#if you think this formating seems somewhat familiar its because i was inspired by a tgcf magazine

[soupysundae]

🐍🐍🐍🐍🐍

[framecaught]

Transmedia Storytelling: A Perspective on the Homestuck Epilogues

First of all, thank you for reading my first post! I created this blog to document some of my research for a directed study project. I’ll be looking at Homestuck from an interdisciplinary lens but focusing especially on its formal artistic qualities and place in art history. The blog will contain various points of analysis which I develop over the course of the project. For my first piece of writing, I wanted to tackle (from a new perspective) what I view as a complicating factor in the controversy surrounding the Homestuck Epilogues.

Rather than critiquing the Epilogues’ content or making a judgement about their overall quality, I want to explore a specific criticism which has been echoed time and time again by fans. In an article for the online journal WWAC, Homestuck fan-writer Masha Zhdanova sums up this criticism:

��No matter how much members of the creative team insist that their extension to the Homestuck line of work is no more official than fanwork, if it’s hosted on Homestuck.com, promoted by Homestuck’s official social media accounts, and endorsed by the original creator, I think it’s a little more official than a fanfic with thirty hits on AO3.”

Between attacks on the Epilogues’ themes, treatment of characters, and even prose-quality, fans have frequently referenced the issue of endorsement and canonicity as summarized above. Although the Epilogues and Homestuck’s other successors (including Homestuck^2 and the Friendsims) attempt to tackle themes of canonicity within their narratives, critics of the Epilogues contend that this philosophical provocation falls flat. While the creators argue that the works should form a venue for productively questioning canonicity, fans point to issues of capital and call the works disingenuous. In Episode 52 of the Perfectly Generic Podcast Andrew Hussie explains that, to him, the Epilogues are “heavily implied to be a piece of bridge-media, which is clearly detached from the previous narrative, and conceptually ‘optional’ by its presentation, which allows it to also function as an off-ramp for those inclined to believe the first seven acts of Homestuck were perfectly sufficient.” As Zhdanova paraphrases, a critical view posits that this “optional” reading is impossible. The company ethos and production of capital inherent to the Epilogue’s release—their promotion, their monetization—renders their “fanfic” backdrop completely moot, if not insulting.

Why does appropriating the “aesthetic trappings” [1] of AO3 strike such a chord with critics, though? What’s wrong with the Epilogue creators profiting from their work? Other officially endorsed “post-canon” materials, including the Paradox Space comics, Hiveswap and Friendsim games, have not inspired such virulent opposition. The issue comes down to the association between the AO3 layout and the separation from canon. The Epilogues ask us to read them as “tales of dubious authenticity,” but critics assert that this reading makes no sense in the context of their distribution. It’s not exactly the endorsement or monetization that prevents a “dubious” reading, though. After all, Hiveswap is also endorsed and monetized, yet fans have no problem labeling it as “dubiously canon.” So what is it about the Epilogues’ presentation that seems so incongruous with their premise as “dubious” texts?

I’ve come to understand this issue through the lens of transmedia storytelling. First conceptualized by Henry Jenkins, “transmedia storytelling” involves the production of distinct stories, contained within the same universe, across different media platforms. [2] This allows consumers to pick and choose stories across their favorite media outlets, since each story is self-contained, but superfans can still consume All The Content for a greater experience. The Marvel franchise with its comics, movies, TV shows, and other ephemera, is a great example of the transmedia phenomenon.

How does Homestuck fit into this theory? In an excellent article [3] for the Convergence journal, Kevin Veale lays out a taxonomy for Homestuck’s role in new media frameworks. Rather than dispersing different stories across multiple media platforms, Homestuck combines the “aesthetic trappings” of many media forms into one massive outlet: the Homestuck website [4]. It’s almost like the inverse of transmedia storytelling. Veale describes this type of storytelling as “transmodal.” He further defines Homestuck’s storytelling as “metamedia,” meaning that it manipulates the reader’s expectations of certain media forms to change the reading experience. So, despite its multimedia aspects, Homestuck structures itself around one monolith distribution channel (the website), the importance of which directly feeds into what we know as “upd8 culture.” The Homestuck website itself, as a “frame” which encapsulates Homestuck and the other MS Paint Adventures, takes on a nostalgic quality; the familiar grey background and adblocks become inextricably linked with the production of the main, “canon” narrative.

Homestuck itself—the main narrative—is a transmodal venture. However, as of writing this post, the Homestuck franchise has taken a leap into transmedia waters, starting with the Paradox Space comics and continuing with Hiveswap, the Friendsims, and Homestuck^2. All four of these examples fit the definition of transmedia ventures: they contain distinct stories still set in the Homestuck universe and are distributed through fundamentally separate media channels from the main comic. Which is to say, crucially, none of them are hosted on the Homestuck website.

This is where I think the issue arises for the Epilogues. The Epilogues, from what I can tell, aimed to present themselves as a transmedia venture rather than a transmodal one. Firstly, they try to act as a “bridge-media,” or self-contained story. They can be read as a continuation of Homestuck, but can also be separated or ignored. Secondly, they take on a distinct format (prose). Hussie notes in PGP Ep. 52 that the Epilogues were originally only meant to be published in print, functioning as a “cursed tome.” In short, they were intended as a transmedia venture: a self contained story, distributed through a separate medium (prose) and separate media channel (print), to be embraced or discarded by consumers at their whim.

Instead, when the Epilogues were released through the main Homestuck website, readers couldn’t help but interpret them as part of Homestuck’s long transmodal history. Rather than interacting with a new distribution channel, readers returned to the same nostalgic old grey website. The AO3 formatting gag makes no real difference to readers, as Homestuck patently appropriates the aesthetics of other platforms all throughout its main narrative. This issue of distribution (print versus website), which in turn produces either a transmedia or transmodal reading, is the crux of the criticism I mentioned before. Despite the creators’ protests, readers failed to see any “question” of canonicity because the Epilogues fit perfectly into the comic’s preexisting transmodal framework, supported even further by the nostalgia of the website’s very layout. The Epilogues read as a transmodal contribution to Homestuck’s main channel rather than a post-canon, transmedia narrative (like Paradox Space or the Friendsims) as they were intended. This created a profound dissonance between the fans’ experiences and the creators’ intentions.

How things might have turned out differently if the Epilogues really had been released solely as “cursed tomes,” the world will never know. In PGP, Hussie cites the importance of making content freely accessible on the website as a reason for the online release, which is certainly a valid consideration. Even though the print format offers a much clearer conceptual standpoint as a transmedia “bridge-story” [5], issues of capital and accessibility may still have come to the forefront of discussion. As it stands, though, I think the mix-up between transmedia and transmodal distribution was a key factor in the harsh criticism the Epilogues sparked.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you liked this post, you can follow the blog on tumblr for updates or, if you don’t frequent tumblr, sign up for the mailing list to receive an email whenever I publish a new mini-essay!

------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] I love this term, “aesthetic trappings”, which Masha Zhdanova uses, so I’ve overused it to some degree in my post.

[2] Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, 2007: pg. 98. You can also find a description of transmedia storytelling on his blog.

[3] Veale, Kevin. “‘Friendship Isn’t an Emotion Fucknuts’: Manipulating Affective Materiality to Shape the Experience of Homestuck’s Story.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 25, no. 5–6 (December 2019): 1027–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856517714954.

[4] Although the Homestuck website shifted branding from mspaintadventures.com to homestuck.com before the Epilogues’ release and has shifted its aesthetic somewhat (re: banners and ads), I treat the core “website” as the same location in my post

[5] Hussie points to numerous fascinating experiences which might have arisen from the print distribution. He describes a tome as “something which maddeningly beckons, due to whatever insanity it surely contains, but also something which causes feelings of trepidation” and references the sheer size of the book and “stark presentation of the black and white covers” as elements which produce this trepidation. The ability to physically experience (through touch) the length of the Epilogues and the impact of the book cover were lost in the online format. Although the Epilogues have been released in their intended book format now, the printed novel still won’t be a “first reading experience” for most fans. 

[dustedmagazine]

Punk’d History, Vol. VIII: This Machine [blank] Fascists

Photo by Richard Young

It has the appearance of a worrisome pattern: any number of punk rock’s founding figures embraced the symbolics of Nazi Germany. Ron Asheton, an original and indispensable member of the Stooges, played a number of gigs wearing a red swastika armband, and liked to sport Iron Cross medals and a Luftwaffe-style leather jacket. Sid Vicious loved his bright scarlet, swastika-emblazoned tee shirt, and Siouxsie Sioux, during her tenure as the It-Girl of the Bromley Contingent, mixed her breast-baring, black leather bondage gear with a bunch of “Nazi chic.” And how many early Ramones songs (inevitably penned by Dee Dee) referenced Nazi gear, concepts and geography? “Blitzkrieg Bop,” “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World,” “Commando,” “It’s a Long Way Back to Germany,” “All’s Quiet on the Eastern Front,” and so on—for sure, more than a few.

“Appearance” is the key term. Poor Sid lacked the sobriety and smarts to have much of a grasp of fascism as an ideology. Siouxsie was just taking the piss, and gleefully pissing off the mid-1970s British general public, for much of whom World War II was still a living memory. Asheton and Dee Dee? Both were sons of hyper-masculine military men. Asheton’s father was a collector of WWII artefacts, and the guitarist shared his father’s fascination. When the Stooges adopted an ethos and aesthetic hostile to the late-1960s prevailing Flower Power rock’n’roll subculture, the Nazi accoutrement seemed to him fitting signs of the band’s anger and alienation. Dee Dee hated his father, an abusive Army officer who married a German woman. Dee Dee spent some of his youth in post-war West Germany, in which Nazi symbols were highly charged with anxiety and vituperation. Casual veneration of Nazis was a convenient way to reject the triumphal ennobling of the Good War, and of the military men associated with its traditions. And (as Sid, Siouxsie and Asheton also noticed) it really bothered the squares. 

None of that makes the superficial use of the swastika or phrases like “Nazi schatzi” any less offensive — it simply underscores that in the cases noted above, the offense was the thing. The politics weren’t even an afterthought, because the political itself had been dismissed as corrupt, boring or simply the native territory of the very people the punks were striking out against. If that’s where the relation between punk and fascism ceased, there wouldn’t be much more to write about.

The post-punk moment in England provided opportunities to rethink and restrategize the nascent détournement of Siouxsie’s fashionable provocations. Genesis P-Orridge and the rest of Throbbing Gristle were a brainy bunch, and their play with fascist signifiers was a good deal more complex. The band’s logo and their occasional appearance in gun-metal grey uniforms clearly alluded to Nazism, with its attendant, keen interests in occult symbols and High Modernist representational languages. TG’s visual gestures were also of a piece with an early band slogan: “Industrial music for industrial people.” Clearly “industrial people” can be read as a highly ironized coupling: the oppressed workers marching through the bowels of Metropolis were a sort of industrial people, reduced to the functionality of pure human capital. TG seemed to impose the same analysis on the middle-managers of Britain’s post-industrial economy, and their uncritical complicity in capital’s cruelties. But it’s also possible to argue that industrial people are industrious people; like TG, industrial people (middle managers, MPs) can get a lot of stuff done. They can produce things. They can make the trains run on time. And what sorts of cargo might those trains be carrying? What variety of conveyance delivered the naked “little Jewish girl” of “Zyklon B Zombies” to her fate?  

To be clear: I don’t mean at all to suggest that TG was a fascist band. Like their punky contemporaries, TG traded in fascist iconography in a spirit of transgressive outrage, expressing their hot indignation with equally heated symbols. And other British post-punk acts flirted with fascist themes and images, ranging from ambiguous dalliance (Joy Division’s overt references to Yehiel De-Nur’s House of Dolls and to Rudolph Hess; and just what was the inspiration for Death in June’s band name?) to more assertive satire (see Current 93’s appealingly bonkers Swastikas for Noddy [LAYLAH Antirecords, 1988]). But a more problematic populist undercurrent in British punk persisted through the late 1970s. The dissolution of Sham 69—due in large part to the National Front’s attempts to appropriate the band’s working-class anger as a form of white pride—opened the way for a clutch of clueless, cynical or outright racist Oi! bands to attempt to impose themselves as the face of blue-collar English punk. And literally so: the Strength through Oi! compilation LP (Decca Records, 1981) featured notorious British Movement activist Nicky Crane on its cover. It didn’t help that the record’s title seemed to allude to the Nazis’ “Strength through Joy [Kraft durch Freude]” propaganda initiative.  

Of course, it’s unfair to tar all Oi! bands with an indiscriminate brush. A few bands whose songs were opportunistically stuck onto Strength through Oi! by the dullards at Decca Records — Cock Sparrer and the excellent Infa Riot — tended leftward in their politics, and were anything but racists. But for a lot of the disaffected kids sucking down pints of Bass and singing in the Shed at Stamford Bridge, it wasn’t much of a leap from the punk pathetique of the Toy Dolls to Skrewdriver’s poisonous palaver.  

In the States, a similarly complicated story can be recovered:

In numerous ways, hardcore intensified punk’s confrontational qualities, musically and aesthetically. The New York hardcore scene made a fetish of its inherent violence, which complemented the music’s sharpened impact. So it’s hard to know precisely what to make of the photo on the cover of Victim in Pain (Rat Cage Records, 1984). If inflicting violence was an essential element of belonging in the NYHC scene, with whom to identify: the Nazi with the pistol, or the abject Ukrainian Jewish man, on his knees and about to tumble into the mass grave?  

Agnostic Front seemed to provide a measure of clarity on the record, which included the song “Fascist Attitudes.” The lyric uses “fascist” as a condemnatory term. But the behaviors the song engages as evidence of fascism are intra-scene acts of violence: “Why should you go around bashing one another? […] / Learning how to respect each other is a must / So why start a war of anger, danger among us?” That’s a rhetoric familiar to anyone who participated in early-1980s hardcore; calls for scene unity were ubiquitous, and the theme is obsessively addressed on Victim in Pain. But the signs of inclusivity most visibly celebrated on the NYHC records and show flyers of the period were a skinhead’s white, shaven pate; black leather, steel-toe boots; and heavily muscled biceps. Those signifiers clearly link to the awful cover image of Strength through Oi! The forms of identity recognized and concretized in the songs’ first-person inclusive pronouns have a clear referent. 

Agnostic Front wasn’t the only NYHC band to refer to and engage World War Two-period fascism. Queens natives Dave Rubenstein and Paul Bakija met at Forest Hills High School—the same school at which John Cummings (Johnny) befriended Thomas Erdelyi (Tommy), laying the groundwork for the formation of the Ramones. Rubenstein and Bakija also took stage names (Dave Insurgent and Paul Cripple) and formed Reagan Youth. But unlike the Ramones, there was nothing tentative or ambivalent about Reagan Youth’s politics. Rubenstein’s parents, after all, were Holocaust survivors. The band’s name riffed on “Hitler Youth,” but specifically did so to draw associations between Reagan and Hitler, between American conservatism’s 1980s resurgence and the Nazi’s hateful, genocidal agenda. Songs like “New Aryans” and “I Hate Hate” accommodated no uncertainties.  

Still, it’s interesting that Victim in Pain and Reagan Youth’s Youth Anthems for the New Order (R Radical Records, 1984) were released only months apart, by bands in the same scene, sometimes sharing bills at CBGBs’ famous matinees of the period. And while Reagan Youth toured with Dead Kennedys, it’s Agnostic Front’s “Fascist Attitudes” that’s closer in content to the most famous punk rock putdown of Nazis.

It’s odd what comes back around: Martin Hannett, whom Biafra playfully chides at the track’s very beginning, produced much of Joy Division’s music, moving the band away from its brittle early sound to the fulsome atmospheres of the Factory records, and to a wider listenership. “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” similarly addresses a formerly obscure, tight scene opening to a greater array of participants, some of whom were attracted solely to hardcore’s reputation for violence. Like “Fascist Attitudes,” the Dead Kennedys’ song itemizes fighting at shows as its chief complaint, and as a principal marker for “Nazi” behavior. Biafra’s lyric eventually gets around to somewhat more focused ideological critique: “You still think swastikas look cool / The real Nazis run your schools / They’re coaches, businessmen, and cops / In a real fourth Reich, you’ll be the first to go.” The kiss-off to punk’s vapid romance of the swastika (it “looks cool”) complements the speculative treatment of a “real fourth Reich.” Both operate at the level of abstraction. The casual, superficial relation to the symbol’s aesthetic assumes a sort of safety from the real, material consequences of its application. And the emergence of a fascist political regime is dangled as a possible future event. That speculative futurity undoes the “real” in “real Nazis.” The threat is ultimately a metaphorical construct. The Nazis are metaphorical “Nazis.”  

Still, it’s the song’s chorus that resonates most powerfully. So much so that the song has found its way into other artworks.

Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room (2015) is frequently identified as a horror film on streaming services. We could split hairs over that genre marker. The film gets quite graphically bloody, but there’s no psychotic slasher killer, no supernatural force at work. And cinematically, the film is a lot more interested in anxiety and dramatic tension than it is in inspiring revulsion or disgust. It terrifies, more than it horrifies. What’s especially compelling about the film (aside from Imogen Poots’ excellent performance, and Patrick Stewart’s menacing turn as charismatic fascist Darcy Banks) is its interest in embedding the viewer in a social context in which the Nazis are a lot less metaphorical, a lot more real. In Green Room, the kids in the punk band the Ain’t Rights are warned about the club they have agreed to play: “It’s mostly boots and braces down there.” And they understand the terms. What they can’t quite imagine is a room — a scene, a political Real — in which fascism is dominant. Their recognition of the stakes of the Real comes too late. The violence is already in motion. In that world, the Dead Kennedys song provides a nice slogan, but symbolic action alone is entirely inadequate.  

OK, sure, Green Room is a fiction. Its violence is necessarily aestheticized, distorted and hyperbolized. But perhaps the film’s most urgent source of horror can be located in its plausible connections to the social realities of our material, contemporary conjuncture. You don’t have to dig very deep into the Web to find thousands of records made by white nationalist and neo-fascist-allied bands, many, many of which deploy stylistic chops identified with punk rock and hardcore. You can listen. You can buy. (And yeah, I’m not going to link to any of that miserable shit, because fuck them. If you do your own digging to see what’s what, be careful. It’s scary and upsetting in there.) It feels endless. And the virulent sentiments expressed on those records are echoed in institutional politics in the US and elsewhere: Steve King (and now Marjorie Taylor Greene, effectively angling for her seat in Congress), Nigel Farage, Alternative für Deutschland, elected leadership in Poland and Hungary. Explicit white supremacist music also has somewhat more carefully coded counterparts in much more visible media (the nightly monologuing on Fox News) and in very well-positioned, prominent policy makers (Stephen Miller, who’s on the record touting “great replacement” theory and is a big fan of The Camp of the Saints). It’s a complex, ideologically coherent network, working industriously to impose and install its hateful vision as the dominant political Real. 

