#i just thought it was interesting that they both acted in stephen king stuff in 2002 and together in easy in 2003

[all-souls-matinee]

BONUS Halloween in August/September Review: Alien: Romulus (2024)

[Eschewing my usual format of 1-2 sentence summary + 1-2 paragraphs of thoughts, this one will be a combination to include several spoilers. It also assumes some prior knowledge of the Alien franchise]

Going into Romulus I was leery of how video game-y the trailer felt and the choice of a director best known for 'subverted expectations' home invasion horror, but those were the two aspects of it I ended up really liking. The premise is that a group of 20-somethings are stuck in an intergalactic mining town where the amount of missions they must fly hours they must work to gain an emigration permit is raised by a few years each time they reach their goal. Our protagonist, Rain, is told by a friend that he and his crew have discovered the wreck of the Nostromo floating above them and plan to break in and steal its cryochambers; the last thing they need for their own ship to make an escape into deep space. The crew welcomes her, but admit that what they really need is her adoptive brother Andy, an ill-liked synthetic who can access the Nostromo's controls. So far so good, I love this premise! It's a little YA dystopia, we've got a ragtag group of mining orphans that look like TikTok influencers and don't have personalities, but that's okay- acceptable and even expected for an Alien movie. I'm also not here to clutch pearls over the sanctity of the original; everything that follows plot-wise is good stuff! Reminiscent of video games, yes, but that means lots of clever little item pickups and interactions, and the tension-building is excellent. An early example: while collecting cryofuel half the team is trapped in a room full of slowly thawing, unseen facehuggers. The other half must retrieve a master-key computer chip from Ash's body (left over from the original mission) to pass to Andy, who is then stuck in reboot mode and unable to help until a critical moment, and this all filmed brilliantly with great effects. There are several standout scenes like it; the movie feels connected to the rest of franchise while contributing new ideas- playing with gravity and temperature and electricity as both weapons and stumbling blocks. It looks good, I like individual plot beats (including the contentious climax), I love the multiple dead rat puppets that are here for some reason, but this is also the only movie I've considered walking out of.

No one barring David Jonsson (Andy) can act, and chemistry is nonexistent. We're told that the crew is composed of friends, siblings, cousins, and love interests, but never actually see it, and no matter how good the plot and pacing are on paper that really makes things drag in places. I like the aliens and love the androids in these movies, but at the end of the day I've always ended up rooting for the humans because of the empathy on display. Many of the Aliens are objectively worse than Romulus from a filmmaking perspective, but this is the first one where I wanted the bad guys to win.

The main villain of this movie isn't the aliens, it's Ash. I was spoiled on CGI Deepfaked* Ian Holm going in, so when they boarded the Nostromo and saw his body I rolled my eyes and braced myself for a scene where he comes to life like a haunted house prop and then they kill him or whatever, but no, he sticks around and drives the entire plot. It's awful; I don't even hate this one from a writing perspective it just feels insanely disrespectful (and is distractingly bad to look at.)

3. The Green Mile is one of my most hated movies of all time. I revisited it early this year when the podcast Just King Things discussed the book within the context of Stephen King's larger body of work, which stresses the character of John Coffey not as an aberration but a trope King keeps coming back to: a black or disabled person who is a holy innocent. Physical prowess and/or magic powers are coupled with the disposition of a character like Of Mice and Men's Lennie or Flowers for Algernon's Charlie to create someone who looks scary but is actually worthy of love because, hey guys, he's nice and sympathetic in a way that appeals to an imagined white American audience. Months after listening to that episode I accidentally walked into an even broader literary context, discovering the character of Jean in E.E. Cummings's The Enormous Room (a nearly 1:1 blueprint for Coffey), and Pip in Moby-Dick, a child traumatized to a point of babbling incoherence that allows him to act as a holy conduit, a prophet, and a comfort to his captain. These characters aren't meant to be racist but rather to teach about antiblack racism, which makes for interesting reading, but a terrible Alien movie.

Andy is the only black character in this film. Andy is referred to as Rain's brother at most twice, then revealed to be her servant (literally programmed by her father to do two things- protect her and make dad jokes.) Andy is cognitively and physically disabled from being rebooted so many times over the years, and faces extra abuse and discrimination because of this. I cannot begin to describe how it felt to have spent the year bumping into saintly black characters in media who are dehumanized in order to teach some vague platitude about humanity, only to run into it again here. It gets worse and more muddled when Andy is rebooted using Ash's chip, which makes him "normal," which makes him evil. Ash uses him to further the interests of Weyland rather than his sister/master Rain and it makes him start saying scary inhuman stuff like 'the solution to the trolley problem is to kill as few people as possible.' (Again, go bad guys.)

I know the movie doesn't see itself as racist. Andy is by far the most interesting character and has a lot of complexity to him; Rain's whole arc is learning that no one should have seen him as expendable or treated him as an inferior, and tells him his new prime directive is to live for himself (as well as her. Can't leave that on the table.) Alverez clearly had the best of intentions, but the movie can't get away from the fact that Andy being cognitively impaired and using his strength and powers to the benefit of some random white girl, choosing family over work but also the individual over the collective, was actually what made him human.

Okay rant over. I liked the part where they threw a flair and the facehuggers scurried after it like a pack of dogs because they hunt by body heat and movement instead of by smell and vision. Yay :-)

*Holm was deepfaked 'respectfully' with the consent of his family using a combination of animatronic and a new actor... and the company literally responsible for deepfakes (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-features/alien-romulus-ian-holm-rook-ash-ai-1235982350.) I cannot stress enough how bad this is to look at for almost 2 hours like i needed to talk about Andy but jesus christ.

[cctinsleybaxter]

Furiosa thots!!! Putting under a readmore since it only just came out and i don't want to dissuade people from going. I find it kinda funny I find it kinda sad (I lowkey hated it but the war rig scene made me go stupid aaaa)

Stuff I liked:

Pacing and sound design. Was really skeptical of the 2+ hour runtime but it went by quick and plotting made sense

Costuming! Any time a practical effect or something textured is onscreen (which is not always. bodes well for the 'stuff i hated' section) is awesome; I don't care if it looks stupid or doesn't make sense it's a pleasure to have in class.

Arm backstory

This car

I went in thinking 'sigh well they're never going to beat robert de niro exploding that helicopter in midnight run' and then the war rig scene happened; I was going crazy!!! I loved it from beginning to end. I actually gasped because I'd noticed the grey mass of cloth being used as a flag at the first encampment and thought 'that's my favorite thing they've shown so far' (i was going to say prop but idk that it was practical); WELCOME BACK GREY CLOTH

Chris Hemsworth was somehow my favorite performance, I felt like he nailed the combination of goofy/ridiculous and scary/threatening

Stuff I didn't like:

George Miller uses bible allegories and imagery like he's the fucking Ultraman guy (Eiji Tsuburaya.) Why make posts about how fascinated you are by 'the japanese' using catholic imagery when we got that egregious crucifixion setup. Australians are culpable.

We don't learn anything about furiosa as a person that can't already be gleaned from Fury Road. I do think this does a pretty admirable job of storytelling for a prequel, we learn about what happened to Furiosa and we (sort of) get the character development that led her to take the wives with her, but I wish it'd been a brand new character's story

I like Anya Taylor-Joy and disagree with people saying this was a miscast because she can't act and is only suited to play models (misogyny takes many forms...), but I do think she's best in roles with a lot of speaking and micro-expressions, so playing a woman who barely speaks or emotes and will later become charlize theron just wasn't it. I'm also legitimately worried about how skinny she is rn

Stuff I hated:

This movie looked like absolute garbage in comparison to the rest of the mad maxes; even the ones I think are irredeemably bad. The combination of whatever frame rate they were using and the CGI was just. Ugh.

Scene transitions (so many fades to black) and montage (specifically thinking about the sped-up footage of them assembling the rig, Furiosa's Lion King dream sequence, and 'the horrors of war') were a hot mess

Framing dementus's anarcho-fascism as worse than immortan joe's regular fascism is such a misstep it casts a shadow over the whole movie. Yeah the hedonist with the working class accent who hates art and is too stupid/selfish to run a territory yadda yadda. It's very Stephen King villain, which would be fine!, but Fury Road had such good politics it just felt tired

You're telling me that a woman who spent her childhood kidnapped and threatened with rape (interesting that said threat only comes from individual extra bad guys btw; both evil men-dominated societies accept slavery and rape but condemn pedophilia) falls for her male coworker and mentor figure. You're telling me this is a compelling relationship between two victims of the same system. You're telling me you filmed it like a YA dystopian romance. You're telling me her backstory is that she showed a guy her most treasured and vulnerable possession, a seed from the fruit she plucked before being taken from eden and losing her innocence, and he bade her keep it by putting his big-ass yaoi hand over hers, and that's what solidified their trust. You're telling me she doesn't once speak to a woman who isn't her mom. Can we die? Can we go to the wasteland?

[dontcallpanic]

Fic authors self rec! When you get this, reply with your favorite five fics that you've written, then pass on to at least five other writers! Spread the self-love 💞

Ah, thanks so much for this ask @writerhellenemeyers! @gege-wondering-around asked as well and I've been putting it off because I didn't know how to answer!

Everything I have is in a WIP status and I am an extremely slow writer. I get no time (despite what my chronically online presence here might suggest!)

Anyway I now have two wips so I thought it was time to answer!

No Title As Yet -

The first one is a strange mix of ingredients and is essentially about Stiles taking a roadtrip for complicated personal reasons and running full tilt into Beacon Hills which is one of those small towns where everyone is acting really weird and there's a strange red eyed monster following him around (nudge wink) - and he basically wants to solve All the mysteries. It's inspired by all those strange small town stories (twilight, Stephen king, gravity falls etc) the songs 'My Silver Lining' by first aid kit and 'Indigo' by Katherine Priddy and this strange Welsh myth about a woman who vanishes on her wedding day only for her bones to be found ten years later, still clothed in the wedding dress, inside a tree that has been struck by lightning/come down in a storm. I'm aiming for it to be funny, creepy, wild and full of strange magic.

I'm manifesting... murder?

Okay the next one was just a funny thing to cheer up my friend who'd had an insanely bad day/week at work but it sort of spiraled.

