#like just with all the imagery of her controlling all the actors on the stage.

[4giorno]

okay at first i was honestly so underwhelmed but then the silhouette part came and she posed for the pictures and suddenly it was iconic

[chunhua-s]

congrats on your milestone event!!! id like to request for kita soulmate!au with angst to fluff genre 👉👈 yknow sumn rejection shit bcs im hopeless like that wehee once again congrats! and i love your writing style :3

anon you’re gonna make me cry 🥺 seriously i’m happy you enjoy my writing and that you think my style’s okay! most of the time i go off of what kind of feelings i get when i’m writing or the imagery that comes up in my head and i’m never sure that it translates well enough for you guys to feel or see the same thing. hopefully as i keep writing then i’ll be able to show you guys what’s on my mind better when i’m writing! thank you again for requesting — seriously, it means a lot! and like always, you guys, don’t be afraid to come and talk to me on and off anon! your interactions mean a lot, especially for content creators! we love hearing what you all think, what you like/dislike about our work, what you think of certain characters — absolutely anything! come and talk with us more whenever you can 💕

writing for kita feels calming somehow. normally the things that come up in my chest or my mind when i write gets nearly overwhelming if that makes sense? like i’ll have to pause and remind myself to breathe because it takes up so much of my attention that i kinda get lost, but with kita, it feels more flowey to me. it’s not demanding but more like a gentle coaxing kind of thing or like looking at the surface of a calm river. i was initially scared to write for him because i was worried i wouldn’t get him right, but i feel satisfied with how this turned out, i think. i hope you guys will find it as calming as i found it too! it might not be exactly what you wanted, but because i had already written the rejection of a person for atsumu’s soulmate oneshot, i wanted to play around with kita’s character and make it instead the rejection of a concept/idea? which would indirectly lead to him... you know, rejecting his soulmate initially, but— ahhhhhh it might make sense to just read it!! these rambles keep getting longer and longer :v i’m sorry for that!! please go ahead and read and tell me what you think in the end! 💕

NOTNING MORE THAN HUMAN ➽ KITA SHINSUKE x READER

genre: angst to fluff

au: soulmate

warnings: none

shinsuke kita is human.

and of course, that much is obvious. he isn’t a machine that’s incapable of feelings and emotions, whose heart is unfamiliar with melodies of an overwhelming joy, or the quiet hymns of deep rooted sadness. his skin still burns under righteous fury and anger, his tongue still weighs heavy under hesitance and silent worries. at the end of every long day, he’s still human.

it’s because he’s human that the words on his collarbone feel so heavy, as if they might cave into the bone and destroy him under their weight. it’s because he’s human that the sight of black markings in the mirror clouds his mind with a new kind of fear and worry. shinsuke kita is human, but he’s long since taught himself how to abandon anxiety and nervousness. he surrounds himself in familiar routines that calm the turbulent voices of doubt, he builds habits that ground him to the earth lest he should be swept away by the current. shinsuke has taught himself not to be afraid for the things that will happen everyday, but meeting his soulmate isn’t one of those things he can prepare for.

it’s a strange concept, he considers to himself. shinsuke doesn’t believe in words like fate or destiny, doesn’t care for the higher powers that should judge his actions. as far as he’s concerned, his own will is what dictates where his life goes — he’s in control, and that’s how it’s always been for him. let the gods watch, if they must, but he’s already decided that he’ll live by what is right, and he wouldn’t dare falter in the face of it. and yet — and it’s such a strange thing for him to do so — he pauses under the notion of a soulmate, of a destined partner who’s supposedly bound to him for as long as he should live. at first, he hadn’t given the idea much thought; it wouldn’t serve any purpose to worry about something that would happen whether or not he wants it, he decided. the truth of it is inevitable, just as the leaves must fall in autumn and the earth should be buried under clouds of white in winter. shinsuke is human — what more can he do but to accept it?

the black words that spread across his skin like droplets of ink became the bitter seeds of doubt that he hadn’t felt in a long time. it’s raining a lot today, isn’t it? the sentence by itself is so bland, like something maybe aran or anyone else might say to him in passing, and at first, it didn’t shake him too much, until he was caught one day under a sudden summer storm. seventeen year old kita somehow found himself stranded beneath a small shelter, where the wooden covering could protect him more than his umbrella until the rain passed. it was nearly unconscious, but he somehow found himself on edge, his breath faltered with the harsh pitter patter of rainfall that tumbled from green leaves and tore ripples from the surface of the lake. shinsuke kita found himself with a stomach full of butterflies and a thundering heartbeat that stole him away from solace and calm, cast the peace that he would so often carry with him away and left him stranded among chopping waves. every trembling breath he took stung on cold air and left him with a burning feeling on his lungs. it’s unfamiliar in its presence and shakes him to his core, but shinsuke kita is reminded of his own humanity when he realizes that what he feels, is anticipation and nervousness.

and it’s an odd thing. as he becomes aware of it, he finds himself twisting his fingers together during spring time; he worries his bottom lip between his teeth during unexpected showers. he feels like a child who stands in line to ride a roller coaster for the first time in his life — wide-eyed and drowning in the millions of feelings that race throughout his body. the feeling itself is nothing new, though it’s unfamiliar and intense in its ferocity and demand, seizes his heart and squeezes so tightly that whenever it rains, he’s left breathless.

it’s almost enough to drive him mad.

his very foundation seems to fall apart with the thunder that rolls across grey skies. for every drop of rain that hits the pavement, he finds himself a jittery mess as his heartbeat tears through his chest. the man who taught himself to abandon his fears reverts into the young boy who watched out for god, for the higher beings who watched his every move. and the thought that comes with every brilliant bolt of lightning burns him just as hotly, invasive and demanding when it flashes through his mind on a single, low whisper:

will you be happy?

shinsuke kita is human. he learns as he sees and lives as he’s learned, and what he saw growing up was that soulmates were bounded together till death do them part. a connection that’s set deep in stone, never to be erased by unforgiving weather and to persevere during the cruelest of storms. it’s an inevitable reality that the gods designed, so that mortals like himself should dance on stage and tell them a story. but shinsuke knows that not all these stories have a happy ending.

there are plays that end in tragedy and loss, those that only knew memories of pain and sang with death’s violin. man becomes the actor to a play that he has no choice in and dances on the puppet master’s strings, he surrenders control and gives himself up to the music, and he has no way of knowing the end of it until the curtains should fall. shinsuke has never been one to lay down his will, and yet, as winter melts once more into gray rain clouds and scattered showers, he’s reminded of his mortality, of the fate that’s been sealed away in the falling of rain. shinsuke kita is human, and so he must, like all men do, bend to fate’s will and never utter a word against her.

and for a long time, the sentiment caused him to completely reject the idea of a soulmate.

that feeling of helplessness that would wash over him with the rain turned into a bitterness that crushed his lungs between tightened fist. the acceptance of an inevitable waltz — whether it be to eternal happiness or to a cruel melody — turned into rebellious loathing that spat in the face of destiny. it’s entirely childish in its tale, like a toddler throwing a tantrum because he doesn’t want to give up his precious toy. that toy is his control, the power he had to live his life by his truth, not by that of a higher being. he’s human, after all, and humans are selfish and resentful by nature.

he finds himself with a heavy chest today, as well, as he waits for the pouring rain to subside. the small shelter in the middle of the garden park is familiar, and carries with it the memories of his epiphany, the one that created thunder storms in his once tranquil heart, and for that, he hates this place. the sound of the rain hitting the roof is like nails scratching against the chalkboard; the sound of droplets hitting the lake like an annoying whining that he can’t get out of his head. shinsuke curses this little pocket away from the world with all the childish anger in the world — let it be damned that doing so wouldn’t change anything. for once, he let himself go on a petty grudge against the universe, and against that looming stage and its heavy curtains.

it’s nearly faint, but he picks up on the patter-patter of footfalls that quickly approach him, and he turns bronze coloured eyes to find your rain-drenched figure running for shelter under the little gazebo. you’re out of breath by the time you make it underneath, letting out an exhausted and frustrated sigh as you press your hands to your knees, and shinsuke finds himself sympathizing with the way you bitterly push your hair from your face. you’re an ordinary office worker, from what he can see; you’ve hidden what looks to be a messenger back beneath your coat, leaving you to tremble in a thin button-up. this day’s downpour had been sudden, unexpected as spring would soon surrender to the approaching summer, and he imagines that he would have been in a similar position as yourself had he not packed his umbrella beforehand.

a silence settles over the both of you that’s only broken by the heavy rain, but the presence of it is so soothing that shinsuke finds himself breathing on a lighter air. suddenly the smell of petrichor turns sweeter, the melody of raindrops melting into a distant lullaby, and for the first time, shinsuke feels his heart melt under an indescribable sense of warmth despite the weather. and when your eyes turn to find his, a helpless grin on your lips, he feels that warmth explode under summer fireworks and coarse throhgh his veins like liquid lightning.

“it’s raining a lot today, isn’t it?”

for the second time in his life, shinsuke has an epiphany under the shelter in the garden.

he feels every bit of resentment vanish on a sudden gust of wind, one that sends raindrops splashing against his skin, but he doesn’t seem to notice. not when grey clouds suddenly reveal to him pillars of sunlight that embrace your figure and makes you glow against a background of green leaves. the rain turns into something sweet and enticing, and it suddenly gives shinsuke this unexplainable urge to grab your hand and dance with you underneath the pouring showers, where he can hear your voice ring out on chimes of laughter and innocent bliss. in mere seconds, he manages to let go of the dark clouds that he’d unintentionally harboured on his chest, he let them burst with the weight of anger and childish fury so that they would hit the earth on giant droplets of rain.

shinsuke kita is human — he’s imperfect, mortal. he feels and he thinks and he speaks what’s on his mind. he can hate, and he can love: he can make that decision on whether or not to hold useless grudges and to curse a destiny he can’t change, or to welcome that inevitability with the willingness to learn and grow.

today, as he stands beneath a wooden shelter, hiding from the heavy rains, he decides to stretch his hand out and let the water hit his skin.

davi hits 200 followers — haikyuu!! au writing event! 💕

taglist: @aiiishiiiteru @bootylikepeachy @tsumue

send an ask to be added!

[aion-rsa]

Synchronic Ending Makes Sci-Fi Movie a Modern Classic

https://ift.tt/32n6OOU

This article contains Synchronic spoilers.

“Time is the school in which we learn / Time is the fire in which we burn,” wrote poet Delmore Schwartz decades ago, and if any genre filmmakers take that couplet to heart, it’s Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead. The self-contained directing/writing/producing/acting pair have made four feature films to date, each of them dealing in some way with the passage of time, the volatility of memory, and the warping of both.

Their fourth feature, last year’s Synchronic—which makes its Netflix debut this week—is the duo’s most mature, fully developed, and coherent film yet, while also their most polished and accessible in a mainstream sense. It continues the filmmakers’ exploration of the themes they’ve touched on before, but adds a new dimension in terms of the way the story’s main character responds to the choices placed in front of him at the movie’s climax.

On the road to that mind-bending finale, Anthony Mackie stars as Steve, a New Orleans paramedic who works the overnight shift alongside his best friend Dennis (Jamie Dornan). Steve is also close with Dennis’ wife Tara (Katie Aselton) and teen daughter Brianna (Ally Ioannides), despite being resolutely single, perhaps alcoholic and suddenly aware that he has an inoperable brain tumor and six weeks to live.

The two friends begin to respond to a series of bizarre, gruesome incidents at work, discovering —are somehow tied to a new designer drug called Synchronic, which is making its way into parties and drug dens. When Brianna disappears after possibly taking the drug herself, Steve decides to find out exactly where Synchronic comes from and what it does. It’s an investigation that propels Steve on a reality-shattering journey.

As it turns out, Synchronic affects the pineal gland in the brain and allows users to travel backwards in time, but they have no control over where they end up and their destination is only dictated by the place in which they’re physically located when they take the drug. Desperate to find Brianna for his anguished friends before his own time is up, Steve begins to experiment with the drug to see if he can navigate through time, without knowing if he can even bring her back.

Working with bankable Hollywood actors for the first time, the filmmakers address themes here that have cropped up in their films repeatedly, including that of addiction on top of stories about memory and time.

Their earlier films focused on the fool’s pursuit of trying to escape from real life—through drugs, isolation and storytelling as in Resolution, through reckless love in Spring, and through existence in a controlled, unhealthy environment as in The Endless. But Synchronic explores the notion that one can spiritually come back from that sort of doomed escape (even if it involves time travel) by caring less about one’s own impulses than the well-being of those around us.

Nowhere is this clearer than in Steve’s character arc and the way that his journey concludes in the film’s ending. When we first meet Steve, he is dissolute and lonely despite his close relationship with Dennis and family. He drinks, is quite possibly alcoholic, and wanders through a number of pointless one-night stands. He and Dennis, who’s just barely surviving a crumbling marriage, numb themselves to the day-to-day monotony of their lives and the horrors they see on the job. Even the news that Steve may just have a short time left to live because of an inoperable tumor on his pineal gland doesn’t seem to rattle him that much.

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It’s only Brianna’s shocking disappearance, combined with the information that his condition may actually make him capable of saving her, which sparks something in Steve. As we learn from the scientist who developed Synchronic, the drug affects perception through the pineal gland, allowing the user to experience time all at once instead of in a linear, forward-moving line. Since our pineal glands age along with the rest of us, it’s more difficult for adults to experience this. They can only travel to the past in a non-corporeal form.

But the younger one is, and the less “calcified” one’s pineal gland is, the more one can actually, physically venture into the past. Ironically, the tumor on Steve’s pineal gland has prevented the organ from aging in the same way, allowing him, even as an adult, to move physically into the past. Brianna has done the same thing but has no way back without another dose of Synchronic.

After buying up the last of the local Synchronic supply and using much of it for his experiments, Steve has just two pills left. He is able to deduce where in the past Brianna went and takes one pill to get there. As long as the person taking the pill is physically holding onto another living thing in the past or present, that living thing, animal or human, can travel with them as well. Steve’s plan is to find Brianna, take the last pill and hold her so that they can both return to the present.

The scheme works at first: Steve finds Brianna, although they appear to have transported to the midst of some kind of Civil War battle zone on the New Orleans waterfront, and gives her the last pill. A local, deranged woman approaches Steve and Brianna with a gun. As Steve moves toward her to protect Brianna, they lose physical contact and Brianna returns to the present, leaving Steve trapped in the past.

We only glimpse Steve one more time, as a “ghost” in the present, but it’s long enough for him to see Dennis and Brianna reunited, and for Dennis to realize the enormity of what his friend has done. With Dr. Kermani having committed suicide after destroying the rest of the remaining drug, there is no way for anyone to journey again to the past and retrieve Steve. And with the latter stuck in a time period and place where it doesn’t look like medical treatments are exactly top-notch, it’s unlikely that he’ll be able to live very long with the tumor still in his head.

