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liskantope · 2 years ago

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The webcomic Questionable Content dropped its 5000th comic on Friday, and throughout the weekend and today I binge-reread all of the most recent thousand. I've never had the impression that many of my followers care about QC (not ~8 years ago when I started to blog about it, nor today), but I do have a tradition, after each thousand of its comics, of writing a post reviewing that thousand. Here is where I blogged after the 1000th comic, reblogged after the 2000th comic, and reblogged again after the 3000th comic (this was all during my early months on Tumblr when I was more into reblogging my own posts), and here is my post from 2019 from after the 4000th came out.

When I look back on the pivotal moment clearly scheduled for QC's 500th comic, when it seemed that QC had already been going on quite a while and developed into a really involved storyline that had built and built to this moment when Faye would finally reveal her traumatic backstory, it's astounding to take in the fact that QC has now reached ten times that milestone.

I'm not sure I have a ton to say that isn't essentially a (perhaps more refined) regurgitation of some of the things I've said in the previous reviews, but I do feel like the webcomic has evolved somewhat significantly in its last thousand comics (though perhaps less so than in the previous thousands), and I have a few thoughts/feelings/opinions.

[Note: all of this post is substantially edited since a few people reblogged the original version.]

I would say that this is the first thousand-strip period where my enjoyment of the comic actually went downhill. (Although I would say my feeling is more positive when skimming back over the most recent thousand comics at once; it is still overall fantastic and there's a reason I've stayed so dedicated to reading it.)

It's hard to entirely pin down why I feel this way. I think it has a lot to do with the continued introduction of new characters, at a pace which has never shown any signs of slowing despite the massive accumulated cast the comic already has. While this means that some old characters are more or less abandoned or kind of shoved to the margins (which in some cases I'm quite sorry to see), by and large the comic has stretched out to make room to be shared by an ever-growing cast. At the 4000th strip, I was still doing fine with this, but by the 5000th, I'm starting to feel a little fatigued and past my capacity for keeping track of who's who (and also who knows whom; I have to give the artist credit for keeping careful track of this in the storyline and bringing it up in the dialog when long-already-established characters meet each other for the first time). Many more of them are AIs now, and I guess it may one day be judged as something-ist on my part that I find them more difficult to recognize and distinguish in my memory. Too many of the personalities are somewhat interchangeable too, which is something I should try to expand on just below.

I continue to describe the QC universe to myself using the term "utopia", even though I know this has to be somewhat of a misuse: as I've pointed out before, the characters in that universe are very aware that the broader society they live in is unjust in many ways, and some story arcs (though thankfully not most) are focused on rather futile battles against that injustice. But within the (quite large) social bubble that makes up the immediate QC universe, I have a hard time coming up with a better descriptive word than "utopia" -- maybe this could be modified to "social micro-utopia" or something? (I'm reliably terrible at coming up with terminology.) As I've been reading Peanuts steadily starting from its debut throughout much of the same period I've been reading QC, I actually see a likeness in these "social micro-utopias" and have been meaning forever to write an effortpost delving into this, but as it happens the 5000th-comic milestone has arrived first and that other post will have to wait for another time.

The attractions of indulging in the dynamics of a fictional social bubble which is this idyllic are that it provides a sort of pleasant escapism and that it's inspiring in a way that might enable someone to enact some of the practices and values seen in QC in their own IRL social lives. QC is a feel-good comic; it never tries or pretends to be anything other than a feel-good comic; and (at the risk of sounding trite and cliche) we all need more feel-good things in our lives, and I clearly continue to enjoy it after 8 years of keeping up through 5000 installments. At the same time, some of this... constant and slightly implausible pleasantness... has just gone a bit overboard for me by this point. Maybe a lot of this has to do with the fact that what little I have of a social life feels a very, very long way from satisfying (and I see that I remarked this in my post after comic #4000, with some language reflecting some optimism related to the fact that I was preparing at the time to move back to the US, and it's a reminder of how things really haven't improved for me to any significant degree. To state the obvious: completely unexpected earth-shaking pandemics really don't help. Neither does continuing to get only temporary jobs.) But back during the first half of the 2010's when I had a happily thriving social life, there was no lack of serious drama, tension, real struggles to tolerate one another's eccentricities, and undercurrents of discord. I keep waiting for the social dynamics between the QC characters to get a little more gritty somehow, to feel a little more real. I know this is an unfair expectation, since as observed above, QC never purports to be genuinely gritty.

One thing that has become a symbol for me of the seemingly incessant cheerfulness that characterizes around half the personalities in the comic is... I don't know if there's a term for this that cartoonists use, but you know the technique of drawing closed eyes so that they're concave down, meaning that it's the lower lids that are showing? Maybe this could be called "upturned closed eyes" or something? In cartoons they signal cheerfulness and easy-goingness. And sometimes it feels like half the QC characters go around showing this on their faces all the time, to the point that it's gotten monotonous and maybe a little sappy for my tastes. (This is part of what I meant above about personalities being interchangeable.) It's a constant reminder of how all the characters are pretty much automatically and immediately in lockstep on Major Social Values / Preferences, which I find pretty unrealistic for a hodgepodge of young-ish people who all gradually met kind of randomly. I honestly feel bad that this bothers me quite as much as it does, but it does kind of bother me. There could actually be some dissonance between the characters in terms of their beliefs, values, and ideas of a good time (example: a few, leaving aside Faye who is a recovering alcoholic, could view getting really drunk in social situations as kind of immature, unhealthy, and un-classy behavior -- even some 20-something people do see it that way!).

(Of course, as always, there are occasional characters who everyone has serious problems with, but they are either complete villains who get dealt with and then written out, people who are pushed to the periphery of the social circle but are visibly Trying To Be Better (actually, Sven seems to be the only one in this category), or once-somewhat-hostile characters that the cartoonist obviously wanted to keep around so had to immediately and pointedly mellow and humanize, like Yay a.k.a. Spookybot and probably like five others.)

The comic continues to follow tropes that I call Everyone Is Hot (and half of them are openly attracted to each other), Everyone's Parents Are Remarkably Cool (by the standards of young, socially progressive culture), Everyone Is Woke (in both an ideological and a "young and with-it" sense), and Most People Are LGBT+. I find the first two slightly irritating from time to time and don't mind the last two, but find all of it somewhat unrealistic.

While there is much less dramatic development regarding Faye and Bubbles, I'm glad that Faye remains sober, and that their relationship is still going strong. The profound and powerful love between them is exhibited by the most exquisite writing that the artist has done in all of his work on QC, I would say. Other relationships are going strong, too, and I'm glad. I seem to be asking for more social drama above, but I don't actually care to see loving relationships fall apart. The deep friendship between Faye and Marten is still visible although very much sidelined compared to the comic's old days. The big new relationship is between Clinton and Elliot, and it is adorable from beginning to end (although, see the Everybody Is LGBT+ trope above; there has IMO been a rather unrealistic proportion people convinced they were straight but conveniently discovering they weren't).

And now... there has been a really long story arc about Claire getting offered a job at Cubetown and visiting there with Marten, and all the while, through the very real possibility that Claire would take the job and she and Marten would move away, I have found myself steadfastly rooting against this happening. Because while I complain about there not being enough drama and dissonant changes and it being unrealistic, etc., I don't want that much of a change. The lack of turnover among the social group is absolutely unrealistic in my experience (perhaps partly because I'm a young academic who tends to know other young academics), but I guess it's a part of the escapism that I unreservedly love. Despite my criticisms (and as I've said, it's always easier to expand on criticisms than positive things in reviews!), I've obviously come to care deeply about these characters and their wonderful (if sometimes sappily and implausibly peaceful) dynamic, and I can't imagine the comic being the same with the initial main character and his girlfriend out of the main scene. Plus, their visit to Cubetown has already introduced us to a raft of new characters and... ugh, this comic's world is just getting too big for the comic to hold up.

And (spoiler), as of just the most recent five comics out of the 5000, it looks like Claire is taking the job and this move -- the most drastic change in the QC universe -- is really going to happen. I wonder if the cartoonist draw out the interim period of Marten and Claire preparing to move, have Dora and Tai's wedding as the last major event with them all together, and then retire the comic altogether. (He is certainly not retirement age yet but may have been planning to bring it to a close one of these years.) We'll see, but I can't say I'm thrilled at this very, very recent development. It's hard to imagine what kind of (questionable) content I'll be commenting on if/when the comic reaches its 6000th installment.

[EDIT: I just saw an announcement by the cartoonist that he does not intend to wind QC down, that he initially wanted to get Marten and Claire riding off into the sunset, but now he feels investigated in following both the original setting and the new Cubetown setting. The groaning-under-its-own-weight situation is about to get much worse... *sigh*]

Anyway, here are a few stray observations to finish things off:

The very slight drama that transpired when Clinton and Elliot were trying to feel each other out and there was sort of a romantic interest triangle -ish with Brun is another example of a subcultural norm that has always been baldly present in QC (and that I'm pretty sure I've aimed at describing before), and that I've come to realize is common in poly and queer groups, where people are much more open than I'd be inclined to be about their romantic/sexual interests in each other. Not only that, but it's the way they treat it as something rather matter-of-fact, not in the sense that they don't get worked up over it (they obviously do), but in the sense that it's dealt with sort of... practically? Where everyone is able and expected to just get over their feelings once they find out the party they're interested in isn't reciprocating, because it's not rationally helpful or constructive to hang onto those feelings? I don't know, I'm probably not expressing this well, and I can't judge that norm (it seems like for the most part it would be really nice actually and make for healthy social groups and I'm all for the people who can pull it off), but it's another one of those things that doesn't reflect the way the world really works for me. And I think I bear a grudge against it because it's in line with the fantasies of the anti- Nice Guy activists of a decade ago, who would go around saying, "And he should just get over it and want to still be friends even if I'm not interested in anything else! Otherwise he was just objectifying me the whole time. I'm entitled to the guy who I just spurned to feel like still being friends with me anyway!"

Every single thing about Aurelia as her Mommymilkers avatar is hilarious, the most I've laughed out loud over the last thousand comics. Sure, she's an implausibly "cool" parent, but she's a really enjoyable character.

Bemused nitpicky comment: the cartoonist Jeph Jacques makes a point of making all his characters very much "in the know" about what is "woke"/PC these days (e.g. Renee gently admonishes Brun from using the word "crazy" to describe someone) but appears to have a blind spot with the word "janitor", which I thought had been replaced by "custodian" in socially conscientious circles quite a few years ago.

The term "goblin" comes up a lot. A lot. (Half the time relating to Marigold somehow, but also in a bunch of other contexts.) I didn't entirely notice this until the past few days when I was doing my binge-reread. I'm not sure why Jeph Jacques is so amused by the word "goblin" that he is this fond of using it to refer to characters.

#qc #utopia #social life #drinking culture #queer culture #social drama #nice guy discourse

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anhed-nia · 6 months ago

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Spoilers be here

The more I think about this movie the less I like it. Under the veneer of competence and sentimentality there may be nothing but a gimmick, and it's an old gimmick too: "What if we made a zombie movie but with REAL human drama instead of all that horror bullshit?" It feels like someone has to ask this question every few years and everybody treats it like it's a really novel idea, even though George Romero was immediately doing Real Human Drama when he invented the zombie subgenre as we know it, and he never stopped. I'm not really doing any kind of good or responsible film analysis here, I'm just venting about this personal pet peeve that won't die (ahem). But this is why I didn't like The Walking Dead (comic or show), because of all this posturing on the part of BOTH the writers and their audiences suggesting that it was really brave and sophisticated of them to have psychological realism and character deaths, and to say "This is NOT a story about scary monsters, it's REALLY about human nature etc" when they're really just imitating what Romero perfected decades earlier. And I mean it would be foolish to insist on originality in any case, but your familiar, derivative thing still needs to be good, it's not enough to just be very serious and self-satisfied. I'm not so sure that HANDLING THE UNDEAD is anything more than just very satisfied with its own seriousness.

Another thing I don't like so much here is also a reoccurring issue in modern horror cinema, and it is also supposed to confer instant sophistication onto a film without the hassle of good writing: that thing of being deliberately ambiguous with your story. I happen to have a very high tolerance for this, in fact I am less tolerant of movies that bend over backwards to rationalize and explain themselves; I mean film is a visual and atmospheric medium, you should be able to tell me a complete story without trying to convince me that it happened in real life. But if you're going to do that thing where some facts are deliberately left in shadow and there are no easy answers etc, there should be a real motivation for it other than just trying to seem smart and artsy. Like in TROUBLE EVERY DAY, which feels like it has about twelve lines of dialog, you don't need any more information than what you get in order to feel fully involved with the story, and in fact more information might have just made the film feel bloated and defensive. But some filmmakers seem like they've decided to be withholding as a stylistic gesture--like they're doing it because they saw Claire Denis (or someone) do it. They don't know why Denis does it, they're just jealous of that bewitching power she has, so they're going to leave stuff out too. But if you don't know what you're doing, this can be really detrimental, for instance:

Some of the characters in HANDLING THE UNDEAD have some sort of troubled past that is not explained. An angsty young burnout doesn't resolve whatever-the-problem-is with her mother before the mom gets zombified, and this is supposed to make their situation extra fraught...but in reality the conclusions are all the same as with all the other characters, "It's really sad when someone dies, you can never go home again, etc." Meanwhile in another segment a woman and her father contend with the re-animation of her five year old son, which raises huge questions not the least of which is "How does a five year old die?" I mean this isn't the dark ages, they don't just expire from obscure weaknesses. And there's this unexplained enmity between the woman and her father, and it's impossible to tell if they're just "dealing with grief differently" or if one of them is specifically culpable in the child's death or what...but once again none of this impacts the answer to the movie's central question, once again it all just boils down to "It's really sad when someone dies." Which frankly is something that nobody really needs to be told. But I think if you propose but refuse to answer a question that is way more intriguing than the central question that you do answer, then that's a big problem and you should rethink why you're doing things the way you're doing them. The End.

HANDLING OF THE UNDEAD (Hanteringen av odöda)

There's a certain common experience of comic awkwardness--actually there's even a Mr. Show sketch about it, if I remember correctly--where, after bidding a sincere farewell to someone at the end of an enjoyable night out, you make the unfortunate realization that you're both walking the same way home. Emotionally you are both somewhere else now, "the night" is conceptually over, and now you're trapped together without a script. Although Thea Hvistendahl's feature debut HANDLING THE UNDEAD probably has nothing else in common with Mr. Show, they both ask this same basic question about closure and the persistence of the past. The film concerns three families of the recently re-animated; there's a sort of will they/won't they tension regarding the obvious question of whether these zombies will behave in the traditional manner, but the focus is more strongly on the emotional problem of accepting that things will never again be as they once were.

I think this film is really going to do it for modern horror fans who have come to expect direct explorations of tough topics like grief and trauma. For me personally, I found it highly competent, but a little flat; yes, it is sad, it is VERY sad, it is VERY, VERY SAD, and what more can one really expect? At my screening director Hvistendahl was available for questions, and she candidly confessed that she didn't have any personal experiences with grief to which she could refer--a fact that had no impact on the amount of sniffling in the audience. She inherited the project from others, after a few false starts over the last decade; it is adapted from a novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, better known for LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, and the writer really did have a powerful reference point for grief. According to Hvistendahl his father was literally defaced in a hideous boating accident and, despite the warnings of morgue workers, he insisted on viewing the body. The filmmaker says that her own reference points lay outside her life; that she drew inspiration from others who'd had closer encounters with death.

Personally, I started thinking about people I've known who died early in the film, and then I just couldn't stop. I wondered what would happen if various people came back. The basic assumption might be that it's usually desirable to have somebody back, if you missed them. But I feel like things are likely to be more complicated, especially if the living have already gone some distance through the grieving process--potentially accessing feelings that were too hard to face during the deceased's lifetime.

I thought about a much-admired friend, somebody who was kind of my hero and who was adored by everyone who knew her, who killed herself. The main initial reaction among her closest loved ones was rage. People were so, SO angry with her for leaving them, or not allowing them to save her, or maybe for forcing them to feel as sad and lonely as she felt, or for whatever other things seem to piss people off so much about suicide. I don't know what would happen if she came back to life. I mean probably a lot of people would lay down their arms and try to be grateful, but who knows. That kind of really personal anger can be hard to come back from.

I also thought about a couple I know well, the wife was extremely well-loved by many people, all of whom were devastated when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The painful, protracted illness made the loss all the more awful, and it fell to her surviving family members to preserve and sort of reenact her memory for everyone else. But the reality was that things were not so perfect at home--not to suggest anything really dark, but the couple would have been divorced had she survived. So then she died and her widower was left holding the proverbial bag; he could never have the personal satisfaction of separating from someone who was not right for him, and criticizing her would be unthinkable. If she came back to life...sure, they might divorce, but it's just as likely that he would suffer public pressure to honor and keep her in a more extreme way than usual for the rest of his life.

Finally I thought about a friend of mine who was murdered. I watch a lot of slasher movies, and whenever I hear the criticism that horror lovers must all be desensitized or delusional about real violence, I think about this person who was senselessly killed by a random psychopath at her sister's wedding. It shattered our circle of friends and I cannot imagine what it did to her family, especially her sister. I mean even if they were to do another wedding, it would be impossible not to think of the murder the second time. It would be permanently associated with the new couple. It's hard to even wrap your mind around all the effects of this event. In this case--setting aside the problems of zombies, which I have left out of my meditation--I can only think that having my friend back really would fix things for everyone.

So maybe ultimately I'm saying that HANDLING THE UNDEAD would be a more interesting movie if the losses in it were a bit more complicated in some way. However, I can't ask one film to be all things to all people, and surprise is a particularly difficult thing to achieve. But if you like John Ajvide Lindqvist and you want to be surprised, I strongly advise you to watch BORDER. You will see some stuff in there that you will never see anywhere else in your life, and it probably won't bum you out too much.

#Hanteringen av odöda #the handling of the undead #thea hvistendahl #John Ajvide Lindqvist #zombie #adaptation #drama

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aotopmha · 4 years ago

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The extra pages for chapter 139 seem to be pretty much finally out!

And they're a bunch panels relying on visual storytelling which need to be put in context by the reader/you need to maybe think about it for 10 seconds instead of 2, something I've learned the internet does not like in storytelling. (Or in general, considering how much misinformation is out there.)

I think Kunihiko Ikuhara's works were my first exposure to this element of the internet in full force; they're some of the lowest-rated stories in some of the typical websites where anime is discussed and they're all mostly very reliant on metaphor and visual storytelling.

I've seen 12 episodes of Revolutionary Girl Utena and a little bit of Yurikuma Arashi and I think you really need to completely engage with those stories to get what is going on. Almost all of the dialog in those stories seems to matter and to need as much of the context as possible to understand.

And to me a story which asks you to engage and put things together for yourself is what I look for in art and I think is art.

The reason why I have yet to go back to those stories is because they are so very dense and you really just need to be in a certain mindset to watch them.

AoT Chapter 122 and now these new pages are 100% visual storytelling.

AoT Chapter 122 in particular is still one of my favourite manga chapters ever because of how it portrayed a character's perspective with very limited dialog.

The thing with AoT is that I think these moments of visual storytelling are like a less dense and complex version of Ikuhara's storytelling, but they have the same elements.

A lot of context-dependent information in relatively few panels is in 122 and 139, that's why I think people get the sense the story is excusing Eren, for example.

