#just generally my take on their potential as a r/s from a narrative/thematic point of view. hehe

[xincountry]

director & cameraman

Love shifting from one side of the court to the other. Separated by the net, a volleyball is the only thing two teams touch for five sets. The longer the rally, the more it becomes the world, its significance inherently bound to the time it stays in the air and the people who hold it. Komori is suspended between; all the love in excess, from Osamu, from Suna, a love that enlarges him.

or: to be held in the eye of the beholder(s)

miya osamu x suna rintarou x komori motoya | T | 7.4k words

- established osasuna, getting together

- canon compliant for the most part

- Komori Motoya is a Chronic Yearner

- relationship study/character study (i do not care if this relationship Supposedly Doesnt Exist im studying it anyway)

[davidmann95]

How about those JL storyboards?

In case you haven’t heard, Zack Snyder is putting on display the ‘storyboards’ - i.e. a rough plot summary accompanied by some Jim Lee sketches - for what would have been Justice League 2 and 3, or as this puts it 2 and ‘2A’. You can see them here (I imagine better-quality versions will soon be released), and read a transcript here. This is evidently a very early version: this was apparently pitched prior to the release of BvS and Justice League being rewritten in the wake of it, with numerous plot details that now don’t line up with what we know about the Snyder Cut, plus it outright mentions it builds on the originally planned versions of the Batman and Flash movies. But it’s a broad outline of what was gonna go down, and while I initially thought it was Snyder throwing in the towel, the timing - paired with the ambiguity left by the necessity for changes, including that this doesn’t factor whatever that “massive cliffhanger” at the end of the Cut is - says to me he’s hoping this’ll be a force multiplier behind efforts to will sequel/s into existence. He’s probably right.

I’ll be discussing spoilers below, but in short: with this Zack Snyder has finally lived up to Alan Moore, in that like Twilight of the Superheroes I wouldn’t believe this was real as opposed to a shockingly on-point parody if not for direct, irrefutable evidence.

Doing some rapid-fire bullet points for this baby to kick us off:

* Folks who know the subject say a lot of this is a yet further continuation of Snyder doing Arthuriana fanfic with the League reskinned over those major players, and I’ll take their word for it.

* I don’t know whether I love or hate that in Justice League 2 the Justice League are only an extant thing for the first scene, and then it’s Snyder giving everybody their own mini-movies. It’s compressing the entire MCU “loosely interconnected solo stories leading to a single big movie later” strategy into a single movie!

*  Funniest line in the whole thing: "Even Lantern has heard of the Kryptonian, worried that he's under the control of Darkseid. He heard his spirit was unbreakable." Hal what fuckin' Superman movie did YOU watch? Second funniest being “IT WILL GIVE HIM POWER OVER ALL LIVING LIFE”

* 90% of the plot I have nothing to say about, it’s generic stage-setting crap. That to be clear is the ‘shocked it’s Snyder’ element, it feels so crassly commercial in a way I can’t believe is coming from the BvS guy.

* Most of what I have to say is unsurprisingly gonna be about a handful of characters but Cyborg’s happy ending being “he isn’t visibly disabled anymore!” is not great!

* The Goddess of War battle with Superman...never pays off? No clue why it’s there.

* What I’d originally heard was that the Codex in Superman’s blood was the last key to the Anti-Life Equation and that’s why Darkseid was coming to Earth. It’s not like all of this wouldn’t have already been averted by Kal-El’s pod smacking into an asteroid on the way to Earth so it’s not as if this makes it any more Superman’s fault, and it would have at least tied all this back to the beginning of the movies, but I suppose that was either fake or from a later draft.

* I have NO idea how this was reimagined without the ‘love triangle’, it’s the central character thing and the entire climax flows directly out of it!

* Darkseid’s kinda a chump in this, huh

Anonymous said: So: Does Zack Snyder hate Superman?

Look: the hilarity of this when Cuck Kent has been a go-to Snyder cult insult towards ‘inferior’ takes on Superman for years cannot be understated, yet at the same time I can almost wrap my brain around where Snyder’s coming from with that as the end for his take on the character. He talked in that Variety piece on how his interest in Superman is informed by having adopted children himself, and Deborah Snyder is the stepmother to his kids by previous relationships, so I can see where he’d be coming from, and I can even imagine how he’d see this as ‘rhyming’ in the sense of “the series begins with Kal-El being adopted by Earth, it ends with him adopting a child of Earth!” In the same way as MARTHA, I can envision how he would put these pieces together in his head thematically without registering or caring what the end result would actually look like. In this case, Superman raising the kid of the man who beat the shit out of him who Batman had with Clark’s wife, who earlier told Bruce she was staying with Clark because he ‘needed her’, suggesting if inadvertently that this really honest to god was a “she’s only staying with Superman out of pity, she really loved Batman more” thing.