Sometimes it feels as if no progress at all has been made. Maybe we’re moving toward the reactionaries. Contrast Skokie in the late 1970s with Charlottesville in 2017. And now if the Neo-Nazis have licenses for their long guns, they can strut through American streets wearing them in the name of “law and order.” It’s even more disturbing that a subculture that wants to clothe itself in “revolution” and “radicalism” is so tightly in league with institutional politics. Say what you will about Siouxsie’s Nazi-fashion antics, no one suspected that her prancing echoed political activity, policy-making or messaging in Westminster.

So what’s a punk to do? It’s certain that a vigorously free society needs to preserve spaces in which unpopular speech can be uttered and exchanged. Punk should pride itself on defending those spaces. But speech that operates in conjunction with an ascendant political power and ideological agenda doesn’t need defense or energetic attempts to preserve its right to existence. In October of 2020, that speech (in this case, speeches being written by Miller, texts by folks who have spent time in Tucker Carlson’s writer’s room and songs by white supremacist hardcore bands) has become synonymous with political right itself.  

So now more than ever, it’s important to be active in the public square, to stand up to the fascists and to say it, often and out loud:

Jonathan Shaw

[tlbodine]

Hard-Boiled Fantasy

So a conversation from @firefly124-writing about the TV show Supernatural and where it exists in relation to horror got me to wondering about the origins and trappings of what we now consider the “urban fantasy” genre, which I realized I haven’t really dug that deeply into before. 

That sounded like a fun rabbit hole to fall down, so I figured I’d do a bit of digging! 

So the initial question was: Is Supernatural a horror show? 

It kind of seems like it should be, right? There’s ghosts and demons and all manner of other things that go bump in the night. 

But structurally, it sure doesn’t seem like a horror. In horror stories, the monsters usually hunt the characters, not vice versa. And the story beats are all wrong. In fact, if you subbed out monsters for regular criminals, you’d pretty much just have a crime drama. 

And in that respect, Supernatural is hardly on its own. In fact, there’s a ton of supernatural crime fiction - from Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series, to Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files, to Angel (not so much Buffy, more on that in a minute) and many, many more besides. In fact, the whole genre of “urban fantasy” seems to have some hefty overlap with supernatural crime stories – but are the two interchangeable? Or is there more to it? 

First Off: What the Heck is Urban Fantasy? 

Our benevolent overlords at Barnes & Noble compiled a handy list of recommendations for Urban Fantasy series (https://www.barnesandnoble.com/blog/sci-fi-fantasy/12-urban-fantasy-series-to-binge-read/), and looking at them side-by-side, we can begin to see some trends:

Super-powered and/or badass main characters 

Serial format that lends itself to a “monster of the week” type storyline

Crimes and/or supernatural political intrigue 

But are they, like, the defining traits of the genre? Let’s investigate further..

According to this article from Writer’s Digest, there are a few key ingredients: setting as character, a central mystery, character-driven story (often in first person narration), and a romance subplot - https://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/5-elements-urban-fantasy-novels-must

But I take some issue with that. I think there are a fair number of stories that feel like they should qualify as “urban fantasy” without ticking off all of those boxes. Setting aside everything that could be considered “paranormal romance” - your Twilight and True Blood and whatnot (Buffy slots here better, maybe)- there’s still plenty of things that seem like they should be urban fantasy, like Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere or Lev Grossman’s The Magicians or Charles de Lint’s Newford series, or War for the Oaks by Emma Bull. 

But it’s OK - urban fantasy is large, it can contain multitudes. 

The real question is, why is so much of it just supernaturally flavored crime fiction? 

The Origins of Crime Fiction 

Crime fiction/mystery/thriller is the second-most popular book genre, coming in right behind romance for sales: https://bookstr.com/article/book-genres-that-make-the-most-money/

With that in mind, it kind of makes sense that you’d want to fold crime fiction elements into other types of stories. A genre that popular and ubiquitous is going to have lots of familiar tropes and appeal to a lot of people. 

And as it turns out, crime fiction has its roots tangled quite deeply with horror fiction – so deep, in fact, that the granddaddy of all detective stories is none other than Edgar Allan Poe. 

Poe’s character C. Auguste Dupin – from famed stories like “The Purloined Letter” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” – lays down the template for detective stories in the 1840s, from the eccentric gentleman of leisure turned detective to the impossible crimes explained by the power of deductive reasoning. That template would then be lifted almost wholesale by Arthur Conan Doyle in the 1880s with his Sherlock Holmes stories. 

And, really, it shouldn’t be a particular shock that detective stories started to really take root in this time period. In a post-Enlightenment world, we were collectively struggling with our relationship to nature, science, industry and the mysteries of the universe. Even as we continued to fear things that went bump in the night, we increasingly sought to rationalize it all. 

There was also, of course, more crime – and, thanks to developments in both city living and news reporting, people were aware of those crimes. Jack the Ripper captured public imagination and inspired terror with his murders in 1888, about the same time as H.H. Holmes was running his murder hotel in the United States. 

So with that in mind, is it any surprise that crime fiction entered its first Golden Age in the 1920s and 30s – a time when organized crime was at its peak thanks to Prohibition? 

What is especially interesting to me is that even as horror waned in popularity in the 1940s and 50s, crime fiction was entering a second Golden Age thanks to Film Noir and all of its now-familiar tropes – from world-weary detectives to beautiful dames in trouble and rain-drenched streets. 

Some reading you may find interesting on that topic, especially in regards to how the Noir genre survived the Hays Code: http://hayscodeandfilmnoir.blogspot.com/ and https://vicolablog.wordpress.com/2017/06/05/film-noir-and-the-hays-code/

Putting it All Together 

So with this historical context firmly in mind, I think we can make a few logical conclusions. 

First, I think it’s safe to say that people like crime stories because they tap into cultural fears and fascinations – crime is something that we are all aware of but which most of us have fairly little hands-on experience with, so it’s only natural that we’d be morbidly curious about it. Crime is interesting because it’s dangerous and taboo, and that makes for good storytelling. 

Second, it also seems safe to say that many people prefer crime stories to horror stories because they are more comfortable to consume: 

The hero is usually empowered rather than powerless

Justice is usually served at the end (whereas horror tends to have a bleak outlook) 

The overall feeling can be fun/adventurous/even silly and largely safe, despite the presence of a murder – see the entirety of the “cozy mystery” genre 

Mysteries tap into a puzzle-solving, intellectual aspect of the audience as opposed to a visceral/primal response

Now obviously these lines are drawn in ever-shifting sands. There are plenty of horror stories that are primarily intellectual, and crime fiction can be plenty bloody and visceral. And that’s not even touching on the cross-overs like Thomas Harris’s work or the entirety of giallo filmmaking: https://vicolablog.wordpress.com/2017/06/05/film-noir-and-the-hays-code/

But by and large, speaking in general terms, I think we can make an argument that there is probably a somewhat wider audience for crime/detective stories than for horror specifically because the intended purpose of horror is to make the reader/viewer uncomfortable, and a whole lot of people dislike feeling uncomfortable. 

So with all of that in mind, I don’t think it’s too much of a leap at all to see how our modern understanding of urban fantasy as a supernatural crime thriller got its start. 

By taking familiar horror tropes that have slipped into pop culture – monsters and demons and zombies and whatnot – and then folding them into the comforting tropes and narratives of popular crime fiction, creators can delve into everything that is cool about horror without the icky, alienating bits that make people feel bad. 

(I’d also posit that this type of storytelling is gaining an increasingly powerful foothold in modern times because it side-steps some of the more problematic aspects of realistic crime fiction – ie, the socio-economic status of most criminals, the corruption of the legal system, etc. By making fantastical creatures the perpetrators, we can skip the discomfort of due process and human rights and focus on the fun parts of solving crimes with a clear conscience)

But that’s just one opinion, from an admittedly biased horror blogger. I’ll leave you with this final essay on the topic, which follows a similar path and draws a different (but quite interesting) conclusion – https://carriev.wordpress.com/2012/04/16/the-long-and-diverse-history-of-urban-fantasy/

PS - if you like these deep dives and want to support me in doing more of them, don’t forget to drop a tip in my tip jar:  Ko-fi.com/A57355UN

[emberinmyheart]

[ writing tips ]

( I am not the person who thought of all of these writing tips and ideas. Writing tips come from books such as Write Your Novel in a Month by Jeff Gerke, The First 50 Pages by Jeff Gerke, Writing Your Novel from Start to Finish by Joseph Bates and a tumblr account called @writingmastery . I do not take credit for any of this, this is just meant to help you.)

c h a r a c t e r s :

- making the characters

- what makes a good character/protagonist

- making the antagonist

- questions to ask about your protagonist

- things your protagonist must have

- supporting characters

p l o t :

- planning the plot

- theme

- outlines

d i a l o g u e :

- basic dialogue formatting

w r i t i n g s u g g e s t i o n s :

- how to get out of writer’s block

- how to get inspiration

[ c h a r a c t e r s ]

- making the characters -

1. Consider your character’s:

• Intelligence

• Natural gifts or talents

• Love language (how they express affection)

• Self-esteem

2. Consider your character’s physical traits, such as:

• Gender

• Age (at the time the story begins)

• Ethnicity

• Height

• Weight

• Hair style and color

• Eye color

• Complexion

• Teeth

• Eyesight

• Physical attraction

• Any deformities, handicaps or distinctive marks

• Facial hair (for male characters only)

• Clothing style (including sense of style)

• Accessories

• Jewelry

• Tattoos and / or piercings

• Contacts or glasses

or things such as:

• Hygiene

• Posture

• Vehicle they use (optional?)

because this can be a massive help when discovering a character’s personality. “How would your character’s personality be affected by the physical attributes you choose?” (Jeff Gerke, Pages 52, 53 & 54)

3. Consider your character’s background, such as their:

• Siblings — ages, names and relationship with hero

• Level of wealth or poverty

• Whether they lived in the city or the country

• Marital status of parents

• Culture

• Education

• Relationship with parent of the same gender

• Era

• Societal backdrop (war, famine, revolution)

• Country and region

• Parents — who are they? What do they do? What were their experiences with the hero in the past and present, and how have experiences with them molded the hero’s life? Are they alive? Are they dead? Rich? Poor? Alcoholic? Was the father a famous athlete the hero had to learn to be like, or never thought he could be like? Does this impact the hero’s relationship with their siblings, if they have any?

(Jeff Gerke, page 55)

- what makes a good character/protagonist -

1. Consider this for your protagonist/hero...

• The selfless hero. For example: “a single mother who works two jobs who works two jobs but still somehow manages to do homework with the kids and go out for ice cream once in a while, or a soldier who volunteers to stay behind to cover his buddies’ retreat, or the silent partner who lets someone else get the glory for the work that was actually shared.” (Jeff Gerke, page 36)

• The compassionate hero. “When someone reaches out in love towards another, it is considered a virtue. It follows that your reader will most likely resonate with a compassionate hero. Show them having mercy on someone when it was within their rights to condemn, or show them going through all kinds of trouble to get a crust of bread to eat, but then show them handing it over to someone who has even less than he does.” (Jeff Gerke, page 37)

• The generous hero. “We love the bighearted giver. Most of us wish we were in a position to be able to give like that, to support some person or cause we believe in. Show your hero secretly dropping a hundo into the subway musician’s tip jar or leaving a fifty dollar tip for the diner waitress or anonymously buying someone’s wares at auction to be sure he has money to live on.” (Jeff Gerke, 37)

• The charming hero. “If your character can make the reader laugh, you’ve got them. We all love charming, winsome people. They’re fun to be around. They make life a little less burdensome. Humor can be hard to write, so don’t stress if this isn’t the direction you want to go. But if you can create a protagonist that makes us smile, you have us.” (Jeff Gerke, 38)

• The sympathetic hero. One of the main ways to engage your reader is to make them relate and bond with your character until they’re attached. Characters can bring back your memories and trigger the release of feelings you’ve got pent up in your head and can help you navigate your own issues. “If you can cause your reader to feel sympathetic towards your protagonist, you’ve won. When you show that gaping hole of pain or loss, the reader leans in, rushing forward with compassion into that person’s life like air filling a vacuum. When we feel your hero’s loss or grieve with them as they fail once again to achieve a noble goal, we build an instant connection. Make us feel like this is someone who we would like who has just been dealt a terrible hand— but who nevertheless keeps trying— and you’ll have us.” (Jeff Gerke, 41)

• The unlikable hero. Some characters in best-selling books are unlikable characters, but they have something redeeming in them trying to get out. It’s the good that makes us tolerate them and even come to like them. Your heroes can be unlikable or have a lot of flaws, but they have to be somewhat likable enough for the hero to be attached to them and their story.

• The winsome hero. “One reason why readers can engage with these characters is that they find them endearing. They’re good souls, they make you laugh, and they’re gentle with others. Characters can be flamboyant and outrageous, but they’re delightful to be around. To make your reader attached to them in the first few pages, you’ll need to reveal this winsomeness to the readers somewhere in the first fifty pages.” (Jeff Gerke, 73)

• The smart hero. “Another way to make readers engage with your character is to make them smart, resourceful, clever or mentally agile. We value characters who can see straight through the smoke to the thing the smoke was meant to conceal. We delight in seeing a resourceful hero trying to climb to that pile of puzzles to tell us what they see from there.” (Jeff Gerke, 73)

“The way you can tell if characters are weak is by reading about fifty pages of a novel. If by then you can’t tell the characters apart aside for cosmetic things like gender, age, role, office, species, attitude or goofy accent, there’s a problem. If you could switch the names around in a dialogue scene and nothing seems out of the ordinary, the characters are weak. If the only difference between your characters is that one’s always mad and the other is always talking dirty, your book is doomed.” (Jeff Gerke)

- making the antagonist -

What does a antagonist need to become a good villain?

A good antagonist, or villain, usually has to:

• Be strong. “A strong villain makes for a strong hero. When a hero overcomes a weak villain, they’re not going to seem very epic to the reader. But have them overcome a galaxy-destroying psychopath with an army of flesh-eating undead giants under their command, and you might just have yourself a hero of legend.”

• Make the hero go through several stakes. When you look back at all of the notes you’ve made for your story so far, you may have a clear idea of what the stakes are. What might be the “OR-ELSE” stakes you can set for your book? According to Jeff Gerke (a very useful source for writing tips), “the stakes can be related to a goal, a relationship, safety or anything else. They can be objectively large (if the hero fails, Earth will be destroyed) or small (if the hero fails, the team won’t win the first game of the season), so long they are important to the hero— and thus the reader”. (Jeff Gerke, page 79)

- questions to ask about your protagonist -

When creating and rounding out your protagonist, there are some questions you must ask yourself first:

1. Who is your protagonist? “The events in your novel are only meaningful for the reader in terms of how and why they’re meaningful for a protagonist. The protagonist is the lens through what we see, and interpret, everything in the book.” (Joseph Bates, page 22)

2. What does your protagonist want, and why is it important to them? “A protagonist must have a clear goal in the book, as well as a clear motivation for wanting to achieve it... not just what they’re after, but why they’re after it, so that the reader feels a sense of personal stakes.” (Joseph Bates, page 22)

3. What stands in the way of the protagonist? “Which is to say, what conflicts will the protagonist face? As with motivation, these conflicts will sometimes be external, plot-level conflicts and at other times, personal ones.” (Joseph Bates, page 22)

4. What familiar genres or tropes are suggested by premise, and how will your novel both play with or against those expectations? “Every story idea will automatically get you thinking of certain genres the story borrows from. Finding ways to make these tropes seem new and unexpected will be much more enjoyable for you to write and for your reader to read.” (Joseph Bates, 23)

5. How does the world of the novel that your protagonist is in— its setting, rules, everything related to the book’s tone— help reveal or illuminate the protagonist’s quest? “A story’s world helps build a reader’s understanding of the character’s quest, meant to find a understanding of motivation, conflict and stakes. World-building is often one of the first aspects that’ll pop into our heads when we think of a new novel idea, and it’s very easy to get stuck into the world-building stage. But the world can only come into sharp focus when we see it as an extension of the character and conflict. We don’t build a world and then drop a character into it. We build the world according to our understanding of story and character.” (Joseph Bates, 23)

6. What personal, everyday questions or problems arise within the premise that you connect with and will explore over the course of the novel? “This is something that you’ll likely have to discover in the process of writing, not necessarily something you’ll likely know from the start, but it’s the everyday that allows the reader to connect with the protagonist and see something of themselves in the protagonist’s plight. As the everyday questions or problems begin to show themselves and repeat in the book, you’ll see themes emerge, which will help support and structure in the book.” (Joseph Bates, 23)

7. What is your character’s internal motivation; What do they really want? “Again, this might particularly be a question to ask of a flat protagonist, the result of a main character who seems motivated by nothing but plot-level or external circumstances; remember that your hero is also a person, like you or me, and consider what we’d feel in a similar situation. But don’t forget that even minor characters have motivations, and lives, and even arcs, of their own.” (Joseph Bates, 42)

8. How might you locate a character’s internal motivation and conflict if these may seem absent? “If your character’s motivation seems purely external, perhaps as part of their obligation as a job— if you’re writing a detective novel, and the character has simply taken on a new case— try to consider what it is about the change personally, that informs their professional work, how it influences their ability to do the job, or speaks to the reason they entered the profession in the first place. Also consider how this particular job is different from yesterday’s job, or tomorrow’s, or last year’s. Presumably part of what makes this job or case different that is personally different, there’s something personally at stake. How might that be the case?” (Joseph Bates, 43)

9. Are you playing both with and against type? “No character is 100% good or evil, kindhearted or callous, capable or clueless, so consider not only how to set up our expectation of character, but also how to subvert that expectation, how to complicate our view of a character.” (Joseph Bates, 43)

10. How is the heart of the character, the motivation, evident in a work you admire? “Consider this with any novel or work that means something to you, no matter the genre. Try looking back at the main character you find compelling and play armchair psychologist a bit, looking at how the external and internal motivation and conflict play with, or pay off of, each other.” (Joseph Bates, 43)

- things your protagonist must have -

1. A protagonist must be active and questioning. “The protagonist can’t merely be acted upon in your novel. Your protagonist has to engage the world instead of observing it. Too many beginning novelists tend to trade character development for world building. Once you fully grasp your character’s want, and why they want it, you can set them down a path of actively pursuing it.” (Joseph Bates, 36)

2. Your protagonist must evoke a connection with the reader. A reader’s relationship to a protagonist is generally one of sympathy, empathy or it’s because the reader sees their own life in the protagonist’s life. “In other words, we see something of our own lives, experiences and struggles related to the protagonist.” (Joseph Bates, 37)

3. The character must be connected to everything in the story. All those other aspects in the story are connected to the reader, too. The character should be bound to those other elements of the story. Theme, mood, description should all be focused through the prism of character. For some reason, readers want to see our characters be punished, destroyed and wounded, but these things aren’t as satisfying until they’re rewarded and end up triumphant in the end.