But that doesn’t seem very important to Steve when we last see him. While his own life is now forfeit, he has taken action to change the lives of others around him. He has saved Brianna and countless others from the terrifying effects of Synchronic, and he has given Dennis a newfound appreciation for his family that will hopefully bring them back together.

While we ultimately can’t control time—“the fire in which we burn”—and while life is random, dangerous and unkempt no matter where or when we are, it is up to us to take what small actions we can to somehow make existence just a little bit less cruel. Steve has learned that lesson, even at the presumed cost of his own life. How many of us would do the same?

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The profound nature of its themes, coupled with the imaginative narrative and unique imagery in which those themes are staged, is what makes Synchronic, in our opinion, one of the best genre films of recent vintage. It’s a cult sci-fi/horror classic that will, if you pardon the expression, stand the test of time.

Synchronic is now streaming on Netflix.

The post Synchronic Ending Makes Sci-Fi Movie a Modern Classic appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3uOKo5k

[stratamuzak]

Interview with Voltagehawk

STRATA: What artists in particular you are drawn to (alive or deceased) that you listen to for particular moods? Such as happy/sad/contemplative/etc… Explain why you might listen to one artist for a particular mood.

CHASE AROCHA When I want to feel inspired I listen to a lot of the different projects of Mike Patton. Be it Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, Peeping Tom, or Tomahawk, the range of styles of music is so diverse that I’ve been listening for like 15 years and I haven’t gotten bored yet, haha. When I want to relax or chill, I love BadBadNotGood, an amazing jazz artist doing incredible arrangements all in a hip-hop context. It’s great! Or Ray Lynch, I really love his writing and use of counterpoint melody. Then if I’m getting hyped I put on something like Dying Fetus or Vitriol, or Maximum the Hormone. And any other time I’m blaring Kamasi Washington, Robert Glasper and Sturgill Simpson.

DAN FENTON I think a lot of the time music finds my mood. Sort of more a spiritual or cosmic connection. When I was a kid my mom would make us watch musicals if we stayed home sick from school. Jokes was on her because I hated school but I loved learning musical scores and how to write dynamic parts and movements. The fact that people like Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra or Marlon Brand were also amazing actors only added to that unlikely education. I learned how to really feel music between that and the intense very bloody hymns we had to sing in church. I understand the sentiment but that shit is harder than a lot of black metal. “Are you washed in the blood of the lamb”. Hard core shit. Sorry, I digress. During the making of our most recent record which is called Electric Thunder and set for release later this year or early next (hard to navigate releases with all this pandemic shit) I listened exclusively to film scores, classical music and radio evangelists. I am not religious but I grew up in a preacher’s home and when I needed to get my creative push and anger at its peak, I listened to preachers who were clearly greed driven and motivated by the lust for power. It made my adrenaline rush in anger and it came out in the recording for sure. I am a huge fan of Hans Zimmer and Vangelis. Each of these artists move me in powerful ways. The juxtaposition of darkness and light both in traditional instrumentation and experimental synth based work. Just musical giants. When I am feeling frustrated about the social issues I see everyday in my East Nashville neighborhood I listen to KRS-One, Kamasi Washington, Outkast. A lot of protest music. I am in love with band IDLES from the UK. Such powerful lyrics tackling issues like the need for male vulnerability, equality for all and the  seemingly ironic brutal beat down of toxic masculinity. That band is great if you’re happy, mad, sad, whatever.

STRATA: Do you have a process you go through prior to writing, playing, and even performing?

CHASE AROCHA I do a lot of breathing exercises like the Wim Hof techniques. I have generalized anxiety disorder and I used to get horrible debilitating panic attacks, it helped me get into breathing and meditation. Anxiety will never go away but you learn ways to live with it and push through your panic. I think about how much this means to me and how long I’ve spent doing it, I try to see that I value myself as a person and then from that thinking I can just let go and play music. Only approaching it with love and not worrying about mistakes because that’s how we learn.

DAN FENTON The entire thing is one process. Like a heros journey of sorts. I listen and meditate everyday, I believe in a cosmic river of inspiration that flows from an energy that is and has always been. I believe if you listen hard enough and give yourself to the music the muse will send your mind transmissions that may only be a section of a song, or perhaps they are an entire album, but everyday I show up. A few years ago I read this book called The War Of Art, by Steven Pressfield. In this book he describes the invisible force he calls the Resistance. The Resistance may be things both “good or bad”, but they are anything that keeps you from showing up for your art. So I show up everyday, you can ask the dudes in the band, they receive a work tape maybe twice a week with new shit to try out. If I don’t feel that muse working I don’t force it, but I instead wait on further transmissions from the cosmic womb. All sounds crazy, but my story is crazy, so crazy makes the most sense. In the studio I have many processes. I found while recording vocals I perform better in complete darkness, I have realized how much I live inside my head and how active my imagination is and equally ADD my eyes are. So when I can’t see it brings to life the imagery and the passion of the song. I can see all those people I write about, all the landscapes, the love, lust, joy and pain. I also do some method stuff, keep things in my pockets pertaining to a character I may be portraying in a song. Wanna be Daniel Day Lewis shit.

STRATA: Your own current project, discuss the process your music went through as you built each layer. From beginning to the end of it. 

CHASE AROCHA This all started with our drummer Jarrad having a vision and going through trials and errors of finding the right people to execute that. Along the way Dan, Tyler, and I all came into the picture and that vision morphed into something we all felt was not even from us. Like we were an antenna receiving a signal and these riffs and lyrics quickly meshed into something I haven’t heard before. Part hard rock, part jazz, part punk and hardcore. All with this message of love and truth being the reason for living. To end the ones controlling our thoughts and dividing us or tribalism and greed. I feel like we made something worth listening to and that’s all I feel like you can really hope for.

DAN FENTON The self titled record that we have available now on all streaming platforms was two different profound stages in my life all in the making of one record. When we began, Jarrad and I partied a fuck ton, and I was descending into some serious personal shit with alcohol. It was bad, I couldn’t get through a day without way too high of a blood alcohol level. Before we finished vocals on the record, I stayed up one night working and drinking, perhaps I had never stopped from how many nights before, who fucking knows. Anyhow, I died for 9 minutes on the side porch of my house. Fully shut down, fucking dead. Mind you, I didn’t want to die, I just didn’t know how to lay off the bottle. Woke up in the ICU surrounded by my band, my wife and what few friends I had left. At that moment Voltagehawk became a complete family to me. I spent a stint in rehab (Jarrad drove me) and that was several years ago now. When I got out I went back to finish the record, make some amends and chase this thing out for real. So that was some info on the first record. The new Album which is a 13 song space odyssey named Electric Thunder, after our beloved Electric Thunder Studio owned and operated by our resident space wizard producer Geoff Piller, was not so dramatic. After I got my shit together and my mind cleared up I began to write everyday like a mad man. Song after song after song came like never before. I think we cut 15 songs out before we settled on the final 13. Our process as a band is often for myself or one of the other dudes to present a bare bones or often finished idea to the band and we run it through the Hawk Filter. The Hawk Filter is just the decomposition and reconstruction of every rough idea till it fits us. Which is silly to say because if we like, it we do it, not a matter of genre worship. Shit’s good, do it. Always do what’s best for the song.

STRATA: Can your music personally be an open door to breath and bend in the world of artistic exploration? In Other Words… how comfortable are you as an artist exploring other types of music and creating projects that might be totally  different than what you are creating now?

CHASE AROCHA There is so much great music in the world in so many styles, why shouldn’t we try to explore them all! I’m always trying something I haven’t done before, not always as a challenge, but I would hope it’s natural for people to do in art. We shouldn’t be the same people we were 2 years ago, let alone 10. I love jazz, Death Metal, and country music. If you can find a really fun and genuine way to blend those then that’s absolutely what you should do! Don’t be tied down to what kind of music you’re making and just make music.

DAN FENTON That’s all we do all day. Everything on this planet, and above it, and in it’s majestic seas and mountains, all these people of all the cultures of all the world and their energy and their culture all influence and musical inspiration is welcome. Our philosophy is never say no, and jump off the cliff, and pull yourself back up. Meaning: try all the musical options then settle on the one we believe is the most amazing. So much of our influence is from cinema and books, video games, you name it. I’ll pluck a support cable on every bridge I see ‘til I am dead just to see if it speaks to me. Sonically there are no fucking rules, and if you impose rules, fuck your rules. We love to create, to talk about creating and then to birth something new is beyond amazing.

STRATA: Are you open to change your style, genre even, and approach to how and what you create every time you enter a studio? Or do you find once you have a formula in place do you find it best to stay with what you know? Many times artists will change how they approach their songwriting and even their recording staff/producers.

CHASE AROCHA

Like I said before, I believe that you should just make music and with that should come constant experimentation. When we record we find sounds from all over the place. From children’s toy instruments, to skateboard wheels spinning to imitate rain. Our writing is kind of always evolving and changing. Dan is an amazing writer who literally has lyrics and melodies pouring out of his hands and face. Everyday he has new ideas and records and sends them to everyone. Jarrad is great at taking those riffs and making suggestions on how the structure could be of a song along with feel. I am obsessed with adding layers of guitars however I can, but I also write a lot and send tracks as well. Tyler is a tone junkie on the bass, filling in the bottom end and has such a great approach to being independent from the guitars with his lines. We send tracks back and forth to each other then we get in a room and flesh them out. The whole time in the process the songs are constantly changing and evolving into the sound we have. We are always open to change and never believe in the word No when discussing music and art. You try every idea and see what works and what doesn’t. Sometimes when one member has a vision of how a song should go and is trying to communicate that,  you should respect his idea and see it through. If it doesn’t work that’s okay, we tried!

DAN FENTON Voltagehawk is ever evolving. As it stands, we spend way too much time trying to pigeon hole what people will refer to our sound as. I don’t care what you call it as long as it moves you. I listen to everything from John Coltrane and Tom Waits to Napalm Death and Motorhead, Antonio Lucio Vivaldi to Kamasi Washington. IDLES and Bad Brains. If you refuse to evolve as an artist, experimenting, growing, trying new methods, all these elements then you cannot grow as a human being. Too many people are happy where they are, just okay, making the same music that their dads made and trying to cosplay some kind of yesteryear. We don’t do that shit, we’re us, that’s it. We grow, when you hear the Electric Thunder for the first time you will understand everything. If you burn some sage next to a photo of Carl Sagan while you listen to Electric Thunder, you will see the cosmic river in your minds eye. The world is full of people with a blockage in their brain. They cannot see that this bullshit we call a life is just a series of labor for hire gigs that leave us rapidly in the middle. We’re trying to break away from it all and follow our feathers, our truth, our search for enlightenment on our hero’s journey. I’ll leave you with this. Know Thyself.

[utopianparadoxist]

Marvus Xoloto: Lord of Blood?

Alright all the weird intense Rage stuff aside, here’s some Classpect talk.

So long story short, Marvus feels like our legit Lord. Like, the verb Command is right there. I’ve written about why I see Command as the key verb for Lord, Muse before, but to recap/add on to the idea:

Command comes up with Caliborn like, a lot. Its also the name of the little arrows that connect every page of Homestuck. Every Command is a sort of direct attempt at mind control to the characters, as Hussie frames it--whether delivered by Exiles, the audience, or “The Author” himself.

The Muse seems inclined to wield that power through inspiration--once given a compelling enough idea, an actor can do nothing but work in relation to it, an artist can do nothing but work on it, as though they were possessed or enslaved.

The Lord seems to wield it through sheer dominance, or charisma--like a King who’s will cannot be denied. I’m sure I don’t need to explain how that relates to Marvus. Y’all know.

So let’s cover why I think he’s a Lord of Blood specifically.

PSYCHE.

I lied there’s a little more Lord stuff to go. So with Boldir, I guessed that just like our apparent Muse had a spiral in a place important to her, so might our Lord. Initially, with Marvus, I didn’t see anything and figured it was bullshit.

Imagine my surprise when I took another look at the Church. Now, to be fair, this spiral was always there, so its not exactly unique to Marvus. Chahut brought us here first, after all.

But it’s notable that Marvus brought us here because he was somehow aware it provided metaphysical safety. It’s “Hallowed ground, bizznatch.” That could be simple religious belief, but Marvus is a little too aware of the nature of reality for me to buy that. He’s aware of the rules of PSpace in a way Chahut isn’t, and the spiral is one of the rules. So it feels somewhat significant.

I also guessed that, since Boldir’s sign actually features the spiral, the sign of our potential Lord might well feature it as well. This was how I initially arrived to my guess of Lord of Blood. The sign of the “Taskmaster” felt fitting to someone who seemed like the ringmaster of a circus, and it still feels somewhat accurate here.

Now I can add this nugget: This is also one of a few purple signs that feature a crucifix or cross in the design. Given that a crucifix figures prominently in his path, that also feels notable.

Even so, this is all pretty circumstantial and quite likely bullshit. Like I said before, Marvus seems to showcase a mastery of many Aspects, and so its difficult to really be sure I’ve got him pinned down, especially based on some hazy symbolism stuff we aren’t sure is relevant.

Even so, lets get to his Blood imagery, which I feel is pretty strongly emphasized in this route--more than any other Aspect, barring Rage. And into why I think its through Blood that he carries his most definitive command over other people.

There’s a couple outright references to Blood early on, describing his effect on everyone around him. His very nature creates conflict, as the overzealous loving passion of his fans meets the violent restriction of his bodyguards.

(Note: “Violence” here isn’t just force applied to hurt someone, but the denial of choice: Society saying no to the free spirited desires of the individual. It’s bondage, where Breath is flight.

This more abstract and cerebral take on violence is the one Kankri is more concerned with, but we see it with Karkat too--he knows all too well what happens to someone “outside” the norms of restriction, not just wrt blood color but with his desires and inclinations as well.)

These are classic Blood themes, all coming to the fore simultaneously.

Passion and commitment meet societal restriction, and the violence through which restriction is enforced. Blood flows in the wake of that conflict.

We see the conflict distilled during the concert. References to physical agony and mortal suffering are made, both of which are significant Blood ideas--the most recent example being Tyzias’ famous quote: “there’s so mmmmuch suffering.”

Though to be fair, that might have at least something to do with Zebruh. Blood may be associated with physical bondage and suffering, but Doom is quite literally the suffering Aspect, so its something of an area of overlap--Likely born at least partly from their close association on the Aspect wheel.

And the MSPA Reader of course falls into the romantic, committed, relationship-focused side of Blood--willing to do anything at all to share a connection with him.