It was this idea that Stiles is having trouble with the authorities trying to close down his museum. And because he's a spark and does a bit of a to b thinking he sort of... Accidentally manifests/wills their murders. At least, it's starts off accidentally... A kind of "I didn't mean for this to happen but it's made everything better??? Is murder the solution to all my problems?" With Derek being dragged along for the ride and becoming his long-suffering accomplice.

My friends brief was 'murder husbands but make it hot fuzz." Still not sure where it's going! It might end up being a 5 times Stiles accidentally kills people and one time it was on purpose - who knows!

Anyway... thanks so much for the ask! I like to write purely for fun so I don't know if this will tick anyone's boxes but that's my stuff!

Thank you both for being absolutely wonderful people! I really admire you both so much so I appreciate the interest!

Oh and tagging @oldefashioned incase You're interested!

[kimmimaru]

Ok, so I love horror. I'm obsessed with it. I honestly don't know why I don't actually write much of it though, I think its because I don't think I'm very good at it lol. One of my fave authors is Stephen King, the man is a genius but he churns out books so fast I can't keep up and only have so much shelf space, sadly lol. Has anyone else read Doctor Sleep? That shit was brilliant, my fave is IT but Doctor Sleep is defo a close second. Very long, nonsensical ramble under the cut about Hojo, Vincent and Lucrecia:

But anyways, I'm doing a couple of little horror fics for Halloween, they're doing alright I suppose. Not particularly ground breaking or anything but they're ok. The fics are, of course, FF7 fics and both revolve somewhat around Hojo. I don't know, I find him one of the scariest characters. He's terrifying, especially in the OG. Not exactly sure what it is about him specifically that scares me more than other characters, because like, Sephiroth is the main 'bad guy' in the story but Hojo's just creepy. Like if I met someone like him irl he would be giving off all the red flags. You know there's just some people who just give you the creeps, even if they're a total stranger? Like every cell in your body is just telling you RED ALERT? That's Hojo for me lol. Maybe its because Sephiroth's motivations are somewhat understandable, he loses his mind because he finds out he's not human and his entire life probably wasn't good. I can understand that, I too sometimes look at all the horrific shit humanity has done and wonder if its even worth keeping us around you know? But Hojo, at least as far as I'm aware, isn't really given any other motivations other than 'because I can' or 'I want to see what happens' and to me that's creepy. Not to mention that in the OG he does kind of try to make Aerith...do stuff...with Red 13...which uh...no. No absolutely not. Lol. Also...why the fuck is he considered so attractive in the OG? He doesn't just manage to lure Lucrecia away from Vincent 'my ass looks great in leather' (just trust me and pause AC at the moment Vincent crouches before jumping into the air to attack Bahamut SIN and try and tell me it doesn't lol) Valentine but also somehow manages to attract a whole gaggle of bikini-clad women on the beach in Costa Del Sol. HOW?? Ok, so I can sort of see how Lucrecia could have agreed to carry Hojo's baby, its probably because she's a scientist too and was also interested in the results or whatever...but still, lady...please wtf were you thinking? At least the beach-goers have the excuse of not knowing Hojo, Lucrecia does not have that lol. How can she spend god knows how long around Hojo and not think; this man is a creep? Honestly I would kind of be interested in seeing something about how all that happened, was he acting different around her? Was she just blinded by the curiosity of the experiment? Was it simply due to the fact that he was the only other man in the mansion when she freaked out about Vincent and her history with his father?

I think maybe that's why I don't write anything much about Lucrecia, I just can't get into her head. I don't understand her at all. To me, not a lot of her choices make any sense. Her actions feel weird and illogical and I'm not sure if its just me being autistic about it, or if I'm missing something in the story or what. But going from 'I love Vincent Valentine' to 'oh no I feel guilty because of Vincent's father's death therefore I must dump him and go with Mr Creeps over here'. Because that's not going to make him feel a billion times worse than just...I don't know, explaining why you're worried and talking shit out? And then sticking the monster that actively killed his father INSIDE him. Its fucking weird. (and then you have Vincent's own weird ass guilt, its non-sensical to blame himself for HER decisions. The whole story is just a giant shit show lol). Does this make any sense? I don't know. I had some Thoughts and needed to write them down. Ugh.

[oocstephenkingtv]

Emily Deschanel as Pam Asbury in Rose Red (2002)

Marguerite Moreau as Charlie McGee in Firestarter 2 Rekindled

vs. Laura and Jamie Harris in Easy (2003)

[mirrorballdazai]

Hey! Can you explain a bit more your comparison between it and st kids? I don't really understand. Have a nice day <3

gladly !!

there are LOTS of parallels between the st and it kids on so many levels, but what i was focusing on in that post was the difference between the two in relation to sex (and other “adult stuff” like cigarettes, but mainly sex) and how that shows different ways to cope with trauma and what the kids symbolize as a whole in the show/movie/book

first off let’s remember that the losers are all 11 years old, if i remember correctly only stanley is 10 in the book. the members of the party are 12 in the first season and obviously they grow up, so at what is right now the end of the show they’re all 14/15.

both groups face struggles like bullying (which is often rooted in racism, homophobia, ableism and other things), abusive or neglectful parents (or in max’s case, siblings), personal fears and obviously there are the supernatural plots, so monsters and whatever pennywise is (i didn’t finish the book yet but i think he’s an alien or a semigod but anyway).

the interesting thing is that even if the it kids are younger they show a knowledge of some, idk how to word it, “adult things”. for example some of them smoke — in the movies i’m pretty sure beverly is the only one who does it both in the og and in the remake. the thing that really stuck with me though is that they all know what sex is or even just have a vague idea of it (for example eddie in the book doesn’t really know what exactly is, but shows that he knows that it’s a thing). they make jokes about it and say/think sexual things in general. it’s also connected to eddie’s visions since in the book he sees a man with syphilis who offers to do yk sexual stuff which is connected to his fear of being ill and stuff.

on the other hand the st kids never show to know what sex is, except for max that talks about “happy screams” in s3, which makes sense because max is supposed to be the one who knows more stuff in the group, the one who lived in a city and all that. el then mentions again these “happy screams”, and when someone (i dont remeber who exactly i’m sorry) asks what happy screams are max interrupts el who was about to answer and says that it doesn’t matter — which could be for many reasons. maybe she is embarrassed or something, but when i first watched it i thought “ah she probably doesn’t want to kind of ruin everyone’s innocence” since she showed stress only after that-person asked what happy screams are, which shows that they don’t know what sex is at least in max’s mind.

the question now is why. there’s this difference between these groups, but why? for mainly two reasons.

1. show different ways to cope with trauma

my theory is that stephen king wanted to show how less innocent kids can be after trauma and abuse. he wanted to show the cruel reality, the one where kids are not that innocent even when they’re very young, especially after bad experiences. those experiences make them want to act like grown ups, talking about sex, joking about it and stuff like they think adults do.

stranger things does the complete opposite: the kids are an ideal. if you think about it even after their traumatic experiences they stay sweet and innocent — because let’s be real, they never act really bad. maybe they’re a bit bitchy or something, maybe they distance themselves from the others, but they never do REALLY bad stuff. i mean they acted like mike was a criminal in s2 because he cheated on a test/essay, or because of the graffiti thing. mike also says “everyone graffitis the bathroom stall”, which is true! they act like he’s a really bad kid for doing something normal kids do on a daily basis! another example that i love is that when will is feeling bad he clings to his childhood even more, whether that be playing d&d or going trick or treating or drawing. those are normal things kids do. when max faces depression and anxiety she stops talking to basically everyone — which kids often do, it can even be selective mutism in some cases. and there are many MANY other examples !! like el and mike’s relationship — whenever they’re stressed they scream about how much they love each other, they cling to each other and their relationship, because it was their first crush, their first love (even if you think they never really loved/had a crush on each other it was their first relationship you know?). being each other’s partner is a part of their childhood they cling onto when they’re scared.

2. because they symbolize different things

the losers are an example of how reality is: even things that are supposed to be pure and innocent can be cruel, “dirty”. they’re the symbol of a society that puts each person to their limit, sometimes making them the worst version themselves.

the party members are an ideal. they represent innocence, the “good” in a world full of bad people, bad ideals, bad decisions. they’re a symbol of hope, because a world that is as ugly as theirs needs hope.

+ i also want to point out that it as a whole has a grey type of morality — the kids do bad and good things and at one point you don’t even know what to think about them. richie is a kid that deals with this feeling of alienation from his friends (canon in book and in the movies, but for different reasons), he’s overall a sweet guy, but also makes offensive comments — sometimes these comments are even racist, or fatphobic, or ableist. henry is a character you’re supposed to hate from the first to the last moment, but you’re sometimes even supposed to emphasize with him because at the end of the day he’s been abused his whole live. while in stranger things the characters are inherently good or bad. a black and white kind of morality.

[not-another-walnut]

I started listening to to Random Number Generator Horror Podcast No. 9 because it was Jeffery and Cecil of WTNV and I love them

In a Stephen King episode Jeffery mentioned another podcast, Just King Things, a show where two literary professionals read and analyze the works of Stephen King in publication order

I start listening to Just King Things, and it’s a really good show and both the hosts are delightful. I’m learning so much about books I’ve always been interested in but not so willing to read myself

One of the hosts of Just King Things (Michael) reveals that he read Homestuck back in the day, and wants to write a book on the subject, and launches a podcast called Homestuck Made This World, where he and his co-host read and discuss the comic

I, naturally, need to listen to Homestuck Made This World, because as a product of being on this godforsaken app for over a decade I somehow know so much and absolutely nothing about Homestuck. It’s always been so mysterious and and confusing and most of all, completely unapproachable

I’ve been enjoying this podcast very much for the last couple months, I’ve learned so much about what drove my brothers in fandom tumblr so wild, but now as this show gets deeper into act six, I find myself still lacking the context and visual references to properly understand what is happening

So I think, maybe I should read some Homestuck? Not chapter one, that sounded pretty miserable…. maybe I’ll just skip to act five… the troll stuff seemed interesting enough…

But now I’m having thoughts about the content I’m consuming (naturally) because some troubling things have occurred (don’t worry I know better than to get involved in vriskourse even if it’s been a decade) but have no actual desire to engage what’s left of the hs community in 2022 (also because i’ve actually read remarkably little of the comic at this point)

And that is how I’ve ended up having personal opinions ABOUT TROLLS in the year of our lord 2022, pain and suffering, thanks michael and cameron for inflicting me with comprehension and context…

[cecilyneville]

the spanish princess ep 4!

