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an-apocalypse-of-magpies · 4 years ago

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On the world of Mortal Engines, class, and the metaphors of consumption

This is less an essay and more a collection of thoughts. Basically I just saw a video on the Mortal Engines film and its being a civilisation too stupid to exist. I got fed up, mainly because so many of the criticisms amounted to ‘the book did it better’ with little elaboration but also the arrogantly grating voice of the presenter got on my nerves, but I cannot deny the points made and in fact wanted to elaborate further on the worldbuilding of this series and, while unrealistic, look at why the books were so engaging.

Some background to start off - Mortal Engines is a four-book series (and three-book prequel sub-series) written by English author Phillip Reeve, and depicts a bleak post-apocalyptic world. North America is uninhabitable and lost to the sands of time, irradiated, poisoned, and flattened by war. Eurasia is mostly barren plains. And, of course, the central premise - towns and cities have raised themselves onto mobile platforms and trundle about. Well, mostly. A major antagonist to this system is the Anti-Traction League, a collective of nations hiding out in old east China, the Indian subcontinent, southeast Asia and some of Africa. They are seen as barbarians and heathens by much of the world for refusing to mobilise, instead hiding in stationary citadels behind their mountains. The Traction Cities near-universally engage in a philosophy of Municipal Darwinism, a savage system of bastardised pseudo-biology where cities literally predate each other and ‘consume’ each other for resources. Cities eat towns, towns eat smaller towns. Some towns and cities deliberately adapt to cheat the system and make themselves a less appetising target, or for that matter a more aggressive and efficient hunter.

THE TRACTION CITIES

The first three books tend to focus their action on one or two cities, whereas the last is a bit more of a road trip. The other consistent thread is multiple characters’ stories running concurrently, usually reconnecting near the end. This allows the books maintain an open, almost global scale - you’ll nearly never not be moving, even sitting still on a city, which reinforces the theme of unnatural life. The first book focuses on London, which has been sulking in what was once Britain (by sheer happenstance on their part and pure irony on ours), and is suddenly running at full pelt back into Europe and eastward as fast as her engines can carry her. Why? London’s not the biggest city around, and the vast expanse of Eurasia is now the Great Hunting Ground - it’s where the big boys play, and by play I mean ‘savagely predate each other’. It’s dangerous territory for a little city. But over the first book, it becomes increasingly apparent that Traction Cities are increasingly non-viable option for existence. Fuel is scarce, prey moreso, and what morsels London can confidently snap up will not sustain it for long. There is an ecosystem at play here - static settlements can farm resources, but are universally seen as food, either by small bandit settlements to raid for supplies or for larger towns to just straight-up eat. Small towns too small to hunt tend to be miners or gatherers, either mining minerals to use or trade, or gathering resources like wood from natural deposits or sifting through the waste heaps left by bigger cities. Most cities bigger than that are ‘urbivores’, or hunter towns, that hunt and eat smaller prey or opportunistically scavenge the ‘carcasses’ of dead cities. I mentioned specialisation earlier, and like in nature, species and cities can occupy a niche that gives them an advantage and thus increased chance at survival. Airhaven, for example, is a politically-neutral city in the air that floats around Eurasia seasonally and serves as a rest stop, fuelling station and trading exchange for airship pilots the world over, Tractionist or no. Tunbridge Wheels is a pirate-run town that has a lightweight wooden chassis and flotation devices to hunt amphibiously in a world where many small towns escape threat by setting up on islands. Panzerstadt-Bayreuth is a conurbation of four massive cities, too big to survive long without prey, they banded together to take down the biggest of prey (it’s unclear whether they achieve this through sheer size or whether they decouple and become a pack hunter). Anchorage, the last American city, neutered its own jaws to increase mobility, skating around the frozen north too fast for threats to catch up with, and survives on trade. Brighton is a pleasure city that paddles around the warm Mediterranean, technically still a predator but with no real agenda and about the only city left that can be called a tourist city (it’s run on the back of brutal slave labour). And these are just the major ones. Throughout the books, cities are treated like living things ... like mortal engines.

And like living things, they need resources to survive.

A DYING WAY OF LIFE

The books are inconsistent on the origins of Traction Cities, as it turns out deliberately - history is written by the winners, after all. But it’s all closely tied to the ‘apocalypse’ part of the post-apocalytic I mentioned earlier. Long ago in-universe, long into our future, was a terrible event known as the Sixty Minute War. This war tore the world asunder with nuclear and quantum energy weaponry. America, the epicentre, is simply no more (it turns out there are some fertile areas in Nova Scotia, but for the most part America is dead). Entire new mountain ranges were born, notably the Tannhäusers in East Asia that shield the heartland of the Anti-Traction League. There was a long period of geological and tectonic instability. According to legend, Traction Cities arose to escape these instabilities. In other words, like animals will flee a volcanic eruption, cities first became mobile to escape and survive. Trade was likely facilitated by towns literally being able to park next to each other. Ironically, London was also where everything changed. After Nikola Quercus conquered (static) London with his mobile fortresses, he decided to upgrade and raise London onto wheels to become the first fully-mobile city. And he did it for war. After all, there’s no better comeback to ‘you and what army’ then literally rolling up with your entire city. By the series present, the idea had caught on and grown into the ideology described above. But herein lies the problem. Early Traction London was a tiny little thing. Now it’s not even the biggest fish in the pond, but it’s still HUGE. And, as we all know, big things need lots of energy to go. London is described as having a top speed of about sixty miles per hour at the height of a hunt. So, you need fuel. There is still oil in this world, mainly because they now have no qualms about mining Antarctica, but if you think there’s nearly enough crude oil to run a world full of cities like London you are sorely mistaken. Wood’s not much better off. And, of course, Traction Cities tend to run on some form of internal combustion engine - it’s only at the very end of the traction era that science has advanced enough for a town to experiment with magnetic levitation. So what do they burn? Well, bits of other prey towns. Do you see the problem? Use fuel to hunt towns, burn those towns for fuel. What next? And it’s not just fuel. London captures a little salt-mining town called Salthook at the beginning of the first book to introduce us to the concepts at play, and we see what goes on in the Dismantling Yards - part of a system literally called the Gut, in case the metaphor wasn’t clear yet. Everything is recycled. Bricks, mortar, steel, wood, everything. Because the state of technology is so weird in this world, Old-Tech (technology from before the SMW) can be incredibly valuable to history and/or science, and London is keen to snaffle that up too. The people are interred into refugee camps, though if you know anything about how real-life Britain treats refugees you can probably see where that is going. And it’s not enough. It’s never enough. Food is an even more pressing concern. Unless you’re very rich (more on that in a mo), food is mostly algae-based, then hardy vegetables that grow quickly like cabbage. And it’s running out fast. And London’s a big city with a lot of resources at its disposal. Most cities don’t even have that. A lot of cities are starving on the wheels, city and populace alike. A lot of cities run on slave labour, and feed those slaves as little as they can get away with. Shan Guo, home of the Anti-Traction League, is a green and vibrant land only because it doesn’t have cities running over or eating its farmlands every other day (and, again, city folk generally don’t know this - they’re given endless propaganda that Anti-Tractionists are barbarian warbands a la Mad Max). A lot of the A story is told from the point of view of Tom Natsworthy, who until the events of the book had never left London. He’s never seen bare earth or walked on mud before. He’s never seen a horse. The idea that you can survive, much less thrive, outside of a Traction City is alien to him. But on the city he came from, everything is rapidly running out, and some cities are turning to desperate measures to survive, including Arkangel openly bribing pilots to sell out the locations and courses of nearby cities. A chilling scene in the first book even has Tom see, from the safety of the air, the corpse of Motoropolis, a city not unlike London that literally just starved to death, running out of fuel and helpless as the scavengers closed in. It’s been weeks since the city stopped, and the narrative description evokes the grotesqueness and sadness of a whale carcass. Sheer Jingoism is about the only thing keeping Municipal Darwinism alive - Traction good, stationary bad.

CLASS, CLASSISM, AND OTHER SOCIAL OPPRESSIONS

In a world so starved as this, compassion is hard to come by. Cities still exist mainly by virtue of rigid social stratification, and often that stratification is literal - most medium-to-large cities have tiers, and will generally arrange those tiers based on social class. London, for example, has seven tiers. The bottom two tiers are dominated by the Gut, the engines, and homes and communities of the workers who keep them running. Tiers 4 and 3 are miscellaneous proles of increasing social standing. Tier 2 is mostly what I’d call ‘tourist London’ - lots of the nice bits and the establishments that London likes to be proud of. Because of his work at the London Museum, this is the quality of life Tom Natsworthy was most used to. Tier 1 is High London, where all the rich live and have their amenities and nice parks (and even that doesn’t last - London’s food shortage means even the High London parks are eventually, begrudgingly, turned over for food production). Katherine Valentine, the hero of the first book’s B plot, lives here. Finally there’s Top Tier, which is purely administrative. The only buildings are the Guildhall (the seat of government), St Paul’s Cathedral (which the Engineers’ Guild have secretly been installing a deadly superweapon in under the guise of ‘restoration’ work) and the headquarters of the Guild of Engineers, the most powerful of London’s Guilds. Social stratification is nearly non-existant, and people are shown to get very uncomfortable when out of ‘their space’. Tom is sent to work in the Gut during the capture of Salthook as a punishment before the plot ejects him from London, and he notes being actively intimidated by the claustrophobia, the dirt, the rough and burly labourers, and the noise. But despite Tom’s relatively privileged life - he lives near High London, above the heat and noise and smoke of the engines, in the care of one of the top four Guilds of London - he is of very low social status. Tom Natsworthy is an orphan; his parents were Historians, but were killed when an accident occurred and part of Tier 3 collapsed, crushing anything on Tier 4 beneath. Even before that, the Natsworthys were middle class at best, but being orphaned meant being left to the care of an orphanage run by the Guild of his parents, the Historians. The Historians were Tom’s only source of education, and eventually they would employ him, but with no parents or money, Tom can only afford a Third-Class apprenticeship. He has no upwards mobility within the Guild, and with no money he can’t leave and train with another. His dream of being a pilot trader, or better yet adventurer, will never come true under normal circumstances. The rich live in a completely different world yet. Katherine Valentine, daughter of the Head Historian and the Lord Mayor’s ‘right-hand man’ Thaddeus Valentine, has a positively bougie lifestyle with not a care in the world. Ironically, though, it is through Katherine’s eyes that the horrors of London’s class system are revealed. Trying to find information about her father’s would-be killer, Katherine finds herself regularly travelling to the Gut, eventually befriending an apprentice Engineer who witnessed the attack. But in the Gut, life is very different. It’s not just a life of hard labour and smoke - petty criminals and the aforementioned ‘refugees’ are tasked with working dangerous and sickening jobs like managing the city’s sewage. And by that, I mean ‘harvesting literal faeces to be converted into food and fuel’. The foreman overseeing their work admits they feed such criminals nothing else. And he has the gall to be annoyed that they keep dying of diseases like cholera and typhoid! These people are denied medical care, denied treatment, denied even basic food other than being told to literally eat sh*t. And when they inevitably die? They get sent to the Engineerium to be turned into robotic zombies that can never get sick, tired or unhappy. And, eventually, they’ll be put right back to work. The crimes these criminals did to deserve this, remember, include petty theft, criticising the Lord Mayor, and living aboard a town that got eaten. The foreman literally cannot fathom why Katherine would care about these people’s wellbeing - after all, they’re just criminals. The Engineerium’s end goal in all this is, again, to staff the entire lower tiers with robot zombie workers who will never grow tired, get sick, complain or protest their lot in life, and will never disobey orders, and just enough human overseers to keep things running smoothly ... because that’s what these people are worth to London, cheap, unending labour. Katherine can’t even bring herself to tell her high-class peers about what she learned down there, because it’s such a different world that they would never empathise, much less care. Again, slave labour is common in this world, especially child slavery - Brighton runs on it to maintain its image as a floating Caligula’s Palace, and in Arkangel slavery is so normal that we watch a rich man beat a slave nearly to death for the crime of bumping into him. In the second book, we see the logical end-point of this. Anchorage’s social structure has completely fallen apart due to a plague in recent years that turned to once-proud ice city into a ghost town manned only by a skeleton crew. The margravine, Freya, is only 14, but with her parents dead, she finds herself in charge of the whole city. She has no household staff, apart from Smew, who finds himself constantly juggling outfits to adopts the roles of steward, chamberlain and so on. His official role before the plague was ... erm ... the Dwarf. He was there in a manner similar to a court jester, for the amusement of the margrave due to being a little person. But the head navigator is just ... the woman who kept the maps. The head engineer is going half-mad, seeing his dead son staring at him from the shadows, and the only reason the town’s still going is because his systems are the best on the ice and can mostly run on automatic. They have no doctor. The only other people of consequence in Anchorage are the Aakiuqs, the Inuit couple who run the air-harbour. The common workers of Anchorage number in the mere dozens. And yet, because they’re so fixated on their traditions, nobody will drop the formalities and just admits that they’re trying to uphold a class system that doesn’t work anymore. No, that’s not quite right - everybody realises it’s pointless to maintain the artifice of Anchorage’s social heirarchy, but nobody wants to be the first one to say it out loud. Much like Municipal Darwinism, nobody want to address the elephant in the room, that the system is broken and that people hold onto it because it’s comfortable in the face of uncertainty. Only in Anchorage’s darkest hour, when everything has been turned upside down and the conquerors are on their doorsteps, do the agree to drop the formalities, drop the artifice of class, and address each other as people, say what they think, and work to save what they have left. And of course, there’s the racism in the world. Life on mobile cities has made cultures smaller and more insular, considering we mainly see this series from the point of view of culturally-English towns. Throughout the first book there is a clear west vs east divide - the Traction Cities are generally English-speaking or multicultural enough that English will get you by. The Anti-Tractionist League, meanwhile, are south or east Asian, or else African, and are commonly understood to be ‘those brown people’. The only ethnically white Anti-Tractionists are from ‘Spitzbergen’ (likely Scandinavia/Finland and northwest Russia) and Hester Shaw’s family, and the latter lived on a town that floated out to an island and gave up running from predators forever. The way Tom reacts to this attitude calls to mind the way racists might refer to ‘race traitors’. There’s even an in-universe slur for people who live in static settlements; ‘Mossies’, because ‘a rolling town gathers no moss’. However, when Tom is taken to Shan Guo itself, he realises that all the propaganda he’d been fed his whole like is exactly that - propaganda. Shan Guo is described as beautiful - an endless patchwork of rolling fields and farms, colourful, bright, vibrant, heaving with life and energy. The Anti-Tractionists aren’t vicious savages, they’re just ... people. Tom can’t understand it at first. He wonders how people can live without the hum of engines or the vibrations of deckplates - he subconsciously equates city life with, well, life, and the absence of that makes him uneasy. But he can also see this culture before him, thousands of years old, outlasting even the end of the world, and he realises there is another way. The next time he sees London, he sees it from outside, from the side of the hunted, and he realises it’s not beautiful or efficient, just dirty, and huge, wrapped in its own waste smoke and driven only by destruction. For the rest of the series, even with the rise of the radicalised Green Storm (Anti-Tractionists Lv2), large Traction Cities are consistently the enemy. Tractionism as a culture is understood to only represent imperialism, destruction, and consumption, literally and figuratively.

SCIENCES SANS FRONTIERES

It should be noted that science and technology are not universally reviled by the series. As a dieselpunk series, a certain degree of technology is fundamental to the series existence. But this is a very different world than the one we know. On the one hand, engines exist that can drive entire cities. On the other, computers basically do not exist. The rare few that still exist are not in working condition, and nobody knows how to restore them. Heavier-than-aircraft don’t really exist - the third book introduces some, but they’re small, experimental ... barely more than short-range toys designed for flashy air shows but not real travel. The main form of personal locomotion in this world is by airship, and this world’s airships are far beyond anything we’ve made in our time. But lost technologies are heavily associated with the hubris and destructiveness of the Ancients. Until now. Like I said, the most powerful Guild in London is the Engineers’ Guild. And they got that way under the leadership of now-Lord Mayor Magnus Crome. It should be noted that Crome genuinely loves his city and wants it to survive no matter the cost. But under Crome, the Engineers began to dabble in sciences considered unethical to downright taboo. Most notable is the MEDUSA Project. Through Thaddeus Valentine, London came into possession of an energy weapon from the SMW ... and, more importantly, the working computer that runs the thing. In terms of Darwinist Evolution, this is like giving a monkey a gun and teaching it how to use it. MEDUSA exhibits a level of power no other force on Earth can match, and London is forced to deploy it early in a crisis. Originally, the plan was to march up to Batmunkh Gompa, the Shield-Wall that represents the only break in the mountains around Shan Guo big enough to permit a city, and blast it to cinders. Unfortunately, London attracts the attention of a bigger, hungrier city about halfway there, and is forced to fire MEDUSA at it to save its own skin. The sheer terror of what that weapon represents is revealed then. Panzerstadt-Bayreuth was the fusion of four massive cities, each one bigger and more powerful than London. MEDUSA killed it dead in one stroke - the energy beam set the entire city ablaze and ignited its fuel stores. Her engines nearly immediately exploded. When the fires go down enough for an Engineer scout ship to investigate, the people had been almost flashed into glass. The flash of light from the attack is so bright that, hundreds of miles to the south, Tom and Hester see the sky light up like a new dawn. The people of London are relieved, of course, that they didn’t all die that night, but more than that the entire city become suffused with the excitement of just how easy it would be to kill ... well, anyone they like, really. London doesn’t even stop to devour Panzerstadt-Bayreuth, as the Engineers can’t afford for the Shield-Wall to prepare for their arrival. Appropriately, and karmically, the finale has an accident lock down the computer lock down, with MEDUSA unable to fire but unable to stop gathering energy, and London melts under the heat of MEDUSA’s glare. But that wasn’t the only scientific sin committed by London’s engineers. I’ve already mentioned London trying to repurpose faeces as food, but we need to talk more about the Stalkers. Stalkers are kinda like discount Cybermen from Doctor Who - dead bodies, threaded with weird old machines and coated in armour, their brains hooked up to simple computers. Originally conceived as soldiers, they were believed long dead. However, one survived to the modern by sheer survivor instinct - Shrike. Through negotiations that are not the purview of this essay, he allowed the Engineers of London to take him apart and figure out how he worked, and hoo boy they did. The Engineers figured out how to manufacture their own Stalkers. The first batch are used as law enforcement like the Worst Robocops, but, again, the plan was to have Stalker workers all over Low London. Katherine, learning this, likens it to London ‘being a city of the dead’ (Apprentice Engineer Pod, to whom she is talking, grimly notes that the Deep Gut Prison is so awful, so callous with human life, that it already feels like that). Logically, the end-point of this idea is to have all workers in London be the resurrected dead, with just enough living to keep things in order ... oh, and they’d all be loyal to the Engineers, because remember, no Freedom of Speech here, and you can be sent to do the worst form of prison labour for dissenting against the Lord Mayor. With Crome being both Lord Mayor and Head Engineer at once, the Engineers’ creed is as good as law - traditionally, London Lord Mayors forsook their former Guild allegiances to show their representation of all of London, and Crome’s refusal to do that caused a bit of a stir. The Engineers are also keen to arm their security teams with some form of energy pistols, despite guns being outlawed in London and the police are only allowed crossbows. Crome’s rationale is the same as every two-bit mad scientist villain, of course - that science should not be held back by moral restrictions, and that progress for progress’ sake is essential for London’s survival. Really, it’s the Engineer’s survival, as they’re rather loathe to share these advancements except to exert power on those around. London isn’t the only example of technology being used to leverage control and benefit the ruling classes. Grimsby is a sunken wreck of a city somewhere in the north Atlantic, yet due to a complex series of airlocks the interior of the city is a secret hideaway of the Lost Boys, a society of children stolen from aquatic towns and trained to be thieves under the watchful eye of the mysterious Uncle. They will then take submarine walkers, attach to passing towns, steal whatever tools, fuel, food and riches they can carry, and vanish back into the depths. Uncle, naturally, takes the lion’s share of the haul. But Uncle maintains his power by careful access to technology, only letting the Boys have what they need and juggling the power structure by choosing team leaders, and punishing insubordination harshly and publicly. Uncle sees and hears everything in Grimsby with his surveillance network, and can address any give Boy in a heartbeat, training the Boys to never expect privacy from him, so that when he demands a progress update from a mission, they never question him. He rewards Boys who do well on burglaries, but more importantly than that, he chooses team leaders according to apparently inscrutable whims. The Boys believe it’s a mark of favour from Uncle, and thus social status, to be trusted with the limpet command and all the tech that comes with. Really, Uncle carefully give command to people he can trust to remain loyal to him, even if that means passing over a more talented Boy who might get a bit uppity. Even in a more mundane way, higher status in the Lost Boys means you can move closer to the heart of Grimsby, where you’re less likely to wake up and find your bedroom wasn’t as watertight as you thought and flooded in the night. Uncle, naturally, doesn’t care if a few Boys drown, so long as he doesn’t lose anything useful. Technology, and in particular access to unusual technology, is the dimension on which power is really decided.