Most of those complaints I've felt are very bad faith, but if I believe in the good and intelligence of humanity for once, maybe it really is that awkward prose that confuses and offends people, not the desire to be morally superior over a comic.

In that sense I think people read the words "thank you" Armin says to Eren and nothing else around it or just find the phrasing to be strange.

They don't go to reread the previous chapter or arc just in case they might've missed something.

Months/years-long breaks between material also assist in not really considering anything else but that one chapter in that one month.

And it just so happens art is also a very individual emotional experience, so "monkey brain" just fully kicks in, too.

To me if you think about it, what the story is saying is pretty obvious the moment Eren became the antagonist. This shift happened in Marley, 40 chapters or so ago.

But this is just what *my* mind leads me to and makes connections with based on the information I have absorbed from the story.

And it's not just that, too. I make connections to what the story was trying to do with Reiner, Kenny, Bert, Erwin or Annie because they were also serial killers/murderers the story took effort in humanising.

The importance of individual perspective and what these characters individually think and how they view themselves seems to be one of the most important aspects of the story.

Because ultimately one of the most important thematic threads of the story seems to be understanding different perspectives.

So why is Eren any different than all of the other mass murderers in the cast?

Because all of the big murderers in the cast get empathy and moments where characters try to understand them, no?

To actually address the pages, here's the general points and my thoughts:

-The whole deal with Mikasa and OG Ymir is that I think Mikasa tries to again, find the good in OG Ymir's suffering.

Her having her children lead to the lives of many people, including hers to be born and Mikasa thanks her for that.

This is a parallel to Eren, whose actions at least gave his friends their lives back. This also ties into Armin's point in chapter 137 about living life for those good moments and Mikasa's promise in chapter 138 to remember Eren for all of the good he did for her.

-Mikasa having a family with probably Jean (which is probably implied with the small scene on the boat) is such a minor thing that I just find hard to care about it at all. The focus on Mikasa really wasn't with it the point to emphasize how she now has kids.

And Mikasa and Historia are still the only characters we see get kids. There really actually isn't anything with anyone else (the spoiler about Armin and Annie doesn't seem to be real at all).

-People visiting the tree is a much more limited panel than the initial leaked images lead on. It's not a tourist attraction, it's something I think the families of Eren's friends ended up visiting. So this also gives it a much more "selfish" vibe.

-Armin's talk with Eren and the scene on the boat with Pieck now gets some pretty nice additional context (makes sense considering Isayama considered it one of the bits to be clumsy himself) because of the panels of Paradis at war in the future.

Those panels don't necessarily say Paradis was completely destroyed by war (we see the black-haired kid), but the alternatives also make the same point: Eren's methods didn't really bring peace.

It sort of gives the promise Armin made to Eren and his words on the boat a more sadder tinge.

Armin tried so hard to make something good out of the mess Eren left everyone. He tried hard for diplomacy to triumph, but war still happened because that's how humanity works.

There's also the layer of violence begetting violence and extremism also hurting your own people. The Jaegerist movement Eren ended up creating probably caused this war on Paradis. I think that's the implied thing with Historia's speech.

The final layer to Eren's actions is the giant Titan tree that literally grew out of his grave: what he did just lead to more cycles and the whole mess might just start again.

But we don't really actually see that happen. It's only a possibility.

Will the kid go in there to get the power and save his people from misery or will he consider the past?

We don't know. It all depends on what he knows of the past and this tree, how his parents presented the past to him, how the world shaped his perspective and yes, also his nature, too.

But the point is, Eren's actions had some good, but mostly bad consequences.

Puts Annie's and Pieck's comments in a stronger perspective, too.

I still maintain this ending is good. Not my favourite material from AoT, but good.

And I'll repeat what I said before that repeating the story's point in more concrete ways gives satisfaction in its own right.

#Attack on Titan #Shingeki no Kyojin #AoT 139 #SnK 139 #AoT #SnK #Eren #Eren Jaeger #Eren Yeager #Mikasa #Mikasa Ackermann

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liliaeth · 4 years ago

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Fix it’s for Teen Wolf

I can think of a few things that would have made Teen Wolf better.

1. I wanted more focus on Scott’s emotional response to what happened to him. I don’t mind that Scott isn’t the type who complains about getting hurt. The problem for me was that the show rarely dealt with the consequences of Scott’s pain, and thus to the casual viewer often made it look like he simply didn’t mind, that being hurt didn’t bother him at all. Or worse, that nothing all that bad had happened in the first place.

Doing this undermined many of the hallucination scenes. For example, in Season 2’s Party Guessed, we get hallucinations for Stiles, Jackson, and Allison which give us a view into psychology, letting us know their issues without spelling them out. For Scott, we got Allison making out with kanima Jackson. Compared to the others, it felt shallow and confusing. The writers couldn’t even bother to give us dialog. He received the same treatment in Season 5, when they read the book designed to trigger their memories about the Dread Doctors. Stiles gets yet another scene about his dead mother who has been crucial to his story since Season 1. Lydia sees her grandmother and her connection to both Lydia’s powers and Eichen House, as well as foreshadowing her treatment at the hands of Valack. Malia about her Mom and sister’s death at the hands of the Desert Wolf, which is her entire arc. And Scott? He gets a nightmare about a dog that was never mentioned before and would not be mentioned after.

2. I wanted more focus on Scott’s trauma in general. In Season 1, Scott was repeatedly mentally and physically violated by Peter, terrorized and abused by Derek, and hunted by the Argents, and it was taken as a given. Even the recaps at the beginning episodes in other seasons barely show any of that. For example, Gerard attacking Scott in clear view at the hospital, stabbing him, and threatening his mother, never appeared in any of the recaps, even in episodes where it would have been important to remind the viewers about it.

While the show had no issue showing us over and over again how Stiles or Derek or Isaac or Allison or any white character really was hurt, they did not focus on the pain Scott was put through, and thus let the viewers conclude that those events didn’t matter.

The show literally had Scott try and kill himself, twice in less than two days, first in Frayed, by refusing to let himself heal, and then again in Motel California, yet neither of those suicide attempts are mentioned even once afterwards. And this while it would have been a good call back in s5b, when Scott is once again not letting himself heal after Theo killed him. and yet again, no mention whatsoever.

3. I wanted more consequences for certain characters. I liked that Scott and to a lesser extent Derek were confronted with the consequences of their actions. When they screwed up, they got called out on it. When they did something wrong, it wasn’t excused. Then they made up for it.

In contrast, certain characters, especially Stiles, got to do whatever they wanted and it was either dismissed as funny or used to make them look sympathetic. Stiles got to be mean and cruel, and the narrative still treated him as if he were the best friend ever. He got to assault people, hurt them, and it was treated as if somehow he was the victim.

For example, I would have liked Stiles a lot better, if when he tortured Scott with lacrosse balls, punishing him for who-knows-what, if someone else had called him out on it or if Scott had got to defend himself, instead of just taking it because Stiles was angry. Scott allowing Stiles to hurt him to maintain their friendship was a pattern between them, just as much as Scott taking responsibility for things that aren’t his fault. He keeps on doing it over the course of the show, but it would have been nice if the show at the very least had made it clear that that didn’t make Stiles behavior acceptable.

Just like I wish that Peter had actually faced consequences for his actions – and/or shown some kind of true remorse for his misdeeds--instead of the others just letting him hang around after all the horrible things he’d done or reduce it pettiness.

4. I would have liked more time spent on Melissa and the McCall family in general, especially on Melissa’s initial reaction to Scott being a werewolf. In the show, they barely spent two minutes total on Melissa’s reaction to finding out her son has been turned into a werewolf. By the end of s6b, she was barely even behaving like a mother anymore. Even to the point where we don’t even get a conversation between her and Chris about his attacks on her son before the two of them start dating. Now don’t get me wrong, I liked Chris and Melissa in a relationship, but it was missed opportunity to humanize both her and Scott that they didn’t bother to show her finding out about that and her reaction to it.

Instead we got the whole horror reaction, of her being horrified at seeing her son’s other face, the reaction that any LGBT kid fears when they come out to their parent. Which could have been a great metaphor, especially if they had then made it clear that Scott was bisexual.

5. I would have liked more focus on Boyd. The production time spent on Isaac and Erica, while Boyd’s arc was treated as almost an afterthought. We barely even got any hint on his past, in the episode before they killed him off. They started out with Boyd as the one who wanted to be like Scott, and then never explained it. Why not focus more on that, and their relationship?

(similar complaints go about Mason, and how little we knew about Mason, outside of him being Liam’s friend. Like... what was his relationship like with his parents? What is Mason interested in, what does he want to do with his life... how did he deal with the after effects of the Beast...

6. I would have liked more focus on Alan Deaton. The show had such huge potential with this character’s backstory, not just with the Hales but as an emissary in general. There was this whole mythology about druids that they barely even delved into.

To not even start on how little we knew about his personal life? Why did he and his sister have different last names? What was their relationship like?

Does he have any romantic relationships? Friendships, relationships in general?

Or how about more time spent on his role as a father figure to Scott, we got so few crumbs of their relationship when we should have gotten so much more

7. I would have liked more focus on Scott and Theo’s interaction in Season 6. I get that in 6a, they had Scott primarily focused on getting Stiles back, but I’ll never understand why they then didn’t use 6b, to deal with the fact that Theo had tried to murder Scott and was trying to make it up to him and the pack for what he’d done to Scott and the others.

I don’t mind Theo interacting with Liam. Those scenes were great, but they should have at least one scene with Scott and Theo dealing with the issues between them. For Theo’s sake, as much as Scott’s.

8. I would have liked a complete rework of Season 6A in its entirety. If you’re going to focus a season on an actor who isn’t available, then you have to make it about his impact on the others. Show us what difference this character made, by showing us the effects of his absence, rather than just try and make it about a romantic ship. (I’ve written a post about this already in greater detail, so limiting it to that, but seriously, that season was such a huge wasted opportunity.)

9. Actual character growth for Stiles. For a character who had as much screentime as Stiles did, it’s shocking just how little character growth Stiles had over the course of the entire show. This contrasts in a really bad way, when you look at how much every single other character grew and changed over the course of the show.

Just look at the last four episodes of 5b, to give an example. After almost an entire season of watching Stiles at his worst, focusing on emotional scene after emotional scene with him, he suddenly got relegated to comic relief. Why? Because they didn’t want Stiles to grow, because unless he grew, there was no way for him to go but down. If Stiles had taken responsibility for his actions, then they’d have had to admit that he did wrong in the first place. And they couldn’t have that happen.

10. And last but not least. More moments of the kids being kids. Even if it’s just proms and beach parties. Moments where we see the characters spend time together, when they aren’t trying to stop some bad guy. Where we can see them be friends, hang out with kids their own age. Even just to remind the audience just how young these children are. And where the viewers along with the characters can rest in between the horror, because doing so makes the horror hit far more strongly in contrast to the light.

11. Also, a better lighting budget, pretty please Davies, were a few more light bulbs that much to ask for?

#teen wolf #scott mccall #anti stiles #teen wolf fandom problems #alan deaton #vernon boyd #mason hewitt #theo raeken #melissa mccall #anti peter hale

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gesternchen · 4 years ago

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Just randomly reviewing scenes from the movies no one remembers now. This week: Avatar (2009).

It’s not like everyone forgot James Cameron’s Avatar. Since we’re still getting some footage from behind the scenes of the sequel and news about the cast, at least someone takes pains to remind themselves of this cinematic experience from the year of 2009. It’s already been 84 (just kidding, 11) years and I’m still looking forward to at least watching the teaser (fun fact: I was 11 when Avatar came out, I’m 22 now). I even bought the Darkhorse comic book on Tsu’Tey’s backstory to, you know, investigate one of my favorite characters a little bit better (spoiler: the backstory wasn’t very much eventful but I noticed a nice detail there which I may talk about briefly a bit later).

Throughout the years Avatar has received a lot of backlash and more or less justified criticism, mainly for the plot and its problematic packaging. I believe, it depends on the perspective one watches a movie from. Of course, I wouldn’t call it an absolute gem of exciting storytelling, even though I truly enjoy it, as in majority its twists are undeniably predictable. However, I always disagreed with people saying relations in Avatar aren’t deep at all. Well, romance between Jake and Neytiri, which, let’s be honest, except for the scene of telling the truth, went too smoothly, and this is why I strongly believe clash of interests is inevitable in sequels. Their interaction remained the key one for the whole movie, and nothing is bad about that, people enjoy a nice lovestory, so do I. But 11 years after I’d like to focus on the disturbing conflict everyone prefers to ignore for some reason when recalling Avatar. For me it’s always been Jake versus Colonel Quaritch.

You guys may have already guessed which scenes I wanna talk about. Those really important ones that I consider climactic to the pace of narration. And what is more about them, they give us crucial details in character development and actors’ play to think through. The main message: Quaritch knew it was coming.

Let me firstly touch upon the scene of short conversation between Jake and Quaritch prior to Sully presumably leaving Pandora. While Jake is awating Quaritch in a large empty hall, he hardly seems to be calm about the talk, every nerve in his body is trembling, but why?

The way Jake’s drumming his fingers on the table makes me wonder if he’s okay.

Then Colonel enters the hall, grabs a chair and reminds that it had been more than two weeks since he got the latest report on how the misson was going. He knows, Sully is questioning reality, and no, he’s not ‘doubting his resolve’. He knows, the right moment to ‘terminate the mission’ is missed. He knows, he lost Jake. He knows, he’s talking to the deserter. Yet Quaritch speaks indifferent. He praises Jake’s effort and rewards him for that. With real legs he promised to him when they first talked. Quaritch hoped they’d trigger the realization in Jake. Which doesn’t happen. How sad he looks when Jake openly refuses to accept the reward.

In just one sequence Stephen’s face demonstrates the shift of all four feelings Quaritch goes through: dissatisfaction, melancholy, shame, disgust.

Quaritch sensed the moment when Jake expressed superiority to the mankind. Jake grasped that Quaritch knew everything, he played with fire, and that’s why he felt anxiety. And it lasted all the way until Quaritch stepped back for leaving the hall. But did Colonel really surrender? I doubt that.

The tension between them both feels electric, so it’s explainable why Jake’s transient smile is so awkward. Sam then heavily staring straight at Colonel's back suggests that up until now Jake regarded Quaritch as his enemy. The enemy he knew he would not be able to defeat.

I remember when watching this scene, I couldn’t get myself the answer to one question. The question was: which report did Quaritch refer to? ‘That report from two weeks ago’, but such information wasn’t satisfactory for me. To be honest, this small discovery became the actual reason why I decided to type this study. Let’s assume that this particular report which Quaritch mentioned was the videolog where Jake confessed that Omaticaya wouldn’t leave the Hometree. Here’s why.

The general audience is used to perceiving Quaritch as a cruel short-tempered military man who just waits for the starting pistol’s shot to destroy everything in sight. Again, nothing is wrong about this, the fact that his character was simply meant to be a generic personification of such type doesn’t leave us with any alternative impression of him. Let’s say, if he was given the order to ignite the operation of the Hometree’s destruction to screw the tribe out of the site, he would absolutely go for it (and so he does). He’s a man of his word after all. Let’s also say, if he was pissed off by Jake’s betrayal, he would transport himself to the mountain site in a blink of an eye, turn off the link and put Jake in jail right after the talk in the hall. Instead, Quaritch decided to wait and give Jake the last chance. Jake preffered unearthly wings to those more tangible, so Quaritch chose not to cut them so abruptly.

We’re moving to the next scene, taking place right before a toned down fight between Tsu’Tey and Jake (I’m saying so, because it’s actually one of the deleted scenes that got edited out of the final cut, and believe me, the pressure between two rivals there is way too intense). Quaritch is watching the record of Jake destroying bulldozer’s lenses with a stone. After that Jake’s face is zoomed and we watch Selfridge get frustrated, Quaritch looks pretty annoyed as well but doesn’t seem to be much surprised. What he’s feeling, is bitter disappointment in himself and knowing that he totally failed to persuade Jake to change his mind.

Just observe Stephen Lang’s performance here. He absolutely nails cold-eyed look, the fire burning slow inside of him is so palpable, and guess what, in a flash he flies off the handle.

Now, shall we check the ultimate scene, preceding the destruction of the Hometree. Though Grace versus Parker juxtaposition is central to this scene, the last time Quaritch confronting Jake face to face in his human body is essential to consider for making things clear.

When it comes to revealing to Selfridge the vainness of further negotiations with Omaticaya, isn’t it just interesting how fast Quaritch manages to find the correct videolog? It literally takes him not more than a couple of swipes to produce the proof. Here is why: he’s already watched the record and is completely aware of the Jake’s values having deteriorated.

You can tell, Jake knew he was under control, but he would rather like to ingnore this fact. His pathetic glance at Quaritch, who’s almost impending above his head, causes to think Jake would guess that Colonel could have watched this videolog. Rather, it was a mutual secret between the two of them until a turning point. But the moment of truth came, and Jake didn’t change his mind. Quaritch made sure of that and finally it was his time to triumph.

So how was it even possible to assume Quaritch may have watched the videolog I’ve been talking about for so long? Well, my explanation may be too easy to believe, but still: we can tell by Jake’s appearance and the date of the record that it is the vlog we need.

This telltale videolog was recorded 16 minutes after the another one, when Jake says that he’s uncertain, who he is anymore (LST abbreviation stands for Local Standard Time). Jake might have suddenly felt depressed and hopeless and got back to the camera while being too emotionally instable, and so must have forgotten to delete the final record.

I have one more note for you. If you check the videolog library Quaritch is swiping through, you’ll see that the latest important record, which he actually needs, is made in the interior of the mountain site block and dates back to August, 13. Other recent vlogs’ covers look nothing like Site 26 sequence. Jake may not have done any of these records at the mountain site. I still wonder though where those three or four ensuing videologs were recorded, the location seems to be red lighted, which means it isn’t blue lighting at Site 26. I may even assume he recorded some pieces at Hell’s Gate. Why would I think so? Probably because in those two scenes (dialog with Quaritch and confession at Parker’s office) Jake looks ten times better than before, he gained some weight at least and doesn’t resemble a living sceleton.

Selfridge gave Jake an hour to relocate the tribe, while gunships led by Colonel’s Dragon were already on full alert. Quaritch had no doubt that Jake’s peacekeeping mission would fail. He knew it from the beginning. Hence he sounds so sarcastic seeing Sully’s avatar tied.

Now Quaritch sipping his villain’s morning coffee tasting like fresh genocide doesn’t feel so cringy: he’s celebrating his victory over Jake (still I should agree with critisism on this point, it really is a stupid cliche and wasn’t intended to carry a deep meaning).

Now I should admit, it’s been a long journey to run this investigation and bring it to light by finally posting it. It took me around a day to collect my thoughts and express them by means of more or less readable English. Just would like to make a little side note: English is not my native, so I promise I did my best! Thanks to James Cameron for making a movie, which woke me up in the middle of the night to start reflecting, and to all the fans out there who still exist and remember this movie and so can read this essay. @avatarmovies I found your blog not so long ago and you guys say you enjoy headcanons (and movie reviews probably?..), so it would be nice if you reblogged this but I’m not insisting!!