But Clark is nothing in this. He’s sad and existential because of coming back from the dead I guess, then he’s corrupted, then time’s undone and he woo-rah rallies the collective armies of the world (interesting angle for the ‘anti-military/anti-establishment’ Superman he’s talked up as) as his big heroic moment in the finale, and then he stops being sad because he’s adopting a kid. So his big much-ballyhooed, extremely necessary five-movie character arc towards truly becoming Superman was:

Sad weird kid -> sad weird kid learns he’s an alien, is still weird and sad, maybe he shouldn’t save people because things could go really wrong? -> his dad is so convinced it could go wrong he lets himself die -> ????? -> Clark is saving people anyway -> learns his origin, gets an inspiring speech about being a bridge between worlds and a costume -> becomes superman (not Superman, that’s later) to save the world, albeit a very property-damagey version, rejects his heritage he just learned about and space dad’s bridge idea -> folks hate him being superman and that sucks though at least he’s got a girlfriend now -> things go so wrong he considers not being superman but his ghost dad reminds him shit always goes wrong so he should be good anyway, which sorta feels like it contradicts his previous advice -> immediate renewed goodness is out the window as he’s blackmailed into having to try and kill a dude but the dude happens to coincidentally have some things in common so they don’t kill each other after all -> big monster now but superman keeps supermaning at it because he loves his girlfriend and he dies -> he’s brought back, wears black which apparently means now he likes Krypton again? -> he has work friends now but he’s still sad because he was dead -> evil now! -> wait nevermind time travel -> rallies the troops -> his wife’s having a kid so he’s not sad anymore -> Superman! Who gives way to more Batman.

Do I think Zack Snyder is lying when he says he likes Superman? No. I think he sincerely finds much of the basic conceits and imagery engaging. But I don’t think he meaningfully gives shit about Clark as a character, just a vessel for Big Iconic Beats he wants to hit. Whereas while for instance he’s critical of Batman as an idea (at least up to a point), he’s much more passionately, directly enamored with him as a presence and personality. So while Superman may be the character whose ostensible myth cycle or arc or however it’s spun might be propelling a lot of events here, it’s a distant appreciation - of course the other guy takes over and subsumes him into his own narrative. Of course Batman is the savior, the past and the future (though if he’s supposed to be Batman’s kid raised by Superman there’s no excuse for him not to be Nightwing), the tragic martyr to our potential. Admittedly the implication here is also that Batman can apparently only REALLY with his whole heart be willing to sacrifice his life to save an innocent, for that matter apparently his great love, once said innocent is a receptacle for his Bat-brood, but he and Clark are both already irredeemable pieces of shit by the end of BvS so it’s not like this even registers by comparison.

Anonymous said: That “plan” Snyder had was utter dogshit. Picture proof that DC & WB hate Superman. Also I love how you’re like Jor-El: Every single idealistic take you had about Snyder, his fandom, and BvS was wrong. Snyder’s an edgy hack, his fanbase just wants to jerk off to their edgy self-insert Batgod as he screams FUCK while mowing people down with machine guns, and the idea that BvS said Superman was better than Bats was completely wrong. You know what comes next SuperMann: Either you die or I do.

In the final analysis, beyond that mother of god is there sure no conceivable excuse for the treatment of Lois in this? The temptation is to join that anon and say as I originally tweeted that these were “built entirely to disabuse every single redemptive reading of the previous work and any notion of these movies as nuanced, artistic, self-reflective, or meaningful”.

...

...

...yeah, okay, that’s mostly right. Zack Snyder’s vision really was the vision of an edgelord idiot with bad ideas who was never going to build up to anything that would reframe it all as a sensible whole. He’s a sincere edgelord genuinely trying really hard with his bad ideas who put some of them together quite cleverly! But they’re fucking bad and the endgame was never anything more than ramping up into smashing the action figures together as big as he could, the political overtones and moral sketchiness of BvS while trying to say something in that movie reverberated through the grand scheme of his pentalogy in no way beyond giving his boys a big sad pit to rise out of so when they kicked ass later it’d rule harder, and all the gods among men questions and horror and trappings were only that: trappings. Apparently he’s really pleasant and well-meaning in person, but at his core his art as embodied in a couple weeks in his 4-hour R-rated Justice League movie meant to be seen in black-and-white all comes down to that time he yelled at someone on Twitter that he couldn’t appreciate Snyder’s work because it’s for grown-ups. He made half-clever, occasionally exciting shit cape movies for a bunch of corny pseudo-intellectual douchebags, folks latching onto and justifying blockbusters that at least acknowledge how horrifying the world is right now even if the superheroes are basically useless in the face of it if not outright part of the problem until a convenient alien invasion shows up to justify them, and a handful of non-asshole smart people who vibe with it but...well. ‘Suckered’ is a harsh word, and definitely doesn’t apply to all of them re: what they’ve gotten out of it up to this point and would (somehow) get out of this. But it doesn’t apply to none of them, either.