THE END OF AN ERA

We’ve already established that this world is not a sustainable one. There are only so many cities. The inherent entropy of Municipal Darwinism is really showing. Once upon a time, big cities could ‘reproduce’, creating little satellite towns that could grow and become independent - even London had some - but those are no more. In a greedy desperation to keep moving, the predators are not reproducing, and static settlements can’t spread and grow fast enough to count there. The attack of London, and MEDUSA, turned staunch opposition into outright war, with the Green Storm being willing to doublethink their way into using the weapons of the Traction Cities in their fight to stop the Traction Cities, even recruiting ex-London Engineers to make weapons and stalkers for them, and eventually even seeking out another ancient superweapon - an orbital laser called ODIN - without a hint of irony. The Green Storm eventually face internal resistance, from Anti-Tractionists who disagree with the outright terrorism angle, and eventually crumbles. The last great Traction Cities stop. The last mobile city is New London, no longer a hunter but a trade platform, and even that probably stopped hovering about at some point. The ending is told by the great survivor, Shrike, who has cheated Death again and again, who outlived Tom Natsworthy and Hester Shaw, Valentine, Magnus Crome, and a thousand other heroes and villains. When he awakes, long in the future, Traction Cities are not even ancient history. They’re a dream, a fantasy, too incredible to be true. But Shrike remembers, and he teaches people the story of London and Anchorage, Arkangel and Airhaven, Brighton and Harrowbarrow. Did they learn the right message from Shrike’s story? Did they learn that ruthless imperialism is like hunting faster than the food can come back, and that you will starve before you have everything you ever wanted? Did they learn that hoarding resources, gatekeeping knowledge, will lead to ruin? Did they learn, or will the repeat the same mistakes of the greed and gluttony of the Traction Era? Well, who knows.

#mortal engines #wow that was a ramble and a half

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noonemonitorsmyscreentime · 3 years ago

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Ungodly

Because I, again, lost my goddamn mind I decided to write the fight from S15, ep19 from Chuck’s perspective, sort of. Like it’s from Chuck’s perspective but in the third person because that makes sense somehow. It’s like real short. And obvs fan fiction, but like commentary, maybe, idk. Anywaaay... enjoy?

“You can’t defeat GOD!” thought Chuck as he kept punching and kicking Sam and Dean. He was finally going to make them show him the respect he deserves. How dared two little insignificant humans mess with his story? They were his toys to do as he saw fit. He kept trying to fix them and yet they were constantly broken. At what point do you give up on trying to make them work?

Chuck couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw those two Winchester bastards rising up after each blow. The constant defiance had lost its cuteness a while back. What would it take to finally beat them?

They could barely stand and had to use each other for support. Together they couldn't make for a whole man and yet, they still chose to try and be two. It really wasn't a fair fight. "Why are you smiling?”

“Because, you lose.” Sam Winchester’s bloodied face was defiant. Maybe he had punched the sense out of the younger brother. Lucifer would have been disappointed to find out that the one who finally broke Sam Winchester had been his pops. But Sam wasn't looking at him. His gaze was fixated on something behind him.

Ha!

Jack. Poor kid was going to see his adoptive dads being beaten to death before he, himself… well, not meet his maker-- before he, himself, would be silenced for good. And with the brothers gone, it would also stick.

What was that silly little child going to do? There was no angel daddy to trade his life for him, his actual daddy, the supposedly new favorite son was soundly sleeping in the empty and his two mommies were in Heaven. This kid did not have a great track record with keeping parents alive. He killed all his moms and all his dads died for him. In any case they will soon. Chuck supposed that the Winchesters could wait a while longer for the next punch. “Hey, Jack.”

He slowly closed the gap between them. The kid was just staring at him. This was too easy. How much fighting had they done and how much pain had they suffered to bring the boy back, and he was just standing in front of him, not even a weapon in hand?

The kid was a great story beat and Lucifer really threw him a curveball by becoming a father. Jack had outlived his narrative expectation to a greater extent than Chuck would have thought possible. He had to admit that his grandson was, as late story additions go, a good one in spite of his cliched beginnings. But how many kids with abusive fathers and dead mothers can you have before it all gets too tedious? He was so innocent, so pained, so tortured and so, so very and thoroughly annoying.

Chuck snapped his fingers expecting the boy to dissolve in a delightfully fine mist of pink. After all, how many times did he need to get rid of the kid to finally make it stick?

Nothing happened. Jack was still in front of him, mirroring his look of disbelief. He'd give him that just like all the men in his life, he was hard to get rid of. Chuck snapped his fingers once more. Again. Nothing. Jack was still in front of him, but he could see that something was changing in the child. He took a step closer to god.

Snap. Nothing. Step. Snap. Nothing. Step. Snap. Nothing. Step. Snap. Nothing. Step. Snap. Nothing. Step. Snap. Nothing. No more steps left.

The boy put his hands on each side of Chuck’s face while his eyes glowed and the veins in his body became illuminated with a powerful gold light. Chuck had known this feeling before; this incredible river of power leaving him was the power needed for the Creation. But, it was at the same time different; he was not merely being drained of power, he was losing it, never to be replenished again.

It was agony. It was his hell. It was never ending.

When the last flicker of power was consumed Chuck fell to the ground trying to catch his breath. He had never felt so weak. He had never been this weak. He would always be this weak.

He heard a snap and prepared to be disintegrated. Instead he saw Sam and Dean healed.

Sam picked up his book that now lay open on the ground. “What… What did you do?”

Dean Winchester looked at him from above, his face half illuminated by the warm sun, each feature of this perfectly crafted weapon was sculpted and majestic “We won.”

“So this is how it ends. My book.”

By the time he finished his words Sam had arrived near him, book open in hand. “See for yourself” he said as he threw it in front of him.

The pages were blank. There were no words. “There’s nothing there.”

“Oh, there is, but only Death can read it.” Cold chills moved up and down Chuck's body at the younger brother's words. They hadn't known how to beat him. He knew that it was time for the victory monologue. He needed an explanation. And, boy, did the brothers deliver one

!“That’s right. So we had to come up with a plan B. That wasn’t too hard though when we realized that Michael really is a daddy’s boy. See, he didn’t take it too well when he found out that you asked Lucifer for help. Oh, he was desperate to be the favorite again.” Dean stated in a cold voice, some disdain directed to Michael. It was natural after all, one iteration took his body for a joyride of murder, mayhem and world domination and the other tricked and used Adam to bring about the end of times.

“Since we couldn’t read the book we had to come up with a story about finding the spell, which we knew Michael would feed straight to you” Sam continued. “All that prep work we did to turn Jack into a cosmic bomb? Well, it turned him into a… a sort of power vacuum. He’s been sucking up bits of power all over the place. So, when the two heavyweights -- your boys-- showed up to duke it out, oh-hoh! That charged him right up.” Oh, if only his children had managed to work together all of this could have been so different. With Michael and Lucifer by his side Sam and Dean would have never won.

“See, we knew Michael would warn you and you’d show up here. And you did. And you killed your own son.” This was the fatal mistake, Michael should have been punished last. John Winchester had it right, kill the spirit, not the body.

“And you beat the crap out of us. Releasing all kinds of power. God power.” “Jack absorbed it all. It made him...”“Well, it made him unstoppable.” Dean finished the explanation.

Chuck can’t help but laugh. “This… This.. This is why you are my favorites.”

Sam, Dean and Jack look at each other wondering if Chuck understood anything of what he had been told or if his mind had gone alongside his powers.

“You know, for the first time I have no idea what happens next. Is this where you kill me?”

It’s easy to see on Sam’s face that it's a tempting idea and one that had been given some thought. He looks at Dean, on whose face only disgust is shown. “I mean, I could never think of an ending where I lose. But, this, after, everything that I’ve done to you… to die at the hands of Sam Winchester… of Dean Winchester, the ultimate killer...”

Both brothers got a long look from the former god when he said their names. In turn they exchanged a glance, cold fury shone in Dean’s eyes, while Sam’s bore a much somber look of sad pensiveness. A quiet conversation was taking place. Sam would follow Dean’s lead, who now held Chuck’s fate in his hands, in what, the former Supernatural writer, felt was an ironic twist.

Chuck laughed in a last attempt to taunt the boys, to make them dance to his music “It’s kind of glorious.” He knew how to push their buttons, he’d done it for so many years. They were as close to a perfect creation as he had ever come. “Sorry, Chuck.” was Dean’s verdict, who moved right along to sentencing.

Chuck cowered in fear. Dean had no weapon in his hand, no magic gun or special knife. No stakes or arrows or even grenades. Death had to come by hand. But it didn’t. “What? What?”

“See, that’s not who I am. That’s not who we are.” They are free of him. Killing is not the only option anymore.

“What kind of an ending is this?” The last sliver of control that Chuck had over his precious Winchesters faded away.

They are his creation! They are not his favorite when they act in unexpected ways that don’t benefit him. Or his story. A little death, then straight to Heaven for some peace and quiet and relaxation. He deserved it. He only knows how much.

“His power. You sure it won’t come back?” Sam asked the kid. “It’s not his power anymore.” Jack replied truthfully.

Sam gives a short half smile to this. What Jack said is good. “Then, I think it’s the ending where you’re just like us and like all the other humans you forgot about.”

“It’s the ending where you grow old, you get sick and you just die” despite Dean’s mercy, it was clear that it would have given him great pleasure to make Chuck feel a fragment of what the men in front of him had endured for his amusement, but he took content in knowing that Chuck’s own creation would do the job for him. The world would save Dean from killing after all the killing Dean had done for its sake.

“And no one cares. And no one remembers you. You’re just forgotten.” The final blow delivered with steel precision right in Chuck’s, now human, heart had been made by Sam.

The trio moves towards the Impala leaving him in dust. “Guys… Guys.. wait.”

The engine revs and they drive away to the sound of Chuck’s begging “Guys… Guys! No, wait… G-guys… Guys, wait! Guys, wait! Guys, wait! Wait! Wait! Wait! Please, wait! Guys!”

Chuck falls into the dust sobbing.

He has no one. He’s all alone.

“

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revisionaryhistory · 4 years ago

Text

Three Days ~ 71

~*~Emma~*~

For the rest of the trip, we relaxed listening to music. Before Sebastian had asked, I’d not thought too much about what I was going to do. Further limiting my time was a given, but I hadn’t thought about what that would look like. Talking about not waking up at “home” with my mom, dad, twin sister, and niece should have bothered me more than it did. That it didn’t, tells me it’s the right decision. One of the side effects of putting up with shit too long is once you decide to stop it’s not that big of a deal. Something inside has been moving in that direction for some time. What Sebastian had said about not sacrificing myself was on target. That I would do what it takes to take care of my sister isn’t in question. It’s been proven.

I texted Angie from the Uber to Sebastian's apartment. We were going to start up at Chelsea and Union Square with Aritzia, Anthropologie, and Free People. Those were sure thing stores, but not always original. We'd weave our way through Chelsea and into Soho. That shop Seb and I found would be last. We'd stop for lunch when we got hungry.

Angie hopped on the subway and headed to Union Square. It would take her thirty minutes and me fifteen from Sebastian’s place. Plenty of time to relax and watch Sebastian gather what he needed to work on. I saw a script, notebook, and a couple of real books. I think I'd find it fascinating to watch his process, but more importantly this time I wanted him to know I had friends and could amuse myself. I didn't care that he needed work time and I wasn’t going to need something from him for ignoring me. Doing things independent of your partner was important.

I grabbed a bottle of water for my journey and made my way to where Sebastian sat. He moved the items in his lap, making room for me to sit down. He supported my back and rubbed along my leg. "What are you shopping for?"

"Whatever I find." I smiled sneakily, "Especially if find something for Paris, our first date, and our live music fun tonight."

Sebastian’s hand made it to my ass, "When I think of live music I picture short, revealing, sexy."

"I love how you think." I ran my fingers through his hair. "Can I bother you for five minutes?"

"Sure" His eyes held questions.

I pulled his head closer, pressing my lips to his until he caught on and joined in the fun.

Our little mini make out session was going to make me late. Assuming Angie left as soon as we texted, walked straight onto a train, and there were no delays. None of these were likely. She'd forgive my lateness anyway. I looped my crossbody bag over my head, "I'll text if it's anything other than seven."

"Ok." He ran toward the kitchen. "Hang on." I heard a drawer slam before he reversed direction and came back. Sebastian held up a key, the slightest smile appearing on his face, "In case I'm in the shower or something when you come back. You remember the code?"

"Yes." I'd punched it in when we got here less than half an hour ago. He was nervous. I admit I had to focus to keep my hand steady as I took his offering. "I love you."

Sebastian opened the door and gave me a quick kiss as I walked out. "Love you, too."

I was a couple of steps away when I heard my name.

"Emma, put it on your key ring so you don't lose it."

The door closed before I could reply. I guess that eliminates any question if the key was a temporary just in case he was in the shower today sort of thing. What made me smile the most was the lack of conversation. If he'd overthought the decision, he didn't feel the need to talk it through. No discussion about what it meant or didn't mean. He may have been nervous, but he wasn't uncomfortable. I seriously doubt he's in the habit of giving out keys to his place, so nervous but not uncomfortable was good.

Angie was leaning against the building when I walked up. We hugged like we hadn't seen each other in months. "Sorry, I’m late."

"Were you having sex? I'll forgive you if you were having sex."

I grimaced with a shake of my head, "Making out."

My best friend huffed out a breath, "Close enough." She held the door open for me, "I got here like two minutes ago."

Aritzia, Anthropologie, and Free People were right in a line. We'd hit them in my favorite order. Aritizia was more comfort clothes for me. Their clothes were more staples than fun. But today I found a gorgeous Sicily sweater and cardigan in a soft heathered cashmere. A pair of tie front pants in purple plaid would look awesome for wandering museums. Anthropologie gifted me with a sequined tunic dress for a night out. A simple black midi dress, a grey-blue fringed and a textured cardi, and a long black wrap jacket. Free People had a colorful mini dress, a definite statement Hyacinth dress, and a fun floral dress. Assorted other things went into my bags too. I went a little crazy, but in my defense, I hadn’t been shopping in a long time and my best friend was egging me on. Plus, there was someone to appreciate what I wore. I had all sorts of cute clothes, but dressing for a boyfriend was different. Especially one who liked to look. I knew what he liked and indulged.

Conversation while we shopped was mostly about the shopping. It's good to have a friend who'll not only tell you something makes your ass look fat but also say, "You look amazing but where the fuck are you gonna wear that more than once?" Part of the fun was trying on horrifying things. Those things you don't understand how they were ever made. We'd mix those in with good stuff and laugh until we cried. We had a long-standing tradition that whoever found the most "exquisite" outfit was treated to lunch. We were pretty even and had pictures for documentation. Today I would be buying lunch.

"We’ve got a table at two. Alissa's going to meet us."

"That'll be fun. Are she and Will coming tonight?"

"I don't think so. They've got a family thing."

I nodded and we headed toward Chelsea, stopping at the Guitar Store for strings and a capo. We had plenty of time so we stopped anywhere else that caught our eyes. Walking was more private and so was our conversation.

"Anything I should know about before I see you tonight with your boyfriend?"

I sighed in relief. Finally. I bumped her hip with mine, "I love him."

Angie put her arm around me, "This is not news, Emma."

We shared a laugh. "I wasn't sure until I was in the cab leaving his place. Georgia solidified it. Sebastian was so good talking me through all their shit. He and Eli have more in common now. They both hate my parents."

"Eli doesn't hate your parents."

I pulled away, looking at her with raised eyebrows and clear disbelief written on my face. "Try again."

Angie spoke through our laughter, "Eli tries not to, but they make it truly hard. I think he'd be more forgiving if you didn't have us and your Seattle family. Eli loves you like a little sister, best friend, and some weird second wife he's never fucked. He’s protective. He and Sebastian are going to have to figure out how to share."

"They'll arm wrestle or something. Then maybe you'll become Sebastian’s little sister, friend, and second girlfriend. Ooo, we could use you to confuse the fans. If we're out and get seen we can trade off and kiss each other’s dates. Set up a different narrative."

"Good idea.

“It'll be more fun for you. I have kissed Eli, but you don't know about Seb."

"I doubt anything will become so severe that making out with Sebastian is the answer." She smiled, "Not that I would mind."

"You would not mind. He's one hell of a good kisser."

She backtracked, "Who said it first? How did it happen."

"He surprised me showing up early from Canada, watched me cleaning up my classroom for a minute, then told me the song I was dancing along to was about sex. I turned around and he had on those ears. He looked so adorable. He looked at me with his mouth and eyes open wide and said, “Fuck, I love you."

Angie slapped her hand on her chest, "He didn't know until right them." She gasped, "He came in wearing those ears to be cute and winds up telling you he loves you. He is adorable.” She glared at me, "And you said it back."

I nodded, “In Romania."

"What's up with learning Romanian?"

I trusted her with everything. "It's his name. He prefers it in Romanian. I've been learning just enough to add it to his name. It has a very nice effect on him.” I remembered the wall and shook myself out of the memory. “Plus it makes him happy.”

"And you’re happy?"

I nodded, "Incredibly. All the reasons we talked about are still going on. He adores me and it's clear by how he treats me. And I love taking care of him." I knew she’d understand what I meant.

"There is nothing better in the world. I'm so happy you have someone. It had been so long I thought you were intentionally keeping everyone away."

“Just waiting for the right one." I pulled out my key chain. "I do have a new key."

Angie snatched it, "He keyed you!"

"Looks like it."

"Do you worry this is going fast? I mean it is going fast."

"Yes. It is going fast. There is a risk that maybe this time next year we could be married, have three kids, and signing our divorce papers." I barely made it through without laughing.

Angie snorted, "Sign a prenup so you don’t have to pay alimony when his mid-life crisis tanks his career."

"I talked to Trevor about Sebastian. He knows about my parents, Amy, rehab, and how shitty they can be to me, but he doesn't how about what happened." I stopped walking and looked at her. "I'm starting to feel ashamed for not telling him. That's never happened before." Relationship or friendship. It had never happened. I looked at the most recent member of my secret club. "I don't want to."

She understood, "Why?"

"I don't want him to change the way he looks at me."

Angie smiled, "He won't. You don’t know that yet. It's only been a month. When you know, you'll tell him, and he will look at you just the same or better than he does now. It'll be fine."

"How do you know?" It wasn’t a smart assed clap back. I sincerely wanted to know her reasoning.

"Because he feels different to you and about you. You’re both sharing things neither of you share. That’s the glue for your relationship. You’re adding a little more glue, letting it set up, then adding more. It's getting stronger and eventually, you'll both tell the big secrets and it will be like a layer of epoxy around you that will make you near impossible to break.”

"I like that."

"I speak the truth."

We beat Alissa to the restaurant and ordered a pitcher of margaritas. I was still rearranging and shoving bags into bags under the table when she got there. Angie jumped up and they hugged. I took a step closer, but instead of hugging me, Alissa looked at me warily. “Is it ok for me to be here? Angie said it would be.”

I looked at Angie then back to Alissa, “Why wouldn’t it be?” Oh, what the fuck was going on? I just wanted a nice drunken late lunch with friends after a successful shopping expedition then go home and make out some more with my hot boyfriend.

Alissa grimaced, “I’m sorry for saying all that about Sebastian.”

“Oh!” I laughed and put my hand on my chest. Relieved. I pulled her into a hug, “I’m not upset. Between you and Kirk and the shit Eli told him, we had a somewhat uncomfortable, but really good conversation.”

“Good.” We sat down and Alissa kept talking. “I didn’t mean to be negative. It was just strange. How he was acting and the things you were saying. In a good way. It didn’t come out that way.”

Why is she still . . . oh. “Sebastian said something.”

She cringed, “More of a small group WhatsApp with me and Kirk.”

I laughed again. “Sounds fun.” I sort of wish he hadn’t done that, but I understand why he did. In the end, it was a good thing, but they couldn’t know if I would be scared off by their words.

Angie jumped in, “There’s no way Emma didn’t talk that through.”

Alissa didn’t know me well enough yet to know I wouldn’t let the conversation fester. “Especially with us being a thousand miles apart for the next two weeks. Why is that distance makes time seem longer?”

“I don’t know, but it does. Seb was right to be angry. We could have screwed things up. Neither of us realized how important you were to him. He was worried. That’s more like Seb. Kinda. He’s confusing.”

I think I know what she’s going for. It’s very like him to be worried, but not so much calling out a friend about a girlfriend. From what we’ve talked about and what I learned on that post he’s not had a history of defending girlfriends. I could be wrong, but I don’t think so. I wasn’t willing to go into that here. I changed the subject. “And then he goes and tells Will to post a picture of us.”

