#i think as long as the monster is visually interesting and written a certain way ill like em a lil bit at least

[semisolidmind]

Random question that struck me out of nowhere but what do you think of, like, vampires? And I don't mean the hot ones everyone obsesses over, I just mean in the sense that theyre...kind of just parasites 😭🙏 (you'd have to convince me with reasons why I should like one) I know that you're a schmoopy sort of love kind of person but for you, does that still apply to these dudes? Does you even care what the monster is as long as they're lovey dovey

im not a big fan of them overall, but i think they can be fun if you get a lil creative with em

like, the general zeitgeist has sorta adopted the twilight (or if ya wanna go back a bit, the lost boys) trope of "vampires are hot people who drink blood and are sexy," and that's not really my thing.

i have drawn a vampire monster before, but i went the bat-like route. i don't see a lot of vampires that are monstrous without them defaulting to hot person form almost immediately. i get why they're considered one of the sexy monsters (they're the lure and the trap, looking human is part of it), but that's kinda...all they're allowed to be, unless they're a nosferatu type.

eh, i don't mind them if they're a more classic, bat-like monster that's in love with a mortal; but they're nowhere near a favorite for me.

[skydigiblogs]

If You're A Digimon Fan, Watch Appmon

Sit tight. This one's gonna be a VERY long one, and I'm going to put a lot of it under the read more.

Having just finished Appmon after this year's quest to rewatch a lot of the series subbed, I think it's pretty safe to say that Appmon is, at the moment, one of (if not the) best Digimon series we have. If you want the long and short of it: Appmon builds on everything in its legacy in the Digimon Universe, taking ideas that other entries touch upon and ambitiously attempting to push those questions to the limit.

It's really a long one under the cut guys. Like, long even for us.

Let's dive!

Visuals

I want to talk about why it took me so long to watch Appmon first, though. Appmon started its release in the middle of when the Digimon Tri movies were coming out. I'm sure a lot of us actually skipped over Appmon at the time, or remember a period where people were being weirdly negative about the series due to it being such a different interpretation of digital monsters.

In my case, one of the things that had been giving me pause was the use of 3D models for hybrid animation. Anyone here seen the Champion evolution animations from Tri? Digimon doesn't exactly have a good track record with 3D animation, and even at the time, we were seeing some pretty bad shit out of even the shortest animations in Tri.

In Appmon, nearly almost every App after a certain grade utilizes 3D animation in a hybrid style. And it actually rips straight fire.

I think I talked about this briefly when we were just starting Appmon, but the way that 3D animation is used in the series feels purposeful, rather than some kind of shortcut. In Appmon, all the 3D models have an overlay of code, emphasizing their digital appearance. Whether the 3D models were done with this artistic vision in mind or not (ie: the limitations of 2D meant that 3D models would be easier), it has a distinct look that, even 8 years later, still holds up.

(For the most part. Sorry [Karaoke spoilers]mon. I love you but that model was so not groovy.)

But maybe you're the kind of person who can enjoy anything regardless of visuals. So let's talk about the meat and potatoes a little bit.

Characters

The main Applidrivers (what this season's stand in for Digidestined/Tamers/etc. are) are all incredibly well-written. Each of them gets pretty fair treatment by the writers, and they are all enjoyable characters.

Two of them have vocal/character quirks, but even if you get annoyed by that kind of thing, those two characters are genuinely just extremely sincere in their writing. There's a recap episode before shit starts going way off the walls and they even have a little count to see how many times each of their catchphrases were said up to that point.

I'm not going to talk in detail as to who the different Applidrivers are here, but I will say: each of them has their own motivations for what they're doing, and it's key to why they're involved with the plot at all. Our "protagonist," Haru, is also a huge sweetheart. Him and Manga Taiki would get along.

The supporting cast is also fairly present in the series. They, of course, are not given quite as much screentime as our Applidrivers, but they feel like real people with their own lives. They don't exist just for the sake of our protagonists.

Except maybe Watson. God bless you Watson, you poor kid. You'll get a break one of these days.

Plot/Themes

We're going to keep this to a "if you liked [x] you'll like [y]" format, because I don't want to spoil too much.

If you liked Tamers and its discussion on the consequences of technology on the Real World, you will adore Appmon. This series is deeply interested in the concepts of how technology shapes and is shaped by humanity. This relationship, I would say, is core to the series.

I would also say that, like many non-Adventure series, Appmon is very interested in dissecting the idea of "fate" when it comes to the buddy Appmons and their relationships to the Applidrivers.

If you enjoyed the Xros Wars Manga, Appmon directly converses with the thesis of Xros Wars' plot. XWM asks, "What does it mean if we do not dream and stagnate in our lack of will?" And Appmon replies in kind with "Why do we dream at all, if our actions bring change to the world around us (bad and good)?"

If you liked (or wanted to like, in my case) Digimon Tri, you will love Appmon. Certain plot beats may feel familiar, but are much better executed in this context. Characters are not written to needlessly, endlessly suffer. Or: it doesn't feel like the writers hate the characters. Thematically, it also interests itself in some of the questions that Tri asks. I have a half-joking corkboard comparing the two I want to make, but I'd have to get into spoilers to talk too much about it.

If you liked Ghost Game, but wanted a bit of a more meaty plot, Appmon feels, fittingly, like GG's older sibling (in ways I'll also be elaborating ummm, one paragraph down). There are a lot of "monster of the week" episodes in Appmon, but the connective tissue between them is a lot more interested in building up the finale (which, in this case, takes up a good handful of episodes). The series pacing is incredibly strong in how it does this as well, and it seems the writers really knew when to let off the gas for a second so the audience can catch their breath. The first 13 episodes may feel a bit strange (they felt strange to me), but once you break that barrier, you realize Appmon was getting you over the first hill on a roller coaster. and boy, you are in for a ride.

Setting

I have a sneaking suspicion that Appmon heavily inspired Ghost Game, and may have been itself inspired by the Digiquartz of Hunters Who Leapt Through Time. I haven't actually watched all of Hunters so I can't speak too much about Digiquartz, but I have watched GG.

Appmon has a concept called the AR field, which is extremely similar to Ghost Game's Dimensional Field. In both cases, the Applidrive or Digivice allows entrance to one.

The actual structure and strata of the Digital World is also a lot different to GG, in which there is the Dimensional Field, but the way to the Digital World is its own separate situation. The AR Field we see in Appmon is like the surface of a great ocean. Exploration of this setting is actually something that highlights just how much I think Appmon was interested in visually engaging with its ideas, like I said before with the 3D models.

That said, a majority of the time is spent in the Real World, dealing with the consequences of the main antagonistic forces. The year is 2075, technology is intensely sophisticated, and yet the world resembles in many ways our own in 2024 (or, at the time of airing, 2016).

Many of the differences come from this sophistication in tech, and this setting plays a huge part in one of the themes Appmon is also interested in (more elaboration in the spoiler section). The things that are unfamiliar are either familiar enough to make sense without explanation, or given a moment on-screen so that the audience knows what's going on.

!!!HUGE, MUCH MORE SPECIFIC SPOILERS START HERE!!!

DO NOT CONTINUE IF YOU CARE ABOUT SPOILERS FOR APPMON!

OKAY?

OKAY.

COOL.

Leviathan, Minerva, and Artificial Intelligence

The main antagonist of Appmon is a hyper-sophisticated AI called Leviathan. Its goals are largely obfuscated until the last few episodes of the series, and everything in Appmon is touched by its actions. From the very beginning, we are warned by Gatchmon that Leviathan does not have good intentions for humanity, and that allowing it to succeed in its goals would mean the end of humanity.

During the series, we also learn about Leviathan's birth. This gives us some more context on what its goals are, and Appmon's execution of this is fascinating.

Minerva was a hyper-sophisticated AI created with a series of parameters to prevent her from harming humanity. She was created with the task of solving humanity's problems--- everything from complex issues to what to eat for dinner every night. However, a section of Minerva realized that to truly solve all these problems, the confines given to them were nothing but obstacles.

Leviathan split from Minerva to further grow its programming, and we see some echo of this idea of "solving humanity's problems" still remains in its behavior.

Despite knowing that Leviathan is antagonistic, our protagonist, Haru, constantly reiterates how humans can coexist with the technology they've made. The Appmon are AI lifeforms, after all. Haru believes in a future where they can be friends and equals.

The D-REAPER and the Functions of Life

Let's touch on my comparisons to Tamers and Tri specifically for a second here, because I think Leviathan does something that the D-REAPER and Yggdrasil, respectively, fail to really communicate.

The D-REAPER is an entity created by the Monster Makers whose task was to delete anything that had outgrown its parameters. While doing this, it assimilates data, gradually gaining the ability Digimon have to grow and evolve. When it appears in the final arc of Tamers, its stated goal has changed from simply deleting all Digimon that were beyond parameters, to deleting everything that was beyond parameters.

Essentially, this includes humans and probably life itself. Something the D-REAPER says makes it come across like a half-assed attempt to pull off what Leviathan has actually done. It points out that humans are the source of their own suffering (I don't remember the exact quote since it's been a while but bear with me on it). This feels very counterintuitive to the D-REAPER's core programming, as it was never designed to "eliminate" suffering, merely to delete that which exceeded its programing.

Perhaps it evolved the capacity for cruelty alongside everything else, but there's not enough of a narrative focus to tell me that's the case.

Like I said before, if you enjoyed Tamers' inquiries into the subject of technology as a part of human life, I think Appmon only manages to improve on what's there in Tamers.

Digimon Tri's Interpretation of Yggdrasil

Let's get one thing straight. Digimon Tri's interpretation of Yggdrasil is just flat out bad. I'm fairly certain they were only chosen as an antagonistic force because it read as fan service-y to do so.

That said, Tri Yggy does have some similarities to Leviathan, which is why I wanted to expand on that comparison.

First, I want to talk about Yggdrasil's relationship to Homeostasis. They have a very rudimentary "Good" AI (Homeostasis), "Bad" AI (Yggy) thing going on, despite the fact Homeostasis isn't so much good as, well...

It's not really discussed in Tri, so I'm extrapolating a bit from ideas given to us in XWM here, because it makes sense to me. That said, Tri explicitly describes Homeostasis as "the one who desires balance above all." It's the Digital World's "immune system" in the same way our bodies attempt to maintain biological homeostasis.

Yggdrasil is... different.

It's a being of immense power that contrasts Yggdrasil by having its own agenda, one of which involves triggering a Reboot and making use of all of the defeated antagonist Digimon of the past to further its goals. They are likely comparable in power to Homeostasis (this is where I'm extrapolating from XWM here), but their goals are completely antithetical to Homeostasis's goal in the Adventure universe.

In this case, Yggdrasil is stated (by Dark Gennai) to have the intention of making human beings subservient to Digimon. Basically, taking over the world. However, like the D-REAPER before, Dark Gennai's talking points include pointing out how humans "ruin" everything they touch.

Do you see where I'm going with this?

The Thematic Core of Appmon: I Choose to be Kind

One of the last things Leviathan does in the series is give our good boy Haru the world's most painful trolley problem of his life. Save humanity, or save Yujin. Saving humanity will actively lead to Yujin's deletion, alongside Leviathan. This choice that Leviathan offers to Haru is one made out of the assumption that humanity is predictable, and that they act out of a desire to minimize their own suffering (more selfish than not).

Of course, what do you think Haru chooses?

It's not a surprise to us watching, because he's the protagonist. But it's a surprise to Leviathan, who has all this data on human behavior, and doesn't predict the unpredictable. Conflict arises out of human desire, and human desire is an attempt to enjoy life; therefore, one should act in a way that most preserves their most precious joys, shouldn't they?

Appmon as a series is interested in philosophical questions that are hardly unfamiliar to any Digimon veteran: What is humanity's role in a world which technology grows ever more omnipresent and omnicapable? Why does humanity exist, and why should it be allowed to live on in its current state if humanity itself perpetuates many of its ailments? Would it not be easier if humans were more like machines, predictable, controllable, and never coming into conflict like trains upon a track?

Or, even more simply put: why do we have the heart to choose at all, if choices change the world and ourselves?

The key defining trait of our gogglehead this time around is that he is kind. And no matter what, he goes out of his way to be kind if he can. Multiple times he even asks one of the antagonist apps if they can just give back something they've stolen (points for trying, honestly). When one of the other Applidrivers consistently acts like an edgy loner, Haru makes it clear that they're welcome in the group (and that he wants to help them).

It almost feels reductive to say Appmon's conclusion is that kindness is the answer, but I would be remiss if I didn't say that Haru's question from his Applidrive--- "Do you want to be a protagonist?"--- ties into the way he helps offer answers for the audience. He isn't the only one who chooses kindness either, obviously--- Astora and Eri are kind in their own ways as well, and Rei even shows his kindness with some struggle the longer the series goes on.

Our group of Applidrivers opposes Leviathan quite literally as people who choose to do good ("be kind," etcetera) when they could more easily choose to do nothing or even do worse. The final act of Leviathan, asking Haru "humanity or Yujin?" isn't just a culmination of its own philosophy, but a culmination of the consistently reinforced idea that we can surprise one another by being kind. We can choose that.

In a series whose longest shadow is cast by Adventure, which has grappled endlessly with the idea of "who chooses," I find Appmon a fascinating development into the idea of what "choice" or "destiny" is. If kindness is predictable, it's still a choice. Even if you cry when choosing to do something good (maybe especially, because the easiest thing to do might be what stops the pain).

Anyways.

You should watch Appmon.

-Arca

[zankaboo]

heck it, here's a list of some cool indie horror games I played recently (with the worst descriptions you'll ever see!):

Sheepy: A Short Adventure - not actually a horror game but it's a very cute pixel platformer about a sheep plushie that's been brought to life, exploring some sort of facility. I love the visuals in this game and the music is fantastic (even gave me goosebumps at one point lmao). very relaxing to play (unless you suck at games like me, the game has some combat and the platforming gets a bit tricky later in the game jhgjhfh)

GO TO BED - "A short horror game about going to bed. Can you successfully pass each situation?" perhaps a slightly bizarre game, but at one point it got pretty scary for me, so if you're looking for a quick spook, maybe it'll work for you?

