#imagine getting connected to a cast of characters only to find out its a doomed reality

[showf4ll-media]

I took an extra shift at work last second today so it’s another day of me not being able to draw to get the incomprehensible emotions im feeling out of my brain. I NEED to at least just get to yell on main but what if Im scared to show my autism too publicly just yet lmao

[teatimecrumpetsandsugar]

ethereal (voltron fantasy/royalty AU) (set up; part zero)

Heyo! It’s your friendly neighborhood Voltron fanfic aficionado- now your friendly neighborhood Klance writer but that’s honestly besides the point I don’t even know why you’d bring up my increasing obsession with them in this Klance fanfic that I swear everyone else will be in, too-

Today, I’ll be writing from a fantasy royalty AU with my favorite show cast ever, even though it may or may not be solely because I want to put water elemental!king!Lance in pretty dresses and makeup and just go crazy with my descriptions of gowns and other things.

I imagine, here, Lance would be from a kingdom with strong ties to Pidge’s kingdom, who has strong ties with Hunk’s kingdom, making them a powerful trifecta. I also imagine that Keith and Lance’s kingdoms are on very thin ice with one another, so Pidge encourages Lance to sit down with fire elemental!king!Keith. 

I also imagine that Pidge’s kingdom is closely allied with Allura’s and that the two of them grew up together, while she didn’t meet Hunk or Lance until she became queen. Also, I’d like to have my beloved Ruler Pidge go by she/they pronouns, simply because I see a lot of myself in the way she dresses and carries herself and I actually believe that these pronouns would fit her, alongside all pronouns.

Hunk and Lance likely grew up together in a very close ally ship and continue to be close friends well into adulthood because that’s just how they are. I can imagine Lance is very vaguely aware of Allura’s kingdom and would never dream of picking a fight with hers since, by default, allying with Pidge made him allies with Allura, but he probably doesn’t know her very well pre the canon timeline because I kind of want to build that relationship from the ground up to make up for what the show did to me-

Keith is definitely allied with Shiro, and Pidge and Shiro were always friends through her older brother, who, along with her father, abdicated from the throne and joined an adventurer’s guild instead (because they believed that Pidge would be a better fit for a ruler and decided that, given how they are, reconnaissance and exploration fit them better. She agreed with this insight, deciding to rule the kingdom the best way she knew how). Shiro, being a much more experienced king and friends with their brother, likely prepared them for the role as they grew into it; the two are on friendly terms, but allied isn’t exactly the right term as none of the people in their alliance knew Keith, so they weren’t sure they could ally with him. 

Lance met Keith at a gala years into his reign; they did not get along.

The system of Magic here will likely be dictated by what element one is born in the kingdom of, (i.e., Lance’s kingdom being the Aqua Kingdom, Pidge’s being the Spiritus Kingdom) and the strength of it in each person will be chosen based on a random set of variables that usually depends on the mood of the Gods corresponding to each element.

Lance- Water (Aqua Kingdom)

Keith- Fire (Ignis Kingdom)

Pidge- Life (Spiritus Kingdom)

Hunk- Earth (Terra Kingdom)

Shiro- Moon (Luna Kingdom)

Allura- Light (Lux Kingdom)

I imagine the reason an alliance is called for with Keith and Shiro’s kingdoms is because a traitor to Allura’s kingdom, either Lotor is planning on starting an entire mutiny with the ranks he’s managed to gather and then, consequently, conquer all of the rest of the kingdoms by force in the name of a long-dead kingdom- the Tenebris kingdom. His parents having died in the midst of a total economic crash caused by a codependent relationship with Allura’s kingdom whilst it was under her father’s rule, he was taken in by the state of Lux by Allura’s request, since they grew up together; unfortunately Lotor held lingering feelings of resentment- towards Lux, for causing the destruction of the only thing he could’ve ever considered his own by right, and towards his parents for always making him feel as if he was of no worth. He wants to conquer the entire world just to prove to himself that he is worth something, though, unfortunately, he’s on a path straight to death.

Might redeem him, might kill him off, might exile him- who knows at this point?

Hunk, I imagine, was a commoner who won the title of king through a series of magic-based trials (upon the death of the last ruler) and now keeps his entire family in the palace with him, using his title to take care of his family and citizens as a benevolent ruler. This likely happened when he was quite young- likely when he was 9 or 10, since magic is an innate thing and, in this kingdom, it’s tested in the youngest members of the kingdom in order to deem who is the most connected to their Goddess Terra.

Allura inherited her title when her own father died in the conflict with Tenebris- he went to battle with the people they’d unintentionally doomed in order to protect his daughter and his people, and died in the process; similar to her story in Voltron except her kingdom survives and Lotor and a select few survivors of the Galra become refugees.

Keith became king by beating the previous king’s son in a battle- his mother, being one of the higher ups in the government, sent word to him that the prince didn’t want to be king, so Keith wound up challenging him for the title. He won, successfully making his way into the world of prestige and getting closer to his mother. The prince left the kingdom shortly after- it’s believed that he ran away to be with someone, but no one is quite sure. All anyone knows is that he’s happy.

Lance wound up being king at a really young age- I’m imagining that, prior to his reign, his kingdom was incredibly strictly patriarchal. The previous king likely only had daughters, and the day of his death, Lance was born with incredibly powerful water magic. As a result, at the age of 6 years old, he was forcibly taken from his poor family and raised strictly to be a perfect king- however, he still saw his sister Veronica frequently in secret, the two of them sneaking around to eat baked goods and try on dresses together. When the palace staff found out, they tightened security and warned Veronica that she was no longer allowed to see him unless she wanted to be publicly executed. After his coronation (at age 8), however, he started making drastic changes to the laws that made the laws against commoners interacting with royalty more lax, and, once allowed to dress himself, started wearing dresses and makeup because it reminded him of home and made him feel as beautiful as he knew he was. He gets quite homesick quite often, and he’s still battling to get his family into the palace with him- he has, however, stripped the kingdom of its strict patriarchy. He constantly tells the kingdom that he hopes to one day pass the throne down to his own future daughter and still keeps the three princesses as his trusted advisors because he believes what happened to them was horribly unjust. The story will be told primarily from his perspective.

Shiro became ruler of his kingdom by fighting his way through gladiator ranks when he was only thirteen, winning the entire kingdom by brute force alone and leaving him with a lot more experience and trauma than he’d have liked. Being the oldest of the current generation of rulers and having inherited a kingdom that was closely related to Pidge’s and Keith’s, he guided them both through the process of becoming a ruler and the process of ruling, no matter how difficult it gets. It’s taken far longer with Keith than it has Pidge, since Pidge was raised a royal and has an innate sense of leadership and Keith is... interesting at the whole being a royal thing. Shiro, having grown up with Keith’s mother on the streets of the kingdom of Tenebris, was more than happy to take Keith under his wing- it helps the both of them come out of their shells more, so they have a mutual appreciation for one another.

I imagine this world will be vaguely futuristic and medieval at the same time- they’ll be able to have video conferences and reach other via communicators, holographic calls, things of that nature; but they’ll also be pretty old-fashioned in their manners of dress, their social systems, their currencies, and the vast majority of their laws. I hope that makes sense.

I wonder if it’s visible here that I spent three hours winging this and started getting more and more into it as I went, or if it’s obvious that I spend most of my time working with really obscure fantasy concepts. 

BAHDHAAHAHA I HOPE YOU ALL ENJOY THIS- 

If you’ve got any suggestions for relationship dynamics (platonic, romantic, or otherwise), any pitches for traits you think the characters may have based on their slightly altered backstories, or any feedback in general, feel free to share- I hope you all find this as fascinating as I did while I was writing it!

Also, @keefsteefs It’s happening, I’m doing it, it’s gonna be so fricking awesome-

[dornish-queen]

Pedro Pascal on Fame and ‘The Mandalorian’: ‘Can We Cut the S— and Talk About the Child?’

By Adam B. Vary

Photographs by Beau Grealy

When Pedro Pascal was roughly 4 years old, he and his family went to see the 1978 hit movie “Superman,” starring Christopher Reeve. Pascal’s young parents had come to live in San Antonio after fleeing their native Chile during the rise of dictator Augusto Pinochet in the mid-1970s. Taking Pascal and his older sister to the movies — sometimes more than once a week — had become a kind of family ritual, a way to soak up as much American pop culture as possible.

At some point during this particular visit, Pascal needed to go to the bathroom, and his parents let him go by himself. “I didn’t really know how to read yet,” Pascal says with the same Cheshire grin that dazzled “Game of Thrones” fans during his run as the wily (and doomed) Oberyn Martel. “I did not find my way back to ‘Superman.'”

Instead, Pascal wandered into a different theater (he thinks it was showing the 1979 domestic drama “Kramer vs. Kramer,” but, again, he was 4). In his shock and bewilderment at being lost, he curled up into an open seat and fell asleep. When he woke up, the movie was over, the theater was empty, and his parents were standing over him. To his surprise, they seemed rather calm, but another detail sticks out even more.

“I know that they finished their movie,” he says, bending over in laughter. “My sister was trying to get a rise out of me by telling me, ‘This happened and that happened and then Superman did this and then, you know, the earthquake and spinning around the planet.'” In the face of such relentless sibling mockery, Pascal did the only logical thing: “I said, ‘All that happened in my movie too.'”

He had no way of knowing it at the time, of course, but some 40 years later, Pascal would in fact get the chance to star in a movie alongside a DC Comics superhero — not to mention battle Stormtroopers and, er, face off against the most formidable warrior in Westeros. After his breakout on “Game of Thrones,” he became an instant get-me-that-guy sensation, mostly as headstrong, taciturn men of action — from chasing drug traffickers in Colombia for three seasons on Netflix’s “Narcos” to squaring off against Denzel Washington in “The Equalizer 2.”

This year, though, Pascal finds himself poised for the kind of marquee career he’s spent a lifetime dreaming about. On Oct. 30, he’ll return for Season 2 as the title star of “The Mandalorian,” Lucasfilm’s light-speed hit “Star Wars” series for Disney Plus that earned 15 Emmy nominations, including best drama, in its first season. And then on Dec. 25 — COVID-19 depending — he’ll play the slippery comic book villain Maxwell Lord opposite Gal Gadot, Chris Pine and Kristen Wiig in “Wonder Woman 1984.”

The roles are at once wildly divergent and the best showcase yet for Pascal’s elastic talents. In “The Mandalorian,” he must hide his face — and, in some episodes, his whole body — in a performance that pushes minimalism and restraint to an almost ascetic ideal. In “Wonder Woman 1984,” by stark contrast, he is delivering the kind of big, broad bad-guy character that populated the 1980s popcorn spectaculars of his youth.

“I continually am so surprised when everybody pegs him as such a serious guy,” says “Wonder Woman 1984” director Patty Jenkins. “I have to say, Pedro is one of the most appealing people I have known. He instantly becomes someone that everybody invites over and you want to have around and you want to talk to.”

Talk with Pascal for just five minutes — even when he’s stuck in his car because he ran out of time running errands before his flight to make it to the set of a Nicolas Cage movie in Budapest — and you get an immediate sense of what Jenkins is talking about. Before our interview really starts, Pascal points out, via Zoom, that my dog is licking his nether regions in the background. “Don’t stop him!” he says with an almost naughty reproach. “Let him live his life!”

Over our three such conversations, it’s also clear that Pascal’s great good humor and charm have been at once ballast for a number of striking hardships, and a bulwark that makes his hard-won success a challenge for him to fully accept.

Before Pascal knew anything about “The Mandalorian,” its showrunner and executive producer Jon Favreau knew he wanted Pascal to star in it.

“He feels very much like a classic movie star in his charm and his delivery,” says Favreau. “And he’s somebody who takes his craft very seriously.” Favreau felt Pascal had the presence and skill essential to deliver a character — named Din Djarin, but mostly called Mando — who spends virtually every second of his time on screen wearing a helmet, part of the sacrosanct creed of the Mandalorian order.

Convincing any actor to hide their face for the run of a series can be as precarious as escaping a Sarlacc pit. To win Pascal over in their initial meeting, Favreau brought him behind the “Mandalorian” curtain, into a conference room papered with storyboards covering the arc of the first season. “When he walked in, it must have felt a little surreal,” Favreau says. “You know, most of your experiences as an actor, people are kicking the tires to see if it’s a good fit. But in this case, everything was locked and loaded.”

Needless to say, it worked. “I hope this doesn’t sound like me fashioning myself like I’m, you know, so smart, but I agreed to do this [show] because the impression I had when I had my first meeting was that this is the next big s—,” Pascal says with a laugh.

Favreau’s determination to cast Pascal, however, put the actor in a tricky situation: Pascal’s own commitments to make “Wonder Woman 1984” in London and to perform in a Broadway run of “King Lear” with Glenda Jackson barreled right into the production schedule for “The Mandalorian.” Some scenes on the show, and in at least one case a full episode, would need to lean on the anonymity of the title character more than anyone had quite planned, with two stunt performers — Brendan Wayne and Lateef Crowder — playing Mando on set and Pascal dubbing in the dialogue months later.

Pascal was already being asked to smother one of his best tools as an actor, extraordinarily uncommon for anyone shouldering the newest iteration of a global live-action franchise. (Imagine Robert Downey Jr. only playing Iron Man while wearing a mask — you can’t!) Now he had to hand over control of Mando’s body to other performers too. Some actors would have walked away. Pascal didn’t.

“If there were more than just a couple of pages of a one-on-one scene, I did feel uneasy about not, in some instances, being able to totally author that,” he says. “But it was so easy in such a sort of practical and unexciting way for it to be up to them. When you’re dealing with a franchise as large as this, you are such a passenger to however they’re going to carve it out. It’s just so specific. It’s ‘Star Wars.'” (For Season 2, Pascal says he was on the set far more, though he still sat out many of Mando’s stunts.)

“The Mandalorian” was indeed the next big s—, helping to catapult the launch of Disney Plus to 26.5 million subscribers in its first six weeks. With the “Star Wars” movies frozen in carbonite until 2023 (at least), I noted offhand that he’s now effectively the face of one of the biggest pop-culture franchises in the world. Pascal could barely suppress rolling his eyes.

“I mean, come on, there isn’t a face!” he says with a laugh that feels maybe a little forced. “If you want to say, ‘You’re the silhouette’ — which is also a team effort — then, yeah.” He pauses. “Can we just cut the s— and talk about the Child?”

Yes, of course, the Child — or, as the rest of the galaxy calls it, Baby Yoda. Pascal first saw the incandescently cute creature during his download of “Mandalorian” storyboards in that initial meeting with Favreau. “Literally, my eyes following left to right, up and down, and, boom, Baby Yoda close to the end of the first episode,” he says. “That was when I was like, ‘Oh, yep, that’s a winner!'”

Baby Yoda is undeniably the breakout star of “The Mandalorian,” inspiring infinite memes and apocryphal basketball game sightings. But the show wouldn’t work if audiences weren’t invested in Mando’s evolving emotional connection to the wee scene stealer, something Favreau says Pascal understood from the jump. “He’s tracking the arc of that relationship,” says the showrunner. “His insight has made us rethink moments over the course of the show.” (As with all things “Star Wars,” questions about specifics are deflected in deference to the all-powerful Galactic Order of Spoilers.)

Even if Pascal couldn’t always be inside Mando’s body, he never left the character’s head, always aware of how this orphaned bounty hunter who caroms from planet to planet would look askance at anything that felt too good (or too adorable) to be true.

“The transience is something that I’m incredibly familiar with, you know?” Pascal says. “Understanding the opportunity for complexity under all of the armor was not hard for me.”

When Pascal was 4 months old, his parents had to leave him and his sister with their aunt, so they could go into hiding to avoid capture during Pinochet’s crackdown against his opposition. After six months, they finally managed to climb the walls of the Venezuelan embassy during a shift change and claim asylum; from there, the family relocated, first to Denmark, then to San Antonio, where Pascal’s father got a job as a physician.

Pascal was too young to remember any of this, and for a healthy stretch of his childhood, his complicated Chilean heritage sat in parallel to his life in the U.S. — separate tracks, equally important, never quite intersecting. By the time Pascal was 8, his family was able to take regular trips back to Chile to visit with his 34 first cousins. But he doesn’t remember really talking about any of his time there all that much with his American friends.

“I remember at one point not even realizing that my parents had accents until a friend was like, ‘Why does your mom talk like that?'” Pascal says. “And I remember thinking, like what?”

Besides, he loved his life in San Antonio. His father took him and his sister to Spurs basketball games during the week if their homework was done. He hoodwinked his mother into letting him see “Poltergeist” at the local multiplex. He watched just about anything on cable; the HBO special of Whoopi Goldberg’s one-woman Broadway show knocked him flat. He remembers seeing Henry Thomas in “E.T.” and Christian Bale in “Empire of the Sun” and wishing ardently, urgently, I want to live those stories too.

Then his father got a job in Orange County, Calif. After Pascal finished the fifth grade, they moved there. It was a shock. “There were two really, really rough years,” he says. “A lot of bullying.”

His mother found him a nascent performing arts high school in the area, and Pascal burrowed even further into his obsessions, devouring any play or movie he could get his hands on. His senior year, a friend of his mother’s gave Pascal her ticket to a long two-part play running in downtown Los Angeles that her bad back couldn’t withstand. He got out of school early to drive there by himself. It was the pre-Broadway run of “Angels in America.”

“And it changed me,” he says with almost religious awe. “It changed me.”

After studying acting at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Pascal booked a succession of solid gigs, like MTV’s “Undressed” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” But the sudden death of his mother — who’d only just been permitted to move back to Chile a few years earlier — took the wind right from Pascal’s sails. He lost his agent, and his career stalled almost completely.

As a tribute to her, he decided to change his professional last name from Balmaceda, his father’s, to Pascal, his mother’s. “And also, because Americans had such a hard time pronouncing Balmaceda,” he says. “It was exhausting.”

Pascal even tried swapping out Pedro for Alexander (an homage to Ingmar Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander,” one of the formative films of his youth). “I was willing to do absolutely anything to work more,” he says. “And that meant if people felt confused by who they were looking at in the casting room because his first name was Pedro, then I’ll change that. It didn’t work.”

It was a desperately lean time for Pascal. He booked an occasional “Law & Order” episode, but mostly he was pounding the pavement along with his other New York theater friends — like Oscar Isaac, who met Pascal doing an Off Broadway play. They became fast, lifelong friends, bonding over their shared passions and frustrations as actors.

“It’s gotten better, but at that point, it was so easy to be pigeonholed in very specific roles because we’re Latinos,” says Isaac. “It’s like, how many gang member roles am I going to be sent?” As with so many actors, the dream Pascal and Isaac shared to live the stories of their childhoods had been stripped down to its most basic utility. “The dream was to be able to pay rent,” says Isaac. “There wasn’t a strategy. We were just struggling. It was talking about how to do this thing that we both love but seems kind of insurmountable.”

As with so few actors, that dream was finally rekindled through sheer nerve and the luck of who you know, when another lifelong friend, actor Sarah Paulson, agreed to pass along Pascal’s audition for Oberyn Martell to her best friend Amanda Peet, who is married to “Game of Thrones” co-showrunner David Benioff.

“First of all, it was an iPhone selfie audition, which was unusual,” Benioff remembers over email. “And this wasn’t one of the new-fangled iPhones with the fancy cameras. It looked like s—; it was shot vertical; the whole thing was very amateurish. Except for the performance, which was intense and believable and just right.”

Before Pascal knew it, he found himself in Belfast, sitting inside the Great Hall of the Red Keep as one of the judges at Tyrion Lannister’s trial for the murder of King Joffrey. “I was between Charles Dance and Lena Headey, with a view of the entire f—ing set,” Pascal says, his eyes wide and astonished still at the memory. “I couldn’t believe I didn’t have an uncomfortable costume on. You know, I got to sit — and with this view.” He sighs. “It strangely aligned itself with the kind of thinking I was developing as a child that, at that point, I was convinced was not happening.”

And then it all started to happen.

In early 2018, while Pascal was in Hawaii preparing to make the Netflix thriller “Triple Frontier” — opposite his old friend Isaac — he got a call from the film’s producer Charles Roven, who told him Patty Jenkins wanted to meet with him in London to discuss a role in another film Roven was producing, “Wonder Woman 1984.”

“It was a f—ing offer,” Pascal says in an incredulous whisper. “I wasn’t really grasping that Patty wanted to talk to me about a part that I was going to play, not a part that I needed to get. I wasn’t able to totally accept that.”

Pascal had actually shot a TV pilot with Jenkins that wasn’t picked up, made right before his life-changing run on “Game of Thrones” aired. “I got to work with Patty for three days or something and then thought I’d never see her again,” he says. “I didn’t even know she remembered me from that.”

She did. “I worked with him, so I knew him,” she says. “I didn’t need him to prove anything for me. I just loved the idea of him, and I thought he would be kind of unexpected, because he doesn’t scream ‘villain.'”

In Jenkins’ vision, Max Lord — a longstanding DC Comics rogue who shares a particularly tangled history with Wonder Woman — is a slick, self-styled tycoon with a knack for manipulation and an undercurrent of genuine pathos. It was the kind of larger-than-life character Pascal had never been asked to tackle before, so he did something equally unorthodox: He transformed his script into a kind of pop-art scrapbook, filled with blown-up photocopies of Max Lord from the comic books that Pascal then manipulated through his lens on the character.

Even the few pages Pascal flashes to me over Zoom are quite revealing. One, featuring Max sporting a power suit and a smarmy grin, has several burned-out holes, including through the character’s eye. Another page features Max surrounded by text bubbles into which Pascal has written, over and over and over again in itty-bitty lettering, “You are a f—ing piece of s—.”

“I felt like I had wake myself up again in a big way,” he says. “This was just a practical way of, like, instead of going home tired and putting Netflix on, [I would] actually deal with this physical thing, doodle and think about it and run it.”

Jenkins is so bullish on Pascal’s performance that she thinks it could explode his career in the same way her 2003 film “Monster” forever changed how the industry saw Charlize Theron. “I would never cast him as just the stoic, quiet guy,” Jenkins says. “I almost think he’s unrecognizable from ‘Narcos’ to ‘Wonder Woman.’ Wouldn’t even know that was the same guy. But I think that may change.”

When people can see “Wonder Woman 1984” remains caught in the chaos the pandemic has wreaked on the industry; both Pascal and Jenkins are hopeful the Dec. 25 release date will stick, but neither is terribly sure it will. Perhaps it’s because of that uncertainty, perhaps it’s because he’s spent his life on the outside of a dream he’s now suddenly living, but Pascal does not share Jenkins’ optimism that his experience making “Wonder Woman 1984” will open doors to more opportunities like it.

“It will never happen again,” Pascal says, once more in that incredulous whisper. “It felt so special.”

After all he’s done in a few short years, why wouldn’t Pascal think more roles like this are on his horizon?

“I don’t know!” he finally says with a playful — and pointed — howl. “I’m protecting myself psychologically! It’s just all too good to be true! How dare I!”