#avatar #james cameron #james cameron avatar #movie reviews #avatar movies #colonel quaritch #jake sully #characters in conflict #gesternchen reviews

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donnerpartyofone · 4 years ago

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reasons my i am probably too sensitive to have anything to do with other people

including other people’s drama that has absolutely nothing to do with me

i started reading this person’s new webcomic on instagram a month or two ago, and what started out as a fun little time killer that i looked forward to every day has started making me so uncomfortable that i wish i’d never heard of it. it takes place right now, in an especially embattled US city, and it’s about the dysfunctional lives of a bunch of shallow millennials, set against the backdrop of an increasingly dangerous country in an unpredictable state of revolt. it’s solidly engaging, convincingly characterized, and rendered in a unique funny animal style; i wasn’t surprised to discover that it’s going to be published soon by the most reputable publisher of this sort of thing. at first, i was impressed by it because i thought the behavior and dialog of its insecure young people was so well observed. it felt like one of the only things of its kind that i’ve read, more or less about real people living right now, that was neither a broad ugly satire, nor a pretentious drama exaggerating the specialness of its characters. the other thing i liked about it was that while it was largely about their sex lives, it didn’t seem at all sexy to me. the artist has a kind of distorted, rough-hewn visual style that i thought put some emotional distance between the overheated state of the characters, and the real consequences of their decisions. then it all got weird.

the artist stuck a really long, graphic sex scene in the middle of story that made me think...oh, maybe i AM supposed to be getting off to this? that’s weird, this all seems really bad to me, like every character is just mindlessly, selfishly bent on destruction and not doing much to make me like them, and i’d been reading along thinking “god i’m SO GLAD i’m not in my 20s anymore and i don’t have to deal with people like this--or with the pressure to act like this, as if using sex to create drama and being ‘crazy’ is the ultimate thing a person can do with their life”--and then suddenly it felt like maybe the comic was actually some kind of celebration of this lifestyle, or at the very least it’s an intensely sentimental portrait of a time of life, and of types of people, that i cannot imagine feeling sentimental about. then something else happened that made the comic even MORE uncomfortable to read, somehow: it had been gaining traction at an amazing pace, with tons of people leaving comments to the tune of “noooo don’t do it!”, the way you would yell at someone in a horror movie not to go back for the cat, as each character made the worst possible personal choice in every daily installment. the “don’t go in there!” response seemed pretty natural to me, but then the artist stepped in and made this announcement threatening to stop doing the comic altogether if the readers wouldn’t stop criticizing the characters. pretty much everyone in the comments was like “???”. many apologized if their comments were offensive, although they had no idea what they could have said that was wrong; other people, who seemed more sure that they were the ones being accused, said that they thought you were SUPPOSED to feel critical of the characters’ obviously bad decisions. that was how i felt, and at that point i was just enormously glad that i never comment on shit online or get involved in any type of community shit, especially when the artist started explaining laboriously that all of the characters represent some facet of the artist themselves and so therefore none of them are meant to be seen in a bad light at all and they’re all meant to be loved unconditionally and if you find yourself thinking mean things about the characters then you are effectively shitting all over the artist as a person. a lot of readers fell all over themselves to be supportive, and i just thought...this isn’t something you should support, though. it sucks that the artist is feeling so sensitive, but they’re about to have a book out in the world where they won’t have any ability to threaten readers who are “reading it wrong” or having incorrect thoughts about it. i mean...life is full of uncomfortable experiences and people you can’t relate to, i really don’t think we should be promoting this hopeless sanitization of all experiences in which trigger warnings used to be something that protected traumatized people from being randomly confronted with traumatic material, and now they’re used to just make sure nobody ever has to hear anything they don’t like, ever. anyone who cares about this artist should be helping them understand that they cannot control how people read their book or how they feel about each character and story in it. or failing that, they should be encouraged to just turn off instagram comments. but because of all this drama, i found myself reading all the comments obsessively--something i did when the blowup first happened, because i couldn’t find anything in there that i thought was mean or offensive, which added to my uncomfortable fascination with the whole thing--and that’s when i spotted a comment where somebody asked the artist is this was a furry comic. i wish this didn’t blow my mind, but it kind of did. i mean, it’s a book where almost all the characters are animals, and they occasionally have a bunch of raunchy sex. i think that if you’re a furry, meaning you’re interested in that sort of thing, this book is completely available for you to enjoy however you want. but this person needed the artist to FORMALLY CATEGORIZE IT as a furry comic. what the fuck is the meaning of that? it struck me as something that people in fandoms do, where they need every single thing to be labeled to death in an intensive and intractable way like it was science, the Final Word on everything in the universe, and they like *argue with each other* about whether they’re *allowed* to ship certain characters together or imagine them doing specific things, which is something you would only worry about if you thought the topic represented a literal material reality that could be adversely affected by people’s improper thoughts. i mean imagine if you felt that way about your jerkoff fantasies about fictional characters? that your horny thoughts are up for debate by hundreds of people you don’t even know? imagine feeling like that about OTHER PEOPLE’S jerkoff fantasies, like it’s worth fighting over and trying to CONTROL? like holy fucking shit you guys, STOP IT. it would even be one thing to ask the artist if THEY were a furry, which may or may not be anybody’s business, but to ask whether interpreting the comic through a furry lens is ALLOWED is like...well, actually, maybe it’s exactly in line with the artist’s recently expressed attitude, that you’re forced to think of the book in exactly the way that they personally think about it, or else you should have your reading privileges revoked. so now i’m still reading the comic, sort of compulsively, because i’m a little addicted to the soap opera of it and i’m ALSO a little addicted to the soap opera of the artist battling the readers over finding the correct orthodoxy for reading the comic--there’s a particular guy i’ve become aware of in the comics community because he is always harassing people with this mix of really caustic sarcasm and really bitter political self-righteousness, and he was surely the main person who was being “mean” to the characters, and HE’S STILL DOING IT IN EXACTLY THE SAME WAY, because i guess the artist would rather have problems with people than simply block them and eliminate them from the equation? but the whole entire thing is making me so uncomfortable i can hardly stand it. reading about like, dumb hot chicks with no self-control, and smug young shitheads who use the veil of progressiveness to hide or justify their predatory sexual behavior, and grownass adults who start drama with 20 year olds in order to feel relevant, AND being forced to know that the artist intends for me to embrace and adore all of this bad shit--like, people and things i left behind in real life, because it was all bad!--with ultimate love and compassion, or else they reserve the right to claim that they’re being personally attacked, has just become too much to take. it’s starting to make me feel sick. i really need to take the reigns on this thing. as much as the artist needs to forget about this control fantasy and stop being so precious about what they’re doing, i need to stop subjecting myself to something i find painful, embarrassing, and frankly creepy, if i ever wanna get back to a state where i have less to complain about.

tl;dr: stupid hipster is too sensitive to read a webcomic by a stupid hipster who is too sensitive for anyone to read their webcomic.

#NOT simon hanselmann #somebody else!#i will tell you if you chat me i just don't wanna get involved

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betterdaysareatoenailaway · 4 years ago

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Random Review #3: Sleepwalkers (1992) and “Sleep Walk” (1959)

I. Sleepwalkers (1992) I couldn’t sleep last night so I started watching a trashy B-movie penned by Stephen King specifically for the screen called Sleepwalkers (1992). Simply put, the film is an unmitigated disaster. A piece of shit. But it didn’t need to be. That’s what’s so annoying about it. By 1992 King was a grizzled veteran of the silver screen, with more adaptations under his belt than any other author of his cohort. Puzo had the Godfather films (1972 and 1974, respectively), sure, but nothing else. Leonard Gardner had Fat City (1972), a movie I love, but Gardner got sucked into the Hollywood scene of cocaine and hot tub parties and never published another novel, focusing instead on screenplays for shitty TV shows like NYPD Blue. After Demon Seed (1977), a movie I have seen and disliked, nobody would touch Dean Koontz’s stuff with a ten foot pole, which is too bad because The Voice of the Night, a 1980 novel about two young pals, one of whom is a psychopath trying to convince the other to help him commit murder, would make a terrific movie. But Koontz’s adaptations have been uniformly awful. The made-for-TV film starring John C McGinley, 1997′s Intensity, is especially bad. There are exceptions, but Stephen King has been lucky enough to avoid the fate of his peers. Big name directors have tackled his work, from Stanley Kubrick to Brian De Palma. King even does a decent job of acting in Pet Semetary (1989), in his own Maximum Overdrive (1986) and in George Romero’s Creepshow (1982), where he plays a yokel named Jordy Verril who gets infected by a meteorite that causes green weeds to grow all over his body. Many have criticized King’s over-the-top performance in that flick, but for me King perfectly nails the campy and comical tone that Romero was going for. The dissolves in Creepshow literally come right off the pages of comics, so people expecting a subtle Ordinary People-style turn from King had clearly walked into the wrong theatre. Undoubtedly Creepshow succeeds at what it set out to do. I’m not sure Sleepwalkers succeeds though, unless the film’s goal was to get me to like cats even more than I already do. But I already love cats a great deal. Here’s my cat Cookie watching me edit this very blog post.

And here’s one of my other cats, Church, named after the cat that reanimates and creeps out Louis and Ellie in Pet Sematary. Photo by @ScareAlex.

SPOILER ALERT: Do not keep reading if you plan on watching Sleepwalkers and want to find out for yourself what happens.

Stephen King saw many of his novels get adapted in the late 1970s and 80s: Carrie, The Shining, Firestarter, Christine, Cujo, and the movie that spawned the 1950s nostalgia industrial complex, Stand By Me, but Sleepwalkers was the first time he wrote a script specifically for the screen rather than adapting a novel that already existed. Maybe that’s why it’s so fucking bad. Stephen King is a novelist, gifted with a novelist’s rich imagination. He’s prone to giving backstories to even the most peripheral characters - think of Joe Chamber’s alcoholic neighbour Gary Pervier in the novel Cujo, who King follows for an unbelievable number of pages as the man stumbles drunkenly around his house spouting his catch phrase “I don’t give a shit,” drills a hole through his phone book so he can hang it from a string beside his phone, complains about his hemorrhoids getting “as big as golfballs” (I’m not joking), and just generally acts like an asshole until a rabid Cujo bounds over, rips his throat out, and he bleeds to death. In the novel Pervier’s death takes more than a few pages, but it makes for fun reading. You hate the man so fucking much that watching him die feels oddly satisfying. In the movie, though, his death occurs pretty quickly, and in a darkened hallway, so it’s hard to see what’s going on aside from Gary’s foot trembling. And Pervier’s “I don’t give a shit” makes sense when he’s drilling a hole in the phone book, not when he’s about to be savagely attacked by a rabid St Bernard. There’s just less room for back story in movies. In a medium that demands pruning and chiseling and the “less is more” dictum, King’s writing takes a marked turn for the worse. King is a prose maximalist, who freely admits to “writing to outrageous lengths” in his novels, listing It, The Stand, and The Tommyknockers as particularly egregious examples of literary logorrhea. He is not especially equipped to write concisely. This weakness is most apparent in Sleepwalkers’ dialogue, which sounds like it was supposed to be snappy and smart, like something Aaron Sorkin would write, but instead comes off like an even worse Tango & Cash, all bad jokes and shitty puns. More on those bad jokes later. First, the plot.

Sleepwalkers is about a boy named Charles and his mother Mary who travel around the United States killing and feeding off the lifeforce of various unfortunate people (if this sounds a little like The True Knot in Doctor Sleep, you’re not wrong. But self-plagiarism is not a crime). Charles and Mary are shapeshifting werewolf-type creatures called werecats, a species with its very own Wikipedia page. Wikipedia confers legitimacy dont’cha know, so lets assume werecats are real beings. According to said page, a werecat, “also written in a hyphenated form as were-cat) is an analogy to ‘werewolf’ for a feline therianthropic creature.” I’m gonna spell it with the hyphen from now on because “werecats” just looks like a typo. Okay? Okay.

Oddly enough, the were-cats in Sleepwalkers are terrified of cats. Actual cats. For the were-cats, cute kittens = kryptonite. When they see a cat or cats plural, this happens to them:

^ That is literally a scene from the movie. Charles is speeding when a cop pulls alongside him and bellows at him to pull over. Ever the rebel, Charles flips the cop the finger. But the cop has a cat named Clovis in his car, and when the cat pops up to have a look at the kid (see below), Charles shapeshifts first into a younger boy, then into whatever the fuck that is in the above screenshot.

Now, the were-cats aversion to normal cats is confusing because one would assume a were-cat to be a more evolved (or perhaps devolved?) version of the typical house kitty. The fact that these were-cats are bipedal alone suggests an advantage over our furry four-legged friends, no? Kinda like if humans were afraid of fucking gorillas. Wait...we are scared of gorillas. And chimpanzees. And all apes really. Okay, maybe the conceit of the film isn’t so silly after all. The film itself, however, is about as silly as a bad horror movie can get. When the policeman gets back to precinct and describes the incident above (”his face turned into a blur”) he is roundly ridiculed because in movies involving the supernatural nobody believes in the supernatural until it confronts them. It’s the law, sorry. Things don’t end well for the cop. Or for the guy who gets murdered when the mom stabs him with...an ear of corn. Yes, an ear of corn. Somehow, the mother is able to jam corn on the cob through a man’s body, without crushing the vegetable or turning it into yellow mash. It’s pretty amazing. Here is a sample of dialog from that scene: Cop About To Die On The Phone to Precinct: There’s blood everywhere! *STAB* Murderous Mother: No vegetables, no dessert. That is actually a line in the movie. “No vegetables, no dessert.” It’s no “let off some steam, Bennett” but it’s close. Told ya I’d get back to the bad jokes. See, Mary and Charles are new in town and therefore seeking to ingratiate themselves by killing everyone who suspects them of being weird, all while avoiding cats as best they can. At one point Charles yanks a man’s hand off and tells him to "keep [his] hands to [him]self," giving the man back his severed bloody hand. Later on Charles starts dating a girl who will gradually - and I do mean gradually - come to realize her boyfriend is not a real person but in fact a were-cat. Eventually our spunky young protagonist - Madchen Amick, who fans of Twin Peaks will recognize as Shelly - and a team of cats led by the adorable Clovis- kill the were-cat shapeshifting things and the sleepy small town (which is named Travis for some reason) goes back to normal, albeit with a slightly diminished population. For those keeping score, that’s Human/Cat Alliance 1, Shapeshifting Were-cats 0. It is clear triumph for the felis catus/people team! Unless we’re going by kill count, in which case it is closer to Human/Cat Alliance 2, Were-cats 26. I arrived at this figure through my own notes but also through a helpful video that takes a comprehensive and complete “carnage count” of all kills in Sleepwalkers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmt-DroK6uA

II. Santo & Johnny “Sleep Walk” (1959) Because Sleepwalkers is decidedly not known for its good acting or its well-written screenplay, it is perhaps best known for its liberal and sometimes contrapuntal use of Santo & Johnny’s classic steel guitar song “Sleep Walk,” possibly the most famous (and therefore best) instrumental of the 20th century. Some might say “Sleep Walk” is tied for the #1 spot with “Green Onions” by Booker T & the M.G.’s and/or “Wipe Out” by The Surfaris, but I disagree. The Santo & Johnny song is #1 because of its incalculable influence on all subsequent popular music.

I’m not saying “Wipe Out” didn't inspire a million imitators, both contemporaneously and even decades later…for example here’s a surf rock instrumental from 1999 called “Giant Cow" by a Toronto band called The Urban Surf Kings. The video was one of the first to be animated using Flash (and it shows):

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So there are no shortage of surf rock bands, even now, decades after its emergence from the shores of California to the jukeboxes of Middle America. My old band Sleep for the Nightlife used to regularly play Rancho Relaxo with a surf rock band called the Dildonics, who I liked a great deal. There's even a Danish surf rock band called Baby Woodrose, whose debut album is a favourite of mine. They apparently compete for the title of Denmark’s biggest surf pop band with a group called The Setting Son. When a country that has no surfing culture and no beaches has multiple surf rock bands, it is safe to say the genre has attained international reach. As far as I can tell, there aren’t many bands out there playing Booker T & the M.G.’s inspired instrumental rock. Link Wray’s “Rumble” was released four years before “Green Onions.” But the influence of Santo and Johnny’s “Sleep Walk” is so ubiquitous as to be almost immeasurable. The reason for this is the sheer popularity of the song’s chord progression. If Santo and Johnny hadn’t written it first, somebody else would have, simply because the progression is so beautiful and easy on the ears and resolvable in a satisfying way. Have a listen to “Sleep Walk” first and then let’s check out some songs it directly inspired.

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The chords are C, A minor, F and G. Minor variations sometimes reverse the last two chords, but if it begins with C to A minor, you can bet it’s following the “Sleep Walk” formula, almost as if musicians influenced by the song are in the titular trance. When it comes to playing guitar, Tom Waits once said “your hands are like dogs, going to the same places they’ve been. You have to be careful when playing is no longer in the mind but in the fingers, going to happy places. You have to break them of their habits or you don’t explore; you only play what is confident and pleasing.” Not only is it comforting to play and/or hear what we already know, studies have shown that our brains actively resist new music, because it takes work to understand the new information and assimilate it into a pattern we are cogent of. It isn’t until the brain recognizes the pattern that it gives us a dopamine rush. I’m not much for Pitchfork anymore, but a recent article they posted does a fine job of discussing this phenomenon in greater detail.

Led Zeppelin’s “D’Yer Maker” uses the “Sleep Walk” riff prominently, anchored by John Bonham and John Paul Jones’ white-boy reggae beat:

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Here it is again with Del Shannon’s classic “Little Town Flirt.” I love Shannon’s falsetto at the end when he goes “you better run and hide now bo-o-oy.”

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The Beatles “Happiness is a Warm Gun” uses the Sleep Walk progression, though not for the whole song. It goes into the progression at the bridge at 1:34:

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Tumblr won’t let me embed any more videos, so you’ll to travel to another tab to hear these songs, but Neil Young gets in on the act with his overlooked classic “Winterlong:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RV6r66n3TFI On their 1996 EP Interstate 8 Modest Mouse pay direct homage by singing over their own rendition of the original Santo & Johnny version, right down to the weeping steel guitar part: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT_PwXjCqqs The vocals are typical wispy whispered indie rock vocals, but I think they work, particularly the two different voices. They titled their version “Sleepwalking (Couples Only Dance Prom Night).”

Dwight Yoakam’s “Thousand Miles From Nowhere” makes cinematic use of it. This song plays over the credits of one of my all-time favourite movies, 1993′s Red Rock West feat. Nicolas Cage, Lara Flynn Boyle, Dennis Hopper, and J.T. Walsh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tu3ypuKq8WE

“39″ is my favourite Queen song. I guess now I know why. It uses my fav chord progression: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kE8kGMfXaFU

Blink 182 scored their first hit “Dammit” with a minor variation on the Sleep Walk chord progression: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT0g16_LQaQ

Midwest beer drinkin bar rockers Connections scored a shoulda-been-a-hit with the fist-pumping “Beat the Sky:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSNRq0n_WYA You’d be hard pressed to find a weaker lead singer than this guy (save for me, natch), but they make it work. This one’s an anthem.

