#i mean it does make sense for thale to feel the guilt but they don't Do anything with it

[catfishofoldin99colours]

OK IM AWAKE and ive had coffee so im able to process thoughts

also spoilers for viking wolf below if you want to avoid them! (also this review will be talking about it as if you have seen the movie so its probably worth watching if you wanna follow along properly)

also if you’re a terf/radfem/’‘‘gender critical’‘‘ keep your filthy fucking mitts off this post and go die in a hole you wretch

my take on this film is that it Is disappointing, but in a meta-textual and textual way.

i find it disappointing because i think this film could have really said something about the estranged nature of the relationship between Thale and her mother, because the bones of it are There, there’s issues they have together and they’re barely friends at all, and it contrasts SO WELL with Thale’s relationship with Jenny which is just so gentle and sweet and tragic, Jenny is the only one to treat Thale like a friend who is NOT harmed by the narrative for it! she loves Thale and ‘will look after her’ and tries so hard and its such a contrast to the clear worry her mother feels but doesn’t exhibit or act upon until it’s too late.

i love werewolf stories because to me they are such a GOOD metaphor for the internal horrifying parts of ourselves that we hate and repress and that will not go away no matter what because they’re PART of us! what better way to portray anger and pain and internal suffering than as a monstrous beast you cannot control, that harms everyone you love as you lash out in pain and fury and is hunted to the ends of the earth for its existence? god what a metaphor, its insane that this folkloric creature exists and fits SO WELL with so many themes and motifs!!!

AND YET!! IT IS ALMOST NEVER USED THAT WAY!!!

i think viking wolf fails because it has the BONES of this structure and the makings of what could be a really interesting film about this, especially with the angle of Thale being the victim of the attack and subsequently becoming the werewolf. she’s angry and upset at her mother for what she feels is giving up on her dead father and moving them to a new town, and she’s trying to fit in so so hard but she’s bullied and scorned by her classmates, and even the classmate who treats her well wants something from her, as opposed to Jenny who just loves her as is. it says something that Thale tries to walk quietly past her stepdad and signs to Jenny that she’s sorry she can’t come tonight; and that Jenny takes her back inside to bed while her mother pushes into the bathroom as Thale is worried about her wound; she hides from the adults but is open and welcoming to Jenny, she trusts and loves Jenny because Jenny only wants to take care of her.

Thale is a girl who feels angry and violated by the world she is in - whether these are warranted feelings is irrelevant, to both her and the audience, because no one is listening to her and she does not feel safe or protected in her world. her only true comfort and friend is her stepsister who looks to be 15 at most and is deaf, and as such Thale *has* to become the monster that will fight back to protect herself. what young woman and/or afab person hasn’t felt like that in their lifetime! who among us of that social class in western society hasn’t felt as if we are alone and unprotected and must look after ourselves!! (TERFS GET YOUR FILTHY FUCKING HANDS OFF THIS POST YOU CUNTS)

and in the end, she is hunted and killed for it. her mother kills her, with the silver bullet as she sleeps, because the good of the town is what is more important to her than her own daughter’s life or wellbeing. this movie falls short in spending too much time building up to the horror of the wolf’s existence, when it should be about WHY the wolf needed to exist in the first place. the horror of this film is not that the wolf exists, the horror is that Thale had no one to rely on or trust and was killed for her emotion, at possibly the most vulnerable time of her life. there’s a reason many young women get pulled into cults and toxic relationships, and its because they don’t have support networks that allow them the safety of expressing anger and pain and hurt, and people talk over them and do not care for their whereabouts (and this goes EVEN MORE for women of colour).

the horror is that her mother does not love her enough to let her live. she does not love her enough to try and make it better. she cries and frets and muses that she can’t shoot her own daughter, but in the end she does load the gun, she does pull the trigger, she is the one who kills her. and given that her mother is a police officer, i think it says something that the police do not have your safety in their interest, especially if you are a vulnerable person. if you express frustration at the pain your world is causing, you are punished for it, for the good of the fragile ‘peace’ they work hard to fabricate. i don’t think the film intended for that message to come through, but it absolutely does.

what a horrifying thing, to have a mother who does not love you.

what a horrible thing, to have a mother.

viking wolf is about a girl scorned, hurt and angry that is silenced for her pain, for the good of a town that does not care for her. and that is the true horror of this story.

it is 9 o'clock at night on a Monday and I am watching a Norwegian horror film about a werewolf

[dmclemblems]

Nopes really whitewashed almost everyone tbh. Edelgard for one. Duke Aegir and Count Gloucester don't even seem as bad; I even agree with Count Gloucester that Claude isn't to be trusted in GW! SB tries to convince you that Lonato not bad, actually, and that Ashe will ditch Faerghus for Lonato. Gustave reunited with Annette way earlier this time around (this isn't whitewashing, it's more that he has a faster character arc lol). Felix is also way nicer in general, Hubert less aggressive, etc.