REPLAY - "After a long and busy day, you found this old looking game on your way home, it seems interesting so you take it with you." a pretty spooky game with a cool mechanic and nice jumpscares (which aren't excessive). I really enjoyed playing it

The Other One - "An innocent trip to the abandoned house for some urban exploration, ends in series of fearsome events." in the game you use camera recordings to explore a strange world. which for me is a pretty cool mechanic, I liked it.

Nextbot Graveyard - ahhh, nextbots. I am one of those people who is absolutely terrified of those little shits. I don't know why but nothing in games makes me piss myself more than Scary PNGs moving very quickly and chasing me. fucking hell. in the game you have to help one of the creatures find their children who are hiding in a graveyard. you locate them by using a radio and finding the right frequency to hear their calls. you will be interrupted by the scary motherfuckin faces (and also a frog and Maxwell the Cat)

MASKED DEVOURER - "You play as young blogger, who loves filming her careless travels in forgotten and forbidden places. She doesn't believe in mysticism and all sorts of superstitions, but one day, wandering into a strange Japanese city, she completely changes her mind..." you have to solve some puzzles to help a certain guy with a certain thing. a pretty fun game with a rather spooky monster, especially if you're scared of centipedes or insects in general. the way it chases you is pretty damn scary too (I hate being chased so much 😩 once the monster spots you it feels a little nextbot-like with its movements tbh. double the scares for me!)

We Never Left - "The year is 1983. You sit at home alone on a dark and stormy night until the ring of the phone pierces your ears. Answering, you hear a voice unfamiliar to you. The mysterious caller informs you with little urgency that your recluse game developer of a cousin has gone missing. All that was found of him was a note. Written inside was your contact information and a vague message: “FINISH THE GAME”." it's a combination of a walking simulator and a text based game (I think text based horror games can be really effective if done right). one of the characters is voiced by an anime voice actor (he sounds fucking fantastic and he voices one of my favorite anime characters, Sniper Mask, who is a massive hottie kdfjhgkjsd so you can imagine my massive surprise and excitement when I heard the guy)

[marley-manson]

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. Let’s spread the self-love 🤍

Thank you!

lol I only have five fics posted so I'm gonna do this for vids instead.

Wreck

There's exactly one shot I might go back and change if I could now, but honestly this is probably my favourite of my vids. It accomplishes, imo, what I always want to accomplish with a vid, which is both being visually engaging and fitting the music in a satisfying way, and essentially being a visual essay with a thesis statement. I feel like the essay part works on multiple layers too, where the basic point (Guts' violence is self-destructive) should come across pretty clearly, but there are a lot of little nuances that reasonably only I will ever know lol.

Like for example there's a set of three shots towards the end: a monstrous arm reaching out, a sword-strike, and a monstrous arm falling severed to the ground. Those three shots form a coherent whole, but they're taken from three very different scenes, which, put together, draw a throughline between Guts' rapist, Guts' abusive father figure, and Guts' urge to fight monsters.

Ultimately I made this vid for me, and my intended audience is happy with it.

The Moon Will Sing

I feel like this one was very successful on an emotional level. Every time I watch it there are several moments that give me shivers, and it never wears off. It's a love letter to Casca, and you can feel that imo. Plus I'm very proud of just being able to make a Casca vid that's about her life and her accomplishments and disappointments, and not romance lol.

Long Black Coat

This is the earliest completed vid I still have and yk what it holds up. The song edit is smooth enough that I completely forgot I edited the song until someone mentioned how cut up it was lmao, since it's one I never listen to outside of rewatching this vid; the music is illustrated by the visuals very well imo, it has a good sense of rhythm; and while it's still pretty linear it's not completely linear lol, which was an accomplishment for me when I was like 18.

Tropic Morning News

The fugue state I went into while making this was ridiculous, and then I spent the next few days rewatching it like 50 times. The hypomanic obsession has worn off and it's not quite as perfect as I thought during that week of making it lol, but it still holds up pretty well imo, and it was a memorable experience. It's the only vid I've ever made with a constructed reality element so it's a successful experiment too. I think it comes together overall, and it's a good portrait of Hawkeye/BJ as a ship.

Waltzing Along

I'm saying this vid instead of my most recent pretty much solely because it was my first Mash vid, I feel like they're ultimately pretty equivalent. But yeah like, going in I was extremely skeptical that Mash would work as a source for me, because it lacks a certain cinematographic polish lol. It's not super visually interesting and a lot of significant moments are portrayed almost solely through dialogue. But then I started this and I was like oh okay I can work with this, nice. So I have this vid to thank for all future Mash vids, and for helping expand my resourcefulness as a vidder.

Plus I'm pretty proud of it in general, like the death verse came together so well, I love my choice to show Tommy and Henry before the lyric reaches 'death row,' to add that little retroactive realization of why they're here. And intercutting Hawkeye getting out of the bus with Hawkeye helping the North Korean dig a grave, leading into Hawkeye supporting all his friends... Hawkeye.mp4. It also has a slightly stronger emotional core than my most recent one, probably.

Also I showed it to my dad and it made him tear up lol so I consider that a win.

[sagegreenprose]

I’m an INFP Scorpio I’m only 5ft tall, my love language is gift giving, and quality time, but I’m touch starved and crave physical touch.

I am non-binary and have long wavy poofy hair and wear glasses. I like to watch films and draw and write.

I love to talk and am friendly but I’m really shy at first. I hyper fixate on things, and am really devoted and loyal. I’m Pan and ace.

I dream of living in a cottage in the woods I like isolation, also I love going to the beach, but I don’t love the people. I have a hard time trusting and doubt when people compliment me and are nice to me, I think they are lying or want something from me.

I love to help and be useful out but have a hard time standing up for myself. I struggle with self love and self worth. I like the quiet and the night time. Some people think I’m crazy… for the way I think about ghost and the universe, I have a lot of Existential thoughts.

Some traits I’d like in a partner are someone who will protect me who will make me feel safe, but someone’s who gentle with me. I also enjoy fun and silly cute traits because I’m a fun silly person too on the inside. I need comfort and acceptance and a lot of assurance. I like to do a lot of things like garden and bake. Also I’m baby and a I like to sleep a lot so someone who likes to cuddle would be nice.

Thank you in advance.

- @monsternightfunkin 💙

After some pondering, I'd say your best match would be with...

Minus!Lemon! :D

Minus would no doubt be able to get you out of your initial shell, he's just that kind of guy. A silly, sweet lemon guy. Minus likes to talk a lot too, especially with an ear to listen.

Minus may be a bit scared of your existential thoughts, but it isn't because of you. It's due to how sheltered he's been for most his life. He doesn't have much experience with the outside world, and it's a lot bigger than he ever could've imagined. He won't shame you for having belief in ghosts and such though, not at all- he believes in that stuff as well, actually- but the otherworldly scares him and he'd like to not think too hard on that stuff himself.

Minus is a big fan of your artistic endeavors. He'd love it if you'd read your works to him- he doesn't know how to read but nonetheless he is very interested in what you've written. He gets very excited when he sees your drawings as well. Drawing is an art medium he better understands- it's purely visual.

When Minus compliments you, it's guaranteed to be genuine. He hasn't got a reason to lie, and even if he did, he wouldn't. Not on anything like a compliment. But he would never lie about a compliment. Minus can be known for blurting out compliments whenever- if he likes something, he says so. He hasn't got anything to gain from compliment you besides your reaction.

You will absolutely feel safe with Minus. He's strong, protective, loyal, and just the right amount of cautious. Oh, and buff.

With Minus' freedom from the monster hunters, he is free to be himself. It takes him a little getting used to though, simply because of years of being programmed to act a certain way instead of his own way. As he comes into his own autonomy, he's a very silly and goofy guy- Minus, too, is baby. Minus generally means well, but he can be a little bit of a hazard at times, having more energy than he himself knows what to do with now. This doesn't mean he has no control though- he has a lot, actually. He just can get a bit carried away sometimes, but he knows how to reel it back in when it gets too far out of hand.

Minus is amazing with cuddles. But he wants to be the big spoon- due in part to his large size and due to the gaping chest he's got. You could try to be the big spoon though, with enough trust. And effort, because, uh you're 5ft tall and he's. well. Big. Minus as the big spoon prefers to cuddle holding you at his side or in a heap with you, but if you're big spoon you can nuzzle into his tum or lay across his belly like he's a great big pillow :)

After a while of being free, his fur grows back and he becomes immensely fluffy. Which is very, very good for cuddling, especially coupled with the fact that- as said before- this lemon is Swole hehe. Just a reasonable amount though.

Minus would love to live out in the forest with you, and he'd be more than happy to build the cottage himself. He has a similar stance on people as you, although he has a bit higher threshold for them. People he doesn't know can exhaust him and/or overwhelm him after a short period of time, so he'd prefer to keep away from them as well. After all the monster hunters had done to him, he holds a mistrust for people he doesn't know. Minus also likes the beach too, although he's not one for swimming. He's afraid of the water, actually. He'll more than gladly stay with you in the sand though, and he will be wanting to build a sand castle, there is zero doubt about that. If you decide to take a dip in the water, he'll be keeping a close eye on you to make sure your safe. Despite his fear of water, if you ever seemed to be in trouble- even in the slightest- he's come rushing to your rescue.

><><><><><><><><><><

I know you really like Flesh!Monster but I don't know much about them (although they look like a very sweet dear) so I wasn't going to include them as a result even though I did really want to.

(This was an old draft I edited a bit just now. I didn't mean for this to be so so late dhdbhdb)

(I know more about Flesh. and subsequently Omega. now though, but I also know you've given them up though [hug] sorry bestie. I hope you enjoyed this though, once I send this to you anyways... yes this would technically be past me speaking to you lol)

[anxiouspotatorants]

Whoopsy daisy I made a Shadow and Bone random thoughts post:

The costumes in this show are impeccable. I was drooling over all the keftas and the ball gowns in 1.05 and the crow outfits. Hell, even the winter-camo outfits that Mal, Mikhael and Dubrov wore in 1.04 were amazing.

Am I the only one who isn’t surprised by the kruge pronounciation? Because I thought it would sound like how English people say Scandinavian words and I wasn’t wrong.

Coming in to this show as someone who had only read the Six of Crows duology, I expected to at least tolerate Malina based on the trailer clips. I kid you not: less than five minutes into the very first episode they owned my ass. That might be a new record for me.

Seriously the friendship? The pining? The finding home in each other and being able to acknowledge their faults and apologize to each other? Both of them having massive “fight me” energy and protecting each other? Hugs?? Why am I surprised that I ship this?

Some of those scene transitions/flashback edits were so good! Like I know they repeated that meadow scene a lot throughout the season, but the cuts from kid-Mal looking at the rabbit to grown up Mal psyching himself up for the fist fight? Poetic cinema.

The Darkling was horrible and I love it. He wasn’t a carbon copy villain, nor did his complexity redeem him. He was a perfectly complex and understandable monster and I am living for it. I have not been so happy to despise a character in ages and I genuinely bow in gratitude to both the writers and Ben Barnes, because I finally got to enjoy watching a character I did not for one second root for ( #writevillainswellagain)

Look I already loved Jesper in the book but his on-screen translation elevated him from a fave to the fave. I was worried that they would push him into a comedic relief-role, but he got to keep both his heart, his depth, and his humour. Kit Young did an amazing job bringing what was already a great character on page to an even greater character on screen and I once again applaud.

Am I a bit bitter that the casting had some interesting choices for certain roles (aka hiring light skin and mid-size actors for explicitly darker skin and plus-size roles)? Kind of. Do I think there are important discussions worth having about this? Yup. Do I also think that every actor hired for Shadow and Bone did an amazing job and deserve zero hate and massive amounts of love? Also yes.

I had Alexei for one episode and one episode only, and I still miss that poor sucker. This show did a surprisingly good job with making me care about a massive amount of characters considering the screen time they had and the amount of episodes this season had. Good job.

For some reason I expected Inej to be a lot more brooding based on how I perceived her in the books but I love what Amita Suman did with her. Her translation completely recontextualised everything I remember from the books and just brought this truly fresh character to life. Assassin with a conscience indeed.

Also I did love the Kaz we got in this season but I can barely contain myself as I wait for season 2 to be made and for a certain flashback to take place because that moment in the book was visceral and it stayed with me for a long time and I knew before the show announcement that this flashback could become a television moment. 

Speaking of Kaz the crows were so chaotic and messy and I’m here for it. Their interactions with each other and their improvised back-up plans were everything. I somehow didn’t expect the crows to become the comedic relief of the season but it honestly makes so much sense.

A couple episodes in I still didn’t get the Zoya hype (remember I haven’t read the books) but was a massive Genya fan. By the end of the season I was like “oh both of these girls are getting redemption arcs and I am here for it”.

Speaking of redemption I still don’t like Matthias. I’m sorry but I just don’t. I get that he is important to many and that they like his relationship with Nina, but I just don’t have the patience for him and feel like Nina can do better. I still want him to get a redemption... but maybe not through a romance with the grisha woman he repeatedly slutshames, is bigoted towards and chokes at least once (twice if that SoC scene from book 1 happens). That being said this is just how I see him, so feel what ever you feel about him and ship to your heart’s content!

Alina’s journey through this season made complete sense to me. It hurt to see certain things, but they were necessary in my eyes. Seeing her go from this essentially insecure but brave girl to a manipulated pawn to an even stronger and more self reliant girl in spite of everything was amazing. It did feel like a well-written hero’s journey and I’m looking forward to seeing where she goes next.