Spoon, who have made a career out of deconstructing rock n’ roll, so that their songs sometimes sound needlessly sparse (especially “The Ghost of You Lingers,” which takes minimalism to its most extreme...just a piano being bashed on staccato-style for four minutes), so it should surprise nobody that they re-arrange the Sleep Walk chords on their classic from Gimme Fiction, “I Summon You:” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teXA8N3aF9M I love that opening line: remember the weight of the world was a sound that we used to buy? I think songwriter Britt Daniel is talking about buying albums from the likes of Pearl Jam or Smashing Pumpkins, any of those grunge bands with pessimistic worldviews. There are a million more examples. I remember seeing some YouTube video where a trio of gross douchebros keep playing the same progression while singing a bunch of hits over it. I don’t like the smarmy way they do it, making it seem like artists are lazy and deliberately stealing. I don’t think it’s plagiarism to use this progression. And furthermore, tempo and production make all the difference. Take “This Magic Moment” for example. There's a version by Jay & the Americans and one by Ben E King & the Drifters. I’ve never been a fan of those shrieking violins or fiddles that open the latter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bacBKKgc4Uo The Jay & the Americans version puts the guitar riff way in the forefront, which I like a lot more. The guitar plays the entire progression once before the singing starts and the band joins in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKfASw6qoag

Each version has its own distinctive feel. They are pretty much two different songs. Perhaps the most famous use of the Sleep Walk progression is “Unchained Melody” by the Righteous Brothers, which is one of my favourite songs ever. The guy who chose to let Bobby Hatfield sing this one by himself must have kicked himself afterwards when it became a hit, much bigger than "You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qiiyq2xrSI0

What can you say about “Unchained Melody” that hasn’t already been said? God, that miraculously strong vocal, the way the strings (and later on, brass horns) are panned way over to the furthest reaches the left speaker while the drums and guitar are way over in the right, with the singing smack dab in the middle creates a kind of distance and sharp clarity that has never been reproduced in popular music, like seeing the skyscrapers of some distant city after an endless stretch of highway. After listening to “Unchained Melody,” one has to wonder: can that progression ever be improved upon? Can any artist write something more haunting, more beautiful, more uplifting than that? The “need your love” crescendo hits so fucking hard, as both the emotional and the sonic climax of the song, which of course is no accident...the strings descending and crashing like a waterfall of sound, it gets me every fucking time. Legend has it that King George II was so moved by the “Hallelujah” section of Handel’s “Messiah” that he stood up, he couldn't help himself, couldn't believe what he was hearing. I get that feeling with all my favourite songs. "1979." "Unchained Melody." "In The Still of the Night." "Digital Bath." "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?" "Interstate." "Liar's Tale." “Gimme Shelter.” The list goes on and on. Music is supposed to move us.

King George II stood because he was moved to do so. Music may be our creation, but it isn't our subordinate. All those sci-fi stories warning about technology growing beyond our control aren’t that far-fetched. Music is our creation but its power lies beyond our control. We are subordinate to music, helpless against its power and might, its urgency and vitality and beauty. There have been many times in my life when I have been so obsessed with a particular song that I pretty much want to live inside of it forever. A house of sound. I remember detoxing from heroin and listening to Grimes “Realiti” on repeat for twelve hours. Detoxing from OxyContin and listening to The Beach Boys “Dont Worry Baby” over and over. Or just being young and listening to “Tonight Tonight” over and over and over, tears streaming from my eyes in that way you cry when you’re a kid because you just feel so much and you don’t know what to do with the intensity of those feelings. It is precisely because we are so moved by music that we keep creating it. And in the act of that creation we are free. There are no limits to that freedom, which is why bands time and time again return to the well-worn Sleep Walk chord progression and try to make something new from it. Back in 2006, soon after buying what was then the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs album, I found myself playing the album’s closing track over and over. I loved the chorus and I loved the way it collapses into a lo-fi demo at the very end, stripping away the studio sheen and...not to be too punny, showing its bones (the album title is Show Your Bones). Later on I would realize that the song, called “Turn Into,” uses the Sleep Walk chord progression. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exqCFoPiwpk

It’s just like, what Waits said, our hands goes to where we are familiar. And so do our ears, which is why jazz often sounds so unpleasant to us upon first listen. Or Captain Beefheart. But it’s worth the effort to discover new stuff, just as it’s worth the effort to try and write it. I recently lamented on this blog that music to me now is more about remembrance than discovery, but I’m still only 35 years old. I’m middle-aged right now (I don’t expect to live past 70, not with the lifestyle I’ve been living). There’s still a whole other half life to find new music and love and leave it for still newer stuff. It’s worth the challenge, that moment of inner resistance we feel when confronted with something new and challenging and strange sounding. The austere demands of adult life, rent and routine, take so much of our time. I still make time for creative pursuits, but I don’t really have much time for discovery, for seeking out new music. But I’ve resolved to start making more time. A few years ago I tried to listen to and like Trout Mask Replica but I couldn’t. I just didn’t get what was going on. It sounded like a bunch of mistakes piled on top of each other. But then a few days ago I was writing while listening to music, as I always do, and YouTube somehow landed on Lick My Decals Off, Baby. I didn’t love what I was hearing but I was intrigued enough to keep going. And now I really like this song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMnd9dvb3sA&pbjreload=101 Another example I’ll give is the rare Robert Pollard gem “Prom Is Coming.” The first time I heard this song, it sounded like someone who can’t play guitar messing around, but the more I heard it the more I realized there’s a song there. It’s weird and strange, but it’s there. The lyrics are classic Pollard: Disregard injury and race madly out of the universe by sundown. Pollard obviously has a special place in his heart for this track. He named one of his many record labels Prom Is Coming Records and he titled the Boston Spaceships best-of collection Out of the Universe By Sundown. I don’t know if I’ll ever become a Captain Beefheart megafan but I can hear that the man was doing something very strange and, at times, beautiful. And anyway, why should everything be easy? Aren’t some challenges worth meeting for the experience waiting on the other side of comprehension or acceptance? I try to remember this now whenever I’m first confronted with new music, instead of vetoing it right away. Most of my favourite bands I was initially resistant to when I first heard them. Queens of the Stone Age, Kyuss, Guided by Voices, Spoon, Heavy Times. All bands I didn’t like at first. I don’t wanna sleepwalk through life, surrounding myself only with things I have already experienced. I need to stay awake. Because soon enough I’ll be asleep forever. We need to try everything we can before the Big Sleep comes to take us back to the great blankness, the terrible question mark that bookends our lives.

#sleep walk #santo & johnny #neil young #queen #dwight yoakam #led zeppelin #the beatles #betterdaysareatoenailaway

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lumi-klovstad-games · 5 years ago

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I have said this before but Destiny is UTTER. SHIT. at telling a coherent narrative.

Like, in other games, you play the story mode and get (more or less) the whole story experience.

Destiny though? Hoo boy.

The problem with Destiny's (lame excuse for) storytelling is that if you play the story missions, you're only getting about 35% of the story.

It doesn't include highly detailed lore text attached to literally every item, plot that plays out in background dialog, plot that plays out in limited time events that can never ever be revisited (which sucks for those of us who refused to do business with Blizzard while D2 was a Battle.NET exclusive), plot that happens in web content, or highly important plot that only happens if you do that one Exotic Quest that requires you to have a perfect K/D in Crucible AND Gambit for three weeks and kill sixteen people in a single blow with a fucking spoon before reforging that spoon into a missile to kill a god just so you can reunite the Husky voiced robot with his favorite dog. Or something like that.

Destiny needs to pick an avenue to tell at least 80% of the story in, make it as accessible and clearly marked as such as physically possible, and then make the story that plays out beyond that scope interesting but non-essential. You know, LIKE HALO DID UNDER BUNGIE.

Destiny is not the only game I play. I cannot keep up with this breakneck canon in its current state, and that makes me want to play the game LESS because continuity lockout is indeed a thing. 90% of the time I take part in a Destiny discussion, I feel like people are talking about a collection of different games because NONE OF THAT happened in my playthrough nor do I have the slightest idea what they did to get to it.

Destiny's storytelling is incoherent and the idea of conveyance (that sense a player has for organically figuring out where to go and what do do next) has never once been mentioned to the Dev team, which is shocking because again, THIS IS THE STUDIO THAT MADE HALO, which ROCKED at those things, and ODST probably shows these qualities at their strongest.

I have such a hard time rectifying in my head that the team that made ODST, which did conveyance better than any other game I can think of, and mainline Halo, which were a masterclass in feeding every single player a common baseline of important plot and keeping the interesting-but-non-essential stuff confined to books and comics, is also responsible for Destiny, which has the storytelling coherence and prioritizing of an ADHD toddler on a sugar high.

This on top of bugs and crashes galore on PC really makes me not want to play it much.

Figure out your storytelling, Bungie. Please.

#destiny 2 #destiny the game #destiny #conveyance #halo #odst #storytelling #narrative

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beardycarrot · 4 years ago

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Alright! Now that I’ve finished Aliens Ate My Homework (kids’ books really are just a couple hour read for an adult, huh?), I have in mind some things that I think are important for the movie adaptation to stick to.

The look of the characters should be the easiest thing to nail... their outfits probably won’t match what’s described in the book (movies always feel the need to change that in some capacity), but I don’t really care about that. What I’m more interested in is how they portray the less humanoid characters. Pong, Grakker, and Snout can all be played by actors in costumes, but Tar Gibbons is described as having a lemon-shaped body with four legs, a long neck, and a turtle-like head with bulging bug eyes; that’s gonna be a fully CG character.

The other is Phil, a potted plant. Basically a big stalk covered in leaves and vines, with a flower where a head would be, who moves around with thrusters on his pot. He has a symbiotic relationship with creature called Plink, described as kind of a blue cat-monkey. I really like how this illustration portrays it; even if it looks more like some kind of cartoonie bug, I would be perfectly happy if this is the design the movie goes for. These two are also going to be fully CG, so unless they base it entirely on the description provided for Plink, base its design on an illustration from another artist, or just do their own thing with it, I can’t imagine them finding a way to mess these designs up... but who knows.

BKR, the evil alien, should be interesting. He’s described as having blue skin, pale orange spikes covering his head (I was picturing maybe a dozen four-inch-long spikes, but the spike density could also be interpreted as covering his head like hair), and... otherwise, looking like Shirley Temple? That’s gonna be interesting, but this is also the character I expect them to take the most liberties with. I can’t say why... maybe just from experience with this kind of adaptation.

There are a few major plot points that I think they have to adhere to. First, that the good aliens’ ship is malfunctioning (the illustrations portray the ship as a traditional flying saucer, but I don’t think the design matters much) and they’re stuck shrunken to two inches tall until the end. That’s... basically the only reason for Rod, the protagonist, to be involved. The aliens need to repair their ship, so Rod has to carry them around to investigate BKR.

Secondly, they need to eat his homework. It doesn’t have to be the papier mache volcano and math assignment portrayed in the book, but, I mean, it IS the title of the movie.

Grakker and Snout have an unspecified relationship... Snout is very, VERY clearly based on Spock from Star Trek (in fact, I think the third book in this series is called The Search for Snout, a play on the third Star Trek movie, The Search for Spock), so it might just be a close friendship, but they share a room on the ship while everyone else has their own, so who knows. At one point it’s mentioned that they’re “bonded”. Potentially Gayliens. I don’t remember what their relationship is like in later books.

Next, Rod is incapable of lying. There definitely won’t be a flashback to the traumatizing-to-a-toddler reason for it, but that’s Rod’s defining characteristic: he doesn’t, and can’t, tell lies. Who knows whether that will be included.

Finally, Rod’s dad having been missing for quite a while isn’t a huge part of the story, but it does play an important role. Him lying to Rod’s mom strengthened Rod’s inability to lie (you’re not told what the lie was, but it’s implied that this was the night he left), and towards the end of the story BKR claims to know where he went, and implies that he’s no longer on Earth. I don’t remember if this is a plot point in future books, but Bruce Coville did something pretty similar in My Teacher Flunked The Planet, so it could be. This is the kind of thing that adaptations will just arbitrarily change, though, so who knows.

So! With all that out of the way, it’s time to watch the movie!

...Okay, first thing’s first, the opening credits of the movie are set to shots of a model solar system, so I’m assuming that’s the replacement for the volcano. I’ll allow it. Also, William Shatner is in this movie? What? As who?? The only adult male character in the story is an android of a man in his thirties, and he’s only there for what would amount to two minutes of screen time at the end. Rod’s grandfather is mentioned, but only once, in the context of “this is my grandfather’s farmland”.

Alright, definitely a modern setting. I guess the model isn’t for a science fair, instead being something Rod’s filming on his smartphone with his mom, twin siblings, and... his dad. Now, this looked like is was going to be an adaptation fail, but it turns out this was a flashback to the night he went missing. Clever!

Less clever is this abysmal color grading meant to represent a dark and stormy night, and the fact that they live in a cul-de-sac instead of being out in the middle of some farmland... but that’s not that significant of a change.

For some reason the story now takes place in the winter instead of mid-May, making me wonder where BKR (in the guise of Billy Becker) is getting the bugs to smash against Rod’s head. More importantly, as revealed at the end of the book, most intelligent life in the universe is about three feet tall, which is why BKR is pretending to be a kid while hiding on Earth. Instead of being a foot shorter than Rod, however, he’s now taller. Weird. Rod also now has his cousin Elspeth staying with his family for winter break, for... literally no reason that I can think of. Elspeth is a character from the second book in the series, but she wasn’t even mentioned in the first.

Grakker isn’t quite book-accurate, but not entirely inaccurate either... except for the color of his skin. He’s supposed to be green. What the hell. They whitewashed an alien. On the upside, the dialog in this scene is all pretty book-accurate. Unfortunately, they lose a lot of points with Madame Pong, who is supposed to be a very calm, understanding, zen character... but comes across as a little condescending. Also, this:

What? What?? Why did they keep this book dialog, when the house is VERY CLEARLY part of some kind of housing development area? I legitimately have no idea what they were thinking.

I also have no idea what’s going on here. Elspeth is... I guess looking through family photos on a computer? Ignore the subtitles, that’s from a weather report on tv. What I’m curious about is what exactly is going on in the photo. That’s clearly Rod’s dad, from three years ago... but recent pictures of the twins? Did Rod’s mom, who apparently runs a pet photography business, Photoshop a family ski trip that never happened? Is that what’s being implied here??

We’re then introduced to the rest of the aliens, and... wow, I can’t describe my disappointment. Remember how I said Tar Gibbons and Phil would be fully CG characters? Yeah, that, uhh... that didn’t happen. I was hoping they would do as much of this movie with practical effects as possible, but I meant that in the “get good SFX people” way, not the “do everything as cheaply as possible” way. They’re literally both just guys in suits.

Yeah sure eye stalks and a thick neck are absolutely the same thing as bulging eyes and a long neck. More importantly, look at that clearly human body with extra legs just kinda hanging off the hips. Phil is just as bad. You can’t really tell from still frames, but yeah, he has two vines with leaves coming off of his human-body-proportioned stalk at shoulder level and moves like a guy in a suit... and for some reason, his flower is split into halves so that it can be puppeteered to move like a mouth. Despite the fact that in the book his flower doesn’t even play a part in communication. They could’ve easily just installed a light inside the flower and explained that he communicates through pod burps, and would’ve been perfectly book-accurate. Why make this specific change. Also, if you’ve read this far, you’re probably wondering where Snout is. Yeah, uh. Me too.

Anyway, they appear to have combined the characters of BKR and Arnie into one person to simplify things (but then why introduce Elspeth??), and for no readily apparent reason, changed BKR, which is pronounced how you would expect, into B’KR, pronounced... b’car. For no reason.

Good GOD is this movie cheap. I appreciate the set they created for the top of Rod’s desk, with the giant pencil and such, and obviously they’re going to use a green screen for scenes like this... but it looks SO bad in motion. Like, see how the shot ends at his knees? That’s because he’s very obviously running in place, in front of a green screen. Also, why are sixth graders learning about the Drake Equation, which concerns the statistics relevant to intelligent alien life in the universe, in math class? I guess it’s technically a math topic, but not the kind of thing you’d learn in pre-algebra...and for comparison, Rod’s math homework consisted of single-digit multiplication tables, the kind of thing you do in like, second grade.

I’m also not fond of the degree to which Grakker is a comic relief character. Like... throughout the book, he’s completely strict and serious, and most of the comedy comes from Phil, Gibbons, and Rod. The first time you see genuine emotion from him is when Rod accidentally injures Snout, causing Grakker to hold him tenderly and shed a tear (again, potential Gayliens).

This is supposed to be the inside of a thick black canvas backpack. Am I crazy? Did I not see the Universal Studios logo at the start of this movie? Why does it look like the cheapest of cheap made-for-tv movies? Anyway. They appear to have given Snout’s ability to slow time to Madame Pong, which is worrying. Did they just... remove Snout, one of most important characters in the entire book series? To what end? To fit in all the stupid pointless Elspeth stuff? If they were hoping to make sequels to this movie, well... bad news, because again, the third book in the series is called The Search for Snout. Okay, I gotta know, is he actually cut from the movie or just a surprise reveal for later?

Alright, I am now officially dragging this movie. Also, I guess we now know where William Shatner fits in... I hadn’t even noticed it was him. Also Also, is that furry pink lump with one eye supposed to be Plink? Why all the arbitrary changes? Did they just decide that since they couldn’t fit a person inside of it, they would give it no limbs at all? Why is it pink??

Eyyy. Roll credits! Yeah, I wish... I’m only halfway through this thing.

They made Rod’s best friend Mickey Asian, which is fine, he’s a very minor character and never really described in the book... but unfortunately, they also decided to make him Data from The Goonies. He’s an inventor. Because he’s Asian. Coooool character, movie. So far it’s lead to an unfunny Coke and Mentos gag and an unfunny Pop Rocks and soda gag (which resulted in projectile vomiting). They cut Snout out of the movie to make room for this stuff, mind you. I’m sure this is building up to some kind of payoff, but I’m pretty sure I’m not going to enjoy it.

Speaking of payoffs, there seems to be an implication that there’s some kind of paranormal activity at Seldom Seen, the hidden field on Rod’s grandfather’s property, and at Rod’s school. I can understand the field, in this version Rod’s dad definitely seems to be involved with aliens in some capacity, and that’s probably where he was keeping a ship or something... but the school is kinda inexplicable. Like, it’s covered in snow... and it’s the only place in town that’s seeing snow. I can only assume it’s BKR’s... sorry, B’KR’s doing, but I’m not sure why. Did they decide that being blue means he’s from a cold planet, and requires it to be cold wherever he is?

No idea what’s up with some of these changes. Instead of BKR’s house being like an unlived-in model home, it’s... a complete sty. The exact opposite of the book. Why. Also, that coffee table is completely covered in video game consoles... GameCube, Dreamcast, PS2, N64... but Rod says he’s got “all the latest video games”. Does he? Does he really? Was that line in the script, so the crew just bought whatever they could find? As for BKR himself...

I mean, I don’t see Shirley Temple, but it’s not bad! Rod wasn’t trapped inside a pocket dimension inside a CRT tv when he took his mask off, but they wouldn’t have been able to manage that scene with this budget anyway. So far, this is the only alien design I fully endorse. There WAS a point to him having a cherubic face in the book, but it’s never addressed, only implied, and I get why they would make him look more menacing.

In the book, BKR didn’t really have any goals. He just enjoyed being cruel for the sake of being cruel, and was hiding out on Earth because it was unlikely they’d find him there. In the movie, B’KR intends to destroy Earth by opening a wormhole (which is what’s causing the snow), and the good guys have about an hour to save the planet.

They kept another of Snout’s abilities, the Vulcan Mind Mel-- er, knowledge transferal, but gave it to Tar Gibbons. This is literally the only thing he’s done in the entire movie. For the record, this was originally the scene where Snout connects their minds, but Rod is startled by it and pulls back, causing Snout severe psychic harm and prompting the aforementioned emotional response from Grakker.