[beatriceeagle]

What do you think of later Veronica Mars seasons? Any advice for Rob Thomas? And (I guess about all VM seasons) anything you would change? Thank you

This got extremely long. I didn’t get into things I would change, and I didn’t give any advice; nevertheless, I have a lot to say about Veronica Mars.

The long and the short of it is that a lot of people discuss Veronica Mars as though it is a noir TV show, but it’s not solely or even primarily a noir work. It’s certainly noir-inspired; many of its characters are drawn from noir archetypes; it’s cynical enough about the status quo to be noir; you might say that it’s in conversation with the noir genre. But although noir detective fiction has plenty of hardboiled detectives (Veronica), dirty cops (Lamb), and femme fatales (Logan), where in noir do we place Wallace? Where do we put Mac? Where does Keith go? What about Meg? What about Duncan? (Poor, poor Meg and Duncan.)

By the time it exited its first season, Veronica Mars was just full of too many bright, funny, fundamentally likeable characters—characters who you fundamentally could not suspect of murder—to be classifiable as fully noir. Moreover, the central mystery that it left dangling at the end of the first season wasn’t about murder, or corruption, or betrayal; it’s about romance. Who is at Veronica’s door?  By the season one finale, Veronica Mars is first and foremost what it perhaps inevitably was going to become, when it aired on network television: an ensemble character drama.

Can an ensemble character drama be noir? Well, sure. Veronica Mars is. But in a long-term ensemble character-based show, the needs of the characters have to be served before the needs of the noir. People watched season one of Veronica Mars because they enjoyed the mystery (and the quips, and the romance). They kept watching because they connected with the characters.

Season one balanced those two needs nearly perfectly; that’s why it’s often held up as an all-time great season of television. Season two remains pretty noir (it is, after all, the season of the acquittal of Aaron Echolls), but the construction of its mystery gets overly complicated, and the personal plot—the character drama—tends towards soapy. It still balances well enough to be enjoyable, but it’s undeniable that there are problems with season two of Veronica Mars, and I think they come from trying to figure out how to incorporate the characters into an ongoing noir storyline. Wallace is simply not a noir character, but he gets sucked into a dead-end story about his missing father and a hit-and-run on a homeless guy for half a season. Duncan, once you establish that he’s not going to kill anyone in a blackout rage, is basically a bland, quiet, nice guy, and not in any way a noir character. So he has to go on the run with Meg’s (also not a noir character, therefore killed off) coma baby halfway through the season.

The basic construction of season two of Veronica Mars is that the cast from season one, now cleared of all suspicion in Lilly Kane’s murder, encounter a new noir mystery, populated by new noir characters: Woody and Gia Goodman and Jackie and Terrence Cook on the one hand, and Felix Toombs and the Fitzpatricks on the other. The main cast are organically enmeshed in this new noir set-up to varying degrees. Logan (who is perhaps the most naturally noir character of the show’s early seasons, above even Veronica) is fully integrated in the murder of Felix Toombs; he’s an obvious suspect, and although we don’t believe he did it, it’s understandable why everyone else thinks he did. Logan’s drive to clear his name (or at least stay out of jail) takes him to believable, if unlikeable, noir depths—which the show engages with! If the murder of Felix Toombs were the main focus of season two, it would probably be a pretty great focal point. But it’s not. The main mystery only touches Logan’s storyline for about one episode, where it’s a red herring, and the rest of the time Logan and the Fitzpatricks mostly operate in a parallel track, at best distracting from and at worst confusing the real plot.

The rest of the cast are involved in the main mystery, but their involvement is a tricky thing. Most of them weren’t on the bus when it crashed, or before it crashed. Most of them aren’t directly connected to the Sharks, or to the mayor’s incorporation plan. (Wow, season 2 has a lot of plates in the air.) Their connections are, by and large, second-hand. Wallace is dating Jackie. Mac is kind of dating Cassidy. Keith and Veronica just really like solving mysteries. And also Keith is running for sheriff I guess?

The thing is, those second-hand connections work to keep the show in the realm of noir. We don’t need Wallace to get involved in a hit-and-run, okay? He can just have a tempestuous and heartfelt but ultimately doomed relationship with a girl with a mysterious past. Duncan probably didn’t need to go on the run with Meg’s coma baby; he could’ve just like, gone to boarding school in Connecticut.

Season two is very aware that some of its characters are noir and some of them are not, because it leverages that fact to make the mystery work. Cassidy is on the bus, and then leaves before it crashes; Cassidy alone of the main cast is heavily connected to the incorporation storyline; Cassidy basically has a big red arrow pointing at him for five episodes leading up to the finale saying, “Hey, SOMETHING’S GOING ON WITH THIS GUY.” But Veronica never seriously considers him as a suspect, and the only reason that the viewer doesn’t (if they don’t) is because... it’s Beaver! Beaver’s not a murderer! Beaver’s not that kind of character. It’s kind of like how season one shows you Aaron Echolls beating a guy half to death, but plays “That’s Amore” over it, and you don’t realize you’re looking at a clue—or how The Good Place hid its first season twist simply by being a sitcom. If you don’t know what genre you’re operating in, it’s hard to be genre savvy.

But there’s a risk that comes with that kind of writing: No one was invested in Aaron Echolls, but I can imagine that someone might’ve been invested in Cassidy. I wasn’t, but someone might’ve been. He was in the main credits. He was dating Mac. In order to make season two’s mystery noir, and meaningful, and keep it connected to the main characters, they had to burn a character with some real work invested in him, and do so in a way that potentially broke faith with viewers who really liked that character and his relationships. (And that’s not even getting into the really unfortunate implications of the specific motivation and backstory they gave to Cassidy.)

Season three is just kind of a mess, for a lot of reasons. It’s not particularly noir; they’ve lost the overarching mystery, as well as the show’s central setting; they lean heavily into the character drama, but although Veronica Mars is an ensemble character drama, it’s not just an ensemble character drama, and it can’t and shouldn’t function without a mystery to sustain it. But more importantly, everyone’s a little out of character, so even if character drama were enough, I wouldn’t be all that interested in watching almost!Veronica get in her fifth fight with almost!Logan. That said, I think that leaning into character drama is a safer way to jump the shark than leaning into noir; at worst, the show is going to get messy and boring, which is basically what happens. And the ending of season three is a pretty bang-on noir ending, and falls out naturally from the weird, messy character drama. It’s not a good season of television, but there’s a reason that it didn’t destroy fans’ love of the show.

This is ~*unconventional*~, I know, but I like the movie, both as a fan and, when I try to step back and approach it somewhat objectively, as a critic. It is extraordinarily fanservice-y; I don’t think that’s a bad thing. There are, perhaps, fanservice moments that I find a little over-the-top. (One of them, alas, is the repetition of the “lives ruined, bloodshed” speech; Logan was drunk the first time he gave that, he doesn’t remember it, and that’s half the point!) But on the whole, the movie gets it. Logan and Weevil (and Gia, may she rest in peace) are inherently noir characters who you can insert into a mystery or a story about corruption or cynicism, and although we don’t want them to have done the big bad thing, they will operate smoothly within the confines of the system. Wallace and Mac are visitors from another genre; the make connections, they comment, their lives are sometimes affected, but they are not noir, and their stories should not be noir. Veronica and Keith are the pivot, constantly drawn into Neptune’s seedy network of crime, trying to root it out.

It’s basically the Logan-and-Fitzpatricks storyline from season two, but updated so that a) Veronica and the rest of the cast is actually involved, and b) Logan is a much more likeable person. And it turns out that that’s a totally solid engine for a movie! And because it’s so fanservice-y, we spend time with all of the characters, even the ones who aren’t really entangled in the noir plots. Mac gets stuff to do. Wallace gets stuff to do. Piz... gets... poor Piz.

Season four leans heavily on the noir. So heavily, in fact, that the characters who aren’t natural noir characters are virtually nonexistent within the season. Wallace doesn’t have a storyline; Mac doesn’t appear because Tina Majorino refused to be in the season, since she wouldn’t have a storyline. Weevil, whose noir tendencies have put him on the outs with Veronica in between the movie and season four, has a story, but it’s not one that’s heavily tied to the main plot, and he’s not around much.

Structurally, season four is similar to season two, in that the main cast encounters a new mystery full of noir characters: Patton Oswalt, Matty the mini-Veronica, that politician and his family, those cartel hit men, Veronica’s bartender friend Nicole. The difference is that in season four, the main cast has functionally been pared down to three people: Veronica, Logan, and Keith. Oh, and Dick. Dick’s still hanging around, I guess.

Because of that, we spend virtually all of our time in season four with Veronica. Sometimes a little with Logan, sometimes with Keith, but mostly Veronica. We see her making friends with Nicole; we see her taking on Matty as a protege. We see her fight with Weevil; we see her fight with Logan. 

Oh boy, do we see her fight with Logan. Because there are so few subplots to distract from it, Logan and Veronica’s relationship is, in many ways, the story of season four. For a show trying so desperately hard to cling to noir and run from character drama, season four isn’t really about corruption; it isn’t about power; it isn’t about cynicism or brutality or the ways that Neptune has been and always will be bad. It’s about a relationship, and what happens to it when one person (Logan) is trying to move on to a healthier place, but the other person (Veronica) is still stuck in old, toxic patterns of behavior.

Nearly everything in season four is in some way about the Logan/Veronica dichotomy, or about their relationship with each other, or about the way that Veronica is pathologically stubborn and guarded and suspicious, and how that kills her relationships. It’s the thematic underpinning of the Matty storyline; it’s what the Nicole storyline turns on; it is, whether the show understands it or not, the devastating backdrop of the few scenes in which Weevil appears.

This is all fine and noir, but again: It comes to its fullest fruition, it finds its highest stakes, the season’s arc reaches its climax, in a romantic relationship. Which the season is, fundamentally, devoted to the psychological exploration of. And when Veronica decides that she can commit to marrying Logan, that is a key moment of character development, in a show that has historically been an ensemble character drama, in a season of television that has been, at least for Logan and Veronica, at least partially a psychological character drama.

And then Logan blows up.

And look, I am not opposed to killing characters. I’ve defended the death of Lexa on The 100 on this here very blog. But Logan’s death is 1) stupid, 2) at a stupid time, and 3) for a stupid reason. He dies moving the car across the street, just at the culmination of a major psychological arc about toxicity and moving on and opening yourself up to others... so that Veronica can stay toxic and guarded, I guess?

It renders any character development we’ve seen from Veronica in season 4 pointless. It cuts the character development we’ve seen from Logan for over a decade tragically and meaninglessly short. And it does it all in the name of taking a hard turn into “pure” noir, so that Veronica can go investigate mysteries in other towns, unencumbered by a troublesome cast that viewers are unwilling to suspect of murder.

The problem is that that cast is a lot of what’s good about the show. Maybe there are people who watched season four of Veronica Mars and came out of it thinking, “Ah, yes, what this show needs is even less of the ensemble cast,” but I was not one of them. The Veronica of season 4 is not a particularly likeable person. Veronica, on her own, was never all that likeable; what she was was funny, and understandable, and righteous, and decent. She had people around her to be likeable, to provide you with an entry point into her mind, to show interesting sides of her you might not otherwise see, to call her out when she crossed a line, and to give the show a lightness that made it fun. The bomb that blew up Logan may have made the loudest noise, and had the most final impact, but it wasn’t what killed season four; that happened when the writers sidelined Wallace.

It is, I’m sure, difficult to balance being an ensemble character drama with being a seasonal noir mystery. (Jane the Virgin ran into similar trouble, in the long run, balancing being an ensemble character drama with being a telenovela.) Nevertheless, Veronica Mars is both of these things, and blowing up the ensemble to service the noir is inevitably going to alienate viewers, because viewers have a reasonable expectation that the shows they’re watching will continue to be the same general kind of show. And because many viewers were drawn to Veronica Mars at least as much for the characters as for the mystery.

So my very, very longwinded opinion on the later seasons of Veronica Mars is that I think the show has an identity crisis, and I don’t think it’s going to resolve it any time soon. It may not be resolvable; honestly, television might not be the best medium for ongoing Veronica Mars stories at this point. But I have very little interest in watching any further seasons produced, so it doesn’t matter much, from my point of view.

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Is It Really THAT Bad?

How many fucking times must I talk about this movie?

I feel like this movie doesn’t need an introduction. Everyone knows this film. Its reputation precedes it. It didn’t bomb and it’s not generally considered one of the worst films ever made (at least on the level of films like Robot Monster or The Cat in the Hat), but this movie is easily one of the most divisive films ever made. This film has generated enough arguments that, if we harnessed the energy of all the flame wars it has caused, we could probably power the entire world until the heat death of the universe.

With the impending release of Zach Snyder’s bloated redo of Justice League, I’ve decided to go back and ask myself of this film here… is it really that bad?

THE GOOD

Here comes the most uncontroversial opinion: the action scenes in this movie rock (or at least two of them do). The standouts are the titular showdown, which almost makes sitting through the rest of the movie worth it, and the epic warehouse fight Batman gets into, which is like something straight out of the Arkham games. It’s so good. And aside from that, a lot of the cinematography in the film is good. The film knows how to look good, though unfortunately it does end up being a lot of style with little substance.

On the subject of Batman, I think Ben Affleck is a great and inspired choice. I certainly think he’s worthy of standing alongside Batmans like Clooney and Keaton, easily embodying both the Dark Knight and Billionaire Playboy aspects fairly well, though the writing does not always handle him quite as well as it should (we’ll get to that soon enough). Henry Cavill, while still a rather dour Superman, is as good as ever as Superman, and Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman was a great choice here, especially since she didn’t have control so that she could insert anti-Arab racism, like some DCEU movies.

Perhaps one of the movies most impressive feats is how, in an uncharacteristic moment of brevity, it manages to condense the backstory of Batman into the prologue, getting it out of the way and not making us sit through yet another Batman origin film. This is literally the only thing the movie has over the MCU; where that franchise just has the character Spider-Man inexplicably in existence without even a hint of his origins, they just get Batman’s tragic backstory out of the way so we can see him beating the crap out of people. If more superhero movies want to take this route and just condense the backstory into an opening montage like this, I’d be down for it.

THE BAD

I really could just say “most of the movie” but that’s such a cop out. Let’s actually look at the problems. Let’s work our way up through the things from least problematic to most, shall we?

The best place to start is what Zach Snyder did to Jimmy Olsen.

Jimmy Olsen is made into a CIA spook who is brutally killed early on, and yes, that was Jimmy Olsen. Snyder put him in to shock audiences with his senseless murder, and also because he felt the character had no place in his series. Does making Watchmen just turn people into joyless husks who like to horribly bastardize iconic characters? Jimmy Olsen is ultimately a small microcosm of the film, but he is the sum total of everything wring with the early DCEU. He is bleak, soulless, and shows a critical lack of understanding about the comics and why people enjoy them.

Now let’s move on to the more exciting problem to discuss: the villains. I don’t even think it’s worth wasting much time discussing what’s wrong with KGBeast. While it is kind of interesting they’d think to use the guy at all, the fact he never dons the costume and dies by the end of the film is unfathomably lame for a character named KGBeast.

Now, onto the main antagonist, and the most infamous part of the movie: Lex Luthor.

Lex Luthor is horribly, horribly miscast. Jesse Eisenberg is a great actor for sure, and he’s effective in movies like Now You See Me, The Social Network, and the Zombieland films. But here he is being asked to play one of the most diabolical cunning geniuses in comic book history, and rather than play him as such, he plays him like a cartoonish twit. This Lex is utterly unrecognizable as Superman’s greatest foe. Does anyone think Lex Luthor would send a jar of piss to someone as a joke before he blows them up? That’s more something the Joker would do on an off day. Lex is not cunning, not intimidating, and not diabolical in the slightest, and yet there are moments where Eisenberg’s acting chops shine through and Lex, for a moment, is almost engaging. Luthor really suffers the way Doctor Doom tends to in film adaptations: the filmmaker clearly doesn’t get why people like the villain, and decide to do some weird, unique take that will only cause to alienate fans.

But perhaps the worst of them all is Doomsday. Doomsday has exactly one claim to fame, and that’s killing Superman, so as soon as he shows up if you have even a passing awareness of the character you know how the movie is going to end, which robs the film of tension for its last battle. The fact he also appears with little buildup and doesn’t have any characterization doesn’t help; Doomsday is just the Big Gray CGI Blob that superhero movies try and pass off as a final boss for the heroes to fight. This has worked precisely once, in Iron Man. The Incredible Hulk and Venom did not make it work, and this film is nowhere close to being in the same ballpark as Venom.

By and far the biggest problem, though, is the movie’s incredible length and its very existence in the franchise at this point in time. This is an epic superhero crossover in which two of the biggest comic book characters of all time fight and then team up… And it is the second movie in a franchise. While they do a good job of establishing Batman rather quickly, Wonder Woman comes out of nowhere. And then at the end, Superman ‘dies.’ We have had one single movie prior to this to make a connection to the guy, and yet here he is getting a temporary comic book death with no buildup whatsoever that we know is going to be reversed sooner than later because the movie telegraphs this to us.

Imagine if, instead of building up the character over the course of a decade and putting him in all sorts of different stories, the MCU went right from Iron Man to Endgame. You go from a simpler, character-driven piece to a massive crossover where a hero dies right away, and it doesn’t give anyone time to care. Tony Stark had multiple films worth of characterization under his belt before they threw him in a crossover, let alone killed him, but Snyder expects you to give a damn about a Superman who just started his career in the previous movie of a franchise.

And the ass-numbing length of the movie is no justification. Even before the director’s cut came out this film was a slog, and the director’s cut really does nothing to earn its existence. All it does is add more runtime to an already tedious and bloated film, leading to the same exact ending and fixing none of the overarching narrative problems of the thing. The problem with any director’s cut is that ultimately the movie is still going to be Dawn of Justice, it’s still going to lead to extremely rushed character decisions, and it’s still going to be a mess. You’d have to redo half of the film to make this into a worthwhile and coherent narrative that’s actually worthy of being an entry in a superhero franchise.

And to top it all off, the movie spends far too much time foreshadowing for its own good. People criticized The Mummy for shoehorning in way too many shared universe elements right off the bat, and if that movie was bad for it, so is this one. The cameos from all the members of the Justice League, while striking, could be excised from the plot with little to no impact, and the Knightmare sequence is just excessive and weird.

Is It Really THAT Bad?

The answer to this question has never been harder.

On the one hand, this film does have some merit. There is some good casting choices, good cinematography, good action… But then, on the other hand, the film is overly long, pretentious, has poor writing and dialogue, mishandles everyone aside from Superman, and is just incredibly unpleasant.

This film is in many ways the exact problem Christopher Nolan created with his Dark Knight trilogy. Nolan, by grounding the fanciful characters of comic books into a realistic setting, created a climate in which someone could suck any sort of joy or meaning out of comics. The success of his films meant that people would see dark, gritty realism as preferable to joyous, colorful escapism, and the negative effects of his films, however good you find them, are still felt today even as filmmakers are finally shaking off the grit. Dawn of Justice is the zenith of Nolan’s style of superhero film. There is nothing fun, joyful, or engaging to be found here; it is simply the characters you know and love forced into dark, miserable scenarios that ends in death and misery. Where’s the fun? Where’s the color? Where’s the wonder, the excitement, where is any of it? This film paints a bleak and miserable and hopeless picture of a world of superheroes. It really makes me think of this rather famous comic panel:

I absolutely hate this movie, but not because I think it’s bad. I hate it because it has enough good ideas where it should be the best thing ever, but it really isn’t. It’s a miserable slog of a film that does nothing to justify or earn its massive runtime whatsoever. It really does belong somewhere between 5 and 6 on IMDB, because I can almost see why people like it, but it just isn’t even remotely close to being how good its fan say it is. This is not a good superhero movie, and this is not how we should want superhero movies to be. There is a market for serious superhero fare of course, and there’s no reason that these films can’t engage with mature themes or anything, don’t get me wrong. But this is absolutely not the way to do it.

[passionate-reply]

Whether you’re a Superman, a judge, a mom, or a dad, we can all appreciate the avant-garde genius of Laurie Anderson, the topic of this week’s installment of Great Albums! Find out what made Anderson’s breakout hit the most unlikely chart smash of the 80s, and what the rest of this amazing LP has in store, by watching my video or reading the full transcript below the break.

Welcome to Passionate Reply, and welcome to Great Albums! Today, I’ll be discussing one of the most unique and unforgettable albums around: Big Science, by Laurie Anderson. It’s very possible that you may not necessarily recognize her by name, but this album’s big hit has been riffed on and re-used many times throughout Western popular culture, so when I play it for you, it just might seem hauntingly familiar.

Music: “O Superman”

Put simply, “O Superman” is not your conventional pop hit, by any stretch of the imagination. It features little more than a sparse, barren electronic instrumental, and Anderson’s eerily vocoder-treated voice, not so much singing as acting out a one-woman stage play. It has much more in common with the avant-garde, minimalist works of 20th Century “modern classical” composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich than it does anything you would hear on pop radio in the 1980s.

While you might assume that it entered mainstream consciousness through being used in some art film, it actually was a bona fide pop hit--particularly in Great Britain, which has always had a pronounced affinity for surprisingly weird chart entries. While the single was initially given only a small release, like most of Anderson’s earlier work, the prominent British radio DJ John Peel discovered it...and fell in love with it. And thanks to his frequent playing of it on the air, a lot of other people fell in love with it too, propelling it to #2 in the UK charts. I think it’s a testament to just how different the media landscape used to be, once upon a time in the 20th Century. Nowadays, the radio doesn’t really have room for idiosyncratic tastemakers like Peel, and the independent DJs who remain certainly don’t have the reach that Peel did. I suppose it’s the 20th Century version of sea shanties and other oddities becoming trends on social media.

But anyway, setting aside the strange legacy “O Superman” has as the world’s least likely hit single, we can appreciate it perfectly well as a moving work of art. “O Superman” is not really a pop song, but what it is is, perhaps, a desperate plea for comfort and protection. The figure, or concept, of “mother” seems to be the focus of the text, and serves as the apparent “final resort” of its insecure, searching rhetoric. We get this idea in a microcosm in the famous opening line, inspired by an aria by Jules Massenet: “O Superman, o judge, o Mom and Dad.” It’s an appeal to any and all higher powers, but culminates with perhaps the most primal, intuitive authority we can understand: our parents. Towards the end of the piece, the narrator begs to be held in the arms of “Mom,” but they’re described not as soft and warm, but “automatic,” “electronic,” and “petrochemical,” creating an uncanny conflation of innate human connections and the harshly artificial, technological conditions of modernity. Have we made the promises of technology and science into some sort of idol, looking to them for reassurance, and projecting onto them a goodwill or benevolence like a mother has for her children? Themes of high technology, as well as the search for safety and security, are found throughout the rest of the album, as is the stark, minimalist instrumentation.