“it’s like ripping off a bandaid,” i tell myself, “just gotta do it.” [proceeds to skip over like half the scenes]

every week i thank god that i’m not the one who pays for the stan subscription and am therefore watching this garbage for free

episode description is like “as meg jeopardizes everything for love”, i think u mean “as meg jeopardizes everything for some bombass douglas dick”

(ok no i think margaret actually did love angus, particularly as she often cited “he loves me not” in her letters as a reason she wished to divorce him. also i think she thought she had to ally with a powerful house regardless of what consequences it may bring. and on her deathbed when she asked that her son might look kindly upon angus - this may have been a bid to protect margaret douglas but at the same time it’s very possible that, as her life was drawing to a close, she looked back on her many feuds with angus and regretted them.) 

anyway enough meg chat, onto the show!

ugh the bird cage is back fuck me

wait wasn’t arthur plantagenet viscount lisle? or was he given that title later on? speaking of which, there’s a figure you never see in historical fiction, which is such a shame

charlotte hope’s horny acting is so cringe 

i wish we’d gotten to see margaret and angus’ wedding!

“angus will not rule with me” hmmm historical margaret thought otherwise lol

how is this so much more interesting than anything that happens in the english court

so, in ep 2 meg calls angus “angus douglas” and now catherine says “archibald douglas, the earl of angus”? boy i hope somebody got fired for that blunder

i feel like the guy who plays wolsey is taking inspiration from mark gatiss’ stephen gardiner (in wolf hall) and if so, i admire him very much

oh...ok. i see what they’re doing. they’re going to have howard ride to the border under catherine’s instructions and he’s going to bring meg back. so basically, we’re eschewing all the fun stuff in scotland for catherine’s dumb diplomacy

“that halfwit in a kilt” THEY’RE NOT WEARING KILTS YOU CLOD, KILTS WEREN’T EVEN INVENTED, WHO WROTE THIS EPISODE

“your sister’s sons must take the throne” uhhh james v is already on the throne, literally no one is disputing that, not even albany

i feel like they should have introduced anne hastings alongside bessie in the first ep (unless they did and i missed it, it’s possible)

once again, ch’s horny acting is super cringe

WAIT MEG AND ANGUS ARE LITERALLY HIDING OUT IN A PANTRY I WANT TO DIE THIS IS THE DUMBEST THING I HAVE EVER SEEN

“that is my son, our future king, you raise your voice to” HE IS LITERALLY THE CROWNED KING OF SCOTLAND WTF, WHO WROTE THIS

meg calling herself sovereign when she is regent and called herself that earlier this episode...

like i don’t expect them to but the tsp writers have no idea how queenship works, in any of its forms

lina & oviedo’s babies are so cute 🥰🥰🥰

lina telling catherine that she is the light is deeply hilarious when lina is the most luminous presence on this show

catherine mentioning joanna offhandedly (in a negative sense) while doing nothing for her...

catherine constantly interfering in mary and meg’s lives and calling herself their sister, whilst doing nothing at all for joanna (yes i am aware that irl catherine wasn’t able to do so, but in tsp!verse where it’s all about ~sisterhood~ this makes no sense)

margaret and georgie both deserve so much better than this...maybe i should actually write that margaret biopic screenplay lol

so...margaret douglas doesn’t exist in this universe or???

“i will never trust again” [spongebob voice, after henry stewart shows up] a few moments later...

not going to comment on how this show has catherine heavily pregnant fighting in war but doesn’t have meg heavily pregnant fleeing across the border on horseback

i should know better than to expect historical lines from this show but they had the perfect opportunity for henry to say “done like a scot” and then they DIDN’T

i love that there’s no time for midwives but plenty of time to alert henry and summon lina & maggie

catherine standing and walking 0.5 seconds after giving birth

“thank you for your efforts” LOOOOOL

[kill bill sirens]

i’m assuming lina is going to testify against catherine in the last ep of the series and i truly cannot wait

emma frost said let thomas howard say fuck

this episode would have been far better if they’d included louis’ death and juxtaposed mary eloping with brandon with meg eloping with angus, and the diplomatic crises that follow, but then i guess there would be less time for catherine clenching her neck and that could not happen

who wrote this episode, i hope they never write for television again

[kenzie-ann27]

My Obnoxiously Long Analysis of Danny Torrance and Richie Tozier

I have thought about this particular analysis for a while, and this has been a really fun thing to write, but at the same time, I feel like I am missing a large part of the story because I am struggling to figure out why? I know these characters are connected in some way, that part is obvious, but I am unsure of the significance. Why are these two characters so similar yet so different? This isn’t a case of the Stephen King self-insert where every male lead is an author but grew up in a weird place and lost a family member that causes him great distress even in his adult life (looking at you, Bill Denbrough and Gordie LaChance). The case of these two characters is different, as their personalities and lives are so different as to not have them be carbon-copies of each other, but at the same time they share so many traits and they have this connection that is interesting to me (though not as interesting anymore, thank you so much, Mike Flanagan).

First, I will talk about the gifs, since I think that’s probably the best place to begin. That quote by Dick Hallorann is so, so interesting to me because it directly relates back to It. Towards the end of the book, Richie recalls a very distinct moment when Bill killed a mosquito that was on the back of Richie’s neck, and he talks a bit about it and how bugs were often drawn to them (though he uses pheromones as an example). Leeches are also mentioned quite descriptively in It as well, them being Patrick Hockstetter’s fear and what kills him in the book. The other gifs are mainly a visual comparison, as I think that the way those two moments were carried out was pretty interesting. I was going to make another visual comparison with the weird cloudy eye effect that both films utilize very well, but that part in It: Chapter Two with Richie does make me pretty uncomfortable. In both movies, essentially, characters’ eyes get clouded over when they get into someone else’s head: Danny Torrance does this to Rose the Hat, while It does it to Richie.

To start off, both Richie and Danny grew up as only children in a family where they had close relationships with their parents despite them having a hard time understanding their children. They both felt closer to their mothers, as their fathers were often busy with work; both Maggie and Wendy seemed to ensure that Richie and Danny grew up with strong moral values, and both of the children were affected greatly when their mothers died. As children, they are forced into an environment where they deal with a supernatural evil, though they are not in any real danger unlike other characters until the end of the story (when Jack chases Danny and when Richie and the other Losers fight It for the first time); all other times, they mainly see things that make them aware of the danger that is present. Notice that with Richie, unlike the other Losers, is not physically affected by It really at any point. This is very different from how It works with the others because that danger is still there even after the event has passed. The blood in Beverly’s bathroom is still there even after she leaves and goes back. But with Richie, in the park, he is able to make the danger go away, he puts those glasses back on and everything goes back to normal (the others physically run away from the danger, but Richie is psychologically running away from it by telling himself it isn’t real). Anyway, this event stays with them long after they’ve grown up and moved far away from the place where the trauma occurred: Richie moved from Maine to California (Chicago in the film) while Danny moved from Colorado to Florida (later to New Hampshire). They then, turn to drugs and/or alcohol, which is said in Doctor Sleep to sort of repress the ability to shine and keep those negative past memories at bay; Richie seems to lean more towards drugs than alcohol, and vice versa for Danny. When they are 40, they are drawn back to the place where they were mainly abused as children and are able to use their abilities to destroy the evil thing finally before returning back home to their pets and their co-workers that they have weirdly close relationships with and all is good. That's essentially their main stories, but I'm also going to talk about a few specific connections that I think are cool to see.

Both Danny and Richie use their hands as the main source of their shining abilities. This is not obvious with Richie in the movie, but it is for Danny with him and Tony. However! In the book, Richie's main goal in life as a child is to become- of all things- a ventriloquist. You know, a person that uses their hands a lot like how Danny does to make it look like Tony is more than just a voice. Speaking of voices, that's Richie's main thing. Who is to say all those voices aren't like Tony in that they're a personification of the shining? (more on this below) This is also a connection between the two because neither of them is particularly good at doing voices, they essentially still just sound like themselves; this doesn't mean that those voices don't represent other people, though, even if they do come out of Danny's and Richie's mouths. The whole hands thing also works for the other members of the Losers Club, with each of the Losers relying on their hands for their jobs, just like Danny, who, in Doctor Sleep, is mentioned as being a janitor before becoming an orderly at a hospice (I would classify him more as an unregistered nurse, as he does say he’s had medical training). Hands and arms in general play huge roles in these two stories, which I think sort of puts the nail in the coffin of this argument. As a child, Danny Torrance gets his arm broken by his father, which is the moment when he starts talking to his imaginary friend/personification of the shining, Tony. While nothing huge happens to Richie’s arms in the book or movie, I would go as far to say (I am aware this goes off-topic, but bear with me here) that in the hierarchy of who shines the brightest of the Losers, Eddie is up there since not only does he get his arm broken twice in the book, it’s also what causes him to die because he gets his good arm bitten off and he bleeds to death. Eddie in his final moments is so strange to me, and I think the reason why that is is that he physically cannot shine. His only arm left is broken. Of course, It would want to take that away from him because it’s aware that Eddie has the ability to kill it.

Both Danny and Richie rely on the guidance of an old (dead) friend to keep them on the correct path. For Danny, this is Dick Hallorann, as he appears in Doctor Sleep to guide Danny to return back to the hotel. For Richie, this is Stanley, as a memory of Stan keeps Richie from going back home.

Both Danny and Richie are able to form a connection with the dead/dying. For Richie, he's mostly connected to those who have already died, while Danny seems to help more with people who are dying. I mostly noticed this in It after realizing the voices of people (rather than original characters) Richie seems to do more often- Humphrey Bogart, James Dean, and Pancho Vanilla (based on Pancho Villa, the Mexican general)- are all people who have died before 1958. I like to imagine that this is just Richie flexing with his shining ability and him being able to form those connections with those people by taking their voices and making them his own. Notice that in the book, “voices” is usually capitalized, as if it represents something a lot more important than just a kid doing an impression.