...They just had to get William Shatner to say Klingon, didn’t they. The climax of the movie is all him flying around spouting (sprouting?) plant puns, then Rod throws a banana cream pie (which was, apparently, part of someone’s science project) at BKR’s face... and finishes him off with foam shot from his papier mache volcano. I guess the shrunken spaceship expanding inside of a house, causing the roof to collapse and knock BKR unconscious, was too expensive violent for the movie... but why is getting him messy a solution to anything? Ah well.

Bruce Coville himself has a cameo as the judge for the science fair, which is nice. I think he might be the principal of the school... I didn’t really notice in the scene featuring the principal earlier, since that happened to be the projectile vomiting scene. I can only imagine he was honored to have his work recognized in this capacity... he’s a good dude, I’m sure he wouldn’t be as horrified as I am with the writing and quality of it.

Also the movie ends with the reveal of the actual size of the aliens... which is, uhh. About the size of adult humans. Hrm. Guess they just straight up decided not to get anything right, huh? Oh, and they reveal that Rod’s father actually is a member of the Galactic Patrol. So, that’s a thing.

Please don’t say that. God, was this movie bad. I would understand if they were passionate about bringing the story to more people and just didn’t have much of a budget, or if they made changes to better suit a visual medium, but that... is not what they did. I’m not the kind of person that demands an adaptation remains 100% faithful; if you want the experience of the book, you can just read the book. This, however, changes so many things. Like, in the book, BKR’s crime is cruelty. That’s the message of the book... that in truly civilized societies, kindness is the norm, and needless cruelty is a criminal act.

The characters in the book all either have depth to them or are interesting as sci-fi concepts, but the movie... Gakker is Mr. Slapstick, Madame Pong is Cool Collected Female, Tar Gibbons is... I dunno, wisdom obscured by things that just don’t translate into English and saying Warrior Science a lot (honestly the closest to his book counterpart, though HE was more interesting and actually did stuff), and Phil... yeah, just William Shatner saying plant puns. Bleagh.

Well, despite that end screen, it’s good to know that we won’t be getting any sequels. I mean, like I’ve already mentioned, Snout going missing is a major plot point in the second book, and the third is literally called The Search For Snout. What are they going to do, just skip to the fourth book?

...Oh hey, George Takei.

#aliens ate my homework #bruce coville #long post

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uas-fics · 5 years ago

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Title: Lego Butterflies

Summary: Tweek is so excited to join a lego house contest with his friends Jimmy and Timmy. Nothing could ruin his day! Except maybe Nathan and his schemes of revenge against Jimmy!

Rating: G

Ships: Mentioned Creek.

Other: For @tweekweek, day 2 Talent. I have no idea if this Red Cross idea would even work but you know what, it's just a setting and conflict set up sooo..... *shrug*

Also, disclaimer, I didn't have time to do as much research as ASL as I should have, so the wording of Timmy's dialog isn't perfect, and I apologize. :(

Read on Ao3

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Tweek bounced in his seat, a goofy smile on his face. The weekend didn’t come fast enough. Since Wednesday, Tweek hopped into bed early in an attempt to force time to move its butt along so Saturday’s event could finally happen.

Jimmy sat to his left and Timmy to his right. They shared his excitement.

Jimmy was the one who brought Tweek the flyer, shoving it under his nose during recess.

"The South Park Red Cross's first annual building contest: An event for children thirteen and under to show off their building skills and have fun!" The flyer proclaimed in Comic Sans font. "Come by and bring your kids for a lego brick contest with plenty of wonderful prizes for the best entries. Lunch and dinner will be provided. starts at 10 am ends at 6 pm. 5 dollar entry fee with be required in advance. For more information call the South Park Red Cross office or email us at SPRedCross@zmail. net."

Jimmy explained that it was a creative competition where a group of up to three kids are given a lego kit and had the day to make the building, but with their own creative twist on it. The first prize winners received gift cards to the local Dairy Queen.

Tweek didn't care about the prize. He was just excited to build with his friends and have fun. He didn't even expect to win, but Jimmy proclaimed he knew they would since Tweek was so amazing at building with legos.

"You have one of your builds on display at the library!" Jimmy reminded. "The one that looks like a b-b-bo-boat? You're a natural. We'll win for sure."

His parents donated his boat to the library without his permission last summer. Though Tweek had planned to recycle the bricks into another project, he couldn’t help but feel pride every time he saw his name on that piece of card stock in the shiny display case.

Tweek looked around the Red Cross building at the other tables. He knew some of the other kids here, but most were younger than him and he couldn't put a name to a face. He knew two of the kindergarteners in the corner. Kyle Broflovski's little brother and the youngest member of the goth kids looked less than thrilled to be there as their parents chatted a few feet away.

Kenny and his little sister and older brother on the other side of the room, Karen speaking animatedly and Kenny nodding along while their brother had a chair pulled to the wall and dozed.

Some girls from his class chatted near the door. A few kids from the special education class that Tweek didn't know waved to Jimmy as they walked in.

"Oh my Gosh!" Jimmy beamed. "There sure is a really big crowd out tonight, huh?"

"Yeah, this might be a fun competition," Tweek agreed.

"Of course, it will be." Jimmy leaned over and picked up his bag from beside him. He unzipped it before taking out some peanut butter crackers and juice boxes. "My mom packed me these, but we're being fed lunch, so I thought we could have them as a pre-build s-s-snack."

Timmy nodded, reaching in front of Tweek for a pack of crackers. His fingers wrapped around a juice box, only for his nose to wrinkle up in disgust when he read the flavor. He tossed the juice box back before snatching up a different one.

Jimmy cocked his head to the side to read the flavor. He stuck his tongue out.

"I a-agree with you there, Tim Tim." Jimmy faked a gag. "Kiwi-Orange is the w-worst flavor. I keep asking mom not to buy this kind, but she a-al-always forgets."

Tweek's mom buys the same brand, and he knew its store-brand juice and the cheapest available at the local market, but he didn’t point that out. Instead, he took the Kiwi-Orange for himself, leaving Jimmy with Peach.

Of the Tropical Explosion flavors, Kiwi-Orange tasted best to him. It was tangy with just the right amount of kiwi. He didn't understand how anyone couldn't love it.

"Well, well, well," A snide voice intoned, "look what the cat dragged in."

Nathan marched up to their table with Mimsy right behind him like a giant shadow. Nathan set his palms on the tabletop and leaned forward a little too far into their space.

"Oh! Hello there, Nathan!" Jimmy chirped, completely unfazed by how close Nathan's tinted aviator glasses were to his face. "You too, M-Mimsy. Good morning!"

"Heya, fellas," Mimsy replied with a wave.

"So, what brings you two here? Jimmy? Timmy? Are you here for the contest?" Nathan nodded to the front of the room where the adults from the Red Cross were pulling out craft supplies from some boxes.

"We s-s-sure are." Jimmy wrapped his arm around Tweek. "Tim Tim, me, and Tweek here are all one group. Isn't that gr-great? Too bad we can't have a group of five, though. You and Mimsy would make great additions to our t-t-team."

Nathan scrunched up his nose like he just stepped on a wet turd with bare feet.

"Oh," he gave Tweek a hard look over the top of his glasses, "really?"

Out of the corner of his eye, Tweek watched Timmy grip his crackers so hard, they crumbled in the wrapper. He glared at Nathan as if daring him to say something.

If Nathan saw, he didn't respond. Instead, he shrugged and stepped away.

"Good luck, there, Jimmy, Timmy...Tweek."

Tweek shuddered at how Nathan said his name. It reminded him a little too much of a cartoon super-villain with a long mustache about to capture the hero with a complicated contraption.

Timmy must not have like how his name was said either since he flipped Nathan off behind his back. Jimmy, on the other hand, seemed unphased completely.

"Good luck to you, too! I know we'll all do f-f-f-fantastic!" Jimmy encouraged. Nathan scowled as he turned around and went to another table.

Mimsy almost followed him, when he paused, taking a look at the box of juice in Tweek's hand.

"Is that Kiwi-Orange? Oh, boy, it's my favorite flavor. Do they have some here?" Mimsy grinned.

"Really?" Timmy signed, sticking out his tongue.

Tweek smiled back at him. "It's my favorite, too. It's yummy."

Jimmy looked into his bag. "Ah, darn, sorry, Mimsy. Mom only packed enough for my team. Maybe I can bring you some at school on Monday."

Mimsy's face fell. For someone with a large and imposing a frame as Mimsy, when he got disappointed, he looked no more threatening than an upset puppy.

Tweek offered his unopened box. "Here, you can have mine. I brought my own drink." With his free hand, he lifted his ever-present thermos from between his feet, still warm with the mid-morning’s coffee.

Mimsy's eyes grew wide. His mouth went slack as he took the juice. "Really? You'd give me the best flavor? Just like that? No fight or nothin'?" Mimsy stared down at the juice box as if Tweek just handed him the Hope Diamond to keep.

"Uh-huh. I'm ok with it, if you don't mind, Jimmy." He turned a questioning look to him.

Jimmy shook his head. "No, it's fine. Our teachers always tell us sharing makes for the b-best friendships."

"Good, there you go, Mimsy. Good luck. I hope you have lots of fun today." Tweek smiled again.

He didn't know Mimsy well, other than he hung around with Nathan all the time, but he didn't have anything against him. Mimsy seemed like a nice kid. He didn’t give bad vibes, unlike Nathan.

Mimsy looked at the box, then at Tweek, and blushed. "Golly, that's swell of you. Thanks a lot, Tweek." He giggled as if Tweek just told him a silly riddle before making a beeline for Nathan.

After the three finished their juice--or coffee in Tweek's case--and crackers, Jimmy gathered up the trash and took it to the trash can before heading to use the restroom.

Once Jimmy was out of earshot, Tweek turned to Timmy with a frown.

"Are you alright? You seem...uh..." he gestured to the crumbs covering Timmy's shirt, "upset? Is this about Nathan?"

Timmy brushed the crumbs off with his face set in a scowl. He looked around before leaning in close.

"Do not trust Nathan," he whispered, keeping his hand movement small and close to his body.

"Why?" Tweek covered his mouth with the side of his hand. Nathan and Mimsy sat across the room, so they couldn't hear him but better safe than sorry.

"He is a dickhead." Timmy cringed. "Jimmy is too stupid to understand Nathan hates him."

"He hates him? Jimmy sure seems to think they’re friends." Tweek frowned.

"He is clueless!" Timmy rolled his eyes. "Nathan hates him. He tries to trick him all the time or get him in trouble."

At Tweek's raised eyebrow, Timmy went on to explain some of his experiences with Nathan that ranged from switching out Jimmy's pencils with colored ones for tests and tripping in him in the lunch line to dumping soda in his backpack and spreading rumors.

When Timmy started to explain something that happened during summer camp, he started moving his hands so fast in his anger that Tweek couldn't understand him.

"Alright, alright, I get it! Nathan is a huge dick." Tweek grabbed Timmy's wrists when he was in the middle of signing what Tweek thought was 'Space-Racist.'

Timmy pulled his hands to his lap. "Be careful today," he warned, leaning over to shoot Nathan a glare.

Tweek peeked over his shoulder. Nathan had his head turned, so he didn't see Timmy's glower. Instead, his gaze was fixed on Jimmy, who was speaking with some girls at a nearby table. His hands balled into shaking fists.

Tweek snapped his head forward. His stomach twisted into knots. Timmy was right. They had to be super careful today.

---

Jimmy, that asshole, flirting with those girls right in front of him! He was just doing it to rub it in his face that, for some reason completely unknown to Nathan, the girls seemed to like him.

He didn't understand what anyone saw in Jimmy. Nathan was much more handsome and charismatic than Jimmy could ever be!

But the girls tittered and fawned over him like he was the best thing since sliced bread!

Nathan gripped his hands into fists.

"Mimsy, we're going to win those gift cards," He growled. "Even if I have to smash their entry myself."

Mimsy looked up from the empty juice box in his hands. He had been staring at it like a dolt since he finished sucking it dry. What was the big deal? It was just a juice box. It wasn't even a good flavor. Only some weirdo like Mimsy would like Kiwi-Orange.

"Ah, I dunno, Boss," Mimsy fingered the box, "maybe we should just try our best to win on our own. We don't gotta cheat."

"Don't you see, Mimsy? Jimmy is cheating! Us cheating would even the odds." Nathan waved his hand towards them. "He brought that Tweek kid with them to help."

"What's wrong with Tweek?" Mimsy's voice pitched up when he said Tweek's name. A small blush grew across his cheeks, eyes drifting down to the juice box.

Nathan pinched the bridge of his nose. "He's an expert with legos, Mimsy! He has something he made shown off at the library! How is that fair to the rest of us?"

Mimsy craned his head around the room a moment. "Well, why don't we ask Colette." He pointed towards her. "She has a lego project displayed at the library too, and it looks like she's all by herself. We can ask her to join us!"

Nathan winced. "Hell no. She's ugly. I don't want an ugly girl on my team." He was trying to win the gift cards so he could get pretty girls. Girls love free chocolate-dipped cones. He would have a whole bunch of girls clambering for his attention when he won those gift cards. Then Jimmy would cry like a baby now that the girls saw who the real man around was.

Mimsy cocked his head to the side. "Well, Boss, maybe you should put your misogyny and bias against women aside this one time and work towards your goal so we can win honestly and you can take real pride in your win."

Nathan stared dumbfounded at Mimsy. Where did Mimsy get these ideas? Probably some dumb cartoon or something.

"Mimsy, shut up."

Mimsy turned his attention back to his juice box with a shrug. "Ok, boss."

---

The rules for the competition where simple: build the lego house from a kit and decorate it with the supplies from the craft table.

The house kit was a simple model, only twenty bricks high with four window pieces and a door piece and a premade slanted roof.

Even if Tweek hadn’t built it before, it was an easy task. He took up the job of putting it together while Jimmy and Timmy gathered supplies and refined the plan.

They had decided to turn their project into a gingerbread house with lollipop trees and candy stuck to the roof. They would use paint to add icing accents and cotton balls as cotton candy lining the outside like bushes.

As Timmy wrapped cellophane plastic around foam balls to make hard candy and Jimmy used a marker to color the cotton, Tweek stood to stretch.

"I'm going to the restroom. Be right back."

Timmy grabbed his sleeve, holding up a sheet of cellophane.

"Get blue," He told him before lowering his head back to his work.

Once Tweek finished his business, he stood over the craft table shifting through the mess of stickers and papers for a blue sheet of cellophane. Most of the stickers had a faint yellow tinge to them and several of the sets of markers were missing colors. If Tweek had to guess, he would say a lot of the supplies were donated from a granny’s leftover scrapbooking supplies.

Tweek glanced over his shoulder at a nearby team’s house kit box. Given how yellowed it was, maybe more than just the stickers came from someone’s backroom.

He set some brown felt aside before a flash of shiny, translucent blue caught his eye.

With a noise of satisfaction, he reached for it, only for another hand to grab it at the same time.

Tweek looked up and met eyes with Nathan himself.

"I saw it first," Nathan snapped, snatching the cellophane.

"We need it for ours," Tweek countered.

All of Timmy's stories played through his head. He needed to be very careful with what he said. Jimmy might be optimistically oblivious enough to overlook Nathan's malice acts, but Tweek sure as heck wasn't.

Nathan attempted to reply, but Mimsy stepped behind him and cut him off.

"Heya, Tweek!" He swung his hands side to side. "Gosh, isn't this fun? We's nearly finished half our house. It's going to be a summer house with a pool and palm trees and--"

Nathan shoved a sheet of craft felt into his mouth.

"Shut up, Mimsy! Don't tell our enemies the plan." He glared over the top of his glasses at Tweek. "He might steal our ideas."

"We don't need your ideas." Tweek reached across the table for the corner of the felt in Mimsy's mouth. He pulled it out then pushed it into Nathan's hands, making sure that the part covered in spit touched his skin.

Nathan dropped everything in his arms back on the table with a yelp. As he wiped his hand on his pants, Tweek snatched the blue cellophane. Before Nathan could make a bigger scene, Tweek took a pair of craft scissors and made a wavy line down the middle of the sheet.

"Here. Problem solved," Tweek set half on the slobbery felt.

A snarl ripped from Nathan’s throat as his upper lip rose. Tweek froze like a rabbit staring down a pet dog.

Oh, shoot! He had let himself get overconfident! Nathan was going to kill him, right there in the Red Cross building, in front of everyone!

Mimsy put his big hands on Nathan's shoulders and turned him.

"That'll be enough blue, dontcha think, boss? I think so. We just needed a little. Ain't it real diplomatic to share like that?" Mimsy jabbered on as he forced Nathan towards their table.

Tweek's body relaxed. Mimsy glanced over his shoulder at him.

"Thank you," he mouthed at him. Mimsy turned forward instantly, the tips of his ears burning pink.

---

Nathan crumbled the blue cellophane and threw it on the table. He was upset, but Mimsy didn't know why. They got more than enough for their pool.

Maybe if his head wasn't so light and spinny, he could figure it out, but right now he felt as though his feet weren't even touching the ground.

Tweek was so nice. He gave him his juice box. He shared the cellophane. He even said thank you for taking Nathan away to cool off.

Tweek was wonderful.

"--msy?"

Mimsy blinked.

"Huh? Oh, yeah, what were ya sayin', Boss?"

Nathan pinched the bridge of his nose, pushing up his glasses.

"I said we have to get those punk-ass jerks Jimmy, Timmy, and Tweek. We can't let them win!" Nathan picked up a pair of scissors and cut the crinkled cellophane to shape.

Mimsy twiddled his thumbs, taking a seat. "Do we have to? I don't think Tweek deserves us destroying his hard work."

Nathan paused and looked up. He fixed Mimsy with a look before he scowled.

"Mimsy, what do you care about that blond twitchy kid?" Nathan asked in a slow, careful tone.

Mimsy picked up a button he had painted to look like a life-ring and twisted it between his fingers. "Oh, well, ah...Tweek just..." He felt a silly smile grow on his face and couldn't make himself look up at his best friend as he continued, "He gives me butterflies, ya know, boss? In my tummy, and I just don't wanna cause him no trouble."

He didn't really want to cause Jimmy or Timmy trouble either, but Nathan had his heart set on being better than them, so Mimsy tagged along and helped him out however he could.

"Oh, for the love of..." Nathan dragged his hands down his face. "You know Tweek has a boyfriend, don't you? Shit those butterflies out already. You don't have a chance."

"I don't wanna chance." Mimsy picked up a lego brick and attached it to another brick. "Just knowing Tweek’s happy makes me happy. I wanna be his friend."

Be his friend, sit together at lunch, even, hold his hand at recess a little, that's all Mimsy wanted. He just really, really wanted that wonderful person to like him and he didn't think ruining his project would make that dream come true.

"Mimsy, you have the brain of a chicken." Nathan shook his head.

"Ah, geez, thanks, boss." Mimsy smiled at him. Chickens are really smart. Their class watched a show on them once. Chickens can count and do basic math! Nathan was such a swell guy for using inside information to compliment him.

Nathan opened his mouth then shut it with a groan. "Just finish building the house and stop pining over Tweek. I'll come up with a plan in the meantime."

Though his stomach twisted with worry, Mimsy nodded. Nathan wouldn't steer him wrong, would he?