The two ideas fuse at the height of his performance, as it makes the MSPA Reader keenly aware of their physical suffering and subjects them to enormous violence and agony, whilst paradoxically keeping them spellbound to the mortal plane where they’re experiencing it. Violence, suffering, commitment, relationship.

Later, the MSPA Reader directly takes on Blood’s violent enforcer position, punching out teens desperate to establish a relationship with Marvus.

And Marvus doesn’t just absently invite these dynamics. He’s keenly aware of both the commitment to a relationship with him his fans experience, and the social obligation he would be subjected to as a result of it, unless the performance is violent enough.

He’s also deeply cognizant of the social restrictions imposed on Purplebloods as a caste, and the various forms of literal and institutional violence through which they’re enforced.

As well as the revolutionary implications of subverting or questioning those restrictions. In other words, Marvus has a deep understanding of the social glue that holds Alternia, a vertical structure held together by repression imposed from top to bottom, with blood spilled through brutality the whole way down.

But of course, understanding doesn’t make a Lord. Command does.

I’ve long said that Paradox Space is a place born of the wills of the individual, and it could be said that what the classes describe, more than anything, is the means by which a Hero most effectively applies their will to reality to achieve any given desired result.

This is what makes Lords and Muses so powerful--they shine at understanding the capabilities and inclinations of everyone around them, and more than anything, controlling and directing the other to achieve their own desired result. A Page might inspire others to serve them and rise to Kingship through their devoted teamwork, but to a Lord this innocence is unnecessary:

Be it freely given, manipulated or coerced, a Lord is supremely talented at dominating, and getting others to give them exactly what they want. When Marvus’ presence suggests silence, the silence is absolute among all blood castes. When Marvus wants his audience ready to turn up, they are so fucking ready. His every request is undeniable, and his will is others’ command.

What makes him scary is that he knows how to use that power. What he does with the Player’s execution is actually pretty clever--he pulls off a small magic trick, simply pretending to stab them. The illusion would fall apart under the most cursory scrutiny, but Marvus knows that doesn’t matter, because he’s working his real magic on the audience.

Marvus knows exactly how his stage will be segmented, and all he needs to do is kickstart a cascade of violent euphoria amongst the lowbloods, who by their structural disadvantage are too far away to tell the difference. (Interesting that the tealbloods are singled out as the rough origin point, considering their Mind association and how vulnerable Terezi was to Gamzee’s Rage-y predation.)

Even any highbloods who figured out what he’s up to are screwed, trapped by their own lucky blood closest to the stage and under his net, where they must fight if they want to get out alive. But nobody does. Once the climactic bloodbath is finished, nobody survives.

Which Marvus expected would happen. He told us so earlier. If Marvus isn’t literally massacring his fans with every performance he gives, he’s doing it during enough of them that it doesn’t feel much like hyperbole. And he does it effortlessly, through a simple understanding of how to move the crowd the way he wants to, like the ringmaster of a circus or the conductor of an orchestra.

This is one hells of powerful clown--frightfully intelligent and ruthless when he deems it necessary, even under the niceguy suave wokeness. Joey’s going to have a powerful ally on her side if they team up. Though I can’t help but worry that the old Purpleblood capriciousness might have him turn on us if the circumstances are right. Or, his ruthless pragmatism could make him end up feeling like a bit of a Vriska.

Probably both are gonna happen. Oh well. Anyway that’s why I see him as a Lord, and one of Blood specifically. Don’t hold me to it because frankly, if I’m really honest, there’s only one train of thought with Marvus that I’m really committed to:

He’s really hot and I’ve been the naughtiest, so frankly he can--

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Lore Episode 30: Deep and Twisted Roots (Transcript) - 21st March 2016

tw: blood

Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous re-reading on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!

In the early 1990s, two boys were playing on a gravel hill near an old, abandoned mine outside of Griswold, Connecticut. Kids do the oddest things to stave off boredom, so playing on a hill covered in small rocks doesn’t really surprise me, and my guess is they were having a blast – that is, until one of them dislodged two larger rocks. But when the rocks tumbled free and rolled down the hill, both boys noticed something odd about them. They were nearly identical in shape, and that shape was eerily familiar. They headed down the hill one last time to take a closer look, and that’s when they realised what they’d found: skulls. At first, the local police were brought in to investigate the possibility of an unknown serial killer. That many bodies all in one place was never a good sign, but it became obvious very quickly that the real experts they needed were, in fact, archaeologists – and they were right. In the end, 29 graves were discovered in what turned out to be the remnants of a forgotten cemetery. Time and the elements had slowly eroded away the graveyard, and the contents had been swallowed by the gravel. Many skeletons were still in their caskets, though, and it was inside one of them, marked with brass tacks to form the initials of the occupant, that something unusual was discovered. Long ago, it seems, someone had opened this casket shortly after burial and had then made changes to the body. Specifically, they’d removed both femurs, the bones of the thigh, and placed them across the chest. Then, moving some of the ribs and the breast bone out of the way, they placed the skull above them. It was a real-life skull and crossbones, and its presence hinted at something darker. The skeleton, you see, wasn’t just the remains of an ordinary early settler of the area. This man was different, and the people who buried him knew it. According to them, he had been a vampire. I’m Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.

While it might be a surprise to some people, graves like the one in Griswold are actually quite common. Today, we live in the Bram Stoker era of vampires, so our expectations and imagery are highly influenced by his novel and the world it evokes – Victorian gentlemen in dark cloaks, mysterious castles, sharp fangs protruding over blood red lips. But the white face and red lips started life as nothing more than stage make-up, an artefact from a 1924 theatrical production of the novel called Count Dracula. Another feature we associate with Dracula, his high-collar, also started there. With wires attached to the points of the collar, the actor playing Dracula could turn his back on the audience and drop through a trap door, leaving an empty cape behind to fall on the floor moments later. The true myth of the vampire, though, is far older than Stoker. It’s an ancient tree with deep and twisted roots. As hard as it is for popular culture to fathom, the legend of the vampire and the people who hunt it actually predate Dracula by centuries. Just a little further into the past than Bram Stoker, in the cradle of what would one day become the United States, the people of New England were identifying vampire activity in their own towns and villages and then assembling teams of people to deal with what they perceived as a threat. It turns out that Griswold was one of those communities. According to the archaeologists who studied the 29 graves, a vast majority of them were contemporary to the vampire’s burial, and most of those showed signs of an illness. Tuberculosis is the most likely guess, which goes a long way toward explaining why the people did what they did. The folklore was clear – the first to die from an illness was usually the cause of the outbreak that followed. Patient 0 might be in the grave, sure, but they were still at work, slowly draining the lives of the others.

Because of this belief, bodies all across the north-east were routinely exhumed and destroyed in one way or another. In many ways, it was as if the old superstitions were clawing their way out of the depths of the past to haunt the living. The details of another case from Stafford, Connecticut in the late 1870s illustrate the ritual perfectly. After a family there lost five of their six daughters to illness, the first to have passed away was dug up and examined. This is what was recorded about the event: “Exhumation has revealed a heart and lungs,” they wrote, “still fresh and living, encased in rotten and slimy integuments, and in which, after burning these portions of the defunct, a living relative, else doomed and hastening to the grave, has suddenly and miraculously recovered”. This sort of macabre community event happened frequently in places like Connecticut, Vermont, New York, New Hampshire and even Ontario, Canada, and long-time listeners of Lore will of course remember the subject of the very first episode, and how the family of Mercy Brown in Rhode Island exhumed her body after others died, doing a very similar thing. Mercy Brown wasn’t the first American vampire, though. As far as we can tell, that honour goes to the wife of Isaac Burton of Manchester, Vermont, all the way back in 1793, and for as chilling and dark the exhumation of Mercy Brown might have been, the Burton incident puts that story to shame.

Captain Isaac Burton married Rachel Harris in 1789, but their marriage was brief. Within months of the wedding, Rachel took sick with Tuberculosis, what was then called “consumption” because of the way the disease seemed to waste the person away, as if they were being consumed by something unseen. Rachel soon died, leaving her husband a young widower, but that didn’t last long. Burton married again in April of 1791, this time to a woman named Hulda Powell. But again, within just two years of their marriage, Burton’s bride became ill. Friends and neighbours started to whisper and as people are prone to do, they began to try and draw conclusions. Unanswered questions bother us, so we tend to look for reasons, and the people of Manchester thought they knew why Hulda was sick. Although Isaac’s wife, Rachel, had been dead for nearly three years, the people of Manchester suggested that she was the cause. Clearly, from her new home in the graveyard, she was draining the life from her husband’s new bride. With Burton’s permission, the town prepared to exhume her and end the curse. The town blacksmith brought a portable forge to the gravesite and nearly 1000 people gathered there to watch the grim ceremony unfold. Rachel’s liver, heart and lungs were all removed from her corpse and then reduced to ashes. Sadly, though, Hulda Burton never recovered, and she died a few months later. This ancient ritual, as far as the people of Manchester, Vermont were concerned, had somehow failed them. They did what they had been taught to do, as unpleasant as it must have been, and yet it hadn’t worked – which was odd, because that hadn’t always been the case.

A lot of what we think we know about the roots of the vampire legend is thanks to Dracula, the novel by Bram Stoker. Most of us know the basics – Stoker built a mythology around a historical figure from the fifth century named Vlad III. Vlad was from the kingdom of Wallachia, now part of modern-day Romania. Vlad had two titles: Vlad Tepes, which meant “The Impaler”, referred to his brutal military tactics in defence of his country; the other, Vlad Dracul, or “The Dragon”, referred to his membership in the Order of the Dragon, a military order founded to protect Christian Europe from the armies of the invading Ottoman Empire. But Bram Stoker never travelled to Romania. The castle that he describes as the home of Dracula, a real-life fortress known as Bran Castle, was just an image he found in a book that he felt captured the mood he was aiming for. Bran Castle, as far as historians can tell, has no connection to Vlad III whatsoever. The notion of a vampire, or at least of an undead creature that feeds on the living, does have roots in the area, though. Stoker was close, but he missed the mark by a little more than 300 miles. The real roots of the legend, according to most historians, can be found in modern-day Serbia. Serbia of today sits at the south-western corner of Romania, just south of Hungary. Between 1718 and 1739, the country passed briefly from the hands of the Ottoman Empire to the control of the Austrians. Because of its place between these two empires, the land was devastated by war and destruction and people were frequently moved around in service to the military, and as is often the case, when people cross borders, so do ideas.

Petar Blagojevich was a Serbian peasant in the village of Kisiljevo in the early 1700s. Not much is known about his life, but we do know that he was married and had at least one son, and in 1725, through causes unknown, Petar died at the age of 62. In most stories, that’s the end, but not here. You probably knew that, though, didn’t you? In the eight days that followed Petar’s death, other people in the village began to pass away. Nine of them, in fact, and all of them made startling claims on their death beds, details that seemed impossible to prove but were somehow the same in each case. Each person was adamant that Petar Blagojevich, their recently deceased neighbour, had come to them in the night and attacked them. Petar’s widow even made the startling claim that her dead husband had actually walked into her home and asked for, of all things, his shoes. She believed so strongly in this visit that she moved to another village to avoid future visits. The rest of the people of Kisiljevo took notice. Something had to be done, and that would begin with digging up Petar’s corpse. Inside the coffin, they found Petar’s body to be remarkably preserved. Some noticed how the man’s nails and hair had grown. Others remarked on the condition of his skin, which was flush and bright, not pale. It wasn’t natural, they said, and something had to be done. They turned to a man named Frombald, a local representative of the Austrian government, and together with the help of a priest he examined the body for himself. In his written report, he confirmed the earlier findings and added his observation that fresh blood could be seen inside Petar’s mouth. Frombald describes how the people of the village were overcome with fear and outrage, and how they proceeded to drive a wooden stake through the corpse’s heart. Then, still afraid of what the creature might be able to do to them in the future, the people burnt the body. Frombald’s report details all of it, but he also makes the disclaimer that he wasn’t responsible for the villager’s actions. He said that it was fear that drove them to it, nothing more. Petar’s story was powerful, and it created a panic that quickly spread throughout the region. It was the first event of its kind in history to be recorded in official government documents, but that report was still missing an official cause. Without it, the stories might have died where they started. But then, just a year later, something happened, and the legend had never been the same.

Arnold Paole was a former soldier, one of the many men transplanted by the Austrian government in an effort to defend and police their newly acquired territory. No one is sure where he was born, but his final years were spent in a Serbian village along the great Morava river, near Paraćin. In his post-war life, Arnold became a farmer, and he frequently told stories from days gone by. In one such story, Arnold claimed that he had been attacked by a vampire years before while living in Kosovo. He survived, but the injury continued to plague him until he finally took action. He said that he cured himself by eating soil from the grave of the suspected vampire, and then, after digging up the vampire’s body, he collected some of its blood and smeared it on himself. And that was it – according to Arnold and the folklore that drove him to it, he was cured. When he died in a farming accident in 1726, though, people began to wonder, because within a month of his death at least four other people in town complained that Arnold had visited them in the night and attacked them. When those people died, the villagers began to whisper in fear. They remembered Arnold’s stories – stories of being attacked by a vampire, of taking on the disease himself, stories of his own attempt to cure himself. But what if it hadn’t worked? Out of suspicion and doubt, they decided to exhume his body and examine it. Here, for what was most likely the first time in recorded history, the story of the vampire was taking on the form of a communicable disease, transmitted from person to person through biting. This might seem obvious to us now, but we’ve all grown up with the legend fully formed. To the people of this small, Serbian village, though, this was something new and horrific. What they found seemed like conclusive evidence, too: fresh skin, new nails, longer hair and beard. Arnold even had blood in his mouth. Putting ourselves in their context, it’s easy to see how they might have been chilled with fear – so they drove a stake through his heart. One witness claimed that, as the stake pierced the corpse’s chest, the body groaned and bled. Unsure of what else to do, they burned the body, and then they did the same to the four who had died after claiming Arnold attacked them. They covered all their bases, so to speak, and then walked away.

Five years later, though, another outbreak spread through the village. We know this because so many people died that the Austrian government sent a team of military physicians from Belgrade to investigate the situation. These men, led by two officials named Glaser and Flückinger, were special, though, because they were trained in communicable diseases, which was a good thing. By January 7th of 1731, just eight weeks after the beginning of the outbreak, 17 people had died. At first, Glaser had looked for signs of a contagious disease, but came up empty-handed. He noted signs of mild malnutrition, but there was nothing deadly that could be found. The clock was ticking, though. The villagers were living in such fear that they had been gathering together into large groups each night, taking turns keeping watch for the creatures they believed were responsible. They even threatened to pack up and move elsewhere. Something needed to be done, and quickly. Thankfully, there were suspects. The first was a young woman named Stana, a recent newcomer to the village who had died during childbirth early on in the outbreak. It seemed to have been a sickness that took her life, but there were other clues. Stana had confessed to smearing vampire blood on herself years before as protection, but that, the villagers claimed, had backfired, and most likely turned her into one instead. The other suspect was an older woman named Milica. She was also from another part of Serbia, and had arrived shortly after Arnold’s death. Like so many others, she had a history. Neighbours claimed that she was a good woman who never did anything intentionally wicked, but she had told them once of how she’d eaten meat from a sheep killed by a vampire, and that seemed like evidence enough to push the investigation to go deeper… literally.

