't have a 12 year old playing a person who is any older than 12. It cannot work. It's not her fault, it's just a bad idea.

The only guy who is any good at all in this is Stephen Rea, a staple of director Neil Jordan's films, who I almost didn't even recognize because his Santiago is so uncanny and dynamic and fun despite having very little to do. I love the way his look references LONDON AFTER MIDNIGHT, it made me wonder how much more could have been done by subtly comparing Rice's vampires with their cultural predecessors. Rea lights up every scene he's in because he's so mischievous and unpredictable, and he's also almost the only person with any standout stunts--which helps me segue into the other main gripe I had with this movie, that it is incredibly stiff and static. It's like a prison. Everyone is totally weighed down by their giant ridiculous wigs and seven layer costumes, so even though the movie is supposed to be all sensual and shit, it's like nobody can even move.

Dealing with INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE is making me realize that I'm not quite sure what I think about Neil Jordan. I have this kneejerk reaction that he is Great because THE CRYING GAME is such an institution, and MONA LISA is real good too, but I might have found all of his other movies kind of humorless and stiff and like, beautiful but not altogether meaningful. I really struggle with THE COMPANY OF WOLVES because of its terrific FX and handful of fun scenes, but there is something about it that fails to connect with me. Sometimes it's overly pretentious, I mean paralleling a maiden's coming of age with the blood on the white roses is like...pretty gross, dude. But overall there is something about it that just lacks substance, despite its relentless and oppressive Symbolism. It seems like this problem should have been smoothed out for INTERVIEW since it was shot from Anne Rice's own script, but according to me, it really does not work out.

[ilions-end]

okay i for real finished quintus' posthomerica so! FINISHING THOUGHTS:

i wish i'd read it sooner tbh. there was a time i was scrambling trying to find out everything that happened in between the iliad and the odyssey, and just reading wikis didn't really give a sense of scope. even though quintus is a WAY WEAKER storyteller than homer it is the closest surviving thing we have to a full linking narrative

MOST ANNOYING quintus thing, even beyond the simplistic morals, is his need to say "this was WAY MORE [thing] than [event in the iliad] actually!". he keeps doing it! like he says achilles' grief for antilochus is even greater than he felt for patroclus... OBSERVABLY NOT, QUINTUS?? you're not fooling anybody

there is such a thing as too much ekphrasis. we don't need to know what's depicted on EVERY shield (and baldric, and quiver) of note, quintus. please.

funniest "nobody's allowed to be mean to each other" thing is odysseus seeking out philoctetes who tells him like "i can never forgive you for abandoning me, i have suffered unspeakable pains for ten years because of you specifically, you absolute heartless bastard" and odysseus tells him "well don't blame me, blame the fates" and philoctetes goes "oh that's true!" and they hug it out. it's like FIVE lines and they're buddies again.

random and silly observations that didn't warrant their own liveblog posts:

quintus makes all his favourite guys IMMENSELY TALL AND BIG AND MUSCULAR. achilles is HUGE. ajax is HUGE. neoptolemus is HUGE. i'm imagining them running around like great danes among chihuahuas.

i know it's an ancient text but the battles FEEL like cgi slurry. it's always "innumerable" men falling every time one of the heroes swipes a sword. the ground is so covered in bodies they can walk back to camp never treading in the dust. it's fantasy numbers of dead EVERY time and they never run out of guys.

achilles and memnon dueling and getting so close their helmet crests keep brushing against each other? dare i say erotic

it's so funny that quintus fanboys achilles so hard he REFUSES to let paris kill him. NO what do you MEAN the prettyboy trojan gets him in the other versions, only a GOD ALONE can kill PERFECT ACHILLES obviously!! so we get "one day apollo saw achilles on the battlefield and he thought achilles was annoying so he shot him". wow great tension, quintus...!

the description of ajax' immediate shock at hearing odysseus won the arms is so visceral and detailed (the flash of pain in his mind traveling down his spine, temporary loss of balance and vision). it makes it sound like there's a genuine disabling neurological event happening, the onset of his madness as a physiological reaction, it's very impressive as a medical description.

i like that teucer keeps popping up through the epic, we even learn who his friends are (as they die...) that's my boy. i had to laugh at myself when i was surprised at teucer being part of the battle the day after ajax died. as if i thought he'd be granted compassionate leave or something????

the one time quintus actually seems to comment on odysseus' agenda is when they're collecting neoptolemus on skyros and deidamia cries like a bird whose young has been eaten by a serpent. odysseus is the serpent!!

diomedes has to run into odysseus' tent to borrow armour mid-attack. girlfriends 4eva

i love how ambiguous phoinix' feelings are at meeting neoptolemus! he gets so emotional reminded of achilles at that age and he's both so proud and so distraught. and neoptolemus is very polite but obviously awkward about this strange man hugging him and crying and it's. ah it's such an emotionally complicated scene <3

ALSO also when neoptolemus is finally left alone and walks into his father's tent and sees all his things and briseis and the slaves and he cries, thinking of home. little boy, what have you gotten involved innnn.

eurypylus meets neo on the battlefield and demands that he says who he is and also to relate the pedigree of his horses. why is nobody normal in this war.