Alissa nodded, “How’d he react to the comment saying he was going to propose?”

Angie started laughing, “She’d say no.”

“I told him not to. He’d need a good reason. Like he’s actually not a citizen and needs a marriage green card. Or maybe health insurance. I have good health insurance.”

That was the end of that and we went on to other topics. Alissa and Will were having dinner with family but would come by Bowery Ballroom if they were done early. Keaton and Eli’s bands were friends and often teamed up to fill a bigger hall and split the money. They usually made more that way than in one of the smaller halls. Both did a full set and even though Keaton was the bigger name they would trade off who opened. Tonight was Eli’s turn.

We split up outside the restaurant. Alissa going back home and Angie and I heading to the boutique by Sebastian’s. It wasn’t a horrible walk, but we had a lot of bags. In the cab, Angie gave me a look. One I could read perfectly. She wanted to know what I’d avoided at lunch. I like Alissa and I’d say we’re friends. She’s also married to one of Sebastian’s best friends. I didn’t know what the line was. Not for Sebastian. He’d tell me to do what I wanted. The line was mine. Will and Alissa were still enough strangers to me that I wasn’t comfortable with too much information flow between all of us. I wouldn’t think anything of it with Angie and Eli and I was confident that given some more time it would be the same with Will and Alissa. Also, I didn’t know how intimate of conversations Sebastian had with his friends. I’d need to be around more to know.

I’d told Angie about our conversation after the party. In general. With what Alissa had said I went into a little more detail, filled in holes, and answered questions. I watched her thinking. I knew what was coming and was glad for it. “Are you worried? I’d be worried. Maybe not worried. Concerned. It’s like being a rebound. You’re the first after something else, only the something else is personal growth. You don’t know if he’s going to go back. You know what I mean?”

I did. “If he wasn’t so forthcoming with talking about it, I would be concerned. He’s laid it all out there. What he’s done, not done, feels bad about. He doesn’t act like that with me. If he starts too, I’ll know what's going on.” I told her about the conversation on the deck where he did want to shut down and how we got through it. “Struggling with change doesn’t bother me. All the girlfriend stuff.” I shook my head and shrugged. “We’re going to have to figure out what both of us are good with. I think I’m going to be able to not get sucked into comments or let them get to me, but I don’t know for sure. I know private is ok, but I’m not ok with being denied. I’d feel like a dirty little secret. I could change my mind. Could be next week. No idea.”

Angie took my hand, “I still get hate from Eli’s fans. We had to figure out how to deal. You guys will too. The rest, I think you’re right. If he’d gotten pissy and refused to talk about what Alissa and Kirk had said it would be a problem. Everybody gets a chance to do things differently. I don’t for one second think you’re going in blind or overlooking things because you want a boyfriend. You’d walk away if he wasn’t treating you right.” She got the look she gets when she’s about to tell me something I don’t like. I know that look, because I have the same one. “I’m one hundred percent not saying now. Way too soon. You’re already started to feel ashamed and that’s not going to get better. Might not get worse, but it’s not going to get better. You are the bravest person I know. Don’t let being afraid of your past ruin your future.”

#sebastian stan #sebastian stan fanfiction #fanfiction #sebastian stan X ofc #marvel actor fanfiction

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mymelancholiesblues · 6 years ago

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My extensive analysis in why RE4 is the top-tier Aeon game

This will be a long ride (seriously though, this have around 9.453 words), so grab a cup of tea (or coffee, depending on your personal preference, of course), sit comfortably and read through this peacefully because Resident Evil 4 is my favourite game and I plan to finally thoroughly explain why. And, for that, first, I intend to contextualize every single prior point with the proper attention they need.

As we’re already sick to death of knowing, Leon and Ada are introduced on this franchise in Resident Evil 2. This is a game originally from 1998, the very end of the 90s, and despite clearly possessing superior quality if compared to the script of the previous game and first instalment in the franchise, it’s still unquestionably a game of its time, and, particularly, of its genre.

We’re talking about the B science fiction and horror hybrid genre: zombies. This is the sort of horror that is frequently campier than the rest since – and let’s all agree over this – zombies per se are not that terrifying. It’s actually their effect on mankind, on human reaction and on how human beings will deal with the gore and all the fairly specific situations this type of horror puts them in that really terrifies us – it’s different from ghosts or demons, for instance. That’s why, inevitably, every exercise of fiction on this genre will ultimately focus on conflicts between non-infected human beings, their greed, how they’re capable of displaying their most monstrous side in these circumstances, and so forth. You can have a read on the “zombie culture” subject and its origins here.

Moreover, Resident Evil is a Japanese game, which is significant, since we should know that cultural repertoire can greatly modify the way storytelling explicits itself, the way it unfolds and develops towards its conclusion, and especially which messages it chooses to prioritize and how those messages are decided to be delivered to the audience. Therefore, even though Resident Evil has fallen upon the clichès its genre generally falls onto (the main plot conflict focus now is much more on how bioterrorism is one of the worst products of the capitalist regime and the endless greed of imperialist countries), the narrative dramatic throughline of the franchise continues to be that of ending in a hopeful, optimistic note.

Back to RE2 OG being a product of its time, however, and characters like Leon, Claire, Ada and Sherry being introduced there: on characterization terms, while these early franchise games weren’t necessarily weak and incompetent in presenting those characters, they were definitely quite limited on how they could do so.

Furthermore, on the account of a not yet established videogames voice-acting trade, and primarily on the rough Japanese-to-English translation efforts that weren’t as easy and accessible as they are today, nor was the “entry” of Japanese entertainment production into the North-American market a normalized matter as globalization wasn’t such a stable and clear concept then as it is today, many typical Japanese storytelling devices, such as certain scenes originally carrying a heavy significance to them and meanings that we couldn’t even presume if we weren’t already part of their culture or had some degree of introduction to it, – eg, a man promising to protect a woman plot-situation: in Japanese storytelling, this is a trope that has more clear romantic undertones than it would have in the West (check here and here), just like childhood friendships carry different implications for their cultural baggage (it’s a typical romantic trope for them; take a look here and here) – were lost in translation and could easily come off as “corny” to the western public if the translator (and the voice actor) wasn’t careful in conveying the originally intended text and subtext messages. And they rarely were.

Leon wasn’t a complex or even a “complete” character back then as he is today. At the time of his introduction, in RE2 OG, he was a more straight play of The Paragon trope. Are you familiar with those more simplified and basic characterizations of, say, Captain America and Superman? Leon was like that! In fact, Leon was the first attempt of an entirely Japanese crew in making a North-American blond police officer, an idealist and overall nice guy that didn’t have behavioural issues like Chris did. So, Leon was an “upright” and “altruistic” guy. That’s what his character comes down to in his introduction. Those two words.

On the other end, we had Claire, who was an “independent” and “brave” young woman (let’s keep those describing terms in mind because they are important!). In her scenario, we would have a journey companion, Sherry, and in Leon’s, it would be Ada.

It’s really important to point out here that when they were developing these characters, coming up with their design and everything, the staff tried to make Ada’s colour palette contrast and complement Leon’s one, and Sherry’s was also thought out to do the same to Claire’s. So much so that we can see that in contrast to Claire’s fuchsia/magenta and black, we have Sherry’s cobalt blue and white. And to Ada’s deep red we have Leon’s navy blue (check this).

Now, about those “describing terms” I mentioned earlier. Similarly to the colour palettes case, staff’s primary purpose while characterizing the two extra journey characters was so that they would offer some sort of “disfigurement” of the basic traits that directed the main characters. Claire is brave and independent even though she is barely nineteen years old and grew up as an orphan, thanks mainly to her older brother’s affection and dedication, whom she actually happens to be looking for in this game. Sherry, however, has to survive independently in Raccoon because she has been neglected by her remarkably still alive scientist parents and has to be brave because she always had to fend off for herself. It’s just like Claire, but upside down.

Leon, on the other hand, upright and altruistic, meets Ada, who seems to have shady means to achieve her goals, and shows a skeptical, cynical demeanor on how she regards others. She’s Leon’s upside down as well.

In the original script, there’s a lot of “mamoru” being used – from Claire to Sherry, who later becomes a maternal figure to the girl (and forms a solid bond with her), and from Leon to Ada (and here is where we should remember that the “promise to protect” trope can oftentimes have romantic connotations in Japanese culture if it’s used in a given context and combination of circumstances).

As I’ve already said, the original game, a product of its time, relied more on “soap drama” writing than on a more organic text development, since it needed to be concise, delivering the message without losing its dramatic appeal to the plot. Thus, everything escalates too fast – the in-game time is short and the script needs to be on par with its pace.

We get to know the characters we have to know, the text then assumes we’re sufficiently familiar with the basic paradigms associated with fiction and storytelling so we should unconsciously recognize what certain parts will mean without needing anyone to babysit us through it. It’s clear, then, that the independent and brave young woman will be accompanied by the neglected and frightened little girl and they’ll form an adoptive mother-and-daughter bond, just like it’s obvious that the upright and altruistic guy will be glued by the shady and cynical woman’s side and they’ll team up and eventually fall in love.

However, the translation process was unpolished, as I said, so the dialogue lines, especially, came off a bit silly and occasionally somewhat unnatural to the audience – quite cheesy indeed. Nonetheless, as I also stated previously, all of those dialogue lines made sense within their own context since the game’s pacing isn’t bad and the events that transpire within it accompany said rhythm, are dictated by it. Within the plot, Leon and Ada, in addition to being attracted to each other, just spent the last almost 4 to 7 hours together, surviving together, helping each other, so of course they’ll fall in love. Just as it’s expected that Claire will feel responsible for Sherry’s life and Sherry will start seeing her as an adoptive mother figure. This little girl was neglected by her parents! And Claire saved her!

We can see those two dynamics as mirrored reflections (in which those two pairs of mirrors – Leon and Ada, Claire and Sherry – function extremely well as they contrast and complement each other), but also as a journey in which the sidekick is the “shadow” (I’d like to thank @madamoftime for her incredible analysis on this subject and for providing me with the sources to quote on this topic: here and here) of the protagonist. Ada is Leon’s shadow because he needs to “kill the boy and let the man be born” (as Maester Aemon advised Jon in ASoIaF — A Dance with Dragons, Chapter 7, Jon II) for this new world he’ll be entering after surviving Raccoon. He needs to be a little more like Ada.

But Ada also needs to be a bit more like Leon, so he’s her mirrored reflection / shadow as well. She needs to start believing in mankind a little more again if she wants to continue in this franchise narrative and make individual progress within it.

Oh, and mirrors are quite important imagery in Japanese folklore (check here), its mythology, etc. RE2 OG does a stupendous job in making use of that.

“The mirror hides nothing. It shines without a selfish mind. Everything good and bad, right and wrong is reflected without fail.”

We have a game story with two sets of characters that manage to tick all the boxes of what should be a complete and comprehensive narrative for them. Complete and that provides closure in itself. We didn’t need a sequel to presume that Leon and Ada would probably meet again, since following Ada’s apparent “death”, the audience knows that she’s helping him against the final boss and in a fashion that he’s also led to suspect it. Claire and Sherry too: we know they’ll take care of each other.

Even so, RE: CV serves to settle Claire’s saga and tie up her journey’s loose ends. In it, she finds her disappeared brother. (And this is precisely why I have my criticisms on the fandom’s constant vehemence in always demanding that she should come back for another cameo: Claire is one of the few characters that had the privilege of having her story thoroughly resolved.)

But then, Leon remained a pending mystery: what happened to him? Had he ever got the chance to confirm his (and ours) suspicions on Ada’s status? Plus: how did it happen? Have they ever met again?

you’ve haunted me all my life through endless days and countless nights there was a storm when I was just a kid stripped the last coat of innocence you’ve haunted me all my life you’re always out of reach when I’m in pursuit long-winded then suddenly mute and there’s a flaw in my heart’s design for I keep trying to make you mine

(You’ve Haunted Me All My Life – Death Cab For Cutie)

RE4 comes out under this excellent reason: answering those questions. In addition to providing a new chapter to this famous and profitable franchise, it would also serve to solve Leon’s pending matters, something that Claire, his companion protagonist in the game that he was introduced on, got, but he didn’t. And look: this unresolved conflict is precisely what drives RE4’s dramatic throughline – so much so that if we think about the main saga plot to which these two games should be supposedly subordinate to, both RE:CV and RE4 seem a little… isolated? Because they are journey conclusions for these two specific characters.

Anyway, Leon is now a government agent (a career unkindly imposed onto him by the actual government, by the way, who wouldn’t just accept that the man simply moved on with his life while possessing the knowledge to what really happened in Raccoon) on a rescue mission six years after surviving Raccoon City’s incident. He’s now more cynical and is taking advantage of somewhat questionable means: being a secret agent for a corrupt government so he can achieve his own goals: put an end to bioterrorism and companies like Umbrella. He’s a little more like Ada.

And from the beginning of RE4 all plot aspects are set in a way that build our expectations over Leon and Ada’s reunion: the church bell that mysteriously rings in a suitable timing and saves Leon’s life at the very beginning of the game. The silhouette in red that appears outside the window and fires twice against the guy who is stomping his chest and prompts Leon’s to comment on how familiar the stranger figure felt (“Woman in red… Somehow so familiar.”). Everything, EVERYTHING that happens in RE4 is a carefully thought slow-burn set-up for us to wait and expect for their encounter.

Let’s not forget that the Anonymous Letter that he finds after passing out in that hut after the fight against Del Lago it’s hers (in the Japanese script, the personal pronouns are feminine, which prevents it to be a note written by Luis; source). In Project Umbrella’s translation of said file, we notice that she laments the fact that Leon is infected beyond her current capability to help him. Oh, and there’s also Salazar stating that he needs to deal with two rats before properly worrying about Leon, and Leon then wondering who’s the other intruder besides himself and Luis – which serves to further increase the audience’s expectations.

see her come down through the clouds I feel like a fool I ain’t got nothing left to give nothing to lose so come on love draw your swords shoot me to the ground you are mine I am yours let’s not fuck around

(Draw Your Swords – Angus & Julia Stone)

When they do finally meet again (after we, the audience, already suspect that for at least three different situations Ada’s been watching and helping him) is this tension-charged scene. The scene backdrop, thoughtfully designed, is a monarchy style couple’s bedroom; as part of its decoration, there’s a painting, a gigantic and impossible-not-to-see one, that turns out to be Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera (check here); and even the mysterious woman’s dress, evoking a Chinese red qipao, has butterflies prints (check here). This is essentially the perfect setting fans have unconsciously hoped for: we’re internally screaming “finally! they’re going to solve their U.S.T. and consummate their feelings!” After all, it’s a couple’s bedroom decorated with a purposefully noticeable painting (the only one large enough to be undoubtedly identifiable in a cutscene) which its symbolism and analogies are famously related to love and sex, and even the woman’s dress carries references to a Chinese romantic allegory that, curiously enough, strongly fits with them.

Ada enters the scene laying her gun barrel against Leon’s back – close, too close, in a staggeringly explicit intimacy imagery, one that we’d normally expect from a 007 movie, for instance –, and the subsequent dialogue follows the same tone: with her ordering him to surrender in a voice of velvet (“Put your hands where I can see them.”) and him throwing back a provoking bluff – also full of sexual innuendo – that serves only to advance their competition for dominance (“Sorry, but following a lady’s lead just isn’t my style.”). Oh Leon, you’re so full of shit and you’re well aware of it, as well as Ada is (“Put them up now.”). For them, this is all foreplay. (And that’s why Leon’s first response in this scene doesn’t bother me. I find it to be consistent with his characterization, he understands what’s going on in this situation and decides to join in the game.)

After their own little – and slightly anticipated – dance, and Leon’s little tip (“Bit of advice – try using knives next time. Works better for close encounters.”) – that uncoincidentally will come in hand later on in this game in another scene charged with this same unresolved sexual tension, and in which our expectations get likewise subverted –, Ada raises the curtains, folds her cards (“Leon. Long time, no see.”).

We all hold our breaths.

But Leon… Well, Leon is resentful, bitter, angry.

Naturally, since, for 1) although he, like us, certainly had a hunch for the identity of whoever put a gun on his back, he couldn’t be quite sure yet, and 2) this is the woman he has spent the past 6 years obsessing about to which end she came off to (later, a spin-off in the franchise will confirm his obsession for us, but nevertheless, one of Leon’s next lines in-game is already enough for us to deduce it), only to find out that the latest news pointing at her happened to be related “just” to the most infamous figure in the recent history of bioterrorism.

Ah, and also he spent the past 6 years dealing with the guilt and trauma of she possibly being dead, which he certainly considered to be his personal failure in preventing. So, there’s that.

Therefore, Leon ruins the atmosphere – and all of our previous expectations together with it – and confronts her (“Ada… So it is true.”) Feeling hurt, betrayed, pissed off. But resigned too. Even when she pretends she doesn’t know what he’s talking about, clearly dismissive of how long it has been since their last exchange (“True? About what?”), his tone is huffy, sullen, when he states to her (doesn’t question, rather, chooses to assert) that it’s true, she’s affiliated with Wesker (“You, working with Wesker.”) And how does he know that? Did something in his investigations also lead him to presume that she’d probably appear in Spain to get something for Wesker? Then we weren’t the only ones hoping for this reunion, holding our breaths for it? See, we don’t even need a spin-off game to assume that yes, he’s been indeed obsessing about her for the past 6 years.

When Leon throws this accusation, it comes from a sore spot, a particular personal ache, almost as if this Wesker issue was a betrayal aimed specifically against him. If we didn’t know any better, this scene would almost feel like it’s a couple washing their dirty laundry over the fact that of them is having an extra-marital affair.

Ada drops her sly, disingenuous facade (“I see you’ve been doing your homework.”) – it looks like he learned the hard way that he should be a little more like her instead of simply diving in blind after all.

Then, shrinking a bit, in a lower tone, he demands a reason (“Why, Ada?”), and she tosses it back since this is a question that can have a myriad of answers (“What’s it to you?”) to which he finally asks what he wants to know with indisputable clarity (“Why are you here? Why’d you show up like this?”), and something in his tone, the non-verbal stress in his words, gives us the impression of emphasis on “here” and “like this”, almost as if what he really wants to say is “Why not before (way earlier)? Under different circumstances (as a friend, as he wanted her to be)?” After a wry chuckle, it’s her turn to break with our expectations, – since Leon’s question steers the mood of the scene back to one of impending emotional and physical resolution – evading the emotional escalation with a dramatic stunt, but not without promising him that they’ll meet again.

By the way, resorting to a ruse to get out of there, having thrown her timer flash bomb glasses so she could have a good pretext to withdraw without major impediments – it’s also a writing device to subvert the audience’s expectations here, since they’re naturally placed upon betting that if Ada tries to leave in a conventional, non-theatrical and unconvincing style, Leon is definitely going to make her stay, even if he has to beg her for it.

the angel came to Jacob the room began to glow Jacob asked the angel are you friend or are you foe? the angel never answered but smote him on the thigh they wrestled through the darkness ‘til morning filled the sky this thing between us has wings, it has teeth it has got horns and feathers and sinews beneath angel or demon to the truth I am bound and so this thing between us must be wrestled down

(Jacob and the Angel – Suzanne Vega)

We play RE4’s main campaign entirely in Leon’s shoes. It’s only after finishing it and unlocking the extra content that we’ll have access to how Ada reacted after their re-encounter: in a mix of anxiety and concern as Wesker now suspects that she went to meet with Leon and, because of it, is ordering her to kill him so there won’t be any disruptions in her mission (“And that US government lapdog… Leon… if you do happen to encounter him, put him out of commission. We can’t let him interfere with our plans.”). She tries from the get-go to bargain with Wesker that Leon doesn’t have a clue to what’s really happening, claiming that he’s there solely to save Ashley so he shouldn’t disturb, etc. (“He has no idea what’s going on. He’s nothing we need to worry about.”), but well, Wesker isn’t exactly inclined to be convinced (“He’s a survivor of Raccoon City. We can do without the extra distraction. Take him out.”).

So we see her apprehensively sighing his name after Wesker finalizes contact. We even have a brief scene where she observes Leon from afar using a machine-gun to contain another horde of Ganados, whispering to herself an apology to him and explaining why she can’t be helping him (“Leon… I’m sorry, but I can’t be seen with you..”) and if you, the player, try to disregard this by nevertheless attempting to run to where Leon is, the game will stop you with the phrase “If Leon sees me now, I would have to finish him off.”. The game enforces you to respect her decision: she won’t follow Wesker’s orders.

Actually, even before she re-encountered Leon, from the very BEGINNING of her campaign when she discovers that he’s in this place as well (and murmurs his name when she sees and recognises him), she already realises that she can’t be seen with him or there’ll be trouble. So, when she nevertheless reveals herself to him, what she’s really doing is going against her best judgment and putting them both in danger because she genuinely wants to see him and let him know that she’s there too.