With permission from Belgrade, Glaser and the villagers exhumed all of the recently deceased, opening their coffins for a full examination, and while logic and science should have prevailed in a situation like that, what they found only deepened their belief in the supernatural. Of the 17 bodies, only five appeared normal, in that they had begun to decay in a manner that should be expected. These were reburied and considered safe, but it was the other 12 that alarmed the villagers and the government men alike, because these bodies were still fresh. In the report filed in Belgrade in January of 1732, signed by all five of the government physicians who witnessed the exhumations, these 12 bodies were completely untouched by decay, organs still held fresh blood, their skin was healthy and firm, and new nails and hair had grown since burial. These are all normal occurrences as we understand decomposition today, but three centuries ago it was less about science and more about superstition. This didn’t seem normal to them, and so when the physician wrote their report, they used a term that, until that very moment, had never appeared in any historical account of such a case. They described the bodies as “vampiric”. In the face of unanswered questions, the only conclusion they could commit to was that each of the 12 bodies had been found in a “vampiric” condition. With that, the villagers did what their tradition demanded: they removed the heads from each corpse, gathered all the remains into a pile, and then burned the whole thing. The threat to the village was finally dead and gone, but it was too late. Something new had been born, something more powerful than a monster, something that lives centuries and spreads like fire: a legend.

[21:20]

Many aspects of folklore haven’t faired too well under the critical eye of science. Today, we have a much deeper understanding of how illness and disease really works, and while experts are still careful to explain that every corpse decomposes in a slightly unique way, we have a better grasp of the full picture now than any previous time in history. Answers, when we can find them, come as a relief. It’s safe to say that we don’t have to fear a vampiric infection when the people around us get sick today, but there were still people at the centre of these ancient stories, normal folk like you and me, who simply wanted to do what was right. We might do it differently today, but it’s hard to fault them for trying. Answers don’t kill every myth, though. Vampire stories, like their immortal subjects, have simply refused to die. In fact, they can still be found, if you know where to look for them. In the small, Romanian village of Marotinu de Sus, near the south-western corner that borders Bulgaria and Serbia, authorities were called in to investigate an illegal exhumation, but this wasn’t 1704 or even 1804. This happened just a decade ago. Petre Toma had been the clan leader there in the village, but after a lifetime of illness and hard drinking, his accidental death in the field almost came as a relief to his family and friends. That’s how they put it, at least. So, when he was buried in December of 2003, the community moved on. But individuals from Petre’s family began to get sick. First it was his niece, Mirela Marinescu. She complained that her uncle had attacked her in her dreams. Her husband made the same claim, and both offered their illness as proof. Even their infant child was not well. Thankfully, the elders of the village immediately knew why. In response to her story, six men gathered together one evening in early 2004. They entered the local graveyard close to midnight, and then travelled to the burial site of Petra Toma. Using hammers and chisels, they broke through the stone slab that covered the grave and then moved the pieces aside. They drank as they worked. Can you really blame them? They were opening the grave of a recently deceased member of their community, but I think it was more than that. In their minds, they were putting their lives in danger, because there, inside the grave and just uncovered, lay the stuff of nightmares – a vampire. What these men did next will sound strangely familiar, but to them it was simply the continuation of centuries of tradition. They cut open the body using a knife and a saw, they pried the ribs apart with a pitchfork, and then cut out the heart. According to one of the men who was there, when the heart was removed, they found it full of fresh blood. Proof, to them at least, that Petre had been feeding on the village. When they pulled it free, the witness said that the body audibly sighed, and then went limp. It’s hard to prove something that six incredibly superstitious men – men who had been drinking all night, mind you – claimed they witnessed in a dark cemetery, but to them it was pure, unaltered truth. They then used the pitchfork to carry the heart out of the cemetery and across the road to a field, where they set it on fire. Once it was burnt completely, they collected the ashes and funnelled them into a bottle of water. They offered this tonic to the sick family, who willingly drank it. It was, after all, what they had been taught to do, and amazingly, everyone recovered. No one died of whatever illness they were suffering from, and no one reported visits from Petre Toma after that. In their mind, the nightmare was over. These men had saved their lives. Maybe something evil and contagious has survived for centuries after all, spreading across borders and oceans. It’s certainly left a trail of horrific events in its wake, and its influenced countless tales and superstitions, all of which seem to point to a real-life cause. But far from being unique to Serbia or Romania, this thing is global. And as if that weren’t enough, this horrible, ageless monster is, and always had been, right inside each of us. Like a vampiric curse, we carry it in our blood, but its probably not what you’d expect. It’s fear.

[Closing statements]

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On Seeing, A Journal. #282 Above and Beyond. Playwright, John Guare. December 4th, 2018

The cast of my ongoing project Above and Beyond was joined, recently – and perhaps fittingly – by the great American playwright John Guare. He is best known for his plays “Six Degrees of Separation,” “The House of Blue Leaves,” and “Landscape of the Body.” Guare, born in New York City, is now 80 years old, and says he wrote his first play when he was 11. His style, which mixes comic invention with an acute sense of the failure of human relations and aspirations, is at once cruel and deeply compassionate. Guare’s plays have won every imaginable award, among them, many Obies, the Laurence Olivier American Airlines Award for Best New Play, several Tony awards, New York Drama Critics awards, and the PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for a Master American Dramatist. In 1993 he was elected to the American Theater Hall of Fame. After our photography session, Guare and I sat down to talk. HS: You’ve said, " I love theatre for recognizing that everything is something else.” What does that mean? JG: That’s what makes poetry possible -- that everything is something else. There is no event, no incident, no object that cannot become something else. Yes, everything is something else, because everything is made for art. HS: You’ve also said, “Theatre is a place of poetry, suggestion and dreams." JG: Well, I couldn’t say it better myself, even if I did say it. That’s the best thing about the theatre, that the theatre is the place of transformation, and the removal of a mask. People go to theatre to see the mask removed. HS: And, you've said, “Theatre has never been an easy place." JG: Never. How could it be? It’s always competition. On one level, just trying to get fannies into the seats. I can write something but how do I get people to come and see it? The fact that a play even opens is a miracle. That you got X amount of people to come together to meet on a certain day -- a director, a designer, actors -- all to show up and tell the same story as the writer is telling, or even for all the people involved tell the same story. Everything conspires against getting a play on. And then having it run is just beside the point. Anything else is pure gravy. The fact it even got on is what is extraordinary. But the competition is mainly to be heard. There are so many valid voices out there. Why should mine be heard? Moss Hart said, brilliantly, "An audience will give any play 15 minutes of their time. They’re there; they’re yours for 15 minutes. And at the 16th minute they’ll decide if they want to go on that journey or not" The audience comes to a play to be costumed, and a failed play means the audience chose not to be costumed in the garb that the playwright and the people on stage have chosen to confer on them. And that’s what that first 15 minutes is about. It is extraordinary that, in those first 15 minutes of a play the entire conflict is laid out and we’re given the imagery to hang onto to make that play come alive. The imagery is what’s going to garb us, what’s going to cloak us. It’s extraordinary what the first 15 minutes of a play are.

HS: Are there guidelines as to what ingredients need to be written into those first 15 minutes? JG: The first 15 minutes needs to convey the central conflict of the play and the emotional coloration in which that conflict will take place. HS: I recall that you said in writing House of Blue Leaves, the first act flowed readily, but it took you five years to complete act two. JG: I didn’t have the craft to handle eight or nine people on stage. It’s a hell of a lot of people to know how to balance and not lose them. It took me a long time to learn. Actors just can’t sit there. They have to be doing something. It’s maintaining everybody’s motivation and everybody’s action, because everybody, every character in the play, has to think that the play is about them or they don’t belong in the scene. It took me a long time to learn the craft of dealing with many actors on stage. HS: The theatre is constantly coming up with innovation, new ideas, new ways of seeing things. Do you derive inspiration or ideas from seeing the plays of others? JG: Of course. I see as many plays as I can. I love to go to the theatre. I have learned a lot. I watch a lot of the new technology. I don’t get seduced by it and say, oh, it’s new, let’s use it. I say, how can I use this? Coupled with less is more. HS: What are you working on currently? JS: We’re doing a new play, called, "Nantucket Sleigh Ride", at Lincoln Center that opens March 18th, so I’m the luckiest guy in the world to have a new play, and an old friend, Jerry Zaks, who’s directing it. I love Jerry, and I’m loving the cast that we’re assembling. So I’m trying….Whenever I go into rehearsal with a play I like to have another play ready to work on the morning after. HS: When you write, do you surprise yourself? JG: I hope so. All the time, actually. You just say, oh, I didn’t expect that to happen. Every play has its own life. There are no rules to apply. I mean, we’ve been working on Blue Leaves to go back to the past, 100 years ago, and I did not…never expected Artie to kill Bananas. It was never in any of the notes, never. And when it happened I was so upset I got up and I threw up. The characters take on their true identity, where they really want to go, and you have to let them go, give them the grace to go.

HS: What is curious to me, as an artist you have to turn your work over to others; the director, the lighting, costume, actors; set. JG: No, I don’t. I’m sharing it with them. I’m letting them into the process. HS: You have control? JG: Yes, I do. If you check the Dramatists Guild contract, nothing can go on that stage without the playwright’s consent. The playwright can choose to give up that consent and allow the designer, or the costume designer, or the casting director to put whatever they want into the play. But everything that will be on that stage has to have approval of the dramatist. And that’s what the Dramatists Guild exists for… only for that purpose. That’s what holding the copyright of our own plays means. Writing for movies is so humiliating, because you give it over and you don’t know what you’re going to see of anything. That’s why I love the theatre. HS: What if a director wants to do this and you don’t want him or her to do this? JG: I would fire them as I’ve done on a couple of occasions. There’s a difference between disagreements and  coming to compromise, and understanding where you might be misguided. I’m not a fascist. There are some playwrights where nothing can be changed. HS: Your plays are done in lots of different places. JG: I’m only interested in the first production, and the first production should be a touchstone in how the play should be done. I just had my three Lydie Breeze plays done together for the first time in Philadelphia. And it was like a set I never imagined, with a cast I never imagined. And it was absolutely thrilling. It went from one until ten o’clock. And it was nothing like I imagined, a revelation, so it was just a gift to me. HS: Does the opposite occur? JG: Absolutely, absolutely. Oh, very much so; very, very, very, very much so. But that’s why I don’t go and see out-of-town productions. The nightmare of a bad production is they’re showing me the truth of my play. And that’s why I avoid it: self-protection. HS: I read about how Six Degrees of Separation came about, a story you heard. And then I understand about this young man who was a sociopath; a brilliant, imaginative, awful human being, how afterwards he then was resentful that you would write a play that was essentially, he thought, about him. And created pain in your life, I heard there was a lawsuit, there was a harassment. JG: He was trying to kill us… it was like death threats. I don’t want to go into it. 

HS: Has the current administration in Washington affected theatre or your work? JG: Sure; it’s screwed up everybody’s heads. Everybody’s…there’s nothing that we don’t see today that we don’t see in the life of injustice, of cruelty, of sheer meanness; relations between men and women. We can no longer look at things with the eyes of the tens, the nineties, the eighties, the seventies, the sixties, or whenever.

[symbolismmotifvariation]

Human? Machine? Beckett’s symbolic warning of technological dominance in Krapp’s Last Tape

Read Time: 2 mins

Without headphones we can’t hear, without microphones we can’t speak. Our world is heading towards technological domination. Technology is evolving alongside our human race; a concept Beckett symbolises through Krapp’s tape recorder. This Tragicomedy is a mirror for humanity to look upon to see the dangers we’re heading towards. How far will we go until we become the machine, or even scarier, the machine becomes us. 

This is not absurdist; it’s real and is happening right now.  

Photo by ThisisEngineering RAEng on Unsplash

My first impression of Krapp was a self-obsessed, middle-aged man. However, with Beckett’s symbolism, my eyes opened wider beyond my artificial screen light. Knowlson says we experience Krapp’s 'faded aspirations and frustrated ideals’. Krapp breaks the fourth wall inviting us into his reality, a motif used where one ‘implicitly acknowledges the artificiality of the environment’. A space where everything evolves ‘quietly’, particularly the tape recorder, his ‘memory-bank’. This device is something Krapp can’t function without as it controls him, it gains an identity of its own. This leads us to analyze technological power, questioning, when has our digital world gone too far?  

‘Krapp finally becomes a fully technological subject as his fallible body is erased by the mediation of the machine.’ Goody, pp.156-57.

Photo by PIOTR BENE on Unsplash

Krapp’s identity dissolves, he’s a slave to the machine with his ritualistic obsession brainwashing any sense of humanity left within. His vocal presence decreases as the play progresses, symbolizing the machine as subconsciously stealing it from it, eventually leaving him static.

His repetitive…

‘[Pause]’

Sorry, just had to reboot there…

His repetitive pauses symbolize his body restarting, mirroring that of a technological device, needing to refresh in order to function properly.

This sounds like Post-humanism, as Hayles claimed ‘we can see a harbinger of the post-human body’. Here, the distinction between robots and humans falls away. This personification of the recorder is furthered through its resemblance to Krapp’s lover. He quotes, ‘my face in her breasts and my hand on her’, her, as in the tape recorder! Therefore, not only displaying his lost concept of humanity, Beckett symbolises the tapes identity as human with its technological features mirroring human anatomy. The ‘[Brief laugh in which Krapp joins]’ gives the recorder a voice of its own. It holds Krapp’s memories and desires, therefore holds an automatic dominance over his submissive persona.

All you have to do is look at Sophia the Robot... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5t6K9iwcdw

Beckett himself told French actor Pierre Chabert to become one with the machine, in order to face the reality upon technology. Whilst we might see the tape recorder as a comfort to Krapp, his intimacy with it also results in a number of problematic issues. Alongside, his reliance, he too starts to imitate it, symbolizing the role swap between human and machines. Krapp’s description of ‘[switches on and assumes listening posture, i.e., leaning forward, elbows on table, hand cupping ear towards machine, face front.]’, symbolises his gradually physical, mechanised transformation. The ‘eyes’ of the human represent the ‘eyes’ of the machine, always watching and learning, symbolising humanities identity as compromised by robotic spies.  