---

Lunch was sandwiches, a snack pack of chips, an apple or orange, and a drink. The adults ushered everyone out to another room to eat, so Tweek's group stood with Kenny and his siblings as they ate.

In the ten minutes since Karen started talking to Tweek, he was pretty sure he counted her take a breathless than fifteen times.

"Since it's a kitten's house," Karen explained, "it'll have a pen outside for mice she can eat anytime she wants and--"

"Karen," Kenny cut in, "looks like they're letting people have seconds. Go get some. Get me another too."

Karen looked at her half-eaten sandwich then back up. Kenny shooed her with his fingers and a nod.

"Mom let us come for the free food, sis," Kenny reminded her, taking a big bite of his sandwich. "We'll put the extras in Kevin's bag."

"But, I was telling Tweek about our project." Karen sighed, but pushed her chair out anyway and headed back towards the serving table.

Jimmy laughed, slapping Tweek's shoulder. "Wow, I thought she would t-talk your ear off."

Tweek blew a breath out. "Thanks, dude.” He told Kenny. “She's really excited, huh?"

He raised a shoulder in a half shrug. "It gets her out of the house to play with glitter glue and stickers. Of course, she's excited. I don't think we'll win, but she's having fun, so it's ok by me if we lose."

From across the table, Kevin snorted. "We'd better win. Girls love being treated to a dipped cone," he muttered, more to himself than the conversation between the fourth graders.

Kenny rolled his eyes as Karen came trotting back up. Chips and fruit ladened down her arms. Several sets of eyes from the nearby tables turned towards theirs when she dropped everything down with the thump of hard apples and oranges and the crinkles of plastic chip bags.

Karen beamed proudly at her plunder. "That nice old lady gave it to me when I told her my last name." She waved towards an elderly woman sitting behind the table. See Karen acknowledge her, the woman waved back before returning to her conversation.

Kenny's cheeks blushed red. He averted his eyes and pulled his hood strings a little. Even Kevin slumped down a little farther in his chair.

As is his nature, Jimmy quickly changed the subject before the heavy silence grew too awkward.

"So, w-what else is everyone doing for their e-en-entries? Do you know? Colette is sitting next to us and is making a fairy castle. It's r-r-r-really neat!" Jimmy waved his hands out, drawing the attention to himself and shielding the McCormicks while Kevin unzipped his backpack.

"Yeah, um, oh!" Tweek moved his arms out as well, though not as wide. "Mimsy told me he and Nathan were making a summer house. Isn't that cool? Errr--It has a pool even."

"A pool?!" Karen gasped. She grabbed Kenny's arm and shook him. "Can ours have a pool? I know cats hate water, but I don't think this kitten would. It can be a special cat pool!"

"Huh? Yeah, sure, we can put fish stickers inside," Kenny replied without looking up from his and Kevin's work.

"I want the pool to have pink water," Karen continued, wrapping her arm around his. "It's fancy rose water. We have some extra paper flowers we can put around it, and we can even make an innertube floatie!"

"I bet you can make the best p-pool ever," Jimmy told her, finally lowering his arms to the table. "I think we have some extra pink plastic wrap you can use. If you make a paper c-c-cir-circle you can cover it for your pool."

Karen released Kenny's arm and darted around the table to squeeze in between Tweek and Jimmy, bombarding Jimmy with questions for more ideas. Feeling claustrophobic, Tweek slipped out of his seat. The instant he did, Karen plopped down.

Kenny set a hand on Tweek's arm. "Thanks. I owe you one,” he whispered, his cheeks still tinged with the red of embarrassment.

Before Tweek could reply, another hand grabbed his arm and pulled. He spun around to see Timmy staring at him with a determined expression. He tugged Tweek away to talk privately in the corner.

"I saw Nathan and Mimsy." He nodded towards the door to the other room. "They snuck back in."

"What?" Tweek squawked. He craned his head around to make sure no one heard him. "What?" He repeated, much quieter. "When? Should we tell an adult?"

Timmy shrugged. "I don't know. Maybe? Or..." He flashed a wicked smile, "we catch them."

"You want to sneak in there? How? You're not exactly..." He gestured to Timmy's wheelchair.

Timmy frowned. "I am sneaky."

"You are, but, eeer," Tweek chewed his lower lip. "There are too many people. We have to open the door completely to get you inside and..."

"You go!" Timmy rolled closer, pointing at Tweek’s chest. "You go in after Nathan."

"Why me? We should tell an adult." Tweek took a step away, but Timmy rolled his chair in front of him, blocking his path.

"You go. In ten minutes, I will tell someone." He promised, crossing his heart with his finger.

Timmy had that determined look on his face. It was the same face he had when he argued with Cartman about changing his superhero from Iron Maiden to Doctor Timothy. Unless Tweek wanted to make a powerful enemy of Timmy, he had no choice.

"Alright, fine..." Tweek heaved a sigh. "We still need a distraction though."

Timmy smirked, wheeling himself back. "That is my job."

Before Tweek could stop him, he spun his chair around and surged it forward. In the middle of the room, he slammed the brakes to a stop and fell out onto the ground. He threw his arm up dramatically with an anguished cry that reminded Tweek a little too much of a soap opera character.

It took seconds for all the adults to gather upon Timmy.

Tweek seized his moment and dashed towards the door. He slipped in and turned his eyes to a horrendous scene.

Drops of red, yellow, and blue paint rolled down half-finished walls and stained cuts of cardboard paper. Stickers had been ripped from the lego bricks on some and whole parts of the buildings taken away on others. Swear words were written along roofs in white glue. Glitter covered every surface.

And the end of the line of crafting carnage stood none other than Nathan himself, gluing marker caps to lego bricks with glitter glue.

"Hand me the buttons," Nathan held out his hand behind him without looking up. "We're going to put a big penis on this house. We'll use those stupid colored bushes as hair on the--"

"STOP!" Tweek shouted, rushing forward. He knew it was too late to save his or any of the other projects, but he had to try to save what was left!

With a rush of adrenaline, he dove at Nathan. Marker caps and buttons clattered across laminate as Nathan gasped and struggled under Tweek.

Nathan smacked Tweek across the face with the back of his hand, but Tweek was able to pin one of Nathan's hands down by the wrist.

With a sneer, Nathan aimed the bottle of glue in his free hand at Tweek's face and squeezed. A line of liquid glue hit him right above the right eye.

Tweek recoiled back, desperately trying to wipe the glue away with his sleeve. Nathan shoved him off. He rolled back, knocking into another table.

The folding table's leg gave way, dumping all the projects on it. Legos, stickers, paper, paintbrushes and shallow dishes of water all dropped to the floor. One of the houses hit Tweek on the top of the head. Stars swam across his vision.

"NO!" Nathan screamed. "My project!"

Tweek looked to his side and saw the remains of a lego house with a styrofoam sun glued to the top. The house crushed a paper water bowl with blue cellophane inside and several palm trees made of construction paper.

"Why you!" Nathan snarled. "Mimsy, grab him! I'm going to put a bottle of glitter glue down his throat!"

Tweek tried to scramble to his feet, only to slip on the loose pieces. Mimsy loomed over him.

There was no way out now. He was blocked by Nathan to his left, the other table to his front, the fallen table to his back and Mimsy to his right.

Tweek didn't think he would die today, but here he was about to meet the reaper.

All in all, he had a good day up until all this started with Nathan. He and his friends had lots of fun building the lego house and adding the decorations.

Too bad he couldn't say goodbye to everyone. Where were his parents supposed to find a new busboy on such short notice? Craig would be annoyed, too. They had a date planned for next week.

Accepting his demise, Tweek clenched his eyes shut and waited...and waited...and waited, but nothing came.

He opened his eyes to see Mimsy staring at him, face red and conflicted.

"Mimsy! Do as I say!" Nathan ordered.

"But, Boss! The butterflies," He whimpered as he grabbed at his shirt. "Can't we just go? Please?"

Nathan let out a cry of frustration. He set one foot on either side of Tweek before grabbing his chin. He held the glue up threateningly.

"If you're going to be useless, I'll do it myself," Nathan muttered.

He squeezed Tweek's cheeks into a fish pucker, forcing them apart. Tweek gritted his teeth.

A pair of hands fell on Nathan's shoulders. He blinked and looked up just in time for him to be thrown back into the opposite table. That one fell backwards with a crash, destroying all the defiled projects atop it.

Mimsy's lip quivered. "I asked ya to stop, Boss. I even said ‘please’..."

As Mimsy wiped away tears on his arm, the door opened.

"What is going on in here — Oh my Gosh!" One of the adults gaped at the scene.

Nathan scrambled to his feet, jabbing a finger at Tweek.

"He tried to come and break everyone's projects," He accused. "We came here to stop him from ruining everyone's fun. Tweek is a big cheater!"

"That's not--argh! That's not what happened!" Tweek countered though he didn't try to stand. His head hurt too much. Hopefully, his mom remembered to put the ice pack back in the freezer since Tweek smashed his elbow at the shop. Tweek was going to need it for the lump growing on the top of his head.

Slowly, adults and kids trickled in, looking on the destruction. Some of the younger kids started crying. A few of the adults already had phones out, preparing to call parents.

"Yes, it is, ma'am," Nathan said in his most sympathetic voice. "Tweek came in and was doing awfully naughty things to other people's projects. When Mimsy and I came in, he pushed me down.”

"No, he pushed me," Tweek snapped. "Please, Timmy! Timmy saw these two come in here, didn't you? Tell them!"

The adults turned to Timmy, who nodded once, glaring at Nathan.

"See!" Tweek gestured.

The adults still didn't look convinced. One walked right past Tweek to Nathan, putting a hand on his shoulder.

"Are you hurt, sweetie?" She asked.

"A little bit, ma'am," he whimpered. “I have a scrape on my elbow. I might need stitches.”

"I'm telling the truth!" Tweek tried to stand, but the world spun too much for him to stay up.

Mimsy chewed his lip. His hands rubbed his stomach before he took a long, slow breath.

"Missum?" Mimsy tugged on the back of her shirt. "Nathan's lying. You see, we was gonna come in and ruin half of everyone's projects, so no one could tell we really were trying to ruin Tweek's teams, but Tweek came in, and Nathan pushed him and tried to put glue in his mouth. I’m the one who pushed Nathan."

Nathan growled. "Mimsy, you fucking traitor," He snapped. "See if I let you sit next to me at lunch now."

"Young man!" the adult gasped. "What did you just say?"

Nathan winced as he realized his mistake. She grabbed his shoulders and marched him towards the door. Mimsy twiddled his thumbs, uncertainly, before the adult yelled at him to follow her as well.

"Mimsy?" Tweek called. "That was really cool and brave of you. Thanks a lot."

Never before had Tweek seen a face light up as fast as Mimsy’s did at that moment. He giggled to himself before following after Nathan, almost skipping the whole way there.

---

Tweek slumped down against the table. His head still hurt, but at least the room stayed still when he moved. Timmy patted his shoulder as Jimmy sat down across from them.

"Nathan's parents just came to drove him and M-M-M-Mimsy home. They're in big trouble for this. They have to p-pay for the house kits they broke and aren't allowed at any R-R-Red Cross events for a whole six months." Jimmy cocked his head to the side. "I just don't get it. Why would Nathan do something so mean and nasty?"

Timmy slapped his palm to his forehead and dragged his hand down his face.

"He is a dick bag," Timmy reminded him. "Remember camp?"

"Those were all just unfortunate accidents," Jimmy countered. Timmy rolled his eyes and let the topic drop.

"And, anyway, Tweek. How are you f-feeling?"

Tweek shook held his head. "I'll be ok. I'm just glad I'm not in trouble, too. It's too bad we couldn't win the prize, though. Did you hear what happened to the gift cards?"

Jimmy nodded. "Yeah, they decided to judge the ones left standing and pick a winner from those, but open the contest again in a month for everyone else who got their projects wrecked."

"Who won?" Timmy asked.

A smile spread on Jimmy's face. "Kenny and his brother and s-s-sis-sister," he explained. "I saw their finished Kitten Dream House, and it was c-cool and creative! Better than our silly g-g-gingerbread idea by a long shot."

"Will you join us for the next contest?" Timmy wanted to know from Tweek.

Tweek winced. "No, thank you. I'll play by myself at home where no one is going to try to make me eat glue."

"Ah, that's a s-stinky spirit to have," Jimmy chided.

After all that had happened today, Tweek didn't care one bit how his spirit smelled.

If even a fraction of what Timmy said was true, then he had to be very careful until Nathan's anger cooled--or turned back towards Jimmy. Who knows how long that will take!

But if Nathan was upset with Tweek, he was positively pissed at Mimsy for betraying him.

Tweek pursed his lips then nodded to himself.

Monday at school he would ask Mimsy if he wanted to join his table for lunch. It was the least he could do. Besides, as far as Tweek was concerned, Mimsy deserved a much better friend than Nathan, and he was willing to step up and be that friend.

---

AN: Shout out to my friend @najti-nightmare for help with the fic and title!

#tweek week #tweek tweak #jimmy valmer #timmy burch #nathan south park #mimsy south park #oneshot #comedy

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ja-khajay · 5 years ago

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Wanted to post this before but I forgot ^^’ so here we go! I read all of Dorohedoro, here are my thoughts on the series :) (spoilerless for those who want to read it later!)

Spoilers : I loved it a lot. Stellar character writing and worldbuilding with a unique graphic style, strongly recommend it to anyone who can stomach how graphic it gets (which is a LOT). If you’re like me and dissapointed by the lack of originality in post apocalyptic and/or fantasy settings, it’s a blessing

artwise : technically speaking it’s not the most advanced shit you’re gonna get but it’s got a very distinctive style. I rarely see manga who stand out that much graphically and it was a pleasure. I know the author’s anatomy gets criticized but it wasn’t much of an issue for me - lots of her characters have the same body types but thats extremely common in manga/comics in general and it’s sweet to have the default body type be “brickhouse” instead of some variant of muscle twink

the backgrounds are amazing, the sketchy grit works wonders with her urban cluttered designs

characters design are great too : iconic, diverse and practical, even if there’s a big sameface syndrome to lament. I’m usually not a fan of such cluttered designs but here they work in the setting and in logical terms too. just a look at the devils or at the mage’s masks would showcase how creative the author gets

the action scenes : loved the how absurdly graphic they get, very disturbing but in style! however i found most of the fights to not be boarded very well, resulting in a confusing mess. couldn’t see what was happening, who was hitting who until the very end so i skimmed through most of them. shame, the ones i do remember are very fun

similarly the story/dialog gets SUPER CONFUSING at times. i managed to understand all of it at once by some miracle but i know a lot of people for whom it took several reads to understand it all. since it includes time travel and identity as major themes thats surprising but still. damn bro

it was written by a woman and like most manga written by women you can feel the difference and it’s a breath of fresh air. expect way less nasty tropes than what you normally see, even if it’s not perfect either. I especially disliked the writing of Ebisu as a character ): and if Chota is a character I like he’s not great either

what stood out most to me were the characters. i’ve rarely seen such weird, well written characters and especially their interactions!!! it feels organic and extremely wholesome (funny given how it’s also famous for being extremely violent but i mean it). i love seeing relationships depicted so well - you see characters living alongside each other, being friends or enemies, spending time together before they go fight and each moment reinforces their personality. the bonus chapters are a lovely addition in that regard, since they focus even more on showing characters living their life outside of the main story. given how wild and fun their personalities get, it’s really sweet! you don’t normally see this sort of stuff outside of fanfiction

related to what i just said but i usually cannot stand romance in media because i am an anti-corny person and find most love tropes unrealistic : here the few instances of romantic love you have are very well written. my favorite being “married couple of 25 years and how their love evolved during that time but stayed there” godspeed

the worldbuilding!!! it’s original, it’s fun, its well done. nothing felt weird or out of place and its frequent reimaginings of classic elements are fun as hell. having the worlds meta lore and divinities being regular characters mentioning how they created the universe as a casual thing was also a treat

this is a personal thing, but i usually end up disliking the near-end of manga where everything escalated right before being epically resolved, but it wasn’t the case here. if i still liked the beginning better, as i do for most media, the ending doesn’t seem to break the pace much. if the story does get very confusing at parts, it doesn’t abruptly clear itself and has more of a bell curve of adding elements that are later solved one after the other. and surprisingly, the “final epic battle” was fun as hell, i usually hate those a lot lol

TLDR : skyrocketed among my favorite series, hyped for the anime, wish more series made girls this buff for no reason, wish more series showed characters having a good time with the lads, wish more series got as weird on the art style, prof haze was my favorite character

#j #dorohedoro quick review : dont read if youre hungry but dont read if youre eating either #damn does the author know how to convey love for food and describe good meals in intense detail #but also damn does she love drawing people chopped up in various ways

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tacitcantos · 6 years ago

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The Biggest Difference Between The Wolf Among Us and Fable Comic

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More than just seeing how clever the writer can be in fitting the jigsaw pieces of fairy tale and modern day together, The Wolf Among Us is interested in the deeper thematic resonance to be mined in looking at the consequences of the original fairy tales: in what happens when you strip fairytales of their gravitas, in the complexities and nuances of how the Big Bad Wolf would deal with his past in the modern day.

The Wolf Among Us is a prequel videogame to the long running Fables comic series. The premise of both is simple: all of the fables of brother’s Grimm fame are refugees in our world after having to flee their own, and now live in hiding in an enclave in New York called Fabletown. The main character of both comic and game is Bigby Wolf, the big bad wolf of legend now reformed as the sheriff of Fabletown.

The Wolf Among Us has a dynamic storyline that shifts and reacts to the dialog choices you make for Bigby, and the game is easily one of the smartest takes on fairy tales you’ll find in any medium. One of the themes inherent in any modern day take on fairy tales is postmodernism, the fun in the premise seeing how fairytale characters slot into a modern world, of juxtaposing the mythos of the original stories with the mundane of everyday life. The Fables aren’t mythical characters anymore, no longer princes and damsels and monsters, they’re all just people now trying to get by.

But more than just seeing how clever the writer can be in fitting the jigsaw pieces of fairy tale modern day together, The Wolf Among Us is interested in the deeper thematic resonance to be mined in looking at the consequences of the original fairy tales: in what happens when you strip fairytales of their gravitas, in the complexities and nuances of how the Big Bad Wolf would deal with his past in the modern day.

Though the comic series was started back in 2002, twelve years before The Wolf Among Us was released, my introduction to the Fables universe came first through the game, and after finishing it I went on to read the comics… and was almost immediately disappointed.

The thing is, while The Wolf Among Us is a nuanced and complicated take on fairy tales, the Fables comics... aren’t. They’re not badly written, but they’re only interested in that fun surface level of draping fairy tales over the modern day without any real engagement with how that changes or complicates them. Every way The Wolf Among Us engages with the specifics of the original fairy tales, the comics don’t.

Now, the comic series does actually at first do some smart things: so Fabletown isn’t ripped apart from internal conflict all inhabitants are granted blanket immunity for past crimes in their old world. To protect from the outside mundane world they’re also forbidden from revealing their magical identities. While for the human fables this is easy enough, for inhuman fables like trolls or talking frogs it requires purchasing expensive spells, called glamours, to disguise themselves, or risk being shipped off to a farm outside the city.

These are a great example of taking advantage of the Fabletown premise: they’re logical extrapolations, and they set the stage for interesting conflicts. Both comic and game explore those conflicts, but do so in fundamentally different ways.