[zenosanalytic]

Crimes Unto Heaven

 MMmmmmOk so

This is A Gag

to be clear(tbc, fyi)[1].

I don’t actually think the Hiveswap team is attempting to cover-up TERRIBLE ZODIAC CRIMES to protect themselves from the Star Police and avoid Astrajail or anything, and obvsl they can structure the EZ however they like since the Zodiac’s been Public Domain for 3000 years, and their Extended additions are their creations. And, while I don’t take it terribly seriously, it’s Fun! Which: Yay. But, I noticed some seeming-discrepancies when looking it over to write a “My Thoughts” response to @witchknights on the EZ, and the idea of running those down a wee bit and writing about them was Also Fun, so I’m Doing This o_o I���m Making This Happen(Requisite(TM)) o_o o_o

My original idea was to get superdetailed about it and explain everything, but then I started taking SCREENCAPS of The Star Grid(this is what I’m calling The Symbol List), and each individual Sign so I could group them all into their various CATEGORIES to illustrate my arguments(:| :|), and then I said to myself “ok this is ridiculous, you don’t have that kind of time, your screencapper can’t isolate fragments on the MSPA page for some reason, it doesn’t seem like you can save custom-sized/shaped selection tools in Paint3D, and you are beiNG RIDICULOUS!” so instead I’m going to just write up the basic patterns I noticed(which prob aren’t all the ones in there, given Hussie), their seeming-violations, and their possible implications, according to Me. You -Our Dear, Sweet, Dear, Dear, Sweet Readers- can imagine the visuals if you like, though, I have no problem with this I am Very Gracious[2] vuv

EZ Rules

Each sign-class has two associated suffixes(they’re also associated with the Aspect of the canon troll of that sign. Possible Sign Pun? Can mean Both??): one for Prospit, one for Derse. The List:

Aries(Time): -ries, D; -rist, P.

Taurus(Breath): -un, D; -us, P.

Gemini(Doom): -mini, D; -mino, P.

Cancer(Blood): -cen, D; -cer, P.

Leo(Heart): -o, D; -lo, P.

Virgo(Space): -ga, D; -go, P.

Libra(Mind): -za, D; -ra, P.

Scorpio(Light): -pia, D; -pio, P.

Sagittarius(Void): -ittarius, D; -ittanius, P.

Capricorn(Rage): -iborn, D; -icorn, P.

Aquarius(Hope): -rius, D; -nius, P.

Pisces(Life): -sci, D; -sces, D.

Now, a Neat thing you’ll notice is that these suffixes are exclusively arranged in top-left-to-bottom-right diagonal series across The Star Grid(I’ll symbolize it \ thusly). So Aries(Derse) is the topleftmost, then the second sign in Taurus is Taurist(Aries-Prospit), the third sign in Gemini is Gemries(Aries-Derse), etc, etc. This pattern holds true; you’ll only find those suffixes along a \ starting with their “parent” sign(the “True Sign”. I’ll call this the “Alpha Sign”, with the meaning First not the HS meaning, to avoid “True”’s connotations), or in another \ an appropriate period down(the period being how long it takes to work through the other sign-suffix \’s. So the Taurus suffixes are on the \ below the Aries, and the Gemini below the Taurus, etc, until it reaches the Aires again). Generally, the Derse-Prospit alternating holds true as well, and that has implications for the verticals and horizontals; to maintain this they’d have to alternate between Derse and Prospit and the horizontals do from Aries untIL-

-LIBRA! At the middle of the chart, at the Libra-line, the pattern breaks down. BUT! From Libra to Lipio along the vert the breakdown in alternating starts at the Libra signs; beginning with Libza it becomes much less predictable. The Arza-Libza \ is “regular” until Scorza, then regular again until Pira. The Arga-Liga \ becomes “irregular” at the Virgo-line(Lega, Virga instead of Virgo). The Aro-Libo \ becomes irregular at Leo. The Arcen-Licen \ becomes irregular at Cancer and is highly irregular from that point on. Like I said I’m not going to go through, find, and list all of the irregularities and I’m CERTAINLY NOT going to try and figure out if there’s a mathematical relation that defines the irregularities(if they are formulaic, or, as I suspect, the result of a non-mathematizable logic), but you get the idea. Periodicity’s Whack! It ain’t right!! I doubt this has any bigger implications beyond the HS Crew wanting to place the 12 canon trolls as the “True Signs” of each of the sign families -which only makes sense from an Earth-centric or Game-centric viewpoint; I mean, Troll culture would order the signs by some interior logic of its own if it wasn’t a narrative creation, and wouldn’t care about preserving the primacy of 12 unknowable nascent apotheokids at the end of history- and there are other bits of evidence that this is the case that raise other objections.