when they enter the wooden horse quintus takes a big pause to call on the muses again to help him list EVERY MAN who went into the horse. and he says thirty names and then "and many more besides". the muses straight up gave up on him!

quintus is way, way more partial to the greeks than homer is, but the descriptions of the sacking of troy are genuinely horrific. it's horrible slaughter, not just cutting down of the enemy but the panic and chaos of naked trojans killed in their beds or desperately trying to defend themselves with furniture and utensils. parents slay their own children to spare them from torture and slavery. it's definitely not just "yay we beat troy".

menelaus and helen's reunion got me, even though it's one of those where aphrodite makes him so horny he forgives her (at least she doesn't flash her boobs this time). when they talk later they agree there's nothing to forgive and then make love like "grapevine and ivy intertwining". aww.

the final mention of odysseus is when he hauls hecuba towards his ship and there's a simile of a farmer leading squealing, lowing wildstock into a new pen. it's just so dehumanizing and horrible it actually makes me appreciate that this is a version where hecuba gets transformed into a dog.

so! posthomerica: a very mixed bag and intriguingly affected by the moral compass of its writer but BOY is there a lot of stuff happening in it.

[rabbitindisguise]

we had this big conversation as a household and it got me thinking about like . . . what sets me off sometimes about things like this, and I think it's hitting my moral scrupulosity reflex (or rather moral injury trauma it's apparently called, wrt my personal PTSD experience of it)

I've talked about before how social justice has been associated with the rise in moral scrupulosity and OCD I think. Personally I've always felt indebted to social justice because even if in many ways it failed me, it also saved my life in many ways as well so it justified a lot of the things random people on the internet said even though it was totally baseless. The encroaching fear was like "I think they're wrong but . . . what if they're right?"

also it's super easy to be around people who have a neurosis and pick it up on accident, my brain just seems to rebel hard against that because autism brain HATE change

personally I'm starting to understand that things I feel compulsions to do like donate to charity, eat local, reduce waste, etc won't make up for the time I felt like I couldn't behave morally because my life was in danger. Shopping a small local businesses won't change the fact that when cornered I behaved like an asshole (and will probably continue to, because fight or flight instincts are hard to change) and that's what I feel guilty over. I felt a lot of resentment recently directed at people who are distressed that they didn't "fight back hard enough" until I realized that people how their own goals they want to work towards, and that not having to fight back feels like a luxury to me when considering the alternatives of "get abused" and "get abused and feel bad about how I responded." Because for me I don't blame someone for not fighting back but now I totally understand that because there are people who do, it's possible to feel that way about your own actions the way I feel guilty even now for not maintaining my moral integrity in a life or death situation.

And that makes it surprisingly easy to accept? I think I can handle a bit more moral hangwringing now that I feel like the stakes are lower. I don't think constantly being exposed to people asking "is this moral" is healthy for me, but I think if I add more interactions where I don't think about that sort of thing that would be good for me.

That relates to an overall conversation about pets- I feel like I had such a gut deep visceral reaction against the idea that an animal could be held responsible for another animal's death because they had to eat or die, and it really surprised me, and I realized I'm an animal as well. If I don't know something, if I can't avoid doing something like using a plastic straw or buying from a chain store, then there's nothing to be held responsible for. Just like I don't ever blame cats for biting people. I can extend the sort of peace I feel around animals where I can get unconditional affection based on just behaving in a kind way alone to life in general and to myself. It all also reminded me that I was holding people who owned pets to such a high standard for so long because unlike other things I wasn't really allowing people to not know better, and I was treating them like how I treat myself when I do something I don't agree with. Which isn't great. Stopping that habit was a good idea, and hopefully having done that means I can translate that to my other problems.

I think I should get more into fandom stuff again based on these realizations because that's always been my oasis of doing shitty things without having to feel guilty about it. I could try reading some mafia AUs or something and see if that makes me feel better

[foxounderscorecube]

House of Hollow - Krystal Sutherland

4½ ⭐

This book fucks!

I impulse-bought this because the description sounded like it could be interesting, but I didn't really know what I was getting into. I didn't expect something so visceral and full of body horror, but I am a big fan of that, so that was a very good surprise.

The three sisters are all very distinct. Iris is trying so hard to be a normal, everyday person, and although the scenes of her bullying are relatively surface-level, they are enough to paint a pretty good picture of how she's viewed at her school and don't seem unrealistic. I do find her hint of attraction to Justine Khan an interesting twist on it, too - especially in combination with the fear of the power she can have over people. Vivi is the least interesting, in my opinion. She's kind of a stereotype of what a punk is. However, she is very sexy and if Sutherland was trying to make a thirst-trap character, she succeeded. Even if she's got the least to think about in regards to her character, she's likeable and I would date her. Grey is horrifying from the start, honestly. She loves her sisters and her fashion line sounds great but she is Not Right. I mean, why she's like that is a pretty important part of the story, but it's cool learning more about her and the appalling lengths she'll go to look out for her sisters.

The queer rep in the story is very casual and I love that. It isn't particularly important but it is part of the identities of Vivi and Iris and ah, it's just so nice to see.