Music: “From the Air”

Expanding somewhat on the references to aeroplanes found on “O Superman,” opening track “From the Air” is narrated by the captain of a doomed flight, instructing the passengers how to handle the imminent “crash landing.” It’s many people’s very worst nightmare, and plunges us straight into the sense of fearing for our lives, in a situation that’s completely beyond our control. A bold move for the very first track we hear! “From the Air” leads with somewhat plausible suggestions, like a very dated request that passengers “extinguish all cigarettes,” but gradually becomes increasingly surreal, adding to that nightmarish feeling. Anderson delivers her lines with a palpable sense of authority, that stirs you to want to obey her character even as they prove their unreliability. A taut, unresolved saxophone-driven ostinato throughout the track provides a constant sense of tension and anxiety, which certainly suits the mood. Until the end of the song, at which point it abruptly cuts off--presumably to represent the crash occurring, and the sudden deaths of those on board.

I like to think of “From the Air” as a sort of dark counterpart to “O Superman,” the latter of which is the opening track of the second side. While “O Superman” deifies technology as a source of maternalistic comfort, “From the Air” presents us with the ultimate failure of technology: slick and polished until the end, but unable to provide any real hope of meaningful security. That human desire for security is interrogated more directly on the final track of side one: “Born, Never Asked.”

Music: “Born, Never Asked”

While “Born, Never Asked” is much more laconic than tracks like “From the Air” and “O Superman,” it’s no less probing and thought-provoking, presenting us with a world of people who are, fundamentally, “free”--and yet deeply unsatisfied. “You were born,” quips Anderson, “and so you are free.” But we’re all too busy asking for a bigger answer, and some explicit, deeper meaning to our existences, that we can’t appreciate the simple freedom to live our lives however we want to, in the absence of any overt goals. The track begins by establishing a stately, handclap-driven backing, which serves to underscore the plainness or simplicity of its message, and is ultimately overtaken by a mournful violin outro--perhaps the embodiment of our emotional turmoil, as we seek the comfort of clear answers despite the fact that they never arrive. If only the world were as simple and well-defined as it seemed to be when we were children, filled with unthinking and unconditional love for our mothers!

“Born, Never Asked” asks us to question what it really means to be “free,” and whether or not it’s even satisfying or helpful to possess “freedom.” It’s worth noting that all of the pieces that comprise Big Science were chiefly intended as part of Anderson’s much longer magnum opus, entitled United States, which she completed in 1984. In that context, criticism of the value of “freedom” is perhaps also criticism of certain traditional American moral values. While “O Superman” prominently mentions “American planes,” I think the track that has the most to say about being American is the title track of the album.

Music: “Big Science”

The title track of Big Science takes us to a desolate and mostly empty landscape, defined more by its potential to be moulded into something habitable than anything it already, innately is. It’s a frigid perspective on America as terra nullius, a wasteland filled with nothing but ultra-recent and ultra-artificial capitalist “developments” as opposed to any real history or meaning. With its chilling coyote-like howls, and nods to Western movies and dependence upon cars, it can easily be contextualized as particularly American, but ultimately, the human drive to “improve” our environment through questionable (and perhaps even destructive) means is fairly universal. Much like the emotionally unsatisfying sense of freedom bestowed upon those who are born, in “Born, Never Asked,” the title track of Big Science shows us a world full of endless possibilities, but devoid of any true happiness born of those possibilities.

The term “big science” dates back to the Mid-20th Century, and has been used to describe the increasingly large scale of many significant scientific efforts, particularly those supported by world governments...and particularly, their militaries. During and after the Second World War, it became increasingly necessary for nations that wanted a place on the world stage to rope science into the military-industrial complex, especially in light of the development of atomic weaponry. Given the album’s thematic emphasis on the way we look to science and technology to provide some aegis of protection, and often in harmful or destructive ways, it’s a very fitting choice for the title.

I think that connection to the nuclear bomb is also an important key to interpreting the album’s cover art. On the cover of Big Science, we see Anderson lit very harshly from the right--so much so that her sunglasses are rendered completely white by the powerful light. While her pose is very deliberate, and perhaps even stilted, she appears to be raising her arms as though to shield herself from whatever is casting this bright light. Is Anderson perhaps portraying an atomic scientist, observing a nuclear blast with its signature burst of radiant light?

Overall, however we interpret this gesture, the black and white imagery and completely empty backdrop seem to pair well with that sparse and minimalistic instrumentation. Anderson appears on the cover with her signature costume, a solid white suit which, when paired with her short hairstyle, gives her a somewhat androgynous appearance. It also looks a bit like a labcoat, often worn by scientists and doctors--figures who culturally embody the principle of benevolent authorities backed by the power of technology and science.

Whenever artists who only briefly felt the spotlight of mainstream success are discussed, it can be tempting to ask whether or not such figures “deserved” more or better. In the case of Anderson, though, she never expected “O Superman” to become the breakout hit that it did, and never followed it up with anything actively pursuing the pop charts. In the wake of her most famous work, Anderson went right back to doing what she had been doing: making great, but totally avant-garde, art. She’s a figure of “art music,” and the “art world,” through and through, performing her elaborate multimedia works at museums, appearing in a number of festival-circuit art films, and accepting honourary degrees. Anderson has had a perfectly successful career, dwelling precisely in the realm of her choosing, and I don’t think there’s any better outcome than that. If you like Big Science, you’ll find plenty more striking and evocative works throughout the rest of her long and ongoing career.

Music: “Sharkey’s Day”

My favourite track on Big Science is “Sweaters.” With a Celtic-sounding melody, a grating fiddle, and perhaps the most vocally hated musical instrument of all time, the bagpipes, “Sweaters” is a dirge about an ancient subject: falling out of love. But despite its backward-looking folk setting, the jump from “I no longer love your eyes” to “I no longer love your sweaters” anchors it into the realm of the totally mundane...if not banal. Overall, though, what I think really makes it stand out on the album is its sense of levity. As I’ve discussed earlier, Big Science is loaded with really heavy themes about technology, Americana, and the meaning of life...so a song that’s not only about a romantic relationship, but also about sweaters, pens, and pencils, jammed into the middle of the first side, really feels like a sort of palate cleanser while you’re listening to this. That’s all for today--thanks for watching!

Music: “Sweaters”

[calamity-bean]

16 new horror films i’ve watched at random lately just cause i’ve been in the mood for horror

Been thinking about horror today, and fun fact, I’ve actually been fairly DEVOURING horror films of late! Sixteen new ones in the past couple weeks, in fact, according to the little list I’ve been keeping! New to me, that is, though they do all happen to be very recent releases (2016 at earliest). Horror is a genre with which I often like to pull up Netflix or Hulu and just pick at random some film I’ve never heard of and don’t know the first thing about; I feel like it’s a genre that depends so much on personal taste and that encompasses such a wide variety of tropes and approaches that I never entirely know whether I’ll like a particular film until I try it. It’s a gamble, sure, and sometimes it’s a dull or infuriating couple hours... But I love horror in general, and I feel like it’s a genre in which even terrible films often stir my imagination with the potential of their premise if not the brilliance of their execution. And you do find those hidden gems.

Anyway, since I love to hear myself talk, I thought I’d share my quick impressions of the ones I’ve watched lately, in case any of you are also in the mood to stream something new! These are (almost) all currently on Netflix or Hulu, so have at it. No specific spoilers; mostly just whether I liked it or not and why. I added a few content warnings where I remembered any elements that, to me, went beyond genre-standard levels of content or involved specific common triggers, but, I mean, they’re all horror films, so do your due diligence if necessary and do expect some level of violent or disturbing content in all of them. 

The sixteen films in question are: Sweetheart (2019); The Lodge (2019); Mercy Black (2019); What Keeps You Alive (2018); Cold Skin (2017); The Golem (2018); Rattlesnake (2019); We Summon the Darkness (2019); The Wretched (2019); They Come Knocking (2019); Pyewacket (2017); The Other Lamb (2019); The Silence (2019); Body at Brighton Rock (2019); Under the Shadow (2016); and Seven in Heaven (2018).

Brief descriptions and impressions and such under the cut!

Sweetheart: Survival/monster horror about a young woman who, after the boat she and her friends were on goes down in a storm, washes up alone on an uninhabited island… and then realizes she’s not entirely alone. Quite liked this one! Like almost any horror movie, it suffers from the fact that monsters are almost ALWAYS far scarier (and far less cheesy) before you actually see their CGI rendering chasing the protag, but that’s typical, we’re used to that. The protagonist is smart and capable, and the actress (Kiersey Clemons) has to carry so much of the film solo and often with very sparse dialogue. Warning for mutilated and decomposing corpses.

The Lodge: A woman who as a child was the only survivor of a cult winds up stranded with her new fiance’s two children in a remote, snowbound lodge. This one was pretty dark! I love themes of cold, isolation, and losing connection with reality, and I think the whole cast does a great job; the acting and production are overall high quality. Not sure it captured my imagination enough for a rewatch, but I did enjoy watching it. My fellow Barkskins fans will notice a few glimpses of our own Renardette. Warnings for onscreen suicide, pet death, and psychiatric/medical manipulation. 

Mercy Black: A young woman returns home fifteen years after, in her childhood, being involved in a disturbing act of violence inspired by an urban legend called Mercy Black. I like the concept behind this one, in terms of the urban legend, the protagonist’s relationship with it; I liked the overall film okay, but I found certain aspects a bit cliche or thinly sketched. Standard supernatural horror levels of violence and spookiness, imo.

What Keeps You Alive: For their one-year anniversary, a young couple vacation to a remote house in the woods, where the protagonist begins to learn some strange things about her wife. I really enjoyed this one. It might be my favorite on this list, and certainly one of the ones I’m more likely to watch again. It’s well structured, well made, with a strong, compact cast, and it’s gotten the song “Bloodlet” stuck in my head for weeks. However, you will probably not enjoy this one if, as I know is the case for some people, you would rather not consume content that depicts LGBT relationships that are unhealthy or LGBT characters who are villainous. I get where you’re coming from, but it means this one probably isn’t for you. It also isn’t for you if you would rather not see some quite brutal injuries.

Cold Skin: Okay, this is the only one that wasn’t actually on streaming, I checked this out from my local library. Set in 1914, a young man takes a post as a meteorologist on a remote island in the South Atlantic, inhabited only by the unfriendly lighthouse keeper… and the creatures that crawl onto shore at night. Gosh… How do I feel about this one? There are aspects that are cheesy, effects that don’t entirely hold up. But I liked it. I like the idea of it, and I like the themes of isolation and connection, and I like the protagonist and overall I think it’s a solid and interesting narrative. Sort of… The Terror meets Lovecraft. Warning for offscreen (but audible, and almost visible) sexual assault.

The Golem: Set in the late 17th century in a rural Lithuanian shtetl, a woman creates a golem to protect her community from the threats of Christians who blame her people for the plague. Thematically, this one centers largely around motherhood, which I think makes sense with how it’s done here, and I always like the supernatural elements of a horror film to have a very strong, personal thematic link with the protagonist’s emotional character arc. Stars Maman Brigitte from American Gods! Warning for mentions of miscarriage and themes of child death.

Rattlesnake: After a mishap on a remote highway, a woman unknowingly makes a deal with the devil in order to save her young daughter’s life. I liked this one as well; I found the protagonist enjoyable, the overall concept straightforward but engaging, and the hot, arid, rural setting — I think it’s supposed to be around Palo Duro? — an effective backdrop. Not spooky-scary, but nice tension throughout. 

We Summon the Darkness: Set in the 80s, three girls travel to a heavy metal concert despite the string of recent killings apparently committed by a Satanic cult. This one is basically a slasher flick — with a twist, yeah, but essentially the slasher model of teens plus extensive violence — and I think it’s a pretty decent one. And I liked the hair and costumes, ahaha. 

The Wretched: A teenage boy becomes convinced that his new neighbor has been possessed by something evil. I like the narrative and the characters in this one okay, but where I really have to give it props is in the overall visual presentation of the supernatural threats; it’s able to lean into uncanniness and human body horror that work well on film rather than presenting a creature created wholecloth (which, as I mentioned earlier, often doesn’t work super well).

They Come Knocking: On a drive into the middle of nowhere, a father and his two daughters hear something knocking on their caravan at night, asking to be let in. Okay, so… this one is a black-eyed children story (with a setup reminiscent of ye olde Anansi’s Goatman, too, in a way), and I have to admit that black-eyed children are one of those tropes that doesn’t work for me even as a creepypasta, it just strikes me as lame and dumb. And I did find the actual children in this film to be, well, cheesy and dumb-looking. But the human side of the narrative — the characters and their relationships and emotional aspects — is actually pretty well done! So I found it engaging enough in that regard.

Pyewacket: A teenage girl who has a difficult relationship with her mother lashes out by trying to summon a demon to kill her, only to regret the ritual right away. I think this one was well done, too, pretty dark, with a spooky forest setting and some genuinely creepy glimpses of the supernatural threat. I am also delighted to discover that Pyewacket is actually the name of a familiar spirit according to the confession of an accused witch in the 17th century. (Not delighted by the fact that this poor 17th century woman was tortured for being an alleged witch, but delighted that there’s a little historical inspo here.) Warning for a fairly graphic death by burning.

The Other Lamb: This one is not horror as in “scary” but horror as in thematically disturbing and a little eerie. A young girl who’s been raised in a cult — all female except for their leader, to whom all the members are either wives or daughters — begins to question her faith. Slow, quiet, and a bit surreal, with some slightly feral-woman themes that are up my alley; I think I enjoyed it? The cast is quite good, especially the protagonist (Raffey Cassidy) and cult leader (Michiel Huisman with, I gotta say, some truly lovely hair). Warning for onscreen but nongraphic (as in, clothed and not showing anything below the neck) sexual assault of a minor.

The Silence: A deaf teenager and her family struggle to survive amidst an apocalypse of deadly monsters that attack based on sound. No, I’m not talking about A Quiet Place. I do feel a bit sorry for this film, because I know that it was conceived of and began production well before A Quiet Place came out, only to essentially be doomed by its striking similarity to such a successful film… And honestly, it’s not as good as A Quiet Place; it’s cheesier, there are more plot and character holes, the ultimate main threat feels disconnected from the premise, and the core theme/character arcs aren’t as cohesive. But it’s not TERRIBLE. It’s more of a B-movie-esque monster/disaster flick, is all. And I like Stanley Tucci, so at least he’s always fun to watch.

Body at Brighton Rock: An inexperienced parks employee gets lost in the backcountry and has to spend the night watching over a (possibly murdered) body she stumbles across while awaiting rescue. This one… hm. It’s like, I didn’t hate it? But it was frustrating. It reused the same scares / fake-outs multiple times, and even by horror movie standards the protagonist was maddeningly careless. I think it was all the more disappointing because I do like the setting and premise but felt it could’ve been better. 

Under the Shadow: In 1980s Tehran, during the air raids and missile strikes of the War of the Cities, a woman begins to fear something evil is stalking her young daughter through their emptying apartment building. This is another top fave, and I think overall the most well constructed film on this list in an objective sense. Strong narrative, strong characters and acting, a really great atmosphere of claustrophobia and tension and dread, and an interesting and effective setting. Would absolutely watch again.

Seven in Heaven: At a house party, two teenagers enter a closet as part of a kissing game, and they exit into a parallel universe that is similar but different in striking ways. This one was, hm… okay? I felt like it could’ve gone so much farther with the potential of alternate universes, in terms of really making them weird and interesting, and although I don’t expect a film to spell out everything for me, I just thought that the whole underlying mechanism of what was happening was left too unexplained. Also, the background characters looked like they were played by actual high school-age teens while the main characters looked like your standard Hollywood 20-something “teens,” which created kind of a weird dissonance lmao. But it was okay.

Overall, I didn’t HAAATE any of these; most were fine, some I found less engaging or more frustrating than others, and some I really enjoyed. I did start and then not finish a few more as well... I watched about 20 minutes of Black Rock (2012) before deciding I wasn’t in the mood for where it was going, and I just barely started We Are What We Are (2010) but realized I was too tired and distracted by other things to pay enough attention to subtitles at the moment. On a not strictly horror note, but it’s still thriller so we’ll toss it in, I got a ways into The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) because that’s a helluva title and I wanted to see Barry Keoghan’s work outside Dunkirk (the only film I’d seen him in), but man, that’s a weird one huh, very slow, very odd style of dialogue. I’ll still likely finish some or all of those at some point, but I just wasn’t in the right headspace when I first tried. 

Anyway, this has been me telling you what movies I’ve been watching! I’m sure you’re enthralled. And please always feel free to talk horror movies to me or send me recs!

[onebadwinter]

The Joker Tropes Part 2

Taken From Here and here

Nether Realm Studios especially seems to love making Joker out to be evil incarnate. In Injustice: Gods Among Us and its sequel, he loses all his cred (and life) once he nukes Metropolis; Harley ditches him entirely, Batman just completely gives up on indulging him any more, even Guest Fighters like Hellboy consider him worthless, and non-Batvillains such as Grodd and Brainiac and even Darkseid loathe him for either Metropolis, or just in general principle. Mortal Kombat 11 shows that even the MK cast see him as a scourge upon the realms, and also express distaste toward him for either his nuking, a previous outing, or because he's seen as a buffoon who cannot be taken seriously (this is usually the case for other villain characters).

About the only person who can tolerate him for long is Lex Luthor, only because they both have the same level of hatred for their respective enemies. Even then, Luthor prefers to keep his distance from the Joker, if only because a bored Joker screws with everything For the Evulz.

In the animated series, he claims to have been beaten as a child when interviewed by Harley Quinn. It is unknown if this is true. According to Batman, he's simply making it up.

In one issue of New 52, he claims to have been driven insane by an abusive grandmother, who also bleached his skin to its present pallor.

In the same continuity, he is one to a baby gorilla he adopts, trains up as a gun-wielding henchman, and ultimately gets killed off for laughs.

In the comic book adaptation of Injustice, it's implied Harley fears Joker would be one, and gives their daughter to her sister, lest he kill the child. It's left ambiguous whether the Joker's even aware of the ruse.

Averted in one story, wherein one of Arkham's doctors realizes Joker's faking insanity just to piss off Batman as revenge for his disfigurement. Another doctor finds the report and excitedly reveals it to the current head doctor, only to learn that  the Joker left it for everyone to read, since the paper's written by Harley Quinn, and therefore worthless as evidence.

In Batman: The Man Who Laughs, it's established that the name "The Joker" was given to him by the media, and he liked it so much that he decided to call himself that.

The same happens in Joker (2019), where Murray tells the audience to "look at this joker" when talking about Arthur. Arthur took it to heart.

Batman: Arkham Knight takes this even further by revealing that being forgotten is the only thing the Joker truly fears.

Just to demonstrate how much disregard he has for his henchmen, a reoccurring motivation for offing his own lackeys is failing to laugh at one of his jokes. Or laughing too late. Or laughing for too long. Or laughing at the wrong joke. He's... unpredictable.

The Joker loves it when people laugh with him, whether genuine or not, but if someone laughs at him, they're most likely already dead.

Joker loves attention and being above the normals, so never imply that he's not interesting or unique. Terry exploits this flaw in Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker just to drive him to a Villainous Breakdown.

The Batman Who Laughs. Since the character's first appearance in Dark Nights: Metal, the mere mention of him is enough to put The Joker in an uncharacteristically un-jolly mood and is a good way to get on his bad side. In fact, the dislike of this twisted version of his archnemesis is so great, that when Lex Luthor and The Legion of Doom started cooperating with him against Joker's protests, he quit the legion (after non-lethally jokerizing every other member of it) in disgust.

If you're going to hurt Batman, do it right. One of the supplementary stories for Joker War had him beyond furious with Bane - to the point of promising him he'd kill him in a way he would never see coming - for showing so little imagination in killing Alfred in City of Bane without even letting Batman listen to it to torture him. By his reckoning, if you have a great gag to break the Bat, use it to break the Bat - don't blow it by having Robin be the only one to witness it.

Originally Conrad Veidt from The Man Who Laughs.

Later portrayals base themselves on his actors, with Cesar Romero a popular candidate, and after Jack Nicholson came in, artists such as Alex Ross base him on him, such as the actor's distinct widow's peak and slicked back hair.

During Knightfall he and Scarecrow killed several members of a SWAT team, and one of his last actions in Batman: No Man's Land was to kill Commissioner Gordon's second wife, Lt. Sarah Essen.

One of the alternate realities seen in Zero Hour! was one where he killed Commissioner Gordon instead of crippling Barbara.

Part of the reason Gordon takes over the post of Commissioner in both The Dark Knight Trilogy and Batman: Arkham Series is due to the Joker killing Gillian Loeb. Additionally, the first game in the latter series, Asylum, he sees several of Arkham's guards killed by him and his men.

He's holding a dead cop's corpse in his intro in Injustice: Gods Among Us and using it as a puppet. He also talks to the body of one of the Regime enforcers who captured him once he breaks out and heads to Gotham.

Whether he was driven insane or was already insane and became completely bonkers.

Where he is on the spectrum between "wacky prankster" and "utterly depraved and sadistic sociopath and murderer".

Whether he is a senseless, performative terrorist wreaking havoc for kicks or a deceptively cunning and competent criminal mastermind. Or both. Usually both.

He's no Batman, but sometimes he is a proficient hand-to-hand combatant, Knife Nut or marksman, and other times a flimsy wimp who goes down in one punch. In some of the grittier settings, his raw strength, numbness to pain and viciousness are enough to level the playing field with Batman.

Whether he actually loves Harley Quinn varies. In the animated series, (where Harley first appeared) the writers haveoutright said he's a sociopath incapable of loving anyone, and just sees her as a useful mook. Some other works imply he really does love her on some level (although he's usually still an abusive asshole.)

He can either be Faux Affably Evil, Laughably Evil, just a Monster Clown, or some combination of the three.

At least one such incident implied he would be interested in Batman... but only after he was dead. Again this may only have been a tactic to get under Batman's skin or truthful admission. The readers will never know for certain.

His plot in The Killing Joke is to put Jim Gordon through the wringer hard in the hopes of driving him mad. He'll also try to drive Batman over the edge (particularly, drive him to break his "no killing" rule), sometimes by cutting off all of Batsy's human connections.

The Dark Knight reworks it into Driving Gotham To Senseless Violence with wanton acts of destruction or terrorism, just to prove everyone's as bad as him deep down.

Ironically, a 1952 story has the Joker get himself falsely committed to an insane asylum, to question a patient who knew the location of a cache of money. The end of the story has him Laughing Mad due to a prank Batman used to disguise his identity.

He didn't have his signature laugh. This seems to have been a way to "goofy up" the character to make him less terrifying in the days of the Comics Code Authority. Later on, he'd learn to giggle while remaining terrifying.

He actually committed crimes for moneynote , and wasn't really interested in causing chaos or terror for a joke's sake.

Building off of that, his plans weren't really "insane" until the Silver Age (at which point it's not even fair to say this was exclusive to him), nor was there any question of the character's mental stability.

His obsession with Batman wasn't there, much less the idea that he would pass up chances to kill the Bat or learn his identity. This aspect was probably introduced to explain the Bond Villain Stupidity he (and every Batman villain) had become infamous for in the Silver Age.

His clown-like complexion was actually makeup in his early appearances. He even removed his makeup to disguise himself as a cop, which was referenced in The Dark Knight. It's later revealed that the look is permanent after falling in a vat of chemicals.