Both Danny and Richie have confusing relationships with others, specifically their bosses. This is more a personal thing rather than a fact, but I have realized that these characters do have rather strange relationships with others. With Danny, he meets Billy after taking a bus to New Hampshire, and Billy gives him a job and a place to stay. They become fast friends, though I mainly attribute this to their shared ability to shine (yes, of course, I’m going to mention that Danny often sings along to YMCA while working). Danny eventually tells Billy about what’s going on with the missing kids, and Billy is just unusually calm with the situation and agrees to go with him to Idaho to find Bradley’s glove. With Richie, however, I would say the strange coworker comes in the form of Steve, who is his manager in both the book and the movie. Obviously, if you have never been to my blog before, I really like Steve. He’s a fun character to look at not only because of the way he interacts with Richie but because I am willing to bet that that’s who Richie ends up with (at least, in the movie, since that was the plan in the 2010 script). Like Danny with Billy, Richie wants to tell Steve about the crazy stuff that’s happening, if he remembered what happened at all. I know this isn’t really a good explanation for the comparison between Danny and Richie, but I feel like their relationships with Billy and Steve are just really interesting and something that stuck out to me in the books and the movies.

Of course, now, I feel like I need to justify all of this. I need to come up with some reason why these two characters are connected and why I felt the need to write all of this garbage. And for the longest time, I didn’t know why. I didn’t know why these two characters stick out so much in this universe.

And then I rewatched It: Chapter Two.

Richie sticks out the most in that movie because of the way he acts is so different from the others. He feels distant, almost. From the minute I see him on screen I am able to look at him and say “that’s Richie”, but at the same time he feels so different to me, as someone who has looked at this character for a long time to try and dissect him. In his opening scene, for one, unlike all of the others, Richie gets a moment on stage where he stares out blankly and he hears these voices, memories from his past (I don’t remember the exact things they said, but essentially they were the voices of himself, Stanley, Eddie, and Henry). That sticks out to me so much because he is the only character that that happens to, even after he drank a glass of bourbon like a minute beforehand (of course, this also can sort of be explained as the shining is dulled by alcohol, not always taken away completely). To be honest, all of the Losers tend to turn to alcohol when faced with stressful memories throughout the movie. But it wasn’t until later that I realized that Richie was seen differently by the Losers. In the Neibolt House, I feel like the Losers tend to somewhat overreact when it comes to Richie after being attacked by the spider-Stanley (like… when Eddie broke his arm, most of them were focused more on Pennywise rather than helping Eddie). And later after Eddie got stabbed, he looks to Richie as if Richie is going to help him.

This goes back to my hierarchy statement before, but essentially, what I’m getting at is that Richie shines the most. Like… Danny Torrance levels of shine. That’s why they are connected. It’s shown in Doctor Sleep that those who shine the most tend to connect to each other, so who’s to say that Danny didn’t know about Richie? In my hierarchy, by the way, I would say that the order of who shines the most would be: Richie, Stanley, Eddie, Beverly, Bill, Mike, and then Ben. Of course, this would bring up the issue of “if Richie shined the most, then why didn’t the Turtle talk to him instead of Bill?”, and that can just simply be put down to the fact that Bill is the leader. That came to be not because of his shining, but rather simply because of the way he looked; the other Losers (I believe it was either Eddie or Richie) mention that they look up to Bill, mainly because he is taller and stronger and more handsome. Why would the Turtle go to Richie for help with this when Richie has been running away from himself his whole life? Bill was the logical reason because he could lead them in a way that Richie never did.

Overall, I feel like both Richie and Danny have these super similar qualities that are hard to ignore. I love both of these characters, so writing this long piece of garbage was a lot of fun. It was also fun to rewatch these movies and see that there is just this big connection that is there for fans of the books, so I am dying to see where it goes. It feels like they are waiting for The Dark Tower to bring them together with the mentions of the Turtle and Ka and space and all of that, but I feel like a whole new story would be really interesting as well. Plus, you know, I am dying to see a teenaged Abra trying to explain to shining to Richie.

[recurring-polynya]

Bollywood Review Time!

Today, I am going to talk about Om Shanty Om, a very good movie that was Not For Me.

Let me back up. People recommend stuff to me a lot and I try to watch it and talk about it, and I always feel bad when I don’t like it. This one was recommended to me by my friend @serene-faerie​ I want to make it very clear that you, reader, may like this film very much! It was a strange perfect storm of Things I Don’t Care For, and I actually rather enjoyed the experience of picking apart what I didn’t like about from what I did, because honestly, I am always interested in the ways stories are told and what stories say about themselves.

Cut for spoilers and also length

First off the bat-- this is not a film for the Bollywood beginner. It’s sort of a meta-narrative, with a ton of cameos from famous stars and jokes about Bollywood tropes and directors and such. There’s a ten-minute dance number in the middle that’s just famous people showing up to get down and everybody cheers every time someone new rolls in. I have only actually seen a handful of Bollywood films, mostly made after this one (it was made in 2007), and I could tell that there were a ton of gags and references that flew over my head. I got the sense, both from watching it, and from reading reviews, that this was all very well done and funny, I just didn’t have the proper frame of reference to appreciate it.

The main character, Om, is played by Shah Rukh Khan, an incredibly famous Bollywood star whom I had never heard of before watching this film. In the beginning, Om is a somewhat-bumbling movie extra, dreaming of stardom, flipping his hair, and falling in love with a beautiful starlet on a billboard. I… was not taken in by his charms. I feel like I really missed out by not knowing who Shah Rukh Khan was ahead of time. That was sort of an interesting thought to me-- that a famous actor brings the good will of all his previous roles to a movie with him, and that it was very interesting to me to watch a film stripped of that context. I was literally shocked when halfway through the film, he rips off his shirt and had killer abs, I was absolutely not expecting it.

The deal of the movie is that, through a series of coincidences, Om meets Shanti, the actress of his dreams (from the billboard). She is played by Deepika Padukone, who I fell for immediately. She is gorgeous and had a ton of charisma. This movie seems like it’s going to be a love story, but it really isn’t. Shanti is charmed by Om’s sweetness, but she’s already in a doomed secret marriage with a scumbag director, Mukesh, who ends up murdering her when she wants him to publicly acknowledge her, which is kinda time sensitive, because she is pregnant. Mukesh had planned to have her star in a lavish movie spectacle called Om Shanti Om, but when she forces his hand, he burns the set down with her locked inside. Om witnesses all this; he tries to save her and dies in the process.

Om happens to die in the same hospital where a famous director’s child is being born, and he is reincarnated as the baby, and grows up to have the life he always wanted-- that of a Bollywood superstar. His name is still Om, but his nickname is O.K., so I am going to call him that to distinguish between 1977 Om and 2007 Om. He meets Mukesh again who is now a super-successful Hollywood producer. O.K. gets all the memories of his past life back, and decides to Get Revenge by proposing to do a remake of Om Shanti Om. He finds a wanna-be actress, Sandy, who looks exactly like Shanti, and has her haunt the set in order to make Mukesh think he is going crazy (and maybe also confess? It’s not a terribly clear-cut plan). You might think that Sandy is the reincarnation of Shanti, but Shanti’s ghost shows up in the grand finale of the film, so I guess she wasn’t?? You also might expect O.K. and Sandy to have some romantic feelings, but they really don’t, and in fact, O.K. is actually pretty mean to Sandy, even though she is extremely sweet and I don’t see how anyone could possibly be mean to her.

The movie is lush. The costumes are elaborate, the sets are lavish, the dance numbers are many and long. There is not a single scene without an off-screen fan to dramatically tousle the actors’ hair. I actually rather liked the last act of the movie where they were gaslighting Mukesh and it was over-the-top, scenery-chewing, Hamlet--play-with-in-a-play madness. A chandelier falls on someone. A lot of the end doesn’t even make a lot of sense or exist in any sort of linear time, cutting between the film-within-a-film and dance numbers and what’s “really happening” and I really had no problem with any of this. I actually really liked the amount of meta that was happening and the breakdown of boundaries, and I found the end to be reasonably satisfying.

So what didn’t I like about it?

The entire film relies on you being charmed by Om and I did not care for him. We all have this set of trope personality types that we enjoy and fall for, and “young person who dreams of making it big on the stage/screen” is a huge swipe left for me. Give me a stolid second-in-command who has been stationed at an ice wall for 30 years to protect his homeland. A incredibly tired dude muttering “fuck” as he wades into a swamp to fight a bog zombie, because who else is gonna? My dude turn-ons include duty and self-sacrifice and really good posture. I couldn’t watch Naruto because everyone spouted off about “their dreams” too much, and I thought Om should have cut his losses and gotten a real job. I am who I am.

There’s a weird fine line between “meta,” that is, stories about storytelling and presentation and media, and movies about being in love with making movies. I like the former a lot and I do not care for the latter one bit. I did stage crew for a high school production of 42nd Street and I have a very distinct memory of thinking “this is a play about putting on a play. Why on earth would anyone who is not an actor want to watch this?” I also hate books where the main character is a writer (yes, Stephen King, this is a call-out). I also hate biopics about musicians and actors. I honestly do not care about the craft, and the “magic of cinema” has never been a thing I have found remotely compelling. 

What I love about reincarnation storylines is the period where the characters recognize the feelings and memories that are tied to their previous lives-- where they see someone and can feel their old emotions for this person, but without knowing why. This is where I live. I eat this with a spoon. I want this to prolong the emotional burn, because the characters don't know what are their own feelings and what comes from their past lives, and that there are conflicts that must be resolved for both lifetimes. Alternatively, you can also use a reincarnation storyline to skip the emotional burn entirely, by just having the character “get all their memories back in one fell swoop.” This is… the opposite of what I want. This is what Om Shanty Om does. I felt deeply cheated.

Relatedly, the entire theme of the movie was "When you want something badly, the whole universe conspires to give to you", a sentiment I wholeheartedly disagree with. I love stories about the conflict between agency and destiny, I think this is a really meaty subject, but once again, the movie used it as an excuse to let the characters sit back and do nothing and have a solution to their problems drop into their laps. I am sure you could make an argument for the charm of this viewpoint, but it is not for me.

I like dance numbers all right, but they are not why I watch Bollywood films. This movie is over two hours long and a lot of it was dance numbers. I was very tired of dance numbers by the end. That being said, the titular song was a bop and I had it stuck in my head for days. “Disco of Distress” was my second favorite.

I do not really feel a lot of nostalgia for the late 1970s, which is when the first half of the film takes place. If noisy patterns and kitsch and big winks and goofy hair is your period aesthetic, you will enjoy this part a lot!

Here’s what I did like!

Sunglasses. There were so many good sunnies in this film. So many. A parade of excellent shades.