Additionally, this is the most probable reason for her not going after him in the past 6 years. Besides obviously wishing him to have emotional distance to move forward while she herself tried to do it, there was the possibility that she could put him in danger if she went after him.

Mere seconds after Saddler kills Luis, Wesker comes in contact with her and spares no time in querying if she already had the opportunity to execute Leon (“Have you had a chance to eliminate Leon?”). We know that she did despite her dismissive reply (“Not yet”). She saw him quite a few times after their reunion at the castle. Plus, she knows that he’s right there in the exact same place that she’s now – the castle’s concourse level –, with dead Luis in his arms. She’s well aware of the fact that she could exploit Leon’s shock and vulnerable moment over Luis death to easily kill him undisturbed.

Wesker realizes this is going to be an arm wrestle with her, so, instead, he proposes that she starts “taking advantage of Leon’s fortuitousness” (“If that’s the case, then maybe we can capitalize on his little lucky streak and take advantage of the distraction he’s causing for Saddler and his followers to retrieve the sample.”). But even this recommended scheme visibly disturbs Ada, as we can notice from her reaction just afterwards.

Ada, of course, doesn’t cease to aid Leon and advice him in order to make his odyssey easier (even if she can’t accompany him as she did in Raccoon), nor does she stop worrying about the advancing of the Las Plagas infection stage on his body, leaving him a letter (again) over that topic, one signed with an affectionate lipstick mark (source).

The next time they see each other in-game is when, once again, Ada chooses to disregard her own best judgment and assessment of the situation by offering him a boat-ride to the island. A scene also packed with sexual tension, in which even a pun brimming with innuendo is allowed (“Need a ride, handsome?”), but still a much lighter in tone than their first shared one. In this one, Leon is finally close to her physically and, as a result of that, spends the whole trip fidgeting where he’s sitting, blatantly staring at her – to which she furtively glances back and sneakily smiles at him.

All of it only for our expectations to be shattered a second time: she abruptly halts their short little cruise, given that they already arrived at their set destiny – and the fact that she really needs to go, otherwise Wesker will kill them both –, but not without first flashing her entire thigh to him (a privileged view he doesn’t refuse to savour) and nearly shoving her butt all over his face, as to show us and him that “look, I’m definitely interested, but this isn’t the right place nor the right time”.

After Leon manages to briefly get Ashley back for the first time on the island, we see a small paper plane flying in through the window. Another note sent by Ada, lovingly identified again, offering tips for Leon’s itinerary to escape (source).

Krauser’s first question when we see him talking to Ada for the first time is on Leon’s status (“What’s the news on our friend Leon?”), to which Ada’s answer (“He’s not making it easy.”) it’s a blatant and near hilarious lie to the audience. Yeah, it mustn’t be easy being forced to deal with that sort of demand: to kill the guy you love more than your own sense of self-preservation and safety.

Everything that follows the lift she gave Leon and her exchange with Krauser is to showcase her desperation and the lengths she’s willing to go to keep Leon alive, since Wesker, whom just now seemed possibly satisfied with Leon’s participation in the most recent set of events (“Quite a jolly mess he’s made, that Leon. But all for the better. Saddler’s people have fallen into a panic. Their destruction is only a matter of time now!”) and in spite of her reiterated effort to try to convince him that after Leon rescues Ashley he wouldn’t pose any more threats to the ex-S.T.A.R.S. Alpha Team captain’s plans (“Once he gets Ashley back, his job will be finished. He’ll no longer be a factor.”), sent in another agent to assassinate him (“No, I’m leaving Leon to Krauser.”).

The pronouncement is enough to unsettle Ada and suspend her walk. The urgency to save Leon from Krauser is so high that we see her running after Wesker’s briefing – his order was for her to rush to retrieve the sample (“Hurry up and retrieve the sample.”), but Ada’ hurry is for Leon’s life (“Maybe you’ve forgotten, Wesker… I don’t always play by your rules.”).

She succeeds in saving him from Krauser, and Leon’s reaction, naturally, is to shout her name, while Krauser is unsurprised by the betrayal (“Well, if it isn’t the bitch in the red dress!”). Ada unceremoniously gives away which side she on in this contest (“Looks like we have the upper hand here.”), and I really enjoy how the scene in which she lowers her gun after Leon dares her to shoot him in RE2R also seems like a visual echo to this one scene in RE4, since Ada chooses him again here – even if that will irreversibly mean trouble for her much sooner than she was prepared for.

And then, Leon, expressing the enthusiasm of someone who’s already prepared for a hard pass, appeals in a frustrated tone for a resume on their earlier and systematically unfinished conversation – so that they can, at last, have the pending resolution they’re in need (“Maybe it’s about time you told me the reason why you’re here?”), and she rebuffs exactly as he expected her to (“Maybe some other time…”) before leaving him for his own solitary path once again; oh, and this nice detail of having Ada always promising to Leon something for “the next time”, though, is definitely something worth pointing out every time it occurs. By the second time Leon is confronted by Krauser, we have the latter vocalizing what anyone could and would reasonably deduce regarding Leon’s relationship with Ada (“So, you two are all hooked up now, is that it?”).

Btw, it’s about time that I point out that I prefer the original Japanese version of Ada’s Report #4 (you can access Project Umbrella’s translation here), since its discourse feels more in character for Ada: for example, it’s relevant to emphasize how in this version she pretty much chooses to describe Leon repeating what Wesker suggested about his role in all that’s been happening, almost as if she were taking advantage of the things Wesker said so she can justify in her own assignment reports the help she continuously gives Leon throughout her mission in Spain and why it’s so important for her that he stays alive. What better way of combining business with personal contentment, huh?

But when we see her interacting with Wesker as he reckons precisely those things she allegedly “thinks” of Leon (his resilience, his luck, the opportunity to take advantage of his protagonism in the ongoing events on the Island and so forth), her following reactions are always of explicitly and adamant indisposition. Which makes me firmly believe that no, Ada never intended to use Leon for anything there in Spain.

Moreover, if we, as the audience, have paid attention to the story so far, we should know that actually, she’s been only delaying her goals thanks to Leon’s direct and indirect interferences. After all, it’s because of him that Luis takes a detour: in order to deliver the pills that would slow down the effects of Las Plagas on his body; something that ultimately leads Luis to die by Saddler’s hands, once again preventing Ada from putting her hands on the sample and concluding her mission.

It is Ada who kills Krauser, but that was yet to happen when she reports it as a fact to Wesker (“Krauser is dead.”). There’s a hint of satisfaction and triumph in her voice, even though the guy isn’t dead yet. Wesker goes on to suggest that he’s hoping for Leon to die in the dispute against Saddler, then (“Really… Hmmmmm… Leon doesn’t die easily. That’s fine, we can use him to clean up Saddler for us. We’ll let them fight it out. Neither one of them will manage to come out unharmed.”), and everything in Ada’s body-language and facial expressions indicates her discomfort and impatience with this insistence on this particular subject – Leon’s demise (“Easier said than done.”).

If she really was using Leon all the time, there wouldn’t be a reason for her to be so clearly annoyed at Wesker’s line of thinking (“Either way, it’s your job to clean up what’s left of them when the fight is over. Don’t forget who is running the show. Whatever happens, we can’t let either of them live to see tomorrow. Our goal is to retrieve the sample. Take out anything that might interfere with our plans.”), to the point that Wesker doesn’t even wait for her response before terminating their conversation. Ada is not complying in this specific topic and this infuriates him; she’ll, actually, – as we know – even go out of her way to intervene in Wesker’s last ideal scenario on this matter: Saddler killing Leon.

The next scene where we see them together is the one where Leon is stumbling and squirming for some reason that Ada surely has a pretty good guess on which is it, but is hoping to be mistaken (“Leon, you okay?”), while he, on his end, also insists on ignoring what’s truly going on, guaranteeing that of course, everything’s just fine.

Here we have another subtextual echo to RE2 OG that RE2R also uses to some extent in honour of those who’ve been accompanying the franchise for so long: the calm before the storm – the oddly unagitated moment before we see them saying goodbye and parting ways again –, even if this calm is, in fact, nothing but an illusion they’re briefly sharing. The audience gets anxious without knowing how to pinpoint what’s causing it.

When Leon comes closer, although everything seems so strange, so out of place, we can see Ada reacting as if anticipating (and welcoming) a kiss. She lowers her guard almost completely, raises her hand gently towards his face and tilts her head slightly to the opposite direction so she can lean onto the upcoming contact. But he’s being controlled by the parasite in his body. For a quick millisecond, she thought she could touch him, kiss him, have that closeness once again – a resolution for emotional and sexual tension in sight. Perhaps they’d even help each other on their path through the island from that point on?

When she kisses him in RE2R more so he’ll stop arguing and pointing out holes in her just newly-improvised plan than anything else, we have Leon reacting in a kind of dazed and stuporous state – going stiff and not entirely knowing what exactly he should do, looking not only surprised and confused but also hesitant, uneasy. Still, we can notice him adjusting his own weight so he can angle his head better and enjoy the kiss. It’s subtle, but it’s there (take a look). If we think about this in comparison, seeing Ada’s reaction to his approximation while being controlled in RE4 leaves a more bittersweet taste – realizing how much these two truly long for each other’s touch, but how the circumstances only seem to work against them when providing the opportunity to it in a distorted fashion (and observe how much care the producers placed into RE2R so it would be a consistent experience juxtaposed with RE4, RE6 and the rest of the franchise).

But, well… Mind-controlled Leon almost strangles her and she has to follow that advice he gave her the first time we, the audience, expected them to address the elephant in the room in this game (their much-needed resolution): his tip to preferring knives in such close encounters. Despite the attack not being intentionally his fault and the fact that he just got kicked in the balls for it, Leon immediately asks her to forgive him (“Sorry, Ada…”), and Ada – with her throat still hurting and her voice hoarse – while seeing him swallowing all those pills, immediately urges him so they get rid of the virus in his body. Although she alerted him about the low chances of surviving the surgical intervention that’s needed to remove Las Plagas in a letter she sent prior to this unfortunately awkward meeting, she presses that they both take action (“We have to get that parasite out of your body!”), emphasizing the “we”. Oh, Ada. It’s not like she’ll just accept that his fate is dying a victim of this without trying to fight against it, right?

Leon’s response, of course, is to prioritize someone else’s well-being and his own mission in helping them (“Yeah… But before that I gotta save Ashley!”) – he’ll do it again for Helena in RE6 under analogous circumstances: following Ada (his recurring element of personal need) vs his sense of duty (everything he believes and stands for) –, and this serves as a reminder to Ada about her own (“Fine… let’s split up…”). For a moment, perhaps, she thought it would be like that night in Raccoon, the two together against anything that threatens their way. As she goes ahead of him and walks out the door, we have a slightly longer focus on Leon’s face looking at the door she just gone through with a wistful expression. Leon’s own expectations weren’t that disparate from Ada’s, but both watched it slipping through their fingers again.

Her last confrontation with Krauser has a great dialogue as well. She mocks him from the start (“Oh, Krauser. I’m sorry, I jumped the gun when I reported you dead to Wesker.”) since she couldn’t wait to put an end to him with her own hands so Wesker wouldn’t dare using this against her anymore (“Hum…. Think of all the paperwork I’ll have to fill out if you were to show up alive.”) We know that this isn’t just about convenience, but also a matter of self-preservation. Oh, and safeguarding Leon’s life.

After killing Krauser, her comment is also loaded with double meaning, (“That’s a large thing you have there… But I don’t like it when men play rough…”) a remark that references directly her last run-in with Leon. The man she’s in love with just tried to strangle her (albeit under mind-control) and destroyed the mood that could’ve led them to have some physical closeness after years.

Afterwards, Ada’s new goal, once again, involves providing help to Leon’s journey – helping him get rid of the parasite in his body and aiding him in completing his mission. That way she can complete her own in peace.

She assists him in rescuing Ashley from Saddler’s hands – firing against the cult leader a hail of bullets and urging Leon to take Ashley outta the chair she’s imprisoned in and to immediately move out of there with the girl, leaving Saddler to her. All of this not without a cost: Saddler has the upper hand in the confrontation that ensues, and captures Ada. Again, helping Leon proves to be a disadvantageous choice to her agenda: helping him literally turns her into the cult leader’s new hostage. And Ada nearly thought her mission was over when she saw Saddler fall – almost put her hands on the sample. She’d finally be able to help Leon and still complete her own mission without major headaches… but, things are never simple for both of them, are they?

On Leon’s side, having already removed the parasite off his body and with Ashley safe and sound under his guarding, the conclusion seems obvious: it’s time to go home, right? But he suspects there’s something missing (“Something’s not right.”), and orders Ashley to wait for him exactly where she is – where he knows it’s clear of threats. I particularly enjoy how he doesn’t still know for sure that Ada is being held hostage, but it’s like he catches this sense of foreboding hanging in the air that alerts his instincts about the oddity in the absence of a detail which he cares deeply about, one relevant enough to dissuade him in feeling confident to straightaway leave that place. “The ties that bind” (as per their theme song in RE6), hnm? Their connection is so strong that it’s like a sixth sense warning them whenever one or the other is under risk. As I thought, Capcom’s zeal in writing and developing their recurring plot themes and overall romantic subplot airtightly is infallible.

And that’s how the cult’s leader baits Leon’s interest: hanging Ada well-tied on a clear view. Of course Leon will go up there to save her, even if he’s already vaccinated against the virus these crazy people injected on him and finally has the girl he should save and bring back home under his care, right? Obviously. He screams Ada’s name in what must be the fifth time in this game, and when Saddler approaches him still trying to exploit the control Las Plagas had over his body, he doesn’t waste any time in playing the cocky hero and provoking his adversary (“Better try a new trick, ‘cause that one’s getting old!”).

Leon suspends time again, just like he did that dawn in Raccoon on RE2R when he confronted her about her lies and challenged her to shoot him while everything was falling apart around them – now, he does it with the enemy dangerously near them: he stops to check if she’s alright (“You okay?”) and she responds in a teasing but gentle tone (“I’ve been better…”)¹ – it’s really like they’ve stopped time and forgot space again. And that’s why Saddler laughs.

Leon looks annoyed to be remembered of the presence of the antagonist (“What’s so funny?!”), to which Saddler sees then the opportunity to deliver the obligatory villain’s speech as an elucidation on what’s amusing him (“Oh, I think you know… The American prevailing is a cliché that only happens in your Hollywood movies! Oh, Mr. Kennedy! You entertain me! To show my appreciation, I’ll help you awaken from your world of clichés!!!”). I like how Saddler explicitly mocks Leon and Ada’s little moment since Leon seems to be so overconfident regarding his victory at the end of this long journey precisely because he just saved the woman he’s in love with (something that even makes him forget about time and space for a minute). It really is similar to the Hollywood clichés: the hero achieves ultimate victory when he gets to save his romantic interest – the end.

Everything that follows from here is just as good: Leon making sure to warn Ada to step aside when Saddler starts mutating (“Ada, stand back!”) and Ada rushing to help him in her own manner, then throwing a Rocket Launcher for him and prompting him to put an end to the confrontation (“Use this!”) – an unmistakable echo to RE2 OG. I’ll harp on the same string again here: I don’t like for one bit that the writers chose to change the circumstances in which she helps Leon with this exact same matter in RE2R so that Leon wouldn’t have had any suspicion on whom might have thrown him that Rocket Launcher to finish Mr. X off; it bothers me a lot since this was a consolidated tradition on the franchise – this specific dynamic between them and Leon being conscious about it. Welp.

He saves Ada, finally defeats Saddler, and… picks up the Las Plagas sample from the cult’s leader body. Ada’s mission goal. The sole reason for her to be there in the first place.

we fight every night for something when the sun sets we’re both the same half in the shadows half burned in flames we can’t look back for nothing take what you need say your goodbyes I gave you everything and it’s a beautiful crime

(Beautiful Crime – Tamer)

If she doesn’t get her hands on this damn thing right now they’re both going to die, that much she’s certain about. So she points her gun to the back of his head, asks him to forgive her and presses him to hand her the sample (“Sorry, Leon. Hand it over.”) and look, he knows she won’t shoot.

He’s not a fool to infer that she’ll because she just spent at least the last 48 or 72 hours helping him and saving his ass again, and again and again. Come on, think with me: Leon blacks out and spends six hours in that abandoned shack after fighting Del Lago, only regaining consciousness when it’s already dark; it’s dawn when he teams up with Luis in that hut just before he and Ashley follow their way to the castle; he gets stuck inside the castle practically the entire day because when he goes through the mines and the ruins at the back of the castle area it’s almost night again, which means that the amount of time he takes to finally leave the castle after facing Salazar and take Ada’s lift to the island fits the period of dusk to dawn; in the island his journey takes long enough for us to see the sunset again when the Ganados horde destroy the reinforcement helicopter U. S. sent him and he confronts Krauser without Ada’s help; it’s morning when Ada runs off after pointing her gun at his head and taking the sample, leaping into the air so the helicopter picks her up. Therefore, the game implies that we spend a day in each map: the village, the castle and the island – that’s 72 hours. In any case, it’s at least 48 hours.

So, he surrenders the sample to her because deep down he knows she’s bluffing and he also suspects that she must have her reasons.

In addition, let us not forget that their first reunion scene in this game has a slow-motion sequence to show us – amongst other things – that Leon is able to quickly disarm her even when she’s pointing her gun to his back at a distance of maybe less than two inches. As he was forced to become a secret agent to the government, he most certainly went through intensive training over the last six years, so, apart from knowing that Ada would never pull the trigger against him, we also know that Leon, if he genuinely wanted to, could easily disarm her. But he doesn’t. He chooses to give up the sample to her, he chooses her.

RE4 bluntly suggests that Leon is willing to brush aside his principles, ignore his sense of duty and ethics and even possibly betray his country – for her, to choose her. It’s fairly likely that hadn’t they been forced to follow different paths in RE2 OG and RE2R, he would’ve done the same. At the end of the day, that threat of “taking her in”, arresting her, was just bravado. This is clearer for him now, of course – six years after Raccoon, Leon had the distance of time and space to hone his wisdom and balance regarding this inner moral struggle he faces between what he feels for Ada and his consciousness, his integrity; although we all are well aware that at the decision-making time, romanticism would topple rationalism, that he’d let idealism speak louder than his sense of pragmatism. That he’d let her win.

This is how much he trusts her – it could be nothing more than a passionate impulse motivated by a gut feeling, an unexplainable instinct, it may not even be something he consciously desires, but it’s what he always comes down to – and that’s why he took that leap of faith six years ago in defying her to shoot, that’s why now, again, he takes a leap of faith passing her the sample without putting up a fight, because he KNOWS that she won’t shoot, he doesn’t need to challenge her once again so he can prove it to her and to himself. Thus, this is another mirror scene: that’s what he was going to do in RE2 OG and RE2R hadn’t she “died” – they don’t need her pointing a gun at him, that’s just a pretext for both of them. But, back to the story climax in Spain, his only reaction then, is to ensure, as much to himself as to her, that she knows what she’s going for (“Ada, you do know what this is.”). Yes, of course she knows. And he knows she does.

She goes on her way, reassuring him about the fate of the sample (“Don’t worry. I’ll take good care of it.”), perhaps to reinforce that he didn’t make the wrong call. Leon’s sixth loud cry for her name is answered with a curt goodbye and a bit of quippy advice (“Gotta go. If I were you, I’d get off this island too.”). And I love how baffled he is to see her pressing the detonator button (“She really pushed it!”). Oh, Leon. He really only gave her the sample because he wanted to, didn’t he? So his bewilderment in seeing her activating the detonator isn’t only adequate but natural. This disappointment doesn’t last long, however, since Ada obviously won’t leave without granting him the key to his escape (“Here, catch.”), rush him to take his path outta that damned place and promise, in her own way, that they will eventually see each other again (“Better get a move on. See you around.”).

Leon’s reaction to the gift she throws him, a sneery remark, expresses his frustration and reveals a bit of his wounded ego (“Very cute.”). Yeah, Leon… this isn’t the moment for you two to have a resolution to all the emotional and physical hangings you still have. “Maybe some other time.”

shadows follow me but she is always out of reach but she’s my favourite thing to see her hook is my escape a reflection of my fate and she is everything I need, yeah

(Fangs – Night Riots)

Ashley embodies all of us, the audience, when she inquiries about Ada’s identity and her connection with Leon (“So, who was that woman anyway?”), and although he sounds intrigued by her curiosity, he looks as he might have been expecting it (“Why do you ask?”), to which Ashley proceeds reflecting the audience’s expectations and insists (“Come on. Tell me.”). Leon’s answer, strikingly brilliant and unforgettable (“She’s like a part of me I can’t let go. Let’s leave it at that.”), is one that RE2R without any kind of reservation or shame makes visual and textual echo in that scene where Leon complains missing her (“I can’t believe I actually miss her…”) and smiles wistfully – that’s why you miss her, Leon. It’s only at the end of RE4, then, that this 27-year-old Leon finally finds the answer to something that has been haunting him since he was 21.