The Brave and the Bold #111 and #191 have him team up with Batman to clear his name after being framed for several murders. The first instance turned out to simply be a framing the guilty part occasion but the second instance was actually genuine on Joker's part (except the person Joker seemingly murdered turned out to be faking their death).

He also does this with Batman whenever The Batman Who Laughs is involved (specifically in the Dark Knights: Metal series).

He abruptly ends a partnership with Red Skull when his Nazi affiliation comes out. Red Skull simply wonders why he is so surprised when he thinks that the Joker would make a great Nazi. The Joker is NOT happy about this, proclaiming "I may be a criminal lunatic, but I'm an American criminal lunatic!" It even provides the trope's image. And yes, folks, even an equal-opportunity murderer like the Joker despises the Nazis!note

The exception is mentioned again in the Last Laugh arc where the Joker immediately refused to join the American Neo-Nazi Aryan Alliance group in the Slab after he was offered membership. Joker: I'm evil and all that, but you guys are just plain mean.

Will not harm dumb animals and doesn't condone it. There's no humor to be had in that. Higher primates apparently do not qualify but a lot more effort went into that one.

While in Arkham with villain Warren White, AKA the Great White Shark, Joker calls him the worst person he ever met. He states that while he may kill people, even he doesn't steal their kids' college funds.

Sees nothing funny about someone parking in a handicap spot when they're not handicapped. However, he does think it's hilarious to hurt them in ways that will make certain they'll always be able to park there.

A girl named Janey Bennett, whose class was studying criminal behavior, became pen pals with the Joker while he was in Arkham. When Janey revealed that her father, the mayor of Motor City, was abusing her (exactly how isn't specified, though it was implied to have been really bad) the Joker broke out and, convinced that the authorities would be of no help, tried to force the mayor into admitting to his crimes and giving him Janey (so that he could find a better home for her) by threatening to contaminate the city's blood supply, going through with it (because the ends justify the means) when the mayor refused to give in to his demands. He originally intended to give her to Batman as well so he could protect her but at the end decided to give her to her mom. Joker: I mean, stealing a city blind is something I can admire... but being mean to one's own daughter... that just makes my blood boil.

For a rather literal form of "standard", the Joker's team-up with Carnage in Spider-Man and Batman: Disordered Minds fell apart in part because the Joker, known for his love of theatrics, found Kasady's desire to get straight to killing boring. Conversely, Kasady didn't like the Joker's flair for theatrics.

The Joker absolutely loathes The Batman Who Laughs, to the point where he drops his usual joking demeanor and is deathly serious whenever directly referring to him, even willing to work together with Batman to face him when it comes down to it. When Lex Luthor goes behind his back to make a deal with The Batman Who Laughs (going against the only condition Joker has for joining his plan), Joker responds by Joker-gassing the Legion of Doom, putting Lex into a series of deathtraps, trashing Lex's Power Armor, and quitting the Legion. In the process, he tells Luthor how he had planned on ruining the Legion utterly on the verge of victory, and as nightmarish as his plan sounded, he claims it is nothing compared to what the Batman Who Laughs is going to do.

While he still gloated about it and found Commissioner Gordon kneecapping him funny after remember that he'd crippled Barbara, the actual act of killing Sarah Essen in the penultimate issue of Batman: No Man's Land is one of the few times the Joker wasn't happy with something he himself did, considering he's seen walking away while scowling afterward, leaves the babies he originally planned to murder unharmed and immediately turns himself in to the police.

Emperor Joker sees the Joker disgusted with a corrupted Jimmy O Lsen tormenting the Superfamily and Batman when they're turned int animals.

Later one he is disgusted when his minions vandalize the Moai on Eastern Island.

Again, when he rescues Lex from The Batman Who Laugh's infected minions in Hell Arisen, the mere mention of his alternate universe rival prompts him to have a very uncharacteristic Freak Out. The Joker: I told you. I told you not to deal with him. You should have shot that thing in the head the second you had it in a cage! It is wrong. It is a wrong thing.

Played more straight in his relationship with Punchline. Only time will tell if it lasts.

There’s also a comic storyline when Hush informed that a dirty cop Office Halmet killed his wife Jeannie. The Joker wanted nothing more than to kill said cop in revenge. Then there’s Batman: Three Jokers where, despite it being being heavily implied he was abusive, the “Comedian” Joker is seen setting up fake tea parties with dolls, clearly trying to substitute them for his wife and child showing that he does miss them and desire to be a family with them.

While The Dark Knight is one of the few times the Joker's clown-like appearance is the result of make-up, he does sport a Glasgow Grin.

While Joker still has the permanent clown look, it's combined with the Glasgow Grin.

While Batman: Endgame would see the skin of his face restored with a chemical called Dionesiumnote , at the start of The New 52, the Joker had the Dollmaker skin his face and then, after he recovered it, spent Death of the Family wearing it like a Leatherface-esque mask. And even in Endgame, his restored face ends up badly burned as the result of the finale battle between him and Batman, though it still ends up restored again.

Gotham sees neither Valeska escape this. After his death in season 2, Jerome (the proto-Joker) ends up resurrected in season 3, but because Dwight thinks his attempt to revive him failed, Dwight ends up cutting off Jerome's face ala Death of the Family and Jerome ends up stapling it on when he catches up with Dwight and while he later has it properly reattached, there's still scars from what happened. Jeremiah, Jerome's twin and the show's true Joker, ends up with the "perma-clown" appearance due to Jerome having the Scarecrow brew something up to spray in Jeremiah's face, but season 5 sees his fateful fall at Ace Chemicals badly scar his face and sear off most of his hair with only stringy patches left.

Averted entirely in Joker (2019), where his clown appearance is entirely makeup, and the worst it gets is painting his iconic smile on his face with his own blood from a car crash. Not even a Glasgow Grin or anything, the blood is from his hand and his face only has a few normal cuts on it.

While Batman is a rather serious character who refuses to kill anyone, The Joker is a rather comical character who revels in death.

Joker's gadgets tend to be rather goofier but much more lethal, such as the Joker Venom that he often uses to kill his victims.

While Batman gets along well with his sidekicks Robin and Batgirl, Joker frequently abuses his sidekick Harley Quinn and has tried to kill her before, not to mention all the times he has been a Bad Boss by killing his henchmen for any reason you can think of, sometimes for no reason at all.

While Batman's backstory is well known, even by the citizens of Gotham who know of the tragedy of the rich Waynes' in Crime Alley, no one knows anything about the Joker's backstory, but most versions he tells are consistent in two things: he was a nobody, and possibly someone poor.

In most adaptations, his voice is high-pitched in contrast to Batman's Badass Baritone.

Why he went by the name the Red Hood has changed over the years: The Killing Joke claims he was a failed comedian driven to crime to support his pregnant wife. The trauma of his disfigurement from jumping in the acid and his wife's earlier accidental death drove him insane. However, even this backstory is questionable, as the Joker himself calls it "multiple choice".

In Injustice 2, an intro with Atrocitus has the Red Lantern wondering what drove the Joker to nihilism.

In the animated series, he claims to have been abused as a child when interviewed by Harley, but according to Batman, it's just another ruse to escape Arkham.

The purple suit and matching pants with either an orange and/or green shirt with a bowtie or tie, remains the definitive Joker look one that many artists and costume designers have given spin on. He is sometimes known for wearing a cool hat but other times goes hatless. Heath Ledger's custom-designed purple long-coat, trousers, blue shirt and green Waistcoat of Style with a tie has likewise become iconic and famous for its contemporary and downright stylish update on the classic look.

The original Red Hood outfit which is a black suit, white shirt, bowtie with an opera cap and a bizarre red dome is also quite famous.

The Hawaiian tourist outfit he wore in the notorious scene in The Killing Joke.

The white suit he wears in Miller's The Dark Knight Returns as well as the white nurse maid outfit with red wig in The Dark Knight is also quite notable.

The Future Joker look from Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker which went with a mime look (black body suit, slicked-back hair) is also quite distinct and unique.

The first issue of Batman with Joker's debut has him described as having "burning, hate-filled eyes" and the moniker, "the harliquin of hate".

The Man Who Laughs had Bruce dosed with a light version of the Joker Venom and he felt his perspective shift into a paranoid vengeance were he felt everyone deserved to be punished for his parent's death just for existing.

Death of the Family had Batman describe how Joker's irises are always narrow when looking at anyone but Batman and that it is usually an indication of negative feelings toward something with Bruce mentioning that his eye are the eyes of someone who hates everything he sees.

In the Justice League storyline "Rock of Ages", Martian Manhunter has to put in incredible effort to reorganize Joker's mind long enough for him to give up the cataclysmic Philosopher's Stone. The briefly sane Joker immediately says My God, What Have I Done? verbatim as he hands it back, before quickly losing his mind and going back to the laughing madman.

The famous example from the end of The Killing Joke, where Batman tries to convince him to allow Batman to rehabilitate him before their vendetta kills them. Joker considers it for a long, somber moment before quietly reflecting that they're both too far gone.

Batman: Cacophony ends with Joker being pumped full of an inhuman amount of antipsychotic drugs to keep him under control while in recovery from a near-fatal stabbing. Batman takes the opportunity to have a relatively-sane conversation with him, though it's somewhat subverted by Joker still being a homicidal sociopath even while heavily sedated.

He even gives multiple reasons on how he came Back from the Dead in Injustice 2 and will go along with whatever his opponent thinks is true, despite being Dead All Along in story mode and only appearing as a hallucination to his ex-moll.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns sees him kill David Endochrine and Ruth Weisenheimer, who were clearly based on David Letterman and Dr. Ruth Westheimer.

During Knightfall, once he realizes that Azrael isn't Batman, his plan's gone to hell, and one too many criticisms from Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert stand-ins, he kills the stand-ins.

In one of the issues for the The Batman tie-in comic, The Batman Strikes, he terrorizes a stand-in for Conan O'Brien. This becomes darkly Hilarious in Hindsight as the real O'Brien voiced Endochrine in the animated version of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. In the series proper, Harley's debut had the two of them terrorize a stand-in for Dr. Phil for the climax.

If you want to know how truly terrifying The Batman Who Laughs is, look no further than the way Joker acts whenever discussing him. He doesn't laugh, he doesn't smile. He becomes calm and serious and simply tells whomever he's talking to that the TBWL is "a wrong thing that shouldn't exist". Someone HAS to be scary if the very thought of him makes Joker act like a calm rational sane person.

In Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, the clown has a massive Villainous Breakdown when Terry mocks him for his failed attempts to break Batman.

On the rare occasion Joker gets bored and leaves Gotham, expect everyone to think of him as just a silly clown, until the bodies start piling up.

One issue of the Robin Series had him talking about having Abusive Parents, only for a psychiatrist to tell him it's the seventh story he's told now.

Batman lampshades on this to Harley in the animated series, thinking it's another lie to gain sympathy.

The Killing Joke claims he was a failed comedian driven to crime to support his pregnant wife. The trauma of his disfigurement and his wife's earlier accidental death drove him mad. However, even this could be a lie, as he himself calls it "multiple choice".

It's even discussed in Injustice 2, as Atrocitus wonders what drove the Joker to nihilism. Despite only appearing as a hallucination to Harley in story mode, he spews out multiple theories for his Unexplained Recovery and will say Sure, Let's Go with That in non-canon fights. Was he resurrected by someone, or is he from another universe? Did he escape from either the Source Wall or the Phantom Zone, or is he just an apparition?

Shadow of the Bat #38, Tears of a Clown: He celebrates his anniversary of the day he was a still sane, but hapless comedian, and was thrown out of an exclusive Stand-Up Comedy club for an unfunny act the patrons mercilessly heckled. It was the last straw as he agreed to provide to his family by pulling a job for the Red Hood gang. So he kidnaps all the patrons and reenacts his act with control collars that will kill them when they laugh. Oddly enough, the patrons are hardcore Stand-Up Comedy fans, so they can't remember the number of times they've booed someone. However, even this origin story could be a lie.

It's come to be his primary disfigurement over the original skin bleaching.

In Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker, Terry McGinnis exploits this by delivering an epic Boring Insult so the clown will have a Villainous Breakdown.

King Barlowe proved to be a big one in his Thanatos Gambit in the episode "Joker's Millions" of The New Batman Adventures. In a spiteful Video Will, he gives the clown his millions, revealing in his tape that most of it was fake. Expecting the clown to splurge on it, he won't have enough to pay off the IRS, allowing Barlowe to get the "last laugh" after his death, without the Joker coming after him.

Alan Moore's "I go Loony" from The Killing Joke, an in-panel song-and-dance tune that was eventually made into an actual song belted out in Batman: The Killing Joke.

Batman: The Brave and the Bold has "Where's the Fun in That?" from the episode "Emperor Joker".

Batman: Arkham City ended with him covering The Platters' "Only You (and You Alone)", Batman: Arkham Origins had him cover Hank Williams' "Cold, Cold, Heart" and Batman: Arkham Knight had him provide an original composition, "Can't Stop Laughing".

Action Fashionista: This incarnation of the Joker has a wide variety of garish outfits for every occassion — most of them straight from the comics.

Adaptational Attractiveness: Metal teeth, lack of eyebrows, and tattoos aside, he's still being played by the youthful-looking real life Pretty Boy Jared Leto; especially since the last two cinematic Jokers were a creepy middle-aged gangster with a botched face-lift and a filthy, scarred vagrant (even the mentally unwell clown-for-hire doesn't scream Mr. Fanservice one bit). This version looks more like Marilyn Manson.

Adaptational Nice Guy: A very downplayed example. While he's otherwise the same Clown Prince of Crime we all know and love to hate, he appears to genuinely care for Harley, and even throws her out of a falling helicopter to save her life. Almost any other iteration of the Joker would do that to save his own skin or rid himself of her.

Adaptational Skimpiness: This version of the Joker tends to be shirtless a lot more than he has in any other medium. It mostly seems like an opportunity to show off his tattoos.

Adaptation Distillation: Leto's Joker seems to be less of the "evil philosopher" that Heath Ledger portrayed him as in The Dark Knight, and instead seems to be a cross between the garish, larger-than-life Mark Hamill version from the animated series and the Arkham games, and the creepy, deeply twisted Brian Azzarello version. David Ayer had also stated that he looked specifically to the Golden Age Joker for reference, providing reason for many to believe that Leto's Joker is a modern re-imagining of that incarnation.

Advertised Extra: Heavily featured in Suicide Squad promotional materials, barely appears in the film for more than seven minutes. According to Jared Leto, several of the scenes he shot were not included in the theatrical cut.

Ambiguous Disorder: In Suicide Squad, most of the time the Joker seems... not all there compared to Harley. In addition of psychopathic tendencies, the Joker has random bouts of maniacal laughter, confusion, and slurred speech-like patterns. All attributes that stem from punch-drunk syndrome. Considering he has faced Batman one too many times, it makes sense that the Joker's mental stability is finally catching up to him.

However, come Birds of Prey, they broke up, mirroring the comics where they do have an Relationship Revolving Door. It appears to stick, as Harley publicly calls it quits between the two of them.

His tattoos are very reminiscent of the Joker in All Star Batman and Robin.

Ax-Crazy: Like all the incarnations before him, calling him a violent psychopath is one of the biggest understatements you can make.

Bedlam House: Spent some time at Arkham Asylum, where he met Harley. Then he broke free from it with the help of both Harley and his gang.

Chewing the Scenery: An important part of the character is his theatricality.

Cool Car: A bright purple sports car with underglow lights and a "HAHAHA" license plate.

Dented Iron: It's subtle, but the numerous scars on his body and metal replacement teeth in his mouth are clear signs that his frequent run-ins with Batman are taking their toll.

Disney Death: He seemingly dies in the crash of his helicopter... only to come back to free Harley from her high security prison at the end of Suicide Squad.

The Dreaded: In true Joker fashion, everyone is terrified of him.

Establishing Character Moment: One that takes place before he even makes his official debut in the setting - he killed Robin (a minor) and vandalized his outfit to mock Batman over his inability to save him.

Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Insofar as much as the Joker can love anyone, anyway, but he does seem to genuinely care about Harley. Eventually, subverted.

Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: He considers the brutal murder of a minor as a joke he played on Batman. When he's torturing Harleen Quinzel, he promises not to shatter her well-kept teeth while flashing his own hideous metal dentures. When Harleen later has him at gunpoint, Joker just says "please don't kill me, I'll be ya friend" in a snarky tone.

Evil Is Hammy: It's not The Joker if he's not Chewing the Scenery. And, sure enough, he does.

Evil Is Petty: The graffiti on Robin's costume seems to imply that Joker murdered him just to prod at Batman. It is confirmed in Suicide Squad that Joker and Harley killed him.

Evil Laugh: It's kind of his thing. One notable example is when he chuckles while surrounded by an arsenal of weapons.

Fake Shemp: Indie rocker Johnny Goth stood in for Jared Leto in Birds of Prey, in the flashback where he and Harley torture and tattoo the big mafia thug Harley later bumps back into.

Foil: To Batman as usual, but with some new additions. After 20 years, Batman became more jaded and cruel, while the Joker somewhat mellowed out and his criminal activity became more professional. Batman didn't settle down until the death of Superman while the Joker grew attached to Harley Quinn.

In Suicide Squad Griggs' smug indifference about his gambling debt immediately becomes pure terror when he realizes the Joker has gotten involved.

He is so feared that even the likes of Black Mask would rather steer clear of him. Harley's enemies only start gunning for her in Birds of Prey when it's become clear that she's no longer with him.

   G-Y

The Ghost:

There is an allusion to him in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice ("HA HA HA Joke's On You, Batman" painted across the chest of the dead Robin's empty suit in the Batcave), but he doesn't actually appear.

He gets mentioned a lot in Birds of Prey, but he's only seen very briefly in some flashbacks, always from the back (including footage from Suicide Squad). There is a whole Deleted Scene where he and Harley have a domestic dispute. Harley leaves the house through the window and the Joker throws her stuffed beaver out through the window. In the film proper, she's just kicked out of the house, with no shot of Mr. J.

Greater-Scope Villain: His role in Batman v Superman. Despite not actually appearing his murder of Robin by this point has driven Batman down a darker, more vengeful path that goes against Batman's traditional moral code; the one that the Joker is always trying to prove is wrong. Batman's rage towards Superman blinds him to the possibility of Lex Luthor being the real threat long enough for Superman to die fighting Doomsday. In a way the Joker's actions contributed to Batman's failure.

Guttural Growler: This Joker is noticeably more snarly than previous incarnations.

Handshake Refusal: He doesn't like to shake hands, as Monster T finds out.

Hell-Bent for Leather: Wears a purple crocodile skin duster at some point in the film.

Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Despite being a homicidal sociopath, he seems to truly love his girlfriend Harley Quinn. Then in Birds Of Prey, he coldly and violently breaks up with her.

Joker Immunity: He appears to die when his helicopter is shot down about halfway through Suicide Squad. To absolutely no one's surprise, he shows up alive and well in the final scene. It helps that he's the Trope Namer.

Knife Nut: And by God, does he have enough blades.◊

Lean and Mean: This Joker, while muscular, is quite lean, especially compared to the heavily muscled Batman.

Love Epiphany: Well, "love" is pushing it, but Joker realizes his affections for Harley when she dives in the chemical bath that ultimately turned Joker into what he is. Symbolic in the sense she was agreeing to join him in madness. Further adding to the complexity of the scene; Joker was tying up a loose end, having used Harley to escape from Arkham. He lead her to her demise and intended to leave her for death but at the same moment realized she had entered his world and his madness. Joker never anticipated the amount of utter devotion Harley would have for him, something inside him just couldn't walk away from her, so he jumped in to save her.

Manipulative Bastard: He manipulated Harley into helping him escape Arkham because she fell in love with him. When she served her purpose, he would have had her kill herself jumping into a bath of chemicals to prove her feelings. He instead saves her from this demise because he has a Love Epiphany in the moment.

Monster Clown: Like the previous film versions, Joker is an Ax-Crazy criminal with clownish makeup. Green hair notwithsanding, his white makeup, red lipstick and absence of facial scars make him look closer to a mime than his predecessors.

Noble Demon: In Suicide Squad, his whole motivation is to rescue Harley Quinn. His commitment is so strong he doesn't even waste time with pranks or petty acts of cruelty. Everything he does is for someone else.

Only Known By His Nickname: He's only known as The Joker, or "J" / "Mr. J".

Outlaw Couple: He and Harley Quinn are lovers and partners in crime.

Sadist: Even though there was only a few select scenes of him, one of them is him torturing Harley. It's disturbingly obvious that he is positively gleeful over it. And he doesn't seem to have lost any sleep over murdering Robin, either.

Pet the Dog: David Ayer confirms that while he did push Harley out of the falling helicopter, his intent was in fact to save her life.

Satellite Love Interest: To Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad. His characterization revolves entirely around Harley, not even getting involved with the main plot.

Scary Teeth: Several of his teeth are made of metal. According to David Ayer, Batman punched his teeth out after he killed Robin, leading him to replace them with metal teeth.

Screw This, I'm Outta Here!: Although he has a presence at the start of the film, The Joker appears to have left Gotham City to be controlled by Black Mask in Birds of Prey, with Roman saying that Joker has already skipped town.

The Sociopath: He's chaotic and remorseless, much like his previous versions. Special mention goes to his murder of Robin, which he topped off by spray-painting a cruel taunt for Batman onto the boy's costume.

Tattooed Crook: His torso is covered in jester-themed tattoos. He also has a few on his arms and face.

Villain of Another Story: He mainly appeared in Suicide Squad, but his biggest act of villainy to date — killing Robin — happened some years before Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, in which he doesn't appear. The spray-painted message on Robin's empty suit ("Ah ah ah joke's on you Batman!") in the latter film can't be anything else than his doing.

Where Does He Get All Those Wonderful Toys?: Is seen with a rather impressive arsenal of guns and knives. And even says to warden Griggs, at some point, "I can't wait to show you my toys." note Notably, he manages to hijack the gunship which was sent to extract Waller and the squad so he can rescue Harley.

Would Hit a Girl: In the past, the Joker electroshocks and manipulates Dr. Harleen Quinzel into allowing her to fall into a vat of chemicals, in order to become Harley Quinn.

Would Hurt a Child: He killed Batman's sidekick, Robin, while the boy was an underage minor.

You Gotta Have Blue Hair: His hair is bright green.

   "Knightmare" Joker

"You won't kill me. I'm your best friend..." Appearances:

Zack Snyder's Justice League

"You need me. You... need me... to help you undo this world you created, by letting her die."

The Joker meets up once more with Batman in the nightmarish alternate future where Darkseid has conquered the Earth and Superman turned evil. But things aren't the same anymore between the two legendary foes.

See also the Knightmare page for more on that setting's characters.

Break Them by Talking: He deliberately tries to agitate Batman by reminding him of how many people have died on his watch.

Cop Killer: He wears a bulletproof vest with at least two dozens police badges on it. Whether these were good cops killed prior to the apocalypse or servants of the oppressive regime of Superman after the apocalypse is not detailed.

Costume Evolution: He has ditched his garish gangster suits for what looks like either a medical gown or a butcher gown, complete with orange gloves and a bulletproof vest with a dozen police badges pinned on it. He got rid of his "Damaged" forehead tattoo, let his hair grow and put red makeup around his mouth, looking closer to more common depictions of the character.