Deepika Padukone. She is so adorable, for one, and she charmed me in every way that Shah Rukh Khan did not. I loved her both as the melancholy starlet Shanti and the doofy, gum-chewing Sandy, and also the Angry Revenge Ghost at the end. I would say this movie is 75% Om and 25% Shanti, and I would have liked it a lot better if it were the other way around. Sandy had basically no agency whatsoever; the second half of the plot was basically about O.K. getting revenge on Mukush... mostly for himself? I liked that the first half of the movie didn’t make Shanti fall in love with the puppy-like Om just because he was devoted to her, but it would have been a nice reversal if the jaded O.K. had softened toward Sandy more in the second act, and that there had been a bit of a love story to temper the revenge plot.

The idea of the plot. The plot described in words is very cool to me, and there was a period of about 3 minutes in the film when O.K. recognizes Om’s mother when I got real excited about where this was going, and then I realized it wasn’t going where I wanted and was sad again. I think I might have liked it better if the movie started out with O.K. and revealed Om’s story slowly, through flashback, but nothing about this movie catered to my narrative aesthetic, so I eventually gave up with ways of trying to fix it.

Anyway, as I said, I can definitely see how someone could love this movie! If you are a big Bollywood buff and you love dance numbers and silliness and Shah Rukh Khan, I would recommend it in a second! It was strangely almost tailor-made to hit some of my pet peeves, and I was mad because I wanted to like it more than I did.

That’s my review! @serene-faerie​ I hope you still love me even though I didn’t like your movie. I am always trying to expand my movie knowledge and I learned a lot watching this one, and I don’t regret watching it, even though it wasn’t my fave.

[problematicwelshman]

Michael Sheen on Good Omens, sex scenes, and why Brexit led to his break-up

28 NOVEMBER 2018 • 4:18PM

Michael Sheen may be 49, and sporting a grey beard these days, but mention Martians and the actor reverts to a breathless, giddy teenager.

It all stems back to one evening when Sheen was about 12 years old. “It was a significant moment in my life,” he tells me over coffee in a London hotel. “My cousin Hugh was babysitting, and he put on Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds.

“I remember us lying there, listening in bed in the dark. It absolutely terrified me, but I got obsessed with it. I’m worryingly into it. I know every single note, every word.”

Wayne’s 1978 rock opera has had a similar effect on countless fans, even if it prompts a bemused shrug from non-converts. Without ever topping the charts, it has slowly become one of the best-selling British albums of all time, and this Friday begins a stadium tour featuring a 35-foot fire-breathing Martian and a 3D hologram of Liam Neeson. It’s a geeky novelty, but one of epic proportions.

When Wayne asked Sheen if he would star in a new radio drama-style version for the album’s 40th anniversary, alongside Taron Egerton and Ade Edmondson, the Welsh actor “bit his hand off”. It had always been his dream. For decades, whether doing serious political dramas such as Frost/Nixon or the great roles of classical theatre – Hamlet, Henry V – the one part Sheen really wanted involved Martians saying “ulla-ulla”.

“When I was doing Caligula at the Donmar [in 2003], I was filming The Deal during the day – which was the first time I’d played Tony Blair,” he says. “I’d be so tired, to wake myself up [before the play] I would do whole sections of War of the Worlds.” He can even beatbox the sound effects, he adds proudly. “The other guys in the dressing room would all be really pissed off with me - but I was playing Caligula, so they had to put up with it.”

Enthusing about an outtake on a collectors version of the album where you can hear Richard Burton coughing, Sheen briefly slips into an impression of the late actor. It’s eerily spot-on. Burton played the role he takes in the new version, which feels apt; growing up in Port Talbot, Sheen was aware of following in his footsteps.

“Coming from the same town as him really helped,” he says. “It’s place you wouldn’t necessarily think would be very sympathetic to acting – it’s an old steel town, very working class, quite a macho place – but because of Richard Burton, and then Anthony Hopkins, there’s the sense that it’s possible [to be an actor], and people have a respect for it.

“Ultimately, though, we’re very different actors - Burton was very much a charismatic leading man, and I’m probably more of a character actor. He wasn’t known for his versatility.” Sheen, by contrast, is a chameleon, as he proved with a remarkable run of biopics from 2006-9, playing Tony Blair, David Frost, Brian Clough, Kenneth Williams and the Roman emperor Nero on screen in the space of just four years.

He concedes that he may have made a “partly conscious” decision to avoid biopics since then. “I’ve been offered quite a few I didn’t do. I did feel, for a bit, it was probably good for me to move away from it – certainly from playing Blair at least, because that’s the one I became synonymous with. I’d quite happily play real people again, but it’s hard to find good scripts and it takes a lot of homework. With some parts I’ve been offered, you might only have a few weeks to prepare for it - and you can’t do that with Clough or Kenneth Williams.”

Despite his best intentions, Sheen is playing another Blair in his next film – The Voyage of Doctor Doolittle, where he’s the nemesis of Robert Downey Jr’s animal-loving hero. “I don’t know if they did that as a joke or not,” he says. “He’s Blair Müdfly – there’s an umlaut that he is very specific about. He was at college with Doolittle, and hates him, and becomes the antagonist because of his jealousy of Doolittle. Müdfly is employed to try and stop him from finding... what he wants to find.” As the film isn’t out for 13 months, Sheen is tight-lipped about further plot details – but he hints that Müdfly is “a villain in the tradition of Terry-Thomas villains.”

It’s the latest in a series of quirky, eyebrow-raising roles. After playing a vampire in the Twilight films and a werewolf in the Underworld franchise, Sheen says he would often be asked in interviews why a “serious classical actor” was wasting his time on fantasy films.

“There’s a lot of snobbishness about genre,” he says. “I think some of the greatest writing of the 20th and 21st centuries has happened in science fiction and fantasy.” While promoting the films, he would back up that point by citing his favourite authors – Stephen King, Philip K Dick, Neil Gaiman. “Time went on, and then one day my doorbell rang and there was a big box being delivered. I opened the box up and there was a card from Neil saying ‘From one fan to another’, and all these first editions of his books.”

It was the beginning an enduring friendship, which recently became a professional partnership: Sheen stars in Gaiman’s forthcoming TV series Good Omens, based on a 1990 novel he wrote with the late Terry Pratchett. Set in the days before a biblical apocalypse, its sprawling list of characters includes an angel called Aziraphale (Sheen) and a demon called Crowley (David Tennant) who have known each other since the days of Adam and Eve.

“I wanted to play Aziraphel being sort of in love with Crowley,” says Sheen. “They’re both very bonded and connected anyway, because of the two of them having this relationship through history - but also because angels are beings of love, so it’s inevitable that he would love Crowley. It helped that loving David is very easy to do.”

What kind of love - platonic, romantic, erotic? “Oh, those are human, mortal labels!” Sheen laughs. “But that was what I thought would be interesting to play with. There’s a lot of fan fiction where Aziraphale and Crowley get a bit hot and heavy towards each other, so it’ll be interesting to see how an audience reacts to what we’ve done in bringing that to the screen.”

Steamy fan fiction aside, it’s unlikely Good Omens will match the raunch levels of his last major TV series, Masters of Sex (2013-16), a drama about the pioneering sexologists Masters and Johnson. In the wake of the last year’s #MeToo revelations, HBO has introduced “intimacy co-ordinators” for its shows - but, Sheen tells me, Masters of Sex was ahead of the curve in handling sex scenes with caution.

“It was a lot easier for myself and Lizzy [Caplan, his co-star], as we were comfortable in that set-up, because we had status in it. But for people in the background, or doing just one scene, it’s different,” he says. “It became clear very quickly that there needed to be guidelines for people who didn’t have that kind of status, who would probably not speak up. We started talking about that, and decided there need to be clear rules.”

Sex scenes, he continues, “should absolutely be treated the same way as other things where there’s a danger. If you’re doing stage-fighting, or pyrotechnics, there are rules and everyone just sticks to them. Whether it’s physical danger, or emotional, or psychological, it’s just as important.”

Despite having several film and TV parts on the horizon, Sheen says he is still in semi-retirement from acting. In 2016 he hinted that he might be quit for good to campaign against populism. “In the same way as the Nazis had to be stopped in Germany in the Thirties, this thing that is on the rise has to be stopped," he said at the time. But now things are less cut. “I have two jobs now, essentially,” he says. "Acting takes second place."

While many celebrity activists limit their politics to save-the-dolphins posturing, Sheen has been working with a range of unfashionable grassroots groups aiming to combat inequality, support small communities and fight fake news. As well as supporting Welsh credit unions, and sponsoring a women’s football team in the tiny village of Goytre, he tells me that he's been “commissioning research into alternative funding models for local journalism”.

If he returns to the stage any time soon, he says it’s likely to be in a show about “political historical socio-economic stuff, a one-man show with very low production values”. It’s clear he’s not in it for the glamour.

Sheen was inspired to become more politically active by the Brexit referendum – which also indirectly led him to break up with his partner of four years, the comedian Sarah Silverman. At the time, they were living together in the US. “We both had very similar drives, and yet to act on those drives pulled us in different directions – because she is American and I’m Welsh,” he explains.

“After the Brexit vote, and the election where Trump became president, we both felt in different ways we wanted to get more involved. That led to her doing her show I Love You America [in which Silverman interviewed people from across the political spectrum], and it led to me wanting to address the issues that I thought led some people to vote the way they did about Brexit, in the area I come from and others like it.”

They still speak lovingly of each other, which makes their decision to end a happy relationship for the sake of politics look painfully quixotic. Talking about it, Sheen sounds a little wistful, but he’s utterly certain they made the right choice. “I felt a responsibility to do something, but it did mean coming back here – which was difficult for us, because we were very important to each other. But we both acknowledge that each of us had to do what we needed to do.”