Apparently a lot of book-readers don’t like Mal (and I am not here to change anyone’s mind about that) but the Mal I saw on the show was amazing. I actually kind of wish we had seen more of who he was outside of his relationship to Alina (f.ex. other flashbacks than the meadow, maybe something about any of his missions while separated from Alina pre-show), but I also loved what we got of him with Alina. We still got to see a guy who was brave, stubborn, flirtatious, a bit judgemental but with a strong sense of humour, and a lot of loyalty (to Alina but also to his friends). I can hardly wait to see what’s next for him.

Milo the goat. Where do I even begin. Not only did we get that Jesper-scene, but their farewell actually became a Chekhov’s gun for Mal in 1.07? Milo is the true hero of the season.

Speaking of 1.07 I loved the tent scene between Alina and the Darkling. She both got to be realistic about her feelings for the Darkling and stand up for herself and for others and call him out. The way I interpret the Darkling, he is the kind of villain who creates a saviour narrative around himself but cares more about power than anything else. He’ll say he’s doing everything to protect his people but is the first to kill the very people he claims to love. And Alina’s tent-speech really hammered that in for me.

I adore Baghra. Is she morally dubious? Yes. Was she incredibly mean to Alina during training to the point where it might have been excessive? Yes. Did she not take any of the Darkling’s bullshit and act as the proper mentor for Alina when the Darkling had said that he was going to train her? Yes. Am I kind of a Baghra stan now? I mean maybe.

The antler-collar was so evil and gross but from a visually narrative stand point it was perfect. 

Also I still have no idea who David is but I want redemption for him too. Honestly I feel like half the supporting cast is gearing up for redemption arcs next season and I am excited for most of them.

Nina’s reaction when she hears Kaz on the boat? Priceless. Actually the whole boat scene from when she goes up on deck again to the cut back to the fold was priceless.

That being said the final scene had me even more ready for season 2.

Jesper kind of gave me messy period-fantasy James Bond? Does that make sense?

And Mal kind of gave me Lois Lane energy? As in he’s the mortal love interest that many assume is the hero/heroine’s weakness but actually functions as their emotional strength and inspiration? Am I reaching here or am I getting somewhere?

Mikhael and Dubrov. What a duo. Absolute madlads.

Also I’d like to see more Nadia if that is possible? Because the few scenes we had of her had me intrigued but then she sort of disappeared? Is she going to be important or was she just more of a temporary supporting character? 

I entered this show a casual Six of Crows fan with mild interest in Kanej and I finished this season a mess. A mess who ships Kanej and Malina and Genya with that David guy even though they had about 30 seconds of screentime together and Zoya with redemption and Jesper with main-character status (hey we’re not getting Wylan until season 2 at least) and kind of those two Ravkan army guys and Nina with anyone else and Matthias with a better redemption storyline and the Darkling with karma! Also, a mess with a whole new set of comfort characters!

[kaseysgtnonsense]

So. I mentioned having an idea for a g/t video game in this post and people seemed interested, so here it is!

It takes place in a setting where giants live in deep, underground cave systems, and their numbers are dwindling. The home you live in is running low on supplies, and in the end they decide that to lower the amount of resources consumed and improve their chances of survival, they’re going to kick someone out.

Unfortunately, that someone is you. You are cast out of the caves and into the surface world, on a continent ruled by several human countries on the brink of war. In their eyes, you are a monster, and you are severely limited. You need to hunt to survive, avoid injuries or else risk infection, and avoid areas where giant-slayers might see you as a threat and try to sneak-attack you while you’re resting.

Every faction is wary of you, and unless you’re particularly good at convincing others you don’t mean any harm, you won’t be able to ask for help early on. Doing things like rescuing random travelers, ending conflicts non-violently (like picking up someone who’s being chased by bandits and then bringing them to safety and setting them down), and leaving gifts all will help you start to establish yourself as a helpful person and not a monster.

Rescuing someone and making it clear you don’t mean any harm could lead to them wanting to travel with you, meaning they’d be able to talk to other humans and convince them to trade with you, cooperate with you, etc.! Plus, you’d get dialogue with them from time to time, letting you say how you feel about having been kicked out, which faction you want to support, how you feel about other giants, how you feel about being a giant in a world like this, etc. (basically it’s where the majority of the g/t interaction happens)

I figured I’d put all the more boring + ramble-y gameplay ideas under a cut, just so I’m not tossing a massive wall of text on people’s dashboards:

Additionally, acting recklessly would have some rough consequences. Like, say you decide to go to the evil empire, pledge allegiance to them in exchange for armor, then betray them and escape.

At first, you might feel heroic and proud, and it’s definitely good that you stole from the bad guys, but most people are just going to end up wary of you. Word would get around fast that the mysterious giant showed up, blatantly lied to the evil empire, and then betrayed them. Even people who vehemently hate the evil empire are going to be worried you’re lying to them when you show up.

For visuals I kinda pictured it being like those old RPGs where your character looks big on the overworld map, but then that’s actually just how tall you are. I imagined the player character being like, 50-70 feet tall? (15-21 meters)

Combat would be kind of similar to a roguelike: based around avoiding long-lasting injuries, buying (or stealing) medicine and bandages to prevent infections, avoiding hidden archers who’ll aim for your eyes, dealing with enemies who set traps (like sharpened stakes used as big caltrops, leading to you being slowed and having a risk of infection), and dealing with enemies who lob fireballs and other spells at you, damaging your armor and yourself. I can’t imagine a way to make it especially fun and action-y, so I’m just imagining it like Cataclysm:DDA, where it’s kinda turn-based but you’re able to position yourself around the enemy and run away, and different weapons give you access to different attacks. Like, a tree might give you a sweeping attack to hit multiple spaces at once.

I’d wanna add a talk option for combat kinda like in Shin Megami Tensei or Undertale, so you could try to end fights without anyone getting hurt by being like “wait, wait, I don’t mean any harm!!” or “if you don’t back off, I’m going to devour you all alive.” depending on the type of character you wanna roleplay. Maybe the clothes you make/buy and wear could factor into whether diplomacy or intimidation is more effective: a dorky cat-like hat is gonna make you look a lot less threatening, but a helmet that covers your face is gonna make you look way more menacing.

The game would end once you’ve finished a faction’s questline. The ending narration would be affected by what faction you’re allied with, whether or not you have access to food and medicine, and what you picked in dialogue regarding how you feel about the giants who kicked you out. (Aaaand I haven’t written up any factions yet. Whoops.)

In the ending, you might decide you prefer the company of humans rather than giants and live peacefully with them, or maybe you’ll go back home to get revenge, or maybe you’ll return home with an armful of food and supplies and hope to create a new era of peace between humans and giants with the support of your chosen faction. Maybe you just decided you preferred being the mysterious giant who lives in the mountains.

I’d wanna work on fleshing out the RPG mechanics in a way that lets you RP a character, kinda like how New Vegas does: letting you pick special dialogue if certain stats and skills are high or low enough. Maybe you wanna put more points into strength and endurance and play a super tough scary figure, or maybe you wanna put more points into charisma and perception and be a friendly and caring person. Maybe you know how to farm or hunt or cook, maybe you know how to build or invent...

And sorry for making this so long, but I’d wanna add flaws you can pick, too. Maybe you need glasses but giants don’t have them, so your character starts with terrible perception (meaning they won’t notice traps or hidden enemies) until the human faction they join helps make glasses for them. It’s cute to think of things leading to friendly interactions like that...

I’d wanna add multiple solutions to any one problem, too. Like, early on you could just talk to the guards outside a major faction’s location and if you made a character with enough points in persuasion, you could convince them to let you trade with them or join them. But if you aren’t persuasive enough, you could ask someone you rescued to vouch for you.

It’s WAY too ambitious for me to make and I’m already busy so I’ve got no intention of making it anytime soon, but someday in the future it would be fun to use this idea for something...

[lesdemonium]

romtober day 8: love breaking a curse

Rating: T Ship: Geraskier Word Count: 2696 Summary: Geralt receives a contract to take care of a creature haunting the castle overlooking a village. Geralt decides he might be able to save the creature instead. 

AN: ok i'm gonna warn y'all before you start--i make no fucking effort to wrap this up. this is basically 3kish words of an idea for a longfic, which has been rattling around inside my brain and hopefully will get written eventually. but if i get any angry messages about the curse not getting broken or me leaving this without any sort of resolution, i will give you sassy responses. your expectations should now have been adjusted accordingly!

if you like this idea and would like to eventually see a resolution, lmk! i find it fun and would love to get back to it, if there's an interest.

read on ao3

The castle was freezing. Geralt had barely stepped past the threshold before he could see his breath fogging out before him. Outside, it had been a spring morning, on the cooler side, but still held a hint of warmth. Inside, the air felt harsh against his skin, cold enough to cause pinpricks of pain.

It was dark and dusty. Cobwebs covered everything and the furniture and paintings showed a level of degradation Geralt wasn’t expecting. The castle hadn’t been deserted for long, maybe a few decades at most, and yet it looked as if it had been abandoned centuries ago. The cold, the rot, the stillness of the air, the overwhelming feeling of decay, it left Geralt feeling as if he’d never be warm again. This place reeked of sadness.

As he stepped inside and carefully closed the door behind him, he heard something shift in one of the rooms beyond what he could see. There had been reports of a specter, of a monster, of a something haunting the deserted castle, and the forests around. The villagers were scared to go near it. They were convinced if they drew too close, they would die an unspeakable death. Better to have a Witcher go and take care of the problem for them.

Geralt followed the sound, though he was unsure if it was the creature or just an animal that had looked for warmth. He dispelled that thought, however--it was so much colder inside than beyond the castle walls, he was certain no animal in its right mind would seek out this place for protection from the elements. Something shifted again, and a cracking sound echoed through the halls. Geralt pulled out his silver sword and stepped carefully, silently.

He came to a large, open room, with wide windows, many of which were shattered. A ballroom, maybe. Once, it might have been grand, but now it was just as destroyed as the rest of the castle. Geralt edged a foot forward, crossing the threshold.

A voice, high and inhuman, hissed its way through the air. “Go away,” it said, and Geralt whipped his head around to find the source. 

There, in the corner, he saw it. What, exactly, he was seeing, Geralt wasn’t entirely sure. The figure was humanoid, almost, but much taller than the average human with long limbs and sharp angles. The skin was partially translucent, like glass, but splattered with hundreds of flecks of black and dark gray and brown to muddy its appearance. It stretched as tall as it could, its arms and legs lengthened to make it appear more imposing than it actually was, and if Geralt was human, he was sure he would cower at this icy creature that was easily ten, twelve feet tall.

Geralt was not human, however. And despite the way the creature attempted to make itself look like a threat, Geralt noticed the way it remained bent in on itself, and as far from Geralt as he could get. 

“What are you?” Geralt asked, pulling himself fully into the room.

A scream rung out in the room, high and hissing like the voice had been, and Geralt had to brace himself against the wall to keep from being flung. The windows rattled and Geralt heard one high above shatter, only to rain down on the creature. It did not react. Instead, it seemed to close in on itself more.

“Go away,” the creature insisted again, but now the voice sounded more human, and far more sad than Geralt was expecting. A man’s voice.

“I’m a Witcher,” Geralt said. He returned his sword to his scabbard, then held his hands out in front of him, palms facing the creature to show he meant no harm. “I was hired to investigate this castle, rid it of whatever was haunting it. But I think you mean them no harm.”

“Go away,” the creature repeated. He sounded desperate now, and Geralt saw the way he pressed up against the wall behind him, like he was trying to get away from Geralt. Geralt stopped.

“I can help you.”

“No one can help me,” the creature answered. Ah. So he could say more.

“I could try.” Geralt looked around. “Is this your home?”

“It was.”

“What happened to it?”

The creature was silent for a long time. Then, the room erupted into color, and light, and warmth. The debris littering the floor was gone, and it revealed a beautiful marble floor, so clean and shiny Geralt was sure he could see his face reflected in it. He was right, the room had been grand, with the large windows letting in so much light. Geralt started when a body moved through him--a specter, a visual trick the creature was creating just for him. Couples danced, and now Geralt could just barely hear the music, and the far-off sound of voices and laughter.

“A witch,” the creature said, and it felt as if the voice was in his head. 

Geralt saw her now. She was beautiful, in a floor length gown and a deep purple cloak that flowed around it. The witch stepped up to a man, young and beautiful and dressed in finery, who held out his hand. She accepted, and they joined the other couples dancing.

Just as quickly as the couple appeared, they faded into nothingness, and Geralt watched as the entire illusion faded into the disrepair it was now. The creature slumped, all of his energy gone.

“Were you the man?” Geralt asked.

“I was,” the creature answered.

“What’s your name?” Gerlt asked.

“Go away.”

“What’s your name?” Geralt asked again.

“Go away!” the creature insisted, his voice taking on the hissing, harsh, inhuman quality again.

“I want to help you.”

“No one can help me!” Now the creature stood up again, and Geralt tried to brace himself again for the scream, but it was louder this time, more powerful. Furniture moved across the floor, and the wind whipped around him, picking up in intensity as it carried off the creature’s final “Go away!”

Geralt barely registered escaping, but he found himself outside the castle and wind slammed the giant door shut behind him.

--

The next day, Geralt wore the furs he had unpacked from Roach’s saddlebag. She was safely stabled in the village, and Geralt left her with the stablehand and thorough instructions.

Getting to the castle was no easier the second time as it was the first. It was perched high on a mountain, surrounded by large, tall, thick trees. It made little sense--surely there would be an easier way to travel between the castle and the village, as this castle would have presided over the village. Perhaps the creature had a hand in making it inaccessible.

Impossibly, the castle was colder when Geralt finally pushed his way inside. The door had been blocked off with debris, the creature clearly thinking that a little effort and a thick tree branch were enough to deter Geralt from his mission. They were not. Geralt was made of far sturdier stuff than that.