4. Tell us what the character (protagonist) wants. It is critical to know what a character wants from the start of the book. The character may not know what they want, but the readers and audience must have that information in order to read more of the story. Maybe, for example, she wants revenge, or freedom from oppression, or their child returned to them, or true love, or anything else that can be seen as a motivation— the reader must know what the character’s motivations are as well, because the readers need to know how far your character has come, what stakes are on the table and what obstacles are between them and their final path.

5. You must prove that your protagonist is worth your audience’s time.

- supporting characters -

1. Supporting characters either help or hinder the protagonist in meeting their goals. Some supporting characters can even end up being villains. “For example, some of the most well-meaning people in our lives try to help, and claim to have our best interests at heart, yet their well-meaning help sometimes ends up hurting. Likewise, people who stand in our way, even those who actively oppose us, can end up pushing us to do or be better. They have motivations of their own, and most supporting characters try to be helpful, but ends up complicating what the other characters are trying to do.” (Joseph Bates, 41)

[ p l o t ]

- planning the plot -

Your hero’s inner journey should have several stages.

These are some things you need to remember when planning out the plot of your story:

1. The hero must start with a problem. A inner journey starts with the hero’s problem. What is wrong in the character’s life? For example, “self-centeredness is often the “sin” chosen for heroes in modern stories. The hero is stuck on themselves, and this selfishness causes no end of problems for them. It deprives them of the life they could have if they weren’t so impressed with themselves. Other popular character problems are bitterness, ambition, pride and a desire for vengeance and/or vindication. But the primary problem that all heroes have is fear. Any from the array of fears and anxieties can propel your hero through a wonderful character arc. Fear of being hurt, or abandonment, or failure, or disappointing others, or loss, or being alone, or losing control, and of meaninglessness, not to mention neurotic fears (arachnophobia, agoraphobia, etc.), anger (which is fear in disguise) and depression (fear and anger turned inwards).” (Jeff Gerke, page 61)

2. The plot is about how the hero must notice their issues, wrestle with their issues and finally deal with their issues. It’s the hero’s chance to change themselves into a better person, from start to finish. “The plot is the stage upon which your hero undergoes their inner journey. Whatever the two forces battling it out inside your hero’s heart are, they’re probably invisible. When you’re thinking of plot structure, your starting point is your hero’s inner journey. Whatever it is they’re dealing with on the inside, that’s what the whole plot will be about.” (Jeff Gerke, page 87)

3. There are several stages in a plot. Examples of this would be events such as: we meet our protagonist, we see the location where the place is going to take place, we understand the protagonist’s goals, and we meet the villain. Beginning, middle and end are good starts for understanding the concepts.

4. In order for the hero to be shown the error of their ways, the author must show them a better alternative, first. Usually, the positive alternative future is the opposite of the negative possible future. What would be a healthy outcome for your hero?

5. There is always going to be an inciting incident in your character’s life. Something unwelcome is going to crash into your hero’s dysfunctional life— this is the inciting incident. Without it, your hero would keep plodding along towards their unhappy ending and go towards the ending you don’t want them to go. The inciting incident doesn’t have to be negative, although it usually is— sometimes, it can be a good thing that changes the character’s life completely. Of course, the character could see it as a blessing, but not while it’s happening. The inciting incident could be something that the character does welcome, but it ends up taking them to places they didn’t want to go. For it to work in the novel, the inciting incident must be powerful and must take the hero on their inner journey throughout the entire book. Our hero won’t immediately embrace the change, or else there would be no inner journey. They have to reject it at first.

6. Your character must have their own, inner journey. “In fiction, a inner journey starts off with a character in need of a significant change in their current life. The journey will then lead the protagonist directly to their moment of truth, which is the moment where the protagonist realizes they’re out of balance and must decide whether they’re going to stay with the imbalance or make the change that will reveal to them what their true self should be.” (Jeff Gerke, page 126)

7. There must be a escalation in the story. “The escalation happens between the inciting event and the moment of truth. This is the internal struggle in which the hero tries to hold onto their old, unbalanced way of living, while the new alternative begins presenting itself as a way back into love. During the escalation, your hero will be pushed and pressed and knocked about because they refuse to embrace the change that will result in their inner healing.” (Jeff Gerke, page 127)

8. You have to combine all of these aspects of the hero’s inner journey together to make the reader truly attached to the story. The cycle that all of these stages go through is starting off with the hero’s unbalanced situation. After the unbalanced situation, which is the hero’s initial condition, there is the inciting event, which is the one event that crashes into the hero’s life that leads to their moment of truth. Between the inciting event and the moment of truth is the escalation.

9. After all of these stages, your hero must have their final state. At the end of every journey, your hero must rest and face the result of her consequential decisions. The final state isn’t whether your hero won or lost, it’s the condition of your hero now that their inner journey is over. However, if your hero chose the wrong way, then the final state is something that is not peaceful or the right way to go. The final state will be good or bad, depending on the hero’s choices.

- theme -

1. Brainstorm a dozen ways to show off primary, secondary and opposite facets of your theme, and see how many of them you can elegantly work into those opening spreads. “You don’t have to cram them all in— you’ve got over three hundred pages to explore your theme, after all— but be sure you’ve begun planting those seeds early on. Such things make rereading a novel especially fun, because the second time, knowing where the book is going, you see things the author was doing to set us up for it, though we couldn’t see them the first time. Imagine it being like a film— in the early section of the film, the filmmakers would plan so many things that would have come to importance later. It’s a testimony to their prowess as storytellers that they were giving us the theme from the outset.” (Jeff Gerke, 207)

- outlines -

1. Outline your story with a beginning, middle and an end. “Each should have an emotional arc for your characters. I’m not talking about a synopsis of what happens, but more of what do they (the key characters) feel when it’s happening. This doesn’t mean that you have to know everything that is going to happen, but you need an arc. Point A leads to point B, then to point C. One thing people forget to do when they outline is define emotional growth, and therefore they forget that the story must include the emotional arc.”

2. Character outlines. “Who is the hero? Who is the heroine? Why do they fit your hero and help them be a better hero? Or vice versa? It is often the hero that helps the heroine and helps her find her way to the other side of a battle. Thus, he becomes a hero for her. Knowing your characters helps shape their responses and the external conflict.”

[ d i a l o g u e ]

- basic dialogue formatting -

There are different types of formatting, such as:

1. Dialogue silos. “In dialogue scenes, keep a character’s words and actions in the same paragraph. The reader understands that, when you change to a new paragraph, a new person is talking. The paragraphs take turns in line with the characters taking turns as they exchange lines of dialogue. Let each paragraph in a dialogue be a little character silo into which only words and actions from that character may be placed.” (Jeff Gerke, pages 138 & 139)

2. Beats. Beats are tools to manage the pacing of your scenes and to tether the scene to the setting. Just as you have to include rests in music, so you have to write beats into your novel, and you have to use beats of varying lengths to create those pauses for the readers. When you want something to proceed without a pause, take out all the words that come first. Without beats, your dialogue scenes are rushed and clumsy, and they become detached to the setting. Beats show us what’s happening in the setting of the scene. They give us the viewpoint character’s thoughts and perceptions, too. A beat implies a pause— if you want to imply a long pause, write a long beat. Short beats equal short pauses. (Jeff Gerke, page 25 & 27)

[ w r i t i n g s u g g e s t i o n s ]

- how to get out of writer’s block -

1. Have a word count goal each day. If you want to write more often than usual, you can set up a goal to write 1,666 words a day or more, depending on how much you want to challenge yourself.

2. Write wherever you go. Having a notebook or a iPad will come in handy when your mind starts wandering to scenes that you might forget later. You can take notes in your notebook or iPad (or any other device you can write or type your ideas down on), email them to yourself and then copy and paste when you get home.

3. Make multiple backups. When your notebook, iPad (or the thing you write down on) crashes or anything that makes you unable to use it, you may need to make backups so you can write on other things. Save it everywhere, or at least on three backups so that you can write whenever, wherever without a problem.

4. Use a timer. Time yourself, and then write down as many ideas or words as you can. See if this helps your inspiration and ideas grow into more complex ideas, and if it does, continue to use it. Surprisingly, most people tend to write faster when they’re being rushed. See if this relates to you, and if not, there are always other solutions.

5. If a scene isn’t working, delete it. Sometimes, a scene is much less forced if you simply let it drag you in the direction that it’s most likely to go. Just keep moving forward, instead of procrastinating by deciding what to write next!

6. Take breaks. Even though you have no time to lose, take a break if you need to. Step away from the phone and do something mindless. Sometimes, the gears in your head overwork themselves, pushing you too far down the rabbit hole, which is why you need to take a break every now and then to get rid of these little moments so you’re not tugging at the strands of your hair in agony when you get to a dead end.

[shinidamachu]

Haunted

Summary: today's prompt of @inukag-week is "Haunted" so I named this... da da da... Haunted. Got it? Oh my God I'm so original and good at titles.

Word Count: 1544  Genre: Inukangst  Fandom: InuYasha  Pairing: Inukag Format: oneshot  AO3 Link: 🌹  Fanfic.Net Link: 🌹

When it first happened, InuYasha thought he had finally gone insane.

That day had started, like so many others lately, with bashful hope turning into heartbreak as autumn’s wind made the walk back from the Honekui no Ido even harder.

Since Miroku and Sango were busy with the twins and Shippo was leaving in a few hours to take his Fox Demon Promotion Exam, it seemed inevitable that the solitude he always worked so hard to keep at bay would crept in.

Deciding the cold was the only issue he could do something about, InuYasha had concentrated on picking up the logs he had cutted to keep the fire alive. Halfway through it he heard it, the voice he would give anything to and do anything for.

“You forgot that one.” The girl pointed to the wood next to his left foot with the hand that wasn’t holding what InuYasha immediately recognized as chips. Blinking slowly at his astonished expression, she jammed a portion of it on her mouth.

“K-Kagome?” Incredulous that his senses had failed to perceive her presence on the spot, InuYasha felt the weight of the logs left his arms as they dropped to the ground.

“InuYasha!” Kagome greated, waiting for a reply that got lost on his dry throat. “So that’s it? First time you see me in ages and all we are gonna do is call each other’s names?” After a short pause she contemplatively brought a finger to her lips. “Do you think we do that a lot?”

His instincts had tried to preserve him, screaming that Kagome wasn’t there, she couldn’t be. Nevertheless, he ran to her — only to have his expectations crushed when he finally reached the girl and watched her vanish at the touch of his fingers.

“Just what the hell is happening?” Hurt and alert, InuYasha pulled Tessaiga out, already pitying the unadvised bastard who dared to mess with his head like that. Jaw locking along with his grip on the sword, he searched around for anything out of ordinary. There was none.

“Would you calm down?” Once again her sudden appearance caught him off-balance. The more he tried to make sense of it all, the less he understood. “There’s no reason to be grouchy, it’s just me.” Kagome — or so it seemed — spoke with the simplicity of someone who ignored how much he had waited to hear precisely that.

“You’re not her.” It was the one thing InuYasha was convinced of by then. Of course he was somewhat aware of this possibility when he jumped head first, but the previous knowledgment didn’t help soft the blow.

“I’m pretty sure I am.”

“But you’re not really here.” The hanyo put Tessaiga back in its sheath, habitual torpor taking over his movements without even giving him a chance to loath himself for being so stupid. He was about to go home when she explained.

“I am. To you, at least. You know, being a creation of your mind and all.” His ears twitched. Creation of his mind? InuYasha had only began to assimilate what she said as he noticed someone approaching. The girl opened the biggest smile. “Is this who I think it is?” She turned away to confirm her guess the moment he arrived.

“InuYasha? Are you alright? Why is your mouth open? You look like a fish.”

The half demon set his lips in a hard line.

“Shippo-Chan! Look at you all grown up!” Pride overflowed every word as she leaned down to admire the few inches he had gained up close. The demon fox, however, stayed oblivious to her presence.

“I’m fine.” That sentence had lost its meaning for a while now. “Are you leaving already?”

“Yeah, I’ll be back in a few days.” Shippo frowned at the abandoned logs on the ground. “Are you sure you’re alright?”

“Is it safe for him to go alone?”

“Yeah, now shuddap!” InuYasha didn’t know whose question he was answering but he desperately needed silence to try and put his thoughts in order.

“Now you sound like yourself. I just came to say goodbye.” He popped into his pink, bubbled self and took off. “See you soon!”

“Banzai!” She had hailed, encouraging InuYasha to do the same while he stared at her in astonishment.

Now, a couple of moons had come and passed and InuYasha knew for a fact he was positively mad — because there she was still, lying on the ground beside him with the same intimacy her real version used to.

“You’re not mad, silly. You just miss me. And that’s okay.”

“Quit reading my mind!”

It felt like a miracle at first, to have her back. Even if their interactions were exclusively restricted to his head, he figured half of her was still better than nothing at all.

Over time, though, InuYasha learned that it wasn’t nearly enough. It did not do to see Kagome without touching her. To hear her voice and not her heartbeat. To have her so close yet not be able to inhale her scent. It wasn’t a miracle, after all. Just an ethereal reminder of everything he had lost.

“Geez! I can go if you don’t want me around anymore.”

“Great. Leave.”

“You have to mean it.”

“I did!”

“Then what I’m still doing here?” Her eyebrows raised in defiance.

If Kagome had never came along, he could do it in the blink of an eye. Everything was easier in the days he had nothing to lose and lived like it, before she showed him how lonely it actually was and addicted him to her company.

Then she left. There was no going back to the way it was and InuYasha found himself hostage of all those stupid human feelings that always got under his skin. If he could get rid of them, letting her go wouldn’t seem so impossible.

For the first time a sketch of a plan started to unfold. He could find a way to lock his human side for good, like he had always intended. Even though the jewel was gone, maybe he could track down a witch powerful enough. It was a shot in the dark but the perspective of not caring for anything anymore was very appealing.

“Oh, don’t you dare!” She warned, in the bossy tone InuYasha inexplicably had become fond of years ago. He stood up and walked away, doing his best to ignore her begging him to stay.

When he got to the door, she bursted in front of him.

“Please, don’t. I had always loved this part of you so much.” She tenderly reached for his right cheek and InuYasha absentmindedly leaned on the touch he could not feel.

Fearing his knees would gave in or his mouth would howl the unfairness of it all, he made his way out, ready to search through the night for something — anything — to placate the sinking feeling that involved him.

“InuYasha, osuwari!”

InuYasha froze as the sound of the word he haven’t heard in so long echoed through his mind, waiting out of habit to be dragged by that familiar, invisible force. The Kotodama no Nenju, however, remained oblivious at the command. And how pathetic of him to be disappointed by that.

“I can’t let you do this.” Her lower lip trembled and she swallowed, eyes glowing with odorless tears. Real or not, InuYasha hated that the sight affected him just the same.

“There’s nothing you can do to stop me! If you gotta problem with it, then don’t be a whole fucking world away, how ‘bout that?” He roared, expecting she would either shout back or disappear for good. Instead, the illusion held his gaze, her face immutable.

“And what happens when I come back and you’re not here? What happens when I come back and you are not you anymore?” He tried to snort, but it came out sadder than the intended.

“You won’t.” InuYasha felt the weight of the words as soon as they sunk in and an insane fear that he could be right eclipsed what was left of his rationality. A cold night welcomed him on his way out.

“InuYasha.”

He refused to do anything beyond walking, every new step even more obstinate than the later, urging to get somewhere, anywhere.

And before he knew it, he was running.

“InuYasha!”

But not matter how hard he tried to shake her off, InuYasha just couldn’t. Not when her voice was the only thing he could focus on. Not when it was calling his name so hopelessly. It was only a matter of time before he gave in.

“InuYasha!”

“WHAT?” Breath as heavy as the silence that followed, he stopped to face the beautiful phantom he had conjured out of memories and longing, daring her to go on.

“If going on this stupid journey is what you really want to do, I don’t think you heading the right way.” Then, like the green on the autumn leaves, she faded away, leaving him alone to at last realize where his path had ended. Right, he thought, it has been three days, after all. InuYasha stood there, looking at the old well, wondering how long it would remain as empty as he felt.

A/N: and I would've gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for this demon dog and that episode of HIMYM which totally inspired this. You know the one.

[rayofspades]

Everyone in the World Forgot How Remakes and Sequels Work and I Have to Talk About It Because I’m Losing My Mind

I tried very, very hard to make this a coherent and somewhat organized post, but it’s still gonna sound like the ravings of a mad woman, so...prepare yourself.

Also, this isn’t gonna be an analysis of why remakes and sequels are so popular, because it’s exactly as simple as it seems: people like things that make them feel nostalgic and creators have caught on to this and realized that by remaking a familiar property, their new product has a built in fan base.

Great.

What I want to talk about is how the concept of remakes/reboots/sequels/whatever has been kind of destroyed. Both audiences and Hollywood have created these weird perceptions that are flooding the market in a way that is exhausting to audiences and confusing to creators. 

So, I’m here to discuss all the different types of remakes and why they work or don’t work and how this culture has been conditioned to support them regardless of quality.

Alright,

let’s do this.

Part 1: Cross-Media Remakes:

I find it somewhat impossible to criticize the existence to book--> movie remakes too much because they’re a vehicle for both creativity and audience expansion, even in cases where they’re motivated by money. Harry Potter and The Hunger Games made for some pretty solid movies, and that’s largely because those books just translated well to film. Obviously some changes had to be made to account for time constraints and visual storytelling, but they can get away with having a similar structure and still feeling entirely new based on the hard shift in presentation from book to film. 

I would make a similar argument for Marvel movies. From what I understand, those movies change more from their source material, and there are a lot of them, but it makes perfect sense to adapt comic books to reach a wider audience. I feel like the main reason people are becoming tired of Marvel movies is their overwhelming quantity, not so much the fact that they’re remakes. 

I would also love to talk about the popularity of GoT and LotR, but I don’t think I’m familiar enough with those franchises to properly discuss them, so I’ll leave that to someone else.

But there is something else I want to talk about.