In Ada’s scenario ending, we can see her exhaling, understandably relieved as the helicopter flies off that hell island: Leon’s alive! And she didn’t have to “die” this time to accomplish both: keep him alive and complete her mission. Everything worked! Everything’s alright.

Another detail that pleases me a lot – and that RE2R ALSO echoed – is that, after seeing him driving the jet-ski with Ashley towards the sunset, knowing that they’re going home, we have one last broadcast with Hunnigan, in which Leon reports to her about succeeding in rescuing Ashley and how he’s currently taking the young woman back home.

Hunnigan congratulates him, cheerfully, (“You did it, Leon!”), and Leon doesn’t dismiss it as a good excuse to flirt with her (“Thanks. You know, you’re kinda cute without those glasses. Gimme your number when I get back.”). Hunnigan’s answer, firm and composed, is point-blank and carries more than one meaning to the audience (“May I remind you that you’re still on duty?”). Remember Claire flirting with him after Sherry’s question offers an opening for that (“That would’ve been one helluva first date, though.”)? And how Leon, visibly embarrassed, trails off in a bland and ambiguous comment that it’s more to himself than to Claire or Sherry (“Yeah, you have no idea…”) at the end of RE2R? His body-language betraying what – actually, who – we know that surely just crossed his thoughts? RE4 had already done that much earlier! When Hunnigan reminds him how he’s still at work detail – thus he shouldn’t be thinking nor saying these kinds of things –, his reaction is to lament how this seems to be his karma (“Story of my life…”), because really, it’s primarily his job and his sense of duty that keeps him from having what he wants most, isn’t it?

We got a pay-off with this game. RE4 delivers everything the audience wanted with each and every scene and concludes Leon’s plot. Just like Claire reunited with her brother in RE: CV, Leon reunites with Ada in RE4 and, at last, finds an answer as to why he couldn’t, why he wasn’t able to move on in the past six years. Also, RE4’s ending promises us that they will meet again, so we didn’t really need RE6 to play its part as a “pay-off” entry. But, since we did get RE6… We carry on with one more satisfying addition concerning them and their relationship, the only difference being that now, according to their body-language throughout the game, they’re more physically intimate (without even weighing in RE: Damn, which implies it more directly).

I think RE2 OG (and now RE2R) and RE4 both do a great job in showing us Leon and Ada going through all the steps in the chemical process of falling in love with each other, while RE6 shows them at a more comfortable stage of “compassionate love” – the everlasting kind of love that no longer is as euphoric, restless and anxious as it was at the beginning (it’s worth taking a look at this biological process I am talking about and its scientific basis here, here, here, here, here and here). Furthermore, this makes me feel confident that Capcom’s writers working on the franchise’s big instalment numbers know really well what they are doing with these two (at least so far) when they have to present further development for them (amen):

“[…] Levels of the stress hormone cortisol increase during the initial phase of romantic love, marshaling our bodies to cope with the “crisis” at hand. As cortisol levels rise, levels of the neurotransmitter serotonin become depleted. Low levels of serotonin precipitate what’s described as the “intrusive, maddeningly preoccupying thoughts, hopes, terrors of early love”—the obsessive-compulsive behaviors associated with infatuation. If love lasts, this rollercoaster of emotions, and, sometimes, angst, calms within [the years]. […] The passion is still there, but the stress of it is gone […]. Cortisol and serotonin levels return to normal. Love, which began as a stressor (to our brains and bodies, at least), becomes a buffer against stress. Brain areas associated with reward and pleasure are still activated as loving relationships proceed, but the constant craving and desire that are inherent in romantic love often lessen. […] there is an inevitable change over time from passionate love to what is typically called compassionate love—love that is deep but not as euphoric as that experienced during the early stages of romance. That does not, however, mean that the spark of romance is quenched […] […] the excitement of romance can remain while the apprehension is lost. For those whose long-term [relationship] has transitioned from passionate, romantic love to a more compassionate, routine type of love, […] it is possible to rekindle the flame that characterized the relationship’s early days. “We call it the rustiness phenomenon.” […] That alone […] may be enough to bring some couples back to those earlier, exhilarating days, when all they could think about was their newfound love.”

Anyway, that’s why I think that all this “aloof RE4 Leon” talk is nonsense. This is the game that was originally thought as a resolution for Leon’s plot in the franchise – that’s why it ends with the “She’s like a part of me I can’t let go.” line (and that’s why this is my forever favourite OTP quote for them). So much so that RE6 really does seems “extra”: we know that by that point they already are more physically intimate, that they see each other occasionally, etc. But Capcom does a good job in exploiting RE6’s potential, since Leon and Ada’s issue was never only attaining physical intimacy nor sorting out their complex emotional connection and feelings for each other, but the seemingly impossibility of them staying together or, at least, finding peace in their own status-quo – a transition to the final, most mature, peaceful and fructiferous phase of romantic love.

Leon can resign himself and, technically speaking, betray his country… But can Ada simply turn her back on everything she’s involved with without this implicating putting Leon’s entire life at risk? Like it happened throughout RE4? This remains their main dilemma, and one that Capcom continues to exploit spectacularly since it’s a structure that doesn’t bore the audience – and no, I’m not contemplating the haters when I say this, I’m referring to the general audience.

My wish for RE8 – or whatever it is the next entry that features them? A resolution to this last major hanging between the two.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk, I can only hope this was an interesting, worthwhile and satisfying read. 💓

¹ Also, have you guys seen that DMC5 blatantly makes a reference to this Aeon dialogue with Trish and Dante? (here)

#Aeon #Leon x Ada #Ada x Leon #Ada Wong #Leon Kennedy #Leon S Kennedy #Leon Scott Kennedy #OTP: like a part of me I can't let go #[meta]#[mine]#//#(very) long post #Aeon fandom #Aeon metas

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mittensmorgul · 6 years ago

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I’m officially out into the early days of Dabb Era (masquerading as the end of Carver Era, but it’s clear that Dabb has already taken over at this point) on the tnt loop. And this scene from the end of 11.16 was just so reminiscent of 14.13:

[BOBBY leaves the house and heads to his car. He waves at the nosy neighbor, and gets in the driver's seat. He notices a bottle, with a note attached to it that says, "Fine, you Ass, you win, for now. Enjoy. R." BOBBY laughs. He gets out his journal to write about the case, when his cell phone rings.] BOBBY: Dean. You boys okay? DEAN: Yeah we're fine, Bobby, where the hell have you been? I've left three messages. BOBBY: Well, I was - DEAN: Look I got a possible lead on Lilith in Maine. But we're on a case in Reno, I texted you the address, so if you're done sitting on your ass…

To John waking up in his car, returned to the past and thinking his trip to the future was a dream:

[The Impala is parked near a lake. JOHN sleeps in the front seat. He’s back in 2003. His cell phone rings on the dashboard. He wakes up and answers the call.] JOHN: Dean. No, I’m okay. I just… I just had one hell of a dream. Yeah. No, it was a good one. I’m on my way back. I’ll see you soon.

And at first I thought, oh hey look at these two incredibly similar scenes between Dean on the phone in the past and his two father figures who’ve just unwittingly actually seen a far-future version of Dean.

11.16 was about the “Soul Eater,” whose nest where he brings victims to feast on their souls exists “outside of space and time.” A place where Dean and Bobby could see one another before being returned to their respective places in time. And 14.13 also exists as a weird not-quite-real pocket in space and time.

But then I realized... In 11.16, Dean was calling Bobby to check out a lead on Lilith because he and Sam were much farther away... in RENO of all places.

Which will become significant again in 12.01, the first “official” Dabb era episode, as the place where John and Mary were married. And also the place where Chuck apparently ditched Amara in 14.20.

The mention of Reno one episode before 11.17 just struck me as significant now, and should for anyone who still believes that Red Meat is somehow glorifying the toxic codependency between Sam and Dean. Y’all need to watch that again and actually pay attention to what the episode does as a whole... Bobo has long been Dabb’s partner in crime when it comes to the big thematic stuff, and they literally co-wrote 11.17, kind of unofficially-officially establishing their start point for the eventual endgame. Billie, Sam’s mysterious resurrection, Dean’s self-sacrifice to barter his life for Sam’s and Billie refuses basically telling him this is not a story that can work like this anymore. And this was BEFORE she became Death. She reminded him that his next destination was The Empty, but then... Dean didn’t die. This episode literally established the defining elements of the eventual subversion of the entire narrative, which we’re seeing finally come to fruition after s14.

Can you see why so many of us were THRILLED by 11.17, and the implications of it, even back then? Because it was NEVER about glorifying the “old story” of Sam and Dean trading their lives for each other. It was about the pointlessness of it on a cosmic scale. And Dabb establishing his own in-story Avatar as showrunner in Billie, the symbolic death of the old spiral narrative. He just needed to bide his time until all the planets aligned and could make the direct run at the ultimate subversion of the original author (i.e. Chuck as Kripke’s avatar).

It made me interested to know the history of Reno getting mentioned in the narrative...

2.19: Folsom Prison Blues. Reno isn’t mentioned in the episode, but the title is from the Johnny Cash song:

When I was just a baby, My Mama told me, "Son, Always be a good boy, Don't ever play with guns, " But I shot a man in Reno, Just to watch him die, When I hear that whistle blowin', I hang my head and cry.

Which is kind of interesting in the context of the episode taken with the context of all the later references. This was an episode where they deliberately committed a crime, deliberately got themselves “locked up,” not only to solve a case, but to help a friend who’d once saved their father’s life in wartime. At the end of the episode, yes, they stage their escape from prison, but their entire compulsion to help people they feel they owe even at the risk of their own lives or liberty, is sort of encapsulated in this episode. I can imagine Chuck’s fascination with these two, “my guys,” stars of his favorite show, choosing the selfless act this way when Chuck tried to keep forcing them to relive his opposite narrative-- one sibling over the other, one being locked up for all eternity while the other goes on happily creating the universe. The eternal conflict-sacrifice narrative... was always Chuck’s imposition on the Winchesters. Even Cain was confused by Dean’s choice in 9.11, not understanding why Dean chose to SAVE his brother rather than kill him, because Cain was living out just another version of Chuck’s story. This is why Sam and Dean are the exceptions, the version that Chuck just can’t understand, the ones who refuse over and over to accept that Chuck’s story must be *their* story. No matter how hard he’s tried, Chuck just can’t break their will. He can’t stop them from continuing to fight. Even now that Dean has broken and said yes to Michael. Even that couldn’t break his will in the end.

3.01: The Magnificent Seven. When Sam learns about Dean’s demon deal for his life, he begins trying to find ways to get Dean out of the deal and save his life. Tamara suggested to him that there’s a hoodoo priestess in Louisiana who may be able to help:

DEAN: Sam, no hoodoo spell's gonna break this deal, all right? It's a goose chase. SAM: Yeah, but we don't know that, Dean— DEAN (cutting him off): Yes, we do. Forget it. She can't help. SAM (trying to cut in): Look, it's worth— DEAN (speaking over SAM): We're not going, and that's that. What about Reno, huh?

And Dean tells him no, because if they try to get out of the deal, Sam dies. So said the demon he made his deal with, and Dean refuses to let that happen. He even refuses to tell Sam that fact yet, and diverts the conversation with the suggestion they go to Reno instead.

And this is the opposite of Chuck’s original choice, to sacrifice and lock up his sister so his creation could expand unfettered. Dean chose instead to sacrifice himself so Sam could go live that normal life he’d always dreamed of. This was just the beginning of the very long game Chuck would play with them...

Vaguely near the end of s4, and also 11.16:

Between April 17th - ~May 3rd, 2009: Bobby and Rufus investigate what they think is a ghost haunting a house in Grand Rapids, MI. Sam and Dean are in Reno

We never do learn more about the case they were working there, but it did give them a lead on Lilith. Remember that 4.20, the Rapture, takes place on May 3 that year, immediately after this point in the timeline. Castiel was about to try to reveal Heaven’s deception, and their role in breaking the seals to free Lucifer and was dragged back to be reprogrammed into an obedient soldier again. And he would break free of that two episodes later in 4.22, siding with the Winchesters over Heaven and sealing his own fate in a powerful display of free will.

8.21: The Great Escapist: One of the Biggersons locations where we see Cas pass through in his manipulation of quantum superposition to evade the angels is Reno, Nevada.

11.16: the other side of the “outside of time and space” meeting between s4 Bobby and s11 Dean.

12.01: Dean, in trying to convince a freshly resurrected Mary of his identity, and the fact that 33 years have elapsed since she died:

Dean: Dad told me. March 23, 1972 you walked out of a movie theater, Slaughterhouse-Five, you loved it. And you bumped into a big marine and knocked him on his ass. You were embarrassed and he laughed it off, said you could make it up to him with a cup of coffee. So you went to, uh, Maroni's, and you talked and he was cute, and he knew the words to every Zeppelin song, so when he asked you for your number you gave it to him even though you knew your dad would be pissed. That was the night that you met- Mary: John Winchester. Dean: August 19, 1975 you were married, in Reno, your idea. Few years later I came along, then Sammy.

14.20: Amara is, according to the Lying Liar Chuck, in Reno... while meanwhile Billie, Jack, and the Shadow are having a double-secret conference in the Empty while Chuck unleashes Hell on Earth.

I’m wondering if we’ll ever hear mention of Reno again...

#spn s14 spoilers #spn 14.20 #spn 11.16 #spn 11.17 #spn 14.13 #spiders georg of the tnt loop #s14 hellatus rewatch #spn 12.01 #spn 8.21 #spn 4.20 #spn 3.01 #spn 2.19 #reno is a quantum superposition #dabb vs cars #it's spirals all the way down #if you say 'mysterious ways' so help me i will kick your ass #that's what free will is

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onceuponamirror · 5 years ago

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hi! A while ago you mentioned how you subscribe to the belief that your personal experience should be priorized above than objective "truth". I just find that super interesting (esp. when it comes to shipping and our engagement with the media we consume) and I wonder if you could expand on that, bc I'm currently taking a class that touches very heavily on the subject =)

i’d be happy to! but i should clarify that it’s incredibly subjective and really, really depends on circumstance. feel like it would go without saying, but i was referring to storytelling and narrative. just want to emphasize that, because objective truth vs experience is more complicated in the real world, especially vis-a-vis racial/gender prejudice/bias. and that’s a whole other conversation.

(occasionally it also can work in terms of actual interpersonal relationships and communication, but, i digress)

anyway. in high school i read a book called “the things we carried” by tim o’brien, which is a war/anti-war collection of short stories. in the chapters, he would take you through a war experience, presented as a memory, and at the end of the chapter, he would sometimes reveal if it was actually a “true” recollection. at first i was annoyed, but then i realized what he was saying was:

fiction can be relative. the experience you personally had interpreting something isn’t. because you felt it, you made it real, for yourself. that’s the skinny. it’s what i feel the entire point of storytelling is—what matters is whether you’re moved by the content, whether you experience things alongside the characters, and sometimes no matter the cost, even if it’s a lie to your reader.

it’s sort of a parallel of death of the author, which is the theory that the creator’s intentions and motivations are moot once they’re received by an audience; that each person’s personal history informs the way they absorb/react to text. this happens in either circumstance.

the difference is that sometimes a content creator is upset by different interpretations by the audience, whereas someone like o’brien did it deliberately to best tell his story; sometimes something was better explained by a dream-like metaphor that didn’t actually happen smack dab in the middle of a “nonfiction” book. so in the case of it being deliberate, it’s in the service of the story; it’s the unreliable narrator.

(ironically, i guess the main difference is the definition of death of the author itself lmao—does it matter what was intentional? philosof etc)

as it applies to fandom—and here’s where the two theories kind of blend up a lot—i feel like it shows up most in arguments of “canon” and shipping wars. does it matter if x ship never comes to fruition, was never planned, never even in the writing, but two actors had some chemistry or there was a moment in the direction, etc? the whole notion of fandom is that the content has a hand off to the fans, which somehow leads to a lot of elitism and false hierarchies over who then “gets” the most content.

but those who are unrepresented or uninspired by the canon often seek to create their own out those tiny moments, and that’s what makes their experience outweigh the “truth” of the story. it changes shape and form by those who want to relate to something else, and what those people experience/feel is absolutely no less than what is felt by those getting “canon” content.

it’s funny tho because—and this is just like, my personal brand of nerdy, i’m going off topic slightly—historically, stories have been changing hands and taking new forms and branching off one another for…forever, basically. i mentioned this in a recent post, but cinderella, for example, has roots in both ancient greece and 9th century china. things like the silk road and the roman empire traded a lot of stories around, and in many ways, the content gets owned by whoever is told it. each person brings their own personal experiences and culture to the story they share, which informs the next, and the next, etc.

the concept of death of the author has existed for centuries (PLEASE read this historian explain how there were legit king arthur fanfics in the 1500s—the traveling bard was a thing because each storyteller had their own version, and came to town with a new but familiar fan fave. that’s why shakespeare as an “original” bard is hilarious)��but it’s only in modern times that the stigma appeared.

(i would guess partially because the ability to directly engage back with the author/actor/etc has changed and blurred the lines. we all have role models who have had impacts on our lives through the work they put out but what a person means to someone doesn’t entitle them to “content,” because a real person’s life isn’t…..content. it’s their life. i think you prob know what i’m referring to.)

(i’m also NOT talking about plagiarism, which is something totally different and is straight up theft of direct text, etc. “you know it when you see it”)

tl;dr,

so in terms of storytelling, “objective truth” loses to “personal experience” because truth is a narrative relative. in a story, regardless of what, say, i-the-author am expressing for myself, what you-the-reader feel makes it real for you.

then an audience inherits whatever story they’ve been told. how the individual interprets it and retell it is the birth of another.

fandom/fanfic are new phenomena only in the sense of their accessibility of scale, but that they’re basically, basically iterations of the oral tradition that have existed as long as language has. the nature of storytelling is that it changes hands and becomes someone else’s story that they expand upon and modify. and again, and on, and forever.

anyway. that was rambly and possibly not very clear. hope it answered your question! i’d love to hear what you’re discussing in your class!

#fanfiction #writing #storytelling #Anonymous

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pass-the-bechdel · 6 years ago

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Marvel Cinematic Universe: Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)

Does it pass the Bechdel Test?

No.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Six (31.57% of cast).

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Thirteen.

Positive Content Rating:

Three.

General Film Quality:

Entertaining, but overrated.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) UNDER THE CUT:

Passing the Bechdel:

Though Nebula and Gamora trade a couple of lines on a few occasions, they invariably speak about either Thanos, or Ronan.

Female characters:

Meredith Quill.

Bereet.

Nebula.

Gamora.

Carina.

Nova Prime.

Male characters:

Mr Quill.

Peter Quill.

Yondu Udonta.

Ronan.

Korath.

Rocket.

Groot.

The Broker.

Drax.

Thanos.

The Collector.

Denarian Saal.

Denarian Dey.

OTHER NOTES:

Seatbelts on spaceships should really be mandatory.

Aahahahaha Peter has a woman on his ship whose name he can’t remember and whom he forgot was even there! Oh, it’s so funny and charming! What a classic misogynistic cliche intro! Garbage.

Rocket chastises Groot to ‘learn genders’, and I don’t think the irony of a raccoon (a species with almost no visually-evident sexual dimorphism) saying that to a tree-person (whose species - if sexually dimorphic at all - certainly has no reason to adhere to the humanoid/mammalian model) is deliberate. The other alien higher-life-forms they encounter in the film are pretty uniformly human in appearance (not much effort going on in the ‘alien’ department besides just painting people in bright colours), but lack of imagination from the creative team doesn’t mean that the binary gender system we’re accustomed to on Earth has any broad bearing on the galaxy at large.

Aaahh, and now Peter is explaining his scars to Drax, with lovely stories of women he cheated on in the past because he’s ~such a stud~.

Thanos tells Ronan off for his dull political raging and whiny behaviour, but he’s sitting on a shiny floating throne himself, so I’m not sure he’s earned the right to criticise what other people have got going on.

Rocket suggests that Gamora trade sexual favours to get things from other prisoners, because we’re being Like That with this movie.

The Collector keeps female slave ‘assistants’, whom he evidently treats so nicely that Carina commits suicide by infinity stone at the first opportunity in order to escape him. We’re just doing so well for the ladies in this film.

As a great comedic beat, Drax calls Gamora a “green whore”. It’s both a shitty line, and nonsensical, since Drax isn’t supposed to comprehend metaphors and he has no reason to believe Gamora is a literal ‘whore’ (nor is he likely to use such a colloquial term, considering the calibre of his standard vocabulary). Basically, it’s a rubbish line from every angle, and all in service of a misogynistic joke.

This film is a terrible waste of Djimon Hounsou.

Ronan is very theatrically over-the-top in his pronouncements, but Lee Pace does his damnedest to make it work on delivery.