Enemy Mine: He and Batman had the worst kind of enmity imaginable, but the Earth being conquered by Darkseid is enough of a Conflict Killer for them to call a truce and work together to try undoing this mess.

Evil Has a Bad Sense of Humor: He utters the line "We live in a society" while gazing upon the devastated landscape in the trailer. This is clearly a Meme Acknowledgement, and it's quite awkwardly used given the context (is there really any society left in this post-apocalyptic world?). It doesn't appear in the actual film, however. The line was improvised by Leto.

Evil Laugh: Even with the world being in such a sorry state and him still being sane enough to acknowledge how bad the situation is, he'll still let some laughs out, even though they sound more subdued than ever.

Evil Versus Oblivion: Even he sees the necessity of teaming up with Batman to try undoing what Darkseid did to Earth.

Future Badass: He survived the apocalypse brought upon Earth by Darkseid and looks like he's geared for guerilla actions.

My Card: He gives a Joker card to Batman as a symbol of their truce. Shall the Dark Knight want to break that truce, he'd just have to tear that card up. The card could be seen strapped on Batman's assault rifle in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: Joker gets a high reminding Batman how costly his mistakes in the past have been.

The Nicknamer: He nicknames Mera "my little fish stick" and Robin "Boy Wonder".

Progressively Prettier: Despite being worse for wear, this Joker is arguably even better looking than his previous appearance, with his over-the-top tattooed gangster image toned down and his androgyny played up. Ironically, this version also more closely resembles the Heath Ledger incarnation.

Thousand-Yard Stare: He has such a stare when looking at the devastated horizon as he starts talking to Batman.

Villain Has a Point: While he’s the one who killed Robin, he gives Batman a minor What the Hell, Hero? for sending “a Boy Wonder to do a man’s job.”

Vocal Evolution: His voice is much softer and higher pitched than it was in Suicide Squad.

[houseofhurricane]

ACOTAR Fic: Bloom & Bone (5/32) | Elain x Tamlin, Lucien x Vassa

Summary: Elain lies about a vision and winds up as the Night Court’s emissary to the Spring Court, trying to prevent the Dread Trove from falling into the wrong hands and wrestling with the gifts the Cauldron imparted when she was Made. Lucien, asked to join her, must contend with secrets about his mating bond. Meanwhile, Tamlin struggles to lead the Spring Court in the aftermath of the war with Hybern. And Vassa, the human queen in their midst, wrestles with the enchantment that turns her into a firebird by day, robbing her of the power of speech and human thought. Looming over all of them is uniquet peace in Prythian and the threat of Koschei, the death-god with unimaginable power. With powers both magical and monstrous, the quartet at the Spring Court will have to wrestle with their own natures and the evil that surrounds them. Will the struggle save their world, or doom it?

A/N: I both love and hate writing Lucien (and Vassa! more of her soon) because he's really smart and perceptive, and honestly it's always easier to write characters who know less than I do. But these are my very favorite characters to read about, so, you know, writing growth? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ You can read early previews of the next chapter every Tuesday by following @house.of.hurricane on Instagram. And as always, you can read all chapters at AO3 if you prefer. You can find all chapters here.

Lucien watches the despair in Elain’s eyes transfigure itself into fear. On reflex, he reaches for the place her hands should be, but his fingers slice through the air. He works his way up her arms, his fingers skittering to find whatever is left of her body, and when he feels her elbow, her upper arm, the curve of her shoulder, his breath rushes into his lungs, pure relief.

“You’re all right,” he says, his palms on her shoulders, a lie he needs her to believe. He’s long suspected that the Cauldron gave Elain some formidable magic and that she has never learned to wield it, and now he thinks that gift is swallowing her up. He does not want her to see his fear, to begin to panic. He takes another deep breath, forces his heart to slow.

“What is so wrong with me?”

She reaches out for him again and he notices that her sleeves do not move as if they’re empty. The fabric moves around a wrist that is no longer present in the world, a magic Lucien knows is beyond his capability to resolve. It lacks the familiar resonance of spells or Fae power, as if whatever has hold of Elain is more tightly woven into the fabric of this world.

“There is nothing wrong with you,” he says, instead. His fingers press against her shoulder blades, his thumbs against her clavicles, the bones that are solid and here. He has heard all the meanings in her question and answers the one he knows will infuriate her most, distract her from the disappearance of her hands. “I didn’t think you’d realize. I didn’t think you even wanted me.”

She sighs, too polite to agree or tell an obvious lie.

“I wanted to want you,” she says, the rage and panic slipping from her voice, a cool despair taking hold. He feels for her elbows and cannot find them, and Lucien realizes, trying to contain his smile, that he’s figured out the rules of this game. Sometimes the world feels as simple as a key in a lock.

“You were always looking elsewhere. How could you imagine I wouldn’t get tired of rejection?”

“Aren’t we all going to live for thousands of years?”

“So you thought I could wait for at least one hundred.”

“I thought you would let me…” He watches her eyes carefully focus on his, trying to hide her thinking as she reaches for the right word. The cover might fool anybody else, but Lucien has been looking for tells since he could walk, trying to survive the Autumn Court.

“I think you are only upset because you feel discarded,” he says, quickly, and feels her elbow against his palm.

“You smell of Vassa. The human queen.”

“You were a human not so long ago.” How quick she is to adopt the High Fae prejudices, sneer when she says the word human. He would be more annoyed if he didn’t feel her arms rematerializing.

“My sister told me how you treated her.” The swerve to this insult is clumsy, a baby’s first steps, but he’s still intrigued by this seeming transfiguration to Elain’s personality. Previously, she has dealt out all her slights with silence, at least where he’s concerned.

“And yet you stay in Tamlin’s home.” He keeps his voice low and silky, which he knows is infuriating.

“I thought he was your friend.” Her cheeks are pink and Lucien wonders if maybe he’ll be spared from this deception sooner than he thought.

Below her sleeves, Elain’s wrists are now visible.

“Our lives are too long for you to remain an ornament,” he says, casting around for an insult strong enough to really rouse her, force her to stay. Somehow Lucien has always been asked to rescue the women who will fall in love with other men, which is probably why Vassa is so eminently capable of saving herself.

“You’ve made me into an ornament!”

And when she swings a hand toward him, he doesn’t mind the ineffectual slap because he feels the tips of her fingers on his cheek. Still, when Elain runs toward the house, her whole body intact, he wonders if she even realizes what happened, its magnitude and implications. Even after all his years of attention and scheming, he cannot quite conjure an explanation.

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

Elain cannot stop running one hand over the other, tracing the curve of her fingernail, her knuckle, the tendons at the back of her hands and the bones of her wrists. You’re here, you’re whole, you have all your fingers and all your toes, she whispers to herself, sounding like Feyre fussing over Nyx.

She had still felt her fingers, her arm, connected to her body, but they were distant, prickling, as if she’d slept on them and the blood was reentering each limb. Where had she gone?

Elain does not think much on the argument with Lucien. She’d seen the panic in his eyes, surely a mirror of her own. His words were a frantic spell, a summoning.

Her mind catches, instead, on the look when he’d found her screaming and wailing all her grief. The pity in his eyes. She cannot imagine how this male is supposed to be her mate, her one true love.

Gradually she banishes the image of him from her mind. She replaces him with the surety of her fingers, the line of dirt that never disappears from under her fingernails without magic, the little etchings at each knuckle. All present and near and normal.

She falls asleep without eating her dinner, her hands clutched around each other.

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

“That could have gone better,” Vassa says by way of hello, as soon as Lucien walks into her bedroom. There’s no point in distance, now that Elain already knows what’s between them. Still, Lucien hesitates before he kisses Vassa. The lie is relatively easy to maintain when he’s far from Elain, but now they will be close for weeks or months, maybe longer. Now he will have to practice some form of daily pining, particularly for Tamlin, who knows the way the mating bond can wreak havoc on a male.

“She’s more observant than I remembered,” he says, unbuttoning his tunic. The hardest part of all this lying are the words he says to Vassa, which are often so unlike the phrases he wants to bestow on her.

“Is this the way all mates behave?”

“Sometimes our marriages are political. I’ve heard this is a common practice in the human realms.”

Vassa swats him.

“You forget how long I’ve been around your people, now.”

“Hardly any time at all, for us.” He drapes his tunic over her desk, where she’s left pages covered with her blots and scribbles out for anyone to read. Was Vassa always so trusting, or does she simply believe her thoughts are so uninteresting for his people to contemplate? Her handwriting is bad enough that it’s possible she believes no one will bother to decipher it.

“I never knew you to be cruel,” she says, and when he turns to her he sees the hurt in Vassa’s eyes.

“I would never hurt you.”

She sighs from her chest, the sound as deep as a groan.

“A queen is expected to have better judgement.”

“The situation is more complex than it appears.”

“Men often say this in simple situations when they are in the wrong.”

Vassa’s shoulders are thrown back, her arms across her chest. She has told him that queens must show mercy but also embody justice, and Lucien has no doubts about which quality she thinks is vital in this moment.

“Do you know how easy it would be for a High Fae of certain talents to learn all of the secrets in your mind?” He’s begun to work on the buttons of his shirt, hoping he can distract her from an argument, though he knows from experience that at this point, when her eyes are bright and calculating, that any attempt is futile.

“You’ve shown me how to make a mental shield and you’ve told me secrets.”

“This secret endangers the peace between our courts.” He does not tell her a skilled daemati could storm her mental shields in a second. Vassa is rightfully proud of her own strength and cunning, and he has caused her enough hurt tonight.

“And yet you’ve made it obvious to anybody who cares to pay attention.”

“Tell me what you think you know.”

“Elain Archeron is not your mate.”

He keeps his face too still and triumph flashes on her face, transfigured quickly into a more sober expression as her mind whirls into action, her eyes now a brighter blue, her lower lip caught between her teeth, an expression he wants to memorize and study until he can never forget it.

“That would only be a political disaster if you knew her real mate,” she says, moments later. Her voice is hushed but still the words echo. “And why has he or she not challenged you?”

“I’m not sure,” he says, glad that he can tell her this truth, for the wide description that shows that Vassa hasn’t guessed they’re in the grand home of Elain Archeron’s actual mate. “I would have thought--”

“Tell me.” Vassa steps toward him, extends her hand.

“You are safest if I tell you nothing.” He reaches for her hands, twines her fingers in his own. Her skin is so soft, so new. He would not be surprised to learn that the spell remakes her body completely each evening.

She raises her eyebrow, refusing to be drawn in completely. “I am under a curse and bound to a death-lord, Lucien. You think I’m afraid of a little court intrigue?”

“All of our monsters have been awfully good to you.” He presses a kiss to her jaw, her earlobe. He’ll make a map of her, catalogue the way Vassa feels against his lips. He doesn’t want to think of Elain or Tamlin any longer. The only benefit to this evening’s scene should be that he can share a room with Vassa to only moderate approbation.

“Tell me, Lucien.”

“What if I share another revelation?”

“Dazzle me, Lucien Vanserra,” she says, her voice so dry he lets out a bark of laughter in spite of himself. Cauldron boil this woman’s enemies, the ambassadors who will visit Scythia from foreign courts.

“Elain was weeping when I found her.”

“Naturally. Her mate was dallying with another woman.”

“I can’t tell if you’re making sport of me,” he says.

“I feel sorry for the girl.”

“You’re barely older than she is.”

“Some women -- or females, I suppose -- remain girls longer than others. Anyway, she was weeping.”

“The word might not be strong enough. She was screaming loud enough to rouse the village. But when she heard me approach, her hands had disappeared.”

“Surely you’ve seen more impressive magic in your storied centuries.”

He explains the buried quality of the magic, the way the reappearance of Elain’s hands had been so clearly connected to her emotions, her seeming lack of comprehension at all that had happened.

“That seems a useful talent, if she could control it. An invisible woman would make a perfect spy. Do you think that’s why she was sent here?”

“I don’t think Elain is in control of any of her powers.”

“She has others?”

“Rhysand has never said exactly what, but I gather that he and his court have noticed that she has other abilities. But I’d be surprised if this wasn’t the first time this disappearance manifested itself.”

“Perhaps you’re underestimating her. She could be gathering intelligence for the Night Court.”

“If so, Rhysand would never have summoned us.”

“He doesn’t trust our host.”

“I wouldn’t put it past Rhys to contrive a situation where Elain and I were trapped in the same house.”

“The firebird would be included for what, romantic lighting?”

He pulls her close against him, so that the embroidery of her gown lays down its marks on his skin.

“Included for your knowledge of Koschei,” he says, because on the whole it is a relief to tell her the truth, “and also for my great good luck.”

Vassa lifts her cheek from his shoulder to smile at him and despite the evening’s events, he smiles back at her, celebrates the tiny solitary miracle that is the two of them together in her room. No matter the secrets, the lies he has to tell to contain them, Lucien finds himself believing in that moment that everything will be all right.

He’s always found delusion to be a particularly heady emotion.

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

In the morning, before dawn, Lucien is in a rush, fumbling with his clothes and pulling Vassa from her bed before she transforms and singes the mattress. Tamlin’s servants meet them at the door with a wrapped breakfast that he doubts Vassa will have a chance to eat, and sure enough, before they’re halfway across the gardens, Vassa is a firebird, flapping her wings across the lavender sky, the new dawn.

She does not speak in this form but she follows him easily as he makes his way through the trees, looping and diving to get a better idea of the terrain. In this form she is formidable but still very exposed, and since the war, she’s learned to be vigilant.

After an hour of walking, they reach the lake nearest to Tamlin’s estate, and Vassa launches herself at the sparkling water. Around her, the water bubbles, the steam rising from the place where she dove. Lucien settles himself on a boulder and scans the forest, palms his dagger in one hand and his breakfast in the other. When he’s sure that the only sounds are Vassa’s splashing and the other birds awakening, he puts the knife down and eats the bread and eggs and cheese, watching her flames mirrored on the surface of the water.

Tending to Vassa was the work of servants for months before Lucien took it over, well before they’d wound up in their latest arrangement. He enjoys watching the world wake up, loves watching her transformation, imagining the way that she beholds the world in this form. She has trouble describing the experience, only its limitations, but he can see Vassa’s character inside the bird, her watchfulness and unbroken spirit. If he does not keep her sufficiently entertained, she’ll splash him or draw close enough to leave a burn on his sleeve. As a result, Lucien has told her nearly all of his stories, decades of court intrigue and gossip, rivalries and petty jealousies and tendres. At first, he wrapped these stories in fine telling, with voices and dramatic pauses as if she were a paying audience. But gradually, as they grew more familiar, he began to tell her the stories and secrets that stuck inside him, his voice low and sometimes hesitant. He’s told her about Jessaminda, about Tamlin’s kindness and his rage, the way that despite most evidence to the contrary, he still doesn’t fully trust the Night Court. During these stories, Vassa always watches him with her great blue eyes, still as a swan while she circles the lake.

At night, Vassa will tell him her own secrets, the intrigues of her court, and though Lucien had long scorned the human realms, he finds herself drawn in by the tales, asking her questions, trying to better envision her world.

Behind him, a fallen branch cracks under a foot and the birds scatter. Lucien is on his feet in an instant, Vassa a warm fire close behind.

When he sees the golden beast, Lucien takes a breath before returning his dagger to his belt. Tamlin has appeared more in control lately, but he’s witnessed enough of his old friend’s behavior over the past few years that Lucien can’t be sure there won’t be an explosion.

“You’ve found a pretty spot to while away the morning,” Tamlin says. The words would be charming if the fangs of the beast weren’t quite so large and sharp.

“I promised to show Vassa your lands.”

“I gather that you’ve made many promises to Vassa.”

Lucien holds himself still. He wants to reach for his dagger, give Tamlin an idea of the danger he’s courting, but knows the gesture would reveal too much. Just this once, he’s grateful that Vassa is unable to speak in this form.

“Rhys recruited you to play matchmaker?” he says instead, trying for the kind of courtly sneer that comes so easily to Eris.

Tamlin shakes his head, sending leaves spiralling out of his golden fur, and then in a flash of light, he’s High Fae again, tall and golden against the trees. Lucien is sure that all the motion was simply a distraction from his shuddering at the idea of being implicated in one of Rhysand’s schemes, however harmless, but once again he wonders if Tamlin senses the mating bond.

“I came to seek your counsel,” Tamlin says.

“Vassa--”

“We’ll stay nearby. You will have the chance to defend your queen.”

Lucien looks toward Vassa, who bobs her head on its long neck as if to say go on.

From behind, Tamlin looks the way he always has, his warrior’s body always ready to strike as he strikes a relentless pace through the trees, and Lucien can imagine that he and Tamlin are the friends they were before Amarantha, before Feyre and the war with Hybern, before the Archeron sisters wound up in the Cauldron. It startles him to think that this before is now long ago, past the human lifespan.

When Tamlin stops, his face is grim, his mouth bracketed by deep lines that Lucien has never seen before.

“Why did Rhysand send you here?” he asks, the words almost lost in his growl. There are talons, now, where his fingers were seconds ago.

“I haven’t spoken to him in weeks,” Lucien says. He’d been avoiding the entire Night Court, thinking of what they’d report back to Elain, the implications. “You were the one who asked me to come here, remember?”

“I forget nothing.” Tamlin’s eyes make Lucien think of trees after an unexpected ice storm, the leaves a deeper, brighter green within their crystallized prison. He’s thinking of Feyre’s escapes, the way Lucien aided her and fled himself. The memories of the High Fae are too long for comfortable recollection.

“His people were investigating Koschei,” Lucien says when it’s clear that Tamlin will not elaborate on his suspicions. This is common enough knowledge by now. He should have found a way to the Night Court over the past week, but he was too focused on those last nights with Vassa which have turned out, now, not to be so finally over after all. “I’m sure that’s why they asked for Vassa. And if Elain was sent to your court, I think that matchmaking is once again the most likely answer.”

Tamlin snorts. “There will be hell to pay when Rhysand finds out you’ve rejected Elain.”

There’s a rustle in the trees and Lucien whirls toward it, his knives in his hands. Nobody appears. Since Amarantha arrived in Prythian, he’s stopped trusting these woods.

“Who is patrolling your borders?” Lucien asks. He hadn’t spotted anyone when he and Vassa approached yesterday, but Tamlin’s sentries know these forests, would surely have been warned about the firebird.

“I keep my lands safe.” His voice is gruff, tight, the pride and shame braided together.

“The army you raised--”

“The people of these lands feared Hybern more than they hated me. Once peace was assured, they went back to their homes.”

“Perhaps a visit from their High Lord would convince them.”

“A High Lord who could offer them what, exactly?”

All at once, Lucien is exhausted with this self-loathing.

“Your people will not love you overmuch when the Autumn Court storms your lands, or if a force from the continent invades. Without a wall, your lands are exposed for the taking.”

“There are tales of the beast who roams these lands.”

“Everyone knows that beast is you, Tamlin.”

A surge of power in the air around them, sharp-toothed. Far away, Lucien hears the beat of wings on water, knows that Vassa felt it.

As he always has, Lucien holds still until Tamlin’s temper ebbs. He imagines what it must be, to feel you’ve had everything you wanted and then have it pulled away. To have been held, Under the Mountain, the principal subject of Amarantha’s poisoned regard.

But this time, Lucien does not feel his own anger melt away. What happens if Vassa is captured, or Elain? Each would command a hefty ransom. Elain could drive the lands to war; he’s still puzzled by her powers but can only conclude that they are mighty and dangerous, if it’s anything like the magic her sisters command. But it’s the image of Vassa, back in Koschei’s clutches, which tears at Lucien’s heart, drives him forward.

“I would help you raise the troops,” he says, the force in his voice a surprise even to himself. “Elain and Vassa could be trusted to rouse support. Your people will remember their roles in the war with Hybern. With a little kindness and a little pleading and ample compensation, all of which are seemingly too much for you, they could even be persuaded to remember the way you double-crossed the king of Hybern and joined the battle at a crucial moment. They can still be rallied, should the High Lord care enough. But you have given up on these people and these lands. You think that once your enemies have slaughtered you, then it will only be oblivion and peace, and that might be true in your own experience, but you forget the fact that when your lands are overrun, it will be your people who suffer day by day. They know this already even if you refuse to acknowledge reality. And so they will not mourn you when your lands are seized and you yourself are killed prowling your imagined borders. You will not be worth a single tear.”

Tamlin’s eyes are wide, and before the anger can burn in them, Lucien stalks off in the direction of the lake.

Behind him, the forest is silent.

[hedgefairy]

Well hello there. While I'm waiting for that breeches video I've been talking about to finally upload, here's

Bridgerton, Episode 4

Phew, half time!

If you've missed the other ones, the tag is Bridgerbore, btw.

Okay, so we start of with Dukey who's going home-ish because drama and heartbreak in the last episode. Stop pretending, nobody takes your pouting seriously! We all know it's twu wuv!

Erm. So, I know, I'm white and this is a delicate matter, but I gotta say I'm not super happy about the whole POC-justifying explanation here. I'd much rather have no explanation at all, it worked perfectly well in Merlin, and this is just as much historically inspired fantasy just with less magic, which I'm honestly quite upset about. I'd be far more okayer with the costumes and overall ugh-ness if there was magic.

But honestly, I'm not a fan of shoehorning that explanation in (it doesn't seem to come up in the books, either, where everyone is basically a baguette in terms of whiteness). The fact that the implications aren't discussed any further makes it even worse. We're talking about the British empire here, and while POC are apparently part of the society (but with more pressure, which... no, this is not how nobility works) the wealth and luxury of this age still stems from the exploitation of POC everywhere else. How isn't there a revolution going on? How is this not talked about? From all I see, Bridgerton is a fluffy, pastel, nice alternate version of the 1800s, and I don't get why anyone would put politics in there instead of just doing what TV tropes refers to as "colourblind casting" and be done with it. Either you do the alternate history thing thoroughly, or you just cast people for being pretty (and maybe good actors) instead of the idea the audience might have about a character's skin colour and have weird costumes and just roll with it.

Also the Queen's marriage seems to suck. I would have liked a deeper, more heartbreaking connection between George III and her, especially because I saw how my Grandmother suffered when she gradually lost my Grandfather to dementia, and it would have been a scene where we could see Charlotte as a person rather than a weird plot device in tafetta and bling, but no, she just seems as annoyed and bored and snappish as ever.

This is getting far too serious. Where's the snark?

We get some Tchaikovsky in the background, which is weird, tbh. Yes, I'm perfectly fine with them covering Top 40s hits and using waltzes from the 1950s, but I draw the line at something from the second half of the 19th century! It's not right! It screams its time of origin all over the place, and even worse, most of the characters would probably actually get to hear it later in their lives, it's not a decent anachronism, it just feels like bad research! This is serious business!

No really, where's the snark?

Oooh, I get it now. That was when I was really, really done with bingeing this show. Yes, I tried to get through as much of it as possible in one sitting. The notes read, in very shaky handwriting

I cannot possibly take more than that

in one day

, so let's continue a few days later when I felt like I could muster the courage to face it again.

So yes, I'm pretty sure this waltz is to young for this show.