While Harry Potter and The Hunger Games translated really well to film, the same isn’t true for some other cross media adaptations. 

Part 2: Adapt or Die:

In the late 70s, Stephen King wrote The Shining. I’ve read the book and I really enjoyed it, largely due to King’s writing style (the prose, the internal monologues, etc.)

The thing is, The Shining doesn’t really translate well into the film format; it’s really long and a lot of what makes it good is tied to its presentation.

So when Stanley Kubrick adapted The Shining into a film in the early 80s, he changed a lot.

Like

a lot.

The setting and characters remain pretty much the same, and the story follows similar beats, but certain events and themes have been drastically altered to the point where I would consider it a different story.

(Brief aside; the three most famous/iconic scenes from the film (”Here’s Johnny!” “All work and no play”, and Jack frozen in the snow) are ALL exclusive to the film.)

Regardless, both the movie and the book have maintained their own popularity with their own audiences. Both are considered good and both are considered classics. 

Although, from what I’ve heard, The Shining film did receive criticism back in the day for being needlessly unpleasant. Interesting. 

It’s a somewhat similar story with John Carpenter. If you ask people to list good remakes, 90% of the time people will list The Thing (1982). It’s practically the poster child for “hey, not all remakes are bad, guys.” 

In this case, Carpenter was working from both a previous movie (The Thing From Another World) and the prior novella (”Who Goes There?”). Carpenter’s film definitely borrows more from the novella, but it was obviously going to be compared more to the previous film, and it is  v e r y different from the previous film. Carpenter’s film (like The Shining) received criticism for how gross and unpleasant it was, but became the definitive version of The Thing and stood the test of time to become a horror classic.

Basically, if you need to change the original product when remaking it, do it. That is the best thing you could possibly do. It gives the creator a chance to actually create their own unique product that just happens to be based on or inspired by an existing property. This is actually a legitimately cool phenomenon; taking preexisting stories and altering them to fit a new cultural context or simply expanding and improving on ideas. It’s a similar concept to “old wives tales” and fairy tales, and how those stories are constantly changed and retold and in doing so become timeless. Gee I wonder if fairy tales are going to come up later in this post.

Part 3: Bad Changes are Bad

*Strums guitar* This one goes out to all audience members out there who have convinced themselves that bad remakes are bad because they’re too different from the original. *Strums guitar*

Stop. 

Please stop.

Look, comparing a remake to an original to showcase how bad the remake is is perfectly valid criticism. It can highlight how an idea can be botched when it’s not handled properly. Sure. That’s fine. I highly encourage people to compare the dialogue, characters, and world building of Avatar: The Last Airbender and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Last Airbender. It’s important to recognize how one story is an utter fucking masterpiece and one is a poorly told train wreck.

Here’s the thing:

people seem to criticize the film on the basis of “it’s different” and, I mean, sure. But it’s not just that it’s different, it’s that it’s different and....um....

bad? 

Like, one of the “complaints” I saw about the movie was that firebenders now need actual fire in front of them in order to bend it, and I consider that to be just a neutral change. It’s not really better or worse, it’s just different. And please don’t comment on this post with “skflsfjsf NO it’s because in the original firebenders used the SUN as their source of fire” like yeah I know I get it it’s still an inconsequential change.

Now, saying that the earthbenders being held on land as opposed to the sea is a bad change? Yes, that is valid criticism because it makes no goddamn sense within the movie’s universe and just makes everyone look dumb.

That movie is an utter fucking disaster. It’s poorly directed, it’s poorly written, the casting decisions are baffling, the acting is horrible, it’s poorly paced, and it’s bad.

It’s a bad movie.

I would apply the same logic to the new Death Note live action movie (the American one). Putting aside the racial controversy for a minute, I’m fine with changing things about the plot and structure to properly adapt it into a movie. But...yeah. The plot is bad. It just comes across as really dumb and weird.

So yeah, bad remakes are bad, but it’s not as simple as just being “different.”

If y’all keep complaining about remakes making changes, then you’re only encouraging the products I’m about to talk about in the next few Parts.

Arguably the worst and most prolific products of them all...

Part 4: Sometimes, Things That Are the Same.......Are Worse

Alright, I’m gonna start with a really extreme example, but it perfectly captures the essence of what I’m trying to say.

In 1998, Gus Van Sant made the incredibly confusing and brave(?) decision to remake Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. And I do mean “remake,” as in, it is shot for shot the same movie. It’s some sort of bizarre cinematic experiment.

I really like the original movie, so you would assume that, since this movie is literally the same movie, I would like it too.

I don’t.

No one does.

It’s the same movie but with worse performances.

It’s pointless.

Its existence is both unnecessary and confusing. Watching it was a bizarre experience that just made me wish I was watching the original.

(The best part about this is that 15 years after this remake came out, Carlton Cuse and Kerry Ehrin solved remakes forever by making Bates Motel; a contemporary prequel/reimagining of Psycho (1960). This show takes the characters and key events from the Hitchcock film and puts them in a different setting with an altered version of plot points. The creators openly and repeatedly state that they did not want to just remake Psycho and instead wanted to tell a tragedy/thriller using the framework of Psycho. To me, this perfectly encapsulates what remakes are supposed to be. It’s a good show and it’s severely underrated. Please go watch it, just ignore like half of season 3 and you’re gold.)

Unfortunately, the most common and (arguably) the most frustrating type of remake/sequel/reboot/whatever is the “let’s do the same thing...but different” type.  They can be a retread of the original plot or just take the title and elements of the original and use them while adding nothing substantially new.

Independence Day: Resurgence, Alien Covenant, The Thing (2011), and proooobably most direct sequels in any popular franchise (like the Transformers movies) fall under this category. 

The most notable ones in recent years are D i s n e y  r e m a k e s, but those get their own section.

Also, I’m hesitant to talk about these because it might just be a cultural difference, but it deeply bothers me when I see Japanese live action films that are based on anime and they just...keep everything the same? 

Like, in a live action remake of FMA, why the fuck wouldn’t you make up some grotesque and upsetting monster thing for the Nina Tucker scene? Why would you just use the design from the manga/anime??? WHY WOULDN’T YOU ADAPT IT TO MAKE IT WORK FOR LIVE ACTION?????????????????????????????????????

But hey, what do I know. It might just be a culture thing.

From what I’ve gathered and experienced, people have the following problems with these types of overly-faithful and/or pointless remakes:

1) They’re boring because it’s just a retread that feels inferior. 

2) They try to replicate elements of the original without understanding the actual appeal (aka the tangible details are addressed while the underlying ideas get sidelined or misunderstood).

3) They just...don’t adapt well.

Even if we were to take The Last Airbender and give it to a competent director who has a decently written script, that’s a case where you probably should have changed a lot more to properly make the jump from animated show to live action movie. Obviously, a lot of things would need to be cut or moved around in order to properly pace it.

I’m gonna talk more about this type of movie in a different section so for now let’s move on to the most recent remake craze that’s driving me up the wall.

Part 5: “I’ve got the power of remakes and anime on my side”

Fuck.

So part of the appeal of anime for me has always been its creativity. While some of it is pretty derivative when looking at specific genres, I’ve always found there to be a significantly wider range of creative ideas and concepts in anime than in any other medium. 

But now the industry’s running on fumes and someone let it slip that you can make a quick buck by just remaking a popular IP.

Fuck.

And I don’t wanna rag on the new-ish trend of readapting old anime for the sake of following the recently completed manga. This has had unbelievably successful results with FMA:B and Hunter x Hunter (2011) becoming massive critical hits (and two of my favourite shows).

(Although it hasn’t escaped my attention that studios have, in fact, used this gimmick to make half-baked and poorly crafted products with the knowledge that the existing fan base will buy that shit anyways. I’m looking directly at Berserk (2016) and Book of the Atlantic.)

But now they’re also adapting/sequel-ing shows purely for the sake of cashing in on the original (or adapting pre-made sequel products that were already made with that mindset in the first place).

Clear Card was boring as fuck and transparently existed to sell toys. 

I dropped Steins;Gate 0 after around 8 episodes when it become abundantly clear that it took the “let’s take elements of the old plot and just....do stuff” route without keeping any of what made the original cool and unique. 

The Evangelion movies seem really antithetical to the original show, and the third one feels like it was made by someone who thought they understood Evangelion and hated it. (But luckily the original is coming to Netflix next year so who even cares. Give me that 10/10 show.)

Although I will admit, Devilman Crybaby’s existence kind of falls under what I was saying earlier in this post. It’s one of many adaptations of an old manga that is changed substantially to fit the current cultural climate, with some unique aesthetic changes thrown in there for good measure.

It’s pretty okay.

But um...

Oh boy...

We’re about to get into it lads.

Part 6: Production IG Broke My Whole Brain. Brain Broken. Dead. No Brain.

Hooooooooo boy.

So, FLCL (also known as Fooly Cooly) is one of my favourite shows. In fact, it’s the only show I’ve ever watched that I have absolutely no problems with. None. Not even nitpicks. 

I’ve watched it 6 times, including with director’s commentary. It has an utterly perfect and unique/fluid aesthetic and I wish its visuals were just playing in my brain all of the time. It’s an arthouse comedy, which is a...rare (nonexistent?) genre, and it pulls it off perfectly. Its cool, its beautiful, its silly, its poetic, its creative, it has great themes that can reach both teenagers and adults, and there is literally nothing else on the planet like it.

So when it was announced that they were making a sequel 18 years later with a different cast of characters, I was...weirdly excited. Like a pavlovian happy response. I got even more excited after seeing the trailer.

Only a short while before the show aired did it dawn on me.

Wh...what are they doing?

From the trailer, I could see that they were taking some familiar plot elements (Medical Mechanica, Haruko, N.O., Atomsk, etc.) and adding some different protagonists.

Um

who gives a single fuck about the plot of Fooly Cooly?

The plot elements...don’t matter. It’s just a vehicle for cool and amazing things to happen.

So the show came out, and I saw more clips on youtube. While it is cool that they’re using different episode directors with some different art styles, the difference in quality between the directing and overall visual presentation is shockingly noticeable. I partially blame the fact that the anime industry isn’t as financially stable as it used to be, but this is also a Production IG show that’s based on an extremely popular property, so that’s barely an excuse. 

It mostly just looks like an anime with some cool stylistic elements, whereas the original looks stunningly perfect, dynamic, unique, and beautiful in every single solitary shot. 

I’ve read and watched many reviews of the sequel, both positive and negative, and from what I can tell it’s a textbook example of a “lets take components of the original and just...use them...while kind of missing the point and appeal of the original show.” Fooly Cooly is made of 100% intangible details. That thing is lightning in a bottle, and by taking the tangible details (plot elements and callbacks) and putting them in your show, you’ve already proven that you’ve completely and 100% missed the point.

Also:

this is the new show’s MAL score. While I consider anything between a 6 and a 7 to be “okay,” MAL scores tend to be higher since people rate on separate components of the show.

Like, a 6.7 on MAL is probably a 3 for everyone else. Yikes.

But honestly, the quality of the show is completely irrelevant, because that’s not the actual problem.

The only way to make a new FLCL product would be by accident. Have a director make a deeply personal product in which they do whatever the fuck they want. Have it be stylistically wild and make it look amazing. Create some sort of arthouse comedy with resonant themes and then just get Production IG to slap the FLCL brand on it to appeal to people’s nostalgia.

And that’s when it hit me.

That’s when my whole brain broke.

That accidental, spiritual sequel product can never happen. 

Because it looks like a huge risk to producers. 

Somehow, by remaking one of the most original and generation defining pieces of media ever created, Production IG proved that we do not live in a world where that type of product is allowed to exist. It can’t exist.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH.

Part 7: Disney and the Culture of Hype(rbole)

When I was young, my family owned two versions of Cinderella on film. The 1950 Disney animated version, and the 1997 live-action version with Brandy. 

Obviously, they’re the same story. They follow the same beats and have the same characters. However, there are some major differences in scenes, character portrayal and, most notably, the songs. Both are musicals, but with completely different soundtracks. 

If we want to go even further, we also owned Ever After, which is a completely different retelling of Cinderella with a whole new plot made for an older audience (and it’s also very good. Check it out)

In other words, I have nothing against live action Disney remakes, In fact, I think Disney movies based on fairy tales have become their own type of fairy tale; classic stories that are being constantly retold and reshaped to remain both relevant and timeless. It’s beautiful.

What the fuck is Disney doing in the 2010s?

Right now, the trend seems to be completely recreating older Disney classics, only making them live action and, um, “fixing” them.

If you want a detailed analysis of this, go watch the Lindsay Ellis video about Beauty and the Beast. I’ll briefly sum up, but you should definitely watch the video.

Look, I personally don’t hate Beauty and the Beast (2017), but once you notice that the Beast’s character arc doesn’t really exist...

and that there are a bunch of plot threads that either don’t go anywhere or are just kind of pointless...

and that there’s a weird trolley problem with Belle and the servants that completely botches the moral of the story....

and that by adding a bunch of logic to a fucking fairy tale you’re stripping it of its appeal and also just creating plot holes...

and that the singing isn’t nearly as good as the original...

and a bunch of other problems with acting and characterization....

you start to notice that “hey, they made the exact same movie....but worse.”

But, people are okay with that.

Most people didn’t even really notice. And that’s fine, like what you like. I enjoyed the movie well enough, even though I definitely prefer the original. But...I would probably also like a different retelling of Beauty and the Beast if it was a good product. Except, then it would also be...new? And potentially better? Or at least a lateral move.

I just watched the trailer for the new Lion King (2019), and it looks...kind of good. But even thinking this...I kind of long for death, because the entire trailer is just “hey, remember THIS from the original.”

I’m just...I’m just done. I’m burnt out. I’ve had it.

When are we gonna stop making the same movie over and over again?

Or when are the changes actually going to make sense? I’ve seen most of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and it just goes in the opposite direction of changing everything, but the changes are just.....uggggh. Not good. Bad changes are bad.

The thing with Disney is that they are also a hype generating machine, especially after purchasing both Marvel and Star Wars. I once heard someone say in a video that, back in the day, people were trying to make the best possible product so it would sell and get popular. People...don’t really need to do that anymore. If you get 304958493093 billion people excited about the next movie in their favourite 80s franchise by promoting and hyping the shit out of it, then you’ve already secured tons of butts in seats before the movie even comes out. Every movie is an event movie if it comes from Disney and is part of one of their big franchises. Every new thing based on an old thing is the new “best thing.”

Even a new sequel that I actually liked, The Incredibles 2, was weirdly hyped up. (Also, even though I liked it, it didn’t escape my notice that there were a bunch of plot problems with the villain and the script proooobably needed another draft. Just saying.)

So, the big questions are, in this current culture, are we ever going to get another original sci-fi property, like the 80s Star Wars trilogy? Are we ever going to see a boom in a genre outside of Disney owned properties? Are we ever going to get another insane, passion-project smash hit like Fooly Cooly?

No. I don’t think so.

Not in the current state of things. 10 years from now? Maybe. 20 years from now? Probably. 

Part 8: Concluding Thoughts

I don’t know, man.

People are still making original things, but they’re not as popular and/or creative as they need to be to change where we are right now.

The very existence of Get Out does lend me some hope. It was a creative and original movie and a very large audience of people (including myself) really liked it. 

Yay.

More of this please. 

So, um, yeah.

I’m going to go watch Fooly Cooly for the 7th time and scream into a void.

Mmmm bye.

[lydiasonlinelog]

Research Point

Sato Shintaro

Source: http://sato-shintaro.com/work/night_lights/index.html (1)

09 Night Lights by Sato Shintaro (1997-1999)

Sato Shintaro is a Japanese photographer who often uses the artificial lights all around him to capture the atmosphere in his birth place, Tokyo.

In his photographic series ‘Night Lights’ he has captured the chaotic streets of Tokyo and Osaka at night. It illustrates that night photography doesn’t have to be dark. He believes that it is a good idea to have exposures quite high so you avoid isolated pools of light within a black frame.

He has avoided the more aesthetically pleasing locations such as the beach and the well known “subcenters” and focussed instead on what he calls ‘the everyday disorder of the streets.’

These photographs are brightly lit and normally filled with the hustle and bustle of life, but Shintaro has removed the people and the purpose of the light is somewhat lost.

The light standing alone reveals a view of the well known streets from a less familiar perspective.

I think Shintaro’s photographs are very effective at doing this because they seem to be illuminating a lack of life on the streets. Like he says, the point of the lights becomes obsolete if nobody is there to see them or be guided by them.

There are 43 photographs in this series and each one of them beautifully represents the artificial and neon qualities of the available light in the busy streets of Japan. By capturing this he has allowed the viewer to step into these streets and have their own look around, undisturbed by others.

Rut Blees Luxemburg

Sources: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/blees-luxemburg-viewing-the-open-p78570 (2)

https://www.bjp-online.com/2018/02/rut-blees-luxemburg-modern-project-liebeslied/ (3)

Viewing the Open by Rut Blees Luxemburg (1999)

Rut Blees Luxemburg is a German photographer who works mostly within London. She spends time exploring the changing city at night from busy office blocks to abandoned buildings and she captures these from unusual perspectives.

Her series Liebeslied: My Suicides (Meaning lovesong), of which Viewing the Open is a part of, was a movement of the photographer from photographing buildings to exploring an immersion in urban space. The photographs in this series mostly show natural elements, such as water and nature, illuminated by artificial light.

This series and its romantic title indicates the photographer’s changing relationship with her environment. In a way, her work is a lovesong dedicated to where she lives and works.

This particular photograph uses the qualities of the artificial light to make something unremarkable become interesting. There are sulpherous yellow and orange tones which light this piece of ground and this adds texture and beauty to the image.

Elizabeth Manchester for Tate comments, “Blees Luxemburg has transformed a scene of urban decay into an abstract study of colour and texture through the use of light, a subject traditionally central to photography.”

I agree with Manchester here that Blees Luxemburg has used her large format camera to create something special. She has captured something similar to an abstract painting in that there are areas of different depths of colour. The reflections from the water and cracks in the concrete also add a strong emphasis on texture.

The colours in this photograph are mostly earthy tones, but you are still able to distinguish that they are artificial which is a clever visual paradox. They also hold an eerie quality, as if something extraterrestrial has come to visit.

Brassai

Sources: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2011/08/interview-brassai-with-tony-ray-jones.html (4)

Conversations with Picasso by Brassai, 1999 (5)

The Eiffel Tower at Twilight by Brassai (1932)

This photograh is part of a photobook published in 1933 titled Paris by Night only three years after Brassai began to take up photography.

Brassai immediately took up night photography as soon as he was loaned a camera because this kind of photography excited him.