[rhowena]

Pile of stuff concerning what happened to Loki between Thor and The Avengers

Originally posted on r/FanTheories

https://inforapid.org/webapp/webapp.php?shareddb=IAxUFHnwkGJSYMj9OFbT8mRl5goHm9SC2qHbWw4knO1cng5qI5Wrg48nP1MdgbWlJmHj6UpwbN343IqnstQUwxIIO01M5Rvb

As it does not escape my notice that I’ve created a digital version of this meme, some navigation help for anyone who needs it:

Mouse over/tap an item or relation to view its description

For items with the yellow ‘Note’ label, select the node and then 'Notes on Item’ in the side menu to view an additional notes page

If an item has a globe icon it the top-left corner, click it to open a webpage

'Adjust View’ in the side menu has controls to zoom in/out, increase/decrease the distance between items, and filter items or relations by category

Relations (and items) are color-coded by type: solid green lines are for in-universe evidence (light green connects evidence to the theory it supports, while dark green connects pieces of evidence that should be looked at together), purple dotted lines denote parallels, and dark red lines mark cases of “one of these things is not like the other”

And an overview of the theories contained therein:

First, the central piece of tinfoil around which all other tinfoil is arrayed: remember how, at the end of the first Thor, Loki was pathologically obsessed with gaining his father’s approval? And how, when he next showed up after vanishing for an entire year, he’d gotten mixed up with a guy who keeps a menagerie of adopted children? And how, during his argument with Thor on the mountaintop, he said this?

Loki: Did you mourn? Thor: We all did. Our father– Loki: Your father. He did tell you my true parentage, did he not?

Loki: I’ve seen worlds you’ve never known about! I have grown, Odinson, in my exile. I have seen the true power of the Tesseract and when I wield it—

Tom Hiddleston: There’s a bit where Thor says, “We all mourned! Our father…” and Loki interrupts him and says, “YOUR father.” And it’s that sense of 'don’t include me in this anymore. I have no relation or connection to you.’ It’s his way of saying 'I’ve let go, I’m gone, I’m on the outside of the fence, I’m happy here, I don’t want to come back in.’

If I may take a minute to get out some of my extremely complicated feelings on this, while there’s a bunch more evidence in favor of Loki having been another of Thanos’s children that can be viewed on the mind map, I want to highlight this pair of quotes because it’s everything implied by the words “Your father” that makes it into a devastating punch in the stomach which draws on both halves of Loki’s Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds characterization: his genuine love for his family is his primary redeeming quality and that he forswore it like this puts the terrible moment when he first knelt before Thanos and pledged himself to the Mad Titan’s service firmly into archetypal Faustian sell-your-soul territory, but when you consider the straits he was in at the time and the implication that Thanos initially ensnared him not through promises of power but by preying on him emotionally, it’s a very human kind of tragic mistake.

The other mitigating factor is that based on everything we’ve heard from Thanos’s other children, it’s a safe bet that he did in fact do unspeakably horrible things to Loki too – indeed, noticing the resemblance between the existing theories about Loki having been tortured/brainwashed and Gamora’s “He took me, tortured me, turned me into a weapon” was what prompted the above realization in the first place. (It’s reminiscent of Theon’s storyline in ASOIAF/GOT: yeah, he betrayed his adoptive family and did some generally awful stuff, but no one deserves what happened to him.) It also bears emphasizing that accountability cuts both ways: one of the key takeaways from the previous bullet point is that the suffering Loki went through doesn’t absolve him of responsibility for his villainous actions, but the other side of the coin is that Loki’s partial complicity doesn’t absolve Thanos of responsibility for the choice he made to take a broken, desperate young man who’d just lost everything and turn him into the rabid animal we saw during The Avengers, and I dearly hope that exploring the rich font of psychological horror that is that time period will erase any remaining doubt that Thanos’s claims of acting For The Greater Good are nothing but empty, egotistical, self-righteous posturing and everyone in the audience who insists on taking them at face value is being duped just as Loki was.

Stephen: No. I mean, come on. Look at your face. Dormammu made you a murderer. Just how good can his kingdom be?

As for where this is all going, I believe there’s a good chance that the Loki Disney+ series will be where they finally address this as a. the split timeline Loki the series will be following is still fresh from his time with Thanos and it will therefore have to explain what happened if we’re to understand the kind of headspace that he’s in at that moment and b. Tom Hiddleston has revealed that the series will also clarify whether or not Loki really is dead in the main timeline, and everything I have so far indicates that understanding the nature of his original pact with Thanos is essential to understanding both Loki’s choice to die and Thanos’s choice to kill him (see the 'Pledge of fidelity’ and 'Limited use’ notes pages on the mind map). Character-wise, I think one of the points of emphasis will be that Loki’s death in Infinity War doesn’t wrap up his story as neatly as it may appear to on the surface; truly completing his redemption arc will require him to confront this part of his past in full, and with it his guilt over everything he’s done and his fear that he’s wrecked his life and relationship with his family so thoroughly that he can never, ever fix them.

Loki: Can you? Can you wipe out that much red? […] Your ledger is dripping, it’s gushing red, and you think saving a man no more virtuous than yourself will change anything? This is the basest sentimentality. This is a child at prayer… PATHETIC! You lie and kill in the service of liars and killers. You pretend to be separate, to have your own code. Something that makes up for the horrors. But they are a part of you, and they will *never* go away!

An additional giant red flag indicating we really should be asking more questions about that time gap is a group of lines in The Avengers which reveal that Thanos taught Loki how to use the Tesseract.

The Other: The Tesseract has awakened. It is on a little world. A human world. They would wield its power, but our ally knows its workings as they never will.

The Other: You question us? You question HIM? He, who put the Scepter in your hand? Who gave you ancient knowledge and new purpose when you were cast out, defeated?

Loki: I’ve seen worlds you’ve never known about! I have grown, Odinson, in my exile. I have seen the true power of the Tesseract and when I wield it— Thor: Who showed you this power? Who controls the would-be king?

Sharing that kind of knowledge and power with someone as volatile as Loki strikes me as an monumentally terrible idea (and as much as I don’t want to be the person who throws a tantrum because their fanfic didn’t come true, I’m kinda salty that Thanos was defeated without it coming back to bite him in the ass), which leaves me wondering what Thanos hoped to gain that he believed would be worth the risks. My thoughts on that particular sub-puzzle are still somewhat hazy, but my basic sense is that there’s something weird going on between Loki and the Tesseract and wanting to exploit that connection is one of the reasons Thanos went to all the trouble of breaking him into submission.

Loki: So I am no more than another stolen relic, locked up here until you might have use of me?

The other reason for Thanos’s interest in Loki ties back to all that emotional twistiness I talked about earlier: he planned to leverage Loki’s anger and resentment towards his family in a bid to destroy Odin and Asgard from the inside.

Zemo: An empire toppled by its enemies can rise again. But one which crumbles from within? That’s dead… forever.

As a prelude to this, during The Avengers Thanos had additionally tasked Loki with killing Thor as a way to prove his loyalty and destroy the last remaining shreds of his own humanity, a test Loki failed because he still loved his brother too much.

Coulson: You’re going to lose. It’s in your nature. […] You lack conviction.

What’s more, Thanos anticipated this, and the Scepter’s influence over Loki was aimed at forcing him to go through with it if he refused.

Loki: I won’t touch Barton, not until I make him kill you! Slowly, intimately, in every way he knows you fear! And then he’ll wake, just long enough to see his good work, and when he screams, I’ll split his skull!

Lastly, even with Infinity War having established that Thanos simply gets off on emotional torture, that he would go out of his way to fuck with Odin personally by turning his second son against him leads me to believe there was a special hatred there stemming from some as-yet unrevealed history between the two. I mean, when I picture the alternate universe where Thanos shows up to attack Asgard with a corrupted Loki in tow like “You screwed up so badly that he chose me as a father figure over you” …that isn’t something you say to a complete stranger.

GRRM on writing villain POVs: That’s a comic book kind of thing, where the Red Skull gets up in the morning [and asks] “What evil can I do today?” Real people don’t think that way. We all think we’re heroes, we all think we’re good guys. We have our rationalizations when we do bad things. “Well, I had no choice,” or “It’s the best of several bad alternatives,” or “No it was actually good because God told me so,” or “I had to do it for my family.” We all have rationalizations for why we do shitty things or selfish things or cruel things. So when I’m writing from the viewpoint of one of my characters who has done these things, I try to have that in my head.

[tossertozier]

you mentioned possibly doing a ben or mike writing guide.. would you.. be willing to post a mike one. i'm plotting a fic and im struggling to get my mans down?? also i think abt ur fics weekly bare minimum.

hi there!!! i did my best. i tried to not sound preachy or like a know it all bc y’all know i can barely write. i hope this is helpful in some way!! disclaimer of of course this is all just my opinion & there’s no wrong way to write, you’re the only person who can tell your story!!

[[MORE]]

i think the first really important decision you have to make as Person Writing Mike is his

family & background

-are both of his parents alive?

-if yes, what’s their relationship like?

-if no, who’s his primary caretaker? what’s their relationship like?

-if no, when did they die? did he cope well with it? what’s his relationship with their memory like?

these are really really where you gotta start to write mike imo. or any character! i think one thing stephen king is to be admired for is he doesn’t neglect the parent-child relationship as so many people who write youth do. your parents are the most important people in your life for a long time. i don’t think there’s a wrong or ooc way to answer the above questions tbh. canon has really left a wide open field for you to run amuck in.

(example: i’ve mentioned in the past that my & tfat mike being a small adult is no mistake and intentional. it’s a bit of a throwaway scene, but i mention in on pointe that mike’s parents are coming. it’s intentionally done there too. mike is goofier, more outgoing, more immature in general in that fic in the small bits he’s in & that’s all a response to his familial life. )

culture + friendships

after you answer those questions, important follow up questions are:

-are the losers his first set of friends?

-how much social exposure has he had?

-has he dated? who is he attracted to?

-who influences him? (celebrities, family, culturally)

-what are his cultural interests? what does he do in his free time? how would that impact how he interacts with the rest of the world?

again, no wrong way to answer these. i’ve seen a super broad spectrum of indirect answers to these questions. even thinking about where he might pick up patterns of speech can make him feel much more like a realized character. i’ve noticed some people dip fully into aave to an extent that doesn’t even seem logical in their character’s current situation & it can really seem like a caricature, but i think to write mike without any sense of aave at all is a little ?? too. just be cognizant of it is my only real advice here. it doesn’t so much matter as long as you don’t forget who mike is which next point

humor & personality

-what do you think he would find (shows, comedians, youtube videos) really funny?