Another pattern in the EZ is that the last(Omega) Sign in each Sign Class shares the suffix(and Moon and Aspect) of the first(Alpha) sign in the next class. This makes a sort of sense if you conceive of them as a ring or continuum: The Omega Sign in each Sign-Class(or symbology, or alphabet) would be the one “closest” to the next sign-class, and so it displays this similarity in its naming until-

-LIBRA! AGAIN!! Or Virgo, depending on how you want to figure it. There is a regular, predictable pattern -Arus, Taurmini, Gemcer, Cano, Lego- until the Virgo|Libra Interface where Virgo ends with Virza and Libra begins with, well, the obvious :\  Though a larger pattern of Omega Signs having one of the two suffixes of the next Sign Class over holds true; just this smaller pattern of Alpha and Omega sharing a suffix breaks down. Both Libra and Scorpio(or Virgo and Libra) are irregular, then the pattern reemerges at Scorpittarius, only to break down again at the Aquarius|Pisces interface. The Pisces|Aries interface is also irregular.

Just to give you an idea of the sort of thinking this can make room for in the EZ, I’ll do a deeper dive on Libra, por ejemplo(though similar implications apply to Virgo, and other sign-classes). One possible implication, I’m sad to say, is that Lipia shouldn’t be the Libra Omega(thus Ultimate) sign, but rather Lipio, which actually makes some very good symbological sense as:

This is Lipio

This is Libra

To begin with, Lipio is a struck-through latin upsilon, which looks like(but is not related to) an upside-down Greek omega. Upsilon, the ancestor of our “u”, is the first letter in the latin word Ultimatus which means mostly the same thing as Greek Omega; both mean “the last, final, end”[3]. So making it the “ultimate”, or Omega, Libra Sign(which is an Omega-themed sign-class) would be a Funny Symbology Pun. Its design would visually reinforce this Omega postion through it’s “letter” being “reversed” in form to Libra’s. Libra is an Omega “balanced” over a line, symbolizing a balanced scale; A potential visual reversal of this would be an overturned scale, an “upside-down” Omega with the bar across it, rather than under. It would also create a nice bracketing of the sign-class, though sadly not a complete one since Libra and Lipio aren’t mirrored. Of course, if they were, then Lipio would be in a kind of balance with Libra, which would undermine it’s conceptual opposition to it, making it less symbolically satisfying. If you dig that sort of reading *looks away at sky, squint-frowns, and kicks dirt; entirely metaphorically*

I suppose you COULD equally say that Scorpia should be the Alpha sign for Scorpio, but that’d break the Derse/Prospit pattern and I refuse to play favorites u_u u_u u_u Replacing Libra with Libza is, of course, Right Out since that’d mess up the visual symbolism. Although...

Libza

Lipia

Crap -__- One is angular, one curvy; one is balanced, one unbalanced; one is open the other closed; they are in (at least)THREE symbolic and conceptual oppositions: these DO make good visually symbolic opposites |:T |:T AND it’d preserve both the Derse/Prospit alternating, AND AND the Omega-Alpha interface to Scorpio, AND AND AND switching Libra and Libza would make Terezi the Fulcrum of the Libra Sign-Class which would be VERY thematically and symbolically satisfying since, if you think about it, The Omega-Sign being most like the Sign-Class to the right implies the Alpha-Sign would be the sign most like the Sign-Class to the Left, logically making the Fulcrum Sign, that furthest from the ends, the “Most Signiest Sign” within each Sign-Class. ANDx4 the \ pattern would then break at Libra instead of Scorpio...

 Daisuki :| :| :|

....Though I now realize that would ruin a potential 8reak/Scorpio pun....

Moving On........

The other Big irregularity I found was the Pisces line. ALL it’s Derse signs/suffixes are in the top half of the line, and ALL its Prospit ones are in the bottom half. Pretty odd.