Gontarski argues the ‘light and dark’ imagery as symbols of Krapp’s doubled ‘sides of his nature.’ The table and adjacent area under strong white light juxtaposes with the rest of stage dowsed in darkness. Such binaries symbolize the technological corruption taking over Krapp’s authentic identity. His obsession is eating all senses of normality, visually manipulating his realist vision.  

Photo by Ronaldo de Oliveira on Unsplash

This is important in our technological society!

As Weiss claims, ‘Krapp edits out certain memories and emphasised others’, allowing him to ‘rewrite the past and present’, therefore allowing him to distort identity. Who is Krapp? Are we presented with the real Krapp or has the tape recorder presented us with another identity? This exposes the dangers of technology.

Do we really know what or in this case who is behind the screen, monitoring our every move, responding to our every command? We must question how long it will take until these devices start to control us like Krapp.

Or are they already doing so? I mean, you’re relying on a tablet to read my discourse right now. Are you a slave to your screen?  

[ganymedesclock]

Occasionally I make stabs into Mononoke as a story, considering despite being a very dark story it still has a warm place in my heart, and the more I think about it the more sure I am that the Medicine Seller is an entity very similar to the mononoke himself- that the sword appears to respond to him talking about himself, and his interactions with many of the mononoke but especially the first Bakeneko and the Nue.

But something else that interests me is several times, you can actually watch the Medicine Seller operate like a mononoke- that is to say, by haunting people.

In the Noppera-Bo arc, we discover that the mostly passive Chou is the Noppera-Bo herself- and that the acts of the masked man, which have set the stage for most of it, were masterminded by the Medicine Seller. Through the illusion of the masked lover, he challenges Chou’s reality and sends it down a road that causes her to relive her life and what led to her coalescing as a mononoke.

In the Nue he’s much more obvious- because the Nue’s game relies on curating a very careful illusion where none of these people realize they’re long dead or that anything is amiss besides the murders they themselves are perpetuating. As soon as the Medicine Seller takes over the incense game, he starts acting exactly the way we’ve seen various mononoke do the entire show: he systematically confronts people with their guilt and starts picking them off. When his objective is that he needs everyone to realize they’re dead, he goes whole hog and emulates exactly the sort of thing he’s usually averting.

He’s setting his own hauntings in opposition to the Nue’s. And once he’s gotten to all the spirits with their lesser guilt, he turns his attention and power on the Nue itself.

The mononoke have the power to warp reality within their hauntings, and they often deploy subordinate “actors” to achieve this. Things like the ghost ship and umizatou for the umi-bozu.

The Medicine Seller’s ostensible equipment all appears to have some form of sentience and respond freely to his will. The mirror, the scales, the talismans, the chest and sword... because the “form” he takes is that of a merchant and peddler, his actors arrange themselves into objects. Even the masked man seems to exist in default as a pipe.

It’s possible that even the Medicine Seller as we know him is merely an “actor” for the true entity of his golden form, but, personally, I’d take a different tactic considering his comments in Noppera-Bo about form and my thoughts that his true, capital ‘f’ Form is a fox spirit.

Like the Noppera-Bo who’s difficult to nail down because its Form evokes formlessness- and who he puzzles out by nailing down Truth and Regret first before coming back to Form- the Medicine Seller is abnormally resistant to his own methods because the nature of his Form makes him a shapeshifter. And like the Noppera-Bo, he has his certain tell- both his default, other self, and the actor he uses in that arc are conspicuously marked with vulpine imagery. As someone who has mastery of multiple forms, it would be easy to use those images for himself and cast them onto his ‘actors’ as needed.

But this ultimately explains the exact mechanism by which the Medicine Seller is able to challenge mononoke, when they operate by warping reality- because so does he. When he sets up barriers using talismans, he’s confronting their distortions with his own. Thus, each arc is a battle between two supernatural entities for the control of the haunting- and ordinarily, Medicine Seller is always playing defense because he’s the one who mostly wants these people alive.

But we also, rarely, see him playing offense, and the Nue arc is the clearest example of that, because the Medicine Seller’s incense game fits very closely to the behavior of, say, the Umizatou- indiscriminately and systematically picking off everyone present by challenging them to answer a certain prompt. It’s just that given the Medicine Seller’s adaptability and nature as a shapeshifter, his hauntings are able to incorporate the language and tone set by the other mononoke- hence his actor in Noppera-Bo wearing a mask and claiming to be faceless. Heck, even his presenting himself as an exorcist to a degree might be reacting to the perceptions of his beholders- since he himself doesn’t have much fondness for the title in Umi-Bozu. 

It’s also quite possible, given the abrupt and oddly convenient way the Medicine Seller tends to pop up at the beginning of the arcs, that his appearance in and of itself is him beginning to haunt people- which would raise a question of whether he’s observable at all outside of them, or, looks like something else (like how both Bakeneko, separate from their illusions, appear to be ordinary cats, though the second was dressed in a vest and a high collar and accompanied by many others). Outside of hauntings, the Medicine Seller may take the form of whatever he was before becoming a spirit. 

[crosbysierra95]

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[briangroth27]

Stranger Things 2 Review

Stranger Things’ second season went up on Netflix last weekend and I loved it! Every episode felt full, many supporting characters from Season 1 got a turn in the spotlight, and the tone recaptured the first season’s perfect blend of dread and comedic moments that endeared me to the realistically-drawn characters. This was the television season I was looking forward to most this fall, and it did not disappoint!

Full Spoilers…

I really liked that Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo), Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin), and especially Will (Noah Schnapp) got to take center stage among the kids; it was smart to flesh out the rest of the central ensemble and it feels like we’ll be going into Season 3 with everyone on relatively equal footing development-wise. In particular, Will being absent for much of Season 1 made his time in the spotlight a crucial gamble that paid off in spades: Schnapp is just as great an actor as the rest of the show’s cast! That said, I missed Mike (Finn Wolfhard), Nancy (Natalia Dyer), and Jonathan (Charlie Heaton), who all felt like they had less screentime this year than last. While the latter two weren’t doing nothing—they had a crucial subplot that felt like the natural outgrowth of how the people of Hawkins ignored Barb’s (Shannon Purser) death—it didn’t require them to do much that we needed to see onscreen, so it felt like they vanished a bit. Perhaps Wolfhard, Dyer, and Heaton had other commitments while Season 2 was in production, but if that’s the case, I wish their plots had been more economical to cover more ground in the same amount of screentime.

Season 2 definitely felt like the natural continuation of Season 1’s events; branding this as Stranger Things 2 instead of Stranger Things Season 2 gives the impression that it’s a sequel instead of the next season in a TV series, and it definitely feels like it. I’ve seen some criticisms that said the joy of discovery wasn’t present this year like last season, but I’m willing to part with it in favor of reuniting with familiar friends on a new adventure. I like sequels and I’m always game for more time with characters I like. Though the threads may not have been as balanced as they could’ve been, I liked that everyone got to go off on their own adventures before reuniting in the climax. Mixing up the character interactions and moving new people into the spotlight provided some great fresh pairings, like Lucas/Max (Sadie Sink), Dustin/Steve (Joe Keery), Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown)/Hopper (David Harbour), and Will/Joyce (Winona Ryder)/Bob (Sean Astin). As nice as it was to see familiar locations like the junkyard come into play again, it’s time to flesh out more of Hawkins’ geography, as it’s starting to feel a little claustrophobic. New locations like the arcade definitely help, though. I loved that the Upside Down was creeping into Hawkins at an accelerated rate, creating some great imagery with the rotted pumpkin patches, decaying forests, and vine-covered tunnels just beneath its surface. Hawkins looks like the quintessential 1980s Hometown, USA, so corrupting it like this is great symbolism. However, I would’ve liked a greater exploration of the townspeople’s inhumanity and grime just below the veneer of wholesomeness the town projects. So much of Stranger Things is inspired by Stephen King as it is—the Duffer Brothers originally wanted to do IT, but couldn’t—so translating the brilliant parallel between societal evils and supernatural ones in IT’s Derry to Hawkins would’ve been a smart way to give the Upside Down’s corruption a little more weight by contrasting its evil with the evils of the real world. By no means does the Upside Down have to control the citizens to make them evil—that would be a copout—but seeing that some of the people are horrible in their own way would bring an added layer of dread to the town and further cut off our heroes’ sources of help. Billy (Dacre Montgomery) and his father (Will Chase) are a good start, but surely they aren’t the only bad people in town.

I loved how communicating through lights evolved into the map of tunnels beneath Hawkins and hope that distinctive Stranger Things aspect continues to develop in the years to come. Joyce seeing the Mind Flayer in a VHS tape’s distortion was very cool too. The CGI was excellent throughout the season, particularly when it came to the Demodogs. There wasn’t a moment as creepy as Hopper cutting open the Will dummy and pulling out cotton in Season 1, but then there wasn’t any moment in Season 1 that matched that high point of weirdness either. Even so, the horror aspect was great here! It felt like several supporting and even a few main characters—including Hopper and Steve—could die at several points. I wonder if the season-ending Snow Ball was supposed to represent that the heroes don’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of escaping the evil pervading their town (or maybe that’s just my love of puns). I wasn’t a fan of the year-and-a-half wait for this season and don’t look forward to another long hiatus, but if Stranger Things becomes an annual Halloween tradition for the next 2-3 years, I’m definitely on board. I was impressed that the trailers didn’t show much from the latter half of the season; that was a nice surprise!

I loved all the 80s references this year, with things like the Aliens movement detector sound effect being incorporated into the score during some of Dr. Owens’ (Paul Reiser) scenes and a riff that sounded like Gremlins’ theme song while the kids were chasing Dart in the school. The kid-friendly Halloween songs they used while trick-or-treating, like “The Monster Mash,” “Ghostbusters,” and “Spooky Movies,” made me think of Halloween when I was a kid (it’s a shame they couldn’t use “Thriller” in more than one excellent trailer, though!). The Police’s “Every Step You Take” was the perfect note to end on, given the government watching everyone all season, the Mind Flayer watching the Snow Ball, and how creepy that song actually is. The show’s orchestral score once again conveyed the feeling that this was a lost miniseries from the 80s perfectly. The fashion in Eleven’s Chicago adventure made me think of the 80s X-men/New Mutants comics, which was a cool peek at 80s punk style completely removed from Hawkins’ small-town world. The kids’ homemade Ghostbusters costumes were awesome, as were Max’s Michael Myers costume and Steve & Nancy’s Tom Cruise & Rebecca De Mornay (from Risky Business) outfits. While the characters played out scenes adapted from Gremlins, ET, Stand By Me, and even Jurassic Park, it never felt like nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake or inorganic to what the show is. The Goonies reference in Bob’s guess about what Will’s map led to was fun too. As pointed out in the behind-the-scenes series Beyond Stranger Things, having the kids play Dragon’s Lair and Dig Dug were cool hints at the direction of the season, since Eleven would go up against a “fiery” monster in the gate room/its “lair” and several characters ventured into the tunnels under the town. The kids’ science class learning about Phineas Gage was also a cool way to foreshadow what happens to Will, since Gage’s personality changed after his brain-damaging accident. I’m looking forward to the Back to the Future references next season, since it’ll be 1985. With the Upside Down monsters being so plant-like, maybe we’ll get Little Shop of Horrors references in Season 4/1986? 

Possibly the largest controversy of the season dealt with Eleven’s solo trip to Chicago in episode 7. I liked the episode, but it shouldn’t have aired in the middle of a cliffhanger: it disrupted the flow too much. Without Eleven in the preceding episode at all, they could’ve split “The Lost Sister” up and cut back and forth between Chicago and Hawkins in both “The Spy” and the reconfigured Episode 7, just like the earlier legs of Eleven’s journey were interspersed with the events in Hawkins. If the contrast between Chicago’s punk scene and Hawkins’ wholesome appearance were too extreme to cut back and forth, “Lost Sister” could have been placed before “The Spy.” I agree with a comment I saw on IGN’s “Lost Sister” review, which pointed out watching it first would show Mike and Hopper in danger before we knew what was happening (Mike screaming “it’s a trap” would spoil the twist, so just show him struggling with the guards and not saying that line), which would be a cool teaser. Either of those solutions would’ve been better than the jarring—but still engaging—side trip to Chicago taking up an entire episode in the middle of a Demodog swarm.

Eleven/Jane Ives Though she was sequestered from the rest of the main cast for most of the season, I liked a lot of what they did with Eleven/Jane this year. I loved the secret family she and Hopper built. Their conversation about being “halfway happy” in compromise was bittersweet and I liked seeing how they figured each other out, both in real time and in flashbacks to the start of their hidden family. Moments like their father/daughter arguments were relatable, things like Eleven wanting to go trick-or-treating as a ghost and awkwardly laughing at Hopper trying to dance were fun, and her psychic temper tantrum felt both realistic and worked as a reminder that she is definitely dangerous. Regarding those fights, it was smart to allow Hopper and Eleven to be angry with each other, but never to let them get to the point where they truly hated each other. That made them coming together again in the end believable instead of a last minute moment of civility that was supposed to make up for nine hours of hatred.

Eleven being instantly jealous about Max and Mike seemingly having fun together didn’t work as well and annoyed me a bit—especially since she knew he’d been calling her every day for nearly a year—but she’s a kid who’s been locked up and abused for a long time and you don’t have to look past her time with Hopper to see she isn’t perfect or eternally understanding, especially when it comes to seeing beyond appearances. Meeting her birth mother (Aimee Mullins) and learning as much as she could about her was emotionally satisfying and it was cool to see Terry Ives was as much a fighter in the end as her daughter. I felt Eleven’s side story in Chicago was a worthy use of her time that brought her to a place where her vengeance and feelings weren’t as important as those of people she didn’t know—she discovered empathy for strangers when she considered orphaning Ray’s (Pruitt Taylor Vince) kids—and that was a great development for her character. I just wish she hadn’t continued to shun Max once she got back to Hawkins; the two of them having a talk would’ve been better, because shutting down Max’s attempt at being friends undercuts much of the understanding she found in Chicago (not to mention at that point, she was yet another person shutting Max out, which had become repetitive). Along with bonding with Max in Season 3, I’d love to see Eleven and Will finally get to interact and become friends (and maybe even step-siblings?) when he isn’t trapped or possessed. Developing a friendship between the two would be a smart outgrowth of the many parallels between them—Eleven was even mistaken for Will at several points in Season 1—and I’m sure their connection to the Upside Down would be a powerful bonding factor. I loved that she got to shut down this year’s invasion by finally closing the gate she’d opened in the first place; the Mind Flayer will definitely remember both her and Will, so perhaps they’ll face its early attacks together.