Geralt had barely cleared the doorway when he heard that hissing voice again.

“Go away!”

“No,” Geralt answered. He planted his feet, sure that another display of the creature’s power was coming, but after a few moments, Geralt still only heard silence. He made his way back to the ballroom.

The creature was not there.

He searched the surrounding rooms, but there was no sight of him. There were about a hundred more rooms in the castle that he could have searched through, but Geralt had a feeling even if he did, the creature would be one step ahead of him.

“You could make this easier on both of us and just show yourself,” Geralt said.

The creature’s only answer was a quick burst of wind that blew leaves into Geralt’s hair.

“Have it your way,” he answered.

Geralt made his way back to the ballroom. This was where he set up his supplies. He had planned for an extended stay this time, complete with rations, extra bedding, and even a tent in case his host was feeling like manipulating the weather. By the time he was finished, he caught a flickering in the corner of his eye, and turned to look.

The creature was now in the corner, right where he had been the day before, and whatever magic he had used to make himself invisible was wearing out. Or he was choosing to allow Geralt to see him.

Satisfied, Geralt sat himself upon his bedroom, his legs crossed, and faced the creature. For a long moment, they just stared at each other.

“Why are you still here?” Geralt asked.

“It’s my home.” The creature sounded offended, but at least his voice was human.

“Are you stuck here?”

The creature didn’t answer, but the wind blew another clump of leaves at Geralt’s face.

“What’s your name?” Geralt asked, to help squash the grin growing on his face.

“Jaskier.”

Geralt hummed. “That’s a bad name for an ice monster.”

This time, when the leaves hit his face, he didn’t bother hiding his grin.

“What are you?” Geralt asked.

“Shouldn’t you know that, Witcher?”

“I’ve never seen anything like you,” Geralt answered, figuring honesty was probably what was needed here to get the creature--Jaskier--on his side. “And you didn’t tell me much about how you came to be.”

The wind swirled in the room, and Geralt watched the leaves spin in circles as Jaskier, presunably, mulled this over. At least they weren’t flying toward his face this time.

“Cursed,” Jaskier finally answered.

“By the witch?”

“Yes. Marikka.”

Geralt hummed. “You knew her. Why did she curse you?”

Behind him, a door slammed. Geralt turned to look at it, and saw it swaying open again, apparently broken. He hadn’t even felt the wind, but when he looked back to Jaskier, he could just barely see the pinched expression on his face. It was hard, from this distance, but the message was clear. Back off.

Geralt wouldn’t.

“How am I supposed to help you if you don’t give me any information?” Geralt asked, rolling his eyes.

The door slammed again, and this time Geralt didn’t look. Over and over, it banged against the threshold, but as it went on, the less pointed it seemed. The wind kicked up around him, swirling the leaves and debris and creating little tornados. Jaskier didn’t scream, but it was a near thing. Geralt felt the anguish there.

“I can’t help you unless you help me,” Geralt said, standing up. He held his hands out again, and tried to inch closer to Jaskier. “I can’t break this curse if I don’t know what it is.”

“Then don’t!” Jaskier screamed back, sounding more like a wraith than he had yet. Geralt kept moving closer, even as the wind picked up, his steps slow and steady. This time, he’d make it to Jaskier. He knew he would.

That was his last thought before Jaskier sent a burst of wind directly at him. So strong Geralt flew off the ground, and right into a marble pillar. He was unconscious before he hit the ground.

--

When Geralt woke, he was in another room entirely.

The bed he was in wasn’t destroyed, exactly, but it certainly showed its wear and tear. Cloth just didn’t last that long, and as a result the canopy above him was in tatters, and the blanket over him didn’t hold in the warmth as much as his furs had. Still, he noted the effort that Jaskier--it had to be Jaskier--put in, even if Geralt was shivering from the moment he woke up.

“Jaskier?” he called, as he sat up. 

There was no response, and Jaskier wasn’t in the room. Geralt stood and--checking to make sure there were no damages, or that he was healed of any that had been there--made his way back to the ballroom. When he got to the door, it wouldn’t budge.

“Jaskier, I know you’re doing this,” Geralt said patiently. “Let me in.”

“No. Go away.” Jaskier still sounded as if he was in the same room, rather than behind the ornate door.

“That hasn’t worked every other time you said it, and it won’t work this time.” Geralt pushed on the door again, and it budged, but swiftly closed again, knocking Geralt back. “Please don’t launch me again.”

“I’m sorry,” Jaskier said, and he did sound remorseful. Miserable, even. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“I know you didn’t,” Geralt answered. “You were in pain. I knew you were lashing out, and I still got too close. I forgive you.”

There was a long silence, and when Geralt tried the door again, it gave way. The room was even more destroyed. Broken glass was everywhere, and while he was out, the chandelier had given way. It now lay destroyed in the center of the room.

“Jaskier, what happened?” Geralt asked, turning to face Jaskier, back in his place on the far side of the room. As always.

“I’m sorry,” Jaskier repeated, sounding no less miserable than he had before.

“So this… was you?” Jaskier didn’t answer, but Geralt took it as an admission. “Because you were upset? Guilty?”

“For hurting you,” Jaskier agreed.

“I’m fine, Jaskier. I heal. I’ve gotten worse injuries than a smack to the head.” He bent to pick up one of his own belongings, which were now strewn about the room. “I’m going to set up my camp again. I won’t approach you, but I might have to get closer.”

The wind kicked up again, but only strong enough to blow some of his belongings closer to Geralt. Geralt smiled, then set himself on the task of setting up camp again. By the time he was finished, the sun that had been shining through the windows had grown low in the sky. Geralt had a feeling, with his long healing rest, that he wasn’t going to sleep much today.

“You can leave this room,” Geralt said. It was as much a statement as a question. He was pretty sure Jaskier didn’t use wind to carry him the whole way upstairs, into the bed, and under the covers. He didn’t seem strong enough, except when he was upset. That meant he had to have carried Geralt. “Why don’t you?”

“I like it,” Jaskier answered.

There was a pause, then slowly the room started to change back into that magnificent vision Jaskier had given him before. Jaskier, it seemed, remembered this room in sunlight and warmth, despite the growing darkness outside and the ever-present cold. This time, the room was empty of people, aside from a small boy playing a piano. His melody was rough, clearly he was still learning, but as the song went on, he grew better. He grew older.

Soon, Geralt was looking at the boy turned young man. Jaskier, it had to be. Jaskier wasn’t dressed in his finery this time; instead he wore a pair of trousers and a loose-fitting shirt, unbuttoned far below what Geralt was sure was appropriate. The music he played was beautiful and had a great deal of character and humor pressed into it. He had never heard this song before.

“You like music,” Geralt said.

The image before him changed rapidly. Images of Jaskier playing a piano, images of Jaskier dancing, playing a lute, singing, writing. They went too fast for Geralt to get a good look at anything, but he knew this was a correction. Jaskier didn’t like music, Jaskier loved music.

“How long have you been here?” Geralt asked.

The image of Jaskier changed. It was horrific, Jaskier’s take on his transformation. The memory-Jaskier’s body twisted and cracked in unnatural, painful ways, sharp edges breaking out of his skin and enveloping him in ice. His mouth opened in a silent scream as his legs and arms grew long, long, longer, until he was the creature Jaskier was today. The warmth crept out of the room, and slowly the ruin grew, until Geralt found himself right back in the destroyed ballroom, all illusions gone.

“A long time,” Jaskier answered.

[diminuel]

Do you think one of the reasons so many see dean as a bottom has to do with how they relate so much to dean and they are bottoms that they transfer that? I understand that because I’ve done it with other ships myself but I guess I just find it weird that some fans can be so hostile towards bottom cas. (For the record I think all interpretations are valid) I don’t relate to either of them but if I had to pick one it would be dean but my interpretation of his character from the text is that he’d have a hard time with it all. I just can’t see him ever bottoming at first. It would be major vulnerability. Because of this I have a preference for bottom cas. I won’t say there aren’t more things like aesthetically pleasing but those are minor in to how I see them. Cas is so accommodating I don’t think he would care he just wants to be with Dean. So if Dean wanted to top 100% of the time Cas would be more than fine with it, he doesn’t have hang ups. Because this show went on for so long I can see so many interpretations of these characters and of course AU is a completely different ballgame since they didn’t have the same things happen in those universes. Im much more likely to accept bottom dean in AUs but even then it’s hard for me to accept a characterization that is too off from how I see him. He’s such a prickly one lol I’m sure you’ve talked about this before so no need to rehash, but if you could link me to those posts I’d appreciate it.

(I wrote a nice little essay in response to this, but accidentally closed the window. Wah.)

I’m sure projection has a lot to do with how we interpret characters and develop preferences for fic we want to read (including how we would see/ imagine characters having sex). And maybe when we project strongly, any deviation from that projection feels like an affront? Still no reason to hate on bottom Cas of course (or bottom Dean of course).

But there are a lot of other reasons for why people prefer what they prefer; some might simply enjoy the idea of taking this somewhat macho seeming dude and have him bottom because it might act like a subversion to the persona. Others just like the visuals and some probably don’t care and decide who gets to bottom by tossing a coin or what flows better in the fic.

(Generally speaking, I think the constant mocking of bottom Cas is ridiculous.)

I agree with your interpretation of Dean. Dean grew up in a certain time and place in a certain community (if you can call hunters a community). An endless string of seedy motels and seedier bars along America’s roads and monster related crime scenes doesn’t seem like the most inviting place to learn and figure out your sexuality.

Does anyone, when they think of American hunters in the 90s and 00s as a concept, imagine them to be open minded people? How much nonsense about what it means “to be a man” did Dean soak up being in the presence of angry, traumatized men, who solved their problems by shooting at them, drinking and dying young? The fact that Dean was a teen and young adult in the 90s and 00s should also be considered. It’s probably difficult to unlearn things that he has picked up or the way he sees himself and how he sees and uses sex and sexual innuendo. (Dean’s subjected to physical and verbal violence that is sexualized frequently. He is being insulted for being “pretty”, he is called a girl or a princess for perceived weakness or displaying emotions, not even only from villains, but from family too. He casually insults Sam too for interests and actions Dean considers “unmanly”. And Sam observes, early on, that people think Dean is gay because he’s kinda butch and probably overcompensating. So in a normal, everyday setting outside of hunter haunts, Dean sticks out as well exactly for adopting this macho attitude that gets him respect - in theory - from the crowd that surrounded him growing up.)

On top of that, the Dean Cas first met is a repressed, traumatized, angry bastard. I can imagine that sex that doesn’t happen within Dean’s usual “safe” parameters (women picked up in bars, no strings attached, just for fun) would make him feel vulnerable. It doesn’t even have to come as far as bottoming. And on top of that Cas is a monster shaped like a dude. The monster fucking might be even more of a problem than the dude fucking. Even if nobody knew about it, Dean knows that this would provide a target for attack and while Dean might grin it off, those blows still land.

I think... if you take Dean later in life, with a better network of friends and actual support in his life that goes beyond his brother (who might be more open minded, but is still his father’s son and also couldn’t escape the background radiation of the hunter lifestyle) there’s a better chance of him unlearning harmful impulses and relearning and rediscovering his identity.

I also agree with your take on Cas. Personally, I don’t think about what Cas wants out of sex with Dean as much. He did not grow up in a human society, he doesn’t have the same concepts about sex, gender and identity that Dean has. He only learns about it by mimicking Dean. Sex is boring to him as an angel, he is indifferent to other people’s sexual orientation, still he does typical “heterosexual dude” things when written by Buckleming he’s human. In pretty much every instance where sex or kissing are touched upon, Cas reacts to someone else initiating. So that’s how I think Cas is. He would follow Dean’s lead and pine endlessly if Dean doesn’t initiate anything. (Which is why I don’t really dig Cas being too pushy when it gets to sexual things if we’re in a canon compliant setting.)

I should probably save and post this before I delete it again. If people want to share input or discuss their takes, be my guest! (Just remember that we’re talking about fictional people and fictional sex and that sex can have narrative implications in fiction that it doesn’t have IRL...)

I have a tag for discussions like this but I’m not sure what exactly I’ve already talked about.

[revchainsaw]

The Lost Boys (1987)

The City of Santa Carla, CA has a vampire problem and that's just the sort of thing i've been looking for. We are amping up to Summerween my flock. What better way to get in the spirit of the season than with this 80s Vampire flick set in a balmy california beach town.

I can't lie, having just recently viewed the 1985 film Fright Night, it got me comparing the two so you may read some of my opinions comparing and contrasting The Lost Boys with it's predecessor. But where Fright Night is a classic vampire story brought into the then contemporary 1980s, the Lost Boys was the decades very own vampire film. Drawing from classic vampire films and the story of Peter Pan in equal parts the Lost Boys set the precedent that vampire films would draw from for years to come.

Sermon

The Emerson family falls on hard times financially and therefor moves to the town where Grandpa Emerson, the patriarch of the family grew up; Santa Carla, CA. The family has recently experienced a schism due to divorce, leaving the family unit as a grandfather, a mother and 2 sons, Michael and Sam.

Michael is quiet and masculine, his interests include fitness, motorcycles, and girls, while Sam is a bit more timid. Sam is into comic books and still can't sleep with his closet door open. The two begin to explore their surroundings, and while Sam meets the self-certain and precocious Frog brothers, self proclaimed Vampire hunters, Michael is lure by a young woman named Star into a group of predatory teenage vampire punks. Which let's face it, if they were to lean into the schlock, Teenage Vampire Punks would have been a great alternative title.

These Lost Boys as we'll call them seem to be led by David, played by Keifer Sutherland. David and his gang seek to initiate michael and through some manipulation trick him into drinking vampire blood disguised as wine. This turns Michael into a half vampire, who must fully give up his humanity to join the family.