Aww, look at that, flirting over cheese! I also like that one of the Featherington girls (I can't really tell the non-Pennys apart) has a suitor, they deserve nice things, too.

The musicians are a mood.

WTF with the hair and the strass. We don't like the strass. Make it go away.

I love Prince Freddy. The poor boy. It's doomed from the start!

Ah, Dukey (also at the ball, even though he was whining about things earlier) gets a heartbeat in the background, because twu wuv.

Middle Bridgerbro goes and meets with the Bohéme. I want more of that! That's finally interesting! That's my people! There's a cool bohemian lady with a pretty dress! People look interesting! Aaaah!

There's a random 18th century burlesque singer at this Regency ball, we need to talk about this. Oooh, it's Opera Girl! Cue Lord B turning into even more of an idiot while Ma Bridgerton tries to hook him up otherwise.

Of course Philippa (that's one of the Featherington Girls) can't possibly have anything nice. Thanks, Dad. You don't get to marry someone you like, that's the people across the street's thing! (by which I of course mean the Bridgertons, just in case anyone forgot the location layout here.)

Eloise is being weird to the housekeeper.

"Are you not supposed to be the smart one", the housekeeper retorts and I'm feeling it, followed by a "WTH, hero" about how servants are too busy to be Gossip Girl, you privileged prat. I think I actually snorted.

Penny gossips with Ducktail Colin, but he's more interested in Cousin, whose dress looks like it was made from the cheap curtains my ex best friend had in his first semester at uni, and God, I hate Daphne's kerchief.

Poor Prince Freddie is trying to propose to Protagonis Girl but of course there's Dukey in the background so she simply must run outside as dramatically as possible where he can find her as she equally dramatically rips the necklace Freddie gave her from her milky white throat. P&P-ish banter ensues. Yawn.

Dukey: * broods *

Daphne: * dramatically exits *

Dukey: * romantically follows her*, and oooh, snogging ensues, oooooh, instant second base, but Bridgerbro the Eldest (known also as Lord B) intervenes.

Lord B: "Marry her!"

Dukey: "I can't!"

Lord B: "Bitch!"

Dukey: "I can't!"

Lord B: "I want satisfaction!"

Me: "Don't we all"

Daphne: "You'd rather die than marry me?!"

(the fuck with her hair)

Middle Bridgerbro is still at the Bohéme-party, and still draws (naked people!). Gay vibes ensue, it's cute. This is Netflix after all, and it took four episodes to get some LGBTQ+ representation!

The Featherington's housekeeper looks a lot like O'Brien from Downton.

Cousin tells Penny about what a cutie Ducktail Colin is, also Penny's "night gown" is really cute (it's not a night gown. She's still wearing stays. It's also the only thing in the whole series that fits her well so far). Penny is super upset but gets interrupted by a hyperfocused Eloise. They fight, and Penny goes on about being mature and not being a "pretty Bridgerton", and that Eloise wouldn't understand. I get her, though, and really, having a perfect family and a "bad" family is such lazy writing.

Somber blah blah between Lord B and Daphne happens and Middle Bridgerbro gets dragged into it. He's informed that his life is pretty much over either way (either way being Lord B dying or being exiled for killing Dukey in the scheduled duel) because his oder bro basically just wants out of his duties. Sucks to be him.

Boxing Bro has to host a frustrated, possibly blueballed Dukey and offers himself up as a second for the duel.

Lord B goes and pleads with Opera Girl to get back with him (doooooon't) because of his little duelling plot and of course intercourse ensues. Girl, where's your self-respect?

Lord F comes into his dark study (we haven't seen much of him yet overall, he probably was too busy gambling) and hark, there's Lady F like the mafia boss I feel she should be, wo berates him about said gambling and that they're broke and how much he sucks. He starts crying, thumbs up for male vulnerability!, but it's kinda played for laughs via her awkward patting of him. Because of course (and I bet the late Daddy Bridgerton would never have lost his composure like that, but he didn't gamble, either, and these are the Featheringtons)

Lord B leaves Opera Girl for THE DUEL (I feel like this almost deserves a ™ by now).

We get gallopping horses! The drama! The panache! Daphne asks Ducktail Colin where it's going down because she wants to stop them, insert pandering feminist ranting about her choosing her own life but I don't really feel it and I wonde where her bangs go when she sleeps because her hair looks so different all of a sudden.

Lord B makes Middle Bridgerbro promise to care for Opera Girl in case he dies.

More gallopping horses! Daphne and her billowing cloak are pretty epic, to be honest, and there's Ducktail Colin on her heels. It's basically a family outing now!

Ugh, I like the seconds in this duel so much more. They should just off and go for a pint or something and leave Lord B and Dukey to their misery.

Duelling protocol ensues. Ten steps, blah blah, nice camera work, though.

Daphne full on rides into her brother's bullet, but she's fine (it would have been so dramatic, can you imagine? It would have been interesting!).

Oh no, they were seen (by her romantic rival, back when they had the dramatic make-outery in the park at the ball after the botched proposal. Sorry, Cressida is such a much better name than Daaaaphneeee. I have a RPG character called Cressida, I might be biased.), she's ruined if they don't marry!. and so she is basically emotionally blackmailing him into marrying her. But he can "never give [her] children!", and goes on how she deserves a household full of love like her family home because the Bridgertons are such a perfect family. God, they all annoy me so much.

Daphne ends the duel by saying that the Duke and her are to be married, with a pained facial expression, no less. I think I just wanna throw a pie in her face or something.

And that concludes Episode 4. That was a long one! Only four more to go! So this is

To be Continued!

Thank you for making it this far with me!

[masterhandss]

WATCH ME RAMBLE ABOUT THE HAMEHURA SPINOFF

My Next Life as a Villainess! All Routes Lead to Doom! have officially taken over my headspace, and I really want a platform to talk about it. I’ve read the manga and novels over and over again, and I’m so happy to seeing the reactions of everyone to each anime episodes.

Though surprisingly, other than obviously the original novel, what actually piqued my interest in the series is actually the spinoff manga for hamehura, “I Reincarnated into an Otome Game as a Villainess With Only Destruction Flags... In a Dire Situation!? Verge of Destruction Arc”. Yes, it has a spinoff.

(This might be considered spoilers for the spinoff and anime, be warned!) I just want to ramble about it and give my critiques, opinions and expectations. My words might not make sense if you haven’t read the spinoff, but I think having a general gist of the events of the original anime/novel/manga is enough to read through my vents and rambles. also there’s screenshots here so there’s that. 

It’s basically the same plot as the anime, but if Katarina regained her memories of her past life during the events of Fortune Lover, within the school year, instead of when she was 8 years old like the original novel.

I don’t even really know if I’m in the right place to comment on it, considering it only has like 6 chapters (with the 7th one still being a month away) anyways and has a lot of time to expand and grow it’s concept, but gosh darn it, I want to talk about it!

I really really love the premise of the spinoff, and i think it’s much more compelling than the original novel. The novel wins by being more wholesome and heartfelt, but with the spinoff, we get to see Katarina play this “game” in hard mode” where she doesn’t have the connections that she would’ve had if she remembered sooner. There’s a sense of urgency in the plot that you don’t really have in the novel because she had already won everyone over before the game even begins. Both premises are charming, but this one really lifts up the concept of the title.

While I’d love to say that i’m excited to see this alternate version of the plot and find out how Katarina would solve herself out of her destruction, sadly the spinoff still follows the original material very religiously, preventing the spinoff as really coming out into its own (again, I could be wrong, there’s only 6 chapters so far after all but from what we have so far, it’s practically identical to the manga/novel). 

I think one of the greatest strengths of the spinoff is that it would take it’s time in the Magic School because Katarina only has one year to put the odds in her favor, instead of years, so it means we wont speed through her school life like the novel/anime/manga did. 

This is why my favorite part of the spinoff is Sienna, Katarina’s main underling when she was still the villainess of Fortune Lover. I love her because her existence provides a reason for the writer of the spinoff to find ways to insert her into the original plot, or to write new ones altogether in order to include what I imagine to be Katarina’s new best friend in this timeline.

Sienna’s existing can also be a sign of a possible future conflict regarding Katarina’s behavior post-accident. In the original novel/manga, it was okay for the snobby and spoiler Katarina to suddenly become dense and gluttonous, because she was 8 years old, and thus in the eyes of the adults, still had a lot of time to grow and develop her character. It’s still weird of course but it can be written off as such. With the event happening during the events of Fortune Lover, characters such as Maria and Geordo are obviously confused but her change of heart. Personally, I’d love to see her underlings and other students call her out on her behavior (especially since we are about to see the dynamic of Keith and Katarina in this timeline) because of how abrupt and sudden this change was. The spinoff tries to run away from this problem by writing off Mary and Alan as “not knowing much about Katarina other than rumors” but I doubt it, considering how much they would probably encounter each other in social gatherings and such. For them to not have an independent impression of her seems lazy to me to be honest, because not having an opinion on her means that she can act in any way that she wants and it can be considered as her being normal to them.

Because of how faithful this spinoff is to the original material, the banter that characters would have about Katarina feels undeserved, such as Geordo being possessive of Katarina during her interactions with Alan, despite not being interested in her until now. Bare in mind that at this point, Geordo had already met Maria (who piqued his interest during their first encounter, according to Katarina in the original novel) and only just gained interest in her fiance because of her out-of-nowhere change in personality. the banter between the twin princes doesn’t feel right when you factor in that he doesn’t care about Katarina enough (yet) to find his brother as a threat. To be honest, I wouldn’t even have this problem if the spinoff wasn’t so loyal.

This also opens up the question of how she will gain rapport with the characters in Fortune Lover. The spinoff pulled off Mary and Katarina’s friendship through their similar interests in gardening, but without the mistake of taking Alan’s in game dialogue, Mary has no reason to be attached to Katarina at all, and is definitely in love with Alan.

I mean i’d be okay if the spinoff writes off their relationship as just friends, but then again that ruins the charm that the original novel had (which is that Katarina catches love interests like she does with pokemon) which can be both a good thing and a bad thing (I don’t mind if they don’t have the harem, but maybe that makes it too far from the source material idk)

This is why I don’t want the spinoff to be religiously loyal to the source material! Keith’s introduction makes me nervous because there is absolutely no way that the spinoff can follow the original method of winning him over without making it look ridiculous, so obviously his route will have to be written from scratch. It’s not the rewrite that makes me nervous, it’s how similar it’d be from the original novel. The same would have to happen with Sophia (who has probably lived in fear and isolation without a real friend FOR YEARS), Nicol (who is intertwined with his sister), and Alan (depending on how far Maria is into the plot). From what i’ve seen from the spinoff so far, Katarina can still realistic gain the character’s of Fortune Lover as her allies, but they won’t be (or atleast might not be) as attached to her as they do in the original novel (like Mary and Sophia maybe)

My only biased exception to this is her and her maid Anne, because it’s pretty endearing to know that even the spoiled version of Katarina is still attached to Anne, so as long as they are together, she doesn’t really mind the difference. 

I would really love it if Katarina could gain allies outside of the established cast, to emphasize how different her situation is now that her circumstances are different due to the time of when her memories return. I just don’t want the spinoff to suddenly make the characters interested in Katarina, even though she’s lived her life until now as a spoiled and selfish noble.

This brings me to another concern of mine: Maria, the protagonist of Fortune Lover. So far, Katarina has already won over her friendship and has forgiven her and Sienna for their actions against her after seeing their efforts to fend off other harassers. My problem isn’t really how quickly she got won over or anything (despite this already solving her problem of being accused of orchestrating her bullying that could cause her end just before the final graduation event of the game), it’s more of what she represents.

You see, what made all the characters of Fortune Lover so attached to Katarina is that she lacks the outlook of a noble, being someone who lived as a normal school girl before being reincarnated. She is a very empathetic person who is able to sooth the worries of the characters but literally not seeing it at all (examples being Alan with his rivalry with his twin, and Mary & Sophia with their appearance). She alleviates the pain and worries of others by being what they need. In the original novel of My Next Life as a Villainess!, the readers/viewers already know that her villainess fate is already thwarted because she had already accomplished what Maria was supposed to do during the events of Fortune Lover (befriend Sophia = gain Nicol’s affections / interest Geordo = gain his affection / differentiate Alan & Geordo = gain Alan’s affections / be a first real source of comfort and company = gain Keith’s affections etc.)

I can’t really speculate on much of the plot of the game, but luckily the anime dvd box comes with the actual Fortune Lover game routes of the 4 boys so I might be able to comment on this better in the future. 

Maria is basically the same as Katarina (or Bakarina, if its less confusing); both characters are outsiders to the world of nobles and royalty, and it’s through their own personal outlook that they help and befriend the characters of the game. The spinoff would probably stick the two by the hip now that they’re friends in order to solve this problem, but it’s basically a race between the two of which of them can apply their personal quirks in getting the characters to ally with them. Again I can’t really speculate bc I don’t know the actual routes of the boys, but yeah. 

For example, Geordo has met the heroine while she was trying to climb a tree with a skirt, which he has never seen before, while her also being the pretty light-magic user commoner, and this definitely made her interesting to him (Note: this is an event that occurs canonically within the events of the game, Fortune Lover, but is not presented as something that had occurred in the manga). 

Now we have Katarina acting out of character and eating tons of sweets, while trying to salvage the dress of her peer after she spilled a drink on it, and this character change made her interesting to him as well. Katarina, considering her actual personality as time progresses in the story, is definitely much more interesting than Maria’s (I say that with biases of course) so Geordo would most likely find her to be the more unpredictable and interesting out of the two, but it looks like the only way (or what seems to already be the chosen way??) of writing the spinoff out of this mess is to make it appear like the Maria event didn’t or hasn’t happened yet, because while the original novel does state that Geordo would have fallen for Maria if he wasn’t already inlove with Katarina before they entered the Magic School, Geordo has yet to address his relationship with Maria. (yeah I get it there’s only 6 chapters yet jhgsdgfjsdg BUT STILL IT’S A LOT TO THINK ABOUT)

I don’t know what kind of dynamic Maria and Katarina would have in the spinoff, especially since you need to factor in Sienna, but in the original novel, Maria was pretty submissive to Katarina and would mostly just follow her lead. Maybe with this new friendship, Maria might not actively approach the main love interests (unless it’s by accident, since they don’t have to always save her from bullying Katarina and Sienna already try to solve that themselves) which gives time for Katarina to win them over with the quirky personality. At least, this is what I hope the spinoff goes for lol. (side note, it’s actually interesting to see what it’s like when Geordo literally only uses Katarina as a shield from other women, so when the shift from tool to romance occurs, i think it’ll be pretty nice to see)

To be honest I don’t even know what I’m rambling about, I’m sure I’ll love the spinoff regardless of what direction it takes lol. I’m just nervous because I really really love this concept an I want it to be different from the source material because it literally has the potential to be its own story (idk if this spinoff is even official at all, like I think it has the permission of Yamaguchi Satoru, but idk if its licensed)

Before I end this long ramble, I just want to note that i actual like the art style of the spinoff (illustrated by nishi) more than the original artist nami. I feel like this more simple artstyle captures the shift between Villainess Katarina and Bakarina more smoothly, while the original illustrations kinda makes it looked forced (mostly the manga tbh, the novel covers and art is fine). With nishi’s art, you can easily grasp that these two personalities are both Katarina. 

Anyways that’s it, my hands hurt lol. Might edit this in the future. 

[leepace71]

When Pedro Pascal was roughly 4 years old, he and his family went to see the 1978 hit movie “Superman,” starring Christopher Reeve. Pascal’s young parents had come to live in San Antonio after fleeing their native Chile during the rise of dictator Augusto Pinochet in the mid-1970s. Taking Pascal and his older sister to the movies — sometimes more than once a week — had become a kind of family ritual, a way to soak up as much American pop culture as possible.At some point during this particular visit, Pascal needed to go to the bathroom, and his parents let him go by himself. “I didn’t really know how to read yet,” Pascal says with the same Cheshire grin that dazzled “Game of Thrones” fans during his run as the wily (and doomed) Oberyn Martel. “I did not find my way back to ‘Superman.'”

Instead, Pascal wandered into a different theater (he thinks it was showing the 1979 domestic drama “Kramer vs. Kramer,” but, again, he was 4). In his shock and bewilderment at being lost, he curled up into an open seat and fell asleep. When he woke up, the movie was over, the theater was empty, and his parents were standing over him. To his surprise, they seemed rather calm, but another detail sticks out even more.

“I know that they finished their movie,” he says, bending over in laughter. “My sister was trying to get a rise out of me by telling me, ‘This happened and that happened and then Superman did this and then, you know, the earthquake and spinning around the planet.'” In the face of such relentless sibling mockery, Pascal did the only logical thing: “I said, ‘All that happened in my movie too.'”

He had no way of knowing it at the time, of course, but some 40 years later, Pascal would in fact get the chance to star in a movie alongside a DC Comics superhero — not to mention battle Stormtroopers and, er, face off against the most formidable warrior in Westeros. After his breakout on “Game of Thrones,” he became an instant get-me-that-guy sensation, mostly as headstrong, taciturn men of action — from chasing drug traffickers in Colombia for three seasons on Netflix’s “Narcos” to squaring off against Denzel Washington in “The Equalizer 2.”

This year, though, Pascal finds himself poised for the kind of marquee career he’s spent a lifetime dreaming about. On Oct. 30, he’ll return for Season 2 as the title star of “The Mandalorian,” Lucasfilm’s light-speed hit “Star Wars” series for Disney Plus that earned 15 Emmy nominations, including best drama, in its first season. And then on Dec. 25 — COVID-19 depending — he’ll play the slippery comic book villain Maxwell Lord opposite Gal Gadot, Chris Pine and Kristen Wiig in “Wonder Woman 1984.”

The roles are at once wildly divergent and the best showcase yet for Pascal’s elastic talents. In “The Mandalorian,” he must hide his face — and, in some episodes, his whole body — in a performance that pushes minimalism and restraint to an almost ascetic ideal. In “Wonder Woman 1984,” by stark contrast, he is delivering the kind of big, broad bad-guy character that populated the 1980s popcorn spectaculars of his youth.

“I continually am so surprised when everybody pegs him as such a serious guy,” says “Wonder Woman 1984” director Patty Jenkins. “I have to say, Pedro is one of the most appealing people I have known. He instantly becomes someone that everybody invites over and you want to have around and you want to talk to.”

Talk with Pascal for just five minutes — even when he’s stuck in his car because he ran out of time running errands before his flight to make it to the set of a Nicolas Cage movie in Budapest — and you get an immediate sense of what Jenkins is talking about. Before our interview really starts, Pascal points out, via Zoom, that my dog is licking his nether regions in the background. “Don’t stop him!” he says with an almost naughty reproach. “Let him live his life!”

Over our three such conversations, it’s also clear that Pascal’s great good humor and charm have been at once ballast for a number of striking hardships, and a bulwark that makes his hard-won success a challenge for him to fully accept.

Before Pascal knew anything about “The Mandalorian,” its showrunner and executive producer Jon Favreau knew he wanted Pascal to star in it.

“He feels very much like a classic movie star in his charm and his delivery,” says Favreau. “And he’s somebody who takes his craft very seriously.” Favreau felt Pascal had the presence and skill essential to deliver a character — named Din Djarin, but mostly called Mando — who spends virtually every second of his time on screen wearing a helmet, part of the sacrosanct creed of the Mandalorian order.

Convincing any actor to hide their face for the run of a series can be as precarious as escaping a Sarlacc pit. To win Pascal over in their initial meeting, Favreau brought him behind the “Mandalorian” curtain, into a conference room papered with storyboards covering the arc of the first season. “When he walked in, it must have felt a little surreal,” Favreau says. “You know, most of your experiences as an actor, people are kicking the tires to see if it’s a good fit. But in this case, everything was locked and loaded.”

Needless to say, it worked. “I hope this doesn’t sound like me fashioning myself like I’m, you know, so smart, but I agreed to do this [show] because the impression I had when I had my first meeting was that this is the next big s—,” Pascal says with a laugh.

Favreau’s determination to cast Pascal, however, put the actor in a tricky situation: Pascal’s own commitments to make “Wonder Woman 1984” in London and to perform in a Broadway run of “King Lear” with Glenda Jackson barreled right into the production schedule for “The Mandalorian.” Some scenes on the show, and in at least one case a full episode, would need to lean on the anonymity of the title character more than anyone had quite planned, with two stunt performers — Brendan Wayne and Lateef Crowder — playing Mando on set and Pascal dubbing in the dialogue months later.

Pascal was already being asked to smother one of his best tools as an actor, extraordinarily uncommon for anyone shouldering the newest iteration of a global live-action franchise. (Imagine Robert Downey Jr. only playing Iron Man while wearing a mask — you can’t!) Now he had to hand over control of Mando’s body to other performers too. Some actors would have walked away. Pascal didn’t.

“If there were more than just a couple of pages of a one-on-one scene, I did feel uneasy about not, in some instances, being able to totally author that,” he says. “But it was so easy in such a sort of practical and unexciting way for it to be up to them. When you’re dealing with a franchise as large as this, you are such a passenger to however they’re going to carve it out. It’s just so specific. It’s ‘Star Wars.'” (For Season 2, Pascal says he was on the set far more, though he still sat out many of Mando’s stunts.)

“The Mandalorian” was indeed the next big s—, helping to catapult the launch of Disney Plus to 26.5 million subscribers in its first six weeks. With the “Star Wars” movies frozen in carbonite until 2023 (at least), I noted offhand that he’s now effectively the face of one of the biggest pop-culture franchises in the world. Pascal could barely suppress rolling his eyes.

“I mean, come on, there isn’t a face!” he says with a laugh that feels maybe a little forced. “If you want to say, ‘You’re the silhouette’ — which is also a team effort — then, yeah.” He pauses. “Can we just cut the s— and talk about the Child?”

Yes, of course, the Child — or, as the rest of the galaxy calls it, Baby Yoda. Pascal first saw the incandescently cute creature during his download of “Mandalorian” storyboards in that initial meeting with Favreau. “Literally, my eyes following left to right, up and down, and, boom, Baby Yoda close to the end of the first episode,” he says. “That was when I was like, ‘Oh, yep, that’s a winner!'”

Baby Yoda is undeniably the breakout star of “The Mandalorian,” inspiring infinite memes and apocryphal basketball game sightings. But the show wouldn’t work if audiences weren’t invested in Mando’s evolving emotional connection to the wee scene stealer, something Favreau says Pascal understood from the jump. “He’s tracking the arc of that relationship,” says the showrunner. “His insight has made us rethink moments over the course of the show.” (As with all things “Star Wars,” questions about specifics are deflected in deference to the all-powerful Galactic Order of Spoilers.)

Even if Pascal couldn’t always be inside Mando’s body, he never left the character’s head, always aware of how this orphaned bounty hunter who caroms from planet to planet would look askance at anything that felt too good (or too adorable) to be true.

“The transience is something that I’m incredibly familiar with, you know?” Pascal says. “Understanding the opportunity for complexity under all of the armor was not hard for me.”