Mike Wheeler At first it seemed like Mike wasn’t given much to do this year beyond being angry/depressed about Eleven vanishing and concerned about Will. I understand the reasoning for both—I think he actually was experiencing the “anniversary effect” of PTSD Dr. Owens thought Will was going through—but I would’ve liked to see more variety to the writing in his scenes. Then I watched Beyond Stranger Things and realized Wolfhard’s understanding of Mike this season is brilliant: he can’t impress his friends by constructing D&D maps and running campaigns since everyone’s into video games now, he can’t lead a quest to save Will (until Byers’ major episode at Halloween, though even then, Joyce leads that charge), and he can’t even find Eleven, much less help her or have her as his secret friend. I love that this builds him missing Eleven into a larger problem of him losing his place as leader of the team. Matarazzo also pointed out that while the kids struggled to find someone to talk to about what they’d been through with the threat of the government hanging over them, Mike was the sorest about being the leader who’d saved the day and couldn’t talk about it with anyone. With this in mind, the entire season focusing more on Will, Dustin, and Lucas becomes something of Mike’s view of his friends after losing his place in the group. I agree with a comment I saw elsewhere that wished Mike had gone off to find Eleven on his own, meeting up in Chicago; as impractical as that might’ve been for a kid in real life (but not in a movie), it would’ve given his feeling of being out of place a direction instead of watching as Joyce, Hopper, and Bob worked out how to help Will. That said, I absolutely loved how angry Mike got about Steve telling the kids they were on the bench during the climax, as that’s exactly what his dad (Joe Chrest) had been saying in lectures earlier in the season. That was a moment where his need to have a place and function in the group coalesced with the plot perfectly, since he (and the other kids) had literally been left out of the plan to defeat the Mind Flayer.

Still, Mike wasn’t one-note in his struggle to belong this year and Wolfhard played all the sides Mike showed very well. Mike essentially eulogizing Bob by knowing he helped found the AV Club was a glimpse at a distinct texture to a relationship we didn’t see onscreen, though I assume Mike and Bob interacted at least a little while Mike was hanging out with Will. I liked the brief scene of Mike almost having fun with Max in the gym, even if otherwise constantly shutting her out wasn’t a good look at all. He doesn’t have to be perfect, but I would’ve liked more reason to not let her in than what I took from it: a girl in the group reminded him too much of Eleven. Perhaps she represented too much change happening to the party in general: if she joined, he thought she’d be another person moving him out of relevance within the group (particularly considering how invested in her Dustin and Lucas were). I liked Mike reclaiming his position a bit with Will, comforting him after his Halloween episode and propping up his courage as their spy; those felt like great moments of their friendship we didn’t get to see much of last year since Will was missing. I’m sure they felt like old times for Mike as well: finally he got to be the old Mike, at least to an extent. Mike screaming at Hopper and even attacking him for hiding Eleven for nearly a year was another great scene. I didn’t see that reaction coming and both actors delivered powerful performances. Mike’s dedication to calling Eleven every day was touching and, as pointed out on Beyond Stranger Things, I liked that they got to be reunited in two very different contexts at both the besieged Byers house and the Snow Ball. Unlike Nancy and Jonathan, this may imply Mike and Eleven’s friendship/relationship is stronger than just being pulled together in times of tragedy and high drama (not to say a middle school dance is without drama!).

Dustin Henderson Not only did Dustin have a love triangle to contend with this year, but he also found a pet from the Upside Down and discovered an excellent, unlikely surrogate brother in Steve. It was also great to get a glimpse of his home life and I hope we see more of his relationship with his mom (Catherine Curtin) next year. I liked Dustin’s friendship with baby Demodog D’Artagnan—and that it had a payoff in the end—but he shouldn’t have lied about his cat’s death to his mom. Allowing her to go on searching for it when she clearly loved it so much was a little cruel and the exact thing Nancy and Jonathan spent the season fighting. Watering down the truth would’ve worked here; he could’ve just said a wild animal got it. Dustin comparing lying about keeping a dangerous animal to Lucas bringing Max in on the Eleven secret didn’t seem equivalent at first, but then I remembered that anyone else finding out could lead to everyone’s death by cover-up. I liked Dustin’s resigned position that he’d accept being removed from the party for his disloyalty especially after he was the one to enforce the rules of reconciliation when Mike and Lucas had their falling out in Season 1. I also appreciated him accepting Lucas and Max getting together instead of flying into a jealous rage, which wouldn’t have been in-character or fitting at all. Matarazzo’s explanation that Dustin thought discovering a new species of slimy lizard would impress Max because his mom laughs off the things that excite him—so he thinks that’s what all girls like—was a cool example of Dustin’s inability to see what’s in front of his face when he’s overcome with excitement, much like he doesn’t consider the somewhat obvious truth about Dart’s origins. That Dustin got a heroic moment at the end by standing up to Dart so the others could flee was great; that made up for the danger he put them in earlier.

I loved Dustin’s brotherly bond with Steve and this was my favorite new bit of chemistry of the season. Pairing Dustin with Steve while they were both heartbroken and on the same ends of love triangles worked well to bond them. I’m also glad the series’ format allowed for leisurely scenes like Dustin and Steve strolling down some railroad tracks discussing hair products. Character bits like that go a long way to not only endear the characters to the audience, but they also show us what they’re like in (relatively) normal circumstances. I want more of these moments for every character in the coming seasons. I liked Steve trying to give Dustin advice about girls, even if he was wrong that acting like you don’t care about women makes them like you (Nancy moving on after Jonathan didn’t make a move for a month proves this). On the other hand, he was right about reading the electricity between you and someone you like, and trying to explain that to Dustin was a funny moment. Steve driving Dustin to the Snow Ball and giving him some parting courage was a perfect culmination of their brotherly arc. I loved Dustin’s “Steve” hairdo and while his walk around the dance continually getting shot down was sad, Matarazzo acted it so well! I also love that Dustin’s reaction to being shot down wasn’t played as though Steve was wrong about being confident, but (according to Matarazzo) that he’s not Steve Harrington. That’s not only more tragic, but it perfectly references Dustin’s insecurities about not being Mike’s best friend like Will and Lucas are because he only met the guys in fourth grade. I hope Season 3 has Dustin finding the confidence to live up to his own potential, rather than just being the best person he can in relation to someone else’s standard. If he’s infected with the spores from the tunnels and they corrupt him in some fashion, that may be the perfect vehicle to force that confrontation on him.

Lucas Sinclair Like Dustin, I enjoyed getting to see Lucas’ home life a lot. Lucas’ sister Erica (Priah Ferguson) was an especially hilarious addition to the cast and her attitude played off Lucas’ perfectly; here’s hoping she returns in a major way next year! His parents’ (Karen Ceesay, Arnell Powell) advice about women was humorous as well. I thought it was funny that the most nuclear families, the Sinclairs and Wheelers, feature parents who don’t seem particularly involved in their kids’ lives at all, though I was happy to see the Sinclairs seemed much happier together than Mike and Nancy’s parents. Lucas navigating how to handle his crush on Max was a fun plot that added depth to him and their banter was a lot of fun as well. He also proved Steve’s advice wrong by giving Max what she wanted and showing her he cared about her. I liked their bonding moments, particularly on top of the bus in the junkyard. Watching Lucas practice lines in the mirror before the dance was also great! His argument with Mike about the coolness of Winston from Ghostbusters was good, and I totally missed that Winston has the “Judgment Day” speech in the film and Lucas gets to call the climax of the season Judgment Day.

I like that Lucas is constantly the most grounded and practical of the kids (like Winston is among the Ghostbusters, now that I think about it); McLaughlin even said that if Lucas had found Dart instead of Dustin, there wouldn’t have been a second episode with the lizard in it. That characteristic plays well off of what the rest of the kids bring to the group, particularly Dustin, and McLaughlin performed it excellently, never coming off as a jerk, even when he was trying to be the voice of reason. One thing I would’ve liked to see more of from Lucas, however, is a reaction to Billy’s racism. It felt like he understood why Max wouldn’t let her brother see him (even if he didn’t vocalize it) and it was terrifying when Billy attacked him in the season finale, but I wanted them to dig into it more. Watching Lucas process and deal with any of the “there’s a certain kind of people you don’t hang around” talk from Billy would’ve added a great deal to his outlook and character. The Sinclairs seem to be one of the few African-American families in town, so is this relatively normal for him, or is having it thrown in his face something new? If he and Max had a real, out-in-the-open conversation about her brother, how would that have gone? He doesn’t seem to have any misgivings about pursing an interracial relationship—he might be too young (and too wrapped up in his crush on Max) to consider the ramifications yet—but would his family? Would the rest of the town? This is an area where the Duffer Brothers could absolutely have taken a page from Stephen King and drawn real-world horrors—particularly in a small, Midwestern town—as parallels to the rot of the Upside Down. The Ghostbusters costume argument brought up the assumption that Lucas was “supposed” to be Winston (and Mike couldn’t) because he’s Black and briefly touched on the issue of race, but the kids sidestepped it for the most part. Billy’s villainy would’ve resonated more if Lucas had scenes dealing with what he represented, and even moreso if it turned out Billy hadn’t just brought racism to Hawkins, but it had always been there.

Will Byers Some reviews have said Will’s plot felt too similar to his predicament last year—communicating through lights/crayons, being captured by the monster, etc.—but I liked the variations on the theme this year. The map of corruption in the town was both a cool visual aspect and a great expression of Will’s own infection, as the Mind Flayer had also wormed its smoky tendrils into his body. I loved that his connection to the Mind Flayer was a double-edged sword that rarely actually helped the heroes, unlike his Christmas lights last year. I totally expected Will to be a conscious solider against the Upside Down this year—particularly with Eleven absent from much of the action—so twisting it to make him the spy for the monsters and leading several soldiers to their deaths was brilliant! This was an especially cool reversal of how honest we know Will to be, even to the point of telling Mike the truth about what he rolled against the Demogorgon in the first episode when he didn’t have to. Making Will the Mind Flayer’s eyes also created a cool obstacle for the heroes: they had no safe haven unless he didn’t know where he was. No conversation about Will this year would be complete without pointing out that Schnapp is a fantastic actor: he did an excellent job of playing his attempts to be a normal kid with his friends, the loneliness of his post-Upside Down captivity, the pure terror/sadness of what was happening to him, the Mind Flayer’s pawn, and even the villain. His reaction to the soldiers burning the vines in the tunnels, the interrogation scene in the shed where he’d first disappeared (nice callback!), and his exorcism scene were particular standout moments for Schnapp (and all the actors involved). Mike, Jonathan, and Joyce sharing their memories with Will to bring him back to the surface was a powerful, incredible sequence! I’m glad the Duffers didn’t go with their initial idea of making Will slip into “evil Will” flashes where the Mind Flayer took over his body—and even killed Bob!—as that would’ve taken his possession a little too far.

All that said, the girl asking Will to dance at the Snow Ball by calling him “Zombie Boy” didn’t work for me, particularly as we were told he was very sensitive about that term. It would’ve helped if they’d established that Will was interested in any of the girls before having one ask him to dance just so he could be partnered up. The first season hinted that he might be gay—Joyce evaded Hopper’s question about whether bullies’ taunts about him being homosexual had any basis in fact—and making Will deal with that bigotry next year would be another way to bring real-life horror into Hawkins, especially in the mid-80s. Will being stunned at the girl’s proposition was cute—and it was probably just a throwaway moment to get Mike alone for Eleven’s entrance—but they could’ve had Will just be content with the normalcy of a dance instead (which would’ve contrasted Dustin’s lap around the gym nicely). Who Will is in normal life when he’s not being directly tormented by demons is definitely something I hope we get next year, since we haven’t gotten to see much of him being himself. I’m also eager to see what he brings to monster-hunting without the benefit of a connection to the Upside Down. Maybe if someone else is the Upside Down’s target, Will can step up as the person with experience and guidance in surviving it. It’ll be interesting to see how Will grows after having survived such an intense connection to the Mind Flayer as well, and how that shapes his outlook on the real world. Maybe surviving that horror could actually help him cope with any anti-gay hatred he faces, if the Duffers choose to reintroduce and expand on that aspect.

Max Hargrove Max was a great addition and I hope she returns next season! Sadie Sink held her own with the rest of the cast, bringing an equally natural feel to her character and a fresh attitude to the gang. It’s good to have more women in the cast and it’s neat that she, not one of the guys, is traditionally the “coolest” of the kids. I liked the guys being bewildered at the “wonder” of a girl liking video games and skateboarding (even if they forgot Nancy was willing to dress up as an elf with them just five years earlier), but I was also glad Max never acknowledged any strangeness about her liking genre stuff: of course girls have always liked it too! Max being genre savvy was a cool way to incorporate a few criticisms about certain nostalgia aspects of the first season when Lucas told her the truth about Eleven and the Upside Down. However, I hope that’s where the meta commentary ends. A little bit goes a long way for me, so Max writing Lucas’ tale off as a derivative story worked as an in-joke while also making sense given the context of what she’d seen, but I don’t think I need any further commentary from the fans voiced on the show. Max’s arc this year mainly focused on wanting to be accepted as part of the party and it worked well without needing to make her the audience’s eyes too much: the show didn’t assume you hadn’t watched the first season (we didn’t even hear Lucas tell her the truth). At the same time, she was thankfully never presented as an annoying girl trying to worm her way into their secret club. We can all relate to feeling like we don’t belong and wanting to fit in, so it felt original that Max had to struggle even to be accepted by the “nerds” of the school. These aren’t bad kids—and of course there are extenuating circumstances with the government threat—but it was a nice change of pace from the popular kids being the ones to exclude everyone. That she’s a girl trying to hang out with a bunch of guys also felt like a timely reference to the fact that she is a girl who likes nerdy things and there’s a lot of absurd pushback (to put it lightly) facing vocal female fans nowadays. Once she was in with the party, I loved that Max was totally in; these are her friends and it was clear she’d do anything to help them.

Next year I hope Max and Eleven bond as friends. Their spat this year shouldn’t have lasted to the end of the season as it was and I hope Eleven comes around between this season and next. I also hope Max finds a family among the party, particularly as she has it much tougher than anyone else in terms of her home life; maybe coping with and surviving that abuse is something that can bond her and Jane. The clear abuse she’s suffered at Billy’s “overprotective” hands was scary and portrayed well without being too graphic. I loved that she stood up to her brother to save Steve and Lucas in the end, and that Billy’s a little afraid of her now. I’m interested to see how their relationship develops because they’re good together (though the story told on Beyond Stranger Things about the origin of their kiss—that it wasn’t in the script until Ross Duffer realized the idea of a kiss freaked Sadie Sink out and its addition led to her having even more anxiety about it (and McLaughlin felt weird about it too)—is troubling, so I hope there was more conversation about the kiss’ addition than we heard and that this is the last time something like that ever happens). If she and Lucas are still together by the time Season 3 starts—and hopefully they are; they have great chemistry—I’d like to see how she deals with a small town’s prejudices about interracial dating as well. That prejudice could also be an obstacle unique to the two of them that the Duffers could play up. Max and Erica seems like it’d be an amazing pairing as well, so hopefully we get to see them interact! We got a lot of older brother/younger brother interactions over the past two years, so getting to see Nancy taking on an older sister role with both Eleven and Max (and Erica; why not?) would be great too.