Why does Ronan’s flashy purple infinity stone weapon not kill people when he shoots them with its energy blast? Obviously it would be terribly inconvenient to the story if he just casually killed all the good guys, but honestly. It doesn’t make much sense. They coulda at least pretended there was a reason.

The part of me that is susceptible to acts of heroism is affected by the guardians all joining hands to share the stone’s power. Not enough to feel that the film or the character relationships actually connected on an emotional level, but enough that this ending doesn’t feel totally unearned.

Drax patting Rocket’s head while he’s crying over Groot is a lovely touch. THAT is the strongest character interaction of the film.

So. I’ll be honest: I don’t like this movie. I don’t think it works. I think it’s essentially just a string of gimmicks, loosely attached, entertaining enough on the surface but with no meaningful depth to hold in the mind or keep the audience engaged once the credits kick in (it’s also much heavier on the sexist tropes than any other MCU film previous). I don’t hate it, but it doesn’t give me anything that I value in a viewing experience, it just happens and then ends and that’s it. And the reason it doesn’t work is, frankly, the writing is lazy as shit. It makes a sub-par effort at establishing character and thus relies heavily on cliches, it rarely bothers to incorporate relevant plot and motivations and such into the story at early points in order to generate narrative pay-off, and the world-building is hazy at best and, like the characterisation, trades predominantly on expectation of stereotypes rather than actually creating anything original.

Let’s start in the obvious place: with our lead character. I’m tempted to just say ‘Peter Quill is garbage’ and then move on, because it’s true and also, he’s just not complex or interesting at all, which is ridiculous because he’s got that whole ‘alien abduction’ origin story and there should be like, literally any layers at all to his story instead of him just being an obnoxious Lothario who makes pop culture references like that counts as having a personality. But, here we are. I’m not familiar with the comics so I don’t know if this is a common complaint from fans who can’t believe their boy got all his nuances deleted in favour of such an inane cliche, but if this is exactly what Quill is like in the comics too? That’s no excuse. Part of the magic of adaptation is the opportunity to improve upon things the source material did wrongly or badly. The Quill we’ve got here in this movie is such a bland template he’s almost functionally useless; he barely impacts the story at all, especially in any way that is relevant to his personality or skills and necessitates his presence (the dance-off distraction is the only good Quill moment, and it’s also one of the few inspired choices in the whole film). At the end of the day, Quill exists so that the story has a Main Guy, being a straight white American male (and making sure we all, excessively, know about it), because God forbid we be expected to identify with anyone else. I have heard people sing the praises of the film for ‘subverting cliche’ by not having Quill and Gamora actively hook up by the end, as if that somehow makes it better that every single other aspect of that tedious forced romance plot is still squarely in place and set to play out in future films (pro tip: if the main guy still ‘gets the girl’, only it doesn’t happen in the first film, that’s not subversive. That’s still playing the trope dead-straight). Quill not immediately being shown to be rewarded with sex is not some incredible feat of original storytelling, and it certainly doesn’t absolve him of being a dime-a-dozen pig of a character. If that’s the most ‘unexpected’ character element you can cite, you’re in dire straits.

Now, I’m not gonna talk about every character individually, because in most cases there’s not much to talk about; Drax is the big warrior guy with the Fridged Family backstory we’ve seen so many times before it elicits zero (0) emotions now; Groot - though an interesting idea on paper - is basically just a Deus Ex Machina of whatever ability is most useful at any given moment, too ill-defined to have boundaries to his powers and conveniently not using his full potential whenever it would allow the characters to win too easily; and Rocket, well, Rocket is actually the only one of the leads who manages any meaningful nuance, which is unfortunate because most of the time he’s just used for sarcastic comic relief. The other character I am going to talk about is Gamora, and it’s because she’s a prime example of how this movie fails to establish things so that they feel like they actually matter or the character’s motivations are understandable, etc. We are introduced to Gamora when she overrides Ronan’s order for Nebula to retrieve the orb from Xandar; as it turns out, Gamora’s introductory moment (literally the first time we see her or hear her speak) is also her act of rebellion when she puts into action her plan to escape Thanos’ clutches and go her own way. The problem, obviously, is this is her introduction. We’ve never seen this character before, we’ve only just met Ronan and Nebula as well, Thanos is barely more than a concept, as is the planet Xandar and the politics around it. Nothing has been established yet about the life that Gamora occupies, so her ploy to escape it? Meaningless. We don’t even find out that Gamora was not planning to retrieve the orb for Ronan until she tells us so after she’s been arrested, and we have literally no reason to believe her because we don’t know her yet because her character has not been established at all. The traditional way to do this would be to show her in her old life, doing as she’s told and/or witnessing terrible things being done by her compatriots, and showing the audience that she has clear misgivings so that when she turns, we understand the context and can believe that’s a logical character decision based on established personality and morals (think of Finn’s introduction in The Force Awakens for a textbook example). Because no time or effort is ever invested in establishing who or how Gamora is, everything we know is delivered to us directly in dialogue, all tell, no show, and what could easily have been the film’s most dynamic character is instead hampered by having her development choked off to avoid spending time on letting her origins matter (despite the fact that those origins are essential to the plot).

On which note, lets talk bad guys. Thanos first, because there’s not much to say, and that’s not a good thing: Thanos is actually pointless to this film, the only reason he’s there is so that the MCU can use him to actual purpose in later films and his relation to Gamora and Nebula and the hunt for the Infinity Stones needs to be established first, but as with everything else this movie is terrible at establishing things effectively. Consequently, Thanos...just floats around on a chair, and then Ronan tells him to piss off and we don’t see or hear from him again in the rest of the film, and there’s no real effort made to integrate Thanos into the story so that he seems like anything other than a dead-end subplot cluttering up the movie for no reason. The closest Thanos gets to anything notable is when he chides Ronan for his boring politics, but even that is symptomatic of the wider problem with this movie’s lazy writing: Ronan’s whole character is essentially just another dull archetype - in this case, the extremist villain - and a solid nothing at all is done to establish his politics or what they mean, other than death for the people we’re told are the innocents. This is a problem with the world-building of the film as a whole, because none of the galaxy’s politics is fleshed out, there’s no context to why the Kree have a problem with Xandar or why we should care, and Xandar kinda gets treated like the centre of the universe but it also seems that’s just for convenience sake so that the plot can return to a previous location for the final act. Hell, I haven’t the faintest fucking idea where Earth is supposed to fit in to all of this, other characters talk about it so it’s clearly a known quantity to the rest of the galaxy, and yet no one knows any details about it and Quill never bothered to go back there for reasons which really SHOULD be explored and yet are not even mentioned (that would seem like some of that characterisation he doesn’t have), so I don’t know what we’re supposed to interpret from that. I’m not confident that the creative powers bothered to think about it, considering how much they didn’t think about anything else. This is a movie where ‘human, but painted’ passes for ‘alien’ and society apparently functions exactly like Earth, tedious misogyny and all, despite the absence of cultural sharing to explain the Earthlike similarities (and boy oh boy do I HATE the laziness of science fiction where everything being identical to Western culture on Earth is treated like it’s ‘just the natural order’ that should be expected to develop in any sentient species, instead of a complex system shaped by unique and varied influences over thousands of years and dependent upon environment, religion, philosophy, and a myriad of other factors not replicated in these poorly-drawn ‘alien’ cultures. I get that you’ve gotta employ at least some shorthand in order to get on and tell your story within time constraints, but come on. If you’re not gonna think about world-building at all, don’t set the story on an alien planet). Above all else, we know that Ronan is the villain because he’s painted (literally) as one; he’s the bad guy through visually-indicated othering, because we all know good guys don’t look like that (whereas most of Ronan’s enemies on Xandar are just regular-looking white folks. Curious...). Sure, Ronan is also introduced spouting rhetoric and then smashing a dude with a hammer, and that seems like villain behaviour, but that only reinforces the point: Ronan’s role is made unmistakable through age-old tropes, and it’s never explored or subverted or made dynamic from there. Like Quill as the ‘hero’, Ronan is a dime-a-dozen cliche.

So anyway. Lets talk plot. This one goes like so: Quill collects the orb from Morag, where he coincidentally runs into Korath and company who just-so-happen to be after the orb at the same time (how it is that multiple interested parties only just found out that one of the most powerful destructive forces in the universe is just chillin’ on this abandoned planet, they don’t bother to explain). Quill runs into both Gamora, and Rocket and Groot, the other parties happening to be after him for different reasons and coincidentally converging on Xandar at the same point. Everyone gets arrested and sent to prison, where they meet Drax and promptly escape and fly to Knowhere so that The Collector can exposition-dump about Infinity Stones. Drax calls Ronan up, just literally straight-up calls the bad guy to come and find them because I guess figuring out a normal plot reason for the villain to catch up with the good guys was too hard, so we had to go for extreme stupidity instead. Ronan gets the orb and goes back to Xandar to destroy it, and our main characters figure they should stop that, so they do. Roll credits. Now, you can make pretty much any story sound basic and stupid by breaking it down into its component pieces, but the important thing to note about this layout is how many convenient or just plain stupid aspects there are. There are almost no character meetings or story developments that come about logically through the sensible development of plot driven by character’s motivations springing from established narrative, etc, and part of that problem is absolutely because there’s so little established character/world-building to begin with, but it’s also because whatever there is tends to apparate when it is needed without any sign of existing beforehand; that is, very little of the story is seeded early on so that it can come to fruition later in a narratively satisfying fashion. The Nova Corps sentence the characters to the Kyln prison as if it’s a big scary concept, but we’ve never heard of it before so we have no reason to consider it trouble. Drax appears and other characters literally tell us why we should pay attention to him, instead of him being, say, pre-established (SUCH AS by having his family tragedy shown on screen as a dual-establishing event for him and Ronan, or something to which Gamora was privy in some way in order to intro her misgivings as discussed above, or even just having someone reference the legend of Drax the Destroyer BEFORE getting to the Kyln (you could also, y’know, establish the Kyln itself in talking about how Drax was sent there. Just saying)). Intro the idea of Knowhere and/or The Collector BEFORE heading there so that it’s less convenient for Gamora to just-happen to have a buyer already set up for the item we didn’t even know she had planned to steal as part of the escape plot we didn’t know she was hatching. For the love of everything, establish some actual REASON for Ronan to follow our characters to Knowhere, instead of just ‘Drax got drunk and called him’. Link the pieces of your story together with concepts and developments that build upon each other in a narrative progression. That’s the difference between having a plot, and having a string of chronological set pieces (some of which - like Morag and the Kyln - don’t even have a purpose anyway beyond providing some action-scene opportunities).

Before I close this out, I just want to run through a little exercise to demonstrate something that you never, ever want to happen in a story. You never want to have a lead character who can be deleted from the plot without leaving a hole too big to be easily filled by the rest of the cast. But what happens if Peter Quill is removed from this story? Well, pretty much all of the misogyny disappears, so that’s a plus. Someone else is gonna have to retrieve the orb from Morag, but we could easily send Rocket and Groot to do that. Gamora can still fight with them on Xandar exactly as it happens in the actual movie, only this time it’s not just pure coincidence that they conflict. We saved vital time that the film spent on Quill’s inconsequential childhood abduction (and we could save more on trimming the pointless action on Morag), which is time that could be better spent on all that other establishing crap I was talking about earlier, tightening up the narrative. Quill doesn’t serve any important purpose in the Kyln, so we can remove him from that no problem, nor does he matter on Knowhere other than a frankly stupid and ultimately pointless moment when he saves Gamora (definitely unnecessary when we’re removing the romantic subplot bullshit along with Quill). And then what? The characters agree that not letting Ronan destroy the galaxy is probably a good call (not Quill-relevant), they head back to Xandar, fight some bad guys, hold hands, win the day. We lose Quill’s only good moment in the form of the dance-off, but it’s an acceptable loss in order to strengthen the entire rest of the film by deleting the most meaningless character: the lead. We also arguably lose the Ravagers in the process, but as much fun as Yondu is, the plot can also survive completely intact without him (the only time the Ravagers matter is for the previously-identified useless damsel contrivance with Quill saving Gamora, and then they do help out on Xandar in the end, but they aren’t necessary for that - the Nova Corps could have been expanded just a smidge and taken care of everything). On the other hand, if you remove Gamora, you lose the connection to Ronan/Thanos as well as the moral compass of the Guardians; some other character would have to be significantly altered to fill the gap. You lose major Deus Ex Machina skills without Groot, and without Rocket someone else’s narrative has to change in order for Groot to have a buddy (plus you need a new mastermind for various plans, though that’s an easier hole to fill). You skip Drax and you do lose a major plot development in the form of him drunk-dialling Ronan, but admittedly that’s one of the worst things in this whole dumb waste of a movie, so maybe it’s not such a loss. You could ditch Drax. But, that’s not important, because Drax isn’t packaged as the leading man: Quill is. If you delete Drax, you don’t really streamline or improve the story (you could fix the one big flaw in his character very easily, he doesn’t have to disappear for that). You delete Quill...I know, comic book adaptation, dropping the main character is not considered an acceptable alteration when you’re improving the story for the screen. But come on. The least they could do is make him actually matter, not just be a perfunctory inclusion for the sake of sticking this ‘weird sci-fi’ as firmly in the centre of over-done cliche as a lazy gimmick story ever could be. There are a few chuckles to be had with this film, and it’s not entirely boring, but it’s not half as endearing nor even an eighth as inspired as it thinks it is. I’m not impressed by any of it.

#Guardians of the Galaxy #Bechdel Test #female representation #Marvel Cinematic Universe #MCU

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stowawayproductions-blog · 6 years ago

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Free Solo — Alex Honnold’s Misunderstood Passion (also be polite at the theater)

Written 10/28/18

Free Solo accomplishes what most fictional narratives can’t achieve: emotional depth and connection. For a documentary about a man who has a hard time connecting this is an incredible feat.

Sitting high on my list of favorite films this year, Free Solo floats into our minds with the same confidence and ease as Alex Honnold scaling a mountain. Persistent, inspiring, tender and thoughtful, this film manages to get our hearts racing with anticipatory adrenaline while also quietly contemplating the psychology of mortality. Alex’s outlook on life, while strange and a bit jarring, to me is quite refreshing: death is natural and there’s no use fearing it if that fear stops us from doing what we love.

Stepping away from the film itself for a second: my trip to the theater to take in this beautiful creation was, as it so often is, marred by a Chatty Kathy sitting three seats away from me. Here’s something I don’t understand: why is it that a film which elicits an audience response also seems to elicit incessant narration? There’s this strange code that happens in a theater. When the movie begins, the chatter stops as we get introduced to the film. The room is quiet and focused and polite. But then the SECOND that someone makes a responsive noise, like laughter, gasping, etc., suddenly it’s like a free-for-all! What is that?? The minute that the audience started responding to this film as it should be responded to (oooooing as he climbed, gasping as he fell, laughing at his humorous interview responses), this woman just began telling us her every thought, and while she was by far the worst offender, she wasn’t the only one. Now I’m sure most of you reading this are perfect audience members, but just in case we need a refresher: please try to remember that no matter how cozy and indie the theater is, it’s not your living room. Also, just because you’re feeling a certain way about a film does not mean the rest of the audience agrees. I was incredibly inspired by this film and really wanted to sit there in silence and cry while being filled with a sense of purpose and strength. That still happened, but it was much less satisfying with dear old Kathy next to me. Some of us go to the movies because we love it more than anything else in the world, please don’t ruin that for us no matter how important your comment seems in the moment.

Okay, done with that, back to the film. I did find intriguing the response of the non-Kathy’s in the room to Alex’s personality. There’s a moment when he’s being asked about his girlfriend and how she affects his decision to risk his life, and he very bluntly responds that he would never choose a girl over his climbing. The majority of the people in the audience scoffed and laughed at this. Am I in a minority in understanding Alex and agreeing with him? I realize that those of us that are blessed with an unwavering passion in something are very lucky, a lot of people never discover what they truly love in life or what they want to spend all their time doing. Yet even with being aware of that, I’m always surprised by the hive-mind assumption that your romantic partner is supposed to be the most important thing.

When my fiance and I started becoming a serious couple, we had a very long talk about our passions and dreams, coming to a clear conclusion that art always has to come first and if that means we can’t be together at some point then so-be-it. Is that agreement as rare as this impromptu focus group of theater patrons would have me believe?

Regardless of the rarity, I loved learning about Alex. I didn’t understand him on an interpersonal level, I doubt having a conversation with him would be a breeze, but I understand his core passion and why he would risk his life to do what he loves. If Nazis came back and outlawed any film that wasn’t Nazi-approved, I’m pretty sure I would be a part of the black-market film trade and still be watching as much film as I could get my hands on. Hopefully that will never happen, so my passion will never require me to risk my life on a regular basis like Alex, but I understand the willingness.

Aside from beautifully exploring his passion and drive, the way that the film captured his past and outlined the causes for him being who he is was fascinating, and not inherently called for in a sports-focused documentary. His relationship with his girlfriend is brought to life by the careful editing choices. The pace is perfect, the cinematography is breathtaking, and it’s more thrilling than any horror film I’ve seen this year. I will happily watch this film over and over again, especially when I need a reminder that having a clear passion is a precious gift and those of us with this blessing shouldn’t waste it for a second.

Rating: Great. In my top ten of 2018.

Perfect

1) Blindspotting

2) Leave No Trace

3) Thoroughbreds

4) Won’t You Be My Neighbor

5) Like Me

Great

6) Sorry to Bother You

7) Free Solo

8) The Wife

9) Colette

10) How to Talk to Girls at Parties

11) The Death of Stalin

12) Eighth Grade

13) Love, Simon

14) RBG

15) The Old Man and the Gun

16) Bad Times at the El Royale

17) Lean On Pete

18) You Were Never Really Here

19) Crazy Rich Asians

youtube

#film #movies #review #critique #free solo #climbing #passion #theater etiquette #manners #el capitan #documentary #national geographic #alex honnold

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nicholasmeyler · 3 years ago

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Researching Time-Travel

I copyrighted my first notebook about time-travel (“The Encryptment Thesis; Vol 1”) in 1995. About that time, a purloined version came out (or so it appeared to me), as a video game called “Buried in Time” by a fellow named Kripalani, based out of San Diego, CA.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Journeyman_Project_2:_Buried_in_Time>

He had even (apparently, at least to my consciousness) stolen my idea or memory of time-travel machines being designed as spacesuit-like uniforms which were designed to save a Chrononaut’s life when/if he possibly materialized in deep space. Since the Earth moves, the Sun moves, the Galaxy moves, and the Universe is always expanding, any time one travels in spacetime (to the past or future) they could possibly materialize somewhere in space without an atmosphere. This was something I thought was actually a memory of mine, from clandestine days working with these devices. I had formed the opinion, or hypothesis, that I had worked extensively for the CIA, and then time-traveled back to a time and history (an alternate-world history) where those events never took place. Perhaps the invention of "Time-Suits" is an inevitability, equally anticipated by Kripalani and his cohorts. I do not know. I experienced them, firsthand, myself (as far as I know or can discern).

My grandparents were friendly with the CIA Director who was involved with Roswell, and I believe that the CIA acquired some time-travel and interstellar technology thru the 1947 event, as well as thru the “Philadelphia Experiment”. My opinion, at the time, was that these time-suits were actually real, and that this leaking (or plagiarism) of my copyrighted work was dangerous to National Security. In fact, I had already spent years petitioning the CIA, the FBI and the NSA for “any and all” files on Time-travel for National Security reasons. This was about a decade after I had invented what is known today as the “Iran-contra” plot, which was also based on the idea of time-travel and “closed timelike loops”. The plot itself is from p. 518 of James Joyce’s novel “Finnegans Wake” which is about the History of mankind. The novel ends exactly where it begins and is meant to be read as a cyclical narrative that reconnects to itself (much like a closed timelike loop). The plot was meant to contain my name in an encrypted fashion: “I ran = Iran= miler = Meyler” and “contra = Nicaraguan rebel = Nic = Nicholas”). I designed the plot this way, deliberately, back in 1983 or 1984.

Previously, I had found enormous amounts of evidence of time-travel encrypted in the Mozart symphonies, etc. which actually referenced not only me (by name) but the names of some of my dorm-mates in freshman year at Princeton. One of these was a Secretary of Defense/CIA Director’s niece, another a famous cancer pathologist (now). By studying this encrypted information, some of which referred to me as a President of the United States (composed around 1776), I became convinced that there would be a severe National Security catastrophe in the near future (this was around 1995). I wrote a letter to the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility in Washington, DC, headed by William Gore, trying to explain that I had extremely legitimate reasons for my requests for help. They simply ignored me, apparently.