When talking about his inspiration, Brassai said, “Perhaps I was influenced a little in Paris by Night by the painter Georges de la Tour with his candlelight paintings which gave me an idea of what things can produce at night, the hidden things and concealed lights.”

Many photographers believe that you should only work with available light but Brassai disagreed with this and thought it was important to light the subject if necessary.

Emerson, the British writer and photographer, awarded Brassai a medal for his photobook and included him in his writing about the history of photography because he believed that Brassai showed that photography could be art.

Picasso was fascinated by artificial light and his favourite photographer was Brassai. Rather than just capturing what he saw, Brassai used his own artistic voice to convey his vision of Paris.

Brassai said that the light he had at night was ‘magnificent’ and he preferred it even to natural light. He believed that the light set off every object and the shadows helped to form them.

When I look at this photograph of the Eiffel Tower I see the classic romantic setting that Paris is often made out to be. The artificial night time light here has illuminated the tower’s reflection in the water and this leads your eyes down from the bridge and to the boats. These boats represent to me, that Paris is not just a romantic getaway and that people live and work here. The train across the bridge shows the constant movement of people even in the apparent tranquillity of the night.

Philip-Lorca diCorcia

Sources: The Photograph as Contemporary Art by Charlotte Cotton, 2014, pgs. 20-21, 46 (6)

Head #7 by Philip-Lorca diCorcia, 2000

Philip-Lorca diCorcia is a photographer who I have researched previously, but I think is more relevant to my work now than ever before.

In his series Heads, he placed artificial flash lighting on a scaffolding construction above a New York street. The movement of people below prompted diCorcia to trigger the flash and photograph the illuminated person within it using a long lens camera.

The people he captured do not know they are being photographed and therefore aren’t posed like they might be for a regular portrait.

The result of this allows us to look at the ‘normal’ which would ordinarily pass us by without the subjects being controlled or influenced in any way by the photographer.

The use of artificial light here is fundamental to the process of the photographer. If it weren’t for his flash, diCorcia wouldn’t be able to capture the individual passers by and highlight specific subjects.

Having looked at his work several times, I find diCorcia’s work fascinating. Usually staged in natural lighting, this series is somewhat different from his normal, but is still a sensetive and thoughtful look at portraiture.

The other work I have looked at with artificial lighting focusses on places or landscapes and that’s why diCorcia is so interesting here, because his work is out of the ordinary.

Studio lighting is a common way to use artificial lighting for portraiture, but diCorcia has been that bit more creative and gone out in public with his lighting to capture something truly unique.

Hand written notes and print-outs

Bibliography

Shintaro, S. (n.d.). Night Lights. Retrieved from Sato Shintaro: http://sato-shintaro.com/work/night_lights/index.html

Manchester, E. (2003, February). Rut Blees Luxemburg. Retrieved from Tate: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/blees-luxemburg-viewing-the-open-p78570

Abel-Hirsch, H. (2018, February 23). London: A Visual Love Song. Retrieved from British Journal of Photography: https://www.bjp-online.com/2018/02/rut-blees-luxemburg-modern-project-liebeslied/

The ASX Team. (2011, August 19). Tony Ray-Jones Interviews Brassai” Pt. I (1970). Retrieved from American Suburb X: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2011/08/interview-brassai-with-tony-ray-jones.html

Brassai. (1999). Conversations with Picasso. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Cotton, C. (2014). The Photograph as Contemporary Art Third Edition. London: Thames & Hudson World of Art.

[cassatine]

So my copy of the TLJ artbook hasn’t arrived yet, but thanks to @ashesforfoxes​ I was able to stare at the concept art of the pages from the Jedi texts and ramble some. 

The script

Seems to be an alphabet of 30+ letters. The actual letters seem to take inspiration from several more or less ancient writing systems. I don’t know how it was designed, but a good half of the letters have simple shapes for which it’d be easy to find correspondences in a bunch of real writing systems. It’s a pretty good choice, gives an air of familiarity but not too much.

Some of the symbols associated with the illustrations do not occur in the text. Could be a set of numerical or symbols, astronomical, zodiacal, something something?

The dots between the letters are interpuncts I think. Interpuncts are word dividers, signalling the boundary between one word and the next (the use of spaces is far from universal – some writing systems are scriptio continua, they don’t use word dividers at all, a bunch of ancient scripts just used vertical lines, in some latin texts there can be multiple interpuncts to indicate the length of the pause, etc). Some of the pages in the Jedi book do use spaces instead, which is interesting.

It’s not fully random. There’s repeated words (one no less than seven times) and letter associations, but it really doesn’t look like a text in English with swapped letters + a few more phonemes either. I don’t think it’s meant to be deciphered anyway.

A note on the hand / calligraphy style – it’s relatively thick and kind of blocky, and probably an aesthetic choice considering there’s a lot of thinner lines in the illustrations.

The other books are probably written in different scripts (well if there’s anything inside the props - maybe they only did one book?); this is the best picture of the spines I could find and it’s still crap but there’s two decently visible scripts and none looks like the one in the concept art pages.

The manuscript

Generous use of space. Either the Jedi of old weren’t worried about their paper supply and/or its cost, either it’s a statement.

Not in so bad a state, considering the age it must have and the fact that it’s been kept in a damn tree for a number of years. 

Most of the text in in black, fading to brown, so in our-universe it’d probably be some kind of iron gall ink. Checks with the state of the manuscript as seen in the movie (brittle pages). But who knows what weird shit the Jedi of old used for pigments?

Red ink seems to be used for rubrication - it’s mostly a medieval thing, scribes would use red ink to write a header, signal the beginning of a section, emphasize something, etc. In The Book it seems to be mostly used in this way - the sixth page’s framed text is not rubrication but the goal is the same, emphasis.

Blue and gold (ink or paint, not actual gold leaf) are also used to emphasize parts of the text, words or standalone letters. Some seem to be initials, but others stand apart from the text. Both colors are also used for the illustrations, along with a bit of white. The red ink is only used in one illustration.

The gold is also used at the top of some pages or in-between paragraphs, with series of rectangular shapes, seemingly to mark different sections. Or it could be for the aesthetics. For a moment I thought it looked like Morse code, but i don’t really think it’s carrying meaning of its own.

The illustrations

The blue and gold illustrations seem to be cosmological/astronomical in nature. The red one on the final page is... different. The use of colors in illustrations may be codified somewhat, though the sample is too small to know for sure.

The first page is the one seen in TLj, without the “spent thousands of years in a tree” option. Looks like some kind of star chart to me, without the actual stars and with the Jedi Order’s symbol slapped on top. Or something like zodiac quadrants maybe. Compare to:

The compass of mystery

The design of the Lothal Temple grounds (x)

According to the artbook, Hidalgo and Chee shared a six-pages PDF of “ancient symbols” of the Jedi with the TLJ creative team, which informed “the shape of the library tree; the Jedi text covers and page designs; the temple’s celestial carving; and the reflecting pool mosaic.” I have no idea whether this was included - but both the TLJ symbols and this are informed by the same preexisting worldbuilding, so have it nonetheless. 

But really, five pages out of six have space-themed illustrations, most of which seem to deal with lunations. Second and fifth page’s illustrations seem to represent the waxing and waning phases of a moon. The little one at the bottom of the second page has a Nebra sky disc feel to me, stylistically, but it clearly represents moon phases. The other, bigger illustration of the second pages features another moon phases pattern, inscribed in a circle divided in two (maybe more moon imagery, a full one and a half one). The pattern of thinner lines could be random but they could also be more star-charty stuff or zodiac thingy. It could be some kind of representation of astronomical observations with a more symbolic representation slapped on top. Third page is in the same vein, and fourth page seems to represent orbits? Or more phases stuff.

I’d be surprised if any of it was, you know, scientifically accurate in any way.

The final page has something different, a geometric pattern in red. A six pages sample isn’t enough to know if it stands out in the books’ illustrations, but it does compared to the other ones we have. It could be purely for the pretty. Or not. It’s too abstract and symbolic and generic for me to hazard a guess. (If I was to, it kinda looks like cells)

Okay so that’s it for the basic observations. Now comes the real brainwank. Starting with the context. [Insert rant about context being key]

TLJ confirmed the Jedi originated on Ahch-to, which answers one question, but opens others - if this happened before the advent of space travel, it would most likely mean the early Jedi were indigenous to Ahch-to, i.e. a species that evolved locally, a cultural entity whose religious beliefs would later spread. If the Jedi started post-space travel, then it’s still possible they formed in relative isolation, but more likely that they either started out on a multicultural substrate and/or were in contact with other cultural entities. Very different origin stories.

We know there is a mythological or historical Prime Jedi. Probably a foundational figure, actual historicity but heavily mythologized. Could be the first (or recognized as such) to have used the Force, or the first to have explored it systematically and have explicited its rules, could be Space Jesus gathering disciples or Space Buddha of the balanced life

And how do the books fit in that? Were they written on Ahch-to? Later, after the Jedi started expanding? Do they predate the Sith Schism? We know they were foundational texts for the Jedi Order so they most likely do. We also know Luke recovered them during his quest for Force knowledge and brought them to Ahch-to. He does not seem to have actually read them in depth, if we believe Ghost Yoda, so the lessons he gives Rey are unlikely to be very representative of the books’ contents. That’s pretty much it.

Looking at the scripts and the bindings, they’re varied enough that they could come from different geographical and historical contexts. But then again it’s possible the texts themselves come from the same source and that the books Luke recovered are translated copies.

Another question would be: what are these texts, actually? Religious treatises? Religious cosmology? Histories of the early Jedi and their philosophies? A life of the Prime Jedi? Observations on the nature of the Force? Etc.

So back to the concept art pages we do have - they represents six pages of a much longer text, so it’s a small sample, and there’s no way to know how representative of the full book it is, even less of the full corpus of works in the Tree Library. 

But due to the illustrations, and because this is fiction so I can just wildly speculate, I think this specific book could be some kind of a cosmological treatise, hinting to the influence the observation of the rules behind the movements of astronomical bodies could have had on the formation of the early Jedi’s beliefs. 

Bear with me. TL:DR, religious and scientific thought weren’t always (generally accepted as) different realms of knowledge and rationality. Historically, they have the same roots, observation of the natural world and its cycles - observation taught us what to expect from the world, allowed early cultural groups and societies to find order and predictability in it. The divine comes in to explain the rules behind these cycles, because knowing what to expect is one thing, but we also need to know why, to make sense of the rules.

See: a fuckton of myths, early astronomy and astronomy being the same thing, alchemy and chemistry, thunderstones, the atomists and the presocratics, lbr literally anything before the Advent of Modern (Culturally Western) Rationality

Back to the GFFA, because otherwise I’m going to keep rambling, and the Jedi. And most importantly, the Force, i.e. what’s behind the rules in the GFFA. The Jedi never had a God Is Dead moment, because why would they? The modern Jedi Order was certainly not anti-science, and their understanding of the Force and its role in the natural world probably changed over time, but they would never have had reason to reassess its existence. 

I’m losing the point - the art in the concept art pages, imo, illustrate observations of natural cycles, definitely lunations, maybe other space stuff. Chances are the Jedi would not only see the Force as the root mechanism behind it all, but also, at least in their early days, believe these observable, external manifestations of the cosmic rules held deeper meaning relative to the nature of the Force.

As a final note because I think I’m mostly done with the bullet points, the lunations and the waxing and waning moons that make up most of the imagery in the concept art pages (and the fact that Ahch-to has two moons maybe but I’m not going there today) could point to that type of waxing-waning cycle being important in early Jedi thought, even mean that their view of the balance between light and dark followed that cycle.

[chuckling-chemist]

Happy Freedom Festivals, Pregame Edition! ((1/2))

((A 4th of July inspired piece for fantrolls. It’s in 2 parts to break up the story a bit, the first being the set up of the event/morning thereof and the second part involving the festival will be posted later. Also I split it up since, on its own, this still works as a cute, fluffy slice of life piece, so like, I feel less bad if I don’t finish it completely.))

((forward==>))

“Good morning Dontoc! How’d you ssssleep?”

Dontoc glanced over to the sound of the voice as he walked in the kitchen, smiling wryly at the petite tealblood pacing around the kitchen, wrapped granola bar in her hand. Her hair, normally pulled back in some kind of messy bun, fell down past her face and bounced around her head. She hadn't changed into any sort of casual wear, opting instead for a purple night shirt and black sweats.

“Would you like the honest answer or the nice answer, dear?” he asked.

They both knew the honest answer. Dontoc had found Pallia working in her lab upon his return from Careen’s in the daytime hours, watching a clear liquid overtop a viscous purple one bubbling inside a round bottom flask. He had to coax her to get any kind of sleep whatsoever, eventually winning her over with reminding her she's done the same for him...after requesting to assist her.

He’s almost certain it was past 3 pm by the time they went to their respiteblocks.

She stopped pacing to look at him threw askew half-moon frames. “Well you're sscertainly chipper for no ssssleep.”

“I could say the same for you,” Dontoc said as he took a seat. He sniffed the air, resisting to frown at the lack of breakfast smells.  “Unless...coffee? But I do not smell it.”

“Oh no I'm steadily running on sleep deprivation and excitement.” She grinned. He tried to ignore the small warmth it sent him. “Coffee sounds good though. Want some?”

Dontoc took a seat in a rickety chair, watching Pallia dart around the kitchen looking for everything needed. “Such a drink sounds exquisite. Though perhaps we should wait for Aisral. I do not wish to see her in the mornings without caffeine.”

“Aisral can make her own coffee,” Pallia huffed. She pulled down two ceramic white mugs from a low cabinet, setting both next to him. “It's not my fault she's decided to spend the morning of one of the biggest festivals of Sandyhorn this side of anything vaguely related to 12th Perigee working,” she said.

“I feel like they are all the biggest festival,” he said. 

“Oh no. You haven’t seen this one,” she leaned on the counter to face him, arms crossed. “The night Sandyhorn celebrates the turnaround from a slaver’s plantation hellhole to a landdwelling haven for tealbloods and down. What it is now.”

He did know, somewhat. Sandyhorn was a strange location for such a city of lowbloods, existing right off the coast in a surprisingly good location for tobacco and sugar trade, even with the extreme weather. While too sandy for most seadwellers too live comfortably (most seadwellers preferred complete underwater living to anything to do with the land), undoubtedly highbloods could and once lived comfortably. He could identify it even by the architecture. And now they just...didn’t. Sure, occasionally you’d run into a cobaltblood or indigoblood, but purplebloods were unheard of, and Dontoc could count the seadwellers living there on his fingers. But he never got much in the way of a finer description for what happened and how it stayed, only that it involved multiple slave revolts and the formation of a free port somewhere in the sand bar.

“To be fair, I have not yet seen the 12th Perigee festivities, what with Careen’s ball. And the one after that - the Feast of Fools? - the two of us were out of town for a whole week.” He ran a hand through his hair, guilt washing over him in waves. He had wanted to go to those events he just had...prior engagements. “Why did you not go to her ball, anyway? I never asked. Ah, if I can ask, that is.”

She shrugged nonchalantly. “Not my thing. Can't dance. No one I like there. Drunken debauchery sounds more fun.” She climbed up onto the counter top and sat on her knees, now only just barely able to reach the top shelf. “All we have is a dark roast. That okay?”

“If it has caffeine, honestly I will be satisfied,” he admitted. “Just watching you is exhausting me.”

“Oh, uh...right.” She slowly slid off the countertop, bag of ground coffee beans in hand. “Sorry. I'm just excited.”

“As do many things,” he said.  “And normally I enjoy it but…”

She let out a short laugh as the coffee pot started up, bubbling just loud enough for Dontoc to register it started up. “When you're not running on three hours after working?”

Another wry smile, this one seen and returned by Pallia. “Something like that, yes. If you constitute what we did as working,” he said. His fins fluttered lightly at the memory of the day prior. It was working in the most technical sense. If that counted.

“As much ‘working’ as Aisral is doing right now, I'm sure,” she said. She slid into the chair across from him, making a face at the statement. “The casual version, of course. I just realized that sounded far worse out loud than in my head.”

Dontoc quirked an eyebrow. The air quotes, while not mimed out, could certainly be heard in her voice. “Mayola?”

It felt almost planned, the way the other seadweller, wrapped up in a fluffy teal bathrobe that barely covered her, pranced into the room and plopped herself next to him, sprawled between two chairs despite being smaller than Dontoc. Her mid-length dark hair gathered in wet clumps that left a trail of water droplets behind her. Aisral shuffled shortly behind, dressed in her standard pants suit outlined in accents of teal and fuschia. She walked immediately toward the kettle and started boiling water, grabbing a few teabags and ramen packets nearby it.

“The one and motherfucking only,” Mayola said.  She sniffed the air. “Oh and coffee! Perfect start to gettin’ drunk in the name of freedom.”

Dontoc had to resist rolling his eyes. Pallia didn't even bother. “You guys can have the next brew. I only put enough in for the myself and Dontoc.”

Mayola snorted, all interest suddenly gone. “Yeah, okay. Whatever. I'll just go buy some lemon squeeze juice at the festival anyways.”

“You can still have coffee--”

“I gotta meet up with Nivs anyhow. Seein’ as I'm seadwelling, I need some kinda excuse t’be down there.”

“You never needed an excuse before,” Aisral muttered, still not looking up. “Unless you feel a sudden urge of responsibility?”

The coffee pot let out a soft ding, signifying its completion. Something Pallia didn't notice at all.

“Responsibility? Nah. Just settin’ a good example for our new seadwellin’ friend here.” Mayola roughly clapped him on the shoulder, thoughts of coffee suddenly gone and replaced with Careen's warnings of volatile lowbloods roaming the streets to attack nobility and how he should stay inside.

“Uh...really? I, ah, well...from what I was told that does, that does not make--”

“Oh come off it. Mayola you're gonna psssych him out and Valeba'sss not here,” Pallia said. With a kind smile his direction, she added, “You'll be fine. Culling of highbloodsss would make the event too high profile.”

He nodded, anxiety only somewhat quelled. “Ah, yes. Right. Right. Thank you, Pallia. Which, by the way-”

“Hey wait who the hell’s Valeba?” Mayola asked. She shifted positions to only take up one chair now, but lounged as if it were a full throne.

“Valeba is my moirail.” He looked over, noticing the obvious confusion with her fins twitching violently enough they seemed to shudder and added, “You did not possibly think Pallia and I were--”

“No, course not,” she said airily. “I know Shorty’s quad situation like the back’o my hand--” he looked at Pallia for confirmation, who just shrugged noncommittally “--name sounds familiar 's all.”

“Excuse me if that sounds well ah...vague,” he said. Looking back at Pallia, he said, “Also, you should know--”

“Goddamnit!!”