-does he have something he quotes often? something he started saying ironically but never stopped?

man i know i’m all there’s no wrong way to write mike !! in this post but i will say real quick that i think mike is funny and i don’t really respect depictions of him where he’s not. i think this is where the movies really just fucked up. book mike drops some of the funniest lines of the book. and honest to god tip is to write out a scene as you feel the urge too, look away for five minutes, look back and give half of richie’s lines away. (or... dialogue.) this sounds like a joke but it was what i did when i first started writing & tfat

i’d always be like “n the funny part goes... to richie.” and thats a fandom inclination too. nooooo. avoid this trap. it doesn’t even make sense. have u ever been in a friend group where only one person... makes jokes? that’d be genuinely so weird. especially bc if you give the joke away to someone else, you can also build on it. amazing things start happening when u start thinking of the characters in flexible patterns. like for example, i almost always give absurdist humor to stan now. wholesome to ben.

mike’s humor is largely situational to me. solid comedic timing & he’s an observant person. sometimes i read back my own writing & have to change the pov bc richies making jokes about things he would never ever notice to make fun of. mike would. mike genuinely sees all. i think he’s just got one of the most analytical brain of the losers. & i think intelligence is subjective and people are smart in different ways but i think it’s foolish to write him as anything other than incredibly intelligent both academically and emotionally. he’s just a natural observer and pattern notice-er. which brings me to my next mike thing:

love & selflessness

i think the biggest part of mike being harder to flesh into a fully realized person is the fandom tendency to make him kind and nothing else. here’s mike. he’s nice. next. bc the book kind of points out his selflessness in his decisions and it makes itself one of his strongest character traits.

especially bc nice seems to trump him having any other emotions. ...no?

i believe in general, but ESPECIALLY in the case of mike, that kindness is a choice. it’s one i genuinely believe he’d make, over & over again. but a choice he makes. he gets annoyed with his friends being annoying like anyone else would. he gets hurt when he feels left out. he feels tired & anxious & hungry and all those other human things. sometimes he might not let it show outwardly, but there’s a difference between that and not giving him feelings at all.

people are selfish. it’s a defense mechanism. it’s to protect us. it’s not a bad thing. we think of how the world impacts ourselves first. we don’t always act upon those thoughts or voice them, but don’t forget to let mike have them. he doesn’t need to be happy for his friends all the time, or rooting for them or supportive. he should have his own things going on.

also. mike’s not a doormat. yes, he stays in derry. but those were life-death consequences for generations of children. it’s really not comparable to almost any decision mike would make in a pennywise free universe. yes, he made a sacrifice in the book but i don’t think he’d just lay himself down in any given universe to whatever fate wants to hand him. but this is where i end this topic bc i’m actually only barely beginning to get to this topic in my own fic!

it’s hard writing the losers young sometimes bc i do feel relationships are naturally a little unbalanced based on basic maturity levels as young people. sometimes friendships just are unbalanced bc of who people are at that time. everyone involved can still be good people in these relationships. it’s about growing together and learning how to be good friends to each other.

for example, in &tfat: certain losers are always checking in with others. others are really wrapped up in their own shit and don’t really notice what bothers the others. it would probably take a chart the size of a textbook to explain how i think this dynamic wholly pans out in full. and yeah, i think it grates on mike a little bit that he is always the checker and never the checkee.

but even when mike snaps, even when he gets upset, i always write it coming out of him with a lot of love. i genuinely think mike, regardless of experience in that fic, has the deepest understanding of love as its own concept and an understand of how exactly it rules his life and and his relationships. mike knows to feel strongly about something he has to care about it. there are lots of things he just doesn’t care about. in the book it’s stated he’s difficult to connect with as an adult. he’s distant. he’s focused on what he wants to focus on. i think mike is actually the most interesting when he becomes a little bit of a disaster man with very little time for what doesn’t interest him.

which last thing, dislikes & disinterests

-what annoys him?

-what makes him genuinely angry?

-what bores him to tears?

i always make jokes that i bring up the nastier parts of the losers bc i love nasty boys but thinking of things people don’t like is as much a part of them as the things they do.

for example, in &tfat, i write richie as making fun of “nerdy” things like anything you could find at comic con. i write bev as not giving a fuck about sports. bill doesn’t care about richie’s music tastes. eddie hates getting condescended to.

bc of the ... kind thing, mike’s one of the harder losers to do this with. i genuinely think mike would listen to any of his friends tell him about anything. & he knows, in return, they can’t say shit when he wants to ramble about history. but dislikes can also be super situational.

again, for example in & tfat: mike doesn’t like when his friends talk about college right now. no one is really being sensitive to him at all. he hates getting blamed for stuff that isn’t his fault, mostly bc it keeps happening.

anyway. i based a lot of my mike (mostly sense of humor and personality) off of a mix of real life friends of mine. it’s a luxury. i know. i’ve been blessed to have friends from literally all walks of life & for me borrowing little habits & quirks & sayings & jokes to slip into my fics and characters is my way of writing one massive love letter to those ive known. i hope i’ve helped you in some way anon. n if not.... don’t be sad i’m hardly one to take writing advice from anyway jandjxjx

overall, as i used to do often, i’d genuinely stop myself and say: is this a person, or a convenience for the plot? and if it was the latter, sigh, and get my backspace key ready.

[crimsonxrain]

All of the space questions you haven't answered, please.

Planets: Life

Mercury: What’s your full name? Hua Cheng, in China they use my courtesy name San Lang, which became my nickname everywhere else.

Mars: What’s your sexuality? I’m pansexual.

Jupiter: Do you have any siblings? Two, both older than me.

Uranus: What’s your hobby? Practicing calligraphy, yoga, meditation, reading... 

Neptune: When’s your birthday? June 10th.

Moon: What are you currently studying/hope to study? Acting.

Stars: Experiences

Sun: Have you ever had alcohol? Yes, a lot of times.

Sirius: Have you ever failed a class? No, I was home schooled.

Rigel: Have you ever gone on a rollercoaster? Yes.

Deneb: Have you ever been out of your home country? Almost more out of my home country than in.

Arcturus: Have you cried out of something other than sadness? Yes, of laughing.

Betelgeuse: What’s something you can never forget about? People who ever helped me.

Bellatrix: Have you ever been forced to lie/keep a secret? Yes.

Alphard: Have you ever lost a friend? Haven’t we all?

Vega: What’s something you’ve done that you wish you hadn’t? Took as long as I did to leave my dad’s place.

Constellations: Favourites

Centaurus: Favourite holiday? I don’t usually celebrate holidays.

Orion: Favourite month? June

Cassiopeia: Favourite book? Stephen King’s The Shining

Delphinus: Favourite study? Languages.

Hercules: Favourite instrument? Violin.

Libra: Favourite colour? Red.

Phoenix: Favourite thing to wear? Jeans and a simple tshirt.

Aries: Favourite movie? Jurassic Park.

Cygnus: Favourite weather? Rain.

Hydra: Favourite sound? Rain falling on the window.

Galaxies: Love/Friends  

Milky Way: Who’s your oldest friend?   @classiquefleur, we grew up together.

Andromeda: Do you consider yourself social? To a certain point.

Black Eye Galaxy: Do you believe in love at first sight? No.

Cartwheel Galaxy: When was your first kiss? I was 14.

Cigar Galaxy: How’s your flirting skills? I don’t know, I don’t think I’m the best to reply to this...

Comet Galaxy: Have you ever had to leave a relationship because someone changed too much? I’ve never been in a relationship.

Pinwheel Galaxy: Would you date the last person you talked to? No, not boyfriend material.

Sombrero Galaxy: Do you have a crush right now? A “crush” sounds too much like a teenager thing, but I am interested in someone.

Bode’s Galaxy: Have you ever had a secret admirer? I don’t know, maybe they’re so secret they never revealed themselves.

Sunflower Galaxy: Would you date/make friends with someone out of pity? No.

Tadpole Galaxy: Would you deny a relationship/friendship? Yes.

Whirlpool Galaxy: Have you ever cried over a breakup? Never had one.

Other stuff: Wishes

Comet: What’s your big dream? I haven’t thought about it. Just making something out of my life, I guess.

Asteroid: What does your dream life look like? The one I have now is satisfying.

Meteor: What’s something you wish you could tell, but can’t? The truth about the one thing I can’t tell most people.

Nebula: If you could undo one thing in your life, what would it be? Spending too much time around my father and siblings.

Shooting Star: If you could bring back one thing, what would it be? My mother.

Pulsar: What do you hope to do in the next 10 years? Start acting and be good at it, enough to be on the screens.

Quasar: If you could spend the rest of your life with only one person, who would it be? That’s a very commiting question that I’m not sure I can reply right now.

Wormhole: What’s something you wish would happen, but know won’t? Meeting my mother.

Black Hole: What’s the last thing you want to see? The face of the person who’s important to me.

[buddiebeginz]

Some ranting about IT Chapter 2 (warning spoilers)

Before I get to the main bulk of my rant if you haven’t seen IT yet and are planning to please beware that there’s a very real feeling scene of violence against gay men in the opening which can and probably will be triggering.

There’s also a lot of homophobia, homophobic slurs, fat shaming, and some serious triggers for suicide in the beginning and at the end.

I saw IT Chapter 2 recently (like pretty much everyone) it’s rare for me to see a remake though especially a remake of a movie I still love so much and is tied to a lot of childhood nostalgia for me. I thought the first one (from 2017) was okay it certainly had it’s flaws but it at least is watchable and felt like the makers were trying. So when the trailers came out for the second I was actually pretty excited to see it. I thought maybe Chapter 2 will be a little better than how the 90’s version handled the adult stuff which tbh got a little clunky especially in the last act. So I went into the movie with some higher than normal expectations for a remake but perhaps that was one of my problems to begin with. There were definitely some issues I didn’t expect though. I expected there to be too much cgi: there definitely was. I expected certain characters to not get fleshed out enough like in Chapter 1: which definitely happened again with Mike and Stan. But I did not expect what happened during the opening scene of the movie at all.

If you haven’t seen the movie there’s this long gratuitous scene of two gay men getting brutally beaten by a group of guys until one of the men is thrown over a bridge and then killed by Pennywise. I’ve never read the book but I heard that the basis for this scene comes from there but I still definitely feel it wasn’t necessary. I heard that Stephen King included it his book to put further emphasis on how we’re all capable of doing really dark things and how IT wasn’t the only monster people can be monsters too but the thing is none of that was made clear in the movie. IT Chapter 2 doesn’t feel like a movie that’s really trying to make you think for the most part either it feels like every other horror movie being made lately. The threw the bashing scene in there for pure shock value as far as I’m concerned.