The only other thing I have to say is that I noticed, in a very cursory way, that some signs are visually similar to the sign-class they share a suffix with(a decent number of Aquarius-suffixes seem to be), and some don’t. It’d be Cool if they’d really committed to this, but I understand why they didn’t since such a level of detail is really stressful to maintain and also creatively restrictive. But, like, clearly Sagius:

should be a Leo-suffix(Sagio or Sagilo), and Camino

should be an Aquarius-suffix(Canrius or Cannius). I Mean: C L E A R L Y. Right??[4]

Anyway, those are the SHOCKING REVELATIONS of my RUTHLESS PEDANTRY that will surely bring down this WRETCHED HOUSE OF CARDS we’re all living in, No Doubt in an Noir-Sufficient-Fashion. If I find/think of any more examples of Dastardly Chaos Weighty with Meaning in our beloved fictional cosmology, I’ll let y’all know :p

[1]Also tbc(and because repeating it here would mark the third time I’ve written it, and I find such triplication aesthetically Pleasing nwn nwn), the EZ lacks my own, secretly created and never shared, fansigns, and so it’s obvsl an incomplete symbology, possibly recovered from a damaged husklet for pre-wrigglers yet unable to pull their own pants on umu

[2]I’ll still probably end up doing that at somepoint though, so there might be a bevisualed vers of this post in the future X| X| X|

[3]Fun Fact: the “extreme” meaning that our “ultimate” inherited from ultimatus may possibly have a connection to omega even though it lacks such an explicit meaning since omega literally means “big O”. Etymology is Fun for many reason, but this un-looked-for and unexpected explication of an anime pun, years after I had last watched an episode of the series in question, is one of the better ones I’ve encountered uwu uwu

[4]Though Camino is a Gemini suffix, so it’s satisfying in it’s own ways.

[goblins-riddles-or-frocks]

No worries! Life happens and it’s fairly busy time of year. I’m just happy to hear from you! Though I’m sorry you’ve been feeling poorly! It’s been a brutal flu season.

But yes, agreed, it does really seem like Bardugo had a specific outcome in mind and didn’t really stop to take into account whether that really served the story being told. She’s talked a lot about being a plotter, and starting with a skeleton draft. And while I think plotting has a lot of benefits, that sort of inflexibility is one of its more common pitfalls. Setting out like of course xyz plot point has to happen, because that was always part of the road map!

I don’t think there’s even anything particularly wrong with being wedded to a plot point or ending and not being willing to compromise on it. But at a certain point you have to reconcile what exists on the page and your vision. And Bardugo definitely tried— like I do really respect how much she managed to course correct Mal’s characterization lol, I had no patience for him in S&S but somehow through R&R he’s likeable— but the end result is still just kind of half baked and disjointed. Anyway idk if you’ve heard of “kill your darlings” as writing advice but it feels sooo applicable here.

Semi tangentially, I finally finished Buffy the Vampire Slayer recently (in the year of our lord 2022 lmao) and despite the wildly different genre and face value plot, the ending really struck me as similar to R&R on a thematic level? But somewhat more successful? Like the very concept of “lonely chosen one, whose destiny has always been a burden, distributes her power among other people and is finally given the opportunity to exit the narrative” feels so similar to me. And watching it, I was thinking that that was probably the effect Bardugo was intending. But I think she just never fully got across that Alina’s in-universe main character syndrome was fully a burden or that she’d be better off leaving. Again we’re told that time and again, but it just ends up feeling like she’s trying to convince herself of that/generally holding herself back by this belief. Discontent and disappointment as a reader aside, I find it incredibly interesting on a writing craft level.

But yes fanfiction! Retconning is honestly such a useful tool lol. Sometimes you just need a character to be in a very different state and it would be extraneous to go back and show exactly how it happened.

Yesss very much two cakes. And frankly we don’t have much Nikolina fic anyway, so anything is a novelty. And them picking up the pieces together is just such good material.

I love that excerpt! The banter is very sweet. I love the balance between him reassuring her and trying to cheer her up with humor.

And truly, Alina does define herself through other people for so much of the series/her entire life. The Darkling dictates the plot and constantly forced her into making choices and essentially just to act as his antithesis because him winning is so abhorrent, meanwhile Mal dictates her identity and what she’s allowed to want for herself. So her grappling with who she even is and what choices she wants to make without these things to confine her is a very compelling topic!

Also potentially silly question but I’ve never done a word prompt fic format like that, though I’ve seen many on AO3, do you usually go off a prompt list or choose them yourself?