Eight/Kali Prasad Eight (Linnea Berthelsen) and her crew of misfits and castoffs (Kai Greene, James Landry Herbert, Anna Jacoby-Heron, and Gabrielle Maiden) had an 80s X-men/New Mutants vibe that I liked a lot, particularly once Eight took on the Professor X role and trained Eleven. I thought their sisterly relationship was well-written and acted, and I liked that Eight was such a contrast not only to the rest of Eleven’s found family, but to everything she knew from the lab and Hawkins. Eight’s quest to kill all the former employees of the Hawkins facility, regardless of the effects on their families, has been criticized by some as one-note, but I think it makes her a great parallel to Eleven. I loved that Kali is the person Eleven could’ve become had she not met her friends or spent so much time with Hopper. I really liked her point about allowing Eleven not to take revenge on the people who hurt her, but warning Jane never to take her choice away. I feel like that’s the nuance other reviews are asking for. Eight is driven to violence by revenge, but she does care about her crew, did care about Eleven, and respected her enough to allow her “sister” to make her own choices. It’s only when Eleven stops her from carrying out her own wishes that they have a problem from Eight’s point of view.

The degree to which Eight has been changed by meeting Eleven was left as an open-ended question in Season 2, so seeing how she reflects on Eleven choosing not to kill will be very interesting. Were her eyes opened by Jane’s empathy epiphany, or will she see Eleven as a weak victim who can’t do what’s necessary to prevent others from being hurt? There could be no redemption for the lab workers in Kali’s eyes, but I wonder if we’re being set up for a redemption arc for her. I fully expect her to track Eleven down next year, causing problems for Jane’s new lease on life in Hawkins. Just as Eleven is allowed to reenter society around Halloween 1985, Eight finally finds her and upends her peaceful life? Sounds about right. I also wonder if Kali will locate the other test subjects and continue building the X-men vibe by recruiting them to her cause. If a portion of Season 3 were Kali and her Brotherhood coming to town and the heroes there having to deal with them instead of the Upside Down, I’d be all for it. I’m glad Eight has an entirely different set of powers and I wonder what abilities the others might have (given the Stephen King inspiration, one is totally a pyrokinetic). On the other hand, as much as I’d like to meet those other kids, I feel like it would shift the show too far away from the established cast to bring on a nearly equal number of new characters…unless Netflix wants to make the seasons longer from here on out, of course. I’d have no problem with that! Perhaps a standalone miniseries about her recruiting them could work between seasons as well. Kali’s illusion-casting was cool, especially the electric butterfly and bringing Brenner (Matthew Modine) “back” to manipulate Eleven. I wonder how that could be used to illuminate the other characters’ inner thoughts and fears if it were used against them.

Steve Harrington I loved that the hints of the good guy Steve is from Season 1 were vindicated here; he was only the jock asshole on the surface/to impress his friends last year and he does have a heart…and really does love Nancy. I thought it was a nice twist that he was genuinely hurt not because she didn’t want to party and act like teenagers with him (and even that suggestion was his attempt to do whatever he could to make her feel better), but because she said their love was bullshit. I also like that despite his clear sadness, he put Nancy and her needs first by driving away from the Snow Ball at the end of the season (unless he’s just acting like he doesn’t care…I hope not, though). Nancy being supportive of Steve taking care of the kids along with his lack of drama about her and Jonathan makes me think that they can develop a friendship next season and I hope that’s the case. I definitely agree with Keery that there’s no need for a physical confrontation between Jonathan and Steve over Nancy; if anything, the three of them just need to discuss where they all are. I love that this is a second love triangle that didn’t explode into angst or fighting, but mature acceptance.

I knew Steve was a good guy despite his mistakes back in Season 1, but I had no idea he’d be such a surprisingly great scene partner for the kids, especially Dustin! Keery seemed to have a blast with the kids and played the big brother role perfectly. His and Dustin’s brotherly relationship developed excellently—even if it started because Steve just happened to show up at the Wheelers’ when Dustin was there and was totally a last resort—and I hope it continues into the coming years. Hopefully even though Dustin failed to be Steve Harrington at the dance, Steve will be there to console him and help him out in the future (even if not all his advice is spot-on). As I’ve seen elsewhere, Steve having no qualms or embarrassment about being a babysitter was cool of him and totally unexpected. There wasn’t even a second thought to him protecting the kids, like when he got Max out of the way to fend off the Demodog while they were trapped in the old bus. Waking up after being beaten by Billy and thinking Mike was Nancy was a totally surprising—and hilarious—moment. I hope there are many more humorous moments like that as we get to see him interact with the kids more. It was also neat to see Steve totally over his position as “king of the school,” much less concerned with being cool than the guy who bent to his friends’ peer pressure was. I wonder if that maturity will take him to college next season, or if he’ll hang around town. I hope it’s the former; he could always just come home from school when things start happening again. Being away and coming back home will provoke more change in him than sticking around town treading water, so I hope that’s what they do with him. It’d definitely be good to see what he wants out of life too.

Nancy Wheeler Nancy’s one of my favorite characters and while I liked her hunting human monsters this time—and outsmarting the government by intentionally getting herself and Jonathan captured so they could get a confession on tape—I wish we’d seen more of her this year. Though Nancy getting to shut down the government project for Barb was cool, I do wonder if her and Jonathan’s quest was a little undercut both by saying all the agents who were around when Barb died and Will disappeared are gone (if that’s true) and then most of the current staff getting killed by Demodogs. It’s true the government got a public black eye and the project has been permanently shut down through Nancy and Jonathan’s efforts (and Eleven shutting the gate), though. I wouldn’t mind a Season 3 that had no military component and just had those in the know in Hawkins against the Mind Flayer as it tries to return. Maybe it would’ve been better to shut down the lab at midseason to free up Nancy and Jonathan for more interaction with the growing Upside Down threat. Specifically, I wish she’d been around to help Steve and the kids hunt Demodogs; Nancy would’ve been useful in the junkyard, the tunnels, or as backup for Eleven and Hopper (though I get the narrative and emotional reasons you’d sequester those two one final time). That said, Dyer was great with what she got, be it romantic comedy with Jonathan, her turmoil over what Barb’s parents (Cynthia Barrett, Aaron Munoz) had been put through for a year, or helping to drive the infection out of Will at the end. Nancy thinking she and Steve were at fault for Barb’s death was a great, tragic bit of self-inflicted guilt, no matter how wrong she was: it was Barb choosing to wait around after Nancy told her to go home that got her killed, not Nancy and Steve sleeping together. I loved that Nancy accepted the rifle from Hopper when they were being swarmed by Demodogs, she was the one who used a hot poker on Will, and that Jonathan turned away from his hurting brother to find comfort in her arms, rather than the other way around. The show is very good about crafting strong female characters and I loved that they subverted gender norms by making Nancy and Joyce the ones willing to do whatever it took to save Will, while Jonathan couldn’t.

Dancing with Dustin and giving him a pep talk at the Snow Ball was a sweet, perfect moment. What a great nod to Dustin’s crush on her in Season 1, back when he offered her their last slice of pizza and argued that she “used to be cool” (even if his then-current assessment had been that “something was wrong” with her). I like that she also tried to get Jonathan to socialize more, snagging him an invite to the Halloween party and even suggesting he might meet someone there. I wish we’d seen more moments of friendship between the two of them to further develop their romantic bond, but the fact that they’d grown apart over the past year worked too. I’ve certainly had life get in the way of keeping in touch with friends, so that felt realistic (particularly in an era without social media). The Snow Ball left things a little unresolved as to whether Nancy and Jonathan were together-together, and I’m game whether the show wants to explore that relationship or not. Perhaps Nancy, Jonathan, and Steve need to find themselves separately a bit more before any pairing can healthily take off. I’m very interested to see where Nancy goes now that Barb has justice and she can finally move on. What are her interests and goals in life? We know she doesn’t want to repeat her mother’s decision to settle for a perfect nuclear family, so what does she want? The similarity between Murray (Brett Gelman) and Nancy—their need to “pull back curtains”—would be an interesting direction to explore in the future. I don’t want her to go full-on conspiracy theorist like he is, but perhaps she’ll become a reporter. Whatever direction she takes, I’m excited to see her journey towards becoming more self-aware continue.

Jonathan Byers It felt like Jonathan got the least to do out of anyone—his incorporation into Nancy’s quest to help Barb’s parents felt more tangential since Will did come back, for example—though I did get the impression that he’s grown a lot since Season 1. I think this year’s Jonathan is in a much better place to be in a relationship, unlike last year when ending up with Nancy would’ve felt like the clichéd loner “good guy” (with a stalker streak that was never a good look) “deserved” to get the girl at the end of the horror movie just by virtue of not being a jerk. This season, he seemed more settled in his home life and comfortable with how things had been going; Jonathan generally felt healthier this year, since he didn’t have to be the guy looking after his family to as great a degree. Heaton was good at showing us lighter shades of Jonathan like that. Jonathan and Nancy’s earlier monster hunting connection and mutual impulse to watch each other’s backs as they got justice worked to play up their connection and stir the tension between them. While I still would’ve liked more development in their romantic relationship, the moment where he and Nancy compared scars and talked about their friendship vanishing was a fun bit of reconnection. I also liked that at every turn, Jonathan was right there with Nancy insisting they weren’t together and looking for ways not to share a bed with her; it would’ve been cheaper if the hotel only had a single room available or for him not to offer to sleep on Murray’s couch. I liked the Temple of Doom homage with Nancy and Jonathan (unsuccessfully) fighting the urge to sleep together; that was fun! I’ve seen this pointed out elsewhere, but if they are together at the end of the season, then I wonder if their relationship really can survive normalcy and times when the world isn’t ending. Whether they can or not, that would be something interesting to explore.

While I liked Jonathan’s reaction to Will’s predicament once he got back into town and his attempts to help his brother were great, I would’ve liked to see him react more to not being there for Will and Joyce. That was such a drive for him in Season 1 that removing him from the equation could’ve yielded a bigger reaction once he realized what he’d been missing. That said, I wonder if the fact that everyone survived without him—and were more capable of doing what needed to be done than he was—will lead him down a path where he doesn’t feel as needed for his family’s survival anymore. We started to see this in Season 2, when he trusted Will to take care of himself while trick-or-treating and Jonathan let himself go to a party. Where will Jonathan go if he doesn’t feel like he has to be the one to care for his whole family? I don’t want him to feel guilty (and especially not emasculated) that he couldn’t face Will’s pain or turn up the heat, but I’d like to see what he wants to do with a clean slate and the ability to move forward, trusting Joyce to handle things and Will to fend for himself.

Billy Hargrove Billy was the final form of every 80s movie bully (and everything Steve seemed to be on the surface last year) and while Dacre Montgomery did a great job making him a constant predatory threat, there didn’t seem to be much complexity to him in the writing. Just like Henry Bowers in IT, Billy made for an intimidating human villain, but while one scene showing us a glimpse of the parental abuse that drove him to be so psychotic is appreciated, it’s too little too late. In a movie that’s more forgivable, but with nine hours to tell the story it doesn’t quite fly. I’m also glad the Duffers don’t think Billy’s abuse at the hands of his father excuses his actions, but only shows where he learned that hate. I liked Billy crying and then suppressing it after his dad left his room—Montgomery’s acting was very good in that scene—but none of this redeemed him for me and honestly, I don’t need to see him redeemed. I also don't think his reaction to being drugged and threatened by Max is equivalent to Jonathan knocking sense into Steve in Season 1. Steve realized what he did to Nancy was wrong and took steps to change right away. He even showed up at the Byers house at the end of the season to apologize to Jonathan, not to find Nancy to win her back. Billy’s violence-induced "respect" for Max is not at all the same thing as the violent moment that made Steve reevaluate his life.

Making Billy a racist on top of everything else would’ve worked better if they’d given Lucas a moment to reflect on why he couldn’t hang out with Max, if Max had a realization about why Billy acted the way he did, or if anyone had confronted Billy about it, forcing him to try to justify himself (not that there’s justification for that). As it was, he was terrifying both whenever he’d threaten Max and when he came after Lucas, but it seemed like there could’ve been more explored with him and the racist angle felt like just one more horrible thing about him. It’s possible Billy’s anger also comes from repressing his own homosexuality, given his reaction to what his father called him and the vibe he gave off when confronting Steve at the end of the season. If Billy is gay, then 80s-era prejudices against both he and his step-sister’s burgeoning interracial relationship could work to bring them closer together (if he can work through his anger issue and develop real respect for her; there’s no excuse for the way he acts). Dacre Montgomery doesn’t think Billy is racist or homophobic, but while he may not be playing either of those aspects and I could be misreading Billy—Montgomery definitely knows his character better than I do—the script left it too open-ended to dismiss as a possibility. I’m not sure his interpretation lines up with what we saw of him “protecting” Max either; if he were so concerned about her and who she hung out with, it wouldn’t have taken his father threatening him to get him to go hunt Max down. Whatever is driving Billy’s anger, we also should’ve seen a happy moment between Max and Billy to show us why her being a “constant” in his life was a good thing in his mind. I do agree with Montgomery that Billy’s insane amount of insecurity about being a man (and the man) is probably a large part of what’s feeding into his anger and lashing out; his early insults and attacks on Steve over no longer being the “king of the school” and getting dumped by Nancy definitely speak to that. As uncomfortable as the scene where he flirts with Mrs. Wheeler (Cara Buono) was, I liked the scene immediately after where Montgomery’s expression revealed it was all an act. That was the one bit of trope subversion his character got this year that reminded me of the undercurrents Steve got last year. Either way, I’m definitely interested to find out what “sinister” plans Montgomery and the Duffers have for Billy next year; how much worse can he get?

Barbara Holland I always thought Barb was fine; neither dull nor the perfect, slighted best friend some parts of the internet made her out to be, but analysis like this (and check out great analysis of all the characters here and here) and a rewatch of Season 1 left me seeing her as a judgey, jealous friend who couldn’t handle Nancy starting to pull away. She may have had good intentions in being protective of Nancy, but when it came time to face Nancy’s decisions, she couldn’t deal with what Lucas and Dustin overcame with Mike and Eleven (and because of her death, she never got the chance to learn from and grow out of her mistakes like everyone else did). That said, it did bother me that no one in town cared she’d gone missing except Nancy and her parents, so tying up that loose end here felt appropriate. It was sad her parents spent a year thinking she’d just run away or something, and moreso that they were spending all their money—even having to sell the house—in the search. I was satisfied with the justice Barb got here.