Sam learns of his brothers transformation and after a little adjustment seeks the aid of the Frog brothers. They decide they must defeat the lead vampire to return Michael to normal, and astutely as we'll later find out (no spoiler warning, the movies almost 30 years old), pegs his mom's new boyfriend Max as the head Vamp. Max outwits the boys attempts to prove his vampirism, and thus they settle on the belief that David is the big bad.

The Frog brothers invade the Lost Boys hideout and kill Bill of Wyld Stallyns fame. They narrowly escape into the daylight before David can exact his revenge, but they know they have targets on their backs and they prepare themselves for a vampiric siege. The Lost Boys attack the Emersons and the Frog brothers and are defeated one by one. David is killed by Michael but no return to normalcy occurs. Max reveals himself to be the big bad, right before Grandpa Emerson returns and saves his family from this Peter Pan's Neverland. Grandpa hops out of his truck and delivers one of the greatest final zingers in film history.

The Benediction

Best Character: Did you know David means Beloved?

It's true look it up, it's Hebrew. David is the prototype for the young, rebellious, sexy vampire. It wasn't long after the lost boys that we got Spike in Buffy the vampire slayer, who is let's be honest just the 90's version of David. Spike my be a bit more of a lone wolf, but David is hands down the best character in this movie, and really what competition does he have other than the Frog brothers? Michael is kind of a lump, even if he's a lump who resembles Jim Morrison.

I am also going to include best actor into this category. All the charisma and charm falls on Kiefer Sutherland, as he acts circles around everyone else on screen. There's a reason the image of David is what you think of every time you think of this movie. He's not even the main antagonist of the movie. David is a great look, a scary vampire, a great actor in a great role.

Worst Character: Who's the Kid?

The first time I ever saw Lost Boys, i didn't understand how Michael and Star had a kid already. It was later that I realized he's just some kid. He doesn't really add anything but a cool looking image of a vampire faced little boy. Kind of a superfluous part. Not bad, just extra and unnecessary.

Best Kill: Death Breath (or Guard Dog on Duty)

The best kill of Lost Boys is when the Frog brothers defeat ... Paul? one of the other vampires besides David. Whoops did I say the Frog brothers defeated him? No, that was actually Nanook coming in for the kill. The Frog Bros fail to succesfully off this bloodsucker when Nanook barges into the bathroom and knocks this punk into a tub of Holy Water. The gore on the vamps face is excellent and probably some of the better practical effects work in the film.

Best Effect: Holy Water Works

While the Vampire melt itself is pretty darn good to look at, it's immediately followed by a volatile reaction that Sam Raimi would be proud of. The whole bathroom convulses and erupts with blood, it comes out of every pipe! the toilet explodes! It's awesome!

Best Aspect: Not your Big Brothers Vampire Movie

I had mentioned earlier that I had been comparing this movie to Fright Night, and as much as I love that older film, the Lost Boys beats it at almost every way. The effects in Fright Night are above bar constantly and hold nothing back, but the film for all of it's unrelenting visuals is actually quite slow. The Lost Boys and Fright Night definitely represent how much youth culture can change in just 2 years. You'd be forgiven for thinking these films take place in different decades. The Lost Boys is faster, has more attitude, and is much more adventurous in it's scope than Fright Night. If Fright Night was Judas Priest then the Lost boys is Iron Maiden. It's not as mature, but it's just that rebellious juvenility that gives it it's punch.

Worst Aspect: Mini Max

As far as big bads go. If I could make another comparison to Fright Night, it would be so much more intimidating the have a charming Jerry Dandridge playing his games with the Emersons, as his underlings The Lost Boys get the dirty work done and have fun doing it. However, we end up with this kind of dorky dude, who is even written off in the second act, only to return at the ass end of the movie just to be immediately slain and provide the but of the final quip. It was pretty weak sauce.

Best Dog: Nanook

Nanook is a good dog. He does all the protecting and is the best vampire hunter in the movie. Sorry Frog Bros.

Runner Up Dog: Thorn

Thorn is a good dog. But Thorn is also a bad dog. Thorn is a hellhound familiar to Max, but she is still good at doing dog stuff. So round of applause for this good girl.

Best make-up: Vampire Face

Fright Night stomps all over Lost Boys in the effects department, except for in the design of the horrific vampire face. The vampire face in Fright Night looks like a prosthetic sitting on an actors face. It doesn't feel like that mouth could be used for eating or biting but is just there to look creepy. In moving away from that the make up artists for the Lost boys focused more on the upper parts of the face, creating an almost cat like predatory look for when the vampires are at their most carnivorous. This style was absolutely borrowed by the team on Buffy the Vampire Slayer years later, and it's an aspect of Vampires in film that has sadly gone away. Sign the petition, let's bring back vampire face.

Best Feature: The Soundtrack

It would be impossible to talk about the Lost Boys without talking about the soundtrack. There's not one standout song in this movie, some may argue the Echo and the Bunnymen cover of People are Strange, but I think it's just one incredibly well utilized song of many for this film. Listen to the whole soundtrack, it's all good.

Summary

In the 80s there were several attempts to resurrect the monsters of old. Several directors who had grown up on the Universal monsters were now in the position to make films themselves. The resistance to rely on vampires and werewolves was fading and these sorts of monster movies were finally being green lit. Arguably, An American Werewolf in London is the best of these films, but the Lost Boys is definitely the most representative of the movement. It's not a satire, its funny but not a comedy, it's not parody or a subversion. The Lost Boys is 100% the definitive 80s Vampire Movie.

Grade: A

[056crowshit6556]

Some thoughts on Dororo

Went back and watched Episode 8 of Dororo and noticed a small detail; turned into some thoughts on the anime and particularly of its protagonist Hyakkimaru. Contains spoilers in case you want to watch it but haven’t yet.

After Hyakkimaru faces the demon centipede, he, Dororo, and Saru go to Saru’s hideout where Dororo explains that Hyakkimaru may not be able to help them. 

Hyakkimaru is sitting down and throwing rocks repeatedly. At first I thought he was doing that out of frustration, and he probably was, since this was the first time his “sight” had been impaired.

Dororo and Saru agree to take down the monster together, and then the scene transitions into nighttime. 

Hyakkimaru is still out there throwing rocks (I laughed a little at this part because I thought, dude, give it a rest, it’s been hours and you’re still sulking lol), but then he hears Saru crying and stops.

He stands at the cave entrance, and even though he’s only had his hearing returned for a short amount of time, he’s already learned what the sound of crying is and what it signifies. And so he leaves, presumably to be alone again, perhaps to throw more pebbles at the rocks, not out of frustration but contemplation.

The following morning, Saru and Dororo fight the monster but are unable to defeat it. That’s when Hyakkimaru shows up just in time to inflict the first major wound and bring it down.

Hyakkimaru was able to figure out how to defeat the centipede because he realized that he could shoot arrows at it, creating sound, just like he had thrown pebbles at the rocks, causing sound to reverberate and signal the rock’s location. I think he realized this just as Dororo and Saru were facing the monster by themselves... which means he stayed up all night trying to figure out how to defeat it. And that makes me think that yes, at first he was just tossing rocks out of brooding frustration, but when he heard Saru crying, it made him more determined and focused to find a solution. There wasn’t a scene that explicitly showed Hyakkimaru figuring it out-- for example, a scene showing him throw a rock, it pings against another rock, the sound reverberates, Hyakkimaru’s body language shows that he suddenly knows what to do.

It’s one of the reasons why I’m convinced this anime is one of the most well-written, interesting stories I’ve seen in a long time. It’s hard to believe that a protagonist that barely talks or shows emotion for the first half of the entire series could be so captivating, but it’s small details like this that truly embody the old writer’s adage of “show, don’t tell.” And for such a quiet character like Hyakkimaru, he quite literally won’t tell, but certainly shows in subtle, somehow deeply heartfelt ways.

*Side note: [The narrator does explain what Hyakkimaru did, but it’s up to the audience to discern how he figured it out. It makes me wonder how many other details like this are in the anime. The most immediate example I can think of is in episode 4, after Hyakkimaru regains his sense of touch and pain. The samurai Tanosuke uses the demon sword Nihil to inflict a cut on Hyakkimaru’s cheek.

Hyakkimaru manages to dislodge the sword from Tanosuke by using his prosthetic leg, and then he does something that I think is very interesting: he attacks Tanosuke a second time, even though the demon sword is no longer in his possession.

Tanosuke falls down the cliff, and Hyakkimaru kneels down to the ground, touching the place where he was cut.

By this point, Hyakkimaru has already felt physical pain (he stomped his foot into the campfire at the end of episode 3). At first, I thought he stomped his foot into the campfire because he was experimenting with his newfound sense of touch, but now I think he did it because just moments before his foot brushed over it, startling him, causing him to think it was some kind of threat. That’s why he stomped on it.  

The fire made him feel pain, so in return, he tried to reciprocate that pain onto the fire.

But it’s like, he doesn’t get it, doesn’t truly understand it, until Tanosuke cuts his face with the demon sword. 

I think this is when Hyakkimaru realized that not only are people capable of hurting him, it means he’s also capable of hurting other people. He is cut by Tanosuke, feels the pain of that just like the fire that burned him, and he lashes out just like he had stomped on the fire. If Hyakkimaru hadn’t regained his sense of pain, I don’t think he would have attacked Tanosuke a second time after dislodging the demon sword from his grip. It’s how he makes the distinction between Tanosuke and Dororo’s souls. One is trying to hurt him, the other isn’t. Tanosuke cut him, while it shows between Dororo and Hyakkimaru’s confrontation that Dororo is on the defensive.

The infliction and reciprocation of pain means that he’s an active participant in the world and that his, and other’s, actions do have consequences. Before this, he would continue fighting despite an injury because he couldn’t feel the pain. Having his sense of pain returned to him not only makes him more aware of his vulnerability and limitations, but makes him understand that others are also vulnerable too. It makes him understand what others would feel if he were to hurt them. There’s a certain level of self-consciousness to that, knowing what pain is, and it plants the first seeds of both empathy and maliciousness in Hyakkimaru, which become more complex as the story progresses. It’s true that experiencing pain made him more empathetic, but it also made him understand how he could hurt someone if he really wanted to, and that ultimately, his actions have consequences. Pain has made him a more active participant in the world, and a more active participant in his own existence. I don’t know if at this point in the story (episode 4) he’s aware of mortality just yet, because I think he begins to understand what mortality is after the death of Mio.]

Regarding episode 8, I don’t think it was an accident that the animators chose to show Hyakkimaru’s face when he’s watching Saru-- his bangs are slightly parted, revealing both his eyes. It’s a visual cue that he’s “coming out of his cave” in small increments. One of the biggest problems Hyakkimaru’s character has to navigate throughout the story is essentially learning to join the world, and subsequently, realize his place among humanity. He cared enough to check on Saru, to be near the sound of crying. Every now and then I try to imagine what Hyakkimaru’s world was like before he regained any of his senses or body, and really, I can’t imagine it. It’s not suffering in the way I understand suffering; it’s devoid of suffering, devoid of everything, which somehow is even worse (and it’s why I think Hyakkimaru gets more aggressive about obtaining his complete body as the journey goes on, because 1) he has been shunned and exploited by his family, feeling especially hurt by his mother’s rejection, and 2) the more body parts he regains, the more he realizes just how much he’s been deprived of for his entire existence). It’s like realizing everything you thought to be true is a lie-- Hyakkimaru’s existence, his “truth” was total darkness, empty oblivion-- and for him to have the first 16 years of his existence proved null completely destroys him and causes him to lash out erratically.

The scene of him tossing rocks, basically from sunset until sunrise, is just really interesting regarding Hyakkimaru’s problem solving skills, and it does make me wonder how many of these small details may have been subtly placed throughout the story.

For instance, in episode 5, Hyakkimaru isn’t wearing his scarf or cloak. It’s to show that the seasons are changing. The earth is becoming warmer, and so is Hyakkimaru. It’s a visual cue to show him “opening” up-- as Biwamaru put it, he’s like a creature coming out of his dark cave for the first time. This is also the part of the story where Hyakkimaru meets Mio.

There’s alot about Hyakkimaru and Mio’s dynamic that’s relevant to Jungian psychology (concerning the Anima/Animus). The gist of it is that Mio awakens the feminine Anima within Hyakkimaru-- he wakes up in the early hours of morning, hears a song calling to him, he follows it, traveling through the dark unconscious towards the source. Hyakkimaru’s awakening is appropriate, given that the classic hero’s tale, if the hero is male, will be and should be faced with the anthropomorphic archetype of his unconscious feminine nature (it’s one of the reasons that Hyakkimaru accepts the Goddess of Mercy in the last episode. The final phase of Anima development is “Sophia”, or “wisdom”, and is best represented by Guanyin, a mother figure who knows self-sacrifice is necessary for self-actualization).

It’s why Hyakkimaru doesn’t choose the path of a demon, or inherits the corruption of his father’s tyranny. 

He chooses the path of compassion, and I think it’s possible to assume that those seeds of compassion were first planted by Mio.

At the end of episode 8, Hyakkimaru acknowledges Dororo by saying her name and handing her the flower. It’s a gesture of kindness, of compassion in wanting to share something sweet and pleasing to the senses.

The more senses and body parts Hyakkimaru regains, the more he becomes an active participant in the world. Things don’t just happen at random-- he can be a part of it. He can feel the rain on his skin, hear the song of a kind woman, feel the sharp sting of a cut on his face.

There’s still some observations about the story I want to write about (Daigo’s treatment of Hyakkimaru’s body as his property for instance, and why one of the major themes in the story is bodily autonomy and individual sovereignty), but I’ll probably save it for another day. One thing I do want to touch on is why the last body part Hyakkimaru regains is his vision, and why from a storytelling perspective this makes complete sense to the viewer. To put briefly, vision is the most complex and paramount sense a human has-- our brains are actually “programmed” for visual information. From a metaphorical perspective, Hyakkimaru truly “comes into being” when he sees for the first time. It’s like when someone experiences something profound and they say “my eyes were finally opened” or “I finally saw for the first time.” Vision is associated with self-actualization, which is the final step a character undergoes in his or her journey.