Re: my own fic, well I very much need to catch up on writing it lol. You haven’t missed much tbh! Maybe two or three chapters? I’ve been slow, I had to write a lot (a lot for me anyway) for various fic exchanges this year so I haven’t made as much progress. I did hit 60k words tho o.o

And I’d say I’ve partially fixed the problem, and partially kicked the can further down the road! I’ve had their general relationship trajectory down from the start, but figuring out the more minute tension and resolution in between key moments to keep things dynamic has been the tricky part. And just making sure that everything’s cohesive. To that effect I think I’ve figured out the next chapter (there’s just the tricky business of writing it lmao) but the one after that is still very much up in the air lol

 @goblins-riddles-or-frocks replied to your post:Sunday Snippet

I love this!! I think my favorite take on these two is just throwing them together post r&r and seeing how they claw their way out of their respective traumas. and idk second choice romance is so poignant to me.

I love what a gut punch it is for her to say “I thought I was” there. where do you even go from that! especially after already getting married, and the nature of royalty being what it is I get not knowing how to resolve it tho, I’m stalling on pretty much the same issue myself alas

Ahhh, thank you!! I love the dynamic between these two, and doubly so during and post R&R. They have #CompatibleTraumas, and I think it’s a lot of fun to explore the ways the characters’ traumas and emotional needs interact—both for better and for worse. 

And yes to your statement about second choice/second chance romances!

IMO, even more than her feelings for Mal or the Darkling, the main obstacle to canon Nikolai/Alina is that canon!Alina is unsuited for life as a political figure. From a Doylist perspective, this unsuitability boils down to Bardugo’s desire to have Alina end her story by returning to Keramzin with Mal at her side—an ending that wouldn’t work anymore if Alina was allowed to fully grow into her leadership role. 

I think you’re the person I’ve discussed this with before, but while I understand what Bardugo was trying to narratively achieve, and I don’t wholly disagree with it, it still frustrates me to see Alina start to reach her potential, only to repeatedly have it cut off and watch her start from scratch over and over again. I’ll freely admit that this is a matter of personal preference as much as it is objective critique! 

I’m sure a thousand metas have been written about how Alina’s different love interests symbolize different parts of herself and different paths she could have taken, but it always hits me anew each time I think about her canonical relationships.

ANYWAY.

I feel like Nikolai could respond to Alina’s accusations by retreating behind his ‘perfect prince’ veneer, or he could be emotionally open with her, as he has been in the past. Likewise, I can see Alina either retreating from him or having a real conversation with him. Despite the rocky start to their acquaintance, the two of them have been pretty low-drama together when it comes to the personal stuff!

Yeah, the nature of royalty means divorce or even an official separation aren’t really options—especially not without the existence of an heir and a spare!—which would only make Alina feel more trapped. That said, I can see Alina going on a PR tour/diplomatic trip/secret mission by herself (albeit accompanied by guards/friends) as a solution of sorts, as that would temporarily give her space from Nikolai, the palace, and her ordinary duties. Likewise, I think it would help Alina if she did more work with the common people, as that’s something that feeds her soul in the same way working with the nobility drains her. 

The role of queen can’t be completely changed without creating problems for the Lantsov reign, especially since Nikolai came to the throne under the circumstances he did, but I think Alina and he could get away with tweaking it some. Alina’s sainthood would aid them in this, as it lets conservatives write her off as the exception rather than the rule, while also gradually accustoming everyone to a different type of queenship.

That said, I think my resolution might simply be adding Zoya into the mix (and potentially moving the entire scene into my WIP Nikolai/Zoya/Alina fic). 

Zoya tosses her dark, glossy curls back. “Self-pity isn’t a good look on you, Starkov.”

“Self-pity?”

“None of us forced you to stay; no one forced you to marry Nikolai. This was your choice. And now you want to quit because, what, it’s too hard?” She sniffs derisively. “If you’re going to run away, do it now before you’ve established yourself any further. I’m sure someone will step up to fill your place.”

Alina sputters, furious. “I—I’m not running away.”

Even if I wanted to, I have nowhere left to go.

“If you say so.” Her tone is infuriatingly, airily dismissive. “But then, that’s your modus operandi, isn’t it? Running away when things get too real?”

“I’m not a coward,” Alina spits back.

Zoya smiles, all teeth and disdain. “Then prove it.”

[cripplinganxietyflix]

I saw Valerian.

If you’ve ever spoken to me at length about movies, there’s a good chance my thoughts on “headache cinema” have come up. It’s an umbrella term I’ve come up with that encompasses the deluge of loud, obnoxious, brainless, neutered, hundred-million-dollar-budgeted trashfests that are destroying theater culture as we know it. I’m talking about the Disney’s Marvel franchises, the post-Matrix Wachowski migraines, the Transformers films- head-exploding visual fuckfests that leave the average adult feeling like they’ve crawled out some hellscape version of a McDonald’s play palace birthday party. This brand of film is easily my least enjoyed and most disliked. The vast majority of the time these movies are castrated down to a PG-13- or worse, a PG!, they’ve got bloated budgets, dumb plotlines, stupid dialog, and best of all: punching, loud noises, explosions, TOTAL SENSORY OVERLOAD. 