Joyce Byers Winona Ryder was great once again and I’m glad her efforts to save Will were listened to this year. There was a definite sense that she had more control and influence over things and, as I’ve seen pointed out elsewhere, it was great to see her take charge of getting answers about Will’s health rather than having to force Hopper to investigate or needing to justify her methods (like when she bought so many boxes of Christmas lights). Like Nancy, I’m glad Joyce was the one willing and able to do anything to save Will from the Mind Flayer’s influence, even though it hurt him. It was also cool that Ryder got to explore a healthier Joyce this year; she was understandably pushed to the limits of her sanity last year, so seeing her as a veteran of the Upside Down and its attacks on her family was a great bit of development. Moments like her concern for Will when dropping him off at the arcade felt relatable as well; even if he hadn’t been abducted by monsters from another dimension, her concern for his medical condition felt like something any mother would express (and his exasperated desire for her to see him as a capable person rather than a kid needing protection was spot-on too). The one area that felt a little lacking with Joyce’s portrayal this year was that she didn’t seem to even notice Jonathan was gone. Of course she was consumed with worry for Will, but an acknowledgment that Jonathan was missing would’ve been nice and some reaction to what he’d done with Nancy would’ve been better, since taking on the government could’ve had direct and deadly results for their whole family.

I liked her relationship with Bob; it brought out a new, almost carefree side to Joyce that we hadn’t seen in her interactions with Hopper, which are almost always fraught with tension over supernatural goings-on. At least at first, it felt like her relationship with Bob was a window into who she possibly used to be. David Harbour’s assessment that Joyce had a relationship with Bob because he seemed to be the safe, dorky father figure is probably accurate, but I would’ve liked to hear what Ryder’s thoughts on it were. The Duffers saying she would’ve left town with Bob had he lived gave his death a bigger tragedy, but I feel like she has a stronger connection to Hopper so I’m more invested in seeing where that goes. I’d also like to see Joyce interact with the other parents more; does she have friends anymore? It would help if she could talk to them about what happened, so perhaps the government facility shutting down will give her at least some ability to discuss a watered-down version of what she’s been going through. It’d also be cool to see what Joyce’s dreams are and what she hoped her life would turn out like. That could bond her with not only the younger kids in the face of so much danger, but the teens as they’re about to go off to college and forge lives for themselves. An attempt to build her life beyond her job at the store and as Will and Jonathan’s mom would also definitely be welcome.

Jim Hopper The change in Hopper from the start of Season 1 to the beginning of 2 (to say nothing of his journey through the rest of the season) was immense, going from a man barely holding it together and caught up in the memories of his dead daughter to a far healthier man building a life for his new surrogate child. Hopper and Eleven’s familial connection was an excellent aspect of Season 2 and one I never thought I’d love so much. Like Joyce being concerned about Will even during a benign trip to the arcade, Hopper and Eleven shared a lot of realistic parent/child moments that grounded the supernatural strangeness of their lives. Glimpses of their happier moments were excellent and, as Harbour pointed out on Beyond Stranger Things, very “dad” things like Hopper trying to guilt Eleven into coming out of her room to share overdue Halloween candy were played perfectly. Life lessons like the fact that even well-meaning parents can let their kids down worked very well too. Eleven’s psychic tantrum felt like a real argument between a parent and a child—even if amped up by her powers—and the push and pull between what was best for her development and what was safest for her created an excellent tension for Hopper to deal with; Harbour played it perfectly. His apology to an empty cabin was excellent and their reconciliation in the truck on the way to the facility was outstanding too. They need each other to build a new family out of their fractured lives and I can’t wait to see how that develops (particularly now that she’ll be able to leave the cabin safely within a year); I was very happy to see that she’s now legally his daughter. I absolutely loved his “You did so good, kid,” moment after she closed the gate and Hopper carrying her out of the gate room was a brilliant connection to Brenner carrying her out of the tank after her early tests with the Upside Down (that was a callback I completely missed!).

I’m glad Hopper didn’t go full-on nefarious Men in Black like the end of last season implied, instead just helping to cover up things in town without any qualms about setting the government straight the moment he realized they weren’t living up to their side of the “keep the Upside Down sealed” bargain. I like that his maybe-relationship with Joyce is seemingly back on track by the end of this year and I wonder if they’ll actually get together next season (or between seasons). If they were to get married, Eleven and Will as step-siblings would work really well given their shared traumas with the Upside Down. Hopper being absolutely done with the kids’ D&D allusions was perfect, so putting as many kids around him as possible would be hilarious! Has Joyce been taking Mike and Will up to have playdates with Eleven? Do all the kids regularly trek up to Hopper’s cabin to hang out with Eleven on weekends and play D&D? Did someone get an NES? I would love it if Hopper and Joyce actually enjoyed playing it just as much as the kids will (I remember my parents playing my Sega Genesis X-men game by themselves often, so the adults being into a video game or two isn’t outside the bounds of reality). I’d also be interested to see if sheriff is the end of Hopper’s career path or if he wants more out of his work. Could he be recruited into further government projects into the supernatural, or will he do something smaller, like running for Mayor of Hawkins? I hope the spores in the tunnels didn’t do anything to him, but I can’t see the Duffers letting that go so easily, especially since he’ll be directly in Eleven’s (and possibly Will’s) orbit. Perhaps that experience with the supernatural will be a way to bond him and Eleven even closer and give her a chance to directly rescue him.

Bob Newby His name literally being “newbie” may have been on the nose, but I liked Bob and the distinct flavor he brought to the character mix. His innocence and sense of discovery created fun clashes with the other characters’ temperaments, like when he was decoding Will’s map. He almost felt like a glimpse into what any of the kids could’ve become had they not had these run-ins with the supernatural. His tech and puzzle-solving knowledge were fresh skills some shows would’ve just randomly given to Mike or the other kids simply because they’re nerds—as if that means they know everything about all nerdy things—so I was glad the Duffers gave them to a new character. Those skills made him invaluable and allowed for a very tense escape from the government facility. I felt he truly cared about Joyce and her boys, which was refreshing to see, and he bonded well with Will. I liked the tragedy that his well-meaning advice about facing your fears was the absolute worst thing he could’ve told Will, and that Will trusted him enough to listen. Bob’s suggestion to move the family to Maine was a cool, sly Stephen King reference; they probably wouldn’t be any safer there! I was sorry he died, but I wish they hadn’t shot it with such a tell; instead of Bob and Joyce having a moment of relief that he’d escaped, having Bob continue running for his life and getting snagged by the Demodogs anyway would’ve been a bigger shock.

Allies I was shocked Dr. Owens turned out to not only not be morally gray or outright evil, but genuinely cared about Will, Eleven, and the others. That was a great change of pace from the stock government scientist and a clever subversion of Reiser’s character in Aliens. I believe he truly did believe doing whatever was necessary to stop the spread of the Upside Down was the best course of action, but once it came to harming kids, he was done. I respected that. I expected him to die, so his survival was a surprise and I hope he continues to be an ally in Season 3 and beyond. The government trying to burn away the infectious Upside Down infestation was a great way to make them problematic in that they were still running tests, while proving they weren’t completely oblivious to how dangerous it was (even if they had no idea how far it had spread). That was a cool split between their deal with Hopper and their own interests. I’d like to see what the larger government wants with the Upside Down testing, though. Are they thinking it could be used as a way to “teleport” behind enemy lines? If an army battalion (or just one operative with a nuclear weapon) entered the Upside Down in Hawkins and punched their way out in Moscow, for example, that would be a powerful military advantage that could clinch the Cold War for the US. Eleven and Eight’s powers both seem to be in the same vein as Cold War psychic experiments (and it all started as part of Project MKUltra), so elaboration on specific goals there would be cool too. Maybe some of the test subjects didn’t escape and are government-backed child soldiers now. If Jane being number eleven means she’s the latest and youngest, there’s no telling how old the earlier subjects are now.

It’s always good to see Mr. Clarke (Randy Havens), the kids’ science teacher. He didn’t have as big a role to play as the kids’ source of science this year, but all his scenes were great. I love that he’s so into science and always seizes the opportunity to pass on that love and curiosity to the kids. I’m not sure if I want him to learn about the Upside Down or not, because the kids’ flimsy excuses are entertaining. He’d have his mind blown by what they’ve seen, however, and that could be fun in and of itself. I also wonder just how much the kids are overlooking due to not having a background in science that could be useful to fighting the Upside Down. Officers Powell (Rob Morgan) and Callahan (John Reynolds) gave welcome returns as possibly the least effective cops (Callahan far moreso than Powell) on TV. I love how small-town they are in their all-too human reactions to things, even if they’re rarely helpful as law enforcement. As fun as they are, I wonder if there’s a way to preserve that quality while subverting the trope of the bumbling detectives. Ted Wheeler is still totally useless, but while I can almost see why Karen would be attracted to Billy after knowing him on his best behavior for two minutes, I wish we’d gotten more depth to her than a joke about bored housewives. Both of her children were gone from the house for days and she barely seemed to care (even if they did give flimsy sleepover excuses). I’d like to see her build a friendship with Joyce instead of continuing to just be an oblivious parent; there were hints that there was more to her in Season 1 and I hope there’s a return to that in Season 3. Digging into the Karen she wanted to be instead of the one who chose the safe life could be a revelation to Nancy—and Nancy venturing into a role in a male-dominated field like investigative reporter a boon to Karen—and I’d love to dig deeper into those dynamics.

Conspiracy theorist Murray Bauman was a nice nod to the fact that other people are taking note of the strange things going on in Hawkins. I liked his rundown of the myth Eleven accidentally created about herself and his complete misreading of Hopper’s dismissal as naiveté, not being in on the conspiracy. Other shows might have had him be so keyed into the mysteries that he’d suspect Hopper’s smokescreen right away, so his total obliviousness in that area felt fresh. His stunned reaction to what was really happening—much bigger than anything he’d imagined—was great too. His plan to water down the truth about the lab was cool as well; a clever way of holding off on letting everyone know about the Upside Down while still being rooted in human behavior. It didn’t feel like the plot was forcing them to keep their mouths shut about monsters just because doing so would change the whole show’s status quo, but like there was a real reason to. Explaining it like this was also easier to swallow than revealing the truth and then having people go back to disbelieving once the government said it was a lie, in an odd way. Even with the explanation that Murray has an obsessive need to expose secrets and illuminate the truth, his investment in the love lives of two teens he’d just met was a little unnerving. He didn’t come off as creepy, I guess, but just weird. I don’t need to see him return—with the government shutting down the facility, he’s served his purpose—but becoming something of a journalistic mentor for Nancy, if they go that route with her, could be cool.

I wasn’t too enamored with the members of Kali’s crew. They were fine foils for Eleven’s friends and definitely brought a distinct flavor to the show, but nothing Kali couldn’t bring by herself. With so little screentime to split among so many new characters, they didn’t feel as fully-formed as they could’ve been. I might’ve cut a few of them or combined their traits into fewer characters. Still, it’s good that they were so diverse; that was a realistic contrast to life in Hawkins. I definitely appreciate that there was an even gender split in the crew too. Perhaps given more time with these characters, I’d like them better.

Enemies I really, really hope Brenner isn’t still alive. He doesn’t need to be. Now that Eleven has discovered and come to terms with as much of her past as possible, bringing him back would feel like a step backwards. Through her interactions with Eight—who acted the way Brenner wanted his subjects to, even if she aimed herself at him instead of the government’s enemies—and Hopper, it feels like Jane’s already defeated the ghost of Brenner’s influence and his physical return wouldn’t be much of a fight for her soul. Now, if Eight shows up in Hawkins and uses an illusion of him to manipulate/terrorize Eleven, that could work. Then again, Millie Bobby Brown’s reading of Eleven’s relationship with her Papa as a warm one—because he was the first person to hold her and she felt there was care there, despite the abuse he inflicted on her and her mother—adds so many layers to the conflict that I hadn’t considered before. Her assertion that she wouldn’t channel her anger or fight as much without Brenner having been in her life is also a fascinating look at Eleven’s survival skills and her ability to make a positive out of the abuse she suffered. I’d like to see Eleven deal with that, but I wouldn’t want them to take her will to fight out of her hands or give him too much credit; I believe she’d be a fighter with or without Brenner in her life, since her mother certainly was in the end and would’ve taught Jane that instinct had she been there to raise her. Brown’s interpretations of their relationship almost make me hope he is alive. Almost.

The Mind Flayer was an imposing step up from the Demogorgon (just for fun, check out this incredible cosplay!) and the Demodogs were cool underlings. What’s going to happen with the Demodog Dustin and Steve put in the Byers’ fridge? It seemed dead, but they do like the cold… At any rate, I love the mythology of a being that’s so ancient even it doesn’t know where it came from, like Dustin theorizes the Mind Flayer is. The show is digging into Lovecraftian themes and I love it! Of course, if they’re going full-Lovecraft, it may also mean the Mind Flayer isn't necessarily evil, just that it’s a force of nature that wants to survive. That’s more interesting. Dustin assumes it wants to control everything because that’s what the D&D character wants, but nothing says he has to be right. Or maybe controlling everything is how it survives, so it needs to continue corrupting everything to perpetuate its existence. If all the beings it’s controlling die, how can this psychic monstrosity continue to inhabit any world?

I hope the Mind Flayer is defeated in Season 3, opening up 4 and 5 for new, even more terrifying threats. I feel like the next step beyond infiltrating the town is burrowing into the people (particularly as we know psychic interaction is possible through Eleven’s watery middle-ground void; that’s where she first met the Demogorgon), which could be cool. Though again, I don’t want the Upside Down to be the source of evil people in Hawkins. Perhaps the Mind Flayer already has a foothold here through the smoky portion of itself that was possessing Will. I wonder where it fled to… If Upside Down beings start taking over Hawkins citizens—or even just altering their perceptions to harm our heroes—that could be the perfect time to bring back the similarly-powered Eight.

 Though I would’ve liked to see more from Mike, Nancy, and Jonathan this year, I thought the writers did a great job of fleshing out the rest of the cast and expanding the story from where they left it in Season 1. They didn’t lock themselves into cliffhangers or open-ended scenes in the season finale this time, so they can do pretty much anything they want. I’m definitely optimistic about where things could go in Season 3 and beyond! We need to see these characters in their status quo so we can see how it changes when the supernatural elements return, so I do hope we get a little more of their normal lives next time; maybe a more expanded season would help. What are the characters’ lives and relationships going to look like in a year? What have the Mind Flