#it makes the concept a lot more approachable and understandable and less fucking alienating to the people who

[cascadianights]

I've been trying to put this into words for a While now

I think a big reason a lot of white people have an issue with acknowledging their very real Privilege (beyond the obvious) is that... ok, its the presence of benefits and perks & the absence of barriers and obstacles. But the default assumption of white privilege, of what those benefits or obstacles ARE, is essentially the archetype of a WASP - generally a male one too. This nebulous, theoretical group of perks & lack of barriers that people often present as white privilege (when in reality then tend to be talking about CLASS) fails to capture the lived reality of a VAST, HUGE majority of poor white people.

They're going to be hostile to the idea that they had opportunities to advance in the workplace that others didn't, when they worked the same shit job at the mill their entire short life. The idea that they had alumni family to help secure them a good spot at a college their parents paid for, rather than being the first person in their family to go to even community college just to have to drop out and take care of siblings. The idea that they lived life with financial and food stability, when they grew up in a family of 8 siblings having a slice of bread each for breakfast and lunch because their mom couldn't access birth control and their dad was an abusive drunk. These aren't theoretical exceptions! This isn't the minority of white people, this is the reality for MILLIONS of people!!

There are absolutely things that apply across the board when talking about white privilege - situations a white person will never face because they are white, that a black person will face because they are black. But is that divide, based on race instead of assumptions about class, really the image conjured by/for many people when we talk about white privilege now? Especially in current liberal circles, where any level of privilege can be used to discredit and dismiss someone's reality - to declare them exempt from a huge swath of dangers, and benefit to a theoretical upper class lifestyle of relative ease. The logic follows that if the speaker is white, or white-passing, much about their life can be assumed and much can be written off that they could not possibly understand or have experienced - they must out and offer another aspect of their identity (disabled, queer, fat, etc) to show they have any right to speak on marginalization. Being white protects you around cops, until the moment you're dirt poor, or disabled, or visibly trans, or just the right queer body they were looking to teach a lesson to that night. Being white protects you in our current government, until you're a felon with no vote, or a disabled person declared unfit to make your own decisions and sterilized.

All this to say, liberals cannot keep clinging to the idea & narrative that white equals automatic access to a huge amount of privileges and protections that are actually Hugely reliant on class and a lack of intersecting identities. Dirt poor people who hear "white privilege" used almost exclusively to describe WASPS, from the mouths of the Liberal Left who have ignored the plight of the rural poor for decades, who are ACTIVELY making jokes about stupid southerners and how we should just cut off parts of the country and let them drown, will not result in them listening! They will not go self introspect about their own biases! They will not look up the real nuances of white privilege and class privilege and how those are linked but not inextricably. They will not think about how to eliminate barriers and create opportunities for other people. They WILL be further alienated from the left and being able to actually look into their very real privilege in the future though!!

[greenlikethesea]

GREENIEEEE I actually REALLY wanna hear your thoughts on why folie a deux is objectively the best fall out boy album LIKE I AGREE but i wanna see what u have to say about it!!!!!

ohhhhhh man!!!!! okay! you asked for this! get ready! under the cut we go:

a bit of historical context: a lot of younger fans approaching this album nearly 15 years post release do not understand how badly it bombed. it was originally going to be released on election day 2008, but they pushed it back a month due to the historical significance of this particular election (imo, rightfully so). it was panned critically. the band went on hiatus two months after its release.

with the bulk of their discography currently (we have five grouped releases after this album, three albums and two eps, plus a number of collaborations and singles), it's easy to see where folie a deux came from. however, many casual listeners saw it as an extreme diversion from even the album beforehand, which in many people's eyes had expanded upon themes of their smash hit success from under the cork tree while, largely, staying safe. i do think a lot of people who have this opinion stopped listening to the album after "thnks fr th mmrs" but that's just me being a purist bitch about it all. moving onward.

folie a deux is brilliant because of the risk factor involved, lyrically and musically. this was wentz's first go at writing songs from a fictional perspective, which threw people. where's the personal anguish? where's the tumult? but he was (at the time) happily married and his wife was pregnant with their first child during the production period of this album, . so pete drew from his influences -- the beat movement, camus, sartre, his heavy involvement in local politics and the leftist hardcore scene prior to making it with the pop punk concept. shrew businessman, first and foremost. son of two lawyers.

(oh yeah, did y'all know he was one semester shy of graduating with a political science degree from depaul university before dropping out to pursue music full time? and that the only reason he exists is because his parents met while campaigning for joe biden's 1972 senatorial campaign? thanks joe biden for inventing pop punk.)

this pivot from vulnerability caused a kneejerk reaction in a lot of people who heavily related to the raw emotion of pete's prior lyricism, but i think it actually allowed him to be more open and honest about what he was going through in his personal life. by masking the alienation he felt, an emotional, sensitive boy ripped from a chicago suburb and suddenly a man whose foibles appeared in gossip rags daily -- and i mean daily, they were fucking HUGE in the mid aughts -- in fiction, he could actually discuss what we learned later was plaguing him. regret. addiction. depersonalization. a madness shared by two, but it's not pete and one singular person -- it's pete and his audience, this cult of people he accumulated who did not actually know him at all. a lot of the fanbases favorite lyrics, and indeed lyrics that have stood the test of time, are from this period of relative freedom for wentz.

on the music side of things, patrick (as well as joe and andy, but they were less involved in the process at the time -- which is a big factor that led to their initial split!) used this as an opportunity to explore his weirdest musical impulses. as evidenced by his solo work, patrick is not necessarily a punk/hardcore guy first -- his instincts are rooted in music genres that are largely dominated by Black artists, such as soul, r&b, and hip hop. he's truly a musician's musician, and with the money that came from their initial successes, he nabbed whoever the fuck he could. blondie, who makes west coast smoker a verified classic b-side? fuck yes. elvis costello, his hero who he named a son after eventually (declan, not elvis, he's not that cruel)? bring it. lil wayne, in what remains the greatest fob guest spot of all time, bar none? hell yeah, and it's going to be the only cameo anyone talks about.

folie a deux, aside from being a bold, beautiful piece of art, is an album that means a lot to me personally. i skipped half a school day my senior year of high school to test a shitty nokia phone for a chance at two free tickets to the record release show for folie a deux. and as i stood in the crowd, hearing songs they'd never played before for the first time to a crowd who didn't know what to make of it, i knew this was going to be special. and it was.

[idreamtofmanderleyagain]

Five years ago, the women on this site who treated me like trash over loving Labyrinth and shipping Jareth/Sarah were almost always obliviously consuming Radfem propaganda, or were out and out Radfems/Terfs themselves.

They were the types of people who casually threw the word “pedophile” around against grown women who shipped an adult Sarah with Jareth, aka literally one of the most popular ships for women in fandom for 30 years.

Pretty much invariably, these women had serious sex-negative anxieties, which included a severe paranoia about any and all kink and fetish, and porn in general. I saw a lot of shocking, fear-mongering propaganda surrounding sexual expression. Pretty much invariably, their method of approach involved immediate personal shock-value attacks on anyone they perceived to be “bad.”

Today, you can look at the way some people react to other popular so-called “problematic” ships and recognize the same toxic, fear-mongering rhetoric coming from women who consider themselves regular, trans-inclusive feminists. Sometimes it even manifests in the words of very well-meaning people (including myself here), who feel the need to talk about specific issues that pertain to their own experiences of trauma and oppression.

The people who shit on Labyrinth often seem to not really be able to comprehend that the Goblin King, like the film itself, is canonically a representation of a teen girl’s psyche, a soup of fears and anxieties and desires and dreams. He’s not a literal human adult preying on a literal child, and to read the film that way seriously undermines the entire point of the film. 

When I (and people of many fandoms) say “This is fiction, calm down,” I’m not just saying it’s not real so it cant hurt you and you can’t criticize me. I’m trying to call attention to what fiction actually is - artistic representations of feelings and experiences. The Goblin King is Sarah’s fiction. Therefore, he can be anything she or any woman who identifies with her wants him to be, including her lover when she’s grown and ready for such a thing.

I once took an alarming dive into Beetlejuice fandom to see what content was there (the cartoon was a favorite when I was little). Chillingly, what you’ll find is an extremely wounded fanbase, with a sharp divide between the older women who had long been shipping BJ/Lydia because of their love for the cartoon series (and whom were previously the vast majority of the Beetlejuice fandom), and a massive amount of young people riding the wave of the musical fad who had decided that the entire old school Beetlejuice fandom was populated by literal pedophiles. 

I saw death threats. Suicide baiting. Constant, constant toxic discourse. It did not matter how the BJ/Lydia fandom dealt with any particular issues that would exist in their ship, in fact I’m certain that the people abusing them cared very little to even consider if they were trying to handle it at all. The only thing that mattered was that they were disgusting subhuman scum asking for abuse. If you have at any time reblogged recent Beetlejuice fan art or content from fans of the musical, you have more than likely been engaging positively with the content of someone participating in toxic fandom behavior.

Nobody is really sticking up for them, either, as far as I saw. It’s really hard to imagine how painful it must be to have such a large group of people explode into into your relatively private fandom space to tell you that you are evil, vile, and deserve constant abuse, and also you are no longer allowed into the fandom space to engage in it’s content. But I think there’s something very alarming indeed about this happening specifically to the BJ fandom, and I’ll explain why. 

The pop-culture characterization of Beetlejuice, which is heavily influenced by the cartoon series to be clear, has always in my mind been a vaguely ageless being who matches with the psychological maturity of whatever age Lydia is supposed to be. He’s more or less like an imaginary friend, a manifestation of Lydia’s psyche. In fact, I would argue that i think most of us who grew up with the cartoon or it’s subsequent merchandizing before the musical ever existed probably internalized the idea as BJ and Lydia as this ageless, salt-and-pepper-shaker couple beloved by the goth community, similar to Gomez and Morticia. In each version of canon he may be a creepy ghost in the literal sense, but any adult who is capable of identifying literary tropes (even just subconciously) would read cartoon!BJ as an artistic representation of a socially awkward outcast girl’s inner world. Lydia’s darker dispositions and interests, which alienate her from most others, are freely accepted and embraced by her spooky magical friend. BJ/Lydia in the cartoon were depicted as best friends, but to my memory there was always an underlying sense that they had secret feelings for each other, which I identified easily even as a small child. In fact, their dynamic and behavior perfectly reflected the psychological development of the show’s target demographic. They are best friends who get into adventures and learning experiences together, who have delicate feelings for each other but lack any true adult romantic/sexual understanding to acknowledge those feelings, let alone pursue them.

Though I haven’t seen the Musical yet, I’ve read the wiki and I would argue that it embodies this exact same concept even more so for it’s own version of the characters, in that Beetlejuice specifically exists to help Lydia process her mother’s death.

This is not a complicated thing to recognize and comprehend whatsoever. In fact, it looks downright blatant. It’s also a clear indicator of what BJ/Lydia means to the women who have long loved it. It was a story about a spooky wierd girl being loved and accepted and understood for who she was, and it gave them a sense of solidarity. It makes perfect sense why those women would stick with those characters, and create a safe little space for themselves to and imagine their beloved characters growing and having adult lives and experiencing adult drama, in just the same ways that the women of the Labyrinth fandom do. That’s all these women were doing. And now, they can’t do it without facing intense verbal violence. That safe space is poisoned now.

Having grown up with the cartoon as one of my favorites and been around goth subculture stuff for decades, I was actually shocked and squicked at the original Beetlejuice film’s narrative once I actually saw it, because it was extremely divorced from what these two characters had evolved into for goth subculture and what they meant to me. It’s not telling the same story, and is in fact about the Maitland's specifically. In pretty much exactly the same way two different versions of Little Red Riding Hood can be extremely different from each other, the film is a different animal. While I imagine that the film version has been at the heart of a lot of this confused fear-mongering around all other versions of the characters, I would no more judge different adaptations of these characters any more than I would condemn a version of Little Red in which Red and the Wolf are best friends or lovers just because the very first iteration of LRRH was about protecting yourself from predators.

I would even argue that the people who have engaged in Anti-shipper behavior over BJ/Lydia are in intense denial over the fact that BJ being interested in Lydia, either as blatant predatory behavior a la the film or on a peer level as in the cartoon (and musical?) is an inextricable part of canon. Beetlejuice was always attracted to Lydia, and it was not always cute or amusing. Beetlejuice was not always a beloved buddy character, an in fact was originally written as a gross scumbag. That’s just what he was. Even people engaging with him now by writing OC girlfriends for him (as stand-ins for the salt-and-pepper-shaker space Lydia used to take up, because obviously that was part of the core fun of the characters), or just loving him as a character, are erasing parts of his character’s history in order to do so. They are actively refusing to be held responsible for being fans of new version of him despite the fact that he engaged in overt predatory behavior in the original film. In fact, I would venture to say that they are actively erasing the fact that Musical Beetliejuice tried to marry a teenager and as far as I’m aware, seemed to like the idea (because he’s probably a fucking figment of her imagination but go off I guess). The only reason they can have a version of this character who could be perceived as “buddy” material is because...the cartoon had an impact on our pop cultural perception of what the character and his dynamic with Lydia is. 

We can have a version of the Big Bad Wolf who’s a creepy monster. We can have a version who’s sweet and lovable. We can have a version that lives in the middle. We can have a version who’s a hybrid between Red and the Wolf (a la Ruby in OUAT). All of these things can exist in the same world, and can even be loved for different reasons by the same people.

I’ve been using Beetlejuice as an example here because it’s kind of perfect for my overall point regarding the toxic ideologies in fandom right now across many different spaces, including ones for progressive and queer media, and how much so many people don’t recognize how deeply they’ve been radicalized into literalist and sex-negative radfem rhetoric, to the point where we aren’t allowed to have difficult, messy explorations of imperfect, flawed humans, and that art is never going to be 100% pure and without flaw in it’s ability to convey what it wants to convey.

This includes the rhetoric I’ve seen across the board, from She-Ra to A:TLA to Star Wars to Lovecraft Country. We don’t talk about the inherent malleable, subjective, or charmingly imperfect nature of fiction any more. Transformation and reclamation are myths in this space. Everything is in rigid categories. It is seemingly very difficult for some of these people to engage with anything that is not able to be clearly labeled as one thing or another (see the inherent transphobic and biphobic elements of the most intense rhetoric). They destroy anything they cannot filter through their ideology. When women act in a way that breaks from their narrative of womanhood (like...not having a vagina), then those women must be condemned instead of understood. Anything that challenges them or makes them uncomfortable is a mortal sin. There is an extraordinary level of both hypocrisy and repressive denial that is underlying the behavior I’m seeing now. Much like toxic Christian conservatism, these people often are discovered engaging in the same behaviors and interests that they condemn behind closed doors (or just out of sheer cognitive dissonance). As an example, one of the people who talked shit to me about Labyrinth was a huge fan of Kill La Kill, which to my knowledge was an anime about a teenage girl in like, superpowered lingere (hence why I stayed the fuck away from that shit myself). Indeed, they even allow themselves plenty of leeway for behavior far worse than they condemn others for, and create support systems for the worst of their own abusers. 

Quite frankly, I’m tired. Instead of talking about theoretical problematic shit, we need to start talking about quantifiable harm. Because as far as I can tell, the most real, immediate, and quantifiable harm done because of anybody’s favorite ships or pieces of media seems to consistently be the kind that’s done to the people who experience verbal violence and abuse and manipulation and suicide baiting and death threats from the people who have a problem.

[flipflap-flipflap]

[Alright take-two on this damn post.  First one got eaten by post editor right as I was ready to post.  You see how long this is?  Save to drafts, kids.]

I’m here to shove a manga on you: Ookami Shounen Wa Kyou Mo Uso O Kasaneru (The Boy Who Cried Wolf Also Told a Lie Today).  It’s a gender bending romance.  Despite how awful that probably sounds, it’s actually really fucking good and I do not say that lightly. 

(No spoilers, this is all in the first chapter)  A high school boy insecure about his intimidating face, Itsuki, has fallen for a shy loner girl, Tokujira, who does not seem specifically phased by his naturally scary face.  So he takes a risk and confesses, but she turns him down brutally.  Itsuki goes to his sister to lament his insecurities about his face, which he (more or less correctly) attributes as why he can’t make connections.  To give him a new perspective on his appearance, his sister (trans btw) gives him a makeover while he’s sleeping and then kicks him to the curb of her salon - fully crossdressed.  On his way home, Itsuki (♀) ends up bumping into Tokujira, and she mistakes him for a boyish girl.  Under this misunderstanding, she asks "her” for a favor...

She has androphobia, and she has it bad.  So much so she can’t even look at men without snapping violently or becoming physically ill.  And Itsuki (♀) is just boyish enough to trigger her, but not enough to lock her down.  So she asks for “her” help, to see if she can desensitize herself to her phobia. Itsuki’s in a bind for a couple obvious reasons, not the least being the guilt of deceiving Tokujira. But nonetheless, he genuinely wants to help her.  So, he decides to continue crossdressing, diving into a lie that he soon finds he has no easy exit from.

I really recommend this manga.  I cannot say that enough times.  It is phenomenal, shattering tropes left and right in fun and interesting ways.  Do yourself a favor and give this manga a try.

Personal feelings and meta analysis below the cut.  It’s, uh, ungodly long, and will get very spoilery.  But I will flag spoilers.  And there will be pretty pictures?

(Also, no, I did not go into this planning to compare a manga about crossdressing to the abolitionist writings of Frederick Douglass, but reality deserves to be a bit absurd sometimes.)

Before you think I’m getting spoilery, with the intro I gave or anything I don’t mark as spoilers, I’m really not.  Everything outside of spoilers is right on the package at the start.  It sounds like I’m spoiling late-game stuff, right?  That’s something that was really fantastic to me: this manga doesn’t spoon feed you.  There’s no arcs of pure silent angst, even at the lowest point in the story. These kids are smart, they think and intuit on the spot, and they share what they’re feeling with each other like good friends do.  Like that next panel down there with Itsuki introspecting about his confidence level while crossdressing?  That’s from the first chapter!  These kids are smart.  And god damn that is so nice to see.

There was a lot I liked about this manga, but at the top is how compelling the protagonist and his internal conflict are.  Right from the first chapter he’s already wracked with guilt about what he’s about to do: deceive this girl by pretending to be a safe space.  But Tokujira told Itsuki (♀) she hopes to one day be able to fall in love, and Itsuki wants to ensure she can have that - even if it’s not him that gets to confess to her.  He’s fully aware of exactly how fucked up what he’s doing is, and is appropriately beating himself up over it in a really realistic way.  But although the guilt never fades, it slowly gains company in happiness. He enjoys this new, fragile life he has constructed around the two precious new friends he's made as a girl.

It was probably easy to gloss over in the synopsis, but arguably the biggest part of Itsuki (♂)’s conflict is his complex about his face.  He looks dangerous, and because of that he is afraid to even lift his head or smile in front of others.  But as Itsuki (♀), he smiles and laughs without fear.  It becomes immediately clear to him on the first day that he's a more confident person while crossdressing.  Happier in a way he can't be as a man.

Botan is easily my favorite character in the series.  She’s introduced early on, as Tokujira’s first and only friend before Itsuki (♀).  At the start she’s a dangerous third wheel, a serious threat to Itsuki’s ability to keep up his lie.  And though the situation is (thankfully) defused rather quickly, she becomes a massive source of internal conflict for Itsuki. Nonetheless, she becomes a dear friend for both Itsuki ♂ and ♀. She’s just so...*chef’s kiss*

^This face is the repository of all my love and affection.

Mark my words, this is the first and I assume last time I will ever say this: love triangle good. You know it’s inevitable in a romance genre piece, but this manga approaches the trope in a new and compelling way. [Spoiler] Needless to say, it’s between Itsuki, Tokujira, and Botan.  But...there’s two Itsukis involved, ♂ and ♀, and in the center of it all is this lie. His lie stops being about him: it's about not hurting these two girls he cares so much about. [/Spoiler]

On a more personal note, I saw so much of myself in Itsuki’s older sister, Ibuki.  She runs a salon, catering especially to crossdressers and transwomen.  She’s a self-described “Youthling��, an alien from the planet Youth, obsessed with observing the exciting and turbulent lives of the youths of earth.  For more or less for the same reasons most of us do: transpeople don’t tend to get the youths we want, if we allow ourselves to experience youth at all. So it’s nice to be able to enjoy it vicariously, through this younger generation that is able to more fearlessly pursue the lives we couldn't. 

^Incidentally, one of my favorite interactions in the manga.

Despite getting Itsuki into this crossdressing mess, she’s someone he can always return to and confide in, and get good, helpful advice from.  Her whole philosophy is to give young people agency to explore their identities and find themselves, and though she tells Itsuki the road he's taking is dangerous as soon as she learns what he's doing, she'll always support him however she can.

That, I feel, is what separates her from other, more creepy/pedophilic enabler types, like Sawako from K-On! or Lucoa from Dragon Maid. It’s a refreshingly honest and respectful portrayal of a quirky adult just trying to be a good older sister.

The last thing I want to say, and I’m not going to even mark this as a spoiler because of course it’s going to happen and if you can’t predict that then you’re not my problem, is that Itsuki of course eventually has to drop his lie.  All I’ll say about it is that it is probably going to live in my head for years. Everything about it, the lead up, the execution, the fallout, and the recovery, are all so masterfully crafted for maximum emotional impact.

That’s all I want to say exclusively about my personal feelings.  On to analysis.  There will be a lot more contextual spoilers here that, even without reading the parts I’ve specially blocked off will probably leak through.  Read at your own risk, but I would recommend revisiting after you have finished the manga.

One thing I really want to talk about is language.  That’s right, I’m going to compare a crossdressing manga to The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, the autobiography of a freed slave turned abolitionist. Douglass talks about a concept that has remained imprinted on my mind ever since I first read it: how and why slaves struggled to comprehend the concept of freedom.  This wasn’t anything to do with fear or “racial inferiority” like pro-slavers would argue, but rather with a lack of vocabulary.  They have all of these feelings and things they know to be true, but lack the words to make meaningful sense of them.  For Douglass specifically, his life completely changed when he learned the word “abolition.”  It was like a floodgate burst, as he was suddenly able to put meaning to feeling, create context from chaos.

And that’s right, we see that happen in a big way, with Tokujira.  This should be an obvious development, but as it happens late in the manga I will mark it [Spoiler].  As Tokujira and Itsuki (♀) practice things like talking, eye contact, holding hands, etc., Tokujira naturally starts to fall for Itsuki (♀).  But she doesn’t understand that.  An important part of her character is that, growing up, she focused on expanding her vocabulary as much as humanly possible in the hopes of being able to better articulate herself.  So words are very important to her.  It’s not until she sees a work of lesbian fiction on display that she finally realizes that’s the word she’s looking for.  The floodgate bursts, and all of her emotions suddenly make sense.  She realizes she loves Itsuki (♀). [/Spoiler]

And I think that is a vital and underexplored concept when discussing LGBT youth, especially in countries where even knowledge of these concepts is taboo.  The reason so many LGBT youth struggle with their identities, especially trans youth, is because we do not have the vocabulary to conceptualize our feelings.  I am always excited to see this concept play out, especially in this context.  It’s such an important thing that needs to be addressed more broadly.

Moving on, I want to talk about historical context of the genre as it relates to what the author did here.  Notably, I want to talk about a specific trope rampant in Japanese queer fiction, specifically early lesbian fiction: the idea that queerdom is a meaningless, youthful phase that children will naturally and inevitably grow out of.  It’s problematic for obvious reasons.

[HELLA HELLA SPOILERS]  My kneejerk reaction to the ending of this manga was that the author fell into this trope.  In the end, Itsuki comes to the conclusion that he does not need to crossdress.  So again, kneejerk.  But...it really wasn’t like that.  He never had any dysphoria; crossdressing was always just a necessity of his circumstance.  Nonetheless he learned to analyze and value his experience crossdressing as a woman, and because of that grew as a man.  And as part of his journey to understand his identity we, through him, see why some people crossdress.  Along with his example, we see why his sister, a bona fide post-op transsexual, has made it a permanent change to her life.  Likewise, we see Miyama, who crossdresses purely for the gender euphoria, but has no (stated) interest in going all the way.  These are all presented as valid and meaningful. [/Spoiler]

Crossdressing, and gender nonconformity in general, is portrayed not as some one-dimensional fetish like cultural taboo would depict it to be, but rather a meaningful exercise for exploring and critically analyzing your own identity.  For some, yes, it’s a phase, but an importantly transformative one when done right.  While for others, it is a gateway to a new way of experiencing and enjoying life.  Or, it’s fun just for the pragmatic reasons...

I honestly cannot recommend this manga enough.  Tragically, I cannot imagine it ever getting an official english translation, so you’ll have to settle for a  scanlation like the one I linked in the title up top (and here, again).  It’s a really good translation, though the site is predictably sketchy.  Warning for lots of NSFW ads.

Read it, and then come talk to me about it!!!  There is basically zero fan community and I need to fangirl with someone!

[aion-rsa]

Critters: The Making of a Comedy Horror Cult Classic

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

Rupert Harvey knew he was on to something with Critters after one memorable test screening.  Specifically, it was the scene where the Critters, who had already been terrorizing the Brown family, were standing on the doorstep of the family’s home talking in their guttural language with subtitles translating for the audience…until one of them is blown to gooey bits by a shotgun blast (wielded by none other than E.T. mom Dee Wallace), and the other lets out a subtitled “Fuck.”

“It totally destroyed the audience,” Harvey recalls. “They just howled. We lost the next scene because they were laughing so hard and I thought: ‘Okay, this is probably going to work.’” 

It had already taken a lot of work for Critters to get this far. 

Bringing Critters to Life

Released on April 11, 1986, the horror comedy about a small town and farm-dwelling family under attack from little furry space aliens with a taste for human flesh was unfairly dismissed by some as a Gremlins knock-off. 

But that did a disservice to the unique tone of Critters; a sci-fi comedy featuring belly laughs alongside genuine moments of terror. A film that owed as much to 1950s sci-fi B-movies as it did anything else, with its tale of picturesque Americana under attack from aliens. 

It also overlooks the film’s quirkier narrative aspect like the pair of shapeshifting alien bounty hunters who arrive on Earth to hunt the Critters down, with one of them assuming the form of a popular Jon Bon Jovi-esque rock musician. 

This surreal sci-fi tone, coupled with the copious violence, occasional bad language, and general unpredictability of it all helped give Critters the feel of a rebellious younger brother to the more mature Gremlins.  

To many, it was the cooler, edgier movie and one that boasted underlying themes that remain universal to this day. 

More importantly, the accusation of imitation was incorrect. If the two films were related, it wasn’t by design with screenwriter Brian Dominic Muir first writing the script for Critters back in 1982, two years before Joe Dante’s film hit cinemas.  

“I don’t think I saw Gremlins until we were in post-production,” Harvey, who produced Critters and worked on two of its three original sequels, tells Den of Geek. “It was certainly not something we were thinking about very much at the time, if at all. 

We were dealing with very different creatures and the fact that they were so different in concept meant I wasn’t terribly bothered by it. Gremlins were these mythical, earthbound, magical beings whereas Critters were extraterrestrial. People who say there are similarities are just influenced by the fact Gremlins was such a huge success, but it was a much bigger budget movie.” 

Muir’s script didn’t see the light of day for nearly three years before he showed it to friend and fellow budding filmmaker Stephen Herek who developed it further. That was where Harvey came in. 

The three men met while working on Android, a distinctive low budget sci-fi film Harvey was producing alongside independent movie trailblazer Roger Corman.  

“Brian gave me Critters to read and l loved it,” Harvey recalls. “It was an archetypal American story about foreigners invading the homeland. It’s quite prescient given the current state of politics in America. There was this quintessentially American setup with this almost pioneering family struggling through adversity to come out the other side.” 

35 years on, that notion of protecting the homeland is one Harvey feels is reflected in the inward-looking politics increasingly prominent in America and the UK today. That sentiment was already bubbling under the surface when Critters came out in the Reagan-era of the 1980s.

“It was novel to look at that then through the lens of Critters,” he says. “No one was seeing the film in those terms but that human fear of outsiders coming in has always been there and has been a fundamental part of cinema and drama since forever.” 

Harvey agreed to develop the film under his production company, Sho Films. Though he mulled over an offer to produce a low budget version of Critters with Corman, everything changed when Bob Shaye and New Line Cinema came calling. 

Writing Critters

“New Line was really a mom-and-pop operation at that point. They hadn’t made A Nightmare on Elm Street yet. They weren’t the New Line of today, but Bob offered to double our budget, so I did the deal.” 

Even so, Shaye took some convincing on the choice of director. 

Herek would go on to helm Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead, and a string of big budget Disney movies in the years that followed but had never directed prior to Critters, having previously worked as an editor. 

“Stephen, to his credit, even though he had no leverage other than a script we wanted to make, absolutely insisted that nobody would direct it but him and if he didn’t it wouldn’t get made,” Harvey says. “He stuck to his guns and there was never any shift in that position on Brian’s side. I had to convince Bob on several occasions to go ahead with us and, even during production, to actually stick with Steve. But we were all very glad that he did.” 