Everyone swiveled their head toward the sound of the commotion. Aisral slammed down a large teacup, dark liquid sloshing all over the counter. “This is the last time I run on no sleep!”

Without missing a beat, Pallia called out, “I'm not cleaning that.”

“What even did you do?” Dontoc asked. “You were brewing tea correct?”

“Tea does not have ramen inside it!” Aisral snapped, flailing her arms about wildly.

Oh.

Dontoc couldn't resist a quiet chuckle at the angry troll in the corner, exchanging a glance at Pallia as he did so. She snickered behind her hand, but it was still plainly audible as a distinct hiss. Mayola didn't even bother hiding it, chortling loudly in the chair.

“Oh my God, I cannot believe you did it again!”

“Says the troll who is the reason I did not sleep because she just realized I am one of the only trolls in existence who actually files her claws,” Aisral retorted.

“And I'm out,” Pallia said. She stood up, leaving her mug on the table. “I'll get some breakfast at the festival. Do you wanna come, Dontoc? I'm guessing you don't have plans for the night.”

“I ah...well, yes, Careen is refraining from the celebrations,” he said. “She believes it to be dangerous for highbloods.”

Her exact words had been, “I for one refuse to partake in something so beneath myself if it's already a danger to my physical, social and mental health,” followed by chastising him for even showing any interest, but there was no reason anyone in the room had to know that.

“Princess thinks engagin’ with a hiveless troll professionally is 'dangerous’,” Mayola sneered. With a noticeable glare from Pallia, she hastily added, “But maybe she's different 'round ya, since you're not another heiress 'n shit. And still a seadweller. Ya gotta get a circle of friends like that somehow.”

“Perhaps,” he said. She probably wasn't. A little under a sweep in their relationship had soured it greatly for him, and if her lack of affection over the winter until Red Quadrant Appreciation Day in spring indicated anything, she likely felt the same. But there was no reason to dump that here. Really, breaking things off now would result in the least amount of hurt feelings for both parties. “She is quite friendly to those in her circle. All five or six of them”

Pallia cleared her throat loudly. “Uh, right. Well, whether you're coming or not, I need to get into actual clothes. I'm not gonna force you to go if you don't want to,” she said. She turned on her heel, hair swishing behind her as she started walking off.

Dontoc sighed, scurrying after her as she strode down the hallway. Was she...upset? Probably not. Pallia had generally been open with him, down to mentioning anything between her and Careen was personal and had nothing to do with him. He loved (liked, he told himself, he liked) that about her: he knew where he stood with her and never really was stuck guessing the way he was back in schoolfeeding.

Maybe he just struck a nerve. He could only imagine how annoyed he'd be if Pallia engaged romantically with someone who tormented him in his younger sweeps -- in particular a red or pale romance. Sure, he's polite enough in general and he could hold his tongue, but even he could only go on for so long talking about them before he'd have to leave the room.  

And that was ignoring the flush crush. He couldn't even imagine how the introduced variable would affect things

“No, no, do hold on! I would love to go with you. I-I, well I quite frankly, I do not know when I last went to such an event? There was one some time...some time ago. It was some sort of seasonal one. If this one is bigger, well, it would certainly be an experience,” he said breathlessly. “Also I truly am sorry, I do hope I did not upset you.”

She shook her head with a sharp-toothed grin. “You're fine. Had to get dressed anyway and Mayola always hogs the meatblock when she's here,” she said.

He let out a breath he didn't realize he held. “Oh. So it was not me?”

“Not at all.”

“Good. Good! Oh I was afraid I, ah...well...it is obvious I suppose.” He ran a shaky hand through his hair. “So ah, this festival then? Is it bigger than the one when I arrived in early summer?”

“Well yeah of course! That was the…” she stopped in place, right in the middle of the hallway, putting an enclosed hand over her mouth. “Oh God you've been here for over a sweep now and I barely even noticed.”

“You forgot about the flowers I gave you?” he asked. “Those were for our ah....well, anniversary is a bad term, I suppose, but...yes. That” 

She shook her head as she started to walk again, slower now that Dontoc followed her. “No. I remember those. I just didn't realize...huh. That long.” She stopped in front of her door, swinging the door open and stepping inside. “Guess I'm just pleasantly surprised how long you stuck around.”

Dontoc’s fins twitched pleasantly and he smiled. “I am glad I stuck around,” he said. He took a step inside, immediately stopped by a gentle hand on his chest.

“Unless Careen is somehow okay with you seeing me change, I'd suggest no,” she said, a light smirk playing on her face. “Plus I'm not sure I want you watching.”

His face burned. His gaze dropped from her and right to the floor, while his hands went to fiddle a non-existent bowtie. “I, ah, oh yes ah...right! I uh, my apologies for, well, not--not thinking and--”

“Dontoc?” Pallia said, her voice light. “It's fine. Go get dressed. I'll meet you at your room.” With a reassuring smile, she slowly shut the door as he turned away. He was only a few steps away as the door softly clicked into place.

Dontoc stopped. Something was missing. “Pallia?” he called out, hoping she could hear him.

No answer. He walked back up to door, giving a few, louder-than-usual raps so she could hear. “Pallia?”

He could hear swift footsteps, then a crack in the door as her head poked out. He kept his gaze pointedly at her eyes, refusing to even possibly look any further down and entertain the possibility she wasn't dressed appropriately. Such wouldn't be proper.

“Hm?” There was no annoyance in her voice, only curiosity.

He gave her a sheepish smile as color tinted his cheeks. “I am sorry to say, but I do believe we forgot the coffee.”

((1/2))

((Like what I write? Buy me a coffee!))

[cyberpoetryballoon]

Instagram's Jelly Cake Revival Turns Vintage Camp Into Modern Art

Jelly first came to Lexie Park in a dream. In her over-10-year career as a fashion designer, Park felt a pull toward texture and transparency, and as she’s transitioned into food over the past year, those qualities drew her to jelly. She wondered what she could suspend and preserve inside a translucent, wobbling mass.

Now, Park has become one of Instagram's most iconic jelly artists. Through Nunchi, which she has developed into a full-time food business, she makes colorful, glassy-looking cakes that her followers fawn over for their pastel hues and glints of sparkle. Often, they have alternating layers of cloudy and clear confection, or pieces of fruit, jelly flowers, and even cartoon bunny heads floating inside. "I feel like [it's] psycho but cute," said Park, of the aesthetic that has earned her collaborations with brands like Nike (a swoosh floating atop tiers of baby pink and blue jelly) and the razor company Billie.

Jelly cakes by Lexie Park/@eatnunchi | Photos courtesy Lexie Park

Not all of Park's work is so dainty. "When I first started, all my previous cakes and posts were a little bit crazier and uglier, in a sense," she said. Her cakes for commissions are primarily cute, but her more experimental jellies have an edge: a fish sliced into four pieces drifts in a jelly aquarium; Pedialyte forms caviar spheres, served in a tin; blobs surround a skin-colored baby, as though it's gestating in an alien womb. "I'm very extreme in my personality, so I don't want to just stick to one [style]—it's really based on how I feel."

In its growing Instagram niche, jelly art is all about duality. Jelly cakes can be adorable and pastel, like a child's toy—or they can be grotesque, making familiar foods look inexplicably foreign. Duality exists in the format of jelly itself: Whether it's made with animal-based gelatin or seaweed-derived agar agar, jelly looks artificial enough to seem almost inedible, and to some, there's still a knee-jerk aversion to Jell-O on premise alone. Despite jelly's niche revival on Instagram and groups like Show Me Your Aspics, which has accumulated more than 42,000 members since 2016, some people still feel that technicolor Jell-O and jiggling, vintage-inspired molds of meat are pieces of the past that they would rather forget.

Jelly cakes by Lexie Park/@eatnunchi | Photos courtesy Lexie Park

But jelly isn't just a medium; it's a state of mind. It engulfs an object and solidifies, making anything set inside visible yet distant, like insects trapped in amber. A photo is a reminder, but jelly is an encapsulation; it has the power to literally suspend items in time and place. The perfect California produce that Park gathers for her cakes, like family farm-grown peaches that taste like "nature's candy," stay pristine in jelly, twinkling in the sun as perfect as they were when Park cut them. For the food artists exploring the scene, jelly can call back the past and capture the present.

Park left fashion for food when she turned 30 as part of a "quarter-life crisis" that prompted her to take risks. "I wanted to try something completely new, but I think I was also holding a part of my youth," she said. She drew from her warm memories of the Sanrio characters and Morning Glory stationery of her childhood when thinking through her jelly cakes. Look at a Little Twin Stars design, and suddenly, the soft shapes and colors of a Nunchi cake carry a pleasing nostalgia. "I was thinking, what will make me feel like a kid again?" she explained.

Jelly cakes by Kiki Cheung/@murder.cake | Photos courtesy Kiki Cheung

Kiki Cheung, who runs the Hong Kong-based cake studio Murder Cake, feels similarly soothed by jelly. As a result of the political protests last year, Cheung felt exhausted; baking cleared her head. Now, her cherub cakes are her most recognizable work: A glossy layer of jelly surrounds a wistful three-dimensional baby angel, pale like a Victorian cameo portrait. "I always imagine my cake is a pond," Cheung said. "There is a cherub antique floating on the water. Perhaps it creates an extreme sense of peace and calm." (The idea of calm might seem dichotomous with a bakery named for murder, but this is because cake is "born to be murdered," Cheung said, unable to be eaten without being destroyed.)

Working as a fashion editor, Cheung is surrounded by eye-catching visuals, and though she loves color, she struggles to incorporate it into her clothing. Jelly cakes, however, give her countless ways to express that creativity, so her work drifts between "kawaii, gothic, vintage, and girlish" depending on her mood or on customer requests.

At times, Cheung tags her cakes with phrases like #uglyfoodisbeautiful. Though the ugliness of Cheung's smooth, pleasingly shaped jellies is debatable, it's a nod to the way a friend once described her work. For this reason, too, Cheung sees her jelly art as a freeing break from the "aesthetic fatigue" of seeing beautiful things. "There is no boundary between pretty and ugly," she said. "Perhaps occasionally we need some 'ugly' things to refresh our tired eyes."

Jelly cakes by Laura Taylor/@laurctay | Photos courtesy Laura Taylor

Still, if Park and Cheung's cakes are dreamlike, like preservations of pleasant moments, then other designs in the Instagram jelly scene might be more like nightmares. A 2014 Globe and Mail piece about the aspic comeback in high-end restaurants concluded that when done right, aspics could be a "culinary horror show" no longer. But what if you want to capture that sense of disgust?

Laura Taylor works in public relations for the fashion industry by day, but she started making jelly cakes as a hobby after discovering her grandmother's vintage Jell-O molds, finding that ideas tend to come to her as she's falling asleep. Once, she suspended hard-boiled eggs in clear jelly, with each section of the mold magnifying and refracting a chalky yolk. She's made jelly in the shape of a koi fish, with lychee fruit inside, and a red jelly cake spiked with yellow plastic fingers, each with a pointy red fingernail.

Jelly is intriguing because it's different from what people see in daily life, Taylor said, though the medium calls to mind the Jell-O she made with her family as a kid. Jelly can look artificial and gross, mirroring a movement within fashion toward the weird and grotesque, she added. "When I saw that people were updating jelly cakes and doing them for modern times and making them super weird and cool, I was, for some reason, super attracted to it," she said. "I think that kind of nostalgic part of it threw me into it a little bit as well."

Jelly cakes by Jasmin Seale/@jasnims | Photos courtesy Jasmin Seale

In Australia, graphic designer and photographer Jasmine Seale makes jelly cakes that are more art project than they are edible, drawing inspiration from "gross aspic recipes" and using ingredients she's scrounged from the garbage or found rotting in the fridge. Currently living out of a van, Seale is trying to find ways to make jelly on the road. Her work, posted on the Instagram page @jasnims, is the type that sears itself into your memory: Coarse, curly hair shakes within pale yellow jelly and falls on the ground with a plop, and ramen noodles dangle in blue goo into which Seale inexplicably inserts a grubby MacBook charger.

For Seale, jelly cakes are about the feeling and the format—but not so much the taste. Her worst so far, she said, was a pickle brine jelly with piped mashed potato that required so much gelatin to hold its shape that it had the mouthfeel of rubber. Since much of her work is made with garbage, Seale doesn't usually eat it. "I sometimes give the top a little lick to see how it tastes but it's never nice," she said. When it comes to her work, revulsion is an understandable (and somewhat intentional) response.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by @jasnims

Like Instagram's messy cake scene, the jelly niche is refreshingly transgressive. It's a creator's state of mind molded into a shaky and gelatinous form, blurring the lines between dinner and dessert, past and present, edible and inedible, disgusting and delicious. Jelly congeals a vibe into jiggly layers, trapping a moment in time for viewers to interpret however they please.

"I want people to have a good time looking at them, maybe have a laugh, maybe be a little confused—something that makes you want to zoom right in," Seale said. No matter how you feel about her work, she finds a sense of excitement in grossness, whether that's by photographing moldy food, or by immortalizing waste—like a crusty, half-eaten sausage roll her housemate left in the trash—in jelly.

"You know how people are pretty gross, with all that pus and body fluid, but also beautiful and sexy?" she asked. "That's what I want my jellies to feel like."

Follow Bettina Makalintal on Twitter.

via VICE US - Munchies VICE US - Munchies via Mom's Kitchen Recipe Network Mom's Kitchen Recipe Network

[regrettablewritings]

Writer’s Tag

Rules: Answer all 21 questions, let the one who tagged you know you answered and then tag your writing pals!

I was tagged by:  @locke-writes. What beast hath you released upon these fields?

The Works:

1. Which is the imagine you’re most proud of?

Hmmm...Not a whole lot because it takes me a while to actually be content with the things I’ve written. At this point, however, I’m most pleased with Stripulation because it was my first Barba fic and done while also writing a long-ass essay on Titus Andronicus. Plus, I managed to speak to @ohbelieveyoume in the first place because I bombarded her with my thoughts on how Barba’s secret could’ve been that he was a stripper. I also think that how it was written sets the tone for my general style of writing: Dramatic, humorous, and just plain weird in some cases. HC set-wise, definitely the Kidnapped HCs. I’m rather proud of how they turned out almost like a regular, paragraphical story and I finally got to use some of the angst I disturbingly like to read about when reading rescue stories. ...Ignore that.  Plus, that sucker is 9 pages in Word!

2. Which is your least favourite?

Blargh, what isn’t my least favorite? . . . Okay but yeah, I’ve honestly never been too fond of The One Reason to Love the Glasshouse. I wrote it right before I blew a mental gasket and couldn’t be pleased with anything I wrote, and I think it shows. The writing feels so lifeless and boring . . . HC set-wise, the NSFW Digger Harkness piece, which is a shame because I love Capt. Boomerang. I think I was just in an off headspace at the time of writing it and also wasn’t sure what to do when it came to writing Digger’s accent.

3. If you were to recommend one to read to your mum/mom?

My mom knows I have a blog where I write, but I could never tell her who or what i wrote about. Besides, she’s wicked good at editing and would spot every single mistake I’ve made and I can barely handle the feeling of a classmate reading over my mistakes, much less my own mother. But if I had to -- gun to my head -- it’d probably be How to Be a Good Catholic. She herself is Catholic and would likely widen her eyes at the crap I wrote ( “We don’t do that anymore, crazy girl!!”). I would, of course, be hiding as she reads it.

4. Which one would you consider re-writing?

God, so many if I actually had the drive. I particularly am not entirely fond of how I ended The Hairy Situation; I know I wanted to go a different route with it, but I can’t remember what I initially had planned. I also probably should’ve divided up Day Bi Day: A Documented Study of the Bisexual because that bastard is way too long to hold general attention. I want to add more to the Dating Finn Would Include but may as well just make a second part to it when I had the time. Might rewrite or at least gussy up the NSFW Digger Harkness HCs though. I also wish I could rewrite the ending of  How to Be a Good Catholic. because I have a bad habit of never knowing how to finish a story until it’s already been posted and gained attention.

5. Biggest regret in an imagine?

Writing The One Reason to Love the Glasshouse. It was just so sloppy and I guess I just wanted to write it to force creativity out of me. It fell unceremoniously into a grotto in my opinion. Also, I wish I could remember how to write simpler. You can tell which imagines were from when I was first starting out because they’re shorter than my more recent stuff (with the exception of A Practice in Happy Memories). The reason why is because most of them were written on my phone

6. Biggest success with an imagine?

Writing Day Bi Day to play out somewhat like a documentary was a bit of a nightmare because documentaries are such an audible and visual thing, even with storytelling regarded. But I fucking did it (I think)! I’m also really proud with how the Kidnapping HCs came out, too. I was originally going to keep it short and simple and start with the reader already being kidnapped with very little interaction between Bruce and the kidnappers but it kept flowing out until I decided to give it a beginning, middle, and end

7. Your imagine with the most notes?

M’kay so it took some time (had to go through each one of these blasted things and record their note counts), but I’ve finally come back with the numbers. In terms of an actual imagine in typical fanfiction format, my most popular piece is . . . the Jonathan Byers Soulmate AU. I also looked at my headcanons as well! The most popular one for that format was . . . the . . . Dating Jonathan Byers Would Include. . . .  *sighs heavily and takes a swig from Dr. Pepper bottle* Y’know, I miss when Bruce was my money-maker. And I’m not ashamed to admit it.

8. Your imagine with the least notes?

. . . *skims through shit again* Uhhhh . . . HC-wise, I think my NSFW Digger?? I know there’s much lower but they belong to the basic HC memes. Traditional format-wise, The Hairy Situation.

9. What do you think makes a good imagine? Tips?

I. . . don’t really know. Honestly, I wing most of my stuff. The only thing I can say is write what you want to see with the notion that it’s not already there.

10. When’s the next update on your works?

Aside from the NSFW Frank Castle meme that’s been sitting in the cellar of my inbox since November, the only thing I got is the prize for my giveaway winner. Otherwise, unless somebody donates or whatever, I don’t plan on writing until I got my shit in order.

11. Number of followers before you started writing and after? I made this blog for the purpose of dumping my crap here instead of dumping it on others via their submissions box. So 0. At the time of this post, it’s 1,264. I don’t understand how it got this bad.

———————————————————————-

The Writer:

1. Which character do you love writing for?

The character who I keep winding up writing for is Barba. Since SVU left his personal life wide-fucking open (fucking assturds),there’s plenty to work with. I particularly seem to take sadistic joy in putting him in blush-worthy situations that force him to be more open with his significant other.