In the 90’s film they made it a point to talk about how the evil of IT was like a plague infecting the town especially the adults. There was one scene where Bev is telling the group about something she had experienced when she was younger, when Henry and his gang were groping her and some old man saw that she needed help but just walked in his house. Bev said that was when she knew they (the adults) were all IT in some way. If the remake had done a better job of highlighting stuff like that then maybe I could understand the opening scene but on it’s own it was just gratuitous violence that would have played just as well had they had Pennywise attack them without the horrible bashing scene first. I’ve seen some people argue that well it was in the book so there shouldn’t be any issue with it being in the movie but apart from the stuff I pointed above I just don’t think we need to add more lgbtq violence to media unless that media is explicitly saying something with it and even then less is more. For one thing it literally used to be the law that lgbtq characters weren’t allowed to have a happy ending in movies so the majority of lgbtq characters in media were beaten, killed, killed themselves, watched their partners or love interests die, or just ended up sad and alone. For another we lgbtq people experience enough violence on a day to day bias both personally, in media, and in the news that unless it’s serving a purpose for mindful storytelling no movie or tv show actually needs to show lgbtq characters getting brutalized especially if it’s because of their sexuality or gender. One of my other issues was how they handled Richie. Now I’m genuinely happy for you Richie and Eddie shippers. I’m glad you guys got some cannon confirmation of your ship and of Richie’s sexuality. And I’m sorry that you lost a character you really care about I know how that feels. ❤️ Still I have issue with them making Richie gay. Not because I don’t want more lgbtq representation or because I don’t think Richie could have been gay. It’s just the way it was all handled. If they were going to go through the trouble of deviating from the book and changing a main characters sexuality I think they should have taken more care with how it was done. I mostly feel like they made Richie gay because it got them a lot of attention and I assume they probably heard about people shipping him with Eddie which it’s fine if they wanted to make fans happy but all they did was give us another lgbtq character with a tragic ending.

We ended up with more homophobic dialogue in Richie’s flashback (adding to the homophobic slurs used in the beginning of the movie from the bashing). Richie also was never even able to come out to his friends and he had to watch the man he loved die. I get that not every character gets a happy ending (nor would I want them all to) but back to what I said before about how lgbtq characters were never even allowed to have happy endings for so long to make Richie gay and then give him such a tragic ending while you have the straight couple (Bev and Ben) with their happily ever after on a boat was just really sad and unnecessary to me.

I know all of you Richie and Eddie shippers will probably disagree with me and that’s fine again I’m not trying to hate on your ship it’s just how I personally feel about the movie. If they were going to make Richie gay it should have been done better he should have at the least been able to come out (even to just one of The Losers) but considering it’s a main stream horror movie I really shouldn’t be surprised that it played out the way it did.

My other issues were with the constant fat shaming even the 90′s film didn’t harp on Ben’s weight as much as the 2017/2019 films have. It got old real quick.

I also felt a little weird about how they wrote Stan and his letter at the end it almost felt like they were trying to glorify his suicide. I remember as a kid watching the 90s film and I never felt like Stan’s suicide was a good thing I felt like it was sad and that maybe IT had gotten to him. In the 2019 version they have this letter where Stan is basically saying if he had come back his heart wouldn’t have been in it so he knew he had to kill himself so the others could succeed. The whole scene where it’s narrated is played out to make it sound like Stan is a hero for what he did. I don’t know... It felt like a pretty dangerous way to frame something like that knowing that a lot of teens are going to see this movie.

[preppymayhem]

This is where I live now

I SAW IT 2, and HONEY Y’ALL DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU’RE IN FOR!!!

But there is something that is to be said about me. I unironically love the book. I know it was written on a coke binge. I know there is a whole lotta shit in it that I wish wasn’t because it was so unnecessary. And you can rec me other similar things that may be less problematic, and I will love them too, but I love this. This is my trash hill and I have lived here for over 20 years.

Everything is spoilers below the cut.

I am going to start with the not great stuff

So most of the most problematic content in terms of graphic discomfort is stuff that is literally lifted from the books. The homophobic gay bash which was graphic but honestly wasn’t as traumatizing as the hammer scene from Roswell New Mexico so you know mileage may vary.  Also Beverly’s abusive husband. I imagine that those will effect you harder if you hadn’t read the book and knew they were coming.

Holy mother of Fat!phobia, Batman! So unnecessary and not all of it is lifted from the books. I felt they could have at least at the end had Ben make it explicit that losing the weight didn’t matter at least that he was still loved for he was.

I don’t know exactly how I feel about how they found the Ritual of Chud stuff (which is different in the book, it involves some more graphic stuff but that wasn’t filmable so I understand why that changed.) I am not knowledgeable enough to comment or critique the Native American bits so I’ll leave that to better people than me to dissect. I will say that the ritual loses something in adaptation not due to the actual change but that in the book it is involved in BOTH timelines.

I understand why they were cut and I wouldn’t argue that they weren’t necessary cuts, and it wasn’t like their roles in the book were that great but the cutting of Patty and Audra in particular was a little sad to me. Why make such a big deal about who they cast as Audra if they weren’t going to do Audra’s whole bit in the final act??? They might as well should have cut her all together and just reference Bill has trouble with endings.

I had to shut my eyes at the two child!deaths, because while they weren’t scary, I just can’t handle that. So I guess content warning for that because in the first Georgie’s (nor Patrick’s or Henry’s for that matter) were all that graphic, but this one was.

While I love that Mike got to be in the sewer, and he did get more this time around than the first, but I still think he was short changed over all. I think they should have given him more of an emotional resonance with Stan’s death since he made the call. And in the book that was such a big thing for him, stressing out about making the calls. In the film they make it like Mike is just bulldozing them into this (I didn’t like the lie about the ritual) whereas in the book, Mike’s whole thing was him being worried that he was leading the others to their deaths. 

Now the middle of the road - neither here nor there stuff:

So the just a bit of casting fun, the main gay basher dude in the beginning. That actor actually plays a major character whose gay in TNT’s Animal Kingdom whose love interest on that show is named Adrian of all things. Just a bit of an odd coincidence, that.

It was gorier but just as scary as the first one. I just closed my eyes during the child deaths as mentioned, but other than that if you didn’t find the first one scary, I doubt your mind is going to change with this one.

There were way too many trailers in front of this movie. That is all. (Also someone needs to talk to me about Ewan MacGregor’s American accent. Also does Doctor Sleep take place in Kubrick’s The Shining or King’s The Shining because those two are very VERY different things)

Now the big one, which wasn’t a downside for me which is why this is in this section and not the above, but I guess it will be for others because I know people had hopes up. Reddie is not subtext but it isn’t like out and out explicit either. The reviews calling this “Horror Brokeback Mountain” were overblown and it was over-marketed. It is not on par with the queer baiting of many things but you aren’t going to get an explicit “I love you” or “I am gay” out of either Eddie or Richie. BUT it isn’t subtext, they make explicit references to it so that anyone who doesn’t read it for what it is, is just fooling themselves or being willfully homophobic. My expectations on that front were low, and I do think they baited it as more than it was, but honestly we all knew Eddie was dying and this film already had one bad gay death, do you all really want to die on that hill?

My big Mike complaints are above, but I guess my middle road of thing was last year they made a big thing about Mike possibly being in an addict in which I was just, “No.” But while there was some subtle prop hints they didn’t really lean on that and for that I am grateful.

All the Billverly was basically what you saw in the trailers, I will talk more about this below.

How they explained how Henry Bowers survived was pretty weak. 

Now the STUFF I LIKE. PREP FOR CAPSLOCK! AND GENERAL INCOHERENCE

The Stephen King cameo was great! I LOVED IT!

THE KIDS ARE STILL AMAZING I LOVE THEM!

No really all the kid scenes were great, and the CGI used wasn’t too bad, the only scene where I was like “uh oh puberty” was in the Bill and Bev bike scene with Jaeden and his voice which definitely sounded different from the connecting scene from the first film.

The separated scenes during the climax were great (tho so sad Mike didn’t get one :(((((((() Particularly the Bill and the Bev and Ben ones. Like the emotional pull of the Ben and Bev scene was amazing and PRIME OTP material, their hands grabbing each other.

MY BOY BEN!!!! Omg, I know everyone was and is rightfully crowing about Bill Hader (Richie) and James Ransone (Eddie), but THIS WAS MY BOY BEN’S BIGGEST FILM. And he may have forgotten most of the events but he held on to that yearbook page and he never forgot Bev, and he understood all this time. I LOVE HIM> HE IS MY THIRD AND ONE NON-DISASTER SON!!!

Ben and Beverly who are my RIDE OR DIE IT OTP, were so good. AND THEY RIDE OFF ON A SAILBOAT?! OMG Is this real, did I dream that? OMG Benverly is so good!! The kiss at the lake, 

I am not over this but Ben Hanscom gave me such Pacey Witter vibes it was fucking UNREAL. We love a great, thoughtful romantic lead guys. WE LOVE IT SO FREAKING DAMN MUCH!!!

Ok I really loved Bill’s whole thing with his guilt over not wanting to play with Georgie one time and and the scene in the cellar..... Was it cliche? Yes. Do I care? Hell fucking No.

I love that they changed the ending and that they don’t forget. Bill and Mike’s I love you (which in the movie is platonic, but if anyone wants to go there I wouldn’t complain). 

I love how they kept Stan present even with what happens in the beginning. I loved that he is the emotional core of it all. I loved the bar mitzvah scene. I JUST....STAN!!! Take me to the universe where you get to live. Please. I guess you could say that the way his letter frames the suicide is problematic, but the letter at the end had me in tears.

AND NOW FOR THE THING MOST OF ALL. THE THING THAT GAVE ME THE MOST JOY, I ALMOST SQUEALED:

THE DEADLIGHTS - OMG, The dead lights. I kept my expectations as to IT’s true form very low, but if you are worried they are going to just repeat with Giant Spider from the miniseries you are wrong, they allude to it but keep the Lights and it was everything that I hoped it would be.

IT SAID IT’S NAME! EATER OF WORLDS!!!!! I literally cried. I was so worried when I saw the Bev scene that they were going to ruin IT’s backstory and make it boring and they didn’t. The animation sequence was really brilliant.

Give Bill Skarsgard a fucking medal.

THEY LOVED EACH OTHER GUYS. THEY REALLY LOVED EACH OTHER.