For many years I have hated superhero movies and glazed over at Hollywood’s air-horn retreads of movies like Clash of the Titans and Independence Day: Resurgence and the recent Ghost in the Shell mishap. I hate movies like this and I find them at least majorly to blame for the death of the hard R-rated action flick. There are exceptions to the formula, like Mad Max: Fury Road, the 2014 Godzilla, and Dredd, but generally speaking, they’re unwatchable. I will be the first to admit that I’m not a big fan of whimsy, but I will be happy to defend my position on this. Giant blockbuster action movies are generally dumb and boring if you’ve got more than two brain cells to rub together. I do try to balance my feelings about people who like brain-dead, ham-fisted, infantile PG-13 sci-fi action movies with my penchant for unrepentantly trashy, low-brow 70s and 80s exploitation horror films. I know for a fact that there’s a certain segment of cinema elitists who would see my interest in that subgenre as an undeniable sign of being a philistine troglodyte, which slightly tempers my extreme prejudicial judgment of those who love headache cinema. 

I can pick up the hanging thread to unravel this tapestry. It’ll lead you through all of the recent loud crashing DC fiascos and the rainbow of annoying apocalypse and disaster films and CG shitshows. Once you hit the Star Wars prequels, you’re getting close. But the film that started all of this hatred is Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element, easily in my top five most despised films of all time (that’s a list for another day!). 

It feels a little bizarre for me to say that I hate Luc Besson. Léon: The Professional is one of my favorite films of all time, and easily my favorite film of 1994. But aside from that and 1990′s La Femme Nikita, I find Besson wholly intolerable. His movies tend toward obnxious, incomprehensible, overwhelming, anxiety-inducing horse shit. And while many people are happy to agree with me, it seems no one outside of myself is willing to slaughter the sacred cow that is The Fifth Element. Some see a sci-fi fantasy classic, I proffer that it’s a grotesque panacea of ADHD, loud noises and cringey acting. To Besson’s credit, most of the time his films don’t take themselves seriously, and that’s fine. But The Fifth Element is the first film in my memory where I felt literally assaulted and invaded by the unfettered gaudy head-spinning madness of big, loud, overwhelming movies. My level of general calmness could be compared to a that of a frightened rabbit with combat shock, so I try to be cognizant that this dislike has less to do with objective quality and more to do with my personal preferences and tolerance levels. Let’s be real- I’m a person with severe, crippling anxiety. Headache cinema is not made for me. 

That being said, I saw the trailers for Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, and I immediately started getting Vietnam flashbacks of Chris Tucker in a wig and leopard print jumping out of my television and screaming into my face. My significant other has a much more relaxed attitude toward these things and a seemingly endless well of patience for Luc Besson, so I had a feeling I was going to end up seeing this film in theaters and I started mentally preparing for it. And I’m really glad that I did all that emotional gestation, because I found Valerian to be surprisingly tolerable, aside from being a chaotic discombobulation of ideas that all generally have the potential to be good but fail because Luc Besson must have the attention span of a squirrel. And squirrels plant trees because they literally can’t remember where they’ve left their nuts. I couldn’t dream of a better summation of why Luc Besson turns nearly everything he touches into abject shit.

Valerian is essentially a very straight-forward narrative about a couple of federal agents (?) in space (???) who uncover a conspiracy involving a group of displaced aliens. They spend the film unraveling a mystery surrounding an enigmatic void in the middle of a space ship (?) or man-made planet (???) that contains thousands of different species from throughout the universe that live in surprising harmony. The alien refugees and the void on the ship or planet are related, you will later find. 

That’s basically it. It’s a simple storyline with simple elements like “war is bad” and “the powerful oppress the powerless” and “love is universal and always wins.” If you dig down past all of the color and noise and distraction, that’s the basic bedrock. I think I was expecting this movie to be a convoluted mess, and to a great extent it absolutely was. But I wouldn’t say that the story was the weakest part of the film. 