2. Which character do you dislike writing for?

There are, but I’ve never had to write for them to begin with.

3. What’s your favourite AU to write for?

Soulmate AUs are generally the only ones I’ve written for consistently.

4. What’s your least favourite AU to write for?

Haven’t written for any AUs other than a buncha soulmate AUs and one mobster AU.

5. What do you hope never gets requested?

Anything rape-y or morally disturbing.

6. What do you wish was requested more?

Hmmm... Well, I don’t really take requests until I’m doing memes to be honest. I can’t trust myself to handle actual requests for a bunch of reasons, though for some reason people only ever request things after I’ve finished asking them for their opinions on things to post.

7. Thoughts on writing Smut/POC/Curvy/MxM/FxF?

H’oh boy. So I’m gonna divide these up by least wordy to most:

1. FxF: I’m okay with it because my sexuality makes it easier for me to put on that mindset. 2. Smut: I can write headcanons, but not full-blown imagines. As a virgin who’s already got some weird situation going on with sex, I know I’m not capable of filling out two to three pages worth of intercourse of any kind. 3. POC: I’m most familiar with writing with a black reader in mind, given that I myself am black. I can try to write for other ethnicities, but admittedly will likely walk on eggshells about it. The thing is, you can’t always or even often write with a POC reader in mind and just leave it at that. While there may be some overlap in circumstances between some groups, each ethnicity has its own stereotypes and situations to confront and conquer in a given situation such as a relationship. Therefore, if I write with a non-black reader in mind, I would still need to ask a person from the group I’m intending to write about just to assure I do right by them. But still gonna be met with extreme hesitancy because that’s not an intersectionality I’m familiar with. 4. MxM: Okay so . . . I can’t do this. I was just explaining to a friend the other day and you can be disappointed in me all you want, but I can’t knowingly write MxM for a couple of reasons. I can try to write gender-neutral (if I remember to), but writing MxM is . . . Okay, just hear me out: I know it may seem like a copout, but I genuinely don’t feel comfortable writing for something I don’t quite understand. Now before you go yelling at me about how I don’t understand a lot of the shit I do write for, let me explain. I am not male. I have never been male. And at this point, I highly doubt I will ever identify as male. I cannot pull or properly fathom the experience of being a queer male, cis or trans. I cannot provide for it the depth I feel that it requires. I know that may seem like a lame excuse, but I mean it. I can write FxF a little better because my sexuality allows for me to comprehend attraction to another female and how it could potentially play out. I cannot draw inspiration or direction from reading MxM fics, either, because I don’t read them. It’s just not my bag. On top of this, a lot of MxM media, both fiction-wise and published story-wise, appear to be written by girls. And while many of them are skilled, I’m sure, my issue is that I can’t in confidence trust them to be entirely spot-on with their interpretations, either. Many interpretations of queer male relationships (at least in Western media) that females initially and even predominantly gain familiarity with come with roots in fethisization and an often occurring desire to see not two consenting males who are emotionally compatible come together, but instead a desire to see two of the most attractive (and often white/white-passing) males come together regardless of how healthy their relationship would realistically be or how much of a foundation it actually has to stand upon. I’m sorry if you’re disappointed, but I had to be honest. I don’t like lying. I just feel that it’s not my place to theorize the happenings of a real lifestyle that comes with struggles I would not and could not be familiar with or feel comfortable winging at. Just like with writing with a POC reader in mind, there are just some struggles that don’t blanket everybody no matter how much you wish it could because it’d just be simpler for you. Everything that isn’t cis, white, straight, and male (aka intersectional) has a struggle that not everyone is going to be able to comprehend with utmost perfection.

8. Which account is your biggest inspiration in writing?

Hmmm... I try to be dramatic and poetic like @ohbelieveyoume, or sensual like @xemopeachx, or nice and homey like @mrsrafaelbarba, or cute and with lovely references and diction like @jonedwardbernthal. I would like to be more broad with my fandoms like @locke-writes, too. Buuuttt . . . I guess what I got going for me now is a’ight. I pride myself off of using my weird sense of humor in my writing anyway.

9. How long have you been an imagine writer for?

One year.

10. Any upcoming secret works? 🤔

Ha! Nope. Just the two things whenever they get done and then that’ll be it unless something happens.

[carolrhackett85282]

Instagram's Jelly Cake Revival Turns Vintage Camp Into Modern Art

Jelly first came to Lexie Park in a dream. In her over-10-year career as a fashion designer, Park felt a pull toward texture and transparency, and as she’s transitioned into food over the past year, those qualities drew her to jelly. She wondered what she could suspend and preserve inside a translucent, wobbling mass.

Now, Park has become one of Instagram's most iconic jelly artists. Through Nunchi, which she has developed into a full-time food business, she makes colorful, glassy-looking cakes that her followers fawn over for their pastel hues and glints of sparkle. Often, they have alternating layers of cloudy and clear confection, or pieces of fruit, jelly flowers, and even cartoon bunny heads floating inside. "I feel like [it's] psycho but cute," said Park, of the aesthetic that has earned her collaborations with brands like Nike (a swoosh floating atop tiers of baby pink and blue jelly) and the razor company Billie.

Jelly cakes by Lexie Park/@eatnunchi | Photos courtesy Lexie Park

Not all of Park's work is so dainty. "When I first started, all my previous cakes and posts were a little bit crazier and uglier, in a sense," she said. Her cakes for commissions are primarily cute, but her more experimental jellies have an edge: a fish sliced into four pieces drifts in a jelly aquarium; Pedialyte forms caviar spheres, served in a tin; blobs surround a skin-colored baby, as though it's gestating in an alien womb. "I'm very extreme in my personality, so I don't want to just stick to one [style]—it's really based on how I feel."

In its growing Instagram niche, jelly art is all about duality. Jelly cakes can be adorable and pastel, like a child's toy—or they can be grotesque, making familiar foods look inexplicably foreign. Duality exists in the format of jelly itself: Whether it's made with animal-based gelatin or seaweed-derived agar agar, jelly looks artificial enough to seem almost inedible, and to some, there's still a knee-jerk aversion to Jell-O on premise alone. Despite jelly's niche revival on Instagram and groups like Show Me Your Aspics, which has accumulated more than 42,000 members since 2016, some people still feel that technicolor Jell-O and jiggling, vintage-inspired molds of meat are pieces of the past that they would rather forget.

Jelly cakes by Lexie Park/@eatnunchi | Photos courtesy Lexie Park

But jelly isn't just a medium; it's a state of mind. It engulfs an object and solidifies, making anything set inside visible yet distant, like insects trapped in amber. A photo is a reminder, but jelly is an encapsulation; it has the power to literally suspend items in time and place. The perfect California produce that Park gathers for her cakes, like family farm-grown peaches that taste like "nature's candy," stay pristine in jelly, twinkling in the sun as perfect as they were when Park cut them. For the food artists exploring the scene, jelly can call back the past and capture the present.

Park left fashion for food when she turned 30 as part of a "quarter-life crisis" that prompted her to take risks. "I wanted to try something completely new, but I think I was also holding a part of my youth," she said. She drew from her warm memories of the Sanrio characters and Morning Glory stationery of her childhood when thinking through her jelly cakes. Look at a Little Twin Stars design, and suddenly, the soft shapes and colors of a Nunchi cake carry a pleasing nostalgia. "I was thinking, what will make me feel like a kid again?" she explained.

Jelly cakes by Kiki Cheung/@murder.cake | Photos courtesy Kiki Cheung

Kiki Cheung, who runs the Hong Kong-based cake studio Murder Cake, feels similarly soothed by jelly. As a result of the political protests last year, Cheung felt exhausted; baking cleared her head. Now, her cherub cakes are her most recognizable work: A glossy layer of jelly surrounds a wistful three-dimensional baby angel, pale like a Victorian cameo portrait. "I always imagine my cake is a pond," Cheung said. "There is a cherub antique floating on the water. Perhaps it creates an extreme sense of peace and calm." (The idea of calm might seem dichotomous with a bakery named for murder, but this is because cake is "born to be murdered," Cheung said, unable to be eaten without being destroyed.)

Working as a fashion editor, Cheung is surrounded by eye-catching visuals, and though she loves color, she struggles to incorporate it into her clothing. Jelly cakes, however, give her countless ways to express that creativity, so her work drifts between "kawaii, gothic, vintage, and girlish" depending on her mood or on customer requests.

At times, Cheung tags her cakes with phrases like #uglyfoodisbeautiful. Though the ugliness of Cheung's smooth, pleasingly shaped jellies is debatable, it's a nod to the way a friend once described her work. For this reason, too, Cheung sees her jelly art as a freeing break from the "aesthetic fatigue" of seeing beautiful things. "There is no boundary between pretty and ugly," she said. "Perhaps occasionally we need some 'ugly' things to refresh our tired eyes."

Jelly cakes by Laura Taylor/@laurctay | Photos courtesy Laura Taylor

Still, if Park and Cheung's cakes are dreamlike, like preservations of pleasant moments, then other designs in the Instagram jelly scene might be more like nightmares. A 2014 Globe and Mail piece about the aspic comeback in high-end restaurants concluded that when done right, aspics could be a "culinary horror show" no longer. But what if you want to capture that sense of disgust?

Laura Taylor works in public relations for the fashion industry by day, but she started making jelly cakes as a hobby after discovering her grandmother's vintage Jell-O molds, finding that ideas tend to come to her as she's falling asleep. Once, she suspended hard-boiled eggs in clear jelly, with each section of the mold magnifying and refracting a chalky yolk. She's made jelly in the shape of a koi fish, with lychee fruit inside, and a red jelly cake spiked with yellow plastic fingers, each with a pointy red fingernail.

Jelly is intriguing because it's different from what people see in daily life, Taylor said, though the medium calls to mind the Jell-O she made with her family as a kid. Jelly can look artificial and gross, mirroring a movement within fashion toward the weird and grotesque, she added. "When I saw that people were updating jelly cakes and doing them for modern times and making them super weird and cool, I was, for some reason, super attracted to it," she said. "I think that kind of nostalgic part of it threw me into it a little bit as well."

Jelly cakes by Jasmin Seale/@jasnims | Photos courtesy Jasmin Seale

In Australia, graphic designer and photographer Jasmine Seale makes jelly cakes that are more art project than they are edible, drawing inspiration from "gross aspic recipes" and using ingredients she's scrounged from the garbage or found rotting in the fridge. Currently living out of a van, Seale is trying to find ways to make jelly on the road. Her work, posted on the Instagram page @jasnims, is the type that sears itself into your memory: Coarse, curly hair shakes within pale yellow jelly and falls on the ground with a plop, and ramen noodles dangle in blue goo into which Seale inexplicably inserts a grubby MacBook charger.

For Seale, jelly cakes are about the feeling and the format—but not so much the taste. Her worst so far, she said, was a pickle brine jelly with piped mashed potato that required so much gelatin to hold its shape that it had the mouthfeel of rubber. Since much of her work is made with garbage, Seale doesn't usually eat it. "I sometimes give the top a little lick to see how it tastes but it's never nice," she said. When it comes to her work, revulsion is an understandable (and somewhat intentional) response.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by @jasnims

Like Instagram's messy cake scene, the jelly niche is refreshingly transgressive. It's a creator's state of mind molded into a shaky and gelatinous form, blurring the lines between dinner and dessert, past and present, edible and inedible, disgusting and delicious. Jelly congeals a vibe into jiggly layers, trapping a moment in time for viewers to interpret however they please.

"I want people to have a good time looking at them, maybe have a laugh, maybe be a little confused—something that makes you want to zoom right in," Seale said. No matter how you feel about her work, she finds a sense of excitement in grossness, whether that's by photographing moldy food, or by immortalizing waste—like a crusty, half-eaten sausage roll her housemate left in the trash—in jelly.

"You know how people are pretty gross, with all that pus and body fluid, but also beautiful and sexy?" she asked. "That's what I want my jellies to feel like."

Follow Bettina Makalintal on Twitter.

via VICE US - Munchies VICE US - Munchies via Mom's Kitchen Recipe Network Mom's Kitchen Recipe Network

[carolinechanson97838]

Instagram's Jelly Cake Revival Turns Vintage Camp Into Modern Art

Jelly first came to Lexie Park in a dream. In her over-10-year career as a fashion designer, Park felt a pull toward texture and transparency, and as she’s transitioned into food over the past year, those qualities drew her to jelly. She wondered what she could suspend and preserve inside a translucent, wobbling mass.

Now, Park has become one of Instagram's most iconic jelly artists. Through Nunchi, which she has developed into a full-time food business, she makes colorful, glassy-looking cakes that her followers fawn over for their pastel hues and glints of sparkle. Often, they have alternating layers of cloudy and clear confection, or pieces of fruit, jelly flowers, and even cartoon bunny heads floating inside. "I feel like [it's] psycho but cute," said Park, of the aesthetic that has earned her collaborations with brands like Nike (a swoosh floating atop tiers of baby pink and blue jelly) and the razor company Billie.

Jelly cakes by Lexie Park/@eatnunchi | Photos courtesy Lexie Park

Not all of Park's work is so dainty. "When I first started, all my previous cakes and posts were a little bit crazier and uglier, in a sense," she said. Her cakes for commissions are primarily cute, but her more experimental jellies have an edge: a fish sliced into four pieces drifts in a jelly aquarium; Pedialyte forms caviar spheres, served in a tin; blobs surround a skin-colored baby, as though it's gestating in an alien womb. "I'm very extreme in my personality, so I don't want to just stick to one [style]—it's really based on how I feel."

In its growing Instagram niche, jelly art is all about duality. Jelly cakes can be adorable and pastel, like a child's toy—or they can be grotesque, making familiar foods look inexplicably foreign. Duality exists in the format of jelly itself: Whether it's made with animal-based gelatin or seaweed-derived agar agar, jelly looks artificial enough to seem almost inedible, and to some, there's still a knee-jerk aversion to Jell-O on premise alone. Despite jelly's niche revival on Instagram and groups like Show Me Your Aspics, which has accumulated more than 42,000 members since 2016, some people still feel that technicolor Jell-O and jiggling, vintage-inspired molds of meat are pieces of the past that they would rather forget.

Jelly cakes by Lexie Park/@eatnunchi | Photos courtesy Lexie Park

But jelly isn't just a medium; it's a state of mind. It engulfs an object and solidifies, making anything set inside visible yet distant, like insects trapped in amber. A photo is a reminder, but jelly is an encapsulation; it has the power to literally suspend items in time and place. The perfect California produce that Park gathers for her cakes, like family farm-grown peaches that taste like "nature's candy," stay pristine in jelly, twinkling in the sun as perfect as they were when Park cut them. For the food artists exploring the scene, jelly can call back the past and capture the present.

Park left fashion for food when she turned 30 as part of a "quarter-life crisis" that prompted her to take risks. "I wanted to try something completely new, but I think I was also holding a part of my youth," she said. She drew from her warm memories of the Sanrio characters and Morning Glory stationery of her childhood when thinking through her jelly cakes. Look at a Little Twin Stars design, and suddenly, the soft shapes and colors of a Nunchi cake carry a pleasing nostalgia. "I was thinking, what will make me feel like a kid again?" she explained.

Jelly cakes by Kiki Cheung/@murder.cake | Photos courtesy Kiki Cheung

Kiki Cheung, who runs the Hong Kong-based cake studio Murder Cake, feels similarly soothed by jelly. As a result of the political protests last year, Cheung felt exhausted; baking cleared her head. Now, her cherub cakes are her most recognizable work: A glossy layer of jelly surrounds a wistful three-dimensional baby angel, pale like a Victorian cameo portrait. "I always imagine my cake is a pond," Cheung said. "There is a cherub antique floating on the water. Perhaps it creates an extreme sense of peace and calm." (The idea of calm might seem dichotomous with a bakery named for murder, but this is because cake is "born to be murdered," Cheung said, unable to be eaten without being destroyed.)

Working as a fashion editor, Cheung is surrounded by eye-catching visuals, and though she loves color, she struggles to incorporate it into her clothing. Jelly cakes, however, give her countless ways to express that creativity, so her work drifts between "kawaii, gothic, vintage, and girlish" depending on her mood or on customer requests.

At times, Cheung tags her cakes with phrases like #uglyfoodisbeautiful. Though the ugliness of Cheung's smooth, pleasingly shaped jellies is debatable, it's a nod to the way a friend once described her work. For this reason, too, Cheung sees her jelly art as a freeing break from the "aesthetic fatigue" of seeing beautiful things. "There is no boundary between pretty and ugly," she said. "Perhaps occasionally we need some 'ugly' things to refresh our tired eyes."

Jelly cakes by Laura Taylor/@laurctay | Photos courtesy Laura Taylor

Still, if Park and Cheung's cakes are dreamlike, like preservations of pleasant moments, then other designs in the Instagram jelly scene might be more like nightmares. A 2014 Globe and Mail piece about the aspic comeback in high-end restaurants concluded that when done right, aspics could be a "culinary horror show" no longer. But what if you want to capture that sense of disgust?

Laura Taylor works in public relations for the fashion industry by day, but she started making jelly cakes as a hobby after discovering her grandmother's vintage Jell-O molds, finding that ideas tend to come to her as she's falling asleep. Once, she suspended hard-boiled eggs in clear jelly, with each section of the mold magnifying and refracting a chalky yolk. She's made jelly in the shape of a koi fish, with lychee fruit inside, and a red jelly cake spiked with yellow plastic fingers, each with a pointy red fingernail.

Jelly is intriguing because it's different from what people see in daily life, Taylor said, though the medium calls to mind the Jell-O she made with her family as a kid. Jelly can look artificial and gross, mirroring a movement within fashion toward the weird and grotesque, she added. "When I saw that people were updating jelly cakes and doing them for modern times and making them super weird and cool, I was, for some reason, super attracted to it," she said. "I think that kind of nostalgic part of it threw me into it a little bit as well."

Jelly cakes by Jasmin Seale/@jasnims | Photos courtesy Jasmin Seale

In Australia, graphic designer and photographer Jasmine Seale makes jelly cakes that are more art project than they are edible, drawing inspiration from "gross aspic recipes" and using ingredients she's scrounged from the garbage or found rotting in the fridge. Currently living out of a van, Seale is trying to find ways to make jelly on the road. Her work, posted on the Instagram page @jasnims, is the type that sears itself into your memory: Coarse, curly hair shakes within pale yellow jelly and falls on the ground with a plop, and ramen noodles dangle in blue goo into which Seale inexplicably inserts a grubby MacBook charger.