To an extent I don't mind them adding in humane traits for some of those characters. They shouldn't be all black and white, good or evil. Most real people aren't like that and in a story like the one they're telling in the Fodlan games it'd be odd to have so many characters specifically on one end. It's one thing to have a small few at best, but I do enjoy seeing aspects of characters that are good when we've only heard bad things about them.

That said I do agree that they made some characters a lot softer and kinder like Hubert. Felix makes sense imo because things happened differently in this timeline. He became the Duke very early and presumably spent a lot more time with Rodrigue and grew into his position. With Dimitri I think it's that maturity that he's grown into that helped reduce how cruel he was.

Rather than just making some of them kinder and whatnot though, I noticed they took a lot of characterization away from some character. For example, Dorothea, Raphael and Caspar were... pretty bland. Normally I like Dorothea but I borderline couldn't stand her in this game. All she does is bitch and moan about the war that she willingly fights in this game and worries about Edelgard constantly at camp. There's basically nothing to her character in the main story outside of simping for Edelgard and I feel like the only reason she's recruitable in AG is because she's so popular and they figured they should make her recruitable in all routes. Her supports with Flayn would be cute if not for Dorothea going on about how she thinks she should've died with the other soldiers and how much she laments being there. She fought for Edelgard because she wanted to, which makes Flayn directly her enemy and yet she acts fine and dandy around Flayn in their supports. If not for the context in the rest of the game their supports could've been cute, but I can't really see it that way with all the things Dorothea goes on about.

Lonato is definitely worse in this game imo if only for the fact that he's willing to go along with the guilt tripping against Ashe. The whole thing came off as even worse than Houses made it out to be.

There's a lot of give and take with the characters in this game that I've noticed. Some of them are worse at the expense of making others better. Hilda for example I like a lot more in this game and she feels more like a real person than her Houses counterpart, but Dorothea only seemed kind of decent to me in some of her supports. Caspar was reduced to not caring who or what he fought for other than the Empire, even if it was being led by Thales and people were burning entire villages to the ground and murdering all the residents (even though his father even told him he could flee and he wouldn't blame him for it).

I'm okay with seeing characters like Erwin have some good traits and qualities. It's one thing that he seems scummy in Houses, but that doesn't mean he's devoid of all humane traits. I can see it working out that his people would love him/his leadership but he's doing underhanded things behind the scenes when he doesn't trust other nobles (like the former Duke Riegan and how he didn't like or trust him. You could argue he did it out of concern for the Alliance based on what we know in Hopes while still acknowledging that it was a scummy way to go about things).

Ludwig is a special case in AG because in SB he's still total trash. Pretty sure SB Ludwig had zero redeeming qualities lol. Like I mentioned before, I feel like they needed to use him because they had nobody else they could use to take the same role Cornelia and Shahid had in their respective routes. AG gave him more opportunity to not be quite as awful. It makes sense to me because if he was just total scum of the earth, I can't see how Ferdinand would even care about him, father or not. In Houses he's distraught at his father's death, so there had to be something there.

Matthias though to a point I do agree was altered a little bit on the "too good" side. He tried to get Sylvain to go alone to stop the remaining bandits from Miklan's group and Sylvain expresses to Byleth that there's no way he's doing that and thinks it's weird of his father to even suggest that. The way he also mentions Matthias to be "pulling his weight" in the timeskip makes it sounds like he... doesn't do very much for the Kingdom? Like, my impression of him from Houses was that he was a total dick but very loyal to Faerghus. Like, he'd do what he had to do for his country but was so emotionally detached that his own son didn't expect much of anything from him. He's kind of in a similar boat as Erwin, where I do like seeing the humane aspects of them but it feels like they really pushed toward the good side instead of the middle (when it would've been totally fine if they made them a bit better than how Houses portrayed them but not quite so seemingly kind).

Yuri kind of seemed a little less... scheme-y and antagonistic (even jokingly/tauntingly/teasingly), so I do prefer him in Houses.