On the writing side, Harvey enlisted Sho Films’ in-house writer Don Opper. A fellow Roger Corman acolyte, Opper had written and starred in Android where he also worked with Herek and Muir. 

He was seen as the ideal candidate to work alongside Herek after Muir became unwell. 

“Brian, unfortunately, became quite ill not long after we started making Critters,” Harvey says. 

Muir was reportedly battling Hodgkin’s disease at the time. Though he recovered, the writer, who often wrote under the pseudonym August White for Full Moon Entertainment later in his career, sadly died from cancer aged 48 in 2010.  

“He was a very sweet, nice man,” Harvey recalls. “In Brian’s absence, Don worked with Stephen on polishing the script. One of the ways was to enhance the family and their relationships.” 

By then the distinctive looking Opper had also been cast in the pivotal role of Charlie McFadden, the town drunk and a conspiracy theorist convinced the fillings in his teeth are picking up signals from outer space.  

Like a cross between Randy Quaid’s deranged pilot from Independence Day and Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade, Charlie would eventually emerge as a fan favorite, appearing in each of the three Critters sequels. 

He was one of several quirky locals introduced early on in Critters with much of the first third of the film dedicated to establishing the Brown family, their farm, and the characters of the fictional Kansas town of Grover’s Bend where the Critters land.  

In one picture postcard scene of the perfect nuclear family, the Browns gather round the breakfast table in a primary colored kitchen, blissfully unaware of the approaching danger and disruption to follow. 

That slow build-up may be less commonplace today, but it’s something Harvey believes was crucial to the success of the film. 

“That was one of the things that appealed to me about the script,” he says. “If you set that up properly and the audience is in there with you. They gain an understanding of the family dynamic right away and they are engaged. It helps you then feel for each one of them subsequently…The rules are the same, and they have been since the first Greek dramas; storytelling is still about humans and the human condition. Just making stuff about what the monsters are doing has no appeal.” 

Critters came during a time when horror comedies were commonplace in multiplexes.

“Studios started to notice in test screenings that the audience response was often bigger when you capped a scare or moment of high tension with a bit of wit or humor,” Harvey explains. 

Post-screening surveys bore this out; using humor to emphasize or punctuate a terrifying moment drew a bigger response from the audience. Regardless of the visceral impact of the scare itself. It made it more memorable to viewers.

The Cast of Critters

It helped that Critters boasted an impressive cast to bring the script to life.  

Blade Runner’s M. Emmet Walsh appeared as the grouchy local sheriff while Dee Wallace, who had starred in E.T. only a few years earlier, was also convinced to sign on as the Brown family matriarch Helen. Billy “Green” Bush was cast as the hardworking man of the house Jay Brown with Nadine van der Velde as his high school teen daughter April. 

Despite some impressive names, Harvey ranks the casting of future Party of Five and ER star Scott Grimes in the role of mischievous central teenage protagonist Brad Brown as the most significant. It’s Scott who first discovers the Critters and Scott that begins to fight back against them using his slingshot and potent firecrackers coming off like a hellish Kevin McCallister from Home Alone. 

“Scott was tailor-made for the role,” Harvey says. “He was at the center of the craziness and he had the audience’s sympathy and support because no one was paying attention to him.” 

For all the acting talent on display, however, much of the movie’s success rested on the tiny shoulders of a few hedgehog-like puppets. 

“The biggest challenge was making the Critters appear to be a viable threat as the antagonists,” Harvey says. “We were really fortunate that we found the Chiodo Brothers.” 

A trio of siblings who specialized in stop motion and animatronic work, the Chiodos were relative newcomers to the movie business and would go on to projects like Elf and Team America: World Police. 

“We knew from the script we were dealing with a fur ball that got around fast by rolling around and was all teeth and voracious,” Harvey says. “That was the extent of the design parameters. They came up with the drawings and the details as to how they would work.”

Harvey cites the Critters’ distinctive, almost limbless design as both a blessing and a curse.  

“From a construction and manipulation point of view, they were relatively straightforward,” he says. “But from an action perspective, there was not a lot you could do with them.” 

While other projects, like New Line’s later Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, would struggle with glitchy animatronics, there were no such problems with the Chiodos’ creations with each running impressively well thanks to a crack team behind the scenes.

“Even though the Critters were fairly simple creatures, there were times for some of those shots, when we had 10 guys running different cables and things to them to get them right,” Harvey recalls. “They had eye movement, mouth movement, lip movement even their little arms and legs move because these things needed to look as believable as possible. But it was still tough to make these things that rolled around something scary and frightening rather than cute and laughable.” 

That was where Billy Zane came in. A good horror villain needs a good victim. Cast in the role of April’s unsuspecting boyfriend Steve Eliot, the then unknown Zane ended up falling afoul of the Critters in arguably the film’s standout gory death after encountering the furry fiends while enjoying a makeout session in the family’s barn. 

“It was the first thing he’d ever done. I think he’d arrived in L.A. a week before,” Harvey says, recalling how uncomfortably hot that barn scene was for everyone involved. “It was 100 degrees in the barn. He had little furry creatures stuck to his stomach and was covered in fake blood. It was so hot and sticky. We stayed there for the whole day, getting all the inserts and various other bits and pieces to make the scene…But that setup in the claustrophobic space of the barn helped to make the scene much scarier because we could set it up in a kind of way that made the punchline, the payoff, much more visceral.” 

The Bounty Hunters

For all the machinations of the Critters themselves, it’s their pursuers from outer space, the two faceless bounty hunters, who almost steal the show.

Especially after one decides to take the form of fictional hair metal superstar Johnny Steele, the singer of “Power of the Night” a song so pitch-perfectly cheesy, you had to wonder if Steele is a real artist rather than musical theater actor Terrence Mann. 

“I went to see Terrence who was appearing in Cats on Broadway. He’d been suggested by a friend and was seriously interested in doing the film,” Harvey says. “We had a friend in New York who was in the music business and had a recording studio. He put together some tracks and we created this imaginary band that he stole the identity of the lead singer from.” 

Despite some striking similarities to artists of the time, Harvey insists Johnny Steele wasn’t set up as a deliberate lampooning of any one artist.

“The band was generically inspired by particular bands of the time,” he says. “There wasn’t any one group or individual. We were post punk and before real heavy metal. There was more of a glam goth influence.” 

Teaming up with Charlie and Brad, the bounty hunters eventually destroy the Critters though it comes at a cost to the Browns, with the family home blown-up in the process. It was a powerful symbol of the way these invaders had shattered their lives but not their spirit. Unfortunately, New Line Cinema didn’t like it as an ending. 

“Bob wanted it changed so that the house was rebuilt in the end but I was against it so we had a few arguments about that, but it was Bob’s money, and we did it and it came out very successfully.” 

Shaye and New Line would occasionally prove tricky customers, with Harvey often forced to traverse the familiar pitfalls of independent filmmaking.

“We were in production and things were really tough and there was one point in time when Bob and I sat down in the trailer and he explained to me some things that I won’t go into,” Harvey says.  “Things were very tricky for a week or two financially, but they sorted themselves out. That was a typical attribute of an independent movie. ‘Oh God you’re spending $150,000 dollars a day, can you spend $100,000?’. Not unheard of but no fun at the time.” 

For all the trials and tribulations of the film, cast, and Critters themselves, however, he has fond memories of working on the film.

“We weren’t stuck in Los Angeles in some smoke-filled space,” he said. “The set was built on Newhall Ranch, this huge bucolic area of land outside of L.A and there we were for five weeks shooting in relatively hot temperatures.” 

Critters Sequels and What’s Next

After a quick turnaround in editing, Critters was released in cinemas, proving to be a hit with over $13 million made at the box office off a budget of $3 million. This kind of success made sequels inevitable.

Though Harvey was unavailable for the second film, he returned for the third and fourth movies, which were filmed back-to-back and released direct to video.

“By then video cassettes were a huge component to New Line’s early success and helped finance the Nightmare on Elm Street and Critters sequels and all of the other movies that they then started making in order to become the powerhouse they became,” Harvey says. “I think it funded something like 40 to 40 to 50 percent of New Line production for that period of time.”

Harvey was initially hesitant to get involved, citing Shaye’s wishes to make the sequels for even less money than the first film. However, he ultimately relented after agreeing to film them back-to-back.

Harvey has mixed feelings about the two sequels, particularly the third movie, which he had conceived as being “much darker and much more violent” than what eventually made it to the screen.

“I wanted to do a George Romero homage for the third film,” he says. “I was very much interested in the claustrophobia of the tenement building in New York City, that kind of atmosphere. Boy, did it ever turn out differently.”

Having also agreed to direct the fourth film, which was set in space and wrap up the franchise, he found himself too busy to oversee work on the third movie.

“It was different. I didn’t have as much to do with Critters 3 because I was directing the fourth film. We were shooting back to back. We had a week down in between the two. All the time we were shooting Critters 3 I was prepping Critters 4.”

While the fourth film featured both a young Angela Bassett and Brad Dourif on top scene-chewing form, the third entry has become among the most noted in the years since thanks to the presence of a young Leonardo DiCaprio in the main role.

“It’s the movie that shall remain nameless on Leo DiCaprio’s resume,” Harvey jokes.

He doesn’t have a lot of memories about DiCaprio on set though there was already a sense he was destined for big things.

“One day he told me he needed some time off. He had to go and audition for this movie. After he came back I asked ‘How did it go?’ and he said ‘Robert De Niro is really great’. he’d been off auditioning for This Boy’s Life…And of course, when he did that movie, it was like, ‘Holy shit. Well, where was that actor when we were making Critters 3?’” 

While Leo is unlikely to return to the Critters franchise anytime soon, Harvey, who had no involvement in a recent TV revival, believes that there is life in the old furballs yet.

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“It’s not a franchise that’s going to go away,” he says cryptically. “Whatever comes next needs to be something that is responsive to contemporary sources. I can’t really say too much about it, because nothing is final. All I can tell you is that I don’t think this is the end.”

The post Critters: The Making of a Comedy Horror Cult Classic appeared first on Den of Geek.

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[ravenwritesstuff]

So we've got Kristanna now, and I TOTALLY agree but could you also share what's bothering you in Elsa in F2, please? I suppose you like her, and I feel like something's off with her, just can't figure out what exactly (except this Christ-like persona she becomes at the end). Even though I liked her creation better than A and K's... I still think characterization was a total disaster in this movie, and so was portrayal of A/K and E/A relations...

Okay. I have a fucking bone to pick with this one.

I have no idea if this will resonate with you or what your cognitive dissonance is with Elsa as a character BUT this is what squicks me.

I say all of this also admitting that Elsa is one of my favorite characters in Frozen because of the potential she had, but not because of how she actually turned out.

The biggest issue I personally have with Elsa is that they mishandle her trauma and anxiety on so many levels.

It seems the writers were never sure if they want her to be a confident queen or a cowering child or intrepid adventurer.

I understand better than most that when it comes to being a chronic over thinker with over bearing/semi-abusive parents and generalized anxiety disorder on top of PTSD - sometimes you have good days. Sometimes you have good minutes. Sometimes you fall into a wasteland that makes suicide seem like a logical choice, but the way they handle it with her was so inconsistent and all over the place.

Even in an irregular mind there are set patterns and triggers.

Which leads me to my next point in that I am not sure if they realized they were writing a character with PTSD and anxiety.

In many ways her reactions are written more like she just lacks confidence in her abilities.

I do not think this is a fair portrayal since we are also shown her panic, her fear, and her intense desire to please authority figures/save face/pressure to not kill someone with the powers she never wanted.

She saw her sister, her favorite human in the world, almost DIE from her abilities and was told by a weird rock creature that people were going to kill her because of her powers.

Hell. If that wasn’t enough to screw her up for life then:

Her parents died (They fucking DIED).

And they were the ones that completely controlled her existence and told her what to do and isolated her form the rest of the world.

Even with their death she cannot even break free of those rules and just be honest with her only other living relative that would support her 2,000% because #PTSD and #EmotionalAbuse.

Elsa is a fucking mess and they show that she is a fucking mess but then they fix it with... I am not exactly sure?

Just like the end of Frozen, Frozen II falls into the same trap of having Elsa experience some revelatory platitude that makes very little sense and then she is just... okay?

She just suddenly rewires every single synapse and behavioral trigger from DECADES of ingrained thinking and mental mapping because you sing a song (Show Yourself)? Or a nebulous concept (Anna mentioning love)?

Yeah.

It’s bull shit.

They have a chance to really show what it is like to have a character struggle with trauma and anxiety in a real way that could be helpful to young people but instead they alienate them further by making it even less approachable by making it seem like if they just found that one simple phrase, that silver bullet, they will suddenly be mentally stable.

That is a fucking nasty worm to plant in the head of a kid that struggles with any form of mental issues.

So instead of being a potential champion of and instructive/conversational aid for people who live with trauma, anxiety, et al. Elsa instead becomes the cultural cancer that keeps most of us silent.

Why can’t we just fix ourselves?

Why can’t we just realize we are loved?

Why can’t we just be fucking normal and stop freaking out about every fucking thing?

BeCauSe ThAt iS nOt HoW tHiS WorKs okAY?

The shit she went through stays for life and takes HUNDREDS of intentional hours with a professional to work through.

Anyway I am so over that noise.

Elsa is a FUCKING TRAINWRECK and not just because of her trauma, but because of how she is written.

She is inconsistent and not because of her underlying emotional state but because writers had to force a plot onto her that did not fit with her mental state and gave her zero opportunity for actually growth.

All of Elsa’s growth in Frozen and Frozen II is synthesized. It has no substance, no backing, no work, no actual effort. It just... happens.

We have no investment in her actually developing or improving as a character.

She has fucking ice powers. Okay?!

What else do we need?

Uhhhh...

A lot?

Maybe her actually working through her massive issues in a productive, effort filled way instead of just have 3 songs and then being 100% normal?

Basically Elsa had potential to be such an amazing avenue for discussion about abuse and mental health and instead that gave her sparkly dresses (the dresses aren’t the issue) and the ability to create sentient life out of snow that has more self-perceptive abilities that she does.

(((ALSO the way the portray her as a ‘loving’ sister is the biggest pile of shit I have ever seen. She is fucking abusive towards Anna from start to finish and it is disgusting)))

But that is another 1,000 word rant so imma sign off now

[bigskydreaming]

@elfysparkles88​

#listen it's a universal problem#I love my mans Scott#everyone is always bagging on him WHY#Scott Summers#X-Men

Its because Scott Summers is inevitably compared and contrasted with those around him, and he has the great misfortune of running in the same circles as an all-star line up of like....just the absolutely most Ridiculous People to Ever Ridick.