For Seale, jelly cakes are about the feeling and the format—but not so much the taste. Her worst so far, she said, was a pickle brine jelly with piped mashed potato that required so much gelatin to hold its shape that it had the mouthfeel of rubber. Since much of her work is made with garbage, Seale doesn't usually eat it. "I sometimes give the top a little lick to see how it tastes but it's never nice," she said. When it comes to her work, revulsion is an understandable (and somewhat intentional) response.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by @jasnims

Like Instagram's messy cake scene, the jelly niche is refreshingly transgressive. It's a creator's state of mind molded into a shaky and gelatinous form, blurring the lines between dinner and dessert, past and present, edible and inedible, disgusting and delicious. Jelly congeals a vibe into jiggly layers, trapping a moment in time for viewers to interpret however they please.

"I want people to have a good time looking at them, maybe have a laugh, maybe be a little confused—something that makes you want to zoom right in," Seale said. No matter how you feel about her work, she finds a sense of excitement in grossness, whether that's by photographing moldy food, or by immortalizing waste—like a crusty, half-eaten sausage roll her housemate left in the trash—in jelly.

"You know how people are pretty gross, with all that pus and body fluid, but also beautiful and sexy?" she asked. "That's what I want my jellies to feel like."

Follow Bettina Makalintal on Twitter.

via VICE US - Munchies VICE US - Munchies via Mom's Kitchen Recipe Network Mom's Kitchen Recipe Network

[mst3kproject]

313: Earth vs the Spider

First we had It Conquered the World, in which It failed to even conquer the town of Beechwood.  Now we have Earth vs the Spider, in which the poor Spider is badly outnumbered even when it, too, is only really menacing one small California town.  It's an incongruous title in other ways as well, but I'll get to that.

High school student Carol Flynn is worried when her father doesn't return from a drive, so she and her rather tactless boyfriend Mike set out to see what's keeping him.  There's no trace of the man, but they do find a huge silk rope across the road, which they follow into a cave, which turns out to be home to a spider the size of a house!  A giant dose of DDT appears to kill it (along with the entire rest of the cave ecosystem), so a teacher has the gigantic corpse taken back to town and stored in the school gym so that scientists from across the country can come and study it. Before that can happen, however, the spider is brought back to life by the Power of Rock N Roll, and soon it's off on the inevitable rampage!

The movie never tells us how they got the huge spider back to town.  Did they just strap it to the top of a truck?  Did they airlift it with a helicopter?  In either case, how did they first get it out of the cave?  Maybe they used whatever it was they did to transport King Kong to New York.

Other than that, it's kind of hard to find anything to say about Earth vs the Spider. It's another bland, by-the-numbers sort of movie that doesn't really have anything to make it stand out from the pack.  It's something to look at for seventy minutes, but it doesn't linger.  The most memorable thing about it is the scene in Lilo and Stitch where it's playing on the televisions in a shop window and Stitch finds it inspiring.

That said, the movie is not necessarily bad.  In fact, there are places where it pays a surprising amount of attention to everyday details that help make the silly story feel more grounded.  For example, Carol's father doesn't seem to have been a very responsible man, but at the same time we can tell he and Carol were very close and she takes great offense whenever anybody else refers to his poor reputation.  Yet in spite of her love for him, she knows she has no grounds to defend him, either, and is eventually forced to admit that his having run off to gamble his paycheque away is a very real possibility.  Her distress over the loss of the bracelet he bought for her would seem like an over-reaction under other circumstances, but understandable due to her grief at his death.

Other character also have nice touches like this.  The fact that Mike keeps putting his foot in his mouth, or that he doesn't have his own car but must borrow one from a friend, make the characters feel more like real teenagers even if the actors don't always look the part.  It's also nice to see that the kids actually have parents who can be supportive, worried, or strict by turns, as the situation demands.  The small town setting makes it plausible that the characters cannot consult with scientists or the military about their spider problem.  The closest thing they have is their high school science teacher.  He's not exactly on the cutting edge of research, so he uses what he's familiar with rather than coming up with some esoteric technobabble solution to the monster.

So the characters are fairly convincingly written (George Worthing Yates also co-wrote Them!, which is easily the best of the 50's giant bug movies), but unfortunately they're less-convincingly played.  I kind of have a thing for June Kenney (Carol), who looked awfully cute in her circle skirts and sailor collars, but she's not a good actress.  She always sounds like she's trying too hard, which makes her the opposite of Eugene Persson (Mike), who sounds like he's barely trying at all.  If they were both at the same end of this scale it might work, but the fact that they're equal opposites just emphasizes how much they both suck.  The Sheriff's skepticism when he first hears about the spider is understandable, but Gene Roth's overacting does neither him nor the movie any favours.

Special effects are a mixed bag.  A composite shot of Mike and Carol running along a ledge doesn't look bad – you can buy that they're actually in Carlsbad Caverns for the purposes of the movie.  A moment later, however, we see a tarantula move through the same image of the cavern, which has now been cut out so that the spider can pass behind the rock formations without an expensive process shot.  This looks terrible, and there's a spot where you can see the edge of the cut-out cardboard.  The dried-out victims that have been drained by the spider are amusingly gruesome, but the skeletons strewn around the cave are obvious plastic.  The huge strands of silk that make up the spider's web look quite nice, all filamentous and springy, but when we see bits of the spider in the same shot as the humans they always look hideously fake.

Come to think of it, where are all those skeletons supposed to have come from?  We don't hear about a rash of car accidents or missing persons along that stretch of road – maybe we should have, since it would give extra foundation to Carol's fears for her father's safety.  There's got to be a dozen or more corpses sitting around in there.  Who were these people?

The spider itself is realized (quote unquote) like all Bert I. Gordon's giant creations are – mostly through superimposed shots of a live tarantula, with a bit of very limited puppetry.  While the latter is, as I've already observed, pretty dreadful, the process shots here are about as good as they ever got in such movies.  Certainly they're a hell of a lot better than the bugs with holes in them of King Dinosaur or The Cyclops.  The angles are matched very well to the background footage, and the spider is never obviously transparent.  As long as it's not expected to interact with its environment or the characters, it's quite acceptable.  It seems that by this point in his giant bug movie career, Gordon had a good handle on what he could and could not get away with, at least as far as superimposition went.

(Incidentally, if you're wondering why you've never heard of a 'bird spider', that's because it's a species found mostly in the rainforests of Columbia and Venezuela.  Bird spiders are golden-brown in colour and about as big as a bread-and-butter plate, make poor pets because of their aggressive temperament, and never come anywhere near the southwestern United States unless a human brings them there.  The furry little spider the movie shows us, supposedly representing a normal-sized bird spider, looks like an ordinary Chilean rose-hair to me. Rose-hairs are half the size of a bird spider (also called a goliath bird-eater... because yes, they do) and not even in the same genus, though both are in the tarantula family.  Spider nerd out.)

Unusually for a Bert I. Gordon movie, Earth vs the Spider never delves into the question of why there's a giant spider running around.  His other movies all give excuses for embiggening things: Glenn Manning's cells were mutated by exposure to the plutonium bomb, the locusts in The Beginning of the End ate irradiated grain, Empire of the Ants blames a toxic spill, and Village of the Giants has the Goo.  None of these are very plausible, but they all make it over the 'just accept it' threshold so we can get to the story beyond.  Earth vs the Spider brings the idea up, but never bothers to do anything with it.  The teacher notes that while the spider may be dead, 'the principle that caused it to grow' is not, and it's important to study this so they won't end up with more giant spiders that could easily overwhelm human civilization.

This idea is somewhat reminiscent of Them!, in which the elder Dr. Medford fears that the ants, which breed faster and build more efficiency, will drive humanity to extinction.  Unlike in Them!, however, the plot point serves only as an excuse for bringing the spider into town so it can wake up and have stuff to wreck.  Nobody ever finds out why it was so big, and at the end the cave is sealed up with explosives while the mystery remains un-solved – it's never even referenced again.  In the other Bert I. Gordon 'giant creature' movies, the beastie's origin is frequently key to its defeat.  In The Amazing Colossal Man the scientists are able to find a cure for Glenn's condition after they realize what effect the plutonium bomb had on his bone marrow.  In Village of the Giants, Genius discovers an antidote to the Goo.  Earth vs the Spider?  Nothing doing.  Why did they even bother to bring it up? It seems like the best approach might have been to just not worry about the origin of the spider and hope the audience wouldn't think of it themselves.

This is the other place where the title seems very strange.  The idea that the spider is a menace to the entire Earth is merely an exaggeration, but the title Earth vs the Spider also seems to imply that the spider itself is from somewhere else, like the interdimensional spiders of The Giant Spider Invasion.  If you're gonna give us a Spider from Nowhere, fine, but don't do that after a title that seems to promise us a Spider from Mars!

I am not watching Giant Spider Invasion next week.  Fifty-foot spiders are something I have to pace myself with or I'll run out of things to say about them.

[northcountryprimitive]

The North Country Primer # 3: William Csorba, Houston, TX

Originally published at North Country Primitive in March 2015

Here we are with another edition of the North Country Primer. This time it's the turn of Texan guitarist, William Csorba, whose recent album, The Bear Creek Child Cemetery, has been getting a lot of ear time here at North Country Primitive. Our thanks go out to William for his illuminating responses to our not always illuminating questions...

Tell us a bit about yourself and the musical journey that took you to a place where you concluded that playing an acoustic guitar on your own was a good idea... Well, for the most part, playing music by myself is the only way I’ve ever played music. I grew up largely on the country music I heard from my mom as a kid. My family has really deep Texas roots on my mom’s side, going back to the time when Texas was an independent nation. I’ve always been really aware of and fascinated by that sort of thing and I think my taste in music has been influenced similarly. I listened to a lot of Texas country music early on - guys like Jerry Jeff Walker, Waylon Jennings and Guy Clark, along with many of the greats of classic country music - Hank Williams above all, of course. So I guess a lot of the music I’ve been drawn to tends towards being a solo affair. The great Texan songwriter, Townes Van Zandt, was a pretty close relative of mine, even though I never had the opportunity to know him - I would have been very young at the time of his passing. It’s kind of funny, actually - I remember growing up and hearing that I had a cousin who “wrote songs for Willie Nelson,” which was simply based on the fact that Willie had done a rather popular cover of Pancho and Lefty and that Townes had never had the commercial success that some of those dudes enjoyed. First hearing some of Townes’ recordings years later was a rather momentous event for me. I was really blown away by them and I guess knowing that I had a connection with him by blood only heightened the profundity of his music for me. To me, he should be remembered not only as a master songwriter, but really as a substantial American poet. I first picked up a guitar pretty much because I wanted to play some of his songs - as well as some Hank Williams songs. I soon recognised that I wasn’t that interested in singing, especially since I didn’t seem to have much of a talent for it. Anyway, through Townes I encountered the hometown blues legend Lightnin’ Hopkins, who he cited as a big influence, which led me to the world of pre-war blues and hillbilly music. This became something of an obsession around the time I went to college six years back. While I was at school out in New Mexico, I fell in with a group of friends who were real into old blues and old-time music. My roommate and good friend that first year, a guy named Michael Laudenbach, played fingerstyle guitar quite well and I made him teach me some of the basics of that kind of playing, with tunes picked up from Elizabeth Cotton, the Carter Family and some other similar stuff. He also introduced me to John Fahey, who, as it must surely come as no surprise, was my inspiration for getting pretty serious about music and on whom I felt compelled to model an approach to begin trying to make some music of my own. To me, Fahey is in many ways the consummate American artist. Aside from the particulars of his work and aesthetic, the most important and compelling significance for me lies in borrowing a method from him as a starting point for a way of doing serious music. In other words, the really decisive thing I got from Fahey was a novel philosophy for composing and art-making in general. This philosophy resonated strongly with me in so many ways, although it was of course the music itself that first got my attention. I wouldn’t even say that the guitar - specifically the solo guitar format he championed - was an absolutely essential element of what I interpret to be his artistic philosophy, but I would definitely say that it undoubtedly fits into it and cultivates this approach better than anything else I can come up with. And since I was already somewhat under the spell of the instrument, it seemed to be a pretty obvious direction for me to go in. What has influenced your music and why? As far as strictly musical influences go, in addition to the spectrum of stuff I’ve already suggested, I’ve always been pretty hugely into classical music - or formal music, if you like - more or less of all kinds and from all periods. There was a fantastic class I took in college, which I can best describe as a sort of survey of Western music. It was far more than simply an overviewt really allowed me to work out a lot of my thoughts and feelings about music and to grow significantly in the art of listening, which I feel to be one of the most important things for becoming a good musician. So, I have definitely gotten a lot of inspiration from many of the classical composers and also from some of the older traditions that play into the Western musical tradition. Perhaps my most important and primal musical influence is the church and sacred music. For me, this originally comes from having been brought up in the southern Baptist Church. Probably the greatest virtue of the southern Baptist denomination is in its hymnal, which is largely composed of strongly American-feeling melodies, mostly from the latter half of the 19th century. This differs from some of the other denominations that preserve and emphasise a lot more an older generation of hymns originating from Europe. My very strong, unhappy reaction to the disaster of the crappy contemporary worship music that was beginning to replace the traditional hymns sung in church while I was growing up is probably worth mentioning as well. Different kinds of world music have also definitely been a big interest for some time, especially after encountering the sounds of India when a friend and I spent a good bit time over there after graduating from high school. I like and listen to a lot of other kinds of music, but it’s hard to say what has really had an actual influence on the music I’ve been making, but there are probably many little bits of things from all over the place that come into it, if you know what I mean. Speaking more generally, I actually came to understand music as something I wanted to do by way of my studies in philosophy and literature. At an even more basic level, I’d say that music has come to occupy a place for me previously chiefly held by more explicitly religious concerns. My relationship to music definitely has a strong religious dimension, which I would say is right at the centre of what I’m trying to do with it. To put it more concretely, a lot what inspires me often comes from a desire, or maybe a need, to express various reflections on personal history, particular places and landscapes that have stuck with me and the diverse emotional states that make up the inner life. In addition to sometimes just going off of a kernel of what I’m feeling at a particular time, simply, I often try to write music while holding in mind certain mental images or memories - sometimes including, for instance, a feeling for the earth itself in a place I’ve been before, if that makes any sense. You know, like nature and stuff, although I’m not confident that’s quite my meaning exactly. I think what I’m trying to get at comes through most perspicuously in the first recording efforts I made last summer with an album I called The Bear Creek Child Cemetery, which is probably why it’s still my favorite thing I’ve made so far. What have you been up to recently? Well, I’m still in school, so I’m doing that stuff. But mostly my real preoccupation these days is, as much as possible, with the music - trying to write music and get better at composing. I’m also just starting to play out in public some lately, which is a lot of fun and pretty challenging. What are you listening to right now, old or new? Any recommendations you’d like to share with us? The first thing that comes to mind right now is that guy Abner Jay, who I listen to quite a lot. If you’re not familiar with him you got to check it out. The dude was a genius, and I don’t say that easily. I feel like he deserves a lot more recognition than he has probably gotten. I’ve got a CD in my car right now of some of Bartok’s piano music, which is pretty great. I’ve also been on a bit of a Brahms kick recently: the violin concerto, which is pretty new to me, but also the piano concertos and symphonies, which I’ve always really dug - especially the 3rd. I always have a healthy dose of old-time music going on at any given time. I guess that’s just like an essential nutrient or something at this point. I’ve been listening a bunch to this clawhammer banjo album by a guy I knew from New Mexico named Ariel Winnick. He’s a fantastic player. The album’s called Glory Beams and can be found on the web. I’d definitely recommend it, especially to folks already into old-time music and such. I should also mention that I’ve been checking out a lot of other the guitarists who I’ve been finding out about since I started trying to get my music out there over the past several months. I had no idea how many great players there are out there nowadays doing this kind of thing. Specifically, just to name a couple things I’ve come upon recently, I really like Chuck Johnson’s album Crows in the Basilica, which I’ve been listening to a lot. I’ve also got to mention that dude Daniel Bachman. I was super impressed by him when I first heard him sometime this past year and it still hasn’t worn off a bit - his playing really resonates with me. But yeah, it’s been really fun and, I guess, encouraging in a way, to check out all these similarly-minded musicians that are now coming to my attention. Oh, and because I just thought of it, that Irish guy Cian Nugent. The other day I listened to a pair of his pieces called Grass Above My Head and My War Blues. I really enjoyed those a lot. The guitar nerd bit: what guitars do you play and what do you like about them? Is there anything out there you’re coveting? I am honestly pretty ignorant when it comes to guitars and whatnot. I play a Johnson guitar, OM size, I think, which I bought off a friend a few years back. It’s not a particularly nice instrument or anything, but it works good and I like it a lot. It’s got a nice, pretty wide fretboard and the neck has a sort of v-shaped cut, which I really like the feel of. Maybe it’s just that I’ve gotten real comfortable with the thing. I like the size of it too. I’m not sure I’m really coveting anything, maybe just because I am not particularly aware of what’s out there, but I would really like to have one of those big, loud Martin Dreadnoughts one day. I’ve played some of those before and they felt and sounded really great. Banjos: yes or no? Oh yes. Personally, I love the banjo. As I actually already mentioned, when I lived in New Mexico there was a really great clawhammer player named Ariel Winnick at my school and I was just totally mesmerized by his playing. It made such an impression on me that I felt that I had to learn how to do it, so I began to pick it up. I still fool around and play fiddle tunes and stuff on the thing all the time. I’ve also always been a huge sucker for that classic hard-driving bluegrass banjo sound. There’s something marvelous about that relentless, cascading sound you get in really good Scruggs-style picking. I really could go on and on about banjos. They’re weird and American and really very attractive to me all round. What’s that Mark Twain quote about banjos? Something about smashing pianos and taking up instead the “glory beaming banjo.” What are you planning to do next? Well, I want to try to make another solo guitar record in the near future, but I want to try to take more time with it than I have with most of my releases so far. I feel like I want to work more deliberately on some much more fine-tuned composition. I also want to get better production values with the recording and get it sounding real nice. I’ve also been trying to start playing publicly a lot more and give that a shot. This means that I’m trying to pull together a more fully worked out repertoire of my songs - most of the stuff I’ve written and recorded over the past while, I haven’t really committed to memory. Oh, and I’ve actually been trying to work out some music to play with another musician I know, which is a lot fun and different for me. What should we have asked you and didn’t? Hmm… I don’t know. These have been very good, wide-ranging questions that have allowed me to talk about a lot of things that I like to talk about. I really appreciate the opportunity to reflect on these topics and share some of my thoughts. And forgive me if I went on and on a bit much - it’s hard to keep it brief when responding to questions like these.

You can find more of William Csorba's music, including his compact disc, The Bear Creek Child Cemetery, at his Bandcamp page.