A few issues into the comics those inhuman fables on the farm rebel and try to take the reins of power for themselves. This is actually one of the few places the comics really engage with the original fairy tales and make full creative use of them: there’s an especially funny reference to Goldilocks having gone native with the three bears from her story and now works as a terrorist and freedom fighter for inhuman fables, but there’s very little long term value to the storyline. The rebellion is put down after a few chapters, but there’s no change to the Fabletown status quo, no growth for any of the characters involved, no examination or deconstruction of the themes of the story or original fairy tales.

Instead of being a fun little side story, the tension between human and non-human fables makes up the core of The Wolf Among Us. A deep trench of bitterness separates the have’s from the have-nots, with inhuman fables ignored by the Fabletown government and treated like second class citizens.

It’s actually remarkably similar to real life ethnic enclaves at the turn of the century. In trying to solve the first murder of a fable in years, Bigby has to navigate a Fabletown where Beauty and Beast, like a lot of refugees, were wealthy in their home country but now find themselves resorting to less than savory ways to pay for a lifestyle they can no longer afford; where racial resentment between those who can pass as the native population and those who can’t is high; where the weak institutions of the fabletown government have allowed an organized crime element to rise to power and take advantage of the vacuum in fabletown just as the mafia did in Italian ethnic enclaves in New York.

Bigby himself operates in a really interesting liminal space between the two classes of fables: viewed as a traitor and Uncle Tom by one side while also never fully accepted by the other. Despite the clemency granted to all fables for their crimes in the old world, no one’s forgotten just how many people Bigby ate in the homelands.

This is an aspect of Bigby that isn’t explored in the comics, and his reasons for taking on the office of sheriff aren’t either. It’s suggested at one point that he came to Fabletown and reformed from his old ways because of his interest in Snow White. And it’s not a bad motivation per se, it’s just that it isn’t explored more than that. There’s no character growth, no struggle in trying to refrain from violence despite his enjoyment and affinity for it, no conflict between his old ways and the new person he’s trying to be, no emotional toll in the suspicion the other fables view him with, no personal cost in what he’s doing.

The best example of this is the introduction of Red Riding Hood a dozen issues or so into the comics. With the Big Bad Wolf as a main character you might think one of his former victims showing up to be a complicated and thorny issue… but you’d be wrong.

There’s a single page where Red Riding Hood is upset by Bigby being the sheriff and forgiven for his crimes in the old world, but it’s quickly discovered that she’s not actually Red Riding Hood, and instead an evil witch in disguise. Narratively, her appearance is simply a ploy by the villains that once discovered isn’t commented on again. There’s no emotional or thematic conflict in it, no examination of the complicated relationship between former abuser and victim, of how to reconcile past wrongs, of the bitterness Red Riding Hood should feel over how the other fables have accepted the monster that once terrorized them all. The real Red Riding Hood does eventually show up later, but she has even less to do with Bigby than the fake one.

While Red Riding Hood doesn’t appear in The Wolf Among Us, the game does confront Bigby with an element from his original fairytale: the Woodsman.

And his relationship with Bigby is nuanced. Instead of the hero of the story as he was in the Homelands, in Fabletown he’s a drunk and abuser of women, and resents Bigby: he’s the hero of the story, not Bigby, so why is he a suspect in a murder case? Doesn’t anyone remember what Bigby is? What he’s done? These are interesting questions that spring from the original fairytale, and ones that go unasked in the comics. They’re also used for character growth: depending on your choices in the game there can be a distinct arc with Bigby and the Woodsman finally burying the hatchet and reaching an understanding with each other.

Bigby’s motivation in becoming sheriff in The Wolf Among Us is positioned as less about Snow, and more about reforming his image and identity as a whole. This motivation informs all his actions in the game: the constant friction between lapsing back into his old Big Bad Wolf persona to speed the investigation along, and the new order abiding and non-violent one he’s trying to forge. And despite his best efforts there’s a real undertone throughout the game that he may be needed because of his ability to inflict violence, but because of exactly that he’ll never be trusted.

It’s a really nuanced way of engaging with the consequences of the original fairytale and using it to inform character growth and theme.

Part of the reason the game is so much better at exploring these themes is down to both a difference in the medium and genre. The main game mechanic of The Wolf Among Us is decision making and dialog choices, and the more complex and multifaceted the characters and conflicts, the more interesting it is to play. And the noir detective genre is simply a better vehicle for exploring those small, personal tensions and conflicts than the superhero war story of the comics.

Moral relativism is a hallmark of noir which makes creating nuanced characters easier, and a murder mystery by its nature requires the detective to move through the different stratas of society and puzzle out the motivations and nuances of suspects and witnesses. There’s also just a hundred small ways the presentation of The Wolf Among Us reinforces the unglamorous nature of Fabletown: the neon lights that drench the world, the constant graffiti in the background, the thick atmosphere of the music, Bigby’s weariness in quiet moments, the way his fridge is empty.

Even the titles of the comics and game set them apart: Fables is a generic and vague title, The Wolf Among Us specific, intriguing, and hints at the liminal space Bigby occupies, the themes of fear and belonging.

None of this is to say that the original Fable comics are bad. They’re not: they’re well written and well drawn. But they’re not everything they could be, not as brilliant as their premise promises. The fairytale elements in them are just draped over a conventional plot, the connections only skin deep.

Found this interesting? Exciting? Sexy? Check out my other writing on my tumblr here, or check out my youtube video essay channel here.

#the wolf among us #bigby wolf #snow white #fables comic #big bad wolf #telltale games #telltale the wolf among us #videogame #twau #twau bigby

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liskantope · 6 years ago

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During the last few months, I read through the the entire archive of Luann comics from 1985 to the present day, as it’s freely available through GoComics. Don’t judge me. Or do judge me, I don’t care. Luann is entertaining and nostalgic (at least the period from the late 90′s through 2006 or so when I was regularly following the strip in the newspaper). Some thoughts below. (I actually wanted to write this a month and a half ago when I had just finished and everything was fresher on my mind, but that’s when holidays and all my distractions hit. This turned out to be very long and I’m not sure if any of my followers is actually interested in a review of Luann, but if anyone wants to scroll down to the final bulletpoint, that is a bit less Luann-specific and more on the lines of my usual discourse topics.)

Never mind bulletpoints; some of these are too long to be easily readable without breaking up into paragraphs!

1) I was impressed, almost all the way through, with how much sexuality is conveyed in the dialog and relationships between the characters while somehow staying within the content restrictions for a newspaper comic. (I do recall back around 2000 a particular comic coming under fire because the dialog between Luann’s parents implied that they didn’t wait for marriage, one which I was able to identify this time around.) I think Luann possibly has the most sexuality in it of any newspaper comic I’ve come across.

2) I understand that daily comic strip artists typically have to do their Sunday comics some six weeks more ahead of publication than their non-Sunday comics, resulting in each Sunday strip usually having nothing to do with the story happening in its neighboring strips. Luann consistently seems to be an exception to this, where either the cartoonist is able to follow a schedule of drawing the Sunday strips contemporaneously with the rest or he is extraordinarily good at planning a further six weeks in advance what will be going on in the story by the time a given Sunday strip will come out. That said, while I remember being annoyed that my newspaper growing up didn’t include Luann in its Sunday comics section, I see now that I wasn’t missing all that much: the Sunday strips are still mostly independent, shallow gags that often look like they could have been carried out just as easily and more space-efficiently in a daily strip.

3) Luann’s relationship with her brother Brad, which was clearly meant to reflect a classic snarky sibling dynamic, went further with the insults, name-calling, complete reluctance to acknowledge caring feelings, and occasionally outright malicious behavior than I was comfortable with (until recent years when this has simmered down now that they’re more fully grown up). Are typical siblings really treat each other by default in such an antagonistic and adversarial manner? I appreciate that I had an idyllic relationship with my sister growing up -- I mean really the closest to ideal of any siblings I’ve known -- but I wouldn’t have thought that the norm was really closer to Luann and Brad.

4) On the flip side, there’s another aspect of Luann’s life with her immediate family which strikes me as probably healthier than what I imagine as the default: the openness with which she and Brad air all their personal trials and tribulations to their parents. Luann in particular is often venting about her crushes (especially her main crush, Aaron Hill, always referred to with his full name) and coming to her parents for support over whatever teenage-style drama she’s caught up in. I suppose the fact that I didn’t feel free to be open about these types of things with my parents has much more to do with me than with them: I’ve always been neurotic about open discussion of certain things, especially my romantic interests or feelings of sexual attraction, and was somewhat more so as a teenager than now. (It would take a much longer post than this to pick apart this neurosis.) I remember actually getting into an argument with my parents over whether it’s within a normal kid-parent dynamic to mention at dinner “I met/saw the most attractive girl today!” with me convinced that it wasn’t. I have to concede that the Luann universe (fictional, but clearly based on the cartoonist’s impression of reality) is a point in their favor.

All that said, I would think that Luann might have felt kind of silly blabbering so much about her obsession with Aaron Hill to her family members (not to mention her school guidance counselor!) knowing on some level that it must come across as immature. Yet, in writing this I’ve remembered that I did plenty of blabbering as a young teenager to my family about whatever Interests I was obsessed with at the time, in a way that I kinda-sorta knew was immature but not enough to stop me... but that just wouldn’t have included romantic or sexual feelings. Also, the desire or ability to feel comfortable sleeping on the sofa in the middle of my family doing things (as Brad is constantly seen doing) is utterly foreign to me, but that touches on another of my neuroses.

5) This strip has obviously changed a lot over its nearly 34 years of syndication, which shows most obviously and superficially in the vast improvement in drawing style. In terms of content and stories it changed a lot too, and I think in a very positive direction. In fact, if I hadn’t known that it would improve in this way, I don’t think I would have bothered getting through all of the first decade of Luann. The basis for Luann in its early years was simple gags meant to reflect life of a typical teenage girl in a typical nuclear family. But there was something very pessimistic about all of it: the lives of the DeGroots, each entrenched in their roles as mother, father, teenage daughter, and teenage son, seem weary and at times slightly on the dysfunctional side. The strip could have practically be titled “The Woes of the Modern Middle-Class Nuclear Family”. It predated but was rather similar to The Simpsons in this way. Moreover, Luann, depicted as an awkward and not very attractive 13-year-old, seemed hopeless in all of the Average Teenage Girl ways, including hating everything about school; not really excelling at anything in school or out; being constantly wrapped up in spending hours on the phone with the same two friends; and never, ever, ever being able to get her the object of her long-time super-obsessive crush, Aaron Hill, to so much as glance in her direction (this theme was dwelt on ad nauseum for over a decade to the point that it got extremely tiresome and I’m surprised I got through that period; maybe what got me through was occasional acknowledgments in the voices of Luann’s friends that this obsession was over-the-top and getting pretty old).

And yet... Luann has grown up into a beautiful and talented woman with ambitions and a number of dating relationships under her belt, and the DeGroots are now held up as an example of a really admirable and healthy family (one that TJ clearly wants as his own family). While Brad’s transformation from teenage slob who lay around and ate Oreos all day into a happily married, responsible, and fit fireman is openly remarked upon, the drastic change in the ethos of the strip as a whole isn’t explicitly acknowledged. Of course the evolution happened very gradually, but if I had to point to a single turning point, my choice would be obvious: things began to drastically turn around for Luann in early 1997 when she bared her feelings to Aaron Hill by giving him a scroll containing all her memories of him (a move that would be considered obsessive and stalker-ish in another context but which finally won his attention here).

6) I think there’s a sort of trope, which the Luann character exemplifies about midway through the strip’s history, where she’s supposed to continue representing the insecure girl who feels unattractive and unpopular so that people can relate to her, while at the same time she seems to constantly attract boys (most of whom she considers really hot) and gets dates with them, so as to make for more interesting stories. I got annoyed at times at how these two things seemed to be in tension. At one point, if I remember right, Luann had no fewer than four of the boy characters super into her, including Aaron Hill even though she had temporarily decided she was through with him (this was unacknowledged later on when she went back to complaining that all those years she was in love with Aaron but he never truly noticed her). Other examples of this trope perhaps include Gus Cruikshank and George Costanza.

7) I would feel amiss if I didn’t put in a word about the Gunther character here. He’s my favorite character in the particular sense of reminding me extraordinarily of myself. If Butters from South Park is the most similar animated cartoon character to me (at least in the opinion of some friends), then Gunther Berger is, a hundred times more so, the most similar comic cartoon character to me. Not only do most of his personality traits match almost perfectly with mine (although I’m not as good with kids and don’t know anything about costume-making), his physical appearance is strikingly similar to mine, especially the way I looked as a teenager (plaid shirts and all). In fact, I sometimes wonder if, had there been (say) a call for auditions for a Luann movie back when I looked slightly younger, I might have had a decent shot at winning the part due to my physical similarity to Gunther -- I’m not an amazing actor, but there’s not nearly as much acting involved when you’re basically playing yourself.

One of the rather negative aspects of the early Luann ethos for me is not only the mildly negative way that Gunther was portrayed as the stereotypical socially-inept nerd but the level of disdain Luann treats him with (despite her own insecurities) which she’s only occasionally called out on. I’m glad to see that Gunther soon became one of the most likeable and admirable characters in the strip. Rather than feel ashamed of our likeness, I see him as reflecting some of the best parts of me and, when it comes to standing up and speaking his mind, an inspiration for me to be better.

8) Luann, throughout its history, addresses stereotypical norms, particularly with regard to gender, in an interesting (although not at all unusual) way. Let’s first keep in mind that the strip and main characters were established in 1985. The original intent of the cartoonist was clearly to portray middle-class nuclear family life, with a special focus on teenage girlhood, as honestly and relatably as he knew how. This meant in particular making each member of the DeGroot family a sort of every(wo)man: Frank is the typical father, the main breadwinner, always the one to worry about money (and the parent to go to when one of the kids wants money or something expensive), and taking a backseat with housework; Nancy is the typical mother, more emotive, burdened with all the housework and daily discipline of her kids; Brad is the typical older teenage boy, a lazy slob with little regard for cleanliness or manners spending all his time either being a couch potato or working on his car; and Luann is the typical 13-year-old girl, hating school and obsessed with boys, shopping, fashion, and talking on the phone. The strip positively revels in stereotypes (especially once we add the blonde cheerleader “mean girl” Tiffany, the unattractive nerd Gunther, and the goof-off Knute). A particular theme is gender stereotypes; in fact, it felt like a good 50% of Luann’s non-story strips, particularly Sunday ones, revolved around the differences between the genders. All of this looks pretty tiresome now and was probably tiresome already back in the 80′s.

And at the same time, the cartoonist was clearly socially progressive and a feminist (at least in the old-school sense) from the start. He made many points about the particular burdens women face and wrote many sympathetic strips about how Nancy willingly did all the housework and cooking but was expected to by default and felt unappreciated because her work went unacknowledged by everyone else. There’s a lot of focus on how the fashion industry puts pressures on teenage girls and women and how women should free themselves from basing their self-worth on how their looks compare to other women’s and on what boys think of them. In fact, the artist very deftly points out the tension between Luann’s awareness of this unreasonableness and her desire to be superficially attractive and objectified by boys anyway!

What reads as a tiny bit strange about all of this -- but only from a very modern point of view, I think -- is that all of these stereotypes are remarked upon and criticized while still being exemplified by pretty much every single character and everything they do. (Compare to Zits, debuting in 1997, where the father, a rather sweet, huggy, un-stereotypically masculine character, is shown doing the laundry from early on.) I get why someone would go with that formula, because as I said it seems at least naively like the best way to maximize relatability, but it comes at the expense of creating a subtle tension and not fully promoting the intended messages. I believe this underscores a fundamental distinction between a bare anti-conformist message and anti-conformist representation and suggests that representation as a social justice concept just wasn’t a big thing back in the 80′s and 90′s in the way it (fortunately) is today.

#luann #comics section #sexuality #sibling relationships #sex casuality #personal quirks #the simpsons #love (netflix show)#Seinfeld #south park

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sterwood · 7 years ago

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it's wild to see how so much of your content is relatively high-effort (you don't seem to just make claims and make it your audience's task to figure out what the fuck you're saying) and even wilder how homestuckposting is the exception to that. I fundamentally disagree that it's good, and I feel like if you had a good argument to the contrary you'd have posted it by now.

This is such a weird ask to me, since I’ve barely been postinganything of substance lately given that I’ve been so damn busy with grad schoolstuff. (And the stuff I’ve been reading, thinking about, etc., wouldn’t makefor very good posts here, since it’s a lot of stuff about Rawls and pragmatismand I just...don’t care, lmao.)

But at the same time: thank you! That’s a very nice thing to see,that one’s effort is recognized even if the culmination of that effort isdisagreed with.

As far as the homestuck stuff goes though, part of the reason Ihaven’t given any justification of it is that I don’t really see it needing anyjustification, insofar as I’m not often making claims about how great it isoutside of some obviously hyperbolic claims. It’s mostly a private interest,forged out of a depression-fueled quick-read of the comic and the fact that thecomic appeals to a bunch of personal interests/themes/etc. I do think it’sactually great, but I haven’t put forth any effort to flesh out that claim or convinceothers of it in any serious way, mostly because I figure that no one cares.

I’ll attempt to spell out a few reasons that I think it’s very good,or at least important, but I want to recognize at the outset that I’m at adisadvantage in talking about this. You say that you ‘fundamentallydisagree that it’s good’ and that I probably have some ready made argument ofwhy it is, in fact, good. Since you’re anonymous, there’s no set standardbetween us for evaluating this claim (good/bad how?),and so I kind of just have to jump in with some generalities about the comic.If you’re serious with your intent in sending this message though (and I thinkyou are, since you started out with a compliment that shows me that you’veprobably given a looking over at my blog and even, dare I say, follow me onhere), then feel free to message me after with something more specificabout why you don’t think it’s good, so at least there’scommon set of propositions that we’re working with (”I think it’s bad becauseit’s overly convoluted” to which I’d disagree; “I think it’s bad becauseof the whole tumblr parody which was really reactionary” to which I’d agree;etc.) and we could move from there.

Let’s move on though. (This will be along post, and I apologize, especially for those on mobile.)

Reasons why Homestuck is At LeastImportant

There’s two major reasons why I thinkhomestuck (HS) is important, or at least should be regarded as a significantmedia product. Firstly, I think it’s a unique contribution to what mediaproducts can do on the internet;secondly, I think it’s important by virtue of what it contributed to mediaculture generally. Note, in this section I’m not strictly saying why I thinkthe comic is good, but only why I think it’s worth paying attention to,especially if you’re a media studies student, say, or someone interested incultural studies generally or whatever. But let’s turn to both of those points.

A quick reflection: I remember howfrustrated I was growing up when I would read articles online that were aboutmovies or paintings or some piece of visual culture that would only pointtowards the media product. I was frustrated, because there seemed to be noreason to simply talk about mediaproducts when you could actually incorporate them into your discussions. Whyonly talk about a scene in a movie, say, when you could include a clip of thatscene in your essay to provide more exacting context? Media productions andcommentaries weren’t simply bound to text, but writers and creators tended to restrictthemselves to this without need. (There are some reasons for this, especiallywith the state of the internet 9 years ago or so [when homestuck began],principally that pictures and videos loaded slowly and would be overlycumbersome. Still, I was frustrated at the unrealized potential.)

I was similarly frustrated by the typeof content that popped up in most webcomics that I was reading at the time. In2010, I believe, I took an on-campus job working in a geology lab. There waslittle work to be done, and, being nineteen, I stupidly blew off the smallamount of work I had. Even in blowing off that work, though, I still needed tooccupy my time while I was working in the office, and for whatever reason Itook to reading a lot of webcomics. I read all of Questionable Content, xkcd,Diesel Sweeties, Achewood, and (most important for my appreciation of HS,coincidentally) Goats. I didn’t actually read HS at this time (that didn’thappen until 2015), but this set the scene for eventually reading it. And whilereading all of these comics, despite liking them, I was sometimes frustratedhow they still read like traditional comics. It was hard to see how thesecomics were webcomics: I couldn’t seeanything that made them particularly different from normal comics, except forwhere they happened to be located.

In this context, Homestuck is the firstpiece of media that I’m aware of (and certainly the largest) which actually expandedthe ways that a comic could operate. Instead of a series of panels with textincorporated, Homestuck is primarily single panel pages with lots of textattributed to them underneath (of course, this barrage of text is also why manydon’t care for the comic). But it is also a series of flash videos, embeddedvideo games, youtube videos, parody accounts (like the DeviantArt one), albums,etc. It really is astoundingly expansive. Again, this is neither good nor bad,but is a reason for its importance. This is the first media production that I’maware of that attempted to take up the internet as a medium for communicationin its full power (even including user generated actions up through parts ofAct 5). This, alone, would make Homestuck worth paying attention to, even ifonly antagonistically.

Now for the second (shorter) point. Isaw someone joke once that HS is ‘the comic of the Obama era’ since it spansthe whole of his presidency, more-or-less (2009-2016). In that time, it createda *massive* internet presence that simultaneously influenced the content,themes, style, and other aspects of many diverse media forms (the wholeUndertale experience is just one gigantic branch sprouting from this Yggdrasilof memes known as Homestuck). It’s impossible to account for the massive impactthat Andrew Hussie has had on the content and form of the internet as weexperience it today (I mean, for one minor aspect of this, just look atSB&HJ and how those aesthetics have informed a massive amount of memecreation).

In this sense, I think it’s impossibleto regard HS as anything other than important. The pure, impossible to measurecultural impact it has had on media artifacts that we enjoy daily—even if theydon’t seem connected—is hard to overstate. For this reason alone, readingthrough some of HS is probably something worth doing (again, even if it’s onlydone antagonistically). To put this somewhat polemically, at the very leastHomestuck should be read as many novels are: not as a great artistic work, butas a window into a certain kind of cultural logic operating during a given timeperiod. And if that is the approach taken, then it’s hard to try and movepassed HS: I can think of no other media product that has had more of asingular impact, more breadth, and more userinteraction than HS has had on popular culture (except for, perhaps, HarryPotter, though that’s in an entirely different way and also—here’s,potentially, my real polemic—HS is much better).

Now on to some reasons why HS may, infact, actually be good.

Reasons why Homestuck is Good

I’ll break this into a few (hopefullyshort) themes: pacing, conversations, villainy, coherence, characterization, and (most controversially) the ending. (I would urge you—thecollective ‘you’ that may have been foolish enough to get this far—to not readthat last section if you haven’t read the comic. I’m trying to keep thisspoiler free, by and large, because part of my purpose in writing this is tosuggest that you should read it aswell [keep in mind Kant’s claim that aesthetic judgements are normativejudgements, lmao], though I think the ending is too important not to tough onto some extent.)

Pacing.HS does one of the oddest and most interesting things I’ve seen with pacing inany sort of media production. Perhaps this is a reason why some people haven’tenjoyed the comic, but it’s one of the reasons that I find it so thrilling toread, even on my multiple re-reads. The comic tends to move at a snail’s pace,with conversations that drag on and don’t advance the plot much (but they dodevelop characters, so it’s notuseless dialog by any means). This pace is enjoyable, but can get frustratingwhen you can see elements of the story building up to…something. Then, in abrilliant flash, the story erupts with tons of action: many diverse strands ofthe story are woven together into a single tapestry, lending coherence,consistency, and progress to the story. And the contrast between the slowtextual pace and the hyperspeed of the flash videos. The most obvious case ofthis is [S] Cascade, though I’d rather focus on [S] Make Her Pay, because Ithink it’s one of the strongest moments in the comic. (You can see the videohere, if you’re interested: https://www.homestuck.com/story/2578.A warning, though: I believe the video still autoplays, and it has music, sojust beware before opening that link.)

I don’t think I’m spoiling much bypointing to this flash video, since I think that almost everyone that has heardof homestuck at least knows that characters often referred to as ‘the Trolls’play an important part. They show up at the beginning of Act 5, which isperhaps a quarter of the way through the comic (given that [S] Cascade isnearly the halfway point). Their entrance into the story marks a kind of ‘reboot’to the story, where similar themes, tropes, etc. that were built in earlieracts are redeployed with these new characters. Further, it marks a definiteincrease in the complexity of thestory, given that it focuses on 12 difference characters, rather than 4, as thestory had done so far. The whole of Act 5 up until [S] Make Her Pay had beentext-based storytelling: detailing the complicated and twisted history of these‘troll’ characters, their involvement in the ‘game’ that forms the basis forthe whole of HS, and exploring new depths for the comic. But it is alsoslow-moving: the comic even makes reference to this pace in multiple partswhere it coyly talks about how we, the readers, ‘don’t have time’ to exploresome such gag, or go into depth about some story point, or to develop a flashanimation for some aspect of the story (e.g. Karkat’s Strife! with his lusus). This all is cut through with theappearance in the story of [S] Make Her Pay, which weaves the whole of Act 5Act 1 together, filling in many gaps of history that were left intentionallyunexplored at that point, and advancing the story by leaps and bounds. Therhetorical and affective dimensions of this contrast are hard to emphasizeenough: going slowly through all this history, all this plot, all this teen drama, in one of the longesttext-only sequences in the comic, only to have that pace flipped upside down bya single short video that connects so many disparate strands is really,well…exhilarating. It’s one of the things that makes the comic so intenselyenjoyable, dynamic, and, I think, worthwhile. I’ve never seen another piece ofmedia do such wonderful things with pacing.

Conversations.Due to this varied pacing, the majority of the comic is comprised of longdialogues. These dialogues have strong rules of how they’re allowed to beconducted, though. Conversations (until a certain element is introduced intothe story) have to take place through some medium: through a chat client(similar to AOL/MSN messengers), dreams, sprites, hand-written messages, etc.No direct conversations can happen between two people. There’s always somethinggetting in the way of conversations. I’ve never seen anything other than HScapture this element of conversations in the 21st century,especially without taking some condescending tone about how ‘screens rule ourlives’ or something. The fact that all the speech in the comic is mediated bysome form of media isn’t meant as a critique, but an accurate representation ofmany actual dialogues that happen. Perhaps this is only a good part of HSbecause it appeals to some of my sensibilities, so I’ll keep this short, butit’s an aspect that makes me enjoy the comic a lot. Growing up in the late90s/early 00s (I graduated high school in 2009, for a sense of my timelinehere), and having forged many friendships—even with friends I knew‘IRL’—through similar chat clients and such, this aspect of the comic simplyseems very real and intimate to me. I know that weird sense of closeness withpeople that you only, or primarily, know through text, and the kind of yearningthat can engender—and I think HS captures that very well.

Villainy.In sending your message, I assume you were prompted by the post I rebloggedthat mentioned that HS features many of the standard tropes of a literary epic.Of those kinds of tropes, one that wasn’t mentioned (and which tends to beparticular to post-1940s epics or pseudo-epics) is the presence of some kind ofabsolute evil entity which corrupts and destroys beyond any realm ofrationality. A figure of ‘radical evil’ if you will: an evil which is cold,calculating, perhaps even intelligent in many respects, but which displays akind of horrifying excess of humanness which is warped into some kind ofabominable evil. HS has such a figure and fleshes him out very well, and healso ends up being one of the best characters in the story (best in the senseof developed, engaging, important, etc. – not ‘good,’ obviously): Caliborn.

Caliborn (and LE) is a reallyinteresting villain because, as Dave mentions at one point, he hasn’t had muchof a direct evil influence over any aspect of the story (“what kind ofvillain is someone you never met who hardly did anything evil to you or yourfriends directly/or even to anyone in your universe for that matter other thanthrough some vague insidious influence/who even is this guy and why should ihate him” (6385)). By and large, he’s been absent fromany direct engagement with any character in the story, and yet his evil isomnipresent. As his constantly tagline goes “he is already here.”

The major way in which Caliborn is evilis through excessively narcissistic he is, how thoroughly self-involved, andhow he desires to make his will reality in all instances. He bends the fabricof time around himself to propagate and ensure his own existence: hisimmortality is guaranteed simply because he will to continue existing. His evilis systemic: it’s the very (genetic) code of the gaming session that all themain characters of the story occupy, and all of its other instances as well.

Further, there’s a level of ambivalentcruelty mixed with enjoyment that we get in Caliborn’s character that’s hard tosee matched in any other literary figure that comes to my mind. Yes, much ofhis dialogue is full of jokes and statements that make him seem very, verystupid, arrogant, etc. But there are a few scenes where we get a sense that heis a kind of primordial, absolute evil, who sees the very purpose of hisexistence as that of wrecking pain and terror across many instances ofuniverses. Two such scenes suffice here. (Potential spoilers follow in the restof this section.) The first is from when Caliborn enters his own session:consumed with hatred for the only other living being he’s known (albeitdirectly), he kills off a part of himself and awakens with joy. He thenproceeds to remove his own leg forcefully (that kind of dedication through painis frightening), and initiate the game. While everything is being sucked into ablack hole behind him, while the whole of his world and life are beingdestroyed around him, he is seen smiling serenely with his eyes closed. He cansmile, because he knows that this is the beginning of his dominance overeverything: this destruction is a prelude to him carrying out his will todestroy everything forever and in all ways. It is, quite simply, chilling.

The second scene happens in a shortconversation with Jake. This comment comes across almost as a joke, but itreally highlights the depth of evil he occupies. In talking about what it meansto be a ‘Lord’ in terms of his class, and how he came to recognize hispotential within this class, he says that “NOW I KNOW. THAT WHAT ITTAKES FOR ME TO LEARN AND GROW STRONGER./IS EXCRUCIATING EFFORT./SO I HAVE ACHOICE. WHICH IS TO EITHER BE WEAK./WHEN WEAKNESS IS COMPLETELYUNACCEPTABLE./OR TO SUFFER. FOREVER. UNTIL NO ONE ELSE EXISTS.” (5671). Despitethe presentation (Caliborn’s manner of speaking often undercuts the severity ofwhat he’s saying, but it’s important for a reader to keep this in mind), thisidea that Caliborn is willing to endure infinite suffering and pain to ensurethat his will is carried out—a will that desire the utter elimination of allthings throughout all of existence—is honestly terrifying. He is a characterwhose evil isn’t marked by any singular action (again, as Dave mentioned), butby a relentless drive. To be a bit obtuse here, Caliborn is basically theLacanian ‘lamella,’ especially in the sense that the lamella “doesn’t exist,but persists.” Caliborn suffers beyond life and death, as a half-dead creature(I mean, to really put the point explicitly here, the lamella is a half-dead,abject excess of life, and Caliborn is a skull monster who through the sheerforce of will ensures the necessity of his continued existence): he is evilincarnate, and I’ve never seen such a radical evil presented in a better waythan through HS. This is honestly one of the biggest literary achievements ofHS, and that’s why I’m dwelling on it at length. But let’s continue

Coherence.This may seem like an odd category, since I believe that many see HS asexcessively chaotic and unstructured. I thoroughly disagree and thinking thatthe overwhelming coherence of this nearly decade-long story is part of whatmakes it so good. This is apparent in the many jokes and themes that arecarried through the comic, even at a distance of thousands of panels (twoimmediate examples jump out at me: the joke about how Sassacre’s text could‘kill a cat’ that’s realized after about 4500 pages, or the ‘bleating like agoat for ironic purposes’ gag that’s realized in about the same span). Further,this coherence is built into the overall structure of the comic: the fact thatthe first half of the comic takes place within about a day’s time whereas thelatter half takes place over 3 years (punctuated at the end by a lot of actionat the end) shows that the general structure of the comic follows the patternof pacing mentioned above. There is a lot more I could point to that would showjust how wonderfully coherent the whole HS story is, but I’m not sure if that’sa useful exercise upfront. It’d be more useful to talk about coherence inresponse to a dispute over whether some aspect of HS was coherent or not—absentthat, there doesn’t seem to be much of a point in detailing such here, otherthan to note that I do believe that the comic is generally very well puttogether (with the ending being a big bit of punctuation on this point).

Characterization.Andrew Hussie did two primary things with characterization that I appreciateand find worthwhile in the comic. The first thing he did was give a lot ofspace for characterization. We end up knowing a ton of information about thecharacters in the comic and a good 90% of it is relevant in some way to theplot (some of it is just interesting details, which is more or less fine whenyou have a character driven story where the characters are likable). Thesecharacters are dynamic and fully fleshed out in almost all cases (Nepeta is probablythe one major exception to this, though she even got a bit more development inthe end that pulled her away from just being a lolcat meme). Sure, any goodstory should have characterization like this, but I think the length ofhomestuck allows it to happen in really supple and subtle ways: the majority ofcharacters in the story are multi-faceted characters who develop in believableways over time that come into conflicts that sometimes just aren’t resolved.There’s also the willingness to have characters that are just irredeemablyhorrible people, without trying to shoehorn some kind of redemption arc in(Eridan is a nice example of this: he’s a thoroughly detestable and horribleperson, and there is no possible way to see him in a good light in a fairreading of the text [the HS fandom, which is not on trial here and should beexcluded from most all of these statements, has tried to make him into asympathetic character time and time again, and this is only possible becausethey’re reading the comic badly]). Further, and lastly on this point, due tothe depth of characterization, there’s also a lot of great between-characterinteractions in the comic: not great because they’re funny or witty orwhatever, but because they show the depth of character and work and a mutualrecognition of that depth between characters. The speech that Dirk gives aboutRoxy before their session’s versions of Derse and Prospit were destroyed is agreat example of this (and one of the greatest tragedies of the comic, from areader standpoint, is that Dirk never gets to tell Roxy any of that directly,at least not in any manner that we see).

Secondly, and this is heavily relatedto the first point, the depth of characterization that Hussie gives to theplayers in HS allows him to start with kind of obvious and one-dimensionalstereotypes of characters and morph them into something fully fleshed. And hedoes this not by simply inverting the roles of those stereotypes of something(which is common in a lot of ‘ironic’ pieces of media that try and overturn themajor tropes working within a given genre) but by fully fleshing outcharacters. I think this may be most apparent in someone like Dave. He beganthe comic by being a stereotype of some kind of hipster-bro, and almost all ofhis jokes, interactions, and conversations revolved around this stereotype. Itwas even folded into his personal mythology: because he’s the coolest, the mostcapable, etc., he’s the one that’s ‘meant to’ take down LE when all is said anddone. Slowly though, through confronting the stupidity that his mythologyforces him into (like having welsh swords as key items, for some reason) andalso confronting the death of his ‘bro’ and the feelings that stirred in him,he comes much more of a fully fleshed character. And by the end of the entirecomic, as he’s confronting issues of cross-cultural exchange, his ownrelationship to his abusive upbringing, his conflicted feelings about how tosituate his sexuality, etc., Dave has easily become one of the most thoroughlyrealized characters in the entirety of HS. That’s a hard thing to do when you’restarting with stereotypes of characters (which, it should be added, wasnecessary given the types of stories and games that Hussie was trying to riffoff of in developing HS) and end up with something thoroughly real, and HSshould be commended for being able to do such on many different fronts.

[I was going to add another piece aboutthe nice temporal dynamics of the comic, taking place originally over a day andthen over the course of three years, but this is already long enough and I’vementioned this part of HS a bit above, so I’ll let it be.]

TheEnding. I had a literature professor onceremark that the most conservative part of novels is the ending, because itforecloses on all of the openness and contingency at work during the otherparts of the novel. This is true for most pieces of media, and is why theendings of most things are bad (I’m replaying Mass Effect right now and it’sreminded me of two of my least favorite endings in media ever: that game, andBattlestar Galactica). I think HS, in many ways, gets around this problem.

To celebrate the ending of HS iscontentious, I know. It was mostly hated among the fandom. But I really thinkthat the ending is one of the most flawlessly executed pieces of the wholecomic. Many people were mad at the ending because it ‘left so many questions’open—but this is precisely why it’s good. It allows us to see that thecharacters continue to exist in some form or another, that their relationshipsdevelop, but it doesn’t answer every question that the comic poses, nor does iteven attempt to give us a rubric for evaluating those questions in anydefinitive way. Further, the ending is *genuinely surprising.* In a comic that’srevolved around a plot point of a ‘final boss’ that must be faced andvanquished, the comic surprisingly ends without this boss being defeated in anysimple manner. Instead, the main characters simply escape the confines of the ‘game’that they’ve been playing: a game that has brought them isolation, tragedy, andendless fear. The major resolution of the story comes through the charactersjust being allowed to live for a while, to enjoy their lives. That’s why theending text for the story isn’t “and they lived happily ever after” (or somesimilar cliché), but “Thanks for playing”—a sign that the worst is in the pastand that the lives of these characters is now truly beginning in a way that’s totallyup to them. That’s why, in the afterward,we get a snapchat story that shows various pieces of the lives of these characters,up through John’s 21st birthday. It was the best solution to such acomplex, diverse, and nearly decade-spanning comic: to allow the characters tohave some space to actually live on.

It was also the single best way ofdealing with this ‘final boss’—Lord English. In his form as Caliborn, as quotedabove, he’s a character that’s willing to suffer forever if it means that hehas complete control over the existence of the whole of reality. The best wayto ‘destroy’ such a character isn’t to have them killed (that would simply markan endpoint to their terror, but LE wouldn’t experience it as anything bad, torturous,etc.), but to have them trapped within a dimension all to themselves. By theend of the comic, LE is trapped in the game, with no means of escape, and isbound to the rules and logic of such a game. Sure, he’s omnipotent within thatsphere of influence, but all the characters have moved on to something else.This assigns him to a fate worse than death: to suffer forever without, throughthat suffering, attaining control and power over others. In this sense, I feelthat the ending that Hussie designed for HS is the only reasonable ending: andpulling off such a wonderful ending to such a long and complex comic is quitean achievement—especially since, as I’ve mentioned, this ending didn’t simply ‘tieloose ends’ or anything. It resolved the central tension of the story while(intentionally) leaving other tensions and questions unresolved and unanswered.It was—and this is rare for most any piece of media—a fully realized,thoughtful, and incredible ending to a story that I find to be one of the bestI have read in very many, many years.

And so that’s it. I was going toinclude another section about how HS is at least not-bad where I list common reasons that the comic is seen as badand show that they miss the mark, but this is long enough as is (9 pages inword). So I’ll leave this here. This isn’t a total justification of why I likehomestuck or why I think it’s worth paying attention to, I haven’t addressedmany of the major points, but I think I’ve made the case, at least partially,for why I think the comic might be worth taking a look into. Beyond that, I don’treally know what I can do, given that I’m only working with the message placed inmy inbox. But considering that most don’t care….that’s probably more thanenough, lmao.

#I got kind of tired near the end #hence why the responses start going less in depth (whoops)#homestuck #mine #Anonymous

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