By 2000, I had gotten more involved with Paranormal research and had taken classes and lectures from government agents who worked for the DIA, CIA and Army about how to use psychic abilities to gather Intelligence. I also joined a group of UFO watchers which was headed by a leading Psychic researcher and took classes from him, as well. At the same time, I renewed my efforts to convince the government, especially the FBI, that they needed to take my concerns about an impending National Security disaster seriously. I recall very clearly even having conversations with my Psychic friend, Peter, where he discussed that some of his contacts in the NSA were quite convinced that there was going to be an attack on the World Trade Center soon “and they’re going to get it, this time”.

I wanted to get my then-friend/ex-girlfriend (Sandra) who was a long-term MUFON member to go to the FBI with me with what we knew. She originally thought it was a good idea, but then backed out. I continued to try to explain the situation to the FBI, and indicated that specifically I thought Cher (singer-actress) might have some very valuable information on this, and that she needed to be investigated…

Completely without an appointment, and in a fairly hostile manner, the FBI showed up at my Office wanting to talk with me (after 6 months of me trying to get them to respond) and made a claim that I was ‘threatening’ Cher. This was around August 18, 2001. I reiterated at the time that I am nonviolent, and that I believed I had time-traveled, with information that was very important to National Security.

The agents were William Gore (the same person I had written to about the Kripalani video game and my concern with that being a ‘leak’ or plagiarism), and a man named “James Davidson”. I later learned that ‘James Davidson’ was literally the exact same name of the piloting instructor that taught the September 11 hijackers to fly jets, without being interested in learning how to land them. This in itself was very odd. Even odder was the fact that William Gore was now Station-Chief of the San Diego FBI Field Office, and that he was here in Los Angeles to speak with me. I did not make the connection at the time, having forgotten my earlier letter to the OPR in Washington DC in 1995 (found in Volume 1 of “The Encryptment Thesis”). I did not realize we had communicated previously.

Nonetheless, my story was very consistent, and I told him that I thought that I had important National Security Information related to Cher and time-travel, that I felt I had time-traveled, etc. He was skeptical, although James Davidson later stated that he thought I was very credible. Gore tried to get me to say that I was “Clairvoyant”, which was not what I had in mind, and I disagreed, although he might have been correct to some degree.

In 1989, Cher released her video of “If I Could Turn Back Time”, filmed at the L.A. Harbor, which my great-grandfather Captain James J. Meyler had designed in 1896. The movie “Groundhog Day”” with Bill Murray also features, and is based on, the idea of a time-loop, which re-initiates with the same day repeating every morning with the Sonny and Cher song “I Got You, Babe” on the radio. These sorts of clues made it quite obvious to me that my intuitions about Cher were indeed, correct, despite the incredibly lax work of the FBI, etc. I believe my investigation and research was entirely justified and totally above-board.

In any case, I did my very best to get them to try to investigate Cher for more information, but they apparently refused. It is worth noting that the one known active Al Qaeda cell in the USA, at that time, was in San Diego, and Will Gore would certainly have had to be aware of it at the time he met with me.

Sometime after 9/11, it was learned that three of the hijackers all had the same surname “Al Sheri”, while one had the surname “Al Shehhi”. I later learned that “Sher” is an Arabic name which means the same as “Usama” (i.e. meaning “lion”). I had tried to make it clear that even Cher’s name might be a clue of relevance, and had even repeatedly tried to contact Saul Kripke (author of “Naming and Necessity”) to try to get assistance and explain my position.

In retrospect, it is clear that the FBI did go to some lengths to try to address my concerns about time-travel and National Security, but why did they ignore me until 3 weeks before the attacks? Why were they so obviously aware of the danger of Terrorism emanating from San Diego, but so unwilling to do anything about it? Why did they send an Agent I had already communicated with about time-travel (6 years earlier) and an agent with the same name as the man who taught the Al Qaeda hijackers how to fly? Gore must have driven 130 miles to meet with me, from San Diego, without an appointment – and in a somewhat threatening manner.

To me, this seemed like a clear message that the FBI was not on the level, not legitimate, and more concerned with power than with human rights and fairness. I see that this does seem to confirm my suspicions about time-travel having happened to me at some point. I am still investigating the mystery.

The FBI next actually sent in Investigators from the Los Angeles DA’s Office to try to dissuade my attempts to investigate. Four days or so before the September 11 attacks, I remember saying to Investigator Kevin Sleeth “It is the responsibility of the time-traveler to warn Society about impending disasters”, but he responded with “Shut up. You are going to get into trouble if you keep talking about this. We are here to shut you down.”

Even after the attacks, I still received threatening calls from the DA’s Office warning me to never speak to any government officials ever again, and never to complain. I responded by death-threatening the Investigator and by filing an extensive complaint against him. The DA’s Office eventually apologized to me and sent me a letter confirming that the Investigator had been punished. I was not satisfied, since I wanted him to be prosecuted and imprisoned. Nonetheless, this is a 100% factual and accurate account. Much of the remaining correspondence is contained within the Vol 2 of “The Encryptment Thesis”, my second copyrighted work.

My interest in time-travel certainly extends back prior to authoring “The Encryptment Thesis, Vol. 1”. In fact, my family sold our home in Tarzana to a Producer known for time-travel movies such as “Somewhere in Time” and “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” back in 1982. I took a class at Princeton in Metaphysics of Time-Travel in 1980, although I did not consciously identify as a ‘time-traveler’ at the time. I believe that my memories had been wiped or repressed. I still believe that I experienced UFO landings in my backyard in Tarzana multiple times. Publicly available photos on Google still show satellite-views of circular indentations in the soil of the hillside (after 40 years), where growth of weeds is still highly repressed.

Convinced of the soundness of my logic, I have contacted over 800 Venture Capital firms trying to advocate the possibility of founding a company based on prediction and aversion of disasters, using logic and methodologies I had developed based on the premise of time-travel and superluminal information transmission. To my chagrin, the only company that even replied was Gefinor Ventures, founded by an Admiral who was a Director of the National Security Agency during the years I attended Princeton (1977-1981). I have also written to perhaps a dozen famous Physicists trying to discuss time-travel with them, but none of them replied, except for Stephen Hawking, who would send postcards acknowledging receipt.

What would You do, in my shoes?

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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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Wynonna Earp Season 4 Episode 9 Review: Crazy

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This Wynonna Earp review contains spoilers.

Wynonna Earp Season 4, Episode 9

Wynonna Earp has often balanced the inherent darkness of its premise with, among other tones, some zany supernatural fun. Ostensibly, “Crazy” is another case-of-the-week story that has Wynonna & co. hunting a social media-obsessed genie who has a cannibal suffering from kuru disease as her, er, master.

Past that, it’s yet another glimpse into just how deeply Wynonna has internalized the curse she was once ruled by, and just how much she is suffering because of it. She may no longer be beholden to the Earp curse, but Wynonna is still living as if the only thing she’s good for, the only thing she deserves, is a life of demon-killing. “Genie, you’re free,” our protagonist tells her target—the implication being that there is no such freedom for Wynonna, only a life of looking morally ambiguous monsters in the eye as she kills them and then going to sleep drunk and alone. I can’t quite figure out where Wynonna Earp Season 4B is going thematically, and I love that I don’t know because I think that is part of the point: Wynonna is in a dark, messy place. She’s an imperfect heroine, a hero who has made some bad choices, and the show isn’t giving us an easy answer to the questions of morality those choices have brought up.

In “Crazy,” Wynonna’s antagonist is not Doug, but rather Ginny the Genie. I’m not sure how well it works that Ginny’s relationship with Doug begins narrative life on this show as an allegory for domestic abuse, but, aside from that, Ginny’s messy end works incredibly well with this larger thematic exploration of monsters & morality Season 4B has been exploring. Because Ginny’s culpability in Doug’s murders isn’t black and white. She may be hiding behind Doug’s wishes and his disease, or she may be genuine when she tells Wynonna she silenced her screams because she couldn’t stand to hear them when there’s nothing she could do. Wynonna seems to believe this is a lie, but it’s unclear if she would have made a different choice, that she would have spared Ginny’s life, even if she did believe the excuse.

“You gotta listen to the screams. You’ve got to look the cost of it in the eye, and tell it to go fuck itself,” Wynonna tells Ginny. Because this is the deal Wynonna seems to have made with herself, the line she has drawn in the sand, and you’ll notice it is very different from what happened with Hoyt Clayborn. She didn’t look Hoyt in the eye. She waited until his back was turned to shoot him, and she seems to think there is no coming back from that. She doesn’t believe she can be with Doc unless he falls down to the dregs of humanity alongside her. “Welcome to the moral low ground,” she tells Doc when she believes he has killed someone, so happy to have a companion once again because she is so damn lonely in her moral failure. But she doesn’t know how to ask for help; she only knows how to keep fighting. “The difference is that you have a way out,” Wynonna tells Ginny because she is so unpracticed at imagining a future for herself guided by self-compassion and forgiveness—these weren’t thinks her daddy taught her.

Meanwhile, Nicole is finally able to face her own ghosts—and I’m (mostly) not talking about that chicken-kicking video. It’s fitting that this episode begins with Wynonna and Nicole doing some friendly sparring because the two mirror one another in some interesting ways in “Crazy.” The difference is: Nicole is much further along working through some of the issues holding her back. She is able to look Doc in the eye and be honest about the mindset that led to making a deal with Margo Clanton, trading Waverly’s safe return for Doc. She admits that she was scared, and she thought Doc would be able to get out of whatever the Clantons had in store for him. She doesn’t say she regrets it because that would probably be a lie—she had to be sure that Waverly would come home—but she listens when Doc rebuts and she apologizes. More importantly, she faces it… and herself.

In the process, she reclaims the town sheriff position. (The democratic process has really fallen by the wayside in Purgatory, huh?) It’s hard for me to get behind Nicole’s return to the uniform as anything other than a plot point driven by characterization. If this series has a major narrative flaw, it’s the lack of specificity in its small town setting. As someone who grew up in the middle of nowhere, I’m always on the lookout for more authentic representations of rural life, and Purgatory is not it. (Though it does get winter right—for obvious reasons.) That being said, I don’t need Purgatory to be authentic, but I do need the setting to have, for want of a better phrase, better character continuity. Wynonna Earp seems to want Purgatory to have a sense of place, but it’s been incredibly erratic, from season to season and sometimes from episode to episode. That someone could live in this town and not know that Doc is a hundreds-year-old vampire or that Waverly is an angel is unlikely. The memory-altering fog hasn’t made it to town… yet.

Speaking of which, Ginny tells Wynonna: “I can stop what’s coming,” implying that yet another Big Bad is on the way—presumably, Eve, whom we haven’t seen since the beginning of the season. It’s too soon to tell and not as much fun to dwell on as other aspects of this meaty scene. We’ve discussed much of it, but not the fact that Wynonna is offered Ginny’s power and seemingly easily refuses. And that’s one of the things that sets Wynonna apart from the villain she is so afraid she has become. Villainy is using the power you have to hurt other people for the sake of securing and/or accumulating that power. It’s what Doug was doing when he started eating people’s brains. (Although that analysis is complicated by the fact that Doug seemed to have some kind of mental illness?) Wynonna has only ever used her power to try to protect others.

The question then becomes: what was Wynonna’s choice to kill Hoyt if not villainy? Is shooting someone in the back to keep them from potentially hurting your family an act of securing power? Does it matter what we call it? Should any one person have the right to decide which demon lives and which demon dies? Wynonna is obviously wrestling with these questions, even if she is unable to articulate them in any real way to herself or her loved ones. The closest she gets is in her conversation with Ginny—a “safe” space to express her feelings as Ginny is about to take them to her grave or hell or wherever she is about to end up. “I get it. I’m poison too,” Wynonna tells Ginny, equating herself with someone who just helped a man slaughter multiple innocent people. It’s yet another sign of just how poorly Wynonna thinks of herself these days, and just how dark this show can get in an episode that also involves another character delightfully yelling “Kristi Yamaguchi!” to a crowded bar.

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Additional thoughts.

It’s telling how cult-like and obsessive people can get about trivia irl that it took. meso long. to realize that everyone in town was under the influence of Doug’s wish.

“I never want you to blunt your ambition… it’s one of the things that makes you you.”

“I got you back. That’s my happy.”

Doc is surprisingly good at pop culture trivia.

“I must remain in this battle to prove that it is I who has the ideal brain.”

Maybe Purgatory should come up with an alternate model of local law enforcement?

I loved the multiple convos between Nicole and Rachel—a reminder that these two spent a lot of time together as family when Waverly, Wynonna, and Doc were in The Garden.

Doc has minions now.

“God damn law enforcement.” “The gun does tend to go to their head.”

“That means our beautiful cowboy is in the clear.”

Jeremy’s a really bad coroner, huh? He didn’t notice that those corpses have no brains.

Jeremy and Waverly get to make a murderboard!

Weather facts!

Wynonna: I won’t leave your side. Wynonna: *immediately leaves Ginny’s side*

“Random trivia is not an accurate way to judge intelligence.” Scream this from the rooftops. But also I love trivia.

“Well, now I love trivia… and you. In that order.”

What did the Clantons want with Doc? I assumed Margo just wanted to, you know, torture him then kill him, but the fact that Season 4B made a point of bringing this up again makes me think it’s more complex than that.

“The badge alone does not give the authority.” Doc demonstrates his peptalk superpower yet again.

Anyone else miss iZombie while watching this episode?

The gap between real-life cops and TV cops is so broad.

The post Wynonna Earp Season 4 Episode 9 Review: Crazy appeared first on Den of Geek.

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creative-type · 7 years ago

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The Problem with the Chunin Exams

Though I didn’t know it at the time, Naruto was my first anime and my first anime love. I was exposed to it through the American dub as a kid without realizing it was Japanese or based on a comic. In my defense, this was before we had internet at my house, and at best I was only able to watch it every other weekend because my dad had cable and my mom didn’t.

I dropped the anime when it started into filler hell and switched over to the manga in high school. I started at the timeskip and caught up to the weekly release around the Naruto-Kakuzu fight. Over the years I grew dissatisfied with the story, though I don’t really have a single moment where I gave up on it entirely. There was a slow decrease in excitement, going from eagerly waiting for the latest spoilers, to reading each chapter as they released, to dropping the manga entirely, and only picking it up again to see the final arc through and being incredibly frustrated with the finale, wondering week to week just where things went wrong.

All this to say, I’m not writing this as a hater. I loved Naruto like I love precious few stories, and though I don’t feel that way now doesn’t stop the series from holding a special place in my childhood. I reread the first 87 chapters to prepare for this - seeing many of them in the manga for the first time - and what I read reinforced what I’ve thought for a long time:

The Chunin Exam arc occurred too early in the series. My reasoning is under the cut, but be warned that long post is long. I regret nothing.

I don’t want this post to turn into a Naruto bash-fest to make One Piece look better in comparison, but in my analysis of the build up to the Arlong Park arc, one of the points I tried to make was that by letting the series build organically to an emotional peak tho “big moments” don’t feel cheap and are much more powerful to the reader.

Naruto starts much faster than One Piece does. It establishes Naruto as a character, introduces Team 7, and gets through the Wave Mission arc by chapter 33. In comparison, chapter 33 for One Piece was the middle of Usopp’s recruitment arc and had yet to have the series’s first, for lack of a better term, epic moments.

The problem for Naruto is that the Chunin Exam arc starts in chapter 34 with the introduction of the Sand Siblings. There’s no time to wind back down, no time for the audience to catch its breath, and no time to explore some of the milestones that were made in the Land of Waves.

And I’m not just talking power ups here, although that would be nice. There are several emotional significant moments for several different characters that are left hanging. I think the most obvious is Sasuke, so we’ll start with him

Team Seven’s Lost Development

Sasuke has a ton of focus even in these early chapters before the Uchia’s took over the plot, and I think it would be fair to say that Naruto and Sasuke are less main character and rival and more deuteragonists with branching stories that interconnect at key points of their lives.

This is taken from when Sasuke saves Naruto from Haku during the climax of the arc. Note the past tense. At this point in time, Sasuke no longer hates Naruto. Through the whole Wave arc there have been moments showing the evolution from Naruto and Sasuke’s relationship from a bitter one-sided rivalry into them actually acting like teammates. The Naruto-Saskuke dynamic is arguably the most important thing in the entire series, and the audience can’t be expected to believe later on that they have this super strong friendship without scenes like this.

Then immediately after the Wave arc we get this

The relationship has soured once more. Sakua even says a few pages later that their relationship is worse than it was before the mission.

I don’t call shenanigans on scenes like this because Naruto and Sasuke are both emotionally stunted orphans unused to interpersonal relationships. There’s a good chance that they don’t know how they’re supposed to react after going through such an emotional life or death scenario.

However, I can and will call shenanigans on events like the Valley of the End or the entirety of Part II because the author never shows Naruto and Sasuke growing beyond this petty antagonism. Instead of being written as two outcasts regressing to avoid dealing with the feels of the Wave arc, the Naruto-Sasuke dynamic stinks of sticking to the status quo.

Sasuke and Naruto aren’t the only ones hit with this, but I tend to give Sakura more of a pass because her character growth happens during the Exams. There are several little hints of Sakura’s increasing awareness of how far behind she is from the boys sprinkled throughout to early exam chapters before hitting the bulk of her character arc during the Forest of Death. There’s even a nice little moment during the written exam where she actually considers someone other than Sasuke for what feels like the first time in the series

The problem here is that this development isn’t given enough set up. I would trade six panels of Sasuke looking cool to see just one interaction between Sakura and her parents. It is absolutely abysmal character writing that we learn about Sakura’s former friendship with Ino from Shikimaru and their rivalry from a freaking info box

Why did Sakura become a ninja? What do her civilian parents think about her being in life-threatening situations as a 12 year old girl? How does she feel about being the only (besides Naruto, as far as she knows) to graduate without a bloodline or family jutsu? What’s the deal with her “Inner Sakura”, is she just repressed, or is there some sort of split personality going on there? Does she have a crush on Sasuke for any reason other than his alleged cuteness? Why didn’t she ever apologize to Naruto for saying that she was jealous he was an orphan, even though he wasn’t present at the time?

Whether intentional or not, Kishimoto made Sakura a very unlikable character early on. I for one remember despising her when first watching the series. And you know what, that’s okay. Each member of Team 7 has enormous personality flaws, and having them slowly overcome said flaws makes for a strong narrative.

The thing is, it takes more time to develop an unsympathetic character than it does one who is sympathetic, and Sakura gets the least character development out of all Team 7 (Kakashi included). This is exacerbated by the fact that she is physically the weakest and does the least during fights - a huge flaw for a main character in a battle manga to have.

Lastly, Sakura’s greatest assets - her intelligence and superior chakra control - are rarely presented as useful. In fact, during her fight with Ino she falls into a basic trap, and the only thing that saves Sakura is her willpower...split personality...whatever the Inner Sakura is. It’s not really made clear and never shows up again.

And speaking of ignored plot points, remember this?

Do you remember Kakashi’s reaction to the possible weakening of the seal keeping in the Nine-Tailed Fox? You know, the innately evil demon monster that can level mountains with just one of its tails?

Yeah, that never gets addressed before the Chunin Exams.

Sakura and Sasuke have an excuse because they didn’t actually see Naruto, but Kakashi is never shown pulling Naruto aside and asking him what happened or taking steps to keep it from happening again. Naruto - the Leaf Village’s Number 1 loudmouth ninja - never asks what happened or is worried that he might lose control to a monster.

Also recall that Naruto decides on his Ninja Way during the Wave arc, yelling it out for everyone to hear because of how upset he was about having to fight and nearly kill someone he liked. This clashes with the current system, a fact Kakashi points out, but Kakashi doesn’t warn Naruto about the potential dangers of this line of thinking, nor are the ramifications of having kids act as child soldiers ever explored.

It’s things like this that make the time taken between major arcs so, so, so important. Not only does it give the characters (and audience) time to process what happened, but quiet moments can lead to incredible character growth, or at least set up later growth that in turn becomes more powerful and realistic because it was properly set up to begin with.

Establishing Secondary Characters

When rereading the primaries for the third round of the exams, three fights stick out as carrying the most emotional weight: Rock Lee vs Gaara, Hinata vs Neji, and Sakura vs Ino.

I’ve already touched on the travesty of the Sakura-Ino rivalry, and while Rock Lee was also introduced during the exams, his motivation and character were established pretty well during the early parts of the arc.

That leaves us with Hinata vs Neji (and later on Naruto vs Neji). Now, out of the Leave genin introduced during the exams, only Ino and Hinata have any real connection to Team 7, and considering Hinata’s place as possible love interest to the main character, she’s arguably the most important to the narrative. Not that she’s ever treated that way, but I digress. Her wholehearted, albeit silent, support for Naruto sets her apart from almost every other character thus far, and her timid, gentle nature is a nice contrast to, well, almost every other character thus far.

(In case it’s not apparent, I really enjoyed Hinata in Part I. I’ll try to keep my bias to a minimum)

In addition, Hinata brings a nice spin on the “hard work trumps natural talent” theme that at this point was important to the story. Unlike Rock Lee and Naruto who (supposedly) are neither talented nor from powerful families, Hinata is a character from a powerful family who has no talent, and has to work past her weakness and overcome the burden of being the heir of one of Konoha’s most prominent families.

We learn none of this until her fight with Neji.

Time is an integral part of tension, and previously establishing conflict would go a long way in getting rid of some of the more awkward exposition dumps. For the Hinata-Neji fight Kishimoto has to explain 1) the byakugan 2) the gentle fist style 3) chakra points 4) how Neji and Hinata are related 5) Hinata’s struggle to better herself and 6) Neji hatred of the main house/fatalist mindset.

That is a ton of information to try to get across in a short period of time, and this isn’t an isolated thing. These mega info dumps aren’t quite as pronounced during Rock Lee and Sakura’s fights, but they’re certainly there. To be fair, it can be hard to convey to the reader what’s going on without some kind of commentator character, but nothing kills the flow of a fight by cutting away from it constantly.

Lastly - and this is again pulling back and looking at the series as a whole - Hinata is basically ignored after this fight, so whatever character development she gets is lessened because there’s no followup.

To be fair, I am just talking about Hinata in this instance. Neji goes through significant growth during the rest of Part I before being mostly ignored in Part II. Because of her injuries Hinata a non-factor during the invasion, and obviously she wasn’t picked to recruit Tsunde or retrieve Sasuke.

This lack of focus has the unfortunate side effect of making the Hinata-Neji fight nothing more than a reason to hype the Naruto-Neji fight. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with hype, and in fact it’s necessary when looking at the arc as a whole. At the same time, it’s also clear Kishi had no idea how to handle the ensemble cast he’d created during the exams.

This mishandling of secondary characters becomes an even bigger issue during Part II, when Shikimaru becomes the only one of the former rookies to get any sort of character focus. Hinata is a favorite of mine, but I don’t buy her love confession anymore than I do Sakura’s, because she’s never seen interacting with Naruto. She is in love with the idea of who she thinks he is (much like Sakura and Sasuke, to be honest. Maybe Kishi should just stay away from romantic subplots.)

I mean, it’s well over 100 chapters before Hinata’s confession is even addressed in canon. I don’t think they have a word for how terrible that kind of writing is.

Fixing the Problem of the Chunin Exams

It can be almost impossible to have “slow” chapters while trying stay up in Shonen Jump’s popularity polls, and I don’t envy the mangaka trying to plan their manga under crushing schedule of weekly serialization, but using the power of retrospect, this is how I would have gone about fixing the problem of the chunin exams.

Firstly, I would have had at least a few of the other rookies be present in the first chapters. Ino would have been a good one to slip in the background when introducing Sakura.

Secondly, I would show the entire rescue the Fire Lady’s cat mission. This might seem stupid, but it would give a baseline for Team 7′s teamwork ability, and give Sakura a chance to show off her brain. For example, Naruto and/or Sasuke could attempt a simple henge only for Sakura to tell them that a cat will still be able to smell them. Something simple like that to establish she’s not absolutely useless.

Thirdly, during the Wave arc I would have Kakashi assign Sakura alternate training, planting the first seed of how far behind the boys she is in terms of ability. This could be anything from working on a jutsu to practicing infiltration to being responsible for setting up booby traps around the house for protection (which would not only make her immediately useful in the Wave arc, but be a nice call forward to the traps she sets during the Forest of Death).

I’d have Team 7 run into Asuma, Ino, Choji, and Shikimaru upon returning from Wave, introducing the concept of the Rookie 9 and Sakura’s rivalry. I would also have Naruto ask Sasuke if they want to train together sometime. In this scenario Sasuke reluctantly agrees, but during the training Naruto asks who Sasuke’s brother is and why Sasuke would want to kill him. This goes about as well as can be expected, thus souring their relationship into the canon state I pointed out earlier.

Forced to train alone, Naruto runs across Hinata working on her taijutsu after Kiba and Shino have gone home for the night. I don’t know if Hinata’s shyness would let her speak in such a situation, but Naruto sees how hard she’s training and tells her to keep up the good work.

Alternately

Team 7 could run across Team Gai at some point, and the audience is introduced to Kakashi and Gai’s rivalry. The Sasuke vs Lee fight from the exams is moved here, while Neji acts like enough of a douche for Naruto to hate him on principle. I kind of like the idea of Sasuke respecting Lee for working to beat someone stronger than he is, which would give Sasuke an added anchor to the village outside of Naruto (for added tragedy when he defects/humanizing him in the present) and give another reason for Lee to chase after Sasuke later in the series.

I would also put a scene where Kakashi asks Naruto about what happened when the seal weakened and/or telling the Hokage about the fox. This would also be a good time for Naruto to first contemplate telling Sakura and Sasuke that he’s a vessel for the fox.

No matter what happened, I would do a repeat of the team’s first cat mission just to show off how far our band of lovable ninjas has come.

Lastly, when Kakashi hands out the application for the exams I would have Sakura talk to her parents about it, or at the very least get their reaction. It would not only give Sakura greater depth but also be a good chance for some world building.

All of this could be done in a chapter or two and without breaking the flow to the exams. Hell, Kishi could have sent them on another C Ranked mission to another country and get in some sorely-needed world building and set up some of the political side of the chunin exams. The possibilities are endless.

In Conclusion

The older I get, the more convinced I become that it’s the stuff that goes on between major story beats that’s most important when developing a story’s emotional tone. It’s a little thing, but it gives a story depth. Unfortunately, it’s a thing that Kishimoto failed to do, and it’s a flaw that only worsened as time went on.

Agree of disagree, thanks for taking the time to read the ramblings of a disenchanted fan. Going over these early chapters reminded me of how good early Naruto was, flaws and all. I don’t regret all the time I’ve put into this series over the years regardless of the omnishambles it turned out to be.

But hey, at least there’s fanfiction.

#naruto #analysis #manga #Sasuke #Sakura #Hinata #Writing #Kakashi #creative-type analyzes

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dhivehi · 7 years ago

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‘A Sphere of Symbols’: Thor Heyerdahl’s Maldive Mystery

The Maldive Mystery has been heavily criticized for historical inaccuracies in its treatment of the culture and people of the Maldives. However, as Jonathan Guilford attests, Heyerdahl’s book remains acutely powerful because of its ability to meld history and legend, truth and fiction.

‘La tua beltà – chissà averla che impegno – ardendo nell’ampolla se ne va: volevo solo dire ‘beltà’.’

‘Your beauty – who knows what duty in having it – flaring in the phial it leaves: I wanted only to say ‘beauty’.’

-Andrea Zanzotto, ‘Ampolla (cisti) e fuori’, from La Beltà

Norwegian ethnographer, Thor Heyerdahl, is not known for being a good historian. This is evident from a quick Google search; sifting through the results pulls up the words such as ‘mistakes’, ‘incorrect’ and ‘wrong’ in connection with Heyerdahl. However, these inaccuracies are irrelevant when one assesses the enjoyment his writing evokes.

To demand that the reader form their opinion of Heyerdahl’s work in line with the truth of history – did Sri Lankans arrive in the Maldives en masse? Did a sun cult precede a Buddhist population that preceded the present-day Muslim society? – is to demand that the layman subscribe to a particular specialist’s code of ethics, and shun everything that falls outside it. This is too much to ask, especially when Heyerdahl’s The Maldive Mystery is such a completely joyous experience.

Theroux compared Heyerdahl to a ‘hack writer of detective stories’. There is some truth to that, and the author revels in the cheapness of his narrative. The Maldive Mystery is a chronicle of his time spent in the Maldives, unearthing various relics and trying to piece together the islands’ pre-Muslim history. It is also patterned after clichéd detective stories; only, instead of a hysterical broad on the other end of a phone, we have a mysterious photo from a colleague appearing in the mail. Instead of a washed-up private detective narrating to us through his last few sips of bourbon, we have Heyerdahl staring at a ceiling fan and admitting his ‘embarrassment’ at being so woefully unprepared for the task ahead. Throughout the book, as in a detective novel, everything is a key to be fitted in a lock: individual elements return again and again, a distinctive type of masonry referred to as ‘fingerprint masonry’, the stupas dotted around the islands, the iconography of the sun – just as the same clues are pieced together by a brilliant investigator in a myriad of different ways as elements enter and leave his novel’s web of relationships.

Some sections of The Maldive Mystery even begin to feel like cliches from genres not yet invented: the rapid-fire coffee-table chat that closes the book, during which various members of the expedition to the islands generously explain the answer to all riddles as they complete each others’ sentences. It has the feel of a hyper-stylized, faux-nostalgic director like Quentin Tarantino.

The ready availability of this library of cliches to the reader of today, in the new millennium, makes Heyerdahl’s book all the more gratifying. This received narrative, pre-packaged, lends logic and integrity to the author’s writing which gives the reader a firm grip on it. This is utterly necessary when the reader reaches the final 100 pages, where The Maldive Mystery transforms from an amusing travelogue into something much more interesting.

To approach The Maldive Mystery from a different perspective, let us look at Jorge Luis Borges‘ essay Forms of a Legend – which explores various retellings of a story about the Buddha: ‘The chronology of India is unreliable; my erudition is even more so; Koeppen and Herman Beckh are perhaps as fallible as the compiler who has attempted this note; it would not surprise if my history of the legend was itself legendary, formed of substantial truth and accidental errors.’ It recalls a fragment of his To Leopold Lugones, published in the collection Dreamtigers, in which accidents of historical reconstruction place Borges in the same time and place as another man: a dead man. What is clear here is Borges’ sense of peace in the fluidity of history: that the legendary is not something to be judged by the historian’s ethic, exemplified by Theroux; instead it should be remarked upon, enjoyed, and, even if only privately, longed for. The legendary is the natural evolution of linguistic relationships: in that fragment, Borges references the dissolution of ‘water in water’. The reshaping of connections between linguistic objects – in these cases ‘Borges’ and ‘Leopold’ – are nothing but the rotation of a ‘sphere of symbols’.

We are treading closely here to the current of post-structuralism, of Derrida and of the myths of ‘time’ and ‘history’, and the contingency and arbitrariness of any claim to ‘truth’. We don’t have to go so far into a movement that quickly began to take itself far too seriously, however, to find an expression of the joy that one can find in Thor Heyerdahl’s book. Andrea Zanzotto, an Italian poet, who is typically considered part of the post-structuralism current – even if many of his contentions place him firmly outside it – illustrates this joy perfectly well in his collection La Beltà. Derridean deferral, in which meaning is endlessly coursing through the network of language with no clear ending point, becomes a sort of game in this collection, teasing the reader, staying always ‘più in là’ (‘further ahead’). That lightning-bolt, that is where joy is: to witness the explosion of language, to trace the currents of its flow, to dance in the sphere of symbols.

Watch a short book review on Thor Heyerdahl‘s Maldive Mystery below:

‘The last king was made a sultan by a pious foreigner who came by sea and started local history.’

Heyerdahl has incredible facility with his prose, and this sentence is as perfect as anything written by the masters. It repeats the motif of the author’s obsessions: the sea, the currents, the diaspora, the oral tradition. He sees himself as the reverse of this initial Muslim traveler who peacefully converted the Maldivian way of life and set about eradicating traces of the islands’ former society. The operation is the linguistic equivalent of Heyerdahl’s famous Kon-Tiki expedition, in which the author successfully navigated the open seas on a primitive raft to prove that humans of pre-history were capable of migrating across the oceans. In The Maldive Mystery, he is building new rafts: assertions about linguistic coincidences, tales of conversations with museum curators, explanations of ancient trade routes in precious shells. With these rafts he crosses the world, bringing influence from and to a vast number of countries, jumping through impossibly remote relationships between disparate pieces of evidence, connecting everywhere to the Maldives, a nation that becomes nothing but another realm in the sphere of symbols, while the reader, almost in stupefaction, can do nothing but sit back and laugh at the hilarious exuberance of it all.

By Jonathan Guilford

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saragolakthesis · 7 years ago

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Case Study

Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared // Web Series // March 2015 // Episode 4

DHMIS is a British animated surreal horror comedy web series created by filmmakers Becky Sloan and Joseph Pelling that first appeared online in 2011. The goal of the series is to comment on children’s television and learning, particularly in Britain. The intended audience of the series is teens and young adults of middle-class but, can be misinterpreted for young children at first glance. When the narrative of the series begins, it is clear that there is a deeper and darker message behind everything and thus, not suitable for younger audiences to watch. According to The Film Theorists, the context of the work is, “ultimately a parable for the loss of control that artists trade off when they work on bigger screens”. Their messages are manipulated and their morals are poisoned by others with ulterior motives. Thus, it addresses the negative influence of media on youth in terms of kid shows and manipulation. Each episode is only several minutes long that uses puppets as actors. For this case study, I will be focusing on Episode #4 entitled, Afternoon of the series as it is most relevant to my topic, directly dealing with the internet and technology. Each episode however, forms into one piece as the entire narrative takes place on the same day, but at different times of the day.

Analysis of Events

1. Question Fun

The episode begins with three puppets, Red Guy, Yellow Guy, and Duck, representing cast members from an ‘educational’ show for children. They are shown playing a board game called ‘Question Fun’ and the Red Guy chooses a card that asks, “What is the biggest thing in the world?” Looking at the details around the room, the viewer can see a calendar hanging on the wall with June 19th as the date, various wall decorations usually depicting an animal, and skill-based activities such as a bookshelf, a globe, and a math timetable poster. In addition, in terms of colour, the image of the room is very dull, boring, and uses mainly primary hues. Moreover, this scene questions the concept of ‘fun’ which is something that is never thought about in my experience. As Red Guy reads the question, he and his friends are unsure of the answer thinking, “if only there was a way to learn more about the world” thus, they turn their attention towards the globe for help. The globe spins around as a personified item with a face that is about to educate the puppets about the world, however a computer suddenly appears into the scene from behind and disrupts their attention from the globe. This expresses the notion that technology distracts users from finding answers with the resources that are available around them, for as mentioned before, the room is filled with other means of access to knowledge.

2. Digital Mind

The computer starts to sing a song that goes along the lines of, “im a computer…I would like to show you inside my digital life, inside my mind there is a digital mind”. I believe it expresses the notion that the user behind the computer is the mind inside the computer as people can be seen as functioning with the mind of a computer, hence being absent from the physical world with digital thinking space. The Red Guy asks the computer his question, thus choosing digital information rather than to look at the globe. However, his question gets interrupted as the computer sings about how wonderful he is for, “im very clever…I tell you the time, help you find something your wanting to find…you can do it all digitally”. During the song, the items that are mentioned are shown in a pixelated/bit-map style. The style used to portray the images relates to the concept of the online interface design. Also, a newspaper is shown on the table entitled ‘OPINOIN’ which is misspelled and the computer holds a magnifying glass over the news that is replaced with an image of oats. This expresses how useful information is replaced with ideas that are meaningless and pointless. Furthermore, as the computer continues to sing, the viewer can hear that auto tune is involved, expressing how people rely on these technologies for everything. I should also mention that the computer has hands that are usually mouse cursors. Furthermore, the word ‘Digitally’ is emphasized from the song as the word itself appears across the screen through a glitching process in a pixelated font. As the song wraps up, the Red Guy points out the fact that they already have a computer, showing a laptop placed near the globe slowly opening. This valuable piece of information had been cropped out of the scenes until this very moment. It expresses that even though the puppets were aware they had a computer, they did not seek it first for information.

3. Information

The computer mentions that, “before we begin our journey, I just need to get some information from you. What’s your name? Where do you live? What do you like to eat?” At this time, it shows the personal questions being printed out from the computer, with the icons and type on the paper in a pixelated style. The puppets immediately answer the computer with their personal information without taking the moment to think about what is being asked of them. This expresses the notion how users are willing to give up their information, especially when signing up for a new website or when starting up a new computer. The computer continues to ask a few other questions, but the Red Guy slowly begins to feel overwhelmed and irritated that he hits the keyboard and tells the computer to essential be quiet. The computer becomes incredibly angered by this and everything in the physical space begins to glitch. The puppets are suddenly transported into the digital world.

4. Digital World

The puppets transform from something tactile into a digitized representation of the self. The computer leads the puppets in an orderly line on a checkered path singing, “Welcome to my digital home! Everything made out of numbers and code!” The computer is suddenly seen with wires as legs, towering over the puppets in relation to height, depicting the notion of control over its users. Throughout the transition, a series of glitched and 3D graphics are shown of items that are floating around with large, googly eyes, looking directly at the puppets as they walk. The Digital world appears to be over-saturated, interesting and engaging unlike the ‘real’ world. The Yellow Guy is confused with what is happening as he questions, “If im sitting at home, but im inside the screen?” The computer answers, “but your not you, you’re your digital you, virtually real whose controlled by real you”. However, the puppets are not using any tools, such as a mouse, to control their virtual selves, so who is really controlling them? The Red Guy begins to show interest in this new world and asks, “in this digital world, what can we do?” The computer offers that, “there are over 3 things to do” showing only a bar graph that symbolizes information, digital style that symbolizes the need to keep up with the trends, and digital dancing that symbolizes entertainment. These words are replayed over and over and each puppet that opened their own door finds something new. The sequence gradually gets faster and the music also speeds up in the background. Everything at this point becomes dark and creepy as the Yellow Guy opens a door to no information, while the Duck’s design style becomes more realistic, and the Red Guy sees more people joining in on the dance. This moment shows how users are distracted by other things that the internet has to offer, such as fashion or entertainment that appear to look more realistic, resulting to the user not finding useful information in the end.

5. Physical World

The scene is shown back in the ‘real world’, however the Red Guy is sitting alone in front of the computer screen attempting to pull himself away and shut off the system. The two other puppets seem to have ceased to exist in the real world physically and are thus, portrayed as creepy pixelated holograms. This expresses the notion that the digital world is trying to create a presence in the real world. At this time, the digital world is shown in a chaotic state as it is glitching uncontrollably during a party. Behind all the ‘digital dancing’ there is a large glowing computer screen that can be seen as a symbol of control with wires exposed from the bottom in which link to the main puppets as some sort of binding chain. The Red Guy notices a plug that stretches from the room and under a door leading to another room. This door can be seen as the divide between the real and digital world as the Red Guy opens it both in the digital scene and in reality. When the door opens, the viewer is shown the backstage of the ‘set’ of the series that is supposed to resemble the room that the episode starts off in. In this room, there is a camera shown with the same large eyes as seen on previous items, which in this case, are constantly ‘rolling’, implying how everything is being recorded. The space is deprived of color and the puppet actors are revealed to be random props, such as a mop or a box of oats. In addition, the design of the room is expressed in an illustrative, amateur style along with handwritten type. Suddenly, a person in white appears from behind the props, holding one of them in one hand, hence expressing the figure that manipulates all the objects behind the scenes. The episode concludes with another figure in black entering in front of the screen with a clapperboard to wrap up the scene. The Red Guy realizes that he was not living in reality and that there were people controlling what he thought was ‘his own free actions’.

Conclusion

Episode 4 of the series is all about computers and how it can teach us about the world, but in the end, the message gets corrupted and it concludes that in the digital world, people end up doing frivolous things like fashion and mindless entertainments. The episode conveys how users are initially getting sucked into digital technology and become distracted with superficial things rather than information they were looking for in the first place. For instance, the question asked at the beginning of the episode was never directly answered by the computer that it is in fact the digital world, but throughout the episode, the red puppet is seen resisting the influence and manipulative behaviour of the computer. It tells the viewer how technology is changing people, distracting us from our goals, taking our personal information, and appearing as something that looks very real, hence confusing the distinction between what is real and what is not. Hence, the theme is how lessons can either fail or succeed in ‘educating’ – brainwashing a specific view onto a person. More specifically, how T.V. shows are not educating kids, but are focused on making money instead. According to The Film Theorists the date June 19th is a time when stock markets reached record highs all over the world, but it was also a time when television was a huge deal in Britain. The internet can thus, be a dark place where things go creepy and too digital, however the episode ‘Afternoon’ teaches the viewer a lesson on a worthwhile topic of digital technology.

This related work is relevant as it uses design elements to portray a sense of the ‘digital’ such as pixelated imagery/text, along with extreme glitch transitions. In addition, the work is thought-provoking, educating the viewer through critical thinking about their own self and how they can relate to what is being shown to them. Other design methods such as pattern, personification, and colour are also used with intent in the series to express a specific message of symbolic meaning of the action taking place. Everything that is seen on the ‘set’ is there for a purpose, linking one idea to another to create a more sinister outlook of the issue at hand. Moreover, the entire concept of the video highlights key points that I wish to bring awareness to within my own project. This includes the notion of surveillance and how the digital world attempts to overpower the physical world with its ideologies and intelligence. This take on the internet reveals the dark qualities that come with it, as they are undermined and hidden from the user by showcasing only its best attributes. Hence, it underlines how the innocence of a digital environment can be so easily corrupted when it begins to blur the distinction with reality.

#DEFINING TOPIC

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