What did some substantial damage was the acting and dialog. The two leads had no chemistry and the actor playing the title character (Dane DeHaan) had a stunning drought of charisma. I think that his opposite, Cara Delevingne, has the potential to be a fun leading lady, but she never had a chance in this movie. The love angle was hackneyed and totally unnecessary to the point that the film would have fared much better if Valerian and Laureline were friends instead of a ~~will they or won’t they???~~ couple. I thought it was insulting to my sensibilities, and that sucks since the romance thing was such an ingrained aspect of the movie. I couldn’t tell if they were even in a relationship with each other or if Valerian had puppy love and Laureline has simply spent their entire careers fighting off his advances only to reluctantly agree to marry him after the film’s climax. This film could have really used a competent screen writer. I think I even could have lived with some of the eye-rollingly dumb but baseline-acceptable dialog you hear in Disney’s© Marvel™ Avengers Part 2: Electric Boogaloo. The villain (played by Clive Owen) was such a stupid caricature of literally everything that is wrong with Bad Guys in major American cinema- instantly hate-able, predictable, no angle or point of sympathy, stupid rationale for his actions-type of shit. And what’s really frustrating is that the Owen’s villain had a completely rational and utilitarian motive for his actions. But that gets torpedoed by the giant flashing neon signs that say “HE’S THE BAD GUY” and “EVIL PIECE OF SHIT” hanging over his head in every scene he’s featured in. It absolutely felt like the characters were totally empty and needed to be reworked from the ground up. I even thought Rihanna’s character had more depth than either Valerian or Laureline. Valerian’s a by-the-books soldier with a heart of gold? Could have fooled me! Laureline’s a toughgirl with a penchant for violent overreaction but still maintains a balanced moral compass? Hard to see through the horse shit nonsense they wrote for her. Character development and the script were both a total, unmitigated disaster.  

Another thing that I think the film failed at was building tension. Everything felt a little too whimsical and inconsequential. In the beginning, a bus full of mercenaries (?) is attacked by a violent hexapedal alien and Valerian and Laureline watch all of them die savagely with nothing more than a smirking “glad we made it outta that scrape!” reaction. It never really feels like they’re in any danger or that there’s any emotional peak or valley for the characters, with maybe a single, small exception. You watch a lot of people get shot to death and even a head get blown clean off and another cut right in half, but it all seems so cartoonish and trivial that you can’t help but feel like nothing really matters and it’s all just a low-stakes video game. 

But I don’t want to give you the impression that this movie is a complete trainwreck (it tries, believe me). There were things that I liked and appreciated. The visuals and alien designs were inventive and there was never really a moment where you couldn’t get lost in the scene. It kind of felt like Rick and Morty without the nihilism and good writing. Everything was very colorful, the universe felt very inhabited. Around halfway through, Valerian and Laureline have an almost brilliant run in with a species of giant food-obsessed frogs (I actually went through the trouble of looking it up; they’re called Boulan-Bathors) and I found the whole scenario to be kind of charming and cute. I didn’t really mind Rihanna’s cameo. The refugee aliens, the Pearls, were cool and appealing in the same translucent way as the Engineers of Prometheus. While I definitely felt some Avatar vibes, the whole opalescent, iridescent aesthetic was visually pleasing and I really liked the semi-androgynous thing they had going on. 

I think the strongest part of this film is the first several minutes that lays out Earth’s journey into space. It was beautiful and touching and enough to make you feel really depressed about the state of our space exploration programs and the hopelessness and polarization of our world affairs. I would liked to have seen more of a thematic connection to the introduction because it felt extremely dissonant with the rest of the movie, which, by comparison, is hard to feel particularly emotional about. If you’re not planning on seeing Valerian, I would at least recommend watching the first few minutes. If the movie had come full circle to it, you can see how it could have been brilliant. 

Overall, Valerian is kind of a giant mess, and by all means I should have absolutely hated it, because it is textbook headache cinema. I think that there was a wide dearth of missed opportunities with the material, and with a more competent screenwriter, a better cast, and maybe someone else in the director’s seat, we’d be talking about a viable start to a franchise. But too often Valerian ties its own shoelaces together and eats shit and expects us to be engrossed and entertained. The relationship between Valerian and Laureline- both as a friendship, coworkership and romance- either needed to be reengineered from the ground up or scrapped entirely. I think Dane DeHaan was totally wrong for the part of Valerian and I could see this movie succeeding in more ways had someone with more charisma been the leading man. Valerian desperately needed some tension, and the total absence of crisis or consequence left an unbridgeable emotional void. It’s beautiful- but it’s a mess, and that seems to be Luc Besson’s calling card. I doubt we’ll ever see another Léon, but if Besson’s next film is as much of an improvement on Valerian as Valerian was on Lucy, then we might have the potential to see something really special. And maybe in five to eight years when everyone has forgotten about this spectacle, we’ll get a decent reboot for the Valerian material. 

★ ★ ½