When Pascal was 4 months old, his parents had to leave him and his sister with their aunt, so they could go into hiding to avoid capture during Pinochet’s crackdown against his opposition. After six months, they finally managed to climb the walls of the Venezuelan embassy during a shift change and claim asylum; from there, the family relocated, first to Denmark, then to San Antonio, where Pascal’s father got a job as a physician.

Pascal was too young to remember any of this, and for a healthy stretch of his childhood, his complicated Chilean heritage sat in parallel to his life in the U.S. — separate tracks, equally important, never quite intersecting. By the time Pascal was 8, his family was able to take regular trips back to Chile to visit with his 34 first cousins. But he doesn’t remember really talking about any of his time there all that much with his American friends.

“I remember at one point not even realizing that my parents had accents until a friend was like, ‘Why does your mom talk like that?'” Pascal says. “And I remember thinking, like what?”

Besides, he loved his life in San Antonio. His father took him and his sister to Spurs basketball games during the week if their homework was done. He hoodwinked his mother into letting him see “Poltergeist” at the local multiplex. He watched just about anything on cable; the HBO special of Whoopi Goldberg’s one-woman Broadway show knocked him flat. He remembers seeing Henry Thomas in “E.T.” and Christian Bale in “Empire of the Sun” and wishing ardently, urgently, I want to live those stories too.

Then his father got a job in Orange County, Calif. After Pascal finished the fifth grade, they moved there. It was a shock. “There were two really, really rough years,” he says. “A lot of bullying.”

His mother found him a nascent performing arts high school in the area, and Pascal burrowed even further into his obsessions, devouring any play or movie he could get his hands on. His senior year, a friend of his mother’s gave Pascal her ticket to a long two-part play running in downtown Los Angeles that her bad back couldn’t withstand. He got out of school early to drive there by himself. It was the pre-Broadway run of “Angels in America.”

“And it changed me,” he says with almost religious awe. “It changed me.”

After studying acting at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Pascal booked a succession of solid gigs, like MTV’s “Undressed” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” But the sudden death of his mother — who’d only just been permitted to move back to Chile a few years earlier — took the wind right from Pascal’s sails. He lost his agent, and his career stalled almost completely.

As a tribute to her, he decided to change his professional last name from Balmaceda, his father’s, to Pascal, his mother’s. “And also, because Americans had such a hard time pronouncing Balmaceda,” he says. “It was exhausting.”

Pascal even tried swapping out Pedro for Alexander (an homage to Ingmar Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander,” one of the formative films of his youth). “I was willing to do absolutely anything to work more,” he says. “And that meant if people felt confused by who they were looking at in the casting room because his first name was Pedro, then I’ll change that. It didn’t work.”

It was a desperately lean time for Pascal. He booked an occasional “Law & Order” episode, but mostly he was pounding the pavement along with his other New York theater friends — like Oscar Isaac, who met Pascal doing an Off Broadway play. They became fast, lifelong friends, bonding over their shared passions and frustrations as actors.

“It’s gotten better, but at that point, it was so easy to be pigeonholed in very specific roles because we’re Latinos,” says Isaac. “It’s like, how many gang member roles am I going to be sent?” As with so many actors, the dream Pascal and Isaac shared to live the stories of their childhoods had been stripped down to its most basic utility. “The dream was to be able to pay rent,” says Isaac. “There wasn’t a strategy. We were just struggling. It was talking about how to do this thing that we both love but seems kind of insurmountable.”

As with so few actors, that dream was finally rekindled through sheer nerve and the luck of who you know, when another lifelong friend, actor Sarah Paulson, agreed to pass along Pascal’s audition for Oberyn Martell to her best friend Amanda Peet, who is married to “Game of Thrones” co-showrunner David Benioff.

“First of all, it was an iPhone selfie audition, which was unusual,” Benioff remembers over email. “And this wasn’t one of the new-fangled iPhones with the fancy cameras. It looked like s—; it was shot vertical; the whole thing was very amateurish. Except for the performance, which was intense and believable and just right.”

Before Pascal knew it, he found himself in Belfast, sitting inside the Great Hall of the Red Keep as one of the judges at Tyrion Lannister’s trial for the murder of King Joffrey. “I was between Charles Dance and Lena Headey, with a view of the entire f—ing set,” Pascal says, his eyes wide and astonished still at the memory. “I couldn’t believe I didn’t have an uncomfortable costume on. You know, I got to sit — and with this view.” He sighs. “It strangely aligned itself with the kind of thinking I was developing as a child that, at that point, I was convinced was not happening.”

And then it all started to happen.

In early 2018, while Pascal was in Hawaii preparing to make the Netflix thriller “Triple Frontier” — opposite his old friend Isaac — he got a call from the film’s producer Charles Roven, who told him Patty Jenkins wanted to meet with him in London to discuss a role in another film Roven was producing, “Wonder Woman 1984.”

“It was a f—ing offer,” Pascal says in an incredulous whisper. “I wasn’t really grasping that Patty wanted to talk to me about a part that I was going to play, not a part that I needed to get. I wasn’t able to totally accept that.”

Pascal had actually shot a TV pilot with Jenkins that wasn’t picked up, made right before his life-changing run on “Game of Thrones” aired. “I got to work with Patty for three days or something and then thought I’d never see her again,” he says. “I didn’t even know she remembered me from that.”

She did. “I worked with him, so I knew him,” she says. “I didn’t need him to prove anything for me. I just loved the idea of him, and I thought he would be kind of unexpected, because he doesn’t scream ‘villain.'”

In Jenkins’ vision, Max Lord — a longstanding DC Comics rogue who shares a particularly tangled history with Wonder Woman — is a slick, self-styled tycoon with a knack for manipulation and an undercurrent of genuine pathos. It was the kind of larger-than-life character Pascal had never been asked to tackle before, so he did something equally unorthodox: He transformed his script into a kind of pop-art scrapbook, filled with blown-up photocopies of Max Lord from the comic books that Pascal then manipulated through his lens on the character.

Even the few pages Pascal flashes to me over Zoom are quite revealing. One, featuring Max sporting a power suit and a smarmy grin, has several burned-out holes, including through the character’s eye. Another page features Max surrounded by text bubbles into which Pascal has written, over and over and over again in itty-bitty lettering, “You are a f—ing piece of s—.”

“I felt like I had wake myself up again in a big way,” he says. “This was just a practical way of, like, instead of going home tired and putting Netflix on, [I would] actually deal with this physical thing, doodle and think about it and run it.”

Jenkins is so bullish on Pascal’s performance that she thinks it could explode his career in the same way her 2003 film “Monster” forever changed how the industry saw Charlize Theron. “I would never cast him as just the stoic, quiet guy,” Jenkins says. “I almost think he’s unrecognizable from ‘Narcos’ to ‘Wonder Woman.’ Wouldn’t even know that was the same guy. But I think that may change.”

When people can see “Wonder Woman 1984” remains caught in the chaos the pandemic has wreaked on the industry; both Pascal and Jenkins are hopeful the Dec. 25 release date will stick, but neither is terribly sure it will. Perhaps it’s because of that uncertainty, perhaps it’s because he’s spent his life on the outside of a dream he’s now suddenly living, but Pascal does not share Jenkins’ optimism that his experience making “Wonder Woman 1984” will open doors to more opportunities like it.

“It will never happen again,” Pascal says, once more in that incredulous whisper. “It felt so special.”

After all he’s done in a few short years, why wouldn’t Pascal think more roles like this are on his horizon?

“I don’t know!” he finally says with a playful — and pointed — howl. “I’m protecting myself psychologically! It’s just all too good to be true! How dare I!”

x

[aion-rsa]

Netflix’s Tribes of Europa Review (Spoiler-Free): Brutal German Sci-Fi

https://ift.tt/37uf2HP

The way that our world is headed, with natural disasters, global warming and political big shots at constant loggerheads, would it be that hard to imagine everything we know crumbling before our eyes? Netflix’s new sci-fi drama Tribes of Europa focuses on three siblings that set out to change the course of the world after a global disaster that happened 45 years prior to 2074, when the series is set.

We’re not exactly sure how this dystopian, post-apocalyptic world came to be the norm. All that is revealed of what once was is the mention of ‘Black December’, when the lights went black and Europe was plunged into darkness.

The team behind Tribes of Europa were also the creators for Netflix’s first German-language series, Dark, and the Oscar-winning The Life of Others. Creator Philip Koch is said to have come up with the idea for the series after the Brexit vote was cast.

The siblings at the center of the unravelling are Kiano, Liv and Elja. They were born into The Origine Tribe, a Robin Hood-like forest commune, and nothing like you’d imagine our ways of life to be in over 50 years time. Carrying around supplies, taking hunting trips and dancing together merrily, the tribe lives a peaceful life until it’s disrupted by an aircraft shot down in their village.

After visiting the site of the mysterious aircraft, those present quickly realises that this aircraft is nothing like those that existed in ‘The Old World’. The aircraft’s pilot reveals that he is a being from The Atlantian Tribe, the only tribe to remain apparently untouched by what happened 45 years ago.

The youngest of the siblings, Elja, is entrusted with a mysterious cube, that looks a little like a smart home device. Elja has a thirst for the truth about Black December, and agrees to help to bring this cube back to the pilot’s homeland, in the hope that he will learn more about the past.

This cube is precious, though, and desperately desired. The Crows are a dark, power hungry group who seek to control the world, and destroy anybody who gets in their way. They attack The Origine forest and immediately create a bloodbath in efforts to find The Cube. While Elja flees, Kiano and Liv are caught up in the battle. Liv is gravely injured and Kiano and their father are captured by The Crows.

Read more

TV

Dark Season 3 Family Tree Explained and Who Dies at the End

By Mollie Davies

TV

Dark Season 3 Time Travel Explored -What is the Tunnel of Light?

By Mollie Davies

What follows from here is the story of three siblings, bound by blood and longing for peace, separated by war and catastrophe. Their separation is nothing we haven’t seen before, and very much like the Stark sibling separation in Game of Thrones. Only we hope it doesn’t take eight seasons for them to be reunited.

The empty streets, marching towards abandoned buildings and ragged clothing very much resembles the poorer districts in The Hunger Games series. The setting for Tribes of Europa has very little colour, it is hell on earth.

Just like the relationship between The Capitol and District 13 in The Hunger Games, viewers are immersed in a dystopia that includes bloodsport and the infliction of pain as a form of entertainment. The latter is present in nearly every episode. The level of brutality may not even be rivalled by another show of this kind.

Character development is well-handled throughout the series, with Elja creating a friendship with a con artist that comes with great comedy. Liv is the Katniss Everdeen of her tribe, willing to do anything to support her family and boy, does that girl have guts. More than any other characters, though, the relationship between Kiano – who at first gives us a very useless, pretty boy impression – and his captor Lord Varvara, is more manipulative than you could imagine. He is emotionally tortured by Varvara and the power play gets dreadfully messy.

Modern day music is used throughout, and although we are looking at a world that is far into our future, it creates an uneasy tension between what is visible on screen and what is heard. The costumes however, are spot-on for what you’d expect of those dwelling in a forest for decades on, and for those who hold the power, wanting to embody pain and control even in their sense of dress.

The comparisons between Tribes of Europa and the Game of Thrones series are hard to ignore, though, and reappear throughout. However, unlike the bleak ending to Game of Thrones where things remain slightly better but all together largely unchanged, Philip Koch is happy that this series includes more positives in terms of its end game, saying that it is “not moving in a radioactively contaminated post-apocalypse where doom lurks behind every corner. Rather, we are living in an exciting world where everybody gets back on their feet. A new beginning for the continent, full of hope – symbolic thus its new name: Europa, with an English pronunciation.”

Plenty of nods are given to other series of a similar nature, with the opening credits strongly resembling those of The Hunger Games. Koch even pays homage to Dark, giving fans a little treat by confirming the connection between the two series when Oliver Masucci, who played Ulrich Nielsen in the Dark series, talks of his déjà vu.

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

Though it does little that hasn’t been seen before, fans of dystopian drama are bound to enjoy Tribes of Europa, which is packed with suspense, bloodshed and power struggles.

The post Netflix’s Tribes of Europa Review (Spoiler-Free): Brutal German Sci-Fi appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3bzyx3d

[thesevenseraphs]

Bungie Weekly Update - 5/7/20

This week at Bungie, Guardian Games nears the finish line. But before we dive into our weekly update, here’s a word from Luke Smith about a topic on many players’ mind these days: Eververse.

REWARDS IN DESTINY 2

Hey everyone,

This week’s update is going to look at some of the changes coming to Destiny 2’s rewards. As you know, rewards for your character come from a variety of places: Playlists where you find random folks to play with, aspirational activities like Raids, Trials, and Dungeons where you form up a Fireteam, and even Eververse, where you sling some Silver or Bright Dust back at us for items you want. However, in today’s Destiny 2, the balance of the game’s rewards is not where we want it to be. To be blunt, there isn’t enough pursuit out in the world. We’re going to fix it.

Let’s get to it.

All of this and more is planned for Destiny 2 Year 4:

VANITY AND ACCESSORY (SHIPS, GHOSTS & SPARROWS) CHANGES

We will be adding a Transmogrification feature to Destiny 2.

This will allow players to turn their Armor into Universal Ornaments.

We plan to allow players to do this with in-game effort OR Silver.

This feature is in early development and is expected sometime during Year 4.

Each Season we will deliver an aspirational pursuit for armor. We haven’t done this consistently in Destiny 2.

This armor will come from activities, not the Season Pass nor Eververse

As an example: We removed the Eververse Armor from Season 11 and itemized it into an aspirational activity, because this is the right thing to do for the game.

We are improving the rewards for Aspirational Activities (Raids, Trials, Dungeons)

Going forward, Aspirational Activities will reward players with power, items, and vanity.

When we build an Aspirational Activity it will have at least one accessory to pursue.

The team is working on Adept Weapons for Trials of Osiris.

Trials will get new Armor (aka not reprisal), accessories, and weapons in Season 13.

Trials will get new Armor every year.

Destiny’s next Raid will have brand new Armor, Weapons, and Exotic Accessories to pursue (no spoilers).

Beginning in Season 12, we will no longer be selling ships, ghost shells, sparrows, or armor ornaments in Eververse that are visually based on themes from Aspirational Activities. 

We are not planning on changing existing items as that is time we could be spending on itemizing the future.

CORE PLAYLIST REWARDS CHANGES (STRIKES, GAMBIT, AND CRUCIBLE)

We are adding a new set of Armor for the core playlists (Strikes, Gambit, and Crucible).

This armor shares a set of new geometry, with decals and shaders specific to the activity.

We will create new sets like this each Year (e.g., Year 4, Year 5, Year 6, etc.)

This set will arrive alongside the next Expansion.

Starting in Season 12, we are adding a new Pursuit Weapon each Season.

This weapon can be earned by playing your preferred Core playlist.

This weapon will have activity-specific Legendary Skins that can be unlocked in each playlist.

We will no longer be selling new Legendary Weapon Ornaments in Eververse.

DUST AND ENGRAMS.

We are making it easier for you to earn Bright Dust.

We will be moving away from character-specific ways to earn Bright Dust and more toward Account-specific paths.

This change is geared toward giving one-character players significantly more Bright Dust than they earn today.

We’re updating the Bright Engram to be more relevant than it is today.

The earned Bright Engram in the Season Pass will be updated to include various Year 3 Eververse items previously sold for Silver and Bright Dust. And going forward, that Bright Engram will update each Season to include Eververse items from 3+ seasons prior.

On behalf of all of us at Bungie, we hope you and yours are safe and well. We know you could be doing anything with your free time, and so, so many of you are spending it in our worlds. Thanks, and stay safe. See you soon, -Luke Smith And now back to your regularly scheduled TWAB!

NEARING THE FINISH LINE

Look, you know it. I know it. Titans have taken a stand, owning the Guardian Games since Day 2 of the event. They’ve held strong against the book-reading Warlocks. They laugh in the face of fashion-centric Hunters like myself. After years of taking a backseat and avoiding the spotlight, Titans are showing off their Light brighter than they ever have before.

The more I think about this, the less surprised I am. Going into the event, I knew Titans would show up… maybe not to this extent, but Titans always have a way of being there when you need them. Day in and day out, Titans are standing strong in the face of darkness to protect the citizens of the Last City. Even if I was hoping for more Hunter wins, I can’t help but acknowledge the unrelenting strength here. Good stuff, Titans. You all deserve a bit more credit than folks give you.

We still have a few days left of this event, all contributing two points to daily standings. Warlocks, Hunters… these are your last chances to make a statement. Will you swap placements before the end of the games, or have you embraced your second and third place standings, respectively? Let’s see what you’ve got.

Now, let’s look at the rest of this week’s topics. Guardian’s Heart is coming to a close, and we have a final list of Bungie Bounty targets for you to hunt in support of charity, as well as a forecast of the final Iron Banner for this season.

GUARDIAN’S HEART UPDATE: FINAL WEEK

The Guardian’s Heart Charity Initiative has entered its final week. If you’ve been following along, we hit our $700,000 goal last week! Knowing this community, though, we aren’t even close to done yet. At the time of writing this article, you’ve already helped raise another $50k to help those impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. We still have a slew of Bungie Bounties to place on the heads of our community in support of this charity event. Here’s who you’ll be looking for over the next few days:

May 8 - Phammy at 1:00 AM on PC (Australia)

May 8 - Benj and PolarBear at 10:00 AM on PC (UK)

May 8 - Kinda Funny and What’s Good Games at 12:00 PM on PS4

May 9 - Zoe_ at 5:00 AM on PC (UK)May 11 - Jarv and HOUNDISH at 10:00 AM on Xbox (UK)

The Guardian’s Heart Initiative ends at 10:00 AM Pacific on May 12, 2020. If you would like to support this charity initiative and receive the Guardian’s Heart emblem, please donate $20 or more to the Tiltify page before this deadline!

Again, thank you to everyone who has donated thus far. I don’t think any of us could have imagined a pandemic like this in our lifetimes. To see Guardians coming together once again to support those in need warms our hearts. Thank you.

IRON FINALE

Next week, Lord Saladin returns to the Tower, hosting the final Iron Banner of the season. If you dig 6v6 power-enabled combat, this is your time to shine. Saladin will bring his final round of weekly bounties, each of which rewarding pinnacle power gear. Let’s say you’ve been striking out on that final Heavy Weapon – Iron Banner may grant you the Rocket Launcher you need to finish your pinnacle journey for this season.

As this is the final Iron Banner of the season, this serves as last call for a few rewards.

Iron Remembrance Armor Sets

Cast Iron Emblem

Iron Precious Shader

Additionally, this will be your last chance to earn the Point of the Stag Pursuit Bow. This weapon will not be available during Season 11, so get in there and complete your quest! Who knows, maybe you’ll fall in love with a new Bowfriend.

Iron Banner and Bonus Valor will be available from 10 AM Pacific on May 12, running through 10 AM Pacific on May 19.

BUG BASHERS

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it a thousand times more: The only good bug is a dead one. The Player Support team is vigilant, diving into as many #Help threads as they can each day to diagnose issues, distribute help articles, and find new issues in Destiny 2.

This is their report.

SMALL FIRETEAM XP BUFF

Fireteams who play together, stay together, which is why it’s important to reward them for their dedication. Earlier this week Bungie Help tweeted out an issue identified with the Season Pass Small Fireteam XP Buff:

An issue has been identified with a fix in progress where a small amount of the Season Pass Small Fireteam XP Boosts aren’t always applied to players appropriately. Regular XP Boosts aren’t impacted. Stay tuned to our This Week at Bungie blog post this week for more information.

We concluded that, in the worst-case scenario, this issue is unlikely to have impacted players more than a single Season Pass rank. We expect to deploy a fix by patch 2.8.1.2 on May 19.

ERROR CODES

Destiny Player Support is investigating increases in connection-based error codes, including BEAVER, ANTEATER, and RABBIT, with priority set to NEWT and WATERCRESS errors.

As we continue to investigate solutions for players affected by persistent WATERCRESS errors, Destiny Player Support has set up an investigation timeline for players to track the progress of our internal investigations into the issue. This thread will continue to be updated with the latest information as it becomes available and until a solution is found.

KNOWN ISSUES

While we continue investigating various known issues, here is a list of the latest issues that were reported to us in our #Help Forum:

The Doom Fang Pauldron exotic Titan gauntlets gain Super energy inconsistently on Void melee kills.

The Warlord’s End perk on Felwinter’s Helm exotic Warlock helmet activates inconsistently with melee and Finisher kills.

Performing a Finisher while wearing the Severance Enclosure exotic Titan chest piece will not count Finisher kills towards bounties.

The end of a TWAB usually means that we’re nearing the end of a Thursday… which leads to another weekend of Trials. While Trials is a predictable Friday offering, we’ve seen some feedback that things shouldn’t be too predictable. This week’s Trials of Osiris map will be [Redacted]!

Wait, what? Didn’t I confirm that Trials maps were on a set rotation per season? Yeah… I totally did. But that’s the beauty of a live game, things can change. The team has been looking at your feedback daily since Trials launched, and some things are a bit easier to change than others. For the foreseeable future, Trials maps will be on a random rotation. If anything changes with those plans, we’ll be sure to let you know.

Have a good weekend, and we’ll see you again next week. Cheers,-Dmg04

[laughingpinecone]

Yuletide letter

I am laughingpineapple on AO3  

Hello dear author! I hope you’ll have fun with our match. Feel free to draw from general or fandom-specific likes, past letters, and/or follow your heart.

Likes: worldbuilding, slice of life (especially if the event the fic focuses on is made up but canon-specific), missing moments, 5+1 and similar formats, bonding and emotional support/intimacy, physical intimacy, lingering touches, loyalty, casefic, surrealism, magical realism, established relationships, future fic (when in doubt, tell me what’s happening to them five, ten, twenty years in the future!), hurt/comfort, throwing characters into non-canon environments, banter, functional relationships between dysfunctional individuals, unexplained mysteries, bittersweet moods, journal/epistolary fic, dreams and memories and identities, tropey plots that are already close enough to characters/canon, outsider POV, UST, resolved UST, exploring the ~deep lore, leaning on the uniqueness of the canon setting/mood, found families, characters reuniting after a long and/or harrowing time, friends-to-lovers, road trips, maps, mutual pining, cuddling, wintry moods, the feeling of flannel and other fabrics, ridiculous concepts played entirely straight, sensory details, places being haunted, people being haunted, the mystery of the woods, small hopes in bleak worlds, electricity, places that don’t quite add up, mismatched memories, caves and deep places, distant city lights at night, emphasis on non-human traits of non-human characters (gen-wise, but also a hearty yes xeno for applicable ships), emphasis on inhuman traits of characters who were human once and have sort of shed it all behind

Cool with: any tense, any pov, any rating, plotty, not plotty, IF, unrequested characters popping up.