Also, Tyler is adorable. I think the feelings Iris sort of harboured towards him were handled really well. I can't believe he got fucking flayed, though… And I'll admit, I kind of hope there is no sequel? Because it ends with Iris and Vivi going to search for Tyler in the Halfway and I think them wanting to find him (or, at least, Iris wanting to) makes perfect sense and I get it as an ending. But I don't think he should be found. Or, maybe it'd be more accurate to say that I don't want to know, if that makes sense. I like it being open-ended. Iris is right, though - kind of fucked how poor Tyler, who was a good egg, died when Grey stayed alive.Spoiler-filled tangent aside, though, I think Tyler's good because he's a bit of a bitch, bit of a himbo, but smart and caring. He's a genuinely good ally in the sisters' predicament and loveable as slight comic relief.

Cate is a very well-written mother, I think. She's controlling and overprotective and overall not exactly the best, but she loves Vivi and Iris so much and it shows. In particular, that she still loves them when she discovers what they are from Grey speaks to her character. It's horrible how much she hates Grey, but I can't say I blame her! She's a pretty realistic portrayal of a parent: not romanticised or villainised, but a person with flaws that impact her children despite her love for them.

I think that's the thing that I love so much about this book. Some bits feel a bit YA, you know? But most of it is this dark, fantastical stuff happening to people that react pretty much how you'd expect. I'm not going to say they're totally relatable - I mean, they live in London and the word "sourdough" comes up SO often because they seem to eat the most bougie stuff possible and there were points where I was just thinking "this lunch has got to be so pricey :(" - but despite the strange magic that the sisters have, they're just… young women, really.

Everything with Gabe is… a lot. I feel for him, honestly, despite it all. I like the difference in reactions to the sisters' initial disappearance and the changes afterwards between Cate and Gabe. I do feel like this book is mostly about familial relations and it depicts them in a really interesting way, with the supernatural stuff complementing it fantastically.

Basically, I had SO much fun reading this. It's creepy and clever and the decay imagery… so good.

[metalgearstranding]

kaz

Alright here we go:

FIRST IMPRESSION

Probably "oh no he hawt" when I played like an hour or whatever of MGSV before I actually became a fan of MGS lol

IMPRESSION NOW

Fuck I have so many conflicted feelings about Kaz, most of it says more about me than about him... What I really love about Kaz, what draws me to him, also really repulses me and makes me despise him at the same time. I find it hard to be subjective about him because he's somewhat of a black mirror for me personality wise and I don't wike it lol But hey, my visceral feelings about him are also proof of how compelling he is as a character. In a game where everybody is, well, playing games, wearing masks, Kaz feels like a breath of fresh air. He does a little scheming on the side (as a treat) but mostly Kaz feels very authentic and sincere, cards on the table face up for all to see. And I don't think he can help it at all. And he doubles down about it and it's dangerous and stupid and fuck it's relatable, what's wrong with you Kaz, I love you.

FAVORITE MOMENT

Unserious one: when he absolutely loses it in a codec in Peace Walker if Snake is in his underwear. His reaction is so over the top, which is very Kaz, but it also says a lot about how it must be like to work with someone like Snake on a daily basis lol

Serious one: when he absolutely loses it in the helicopter in Ground Zeroes when he goes "give it back! This isn't right, that was ours!". Kudos to Robin Atkin Downes for that delivery, it was absolutely heartbreaking.

IDEA FOR A STORY:

I just want anything dealing with the relationship between Kaz, Snake and Ocelot, not even necessarily in a shippy way, just as people who deal very differently with stuff. MGSV doesn't scratch that itch, because Snake just isn't Snake, and except for the hamburger tapes, all Kaz gets to do in this game is rage and brood. So yeah, it'd probably have to happen during Peace Walker. If anyone knows of a fic like that that's not obviously biased towards either ship hit me up.

UNPOPULAR OPINION:

I don't know if it's an unpopular opinion, but I hate when people woobify Kaz while demonizing Snake and Ocelot. I'm sorry, your pookie has a lot of blood on his hands.

FAVORITE RELATIONSHIP:

I'm gonna give an honorable mention to Ocelot, just because I think there's a lot of untapped potential there. I have to go with Snake though, because oh boy are they fucked up... On the one hand they compliment each other wonderfully (although it kinda borders on co-dependency). If they had been normal people their differences could've brought them together even more, but sadly they're both unhinged assholes so mutual destruction was all but assured.

FAVORITE HEADCANON:

Eye problems aside, I really love Kaz perpetually wearing sunglasses, and all the different ways you can interpret that symbolically: 1) vanity (both real and a front) 2) a futile attempt at trying to hide his real feelings, and a third thing I thought about recently.

This might be obvious or old news to some, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone talk about it: just the fact that his sunglasses could also hide slanted eyes and betray his origins, which we know he had trouble dealing with when he was younger. I'm not a fan when Kojima makes his character half Japanese but doesn't bother giving them Asian traits at all, Kaz being the worst offender of this. But yeah, I guess my headcanon is that one of the reasons he always wears sunglasses is to hide the one clearly Asian trait he should have lol