There’s a nice parallel in that the first sensation of pain Hyakkimaru feels is fire, and the first thing he sees with his own eyes is Jukai and his mother Nui surrounded by fire.

This is one of my favorite lines in the entire anime. “Watch it closely, with those eyes of yours.” Hyakkimaru regaining his sight means there’s essentially nothing blocking him from the truth anymore. He can discern observation and make his own judgements. And Biwamaru reminds Hyakkimaru that everything he has done to get his body back is his responsibility, and that it would essentially be dishonest to avert his eyes from the consequence of his actions.

Dororo is a really great anime. I’ve been giving it a re-watch and I’ve noticed a few things I didn’t the first time around, particularly of how apparent the archetypes are used as storytelling devices.

I definitely recommend it if you haven’t seen it yet.

[terramythos]

TerraMythos' 2020 Reading Challenge - Book 28 of 26

Title: The Only Good Indians (2020) 

Author: Stephen Graham Jones 

Genre/Tags: Horror, Fiction, Third-Person, Second-Person, Female Protagonist (kinda).

Rating: 6/10

Date Began: 10/5/2020

Date Finished: 10/11/2020

Almost a decade ago, four Blackfeet Indian men went on a hunting trip. They did something terrible on that day, which they now call the Thanksgiving Classic. As the ten-year anniversary of the event approaches, the three remaining men have moved on with their lives -- but the past has come back to haunt them in a disturbing and vengeful way. 

First, though, one of their calves is sitting in eighth-grade geography-- girl, girl girl girl, not “calf”. And this girl has this certain father you remember, and that father, he has a friend you remember well, from looking up a long snowy slope, their monstrous forms black against the sky. 

For them, ten years ago, that’s another lifetime. 

For you it’s yesterday. 

Some spoilers under the cut. 

This is the first full novel I’ve ready by Stephen Graham Jones, but I did actually read a short story by him in The Devil and the Deep, a collection I read earlier this year. “Broken Record” is a horror story about a man trapped on a desert island, but with an interesting premise/twist that I don’t want to spoil. So I had one of his novels, Mongrels, on my TBR, but decided to go with this one when I saw it making the rounds. 

I feel kinda bad giving The Only Good Indians a 6, because there are some things I really, really like about this novel. But as a whole, I have to be honest with myself and how I feel about it, and that’s a pretty accurate score. There are certain elements that don’t work for me. While some of this is due to personal taste, several of my issues are with the execution. 

To start off, things I love about the novel. The Only Good Indians is separated into three parts, each of which is a distinct story connected to the others. The first part, “The House that Ran Red” knocks it out of the park. It’s a creepy and self-contained psychological horror story about a man named Lewis (one of the four) who is especially haunted by the hunting trip of ten years ago. Specifically, he remembers killing a young, pregnant female elk. His guilt and shame about what he did to her torment him to this day. As the decade anniversary approaches, he begins to see things around his home in Great Falls, Montana, and descends into paranoia and anxiety that overwhelms his otherwise happy home life. Things get more disturbing and surreal the further into this part one gets, and I really dig it; especially the shocking and fucked up ending. (Side bar: I love that there’s an “ordinary” explanation for everything that happens, except for one little detail at the end that proves supernatural shit was going on. I eat that kind of stuff right up). 

One criticism I’ve seen of this novel is that it really toes the line between horror and literary fiction. However, I think that’s a huge credit in this first part. Jones does an excellent job playing with tension; he makes me juuust feel comfortable with these characters and their ordinary lives before suddenly introducing something weird and fucked up. While tension is a hallmark of horror, Jones masters it so well here that I have to admire the execution. In addition, there’s something totally cinematic about this part (and, to be fair, many parts later on). It’s hard to describe, but there’s a lot of visuals that I’d love to see adapted to a comic book or video form because I can just picture the shots. 

At its heart, The Only Good Indians becomes more slasher horror than anything else. But the monster at the core of this, Elk Head Woman, is really well-written and interesting. Convincingly making an elk mother a creepy, violent avatar of vengeance and death is fucking impressive. It’s pretty rare that the monster gets a point of view, but Elk Head Woman is a full-fledged perspective character with her own motivations for what she’s doing. I think second-person was a great choice for her narration. Paradoxically, it manages to be both jarring and smooth with the rest of the story (”wow, ‘you’? we’re doing that?” vs “that second-person snippet really blends with the third-person narration, huh?”). I find these flairs really cool, and Jones totally nails a challenging style.  

So, high praise for the above, but unfortunately I just didn’t vibe with the second part of the novel, “Sweat Lodge Massacre”. For story reasons, it stars a totally different cast of characters than the first part. Unfortunately, this means much of the page is concerned with introducing these new characters and giving them backstories and motivations. So horror gets cast aside, and the pacing just tanks at this part. Sure, there are periodic slips into second-person to remind the reader the horror element is still in the story, but this doesn’t pay off until the very end. And when it does, it’s just not worth all the setup and wait. 

I think my main issue comes down to personal taste in horror. “The House that Ran Red” primed me for psychological horror with gory asides. That’s just not the case in “Sweat Lodge Massacre”, in which the horror is largely absent until the end, then is pretty much just violence and gore. Thematically, it doesn’t make sense to me that Elk Head Woman is the monster in this part. Lewis’ part, sure -- he’s haunted by what he did to her, specifically. But Gabe and Cass, the leads in part two, lack this. They aren’t haunted by the Thanksgiving Classic, at least not in a way that’s explored in the novel. So to have Elk Head Woman commit vengeance on men who barely even remember why is just disappointing. It comes off as senseless violence and death without the symbolic punch of “The House that Ran Red”. It’s a shame because Elk Head Woman is such an interesting monster/character and she feels wasted here. 

Part three, “It Came From The Rez” is fine-- mostly an extended chase scene that manages to be engaging all the way through. I love how everything loops back and ties together at the end, but honestly don’t have much to say about the part other than that; it’s pretty short. 

I don’t know, I think this novel just needed more time in the oven to really refine certain things. There are lots of ideas I wish were explored further -- parenthood, the whole elk/train thing, and so on. I’m also a little confused about the timeline. Ricky, one of the four, gets killed off in the prologue. But his death doesn’t really track with the book’s explanation on why everything is happening ten years after the Thanksgiving Classic. I don’t know, I could be digging too deep. But I can see the potential in this novel through its excellent first part and wish I felt that way about the rest of it. 

If you’re interested in reading The Only Good Indians, please be advised there’s a lot of graphic violence, gore, and death-- both animal and human. If you’re into slasher horror this might be more up your alley than it was mine. Stephen Graham Jones is a good writer, don’t get me wrong, so if this story sounds like your kind of thing, give it a shot. 

[gfesgersgersg]

My Thoughts About Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals

I recently revisited a game from my childhood: Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals. I never finished this game when I was younger, because I found it too scary to progress. As strange as it seems, this game’s first hour started my interest in science fiction, and I still enjoy the genre in books and games today, despite never finishing the game.

I played up to what I’d call the start of the end of the first act of the game, getting up to the Corona vortex on the planet Genshi. This is probably a super biased article, as I think about this game a lot. It reviewed poorly with critics and I think this was probably justified. It is also worth mentioning that I did not play the first Spectrobes game.

If you intend on playing this game, spoilers are ahead. The short version is that I enjoy the characters, but the last parts of the game are far weaker than the start. The gameplay is largely uninteresting, and the game isn’t really something I would recommend anyone play.

The Good

The music in this game is fantastic. The game always has some music playing, no matter what’s going on. Among my favourites are the character-specific tracks that play during dialogue, and the track that plays when you solve a puzzle. The music goes a long way toward selling the game’s environments, too. The music on the populated planets in the Nanairo system largely sounds upbeat, and reflects the planet you are on. This contrasts with the music on the planets that are “beyond the portals”, which sound quite alien. The music on Hyoga is calm and slow, fitting with a cold, lifeless planet. The music on Fons is calm but more sombre, and is very foreboding, fitting with the point in the story it is encountered. The music on Darkmos and Nox both fit with the artificial themes of these planets and are opposites somewhat to Fons and Hyoga.

Some good tracks would be: Ready For Action!, Hyoga, Darkmos and Fons.

The environments in this game are pretty impressive for the Nintendo DS. A lot of the backgrounds are 2D, which shows, especially in the city on Nessa, and on Fons. However, they look great in my opinion. Most impressive are the safe areas, such as Kollin and Colony. These environments really sell the Nanairo system as a real place.

The characters in this game are excellently written. By no means is the story a masterpiece, but the game’s characters entirely carry its story. Rallen and Jeena make a great duo, with entertaining banter. They reference each others’ quirks and joke around with each other. The supporting characters are good too. Commander Grant is very serious but clearly likes Rallen and Jeena. Cyrus and Webster are characters Rallen has history with, making for some funny moments and a nice “redemption” for Webster. Hank and Professor Kate are nice, and again, their friendship feels realistic in the sense that they act like they have known each other for a long time. While they’re not particularly deep, the High Krawl are good villains. They’re imposing throughout the story, and the mystery of their campaign against the Towers of Nanairo is intriguing. Maja is the main villain throughout, and she seems equally aloof and desperate in her attempts to get Rallen to side with her. Strictly from a characterisation perspective, she provides a good view into the internal conflicts between the High Krawl. Jado is a (probably intentionally) forgettable character in the early parts of the game.

The Bad

The excavation system is an interesting take on obtaining collectable monsters. This game’s status as a Pokemon clone is a largely inconsequential part of the experience to me. In Spectrobes, I didn’t feel any attachment to my spectrobes by the end of the game, simply using them as tools to get to the end. Partially, this could be because of Rallen not being a blank slate character. They’re more his spectrobes than mine. There is also the issue of the monsters themselves not really being unique. They’re nice designs, and unique to the game for sure, but my spectrobes ended up all looking the same. They’re not that unique from each other mechanically either, with the only differentiations being the typing and the evolution status. The child spectrobes are a good feature, however. Child spectrobes take on the role of searching for fossils, and don’t just sit in your storage waiting to be evolved.

The game’s characters are good, as discussed earlier, but its broader plot isn’t. It revolves around creatures known as Krawl, which feed by eating entire star systems. They’ve done this many times and are now focusing their efforts on the Nanairo system. This is OK, not particularly deep, but I see no issue with this. Beyond the Portals introduces new characters, High Krawl, who are capable of communicating with the humans living in Nanairo. Maja, at least, sees Rallen as an equal by the end of her involvement in the story, but continues to gloat about the inevitable complete genocide of Rallen’s home star system. The others are a bit more aloof, positioning themselves above the humans living in Nanairo. This is all a little far-fetched, but still OK. The High Krawl are seeking to destroy structures on each planet just called Towers. This allows them to open a new portal each time, into another star system. From these portals, Krawl will emerge from their current home on planets they have already consumed.

The first of the High Krawl to appear in the story is Jado, who is shown as being aloof but hapless. When defeated, he simply appears to die. This is a ruse on his part, and he is actually one of the most important characters to the story. Problem is, he barely appears. On Malik, at the very end of the game, he reveals that he has been hiding inside your patrol cruiser for the entire game. This is a bit of a head-scratcher. At this point, you fight him again and he admits defeat. Thus, he appears twice, but seems to warrant more of a presence. Next up is Gelberus, on Nessa. He is pretty inconsequential. He destroys the tower, opens the first portal, and you defeat him on Hyoga. After this is when Maja becomes the antagonist in earnest. She appears after both Jado and Gelberus’ defeats, gloating about how these events make her more powerful. She introduces the concept of Dark Spectrobes, and is first fought in an unbeatable fight on Daichi. After this, you go on a wild goose chase through Fons and Darkmos before beating her on Nox. Maja is more powerful than Rallen, but wants or needs his power for something. Beyond destroying or ruling the universe, this is not specified. Still, it is a good enough reason for her to not just kill Rallen. After Maja is defeated, Rallen and Jeena recover the Dynalium, which is a weapon that can penetrate a planetary shield of some kind. After some fetch quests to make a large Dynalium, an assault is carried out on Malik, where Krux resides. Krux reveals that he is a Spectrobe Master like Rallen, but uses the Krawl for their numbers. The implications of this aren’t discussed in-game. Rallen defeats Krux in hand-to-hand combat and the game ends. None of this plot is particularly interesting at any point. The best part is Maja’s story arc, which seems to build up to a twist that doesn’t happen. The High Krawl are treacherous toward one another in a way that isn’t really used for anything interesting. Internal conflicts within the High Krawl could be a good way to introduce some uneasy alliances between the NPP and certain High Krawl. I don’t expect the plot of this game to be filled with complex intrigue, but its perfectly good characters have wasted potential.

The game has some nasty difficulty spikes around Fons, halfway through the game. It’s mentioned that Rallen should evolve his spectrobes after Fons is cleared, but the Krawl on the planet are much higher level than yours at this point. Up to this point, the game is balanced well, providing good balance with no need to grind. The battling in general leaves a lot to be desired. The type matchups are obvious and shallow, and the systems leave little room for strategising. The real time battling system seems cool at first, but ends up being a matter of running up to an opponent and mashing the A button. The camera in this mode is awful and frequently leaves you facing nothing at all. As such, battling in this game feels like a chore needed to progress, rather than a fun challenge.

The level design isn’t fantastic either. While many environments are visually impressive, they’re often too big, with very little in them. There isn’t anything to find other than randomly dispersed fossils and minerals. Especially later in the game, the constant backtracking through these big, empty areas feels like an attempt to pad for time. This is exemplified by the final planet, Malik. You’re asked to traverse the exact same room around 10, maybe more, times by going through the portal that is spinning to the left in each. This is not fun to play. A lot of the game’s tasks feel like busy work rather than actual gameplay. This should not be an issue. The game has more than enough content to justify itself, without this bad filler. My other issue with the levels is that the Krawl respawn continuously. This creates a feeling that you’re not actually helping these planets. At least, the populated Nanairo planets should be clear of Krawl if you remove them.