DNW: non-canonical rape, non-canonical children, focus on children, unrequested ships (background established canon couples are okay, mentions of parents are okay!), canon retellings, consent issues, actual covid (fantasy plagues are okay)

Les Cités Obscures: any

This is a very general “please, anything in the style of canon, just maybe with less thoughtless sexism” request. I want to lose myself in these cities again, and in the strange lands that connect them. I’d be happy to follow any of the known characters and/or OCs, or eschew characters altogether and write about the cities themselves. What caught your imagination in Brüsel, Xhystos, Taxandria, Alaxis...? The history of some cool building that was only marginally featured in one of the stories? Or an OC city! If you’ve got a favourite European city that doesn’t already have its obscure counterpart, please tell me all about it! Go big, go wild! What strange and classically surrealist happenings take place within its walls? Or even... outside Europe... Nerding out about architecture is of course very welcome. I would also love to read a story based on any Schuiten illustration, contextualizing it as if it were part of this ‘verse. Here’s a bunch of them, for example!

Ghost Trick: Cabanela

You know.. him. Dazzlingly OTT, untiring, rock-solid self-esteem, loyal to a fault, following a rhythm of his own, flawless intuition until it fails and it all burns down… him. I just want to see more of him doing stuff! The way he’s chill and open toward new people (like Sissel and Missile in ch15) makes him perfect to throw at most other characters and see how they react to the sparkles… I’d love some focus on how ridiculous his aesthetic is, half Saturday Night Fever half hardboiled detective half bubbly preteen (for a total of 150%) and yet he makes it work. Or how ruthless he can be, possibly for the sake of the people he cares for. The quote “The intimacy of big parties”. Him and Alma in the new timeline bonding over knowing (once Jowd has spilled the beans) but not remembering that terrible timeline. Some tropey scenario on the job. Snark-offs with Pigeon Man, by which I mean PM snarks and it bounces off him like water off a spotless white goose’s back.

Ship-wise it’s only Cabanela/Jowd whenever it’s not infidelity, Cabanela/Alma in what-ifs also if it’s not infidelity and Cabanela/Alma/Jowd for me (and Lynne/Memry and Yomiel/fianSissel on the side). There are a bunch of shippy prompts in all my past letters - I would however reiterate here that Jowd. is. the worst tease. always. Like, just saying, but assume he’s pining big time and Jowd and Alma figure it out - they’d make a national sport out of excruciatingly protracted teasing.

Conversely, Cabanela/Lynne and Cabanela/Yomiel are NOTPs especially from Cabanela’s side. So while I appreciate the thick tension of a good Yomiel VS Cabanela confrontation like everyone and their cat, and also really appreciate a roughed-up Cabanela, and I do love Yomiel in his own right… I don’t want Cabanela being into it. Adrenaline junkie he may be but this hurts and his coat’s a mess and there’s no perfect winning scenario so he hates every second of it. (JOWD being super into Cabanela being roughed up is another matter altogether and he should probably mind his own business. ...incompatible kinks, truly tragic. they’ll have to find some other common ground. they’re smart, resourceful, playful fellows, I’m sure they’ll manage)

Kentucky Route Zero: Donald kentuckyroutezero

I love everyone in the cast, all acts and interludes, and I am extremely into all the themes this incredible work of art ended up exploring. Agreeing with the overall doom and gloom up to Act IV, I was blown away by Act V’s strong affirmation of the importance of the arts and of the bonds we make and of carving up spaces for ourselves in capitalism’s wake. Donald was, indeed, not a part of any of that. Even the final interlude updates us on Lula and mentions Joseph, but the big guy is nowhere to be seen. So, you know, there’s fanfiction! He’s so static, defeated. I am fascinated by the chain of metaphysical spaces that goes surface -> Zero -> Echo -> Dogwood and even within that framework, the hall of the mountain king is like a hopeless dead end. Dude’s terminally stuck. So - once again, in the spirit of transformative works, how could he get... you know... unstuck? Did Lula’s momentous appearance in Act III shake him? Having a functioning Xanadu again, perhaps? How could he interrogate that oracle, what recursive wonders would it show him? If he decides to leave, what does it feel to be on the surface again after so long, or on the river perhaps? Maybe he is forced to leave by the flood, if not this one, the next... Having him meet any other character would be amazing. Past or future time spent with Weaver... seeing Conway again, changed... programmer guy chatting up musician androids... did he know Carrington from his college days or was Carrington only a friend of Lula’s?

As for Lula herself and Joseph too: “Flipping through the pages, Conway is able to gather that it’s a story about three characters: Joseph, Donald, and Lula. It’s something like a tragic love triangle, but much more complex. Some kind of tangled, painfully concave love polygon.” 😔 I ship them as a full triad, if you can nudge them in that direction, good. But I’m very open to non-romantic resolutions as well, going past their messy feelings to find each other as friends after so many years maybe. Or... a start. idk.

I’d be interested in fic that leans on the game’s adjacent genres: wanna go full-on American Gothic? Dip into surrealism? Take a leaf from Twin Peaks with tulpa / split narratives to explore the characters’ issues? I’m also open to AUs, real or through Xanadu. This also feels like a good place to stress that I really, really like caves.

And now for something completely different: FAQ:  The “Snake Fight” Portion of Your Thesis Defense is in the tagset this year. I’d say that the crossover with the snake portion of Here and there along the Echo writes itself, but it would not be correct, as in fact I would like you to write it for me. Feel free to not feature Donald if you focus on this crossover instead!

Uru would be a fun crossover too, for Donald specifically. He’s very DRC-shaped in how he tilts at doomed projects which just so happen to be deep underground.

Pyre: Volfred Sandalwood

This is a Volfred solo, Volfred&literally anyone or Volfred/Tariq, /Oralech or /Tariq/Oralech request. I adore everyone in that Blackwagon+Dalbert+Celeste, so if you want to add a Nightwing or two to any prompt, please do! I also love all the Scribes and find Erisa a compelling tragic figure, while out of the other triumvirates, I’m “love to hate them” for Manley, Brighton, Udmildhe and Deluge and would not like to see them featured in sympathetic roles. fwiw I also enjoy Jodi/Celeste and Bertrude/Pamitha a lot!

I feel deeply for all of Pyre’s main themes - literacy, degrees of freedom, the fragile time that is the end of a historical cycle, nobodies rising up to the occasion, building a better society, and of course found family, “distance cannot separate our spirits” and all that jazz, and Volfred is squarely rooted at the center of all of them. I really really love everything he stands for, even if he’s overbearingly smug in standing for it. Just please tell me things about my fave. His relationship to the Scribes (as a historian, a some kind of vision, via *ae or once he’s a star himself)? A ‘forced vacay’ Downside ending where he looks at the Union from afar and keeps living in this strange transformational place? Life in a cramped Blackwagon that was meant for like 5 people tops and is currently eight Nightwings, a herald and an orb? Since he picked him for the job to begin with, does he respect and cherish Hedwyn as he dang well should? What does it feel like to try and Read a herald? Was he ever in danger, in the Commonwealth or in the Downside? What daring act of resistance did he and Bertrude pull off at some point in their past? It’d be cool if one of his old pamphlets came up at some point. Does he puff up as prime minister because he’s nervous, and who can see past his hyper-professionalism and lend a hand? Please roast him big time about the votes he assigns to the various Nightwings in his planner? What’s his attitude toward the flame’s purification (what with being a tree but mostly like, as a general concept. He did nothing wrong!) (well he definitely said some things wrong and sometimes oftentimes the ego jumps out, but his intentions did nothing wrong)? When did his calculating approach fail him? Something with Pamitha along the lines of that edit that goes “Can we talk, one ten to another?“/"I am an eleven, my girl, but continue”? Dude could easily be voted sexiest voice in the Downside - how much is he aware of it? Does he sing? I love how he bears his ‘reader’ brand proudly. And speaking of scars, I have to wonder, looking at Manley for comparison, if the shape of his head, with that massive crack, isn’t also due to injuries.

As a refrain from my general likes: emphatically yes xeno to both shippy interactions at all ratings and to gen explorations of what a Sap is like… I’d love to read all your headcanons.

Ship-wise, I enjoy him with Tariq as this kind of esoteric connection of minds, guarded words full of secret meanings, long contemplative walks together (is any external pov watching...?), Volfred’s Reader powers brushing against Tariq’s mind and getting weak in the knees at the starlit expanse he finds there, so unlike mortal thoughts. Tariq finds his individuality learning from him; Volfred presumably gets a transcendent glimpse of the Scribes. And I enjoy him with Oralech as pretty much the opposite of that, Oralech is so very mortal compared to him, such a precious, fleeting, burning life especially after his fall. Oralech’s idealism is very dear to me, it was their plan, their shared revolutionary spirit, I find it deeply moving. And I am very interested in seeing them rebuild their connection now that Oralech is back, changed, and in some ways he can learn to let go of his misconceptions and slowly open himself to Volfred’s love again, but in other ways that’s who he is now, with this deep-set anger, and what does it even feel to realize that you’re the symbol of the end of an era (the end of the Rites, the fading of the Scribes). I’m interested in both topside and downside endings for all of them, as long as they end up on the same side, the revolution was peaceful and they don’t angst too much about the side they ended in. Tariq can ‘find his way home’ in the near post-canon somehow or even be summoned again, as a different aspect of the same ‘moonlit vision’ that once inspired Soliam Murr.

Strandbeest: any

https://www.strandbeest.com/

I would just like words to go with these, please and thank you so very much. Worldbuild to your heart’s content! Specifically: I’m fascinated by the premise that the strandbeest are living creatures that evolve and adapt to their ecosystem. A world where life is just wind stomachs and sandy joints, and the tide that can catch you unaware. I would like a story that feels distinctly inorganic. The wonder that is the existence of these creatures. Their unique struggles. Weird and experimental if you like. With a mechanical focus, maybe?

I nominated four critters as a selection of the different cool things they can do - Percipiere Excelsus is huge and has the hammer mechanism, Suspendisse’s tail senses the hardness of the sand, Uminami is my fave caterpillar and the caterpillars overall feel like a new paradigm after a mass extinction event, Ader straight-up flies... but they’re all wonderful. If you want to focus on different strandbeest, please do!

Twin Peaks: Lucy Moran

Case fic but they don’t find out jack shit, someone disappears, David Bowie was there, it’s complicated. Fragmented, shifted, mirrored identities. New Lodge spaces. The risks of staring into the void for too long. Gentle illusions. Transcendence. The moon. Static buzzing. Any title from the s3 ethereal whooshing compilation used as a prompt, actually. Whatever goes on on Blue Pine mountain or the even more mysterious things that go on on White Tail mountain where exactly zero canon locations are found. Twin Peaks is all about the mystery to me, the awe of mystery and unknowability and the human drive to look beyond and the risks of getting a peek, and about shared consciousness and trauma taking physical form in an uncaring world. Go wild with the ethereal whooshing! But I also love the human warmth at the heart of it all, and sometimes it’s enough to anchor these characters and let them have a nice day. A fic entirely focused on some instance of coziness against the cold chaotic background of canon would be great too.

For Lucy specifically, a big draw for me is how canon (...s2 need not apply) empathizes with her way of processing the world. Not just Peaks, but On the Air’s protag who is basically a Lucy expy also gets the narrative completely on her side and that’s great. And I love how in s3, her focus on the small things around her is always echoed by bigger, climactic events beyond her horizon (bunnies / Jack Rabbit’s palace, chair order / Garland’s chair, her first scene talking about the two sheriffs / doubles everywhere...). It feels to me like some kind of off-kilter mindfulness and I love it. She’s also got a loving husband and an amazing son, which, in this economy and also this canon? Damn. The one functional family, imagine that. I am not interested in focus on family dynamics, but singularly, either Lucy/Andy or Lucy&Wally are great - in particular, I’m interested in how strange they are and yet they make it work. With the ruthless critique of traditional family structure that’s all over canon, maybe they make it work specifically because they’re not doing any of that. A bit like the Addams family... but... not goth...? Anyway. I’d love to see Lucy interact with and maybe strike a friendship with any character she’s never shared a scene with in canon! In the tagset, there’s Diane for some secretaries bonding, Audrey because??? why not?, Albert because it’d be an epic enemies to friends slowburn, some version of Laura in the future, if we’re feeling really daring maybe even some version of Coop in the future, still fragmented... or anyone you want! Outside the tagset I’d be curious about Hawk, Margaret and maybe Doris in particular, I think, and Phil, and Nadine and the Invitation to Love fandom in general (Frost says it still airs - did it get as weird as TP s3 did?), but if you have an idea with someone else, absolutely go for it!

Canon-specific DNWs: any singular Dreamer being the ‘source’ of canon, BOB (let alone Judy) being forever defeated in the finale, Judy being an active malevolent presence in the characters’ lives, clear explanations for canonical ambiguities, ‘Odessaverse’ being the reality layer, the Fireman’s House by the Sea being the White Lodge, whatever Twin Perfect’s on about, Cooper/Audrey, Cooper/Laura

[ranger-report]

Thoughts On: HEXEN: BEYOND HERETIC

In 1995, less than a year after the release of Heretic (which I talked about here), Raven Software unleashed a masterpiece upon the first person shooter landscape. Titled Hexen: Beyond Heretic, the game featured radical new features for the id tech 1 engine, including scripted events (such as monster falling through the ceiling to ambush the player), hub level design, CD music, and moving walls. But what it really brought to the table was an unrelenting difficulty and obtuse puzzle system revolving around the discovery of multiple switches throughout a central hub to open the path to the next world. Combined with a pseudo-RPG character class feature, beautiful sprite work, and a rich atmosphere to explore, Hexen introduced concepts and mechanics that influence FPS games to this day, overshadowed only by the release of Quake the following year.

YouTuber GmanLives produced a video on Hexen calling it, “The Dark Souls of FPS Games,” and that's really not far off the mark. Hexen is oppressive. It's brutal. It's actively trying to prevent the player from achieving their goal of beating the game. While the previous entry in the series, Heretic, offered a fast-paced shoot-em-up blitzkrieg, this game operated with a more measured approach. Methodical pacing, resource management, and the utilization of each class's weapons are key to moving forward. Hidden doors and paths and switches, sometimes activated with the use key and sometimes by firing a weapon at them, permeate the levels to the point where half the game can be spent clicking or shooting at random walls just to see what's going to open up when – or if at all. Most games would tuck away secrets by this method, but Hexen, oh no. Hexen offers little rewards aside from survival, and it's glorious. It's harder than shit, but it's glorious.

Opening up the game, players are given three options to choose from: Baratus the fighter, Parias the cleric, or Daedolon the mage. Each class has their ups and downs; for example, the fighter is a beefy fucker who has high hit points and damage, but weak magic, leading to a mostly melee combat style if you run out of mana. The mage is the opposite, low hit points but high magic damage, with some gorgeously rendered spells that beautifully highlight the detail that id tech 1 was capable of. And the cleric is a mixed bag, balanced between the two, with a woefully weak melee weapon and decent ranged magic weapons, but he also carries the single best weapon in the entire game: the Wraithverge, a crucifix that shoots out Arc of the Covenant ghosts that scream and eviscerate anything on the screen in a glorious display of carnage. Clear out a room in seconds with two well placed shot. Arguable, the Wraithverge should be right up next to the BFG 9000 as one of the most ridiculously overpowered weapons in any game – maybe even higher. But the Wraithverge is an Ultimate Weapon, and each class has an Ultimate Weapon, which needs to be assembled over the course of the game by finding the pieces of it tucked away in hidden corners of the levels. Depending on your vigilance, you might find the pieces sooner vs later, and the rewards for this are plentiful. However, unlike the prior game, this game doesn't use unique ammo type for each weapon; that would be too easy. This time around, weapons require mana to use, coming in two different flavors, blue and green. Each class works as such: weak melee weapon that needs no mana, a slightly stronger weapon that uses blue mana, a much stronger weapon that uses green mana, and the Ultimate Weapon which uses both. With the fighter, all of his weapons can be used as melee if he runs out of mana, but if he has the stock, they take on ranged properties. The mage has a starting weapon that requires no mana, but it still ranged. Meanwhile, the cleric maintains the balance with his solo melee weapon, and the rest are ranged. What's notable about the differences in the classes is that it's not just limited to weapon usage, but also inventory usage. Different classes will garner different amounts of armor points depending on their “familiarity” with how to use armor. There's an item called a fletchette that varies in use depending on the class; for example, the fighter throws the fletchette like a bomb, where the cleric drops it in place and it explodes into a cloud of poison. New players will have the opportunity to briefly look over the classes at the beginning as the opening screen displays stats such as speed, armor, magic, and strength, all of which seem a little arbitrary since they don't explicitly state what they do or how they affect the game up front. At the same time, each class is going to lean towards a bit more difficulty, seeing as how the tanky fighter is going to make bruting through the game a lot easier than the tissue paper mage. First time players would do wise to pick the fighter or the cleric as their first timer, saving the mage for a later playthrough, unless you're a masochist when it comes to the games that you play.

One of the great distinctions about Hexen as compared to Heretic is that the former feels more like a fully realized game world vs the cool fanfic/DOOM clone of the latter. Director and designer Brian Raffel no doubt had a hardon for dark fantasy substance, having worked on Raven's previous two fantasy games, and with the release of DOOM thought, “You know, we can do something with that.” Didn't hurt that id Software was just a block down the street from their offices around that time (true story!) and John Romero, AKA Rock God of Gaming, worked directly with Raven during development so they could make the most of id tech 1. Taking what they knew after Heretic, hungry to dive in further, Hexen feels like a natural expansion of the concepts introduced in the first game: weary travelers journeying through worlds and dimensions to combat an ancient evil using magic and steel. It's great stuff, leaning even harder on the 80's horror fantasy art aesthetic. The game is oozing with deeply detailed monsters and environments, even more refined than the very good work done on Heretic. Translucent objects, fog, breakable terrain, each hub and level are intimately crafted to feel like it's a living, breathing world, not just something you've decided to boot up on your 486 PC. Ranging from traditionally gothic architecture with stained glass and parapets, to jungley swamps, arid canyons, and moldy sewers. And as mentioned before, it's brutally oppressive, absolutely unwelcoming in design. Even the environment doesn't want your presence here. Sometimes it doesn't even want the other monsters around; if you're lucky, you can get creatures to turn on each other by creeping into a new area, and if you can go unnoticed before their attack animations kick in, monster castes will infight with one another, saving you precious mana in the process. It doesn't always work, but when it does, it's a fun little sight to behold your meddling.

The sound effects are truly phenomenal, a game worth wearing headphones for. Composer Kevin Schilder returns for the soundtrack, and while his work on Heretic was suitable, here he knocks it completely out of the park. Ominous, brooding, energetic but not too up tempo, it's perfect dungeon crawling music that creeps up your spine at the same time. Meanwhile the distinct creature sounds echo and crawl around corners, letting you know what is where, and also what to be afraid of. I can still hear the sounds of the Dark Bishop in the back of my head, letting me know that I need to turn tail and put some distance between me and them. Enemy design is even better this time around: the aforementioned Dark Bishops take the role of the previous game's Disciples of D'Sparil, teleporting and blasting you with dark magic from their hooded, faceless bodies. Ettins are double-headed warrior beasts that carry a spiked mace, and are the most prevalent monster class in the game – and while they might be everywhere, they pack a helluva wallop, meaning you don't underestimate them no matter how many times you've killed one. Meanwhile, the Centaurs and Slaughtaurs are horrible little shits. Just like the tag says, they're centaurs with full-face helmets, swords, and spiked shields. They can raise their shield to deflect any incoming attacks and reflect them back at you, which is infuriating, especially since the Slaughtaur can fire deadly green magic at you while holding up their shields. And since they look the same, you have to approach any of them with intense caution, otherwise you're staring down the face of death while waiting to make your next strike.

Puzzles operate primarily on a “find the key/switch” platform, but rather than tracking down everything necessary to proceed in a single level, Hexen challenges the player to locate and operate everything they need to move forward throughout a spread of areas around the hub. For example, the Swamp Key won't be directly located in the swamp itself, but maybe over in the Forest. Multiple switches necessary to unlocking the Final Door in the central hub are located in the various hub worlds, informing the player with a quick “You have solved 1/3 of the puzzle” text across the screen when you've found one. Find another switch, the number increases from 1/3 to 2/3, etc. But each hub has more switches, all the way up to nine switches necessary to journey on, which to some is going to be a slog. While frustrating at times, I never felt like I was wading through a switch hunt just to proceed. Each switch seemed to naturally pop up on its own, and once I realized that certain areas couldn't be accessed within the levels themselves, I'd hop around the various worlds in the hub until I found a new switch or key, and then went back. Imagine if Super Mario 64's paintings were all connected to each other, and you had to hop back and forth between them in order to get to the next floor of the castle. It's innovative, and certainly makes sense; if an evil overlord tyrant person were going to hide the keys to access their lair, they probably would spread them out to make it harder to find. It's gratifying to open up section after section of these levels, defying the odds and slaying your way through the puzzles. Adding to the depth of torment is that, unlike Heretic, clearing a room of monsters doesn't mean it will stay that way. Scripted sequences again have monsters teleport in when you least expect it, repopulating areas you thought were safe for the time being. Damning though that may be, it adds to the feeling like the player is being watched at every moment, and that the game is doing its level best to fight back against your progress.

Hexen is hard. I resorted to a walkthrough once, just like in Heretic, and absolutely utilized the minimap in order to suss out where switches were located. There is nothing here to suggest a walk in the park: it is labyrinthine, it is torrid, it is nightmarish. But the mechanics all come together in the end, particularly in the moments where the game gratifyingly presents a room full of mana and health and a lot of monsters to let loose on. These apeshit moments are some of the best in the game. After spending hours managing resources and trying to hoard as much mana and health as possible, to be allowed a moment of pure rip and tear is wonderful.

If you're going to play Hexen, I highly recommend getting the expansion, Deathkings of the Dark Citadel. Not only is the title metal as fuck, but the three new hubs it offers are even more vicious, demeaning, and frustrating. They shove all the elements of the previous five hubs down into three, and it shows. You'll be assaulted on all fronts right from the start, continuing where the final battle left off in Hexen. You still get to pick your class, but sadly, you're also starting over. Curiously depowered and without any inventory items to work with, you'll feel extra squishy for the first level or three. Honestly, Deathkings was where I felt I had the most pure Hexen experience: solidly brutal and unforgiving as fuck. Interestingly, Deathkings was released in 1996 around the same time that Heretic got a retail release with two additional episodes under the name Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders. Factor this in with the upcoming release of Hexen II in 1997 (which saw a hefty difficulty spike as well), it seems that Raven got in one last hurrah with id tech 1 before moving on to id tech 2 -- the Quake engine. But more on that game in another post.

As with Heretic, I recommend playing this one through GZDOOM in order to get the best experience. And you'll need the best experience to stay one step ahead of everything that's trying to kill you. In a nutshell, Hexen is a true masterclass of determination to see the day through. For fans of retro FPS games, it's a must play, but be warned that coming into this after Heretic there is a distinct shift in how the game plays, looks, feels. Gone is the run and gun, which exists now only in pockets. But what's here, crafted lovingly and passionately, is a true nightmare of agony and difficulty unlike anything made before it. As Gmanlives summed it up, perhaps Dark Souls should be called the Hexen of third person adventure games.

Next time, we'll take a look at Hexen II, a popular but vastly different title in the series, and how the changes it made not only distinguished it from the previous two games, but may have also set it slightly backwards as well.