We’re talking about a guy whose dad was abducted by aliens and from there went on to decide, welp, guess I gotta become a space pirate now, jaunty earring and all, no, shhh, shh, no, there are no alternatives, I gotta, no, I said no - SHUT IT, I SAID I GOTTA BE A SPACE PIRATE NOW ITS THE ONLY WAY. Oh btw, meet my fianceé. She’s an alien mercenary who is a little like a skunk but don’t call her that to her face or she’ll shoot you in yours. How’s that for swoonworthy, am I right, son?

We’re talking about a guy whose own son was a literal sixty year old Grumpy Old Man overburdened with world-weariness, wildly unnecessary shoulderpads and arthritic joints when Scott was barely hitting his third decade. With said son now randomly being a moody sixteen year old again, with a pet sentient sword he talks lovingly to, because apparently Nathan Summer’s take on teenage rebellion was to act out by being all LOL Fuck Time Travel Paradoxes and then rebelliously zooming around the space/time continuum while blasting a soundtrack of MCR probably, until he finally got a bead on his older self and shot himself in the face while being like “its not that I’m angry with you, I’m just disappointed” and look this is the part where your eyes are gonna wanna just glaze over so your brain can have a break, shhh, shh, don’t ask questions, just let it be, it happened, its a thing.

We’re talking about a guy whose brother rode a merry-go-round of “Am I a good guy this week or am I a bad guy because Reasons or sometimes Brainwashing or sometimes I Don’t Even Fucking Know, Look Don’t @ Me Bro, I Just Fucking Work Here, I’m Not In The Loop” for most of his twenties until dying in a fiery explosion only to inexplicably return years later as a coma patient who finally woke up one day and said “Whoa, just got back from tripping around the multiverse and boy do I have stories cuz apparently I’m the Nexus of All Realities, so hah, SUCK IT, big brother, and yes that is TOO a thing, shut up, LET ME HAVE THIS. Oh and also btw don’t spend a lot on your wedding gift for me and Lorna because I’m gonna leave her at the altar once I realize that I’m actually more in love with the random nurse lady who changed my bed pans while I was in a coma having a romantic rendezvouz with her in Paris in my brain courtesy of her psychic eight-year old kid trying to play matchmaker for her cuz like, she doesn’t date much apparently but its whatever, this is FINE, I have no objections. Ugh why are you looking at me like that Scott, no, I don’t need to “talk” with someone about everything I’ve ‘been through,’ ugh I’m HAPPY you asshole, god, why don’t you ever want me to just be HAPPY ugh you just have to control EVERYTHING with your over-bearing BS like “I am concerned your decision-making processes might be affected by all the people tampering with your decision-making processes over the years” like umm DID I ASK? No? I didn’t think so? YOU’RE NOT MY REAL DAD, SCOTT, UGH THAT DOES IT, IM RUNNING AWAY TO BE A SUPERVILLAIN AGAIN AND THIS TIME ITS TOTALLY YOUR FAULT, YOU’LL BE SORRY WHEN I CRY HAVOK AND LET LOOSE THE DOGS OF WAR THIS TIME FOR SURE, AND OMG FOR THE LAST TIME I KNOOOOOOW THAT’S NOT HOW ITS SPELLED, ITS ABOUT THE AESTHETIC SCOTT, ITS CALLED HAVING A SENSE OF STYLE, UGH, LET ME LIIIIIIIIIIIVE.”

We’re talking about a guy whose other little brother randomly showed up and started killing people one day being like “hahaha surprise, bet you all forgot about me, PS, I’m REALLY FUCKING MAD AT YOU ALL FOR FORGETTING ABOUT ME” because the world’s most powerful telepath made everyone forget about him and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day they all had once and this is fiiiiiiiiiiiiiiine, this is normal. As is the way his newly discovered slash remembered slash resurrected slash recently returned from spending the last decade fucking around as a disembodied energy ghost on a rock up in Earth’s orbit little brother then decided the Earth just wasn’t big enough for the both of them, the both of them in this case meaning both him, singular, and his Angst, as a wholly separate and towering entity in its own right. So instead he fucked off to space and decided to conquer a vast alien empire and spend the next several years being their god-emperor or whatever until he got bored with that. And also he kinda sorta killed their dad for a bit but whatever, its fine, he got better, and then he also kinda sorta died for a bit himself but whatever, its fine, he got better, and there was that whole interstellar war between himself and the Inhumans but whatever that wasn’t even his FAULT, Scott, THEY STARTED IT, god, do you ever stop JUDGING ME AND MY LIFE CHOICES and PS I’m still mad at you for killing Xavier, you fucking asshole, not because you did it but because like, you KNOW I wanted to do it, I had a whole fucking villain monologue moment about it and everything, you were literally there, UGH WHY WON’T YOU LET ME HAVE NICE THINGS?!?! YOU ARE THE ENEMY OF FUN AND JOY AND HEY MAYBE YOU WERE THE REAL VILLAIN ALL ALONG, DID YOU EVER THINK OF THAT? HUH? MR. I’M THE BOSS, WAIT WHO’S THE BOSS? OH YEAH STILL ME, SCOTT, I’M THE BOSS, YOU GOTTA STOP BEING A SPACE EMPEROR GABE BECAUSE YOU CAN’T BE THE BOSS, ONLY I AM ALLOWED TO BE THE BOSS BECAUSE I’M THE BOSS AND I SAID SO AND YOU GOTTA DO WHAT I SAY OR I’LL TELL DAD.” 

And that’s not even getting into how we’re also talking about a guy who basically ended up divorcing his first wife and suing for sole custody on the grounds of “Well, your Honor, she tried to sacrifice our son on a literal demonic altar in order to summon Hell to Earth to destroy everything just to get back at me after I left her. Yes, your Honor, I understand that is in fact Asshole Behavior, but there were extenuating circumtances, you see, the woman I left her for was my first love before her who I thought was dead. And also, she was literally my wife before my wife was. No, I don’t mean I was married before Maddie, I mean Jean was kinda pretty much already Maddie before Maddie was Maddie. Its this whole clone thing. Look, I’m just saying it was a complicated situation and I know I have my part to play in it, but I still stand by my conviction that trying to sell out our entire planet and species to the legions of Hell while using the innocent blood of our ten month old as the Golden Ticket to the Chocolate Factory was still a little over the top and not really the right way to handle it either. Also, I contend that I can provide a better home environment at the moment than someone who is insisting on being addressed as The Goblin Queen because what even is that, honestly, Your Honor, and also, she also brainwashed my brother into trying to kill me on her behalf, which to be fair does happen about every other month anyway, but still, like. Dick move, you know?”

And we’re also talking about a guy whose second wife who was kinda sorta his first wife but only in that It Ain’t Bigamy If Its A Clone Thing way....like, I mean. Its kinda hard NOT to come across as the bland one in the relationship when your second wife occasionally moonlights as the AirBnb of choice for a cosmic parakeet goddess of rebirth and fiery destruction who is pretty infamous for the ragers she hosts every time she pops into town for a visit, all smiles and (literal) sunbeams (of scorching lethality) and “Lol hey hot stuff, remember me?” As if someone who ate an alien civilization’s sun the last time she hit a Mood is like....really in danger of ever being “New phone, who dis?”ed. But that is neither here nor there, much like the sentients of Alpha Centauri Bumfuckville after she went all Goodnight Sun, Goodnight Moon, Goodnight Solar System on their corner of the galactic neighborhood, because.....tbh I don’t think she ever actually said “why” there. Its one of those things where if you don’t already KNOW why a cosmic parakeet goddess of rebirth and fiery destruction has decided its nighty-night time for this particular zipcode.....like.....that’s not really something you just ASK, y’know? Its....tacky, probably. Also, low on the self-preservation instincts, probably.

Plus we’re talking about a guy whose second marriage to Yet Another Woman It Probably Should Have Registered As A Bad Idea To PIss Off Like This ended in like....so, okay, this was a bit more His Bad than even Round One was, courtesy of a “Groundbreaking. Revolutionary. Show-stopping” reinterpretation of what was up until this point te much more ambiguous and metaphorically named “Mental Affair” concept. Though it must be said, Scotty always has skewed a bit more towards the literal minded in his personal approach to things, so, y’know. That tracks. But regardless, the pattern remains consistent here, as once again, its not always easy to register on peoples’ radar as anything other than the Plus One when your newest paramour prides herself on being both the entire planning committee AND star attraction of Victoria’s Secret (assuming that said Secret is Secret Aims at World Domination) Presents: A Renaissance Faire. But in an evil and also kinky way. Except now with sixty percent less evil on account of how Emma’s reformed these days, but not a hundred percent less evil because she’s not like, REFORMED reformed, cuz that would be boring, eww, could you imagine, no, you couldn’t, because she won’t let you and she can do that, she’s that good at telepathy and that bad at boundaries. Still the same amount of kinky as before though, but like. That’s just about Strong Branding. After all, at the end of the day Emma Frost is above all else, a good businesswoman.

But yes, she is also a big fan of the Aesthetic, with that aesthetic being Her Whims On Steroids because like they say, go big or go home, and Emma Frost does not believe in going home when she can simply acquire your home instead. Hate the game, not the player. She didn’t make the rules, she just came to win. Point being, its hard to follow up an act like Jean-Who-Is-Sometimes-Phoenix-And-Sometimes-Dark-Phoenix-And-Oh-Hell-She-Cant-Even-Keep-Track-So-How-Could-Anyone-Else-Really, but say what you will about Emma’s wardrobe, she’s more concerned with clothing herself in unapologetic take no prisoners ambition, and as such, her being the follow-up to Scott’s epic romance with his childhood sweetheart turned literal cosmic embodiment of fire and passion, like.....this was never a big checkmark in the con side of a pro and con list for Emma. It was more like oh, yes, hello there, Challenge Absolutely Fucking Accepted.

Which, y’know, all the points to House Frost for showing spine and boy howdy, that’s a spine alright.....but at the same time, going head to head with someone who is classified as a galactic threat when people are deliberately low-balling her, like, for no other reason than you’re bored and your manicure appointment isn’t for another couple hours.....like that’s the kind of thing where it has to be pointed out that there were possibly alternative options worth considering somewhere in between ‘having no spine’ and ‘spiting cosmic entity who can kill you with her brain by stealing her man and saying come at me bro because like....my spine, let me show you it.”

But again, just to reiterate the premise here.....our thesis here today is that Scott Summers Gets a Bad Rap For Being Bland or Boring or Not Standing Out, But In Reality The Issue Is Just That All The People He Knows Are Truly Ridiculous People.

In other words, Scott Summers is no more the Everyman of the X-Men than any of his Truly Ridiculous Friends and Family.

Because an actual everyman would have bounced out of that madhouse way the fuck back in Chapter One: In Which Things Just Got Ridiculous.

Cut to Scott Summers, in contrast: *looks around, purses lips, weighs options* Nah. This is fine.

See also:

His daughter, who didn’t so much arrive after the traditional nine months of waiting and preparing for a bundle of bouncing baby joy but instead just like...plopped back into the past as a full grown woman hailing from a dystopian future she was hellbent on preventing by any means necessary, even if that means had Scott frantically shouting RACHEL NO as she screamed RACHEL YES and sprinted straight at someone like Selene (a villain who has survived 17,000 years of pissing people off and making enemies of actual, literal gods) while thinking “oh yeah, I got this.”

(To be fair, she probably DID have it, or would have, if Logan hadn’t chosen that moment of all moments to have his once-centennial contemplation of “Wait, what if....murder is...NOT good?” Never underestimate the daughter of a cosmic goddess.)

Or see also also:

Scott’s original classmates, including Doctor Hank “I’m not an over-archiever, I’m just stress-eating because its lunchtime and I’ve only revolutionized two whole fields of scientific study so far today,” McCoy, Warren “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful, hate me because I’m a billionaire, wait no, I’m just kidding don’t hate me at all hahaha I’m too sexy” Worthington III, and Bobby “I may look cute and unassuming and like my only priority in life is video games but sike, I too am a potentially cosmic level immortal being of nigh-unlimited power or at least I will be whenever I get around to tapping that potential like I’m currently tapping xy up down A + BBA like a boss, now shhh, don’t interrupt me while I’m kicking ass at Mario Kart I said I’ll GET TO THAT LATER, ugh, JEEZ, my priorities are FINE, Scott, like get off my back already, you’re not even my real dad” Drake.

In conclusion:

Scott Summers is valid, and there may be legions drinking his Hatorade, but make no mistake, its not that he’s Less Than, its that every single person in his social circle is just that damn Extra.

[firelord-frowny]

If you like ~good storytelling~, unique plotlines, ~diverse~ casts in terms of not just gender and race, but also in personality, and if you like ~contraversial~ subjects explored with tact and objectivity, and you enjoy or even just Don’t Not-Enjoy sci fi, please please PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE watch Star Trek omfg. 

I can only speak on TNG, DS9, and Voyager, but they’re all SO freaking beautiful, and they reflect a looooot of the artistic values that I know are popular amongst the kinds of people I associate with. 

TNG is great if you’re hella into ~concepts~ being explored in depth. Though the characters are all interesting and have compelling development in their own right, my opinion is that TNG is less character-driven, and more concept-driven. Episodes are more about analyzing points of view on complicated and sometimes contraversial subjects - poverty vs wealth, exploitation, racism, religious intolerance, adoption, war, judicial systems, capital punishment, grief, etc. Also, TNG is pretty well-suited to picking and choosing which episodes you want to watch. You don’t necessarily need to start from the beginning and watch everything in chronological order in order to understand each episode.

DS9 is great if you love interpersonal relationships and the ways in which they develop. Though there’s still a LOT of ~big concepts~ being explored and navigated and investigated, much more time is spent on how those big concepts affect people’s personal relationships with their friends, family, coworkers, etc... the series is set during a transitionary period between one alien race, the Cardassians, finally being driven out from controlling/oppressing another alien race, the Bajorans. The character’s relationships are all heavily impacted and influenced by the political climate and history. The types of relationships include parent/child, best friends, romantic partners, bosses and employees, spiritual leaders and the people who look up to them, etc. There’s also a HELLA prominent religious aspect, as the Bajoran’s are generally super devout to deities they call “prophets,” which non-Bajoran’s usually refer to as “wormhole aliens,” because the prohpets are Actual Proven Life Forms that reside within a wormhole, and are known to have at least some degree of omnipotence and ability to influence people and events. So, I guess you could say that compared to TNG, DS9 is more about culture, and TNG is more about philosophy. In DS9, it’s a bit more important to actually start from the beginning and watch everything in order. 

Then, there’s Voyager. Voyager has a reputation of being one of the Least Good shows in the Star Trek franchise, but honestly, the rest of the franchise is so damn good that even the Least Good serises are still pretty damn good. 