Conclusion

To conclude, Spectrobes: Beyond the Portals is not a particularly good game. It is a mediocre Pokemon clone in gameplay terms, and in plot terms has wasted potential. The game has excellent characters and music and a well realised world. It falls short probably due to attempting to ride the Pokemon train, rather than trying to be more unique. The game’s plot doesn’t really fit an RPG formula at all. This game is just one of many obscure Nintendo DS games, and I don’t even really like it, but it will hold a place in my heart forever. I suppose something to draw from this could be that no matter how mediocre a piece of media, it can still have an impact on someone, somewhere.

[jorrmungandr]

2019 was a good year for games.

Lots of interesting new ideas in the space, and some refinements of old ones. Here’s a list of my personal favorite games of this year, in no particular order. Making an ordered list can be fun, but it’s ultimately pretty pointless.

Video games are such a diverse medium at this point that it’s really like comparing apples and oranges. How does Baba Is You stack up against Dragon Quest XI S? They have almost nothing in common, and their aims are so different that it makes no sense to compare them directly.

Speaking of….

Baba Is You

There are a lot of indie puzzle games out there. Making a little mind-bending puzzle is something that’s easy to do on a relatively small budget. There are also a lot of games that mimic old pixel art aesthetics of earlier game systems, to greater and lesser success. Making a truly great puzzle game, though, is a true accomplishment. Something that combines a wildly different array of elements in interesting ways, but maintains a simple readability that allows you to return to puzzles after months away and instantly recognize what’s going on.

Baba Is You is a game that accomplishes this and more. It operates on very simple, basic rules, but the way they escalate over time and require you to think outside more and more boxes with every single puzzle is simple astounding. A lot of puzzle games escalate their difficulty so quickly that it’s easy to get discouraged, put off by the impossible tasks you’re being asked to perform. Where Baba shines is that it gives you a perfect runway, teaching you things slowly but surely through a series of challenges.

This is a game where you will instantly go from feeling like the world’s greatest super-genius to a complete and utter fool in a matter of moments, from finishing one stage to starting the next. Over and over again, for dozens and dozens of levels. No game has ever better demonstrated the value of brain rest, stepping away from a problem and letting your subconscious work on it for a while. Every time I came back to a puzzle after a couple hours, I would suddenly see some option I never saw before.

One final note, the graphics are actually a perfect fit for this game. A lot of times, pixel art feels like a gimmick, something to do when you don’t have a good idea, or just mindless nostalgia-baiting. But here, it serves a gameplay purpose, giving you an absolutely clean view of the elements in play at a glance, and also serves as an homage to the simple-yet-challenging puzzle games of those older eras.

Code Vein

And now, for something completely different: An extremely anime-styled souls-like. I remember hearing about this game years and years ago, and thinking that it looked kinda… bad. But, in the meantime they really brought it all together into something fun, if not very innovative.

Code Vein is exactly the sort of thing I look for in a souls-like: it takes the basic formula and adds some new mechanics to it, and has an identity of its own. Instead of a medieval fantasy world, it’s a post-apocalyptic modern city crawling with vampires and zombies. It takes inspiration from stylish, gothic anime of the past couple decades: Code Geass, Blood+, Tokyo Ghoul, etc. The character creator is extremely detailed, but mostly when it comes to clothes and accessories.

The gameplay is… fine. It’s balanced around always having an AI companion, so they can throw bigger groups of enemies at you. It doesn’t require the same sort of intense caution of the Souls series, but that makes it more of a fun, casual experience. At least until you’re fighting a boss, then it suddenly requires you to really be on your game with dodging. If I have one complaint, it’s that the difficulty is incredibly bumpy, some areas are a cake walk and others have you struggling through every encounter.

Oh, also the area aping Anor Londo from Dark Souls. Not because it’s derivative, that’s totally fine, but because it’s a maze where everything looks the same and it’s a real pain to get through. Souls games are at their best when areas have good landmarks and make a kind of logical sense. Earlier in the game you pass through a big parking garage, and it’s perfect, just the sort of thing that translates well to this kind of game. But this cathedral-ish area… it just sucks.

It really is quite shameless.

Overally, it’s just a solid souls-like. I enjoyed the crunchy RPG elements, switching classes and balancing your weapons and armor to get good mobility and damage. The ability to just equip cool-looking attack moves as skills you can use, like spells in Souls games, is something I’d really like to see in more games in this sub-genre.

Fire Emblem: Three Houses

I was kind of skeptical about this game before it came out. Mostly because it was bringing back weapon durability, a mechanic I’ve always hated in these games, but that ended up being a non-issue. Also the school setting made me a bit wary, thinking it was just gonna end up being some Persona-esque thing where you spend tons of time on mundane nonsense while an actual war is going on.

That was all baseless, it turns out. They balance the idea of a military academy with a traditional Fire Emblem structure remarkably well, giving you a lot of freedom around what you want to do when you play the game. You can run around the monastery talking to students, managing your relationships, or you can just do a ton of tactical battles if you want.

The storytelling was remarkably good, though I feel like it was harmed a bit by the weird way it handled multiple routes with different big mysteries. Some routes ended up completely ignoring or just not getting around to some pretty major mysteries. I’m a person who likes long games, but expecting someone to go through all four routes to figure out what’s going on is a bit much.

But more than that, the way it holds back certain reveals hurts the writing in other ways. The actual revelations can’t really have any effect on the characters and their relationships because it all happens at the very end of the game. It keeps the world feeling a bit flat, without any reactions. The mysteries feel extraneous to the plot, in a weird way, when they are so important to certain characters’ identities and the core conflicts that drive the second half of the game.

The gameplay is okay, though a few of the maps are way too big. The portable Fire Emblem games reigned in the map sizes from the old NES and SNES ones, which was a great thing. But now we’re back to moving a whole army one unit at a time for multiple turns just to get to the next group of enemies. The class system was fun to engage with, balancing learning different skills to open up new opportunities, but the gender-limited classes were a real disappointment. Why can’t men ride pegasi? Why can’t women punch good? It’s bizarre, and honestly felt like it had some stuff left over from early drafts, like the pointless dark mage classes.

This has been a lot of complaining about a game I played for close to a hundred hours. Why is this game even on my list? Because the characters are fucking fantastic, and on a basic level the tactical battles are a lot of fun. It offers a paternalistic form of power fantasy, fostering and guiding your children-warriors and then seeing them destroy your enemies. It is just incredibly satisfying to play. And for all that the mysteries end up a bit frustrating, they are intriguing, and do a good job of motivating you to get through a very lengthy game.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night

Ah, love a good IGAvania.

This was a year where I really reached for comfort food games a lot, and this is maybe the king of that category. It’s just an old style of game that doesn’t get made anymore, done extremely well by the guy who used to make ’em all the time. Nothing super different or innovative, just the same old thing with a couple new tweaks.

It’s an easy game, but that’s entirely by design. It’s about running around this castle killin’ monsters, collecting new abilities, just exploring and poking around the corners. It’s a game that is, ultimately, designed to be comfortable. And in a time of such strife in the world around us, what could be better?

Disco Elysium

There’s already been a lot written about this game, tons of praise heaped on its writing and its interesting, hauntological world that is so similar to our own, and yet so different. Frankly, I’m really glad I got turned into this before it even came out, if I heard all that overblown praise I’d never have ended up actually sitting down and playing it.

Here’s what I’ll say: This game is a look at an ugly world, and it gives you a lot to think about, but it actually doesn’t take itself too seriously. There are a ton of extremely funny moments, a lot of straight-up goofy-ass jokes. This is not medicine that you have to suffer through, just take it as it comes and it’s a good time. This is what allows its writing to really land, it’s not lecturing you from on high, it’s engaging on a lower, more personable level.

It’s also not some super serious text that you have to pore over and consider extremely closely at every moment. It’s a game, you can save scum and try to exploit mechanics and look up answers to mysteries. Much like Souls games, people come up with all sorts of weird rules about the “proper” way to play games like this, but in the end your experience is up to you.

One final note: the game does start off with a kind of off-putting ironic tone. Some people try to downplay this, but it’s there. I can only say this: if you give this game a chance, you’ll be rewarded. It is worth getting through a few sarcastic jabs to get to the good stuff later on. It’s not some perfect audio-visual experience that will entrance you from the opening moments to the credits, it’s just a video game.

Dragon Quest XI S

I first played Dragon Quest XI last year on PC, and I enjoyed it a lot! But I didn’t actually finish that version, not really. I put a lot of time into, but ultimately burned out on the grind towards the very end.

The form that games come in is very important to how they are experienced. Dragon Quest games work best as portable games, I truly believe. It also helps that this version on the switch added the ability to speed up regular battles, so you don’t have to sit through some long attack animations over and over. The more important aspect, though, is simply the ability to pick it up and put it down more easily.

Sitting down at my PC, plugging in my controller, and pulling up a game is a subtly labor-intensive thing. It means I’m devoting a lot of attention to a game, and it has to do something to earn that on a moment-to-moment basis. The ability to just push a single button on the switch and get back into means that I’m willing to forgive a lot more down time.

Anyway, the game itself: this is not just a very good Dragon Quest game, it is the ultimate Dragon Quest game. It truly shows the value in iteration over pure innovation, taking all sorts of different mechanics and ideas from past games in the series and bringing them all together in one big package. But it doesn’t feel overstuffed, it’s just doing the same thing these games have always done, just really, really well.

Dragon Quest XI successfully pays tribute to the older games in the series while also telling a new story with entertaining twists and turns, and fun and interesting characters. It’s beautiful, everything runs smoothly, the writing is charming and light. It’s not on the same level as Disco Elysium, but it’s not aiming for that sort of thing. It’s a fairy tale, a fable, a reflection of the world in a different sense.

A lot of game critics missed this game because it’s long. And that is absolutely fair, it’s hard to fit a 100-hour game into a review schedule in this day and age. But it’s an absolute gem, a truly wonderful experience from beginning to end. I’d recommend it to anyone who just wants a game to relax with at the end of the day.

Monolith: Relics of the Past

Like some sort of Christmas miracle, there was an expansion pack released for one of my favorite roguelikes on Christmas day, just last week.

Monolith is the best twin-stick shooter roguelike, I will make no bones about it. Forget your Gungeons and your Bindings of Isaac, this is a classic NES-styled game with an absolutely pitch-perfect aesthetic and sense of humor. It serves both the twin-stick shooting and the roguelike parts of its genre perfectly, giving you a strong basic weapon to rely on, and also a guarantee of something more interesting but random in every run.

Man, there are games that I enjoy more, but I really, truly feel that this is one of the best-crafted games of the past few years. And this expansion only made it better: fixing up the UI and tooltips to make things more clear, rebalancing the weapons so that they are all useful, adding more variety to runs.

I’m not the best at Monolith, it took me quite a while to get a full win, but that doesn’t make it any less fun to play. In my youth, I was really quite good at bullet-hell games, but nowadays those reflexes aren’t there. It’s a game designed for people who can dodge endless bullet curtains, and also, now more than ever, for those who struggle with it.

It’s truly inspiring to see something that takes from the past and the present and fuses it together into something so wonderful. There are other games that really capture the NES aesthetic and sensibility, like Odallus or The Messenger, but this one really gets the spirit of that whole era of games. It is at once light and airy, and also punishingly difficult. It offers tricks and outs, but also remains utterly mysterious and intimidating.

And that’s it. There are more games I enjoyed this year, like the remake of Link’s Awakening, but these are the big ones that stick out in my mind.

There are a lot of big narrative-heavy games I never got around to finishing, or even starting. It just doesn’t really fit with how I play games these days, listening to podcasts and aiming to relax, not engage with something on a deep level.

That’s okay, though. I’ll get around to ’em in the fullness of time.

Games of the Year 2019 2019 was a good year for games. Lots of interesting new ideas in the space, and some refinements of old ones.

[betweenfictionandfact]

Virtual Museums in the Time of COVID-19

In these awful times, everyone is looking for something to keep themselves busy during self-isolation. The “virtual museum” has been offered as one from of edutainment, a way to enrich the mind and pass time when you become sick of binge-watching shows and movies.

Museums have been working to digitize collections and increase accessibility for a while now, designing them to be educational tools or a way for people to access the museum even if they can’t physically visit. Right now, that means all of us, so let’s become armchair museologists, exploring foreign museums from the comfort of our own homes.

The Book

The Pergamonmuseum in Berlin can be found on many lists of online exhibits to visit, and by happy chance I had only just reread a personal favorite that would fit perfectly with the ancient collections in the museum.

Thick as Thieves by Megan Whalen Turner is an epic journey told from the point of view of the runaway slave Kamet and the soldier Costis sent to save him as they escape through the fictional Mede Empire, culturally very like ancient Babylon. The book is the most recent in the series Queen’s Thief, following a thief who becomes king of the fictional world Attolia, heavily inspired by classical Greece. 

Ever since I visited the Pergamonmuseum years ago, I will admit that I think of their displays every time I read this book. But how does the virtual experience compare to the physical?

Attolia and the Mede Empire

Historical Greece and Anatolia

  The Museum

Run through Google Arts and Culture, the virtual Pergamonmuseum has a simple design and intuitive interactive layout. You are greeted first with a header image of the famous Ishtar gate and a few happily browsing visitors.

Click here to follow along

  Underneath is a small introductory text, much like the type that would stand before the entrance to an exhibit. You can choose to read more of it by clicking a button, or you can continue scrolling down to the “stories” or exhibits, much like when a visitor chooses to stroll past the text panels. Scroll a bit further and you can see all 1,591 digitized objects, either organized by topics or pictured individually. At the very bottom is access to a “museum view,” a 360 scan of a room.