Voyager is unique in that the ~Federation~ and Star Fleet are both pretty absent, and the whole series works toward one overarching goal, as opposed to TNG and DS9, neither of which had any major predetermined goal that carried on throughout the seasons. I’d say it’s a bit more similar to TNG than to DS9 in that it’s less character-driven and more plot-driven. I think morality is a bit more of a factor than it is in TNG or DS9. The Main Plot is that the crew of Starship Voyager gets marooned several thousand lightyears away from Earth. They’re so far away that even if they were able to travel at full warp-speed all the way back home, it would still take them 75 years to get there. So, they’re faced with a lot of moral and ethical dilemmas as they try to seek out ways to get home sooner. 

I at first didn’t understand why Voyager was held in lower esteem than other Star Treks, but now that I’m well into season 5 of 7*, I think I understand where it falls short to a lot of people. Or at least, there are reasons why I think it falls short of my tastes. Though Star Trek pretty much exists to explore moral philosophy from every angle they can think of, Voyager is a bit... preachy in it’s approach sometimes. A TNG episode about, say abortion, approaches the issue in a manner that explores ~all sides~ of the argument in a fair, generally unbiased manner. The characters have their own opinions about what’s right and wrong, and they often disagree with each other, but the narrative itself doesn’t seem to promote one ideal over the other, and allows the viewer to decide their own opinion about the issue. A Voyager episode about abortion, however, seems to be actively promoting one perspective, and most of the characters ultimately end up agreeing with it. Basically, I think Voyager sometimes has an ~agenda~, which feels offputting just because the other Star Treks do such a good job at keeping a neutral, tactful narrative. I also think Voyager panders more to sex appeal than the other shows. Like, TNG and DS9 both had super beautiful women in their casts, but there wasn’t much specific attention drawn to their beauty. Voyager, on the other hand, makes more of a point to ~accentuate~ the hotness of certain female cast members. But even then, it’s not to a degree that I would consider bothersome. 

So, I guess one reason why Voyager wasn’t as well-recieved as TNG or DS9 is because it has a few cliche or mildly problematic and ~typical~ narrative elements that are common in most shows, but that Star Trek was known for rising above. People like Star Trek specifically because it doesn’t cater to the whims and values of mainstream television. But like. It’s still good. 

I so so so so so so so recommend them. Like wow. 

You’ll find, in the early seasons of TNG especially, that the visual effects, the sets, and the fight scenes and action sequences are SO FUCKING BAD lmfao like WOW. we really are spoiled in 2020 beause that shit was laughably horrendous. But it’s TOTALLY forgiveable considering all the other things that are amazing about it.

[lisafrnkenstein]

you know what, fuck reboot kirk. ppl have talked about how him being a playboy who disrespects and sexualizes women is so fucking ooc to tos kirk, but like. his fists first brawl it out attitude is thoughroughly antithetical to the entire concept of james t kirk as a character, who was able to make peaceful contact with a new planet because he refused to kill and believed humans to have evolved past the instincts for violence.

i get creating the alternate universe, and there are changes like....like i enjoy the more humanized spock in this verse, but that's also because he's not any less vulcan the rest of the time, even with some more glimpses into his human side than tos.

but reboot kirk....can you tell me that reboot kirk would, in the same situation as an episode in s3 where a mysterious alien entity increases their urge to fight, recognize the outside influence because of how they've been trained not to be violent? trying to imagine him in this episode...he would have just fought. threw fists at the klingons and with scotty and with spock, and asked questions later. because no matter how smart they kept him, they still established a "more entertaining" toxic masculine ideal basline of the womanizing brawler who starts bar fights and takes illegal, covert military missions at the loss of his own crew.

(and that's not even dealing with the destruction of his relationship with spock, which was one of mutual respect and understanding, changing it into one starting with rivalry, fighting, anger, and disrespect which can't possibly have anything to do with the incredibly analyzed homosexual subtext of tos that basically birthed modern shipping fandoms.)

lowkey that's also why i love Beyond so much, it did a lot to fix the problems i had with kirk and how it approached telling star trek stories in general.

[exeggcute]

the way a lot of self-described “bookworms” seem to approach reading strikes me as more of an act of collection and physical/intellectual curation rather than something motivated by any innate enjoyment of reading (other than the inward-gazing spectacle of Look At Me, The Bookworm, Currently Reading A Book! Isn’t That A Sight To Behold!) and it’s obviously not, like, the worst phenomenon that’s ever existed but it is kind of weird and annoying. I don’t think it’s something necessarily unique to reading and there are probably equivalent subcultures for film, music, video games, what have you, but I’m less entrenched in those things than I am with bookworm types (or at least I used to be) and I think books hit the particular sweet spot of being cheap, easily-collectible physical objects while also being somewhat “intellectual.”

actually, I do see this bookworm phenomenon somewhat less than I used to, and I’m not sure if it’s because I just occupy different circles now or if the general population of book-obsessed people have shifted their attention towards something else (if I were being less generous, I’d say that it’s because nobody even pretends to read anymore, but I can’t throw stones in my own glass house here) but back in the 2011-ish internet era I felt like you couldn’t go more than five minutes without running into a picture of someone’s “reading nook” populated by half-drunk cups of tea and a near-untouched copy of whatever young adult novel was popular at the time, or like a coffee mug for sale that said “don’t even talk to me until I’ve eaten every single book on the goodreads top 100 list this year,” or even just some vague platitude about people being really into the mildewy smell of old books. and like, you know, do whatever makes you happy, nobody’s getting hurt, whatever. but it was kind of bizarre seeing so much aesthetic and intellectual value placed on the idea of Books and Reading but so few discussions about the nature or content of any of the things people were supposedly reading (and any rare discussions were almost certainly about a select few genres and titles, and very rarely in-depth or under any kind of critical or analytical lens).

a lot of it strikes me an obsessive worship of Books as a concept more than the information that they contain. like I clearly understand the sentimental value of a well-loved book, don’t get me wrong–I have some books that are so disgustingly old and thrashed and annotated that they’re essentially unreadable, but the emotion and memory associated with them far outweighs their usefulness as an object–but treating anything bound between two covers as a piece of faux-religious iconography is laughable. a copy of shakespeare’s first folio is as much a book as a paperback harlequin novel you buy at an airport bookstore, but they clearly hold different levels of value (both for the content they contain and as physical objects). a sentiment I saw expressed by a lot of people in the golden era of bookworms was how reprehensible it was to physically harm, alter, or modify a book in any way, regardless of the intention behind it. sure, I’d be a little miffed if I loaned someone a book and they dog-eared it without asking, and I’d never do anything to alter a book I borrowed from a library, but I do dog-ear my own books sometimes, especially ones that are old or cheap or not otherwise physically special. maybe a first-edition hardback gets the dignity of a bookmark, but my childhood copies of magic treehouse books didn’t bring me any less enjoyment just because I’d folded down the corners of pages. the same thing goes for annotations, or warped spines, or pretty much any other signs of wear and tear that are incurred by actually engaging with a book–at some point it’s almost impossible to even read the damn thing unless you rough it up a bit, and presumably your motivation for owning books is to read them and not just to put them on a bookshelf so you can take pictures of your collection. (right? right??) same goes for the people who still act like listening to an audiobook somehow doesn’t “count “or that ebooks are for lesser-minded fools (which is distinct from actual criticisms about the nature of DRM, or people who genuinely have an easier time reading something printed on a page, or even matters of pure preference). it’s even more encapsulated by people who decry historical acts of mass book-burning by lamenting the physical loss of libraries being burned, as if the charred pages could feel physical harm, rather than the loss of the ideas contained within those books and (more importantly) the social and political implications of destroying and suppressing information, and what it means to have singled out certain demographics and authors (ahem) to be destroyed.

I think a lot of what it comes down to is a physical fetishism of books (in the non-sexual definition of the word, people, don’t be weird) and an obsession with collection and curation and aesthetics that does extend to pretty much any other hobby on earth and is part of living in a capitalist and consumerist world where it feels good to Own Things, but it’s enhanced by the fact that there’s a supposed intellectual superiority in being a Person Who Reads in a way that extends beyond normal in-group snobbery. like, the guy on /mu/ who owns every radiohead album on vinyl is engaging in his own little dick-measuring contest with other /mu/ users and may decry normie music taste as inferior to his own enlightened collection, but for the most part his sentiment stays contained within niche circles. and even then, very few people would consider the blanket act of “listening to music” to be a hobby (cue the gabriel gundacker vine), let alone one that makes you better or smarter than other people.

even the idea of Reading as a hobby (as in, “oh, I love reading!”) feels kind of alien to me, because I do enjoy lots of genres and forms of writing, but I wouldn’t say I necessarily love reading as an act in itself. reading can be really fucking tedious! especially reading something that sucks, or trying to read when your brain is riddled full of holes like mine is, or reading when you’re just not in the mood. I like to read when it involves authors and works that tickle my fancy, and some may have even described my past reading habits as “voracious,” but it’s not that I’m motivated by the indiscriminate act of drawing my eyes across a sentence and processing those words in my temporal lobe any more than my reason for playing video games is that I enjoy the sensation of analog sticks beneath my thumbs. 

[unproduciblesmackdown]

merkleymrack replied to your post “kinda a funny shtick of mine that i’m aro and have such strong takes...”

(1)i agree with u 100%, i think love is hyped up so much, partially because people looove the narrative that love can save you in some way. whether that's saving you from evil, from your shitty environment, from mental illness, from sadness, or from yourself. and that is basically bullshit. "love" as a mystical force and chemical attraction between 2 people doesn't and can't do any of that. real relationships forged over time, based on trust and compromise and a fundamen-

2) tally optimistic outlook on life can help you deal with life, but that's not as snappy. and i think this ties in nicely with what you pointed out about love being perceived as isolating (in a positive way almost) by lots of people: it is because they are co-dependent and attracted to this toxic relationship because it feeds the narrative that "love" is all they need to be happy or to be saved. thats my hot take of the day

talk series criticizing Romahnce, every thursday at 6

for real though let me accuse capitalism some more for Not Great Ideas About Romantic Love b/c like!! that’s basically all you’re allowed to look for in terms of reliable companionship and Any kind of close relationship from your peers. b/c the Nuclear Family is the imposed social unit of choice b/c extended families don’t allow for enough isolation / cut-off support networks......you Outgrow the nuclear family you were born into, and then you’d better find your romantic partner asap to start the next generation nuclear family, because you’re not gonna get other support / community anywhere else, better enjoy having friends before everyone righteously pairs off and sees each other way less, because it’s Totally Fine to have all of your time -> energy -> identity -> existence consumed by just your roles as Parent and Spouse

not to mention like, whenever people of any relationship status are super overworked and like, especially with having unreliable / inconsistent schedules that don’t line up and needing to work a thousand hours a week to scrape by, people have less time to spend with each other and to foster those connections when they’re like always At Work or exhausted and recovering from work or, when they Do have some free time, it doesn’t like up with the free time of their friends’..........like hmm too bad there’s not One Person who is super devoted to Just You and can always make time and prioritize You, Alone.......

Life Under Capitalism is dehumanizing and alienates everyone from each other and doesn’t value life and commodifies anything that people might find adds Value To Their Life and like, our grievances and suffering is just Personal Problems that need to be fixed through our Personal Choices, b/c community is strangled off, isolation is pushed, and you need to Have Money or Die, and there’s the idea that the Way Things Are is flawed but ultimately okay and works out for good people............and it all brings it around to like, the idea that actually Finding Romance is *all* that life is about and is the one route to happiness. like, this concept is just casually trotted out in whatever media as blatantly as that, that “what’s even the point of being alive if you don’t find that Special Someone” and everyone just kinda goes “huh, yeah, that’s true...” like, it’s just Fine to accept that life is a hellscape and you’d want to die if it wasn’t for this one nice magical thing (your true love(tm))......like, maybe there’s a problem with that? we shouldn’t all just accept that life is unbearable but romance is the sole cure? and it’s not even really Anti-Capitalist when a holiday movie / any romcom is all like “this career person thinks that Love is for suckers and only making money is good, but then eventually their romantic interest shows them otherwise and they realize that said romance / a dash of Family is actually what Really matters” b/c it’s just like.......hey don’t be upset that you can’t actually Get Ahead under capitalism!! the people who are making more money than you are unhappy, i promise! it’s fine that you aren’t really succeeding Financially, b/c you have Love, so be happy with that and don’t think that there’s any systemic issue here.

anyways and like yeah of course it does probably seem to people like Romance is the only thing that can improve [insert any bad situation about their lives] because what even else is offered to people, seemingly, right......it’s like, first of all i hope you have a good relationship with your Nuclear Family, b/c they’re the only ones who will be Unconditionally There For You......but even if you do, it’s not like those people can be Everything in your life........and re: friends it’s like, well, i hope you’ve made super lasting friendships in high school and/or college, cuz after you enter The Working World good luck making new friendships!!! even if you do you’ll drift apart b/c nobody has time to nurture the relationship!!!! meanwhile of course everyone should be looking for romance, and hey, that will transform your life and enable you to endure all the other miserable everyday shit you go through, b/c the one person who matters cares about you. and they’d better b/c that’s the only really strong mutually supportive “unconditional” relationship you’re guaranteed! clearly!!!

like of course positive relationships of any kind tend to Improve Someone’s Life......of course isolation makes everything worse for anyone......it’s not like a good romantic relationship SHOULDN’T improve stuff for people, but like, no way should it be the case that romance is the ONE THING available and it better fix fuckin Everything or else you’re on your own when it comes to dealing with those problems that Aren’t improved and if you can’t deal with it on your own you’re fucked, cuz it’s romance or nothing!!!! it would be totally convenient to like, be deeply in love asap and have that make everything amazing and hopefully it’s ur life partner so that you don’t have to worry about Struggling On Your Own like..........a romantic relationship is really all that looks to be on the table according to the Life Narrative that’s pushed really hard. and defining that romance as “this person will always be there for you for Anything and you’ll always be there for them and you’ll always be happy as long as you’re With Each Other” is really Something when life under capitalism guarantees no happiness nor for anyone to be there for you or care about you or help you otherwise

like yeah Friends are nice but they’re kind of sold as the nice optional bonus, or like, they’re there for you but you don’t have to be there for them, low maintenance ideally, and if they drift away when you don’t spend time on them or support them then that’s fine as long as you’ve got that romantic partner b/c that’s how romance is so often defined, as being More than any other relationship, like, hey i don’t Need anything else, i don’t Need anyone else, it’s fine if i only have you, for some reason we gotta view relationships as Tiered and know which one’s you’d consider disposable if you put them all through a winner-take-all tournament bracket.......brilliant approach which is totally fine if the agenda is “give people One Good Relationship with One person which must fulfill their existence and fix everything lacking” like ok

i mean there it alll comes back around to going “augh jesus christ” at Isolation packaged as romance where it’s like “[as long as Romance] it’s fine if i die, it’s fine if i don’t have anyone or anything else, it’s fine if we never engage with the world or talk to anyone else again”.......like fuck!!!! this is horrible!!!!!! god!!!!!! Isolation is Bad gang!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! and abuse overlaps sooooo hard with isolation, and you’ve got that deliberately isolating tactic that abusive partners pull that like, you can’t spend time with family and friends, it’s me vs. them, and you should always be prioritizing More Time With Me and be perfectly happy with *Only* our relationship or you don’t *really* love me..........but then this same sort of Concept will be just be touted as Ideal Romance as long as both people are cool with it lol!!! like, i don’t even Want to be around or think about anyone else, this one person is my whole Life And World, other loved ones who????? it’s Just Us now and hopefully forever, #sweet

like it’s pretty Effed Up that people have to feel like there’s only one way to expect someone to ever be at all devoted to them or really care about / understand / support them and that’s through having a Current Great Romantic Relationship, which must and should be *everything*..........like, everything i think abt “this idea about romance seems awful” is about like........romance shouldn’t be this way for even people who currently have that kind of relationship, and it should Always Be Fine to be single, even if you want / hope for a romantic relationship.........i’m keenly aware that snagging a Romantic Relationship seems like the only way to have someone committed to being On Your Side and paying attention to your existence every day. but really of course that shouldn’t be the case......and when a romance IS had, why is it worse to have a grounded view of it like, when people compare it moreso to friendships rather than to being some kind of magical bond which effortlessly yields Everything You Need In Life, so now you don’t have to care about anything or anybody else

sounds mean or Cold or whatever to be like well the way i see it is that “romance is unnecessary” but i mean, first off it is, you don’t Need it and some people don’t want it. but imo it’s not Bad to see it as just like, a sick bonus, a really awesome thing if you want it and it happens, but like, of course life isn’t Worthless or Ruined if someone who Wants a partner is single / becomes single. like, ideally Being Single regardless of whether you want that to be permanent or not should actually be enough on its own for anyone to be happy!! nobody should Need to have a partner to be happy / feel like their life is okay the way it is. like, is it not actually more ~romantic~ or whatever to feel like okay, i would be fine and happy with being single, but i would rather be with this other person because i Want to be, but i don’t Need this relationship to be okay. vs. the whole like i *need* this relationship type “that’s the puppetmaster who cursed my dick” approach where it’s like, god believe me this isn’t my idea but i MUST be with you, i’m miserable without you so i basically have no choice, this is like, the universe holding me at gunpoint. why not have choosing to be with someone just like “yeah i prefer this to Not being with you and i think it improves my life overall” without anyone having to feel like it’s their only option for happiness

anyways i really can’t imagine the concept of like, a Romance just absolutely cutting down all these other aspects of your life b/c you don’t care about / Need that shit anymore being an at-all pleasant or appealing concept versus like, it just being its own positive relationship that enhances everything and Doesn’t become your sole source for so much shit like validation and commitment and intimacy and support / help and companionship and etc etc etc etc etc etc

i’m sure this isn’t the only tangent i forgot to throw in somewhere else but everyone knows my “'teen angst’ is largely comprised of anticapitalist sentiment in the face of the hellscape and cognitive dissonance of adult life under capitalism and YA media deals with this and the struggle to find genuine connection and value in everyday existence" takes, well, it’s kinda wild how it’s basically a requirement for any YA work to have a thread of Romance running central to the whole thing. not like that doesn’t happen in other Genres, and not like some works don’t lean into that way harder than others, and not like every main char Ends Up with the/a love interest at the end, but it’s like, jeez. imo supports my idea that romance is Supposed to be *the* panacea for the ailments of capitalism

[lvminae]

SwSh Opinions

Actually fuck it I'll make an in depth post on swsh since I'm sick and it is 2:30 am and I can't sleep.

Keep in mind that these are my opinions and I’m not out here to argue with anyone, I just want to share what I think. And there is a lot. Since I wrote this in the middle of the night and edited the next day, I probably forgot some things, but it is long enough as is.

I don’t think I actually went into anything spoiler like.

Things I like

- Characters: I adore the variety in the characters and a lot of them are loveable. Some stick out as ones I don't particularly like, and some are silly, but that variety is good and it isn't so common that it becomes irritating.

And I have reasons to care about characters I initially disliked (like Bede; his development is JUST enough for me to not hate him). Some I still don't care about, and some characters deserve more development, but it isn't bad to the point where I am not happy with it (and I will address this more later).

- Pokemon (Variety): I'll talk about pokemon later on the neutral list, but I do really appreciate just how varied and even wild the pokemon are. Design wise, anyways - I don't know jack about competitive stats and don't care.

- Wild Area: The wild area has the silly mechanic of sudden weather changes depending on the areas, and the pokemon who pop up can be repetitive when you are dex filling. But other than that, I LOVE it. It is huge, and immersive, and I much prefer running around there than on routes.

And the pokemon popping up and approaching? Amazing. Can be annoying sometimes when pokemon you don't care about chase you (looking at Tyrouge and Electrike seriously Leave Me Alone), and hunting water types that hop around is frustrating (but makes sense), but it's still a wonderful addition.

- Exp. Share: I know a lot of people are pissed off it can't be turned off, but as someone who cannot get into old games because of not having it/how long it takes to get it, I appreciate it.

Some people think it makes it too easy, but now that you can box pokemon at p much anytime, you can (mostly) avoid the effect by boxing pokemon. I say mostly cause not all situations work with it, but I don't think it is common enough to say it is bad.

- Improvements of life: To add to my point above, I enjoy things that makes the games easier. I'm not a hardcore gamer. I want to have fun and actually be able to reasonably beat a game. Difficult games aren't bad, but these are for all ages. And it is easier to make things difficult than it is to make them easier if they were made difficult, yknow?

Things like showing the effectiveness of moves is one of those things- which I am glad they kept from SuMo- because I have memory problems. Lots of fans do, or are young, or just can't remember Every Single Type Matchup. I prefer having that than having to google type advantages constantly so I don't get a 1 hit ko on either my pokemon or a pokemon I want to catch.

It isn't quite as hand holdy as SuMo was (love ya rotomdex, but pls give me a break), but it is accessible to a range of players. That is how it feels to me, anyways.

- Side quests: Having little quests that give incentive to explore the region and just give a little spice of life to the region. And they aren't super confusing to do.

- General aesthetic: I love how the region looks. It hits so many aesthetic points for me. It is a pretty game with pretty locations, and the graphics are far better than anything I would have expected for pokemon.

Seriously, I've seen people comparing it to BotW and.... That is not the style Pokemon i or ever has been going for. It's an unfair comparison. Also BotW graphics are :/ in my opinion. Beautiful locations, but I don't like how people look. Pokemon? It looks nice, all fit together well. Feels like POKEMON. Not like other games that people compare it to.

There are some graphics that need fixing, like the berry trees and the whole mess they are when you shake them. But it isn't nearly as bad as people pre release were saying. And the battle locations are fine too. Seriously pre release thoughts were a mess.

- Performance: It runs well. I haven't had issues. Frame rate is fine, very rare drops, graphics work fine. I've only had a crash once, and that's because I was chaining max raids and the vibration was too intense for my machine. I took a break, turned vibration off, and everything was fine.

Note: I know that there have been some issues with glitches and stuff, and those are an issue. I haven't experienced any myself so I can't complain. And I'm not any sort of expert.

- Regional variants: I love regional variants in general. It is just So Good. And there are more than just gen 1 variants in these games! Thank god! Obviously many are still gen 1 but they aren't Exclusively gen 1.

I'll talk about that pandering later.

- Gyms: I love how the gyms works. I love the entry trials. I love the feel of the gyms and the competition, and the cheering and the music!!! It is just a great time!

- Character customization: Not quite as extensive as I was anticipating, but still super expansive and I love it.

Things I am neutral on

- Post game: It isn't that bad, but it isn't super interesting either. And I hate the sword based dude. His hair looks like a dick. Yes this is a genuine complaint. Both his and his brother's designs are... silly, and kinda uncreative, and I don't like it.

But they do pose a challenge, and it gives an interesting look at lore and the concept of people believing their assumed ancestry gives them certain rights and just how far these people will go.

- Pokemon: I think we have a good amount of new pokemon, but overall I am... eh on the designs of some. In my experience, regions have either a good amount of good looking pokemon, or a good amount of bad looking/boring pokemon. Obviously this is purely subjective, but this region has me drawn down the middle. I have pokemon I adore and are new favorites, but also quite a few where I just.... Don't like them at all. I've never been this split on them, so while I appreciate their variety like I noted above, I don't necessarily like all of them (especially the fossils. Their story makes sense, yes, but I can't fucking stand them.)

- Dynamax/Gigantamax: I get it's ties into the story, and I love that tie. And it is the gimmick of this region, which I absolutely am ok with. But in use... yeah, having a large pokemon is fun! But I don't really... Care about it? And I only use it in gym battles where I know the leader is gonna Gigantamax (even though generally I didn't need to), or max raids.

I like it more than Z moves, but it does make me miss Mega Evolution. At least it gives people something fun to design. And some of the gifantamax designs are great (and some are.... Basically dynamax. Pikachu and Eevee especially.) The raid make for good leveling though so I do like that.

- Story: I like pokemon for the stories. I actually don't like the style of the games gameplay wise. Pokemon I can handle and enjoy because it is simple compared to other games in the genre, at least enough so where I can be pretty clueless but still have fun and drive to play/grind somewhat. Bur ultimately for me, I enjoy pokemon for the story and characters.

Story... is lacking in this game. I love what we get! It is super interesting! But it is so much on the back burner compared to other games in order to focus on the gyms that it feels... I dunno. I miss a larger, more involved story. The focus on specific characters like Hop do still give me something to focus on, at least.

But the story could have been improved overall had it not been shoved to the side so much. A different, less involved story could have worked better, or something that involved the league and gym leaders more since the gyms were the focus.

Or find a way to involve the player more! It really comes down to the goal of the game, which was the improvements for competitive play. As a non competitive player, this isn't anything I care about or want. But some do, and with that being the focus, I understand the story being a bit lackluster compared to previous games.

Doesn't mean I have to like it, though :P

- Dexit: I don't... care about dexit. Having to play only with the pokemon from the gen isn't bad, and you can still use some. Yeah, a lot of pokemon I like are missing, but that gave me incentive to use pokemon from this gen. I think people making a huge fit over it also made me just Not Care. I'll miss my old pokemon, but maybe I cam actually complete the dex for this gen.

Things I dislike

- The trading system/y link: The fact you have to have nintendo online for this is awful. It is alienating to all those players who can't afford the subscription. All you should need is an internet connection just like the other games. It's a cash grab and I hate it.

The trading system is also irritating to use in general. I know the gts was not the best, but being able to search was nice. And one on one trading was so much easier. Using these codes is problematic because people you don't know can use the same code and you might not know! It fucks up trades! It sucks. It just sucks.

- Gen 1 pandering: Leon's key pokemon is a Charizard. Charizard got a gigantamax pokemon. Most gigantamax not from Galar are gen 1. Most regional variants are gen 1. I Do Not Fucking Care About Gen 1. Meowth has both an alolan AND galarian form AND gigantamax! It's annoying! Give the other regions some light. Please. I am so, so fucking tired of pandering to gen 1. The pandering makes me hate the gen, not want to go back to it.

- Version exclusive gym leaders: This one doesn't irritate me like the other things, I just think it is dumb. Especially since they didn't change the towns to make sense for the exclusive leaders.

- Cost: I am not made of money and I really do believe it should have been the normal $40. But it is a main series game with a lot and switch games seem to generally run at that $60 mark - main ones anyways - so I'm not surprised. Just disappointed.

[thaumatological]

im gonnaaaa revise and post my very dirk centric analysis of the epilogues here as well

also in case it needs stating, spoilers abound!

i read through both of the epilogues simultaneously yesterday, consuming both at the same time rather than one and then the other, and i feel like while it may not have been the most “satisfying” approach from a character-centric perspective, i have a more complete understanding of the stories than those who read them separately. if you’ve read through both and have the stomach to do it again for some reason, i suggest doing it in parallel, m1 c1 m2 c2 etc.

i will warn you though, i ended up having two nightmares at the same time in my dreams last night. like, simultaneously, two separate threads of terror unraveling in my subconscious. i woke up this morning already knee deep into an analysis of the homestuck epilogues, and it was less like “waking up” and more “becoming aware that i was conscious”

anyway, without further ado!

dirk killing himself in candy 14 is the scene that resonates with us as being “dirk” because it is. that’s all dirk, our dirk, the one from homestuck. he Has to do that in order for candy to continue being candy, and part of me believes that he knew that on a conscious level—hence his death being just. he knew he wouldn’t get a nice fluffy outcome in the candy timeline because him, all of him, not just this one instance, was fated to be meat dirk.

—and speaking of, the concept of Ultimate Selves pretty much squares away meat dirk. he doesn’t read like our dirk, the one from homestuck canon, because the narrative explicitly states he’s Not anymore. he’s become all of him, all of him from across paradox space, including notable players bro, doc scratch, and lord english. dirk’s Ultimate Self is a culmination of every possible him taken to the highest intensity. it reads like one of his personal nightmares because it WAS his personal nightmare—the personal nightmare of our dirk. he’s a prince of heart. the ascension to his Ultimate Self resulted in the complete destruction of the barriers between his splinters. the more i think about it, the more brilliant it is. he seems out of character as the dirk we know and love because he isn’t.

i feel like i finally Get it, but i’m still not looking forward to seeing people who dislike dirk using this to discredit the progress he made on his personal journey (ie “see he was evil the whole time!”) nor am i looking forward to all of the “dirk would never do this! it’s ooc writing!” from people who seem to have missed the part of homestuck where what scared dirk about himself most was the undeniable truth in it. there’s more than one example of “bad dirk and/or dirk byproducts” out there in paradox space. it’s more than feeling like you “might” be bad, it’s… being afraid of what you would be if you weren’t so afraid of being it, it’s seeing things that were a result of You-but-not-you and having to stare down the fact that even if you weren’t bad, even if you didn’t, you could have, would have, did. dirk’s Ultimate Self being a nightmare scenario is ..almost a recursive throwback to his fears about his ultimate self (note capitals)

him taking control of the narrative was epic though. it honestly did not catch me off guard? it makes sense. it is a 100% dirk strider move. if you haven’t read it by now for some reason, go read detective pony. i am diagnosing you with read detective pony by sonnetstuck. it’s terminal.

the only two people aside from hussie to have controlled the narrative in homestuck canon are the cherubs. and i did make the point somewhere up there that dirk absorbed lord english, and by extension, caliborn. that’s WHY he got that ability. not because he’s a prince of heart. dirk controlling the narrative makes sense from the perspective of dirk controlling the external narrative as well, ie, the whole thing is on a piece of paper that he wrote as some form of bizarre cathartic self punishment for his existence, but in the grander scheme of things and truth of homestuck dirk controlling the narrative makes sense as the puppetmaster-turned-puppet we see him become in several of his iterations, because caliborn literally becomes part of him.

everything is so skewed by the narrators. yes, both of them, because the whole point of the epilogues is that both of them suck and muse calliope is just as shitty as “impartial” “narrator” as Ultimate Self dirk is. it actually makes the whole thing a lot greyer in morality than it comes across at first. US dirk does a lot of Bad Shit as narrator, yeah, but even as passive as she is, calliope’s narration has its flaws (see: everything relating to trickster mode)

the epilogues are less about the characters themselves and more about a grander conflict between the two cherubs, using dirk and jade as their puppets—and yes, muse calliope is using jade as a puppet LITERALLY, which upsets me on so many levels i can’t even get into it here. let jade be fucking relevant and happy hussie or so help me i will write myself into your narrative and do some renovation of my own. but dirk is equally deprived of his agency in this scenario. i’m not going to debate with anyone about the inherent goodness/badness of dirk strider because that’s an entirely different essay, but in canon, dirk’s entire arc is about NOT becoming exactly what he becomes in the epilogues. the dirk we know didn’t choose to become his “Ultimate Self,” the dirk we know doesn’t get a choice between meat and candy, the dirk we know is at the mercy of the narrative even as he pretends to control it.

and that’s not something new to dirk strider, in any variation of himself. i’m specifically going back to thinking about the term “puppetmaster-turned-puppet” here, because i like it. in canon, we see dirk get out-puppeted by hal. it’s implied that bro is being controlled at least in part by lil cal, who is in turn.. a splinter of dirk indirectly via hal via arquiussprite. i’m getting a little lost in all the splinters. why is dirk’s worst enemy consistently himself? don’t answer that. uhh also it should be mentioned that makes lil cal a puppetmaster-turned-puppet-turned-puppetmaster, both literally and metaphorically. i fucking hate andrew hussie.

anyway, both of the epilogues do all that shit to to drive home the point that both of them (and i mean muse calliope and LE here when i say both, because this has officially stopped being about the dirk we know) are removed from human concepts like “good” and “evil” and represent duality in an alien manner that to a casual observer could be mistaken for some objective statement about morality, but they’re both wrong to us from our perspective as humans with human morals. the choice of candy and meat from the beginning was a cherub one. that’s not a balanced meal! that’s not even a reasonable dichotomy for humans! meat is not more real or “canon” than candy was, both of them are very flawed stories being manned at the helm by omnipotent green aliens.

okay we’re ALMOST done here, i just want to touch on the actual authors of the narrative rather than the ones the narrative insists are its narrators. by which i mean the actual real life human beings who wrote the epilogue. the point i was making above about how dirk doesn’t have any agency? the point of these epilogues were that none of the characters have any agency in their stories. every work is a reflection of its author, even when aforementioned authors are hiding behind pseudoauthors on a narrative level.

the homestuck epilogues feel very meanspirited to me. they punish their readers for not understanding their intentionally heavyhanded meta. homestuck was always very meta, but it was also fun. this, on the other hand, wasn’t fun. i haven’t seen anyone claim that the epilogues were a “fun” read, even those who enjoyed them enjoy them on the basis that “tragedy is a valid form of art,” and,,, ........and their opinions are. valid. and they can have them. sure.

but for those of us who read stories in order to enjoy them, which i am safely assuming makes up the majority of those who read homestuck, the homestuck epilogues are like a final kick in the teeth as a send off to a fandom with barely any teeth left to lose. we’re already having people who refuse to read them, and god i wish that were me, but it’s also.,, you can’t criticize something properly if you haven’t read it. we’re going to see a lot of very bad takes in the coming days about all kinds of things from information proliferating through the grapevine, and personally, i am not looking forward to it. i really hope this is the end, that homestuck is finally fucking over, and the epilogues are done with and we can all live our lives unmarred by strange orange men with typewriters. i’m going to hole up with my cool and new webcomic music albums and all of the good novel-length dirk-centric fic i’ve bookmarked over the years and wait this one out. i invite you to do the same.

cool and new webcomic bandcamp | cool and new greatest hits | my personal favorite album by them

detective pony by sonnetstuck (seriously please read this it watered my crops and cured my lead poisoning)

literally anything by callmearcturus but this is my personal favorite (chamomile, rosewater, and other unlikely intoxicants)

this long winded discworld joke by oxfordroulette that inflicted me with a terminal case of loving jake english despite it being a dirkjohn fic (vanitas vanitatum) also if you finish reading this one and also succumbed to loving jake english, i’m not going to link it but they have another fic that’ll scratch that itch for you. that’s all i’ll say on that matter.

this fic said nonverbal autistic dirk rights and thank god (we were made for another world by princex_n)

thanks for reading

[howsermax]

Thoughts on Pet Sematary (2019)

So I saw Pet Sematary in theaters a few days back, and I’ve gotta say, I was deeply, deeply disappointed. While I love the 1989 film about as much as I love the book, with the screenplay for the film being one of the only good screenplays written by King himself, it was admittedly in dire need of an upgrade. From Louis Creed’s hilarious line delivery, to the obvious switching to a Chucky-style doll during certain scenes with Gage, to the cinematography, the problems with the 1989 version of the flick were only in execution. The story could have been kept entirely the same (with a more ambiguous, book accurate ending), and it could have been an amazing remake. But instead, we got a very disappointing film.

First, I’ll go over what I liked. The cinematography, while gray, was still pretty creative at times in terms of camera movement. All the actors do a pretty good job for the most part, however, Ellie only does a good job after she dies. The practical effects were all pretty amazing, even though Ellie could have used a little more rot. The score is also pretty memorable and interesting. Surprisingly, the movie makes a few changes to the source material I actually really welcome. For example, the Zelda storyline is changed up in a way where it makes more sense why Rachel’s feeling of disgust towards Zelda added to her guilt by making Zelda’s death directly involve Rachel’s reluctance to interact with her. The Zelda flashbacks also have very creative transitions. However, those are all the praises I can really sing for this movie.

The writing is the most noticeable flaw with this movie. The characters never once talk like real people, they simplify story concepts way too often (for example, Rachel’s feelings of guilt in the first place are barely explored), and the movie brings up it’s themes of coping with death and loss in the most amazingly ham-fisted and basic ways possible. After Ellie asks about what will happen when Church dies, Rachel and Louis share a conversation IN PRIVATE about whether or not they believe in the afterlife. The movie quite literally decides it’s going to directly tell the audience that the character who is a surgeon doesn’t believe in the afterlife. Keep in mind, this isn’t really written into any other aspects of his character. I really don’t think these writers passed Screenwriting 101.

But on the other hand, the movie also has a recurring tendency to forget to write about the themes of the story altogether. For example, Pascow is criminally underused in this movie. You may remember in the original movie, Pascow was extremely important, as he spent his screen time trying to stop Louis from trying to cross the barrier between life and death, so Louis can learn to accept death. However, Remake Pascow is the most vague, boring, cookie-cutter horror movie ghost you can imagine, complete with never explaining what he means, and not influencing the events around him. Pascow also doesn’t appear at all during the ending. The writers genuinely don’t understand the importance he serves to the themes of the story. But his underuse is the least of this movie’s problems.

Now, I don’t have a problem with just the concept of changing things from book/old movie to movie. It’s necessary at times, and this remake has some welcome changes up it’s sleeve. However, this movie is almost entirely full of unnecessary changes that make the movie worse in one way or another. The first one I want to talk about is the decision to have Ellie be killed on the road rather than Gage. This is something that was explicitly revealed in the trailer to anyone who remembers the original story, and what’s worse? They extensively spoke about this major plot point in the film industry press surrounding the movie before release. I get that the trailer thing is a topic for a separate nerd tirade, but I can’t describe how stupid it was of these producers to talk about such a big change pre-release. Even though it’s a remake, it’s kind of alienating to movie-goers who don’t know the classic Pet Sematary story somehow. The filmmakers extensively spoke about how they made the change so that the resurrected child could be bigger and more threatening, though I think they were too weak to give us the true depressing movie we came here to watch. Because I guess movie audiences are somehow more emotional than they were 30 years ago? Comparing this attitude to how they actually put the scene together, it looks more like they were trying to pull an ol’ switcharoo on the people who know the story. Which begs the question: WHY ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT IT IN PLACES WHERE POTENTIAL MOVIE VIEWERS CAN SEE IT??

Another huge issue I have with this movie is how fucking seriously it takes itself. The original had a very light sheen of comedy to it, think something similar to An American Werewolf in London. This is extremely prevalent in the scenes involving Pascow, where he casually stands around the afterlife, contrasting against everything and everyone as a walking corpse that nobody can see. The remake genuinely lacks all intentional comedy, which makes it really really hard to actually remember the experience, or care about it. It also ends up making certain parts of the movie unintentionally funny. For example, during the scene where Louis does his internet research on the Pet Sematary, he finds a fucking newspaper clipping about a literal fucking bison being implied to have been buried in and resurrected by the Pet Sematary. I subsequently chuckled out loud in the theater, as my mind was crossed with the mental image of a grieving child lugging an entire bison to the Pet Sematary, and struggling to find a place to bury it in the already cramped cemetery.

The editing and scene pacing is legitimately the most stereotypical modern horror film schlock ever put to screen. Firstly, jumpscares are all over this film, and it’s not a look. From the Orinco trucks, to Zelda in the dumbwaiter, to Church, everything in the film is given a loud THUD effect to accompany it, and I was supplied with many Silent Hill: Revelation 3D pop-tart jumpscare flashbacks through it’s run-time. The placement of the THUDs at times felt like watching one of my Spooky Guys episodes. Again, back to Pascow being utterly useless in the story, he instead spends this film being relegated to “look at me, I’m vague and say 3 spooky sentences I repeat over and over and I’m in a modern horror film and that’s my whole character I’m scary I say stuff about ghosts and death”.

Now here’s the big one. The ending. The ending is genuinely the worst thing about the entire film. Here’s a basic summary from what I remember. So Louis buries his dead daughter and waits for her to come back as his family tries to contact him, while Gage is troubled by visions of Pascow (who does nothing of note through the whole story). Ellie comes back and catches on to the fact that she died, but Louis denies that and gives her a bath. Jud goes over and suspects that Louis has brought Ellie back from the grave, and Ellie gets mad about it and kills Jud. Rachel and Gage arrive back at the house after Louis stops returning their calls, and Rachel is greeted by an undead Ellie. Ellie thinks that Rachel doesn’t want her around anymore, and tries to kill her, Gage, and Louis. Rachel manages to allow Gage and Louis to escape, but she’s impaled and buried by Ellie. Louis puts Gage in the car and tells him to not open the door for anyone, not even Ellie. Louis faces off with Ellie in the Pet Sematary, before being killed by the now resurrected Rachel. Rachel and Ellie resurrect Louis, and for some reason unlike Ellie, Louis and Rachel are big dumb traditional zombies. At daybreak, they approach the car with a can of gasoline, having burned down Jud’s house. However, instead, they decide to unlock the car for Gage. I have a lot to say about this.

First off, this ending is fucking weak compared to the original ending. In the original film, the process of Louis killing Gage with the lethal injection is so indescribably heart-breaking. It’s actually a high point for the actor’s performance, and he definitely sells the sheer emotion of the scene. The remake’s ending definitely suffers from how frequently it fails to actually capture the emotion of the original story and film. With that, let’s just say, this movie is the prime example of why horror movies with dead protagonists fail so often. If you aren’t both careful and skilled, killing your protagonist can result in your protagonist’s character arc not being fulfilled or completed. The original Pet Sematary story has a very strong and compelling character arc for Louis. In the final scenes of the original film, after Louis has begrudgingly put down Church and Gage, and has burned Jud’s house down, he carries Rachel’s corpse with him. Pascow tries to get him to no longer try and cross the barrier between life and death, and that he needs to let go of those he loves. He needs to learn to cope with death, and understand that dead is better. Louis, however, doesn’t listen, and finds a reason to think it’ll be different this time: because she just died. Pascow realizes that Louis has failed to learn his lesson, and shouts an admittely hilarious “NOOOOOOO” as he fades away. Louis waits in his home after burying Rachel, and as she walks in, now decayed and deformed, Louis makes out with the walking corpse, before being killed by her. What works here is Louis has completed his character arc. Granted the character arc consists of failing to learn his lesson, but it’s a powerful arc no less. It drives home how much the movie is truly about being as grateful for death as we are for life, and how a life spent yearning for those who’ve passed to return is a life spent suffering. While the more ambiguous book ending is more favorable, the 1989 film version still drives home this theme extremely well.

Overall, very bad movie. Don’t waste your money on this. Save your money for Endgame, that looks good. Or if you’re a King fan, wait for It: Part 2. Just... please no more ‘80s jokes guys, it isn’t funny anymore.

[kierongillen]

On First Issues

I wrote this for my last newsletter, and figure it likely should be added to the tumblr, just it can be added to the Writer Advice tag. Anyway! Sign up to the newsletter for more of this kind of stuff, of course.

Mags Vissago on twitter asked what people's favourite issue ones were, which spiralled into a larger discussion of what makes a good issue 1. That I'm back in the world of Number Ones with the new projects kicking off meant I felt like throwing in my assorted spare change. Also, it was a good way to avoid work. The conversation spiralled a bit, and I thought it worth trying to pull some of this together in a chunk.

There will be a lot of obvious caveats in what follow. I would question anything and everything. What follows below is what I consider pretty solid advice, but pretty solid advice collapses into useless dogma is unexamined. This is just where my head is at presently. Now that I've put it down, I'll likely set it on fire.

Firstly – most of what follows is about writing about a comic which tends to be a standard 20 page unit, released sequentially in a regular release schedule. It doesn't apply to graphic novels. It doesn't apply to comics released irregularly. It doesn't apply to any other form that isn't comics. This is stuff which is warped because of the economic construct. It is also leaning towards what I'd call a pop comic. These are almost entirely genre comics of one form or another.

Issue 1s obsess many writers for various reasons, both good, bad and necessary. Part of it is simply because anyone working in a serial comics in the Anglophone American pamphlet model have more experience in writing issue 1s than any other issue number (“Last issue” isn't an issue number, pedants). So you spend more time proportionally working on them and thinking about them. Perhaps most tellingly, in the present Direct Market, your sales of the first issue are what establish the sales of the latter issues. If you can launch stronger, you have longer until the standard erosion of sales makes the book commercially unviable in singles (and so also gives longer to gain a trade readership which means that doesn't matter). “How effective the first issue is” isn't the only thing which effects sales, but it doesn't for hurt.

Even for books which find an audience in trades, it's worth noting that the number of books which are huge in trades are often books that also did well in singles. The single is many things, including an advertisement, and the more part of a conversation the single is, the more there is an awareness of the trade. The weirdest thing about WicDiv being a hit was how much easier it was to sell more copies of WicDiv. Its success kind of sold itself.

Anyway – in the conversation online, I argued that the best first issues tend to do two things, which I unhelpfully described as “First It” and “Second It.”

The First It is includes everything which I would describe as good writing (good writing, for comics, includes everything, not just the words – it's also art, design, etc). You introduce everything the reader needs to know about your book to have a fair understanding of it. The “Needs” is key. It's not the whole book, but certainly enough to give a reader a fair understanding. You show the sort of thing you do, and how you choose to do it. Obviously not everyone who ends up liking the book will like it (or vice versa), but generally speaking, you lay out who you are, as honestly as you can.

(Worth noting this also includes possibly alienating some readers. If they're going to burn out of a book, I'd argue its rude to string them along. I've never done this as aggressively as I did with my first comic, Phonogram, whose opening caption was so noxious to basically show the door to anyone who wasn't in for this level of nonsense. Why waste anyone's time, eh?)

A competent first issue working inside First It principles will introduce initial key characters, delineate them, their desires and the world they operate inside. In the style you do so, the readers will get an understanding of the book. Frankly, anything which you reveal when hyping the book is almost certainly inside the First It.

In short: most of First It is actually The Pitch – or rather, showing you can competently execute The Pitch.

(A common form of incompetence in Pop Comics writing is failing to do that, and you end the issue with less information delineated than you got from the solicits. I read a first issue in the last year, and found they'd printed the pithy series blurb on the back cover, none of which was explained to any degree in the comic I had just read.)

The Second It is where it gets tricky. This is more rarely pulled off, and also much more subjective, but it's also something that the vast majority of hit books have managed to do, which makes me suspect there's something powerful to at least consider.

The Second It is giving the reader something that wasn't in the pitch. This normally speaks to the actual truth of what the book actually is, or at least gives a sense of the book's direction. It can be a big huge genre twist, but it doesn't have to be that large. But it does have to be something.

(Or at least, it has to be something unless your core pitch is so unique, so magical, so entirely without precedent that you don't have to worry about any of this tawdry nonsense.)

There's a TV first episode which is often mentioned by other writers when talking about this. It's The SHIELD. Spoilers, obv. The show is about corrupt cops. We know this going in. Hell, you know that throughout the first episode, as it's delineated carefully (This is all First It stuff). However, in the final scene, the lead shoots another cop who's on his team. That's the Second It. It lets us know exactly how corrupt these cops are, and also immediately lets us know the direction of the series. For the genre it's working in, that's a strong opening.

A book that is competent with First It regularly fails to hit Second It in various ways, but there's two which I see a lot.

Firstly, the last page reveal is actually just the book's high concept. As in, what the reader already knew by how the book was described to them, or included in solicits. If it was Harry Potter, it'd be “You're a Wizard, Harry.” This means that a reader has paid $3-5 dollars to learn what they already knew. No matter how well executed, this tends to be a turn off. It's also a turn off which is 100% great writing if you were writing (say) a Novel. But there you aren't selling sequential units.

Secondly, the last page reveal is a big event which the reader simply doesn't care about. This is a failure born of the rest of the book, and shows well how First It and Second It aren't separate units. If you know the Second It is reliant on some emotional underpining, you need to make sure that is established. A classic example would be (say) a long absent relative turns up. If the issue has not spent sufficient time making the absence of the relative to your cast of absolute interest, that isn't going to land.

In Doctor Aphra 1, her Dad turns up into the end, and that's not set up at all in the issue. However, my hook was “her dad has turned up... and he's just fucked over Aphra.” The latter is the reveal of character about the former, and is the directional thrust. It's not about the existence of her father, but rather her father's character and what that means for Aphra.

Yes, you should be raising an eye on “Last page Reveal.” The commonality of “Last Page Reveal” in these books is another question, and a hint towards how this kind of writing has been codified. There's been a lot of people reverse engineering BKV, shall we say. “Reveal in final scene” may be a better way of thinking of it, and even that is too small for my liking.

To talk about WicDiv for a second, it's a complicated mess of a book, but our First It is establishing a bunch of the key mythology, vibe, style and two lead characters. The Two Lead Characters feed into the Second It – which is “A Judge is Murdered in the Middle the Court. Did Lucifer Do it?” That only even vaguely works because we spent the majority of the issue delineating Lucifer as much as we did Laura. The Second It for WicDiv was signalling this is a genre work with an actual plot, and not just ambling along Phonogram style. First It was “Here's our world” and Second It is “And here's where we're going next.”

You may be reading the above and thinking of it as a checklist. “Must make sure I have Two Its.” That would be a mistake. The two Its are an analytical tool. It's an editing principle when approaching your own material of what narrative unit makes a useful, accurate and compelling introduction to the story. In my case, it's looking at my story, recognising the point where First It (introduction to the book) and Second It (reason to continue reading book and hint at immediate direction) have been fulfilled to my satisfaction, and then writing and editing to ensure I include them both.

In the case of WicDiv, I looked at the story and thought “I have to get to the murder of the Judge.” I could have perhaps ended with Lucifer having just murdered the assassins who tried to kill her... but all that would have shown is “these pop star gods who claim to be gods have godly powers” and I said that in the hype. Perhaps I could have worked out a way to make that work if I played with the sympathy towards Lucifer differently, but that still felt like reiterating the pitch. The Death Of The Judge leading to a murder mystery was clear and direct. That's what I had to get to.

It's also worth noting that many of the most successful first issues (and some of the biggest hits of recent years) are longer than 20 pages. Y: The Last Man (which is a clockwork masterpiece of First-Issue-ness) was 28 pages. Saga is double issue size. Monstress was triple sized. For me, WicDiv was 30 comics pages. Spangly New Thing is 34. Longer issues both let you spend more time making sure First It is done well, and more time to push towards whatever beat you consider to be Second It.

(That's another reason why the Second It can come at the end of an issue. By definition, it's the point you were trying to reach. When you've reached it, you can stop.)

And as another side point, it's also worth remembering that How You Hype The Book can vary hugely. If I'd sold WicDiv as “Pop Stars who claim to be gods...” perhaps Lucifer having actual powers would have been enough for a Second It. I suspect not, because clearly me even posing the question is implicitly promising the reader the answer is “Yes.” That'd be like me selling an autobiography with “Does Kieron Gillen have magical powers?” and then showing across 300 pages that no, he's just a dude. But still: you get the point.

That's enough on this. It's interesting stuff to think about, because this is only a tiny fraction of it. If Issue 1 is everything that has to be in issue 1, what is Issue 2. Issue 1s are the hardest worked issues in a series, because you're preparing for so long, but Issue 2 are a special kind of heartbreaker.

I said it at the top, but all of this is also for a certain mode of comics. And not even all that certain mode for comics. The First Error I listed above? If a writer is figuring it's primarily a trade based book, and they feel it's not worth distorting issue 1 to serve the single, that could be a fine choice. I sometimes wonder if I'd have been better ending THREE's first issue with the Spartans turning up rather than the slaughter.

That's still a cliffhanger. You can go more extreme that that. When I launched WicDiv, and Warren and Jason Howard were launching Trees, I felt entirely ashamed having done this Pop Thrill Banger and Trees just cuts at the end of an issue and assumes you'll be back in month. It believed in a maturity in the audience and a willing to follow it wherever it went. That's something I find entirely admirable.

Point being: the above is only useful tools in so far as it aligns with your goals as a creator.

[thesinglesjukebox]

JULIA HOLTER - I SHALL LOVE 2 [7.17] And we shall reciproc8.

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Nearly a decade ago, Julia Holter released an album of quotidian but surprisingly intimate field recordings, one of which was an interpretation of a score by Michael Pisarov--vthe greatest composer of the 21st century, and someone who Holter studied under while attending CalArts. While she has collaborated with him on his records, Holter has never recorded music that felt obviously aligned with the post-Cagean philosophy and aesthetics of the Wandelweiser collective. She has, however, elucidated the importance of Pisaro's lessons and experimental music workshops in providing a space for "listening and focus." Holter described hber upcoming album, Aviary, as a reflection on "how one responds to [the cacophony they experience daily] as a person -- how one behaves, how one looks for love, for solace." This song accomplishes exactly that through language reminiscent of classical texts and a delivery that demands listeners to consider its utility. The song is simply prefaced: "That is all, that is all. There is nothing else." A matter-of-fact decree that renders the following statement as irrefutable truth: "I am in love." Appropriately, the song spends most of its runtime in a calming trance-like meditation. There's a thoughtfulness to the arrangement -- the soft bed of synth pads, the otherworldly vocoder harmony, the soothing string section -- and it helps to capture the subtle flutter and comforting security of finding a partner. The song eventually swells into a beautiful wall of noise that finds the titular line transforming in meaning and tone. "In all the humans there is something true/But do the angels say, do the angels say/I shall love?" she sings. What begins as an elevation of self beyond that of celestial beings becomes a therapeutic mantra of self-assurance -- not "I shall love?" but "I shall love." I'm drawn to Holter's music because her compositions and voice are always conduits for intentional listening. The result is deep contemplation, an invitation for listeners to see how the material used can lead to a better understanding of the material itself, or even one's self. More than simple platitudes, "I Shall Love 2" calls for people to truly understand that they deserve love, even if it requires constant reminding. She models how to do just that, but gives another piece of sound advice: "Who cares what people say." [7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Julia Holter's music often feels like it holds you at a distance, intentionally breaking from expectations and forms to artificialize its sound. On "I Shall Love 2," she takes a simple concept -- the overwhelming and universal nature of love -- and treats it in a way that almost feels like an alien's view of the concept, talking and singing through these questions and declarations of love as if it the first time she is handling them. But as the baroque-ish instrumentation of "I Shall Love 2" builds from a simple, almost-childlike ambient soundscape to a full, crashing chant of a song, Holter's inhuman facade begins to melt away, leaving the song feeling like a personal revelation of a sort. [7]

Kat Stevens: I've got a lot of admiration for Julia's queasy strings but, with one or two exceptions, I've always found her songs hard to love. "I Shall Love 2" doesn't have the immediate menace of "Horns Surrounding Me" or the feeling of stumbling around a maze where everyone is dressed as a Versailles courtier of "Feel You." What it does conjure up is this image: a woman has escaped to a secluded forest glade for some peace and quiet, when a bird sets alight on her shoulder to tweet a little. Fine, she says. You can stay. But then a steady stream of bunnies and baby deer and pixies arrive to bother her with flowers and schmaltz until the woman finally cracks, crams her hands over her ears and tells them all to either shut up or fuck off. I sympathise, Julia, but I ain't getting involved with your Bambi beef. [6]

Alfred Soto: As a sonic experience, "I Shall Love 2" is a trip: a string arrangement accumulating power, cello, backup vocals shouting from a mountain peak to the heavens. I wish Julia Holter had chosen a less discreet vocal approach in the first minute, but she knows her track has surprises. [7]

Tim de Reuse: Delightfully off-kilter, a little out of tune, unpredictable -- It's delighful to see an ocean of reverb put to use actually meshing together points of interest rather than filling space in its own right! A chant as direct like "I Shall Love" just wouldn't have worked under a totally clean delivery; here, the finale achieves cathartic impact through the sweeping force of an awkward clutter. [7]

Josh Love: Holter is a brilliant pop composer and it's great to have the focus be on her music again after she bravely went public last year with the abuse she suffered while dating former Real Estate guitarist Matthew Mondanile. Admittedly, it's hard not to hear elliptical lines like "I'm in love / What can I do...Who cares what people say?" without reflecting on Holter's personal traumas but in the end what buoys this song are its wonderfully unorthodox orchestral melodies and the Velvet Underground-esque sense of spiritual deliverance embedded in the closing refrain, "I shall love." [7]

Vikram Joseph: The magical realist dreamscapes of Julia Holter's songs are always compellingly strange. "I Shall Love 2" feels like waking up on a tropical shore, surrounded by fallen fruit and parakeets, but with the colour of the sky just odd enough to make you wonder if you might, in fact, still be dreaming. It's a fitting space for a love song, delivered without irony or trepidation; maybe this is what it's meant to feel like? Julia, dazed and blinded by the sun, wonders "what do the angels say?" and is answered by a celestial chorus; the song builds to a Deserter's Songs-ish climax of swirling, entwining vocal parts, strings and brass, strands of the entire galaxy uniting in imperfect synchrony to celebrate her newfound love. I mean, sorry Julia, there's no way this isn't a dream. [8]

Ramzi Awn: Listening to "I Shall Love 2" is a bit like discovering a new painting. Julia Holter pairs humor with sincerity in a dizzying arrangement that employs instruments as brushstrokes on a fresh canvas, ripe with possibility. Holter plays with the idea of voice as conductor, threading the different elements together with short, deliberate phrases and just the right timing. [7]

Edward Okulicz: After listening to this on a loop, I really enjoy the "that is all, that is all" spoken intro as an outro before the song repeats. In fact, I might just edit the audio to make that change. Otherwise, "I Shall Love 2" is so meticulously arranged that I feel like there's something wrong with me that it can't hold my attention the whole of its running time, but the layering of vocals and strings -- which are lovely but less involving by themselves at first -- in the second half is impressive. [6]

Ryo Miyauchi: Julia Holter's left looking pale upon facing the song's central epiphany, and what really pushes "I Shall Love 2" is her follow-up question: "what do I do?" It peels back how truly daunting it can be to get hit by the feeling when you least expect it, and how you're never prepared to respond to love's arrival. The creaking music, too, sighs and crashes on its knees as powerless as Holter. The final swirling of voices that declare her breakthrough to choose love despite its known terror, then, echoes with bravery. [7]

Cédric Le Merrer: They sound like falling in love, these thousand voices pulling and pushing chaotically towards the same direction. The stomach dwelling butterflies. The social pressure of a million amatonormative songs and films and friends. Your feelings going so much faster than your thoughts. Your will drowned out. Your self tractor beamed like a cow by a flying saucer. [8]

Rebecca A. Gowns: One layer isn't enough, but as the song builds, it becomes more and more satisfying, like piling on thin sheets of butter and baking it until it becomes a croissant. What seems thin and threadbare at the beginning becomes transcendent. (Again, like a fresh croissant.) [9]

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