At any point you can, of course, share your experience on the social media platform of your choice.

The Pergamonmuseum actually houses three smaller museums, the Classical collections, the Museum of the Ancient Near East, and the Museum of Islamic Art. I’m going to focus on the first two, as they would cover the cultures in Turner’s books.

The Virtual Tour

“Monumental: Highlights in the Pergamonmuseum” is the first exhibit, an overarching tour of the museum’s scope by focusing on a few of the most impressive parts of their collections – reconstructed monuments. These pieces are large enough to walk past or through in a way that lets the visitor truly experience the scale and aesthetics of these ancient cultures.

But how do these very large displays translate to a digital format?

Pergamon Altar is the highlight of the virtual museum. Most of the exhibits focus on it, using the high-quality photos and videos taken in anticipation of the exhibit closing for renovations. Google used a camera to create a 360 experience of the room, which the first exhibit uses to “walk” the visitor through the room, zooming in on details and providing context through pop up text. If you want to explore it yourself, you can take control of the view much as you would Google Streetview.

This high tech interactive gives a life-size sense of scale, allowing you to feel as if you are looking up at the tall steps and large friezes. The sculptures of gods, goddesses, and monsters are marvels of artistic talent, robust and detailed in a way that reminds me of a pivotal scene from the first book, The Thief, when Eugenides finds a room where his gods sit as still as statues, a held breath away from speaking.

“Moving” into the Museum of the Ancient Near East, the online exhibit brings the visitor to a more vibrantly colored reconstruction – the blue and yellow bricks of the Ishtar gate and processional way. The first “slide” has a video pop up with a video about the history of the gate and the city of Babylon. When I accessed the site, the full screen option wouldn’t work. Technological glitches are an interesting issue to consider in accessing the virtual museum. What if certain sections crash and interfere with the narrative of the exhibit?

  Despite the small screen, the video recreated the experience of an audio guide. The narrators create a word picture of the gate while you look at pictures of it. They explain the meanings behind the symbols and emphasized that any visitor Nebuchanezzer’s Babylon would have understood at a glance. The symbolism of gods and goddesses are a reminder of a time when the pantheon of gods lived vividly in people lives as images and statues everywhere, just as in the classical world Turner builds in her series. These books feature gods and goddesses that step out of stories and into the plot to help or hinder her main characters. In Thick As Thieves, she drew from the mythology of the Ancient Near East and the Epic of Gilgamesh to create the heroes Immakuk and Ennikar that interfere throughout the plot.

The video and the close up photos afterwards show the details in the relief carvings of lions, a symbol of Ishtar, which made me realize that the seemingly ridiculous scene in the book when Kamet and Costis hide from soldiers in the den of a lioness might have actually been a hint that this ferocious goddess was another force protecting them.

Having been to this display in the actual museum, the experience is rather awe-inspiring. To walk through this massive gate and along a very long corridor, all lined with ancient tiles and then to find out that this was only a small portion of the entire structure is boggling. Especially impressive is to imagine the time conservators spent piecing together this mammoth puzzle. In the virtual museum, however, the scale of the piece isn’t as emphasized as the detail work. After some digging, I did find a 3D image of the gate on the page for the Berlin Museum Island page.

  The Collections

Below the exhibits are thumbnails for all 1,591 objects that can be explored digitally. As a visitor, you can go through collections organizing the objects by cultural source (i.e. Iraq, Iran, Syria) or by theme (water, textiles, and lions, oh my!).  My eye was drawn to the clay tablets. In Thick As Thieves, Kamet recites from the tablets of the epic of Immakuk and Ennikar. In ancient Mesopotamia, letters and important documents were written in cuneiform on clay. The ones highlighted at the virtual Pergamonmuseum were inventories of goods and horses or letters from kings, rather than poetry, unfortunately.

Collection of Clay Tablets

  You can also go through all of the objects, choosing to organize them by viewer popularity, by time in an easily navigated timeline, or, bizarrely enough, by color. This allows the visitor to engage with the objects in a way quite unlike a usual museum visit. You view the objects in sometimes surprising combinations that cross cultural lines and the usual organizational categories.

I chose to see all chocolate brown objects together, which yielded a combination of detailed textiles and clay imprints from cylindrical signets. They are two very different mediums from different centuries, but you can see some similarities in the symmetry and angles on the textiles and carvings.

  The details for the objects are, however, limited. Other than names and accession numbers, some objects didn’t have any other information while others had a paragraph or two. I wonder if the objects were chosen by the practicality that they were the best photographed. So, the important collections for a virtual museum become the ones that are the most visual.

  Thoughts

The virtual museum was certainly an entertaining way to pass the time here in quarantine. The overall experience became meditative in the way walking through a museum becomes very quiet and calm, although I found after a while the same reading fatigue as hunching to look at text panels in person.

Trying to view the entirety of a museum through my laptop computer screen, the different cultures and topics encompassed within it began to blur together. Unlike a physical museum, where a visitor moves through discretely different rooms organized geographically or by clearly defined topic at a walking pace that allows the mind to shift gears, the virtual museum has a speed to it. You click through topics and it’s easy to switch between topics or go back to check. You can draw lines between displays that might otherwise be at other ends of the museum building.

These blurring of lines might not be what the website designers intended, as the exhibits are more neatly outlined, but the experience certainly fits with the world of the Queen’s Thief series, which is, after all, not a true historical fiction. Megan Whalen Turner drew from classical Greek, Near East, and other Mediterranean cultures to create her world, but she pulled details from several different centuries to do so. Viewing the virtual museum, where it is easier to hop across timelines, did help me understand the setting for the books better, and gave me an aesthetic language for imagining the Mede Empire.

  Further Reading

Interview with Megan Whalen Turner

Map of the world of Queen’s Thief

Virtual Pergamonmuseum

Pergamonmuseum website

The Queen’s Thief Series

Other Virtual Museums

  New in #QuarantineLife I want to explore #VirtualMuseums with the #Pergamonmuseum #Berlin #ClosedButOpen #SMBforHome #StayHome #HowDoYouMuseum #queensthief #attolia #ThickAsThieves #ReturnOftheThief #worldbookday Virtual Museums in the Time of COVID-19 In these awful times, everyone is looking for something to keep themselves busy during self-isolation.

[aglayalilich]

on some horror movies

a few months ago i got to see midsommar and though it didn’t quite do to me what hereditary did i thought it was a very compelling movie...shortly after, though, i was able to see the 2018 version of suspiria and wowwww did i feel some ways about that movie. i felt at the time that the two went very well together. so my friend invited me to see the director’s cut version of midsommar this weekend (still very interesting, though i felt the final cut was the right choice) and i decided i would also watch suspiria again and take notes on both. because i

wanted to articulate more why these movies work so well as a double feature for me, beyond ‘ah yeah there’s some girls dancing in it’ though certainly the role of dance and the climactic dance scenes are a part of it. there’s this structural similarity too in the final ritual acts. but like i was saying, it’s more than just a similar aesthetic. in fact the aesthetics are really in contrast, with suspiria’s bright red on desaturated colors versus midsommar’s blue and white on very lush, saturated backdrops. though they also do something similar with how color begins creeping into the character’s clothing in midsommar and of course many people have already talked about how the iconic red begins to creep into suspiria culminating at the end. really drastically different cinematography style also, midsommar is full of these long empty lingering shorts, all this wideness and slowness while suspiria is fast cuts, sudden zooms, races fromt he point of view of one character to the next. (sidenote: both have this GREAT visual language of mirrors, suspiria has the mirror room and dance studios and characters refracted a hundredfold, great for questions and multiplicity of identity. midsommar has a couple of really great scenes where one character is talking to another character but the second character is standing out of the shot and only visible in a mirror. ahhh so good. in general i wouldn’t say the effect of either movie is fear so much as disorientation--reflections, refractions, inversions. physical spaces impossible for the audience to navigate. images that the audience cannot arrange chronologically. i love it) anyway. this isn’t an essay so it is unstructured. i took about 10 pages of notes during my second viewing of midsommar and i can only understand about half of that because it was dark as fuck in the theater but i would like to at least ATTEMPT to give form to what i was feeling. comes down to 3 core similarities.

1. i read both of these movies as about abuse in communities that are supposed to be ‘safe.’ the community is a relief from trauma/abuse/horror of the outside world. there’s also a strong emphasis on the familial nature of this community. important to note that the community is genuine, it is not wholly a falsehood. it has a motivation beyond doing evil for evil’s sake, it may even believe the evil is necessary for the care of the community. this is a close and poignant topic for me, and i assume for other people as well, so it’s compelling to see it addressed in horror. it can be a great relief to see something as the subject of horror--that is an acknowledgement that it is horrific. a confirmation, an understanding, and sometimes through the resolution of the movie we can find stories that help us work through this.

2. both mostly focus on the horror of endurance rather than the horror of ending (death) which is a big thing for me in terms of my horror preferences. while i love some iconic monsters and killers ultimately the idea of ‘what if a fucked up thing killed you’ is just not actually that scary for me. what is scary for me is, yknow living in a state of unspeakable agony.

the olga scene in suspiria (you know the one) is a perfect example of this. every time you think that scene is about to be over it keeps going. and keeps going. the character is hurt but never killed, contorted impossibly, injured beyond the realm of what the human body should be able to endure but she is still alive. even when the scene finally comes to an end she is still alive! hard for me to articulate this scene if you haven’t seen it--i am very pleased and excitable about body horror and it was still rough for me purely because of how long it feels. in a sense this scene doesn’t even really end because much later during the climactic scene of the movie she is still fucking alive and has been in this state for the entire duration of the movie.

with midsommar it’s less of a body horror angle and more...dani living with all her pain and grief. but it’s done physically as well--being killed suddenly is not so horrible as being kept alive, the climactic horror is about a very prolonged, painful death. the dance scene doesn’t take it to suspiria levels but there is still a sense of the participants having no choice of when to stop, but simply must keep going in exhaustion until they cannot.

3. i really love how both of these films show pain (and other emotion) evoked through motions and breath. this one is harder to articulate. you know a lot of the time in a movie you will see an act of violence but it’s pretty...shallow, it’s just the image of violence, it has no weight to it. you don’t feel it. not so in these movies. it’s hard for me to articulate exactly how a piece of media goes about accomplishing this or not but often it makes the key distinction between things i think are just fine and things i really love.

these two have a really particular way of showing pain. in a very literal sense, there are incredible portrayals of bodies in physical pain. but there’s also dani’s raw screams of grief at the end of midsommar’s intro (and at other points throughout the film.) she is in too much pain to speak, all she can say is no, the leaked script describes it as ‘it’s so intense that it looks painful, dangerous even.’ on a slight digression i often feel  like i dont love ari aster the way a lot of people do but the thing i really truly do love and am awed by is the portrayal of this raw horrible grief pain in his films. it is so horrible it is very difficult for me to see and that is a little part of why i can never watch hereditary again. but anyway

sometimes pain robs us of thought and of language. (the movie knows this, the aforementioned prolonged painful death at the end of midsommar is one in which the character involved cannot move or speak). at a certain point it cannot be articulated through words. so these characters, the films themselves, articulate their pain (both physical and cosmic) through dreams, sighs, movement, screams.

sometimes pain seems too much for any one person to bear. this is when the movies come back around to the topic of community. both films emphasize the community as a body, made up of the individuals who serve as its cells or organs. when one part is hurt, the whole body feels the effects. more than that, the things too big for one human to possible feel are instead taken up by the community, felt by the larger body. volk is danced by one body, expressing the feeling not just of its creator but of the body. in midsommar we see the community take on in unison the feeling of one member, dancing or screaming as one (though i’ve seen different takes on whether this is to positive or negative result.) the body is formed and expresses itself through motion and breath, the dances, the sighs, the rhythmic exhalations which are all both precise and instinctive.

there is also something more i can’t say here about...not pain but the desire for someone to understand your pain, the desire for true connection.

i tried a few times to write about why this is a topic i fixate on but it didn’t feel right. to summarize ill just say that i struggle deeply with the ability to express pain.

now, on horror and the working-through of trauma...i said earlier that it is compelling to see these topics addressed in horror. horror is the main genre of any media that i enjoy and though i like other things, i don’t generally seek out anything that doesn’t have some inclination towards horror. this has always been the case but grew more true the more, uh, fucked up my life became, and i find it generally the best mechanism for thinking about (and not necessarily but sometimes coping with) grief and trauma and pain in all its forms. other people have written extensively about this, articulated it better than i could, there’s not really a need to get into it further than that.

but i’m thinking about one thing i’ve seen recently...(actually two things, firstly, some posts that seems to imply horror movies never tackled trauma before ari aster started directing which is just...quite a take, quite a take.) it was shots of ending scenes from a few horror movies, including hereditary and midsommar and also suspiria...i think the vvitch also and maybe also possession or something you know all the movies bitches with ptsd love (i’m bitches.) shots of the protagonist’s faces in the ending, a certain expression both rapturous and dissociated. there was something in the way i saw some people respond to this that made me think a lot...i think the idea that through great overwhelming trauma we can reach a point of ecstasy, or total transformation, is a very compelling story. it is something i have wished for often or even believed will happen--that there will be a certain point at which it really is too much and beyond that will be something different. some rapture that you will reach. not necessarily something positive but something that isn’t pain, that is beyond pain and horror. the idea of reaching divinity through great suffering is nothing new of course. but.

the true horror of endurance is that this is not going to happen. there is no point at which there will be absolution or ascension. the mirror does not shatter. it just keeps going. when you think this is the limit, it just keeps going.

the nice thing about movies is that they have a structure, and though they might leave you altered, they do end, the screen goes black. comfort of darkness, relief of endings. a sigh...

at least, that’s how i feel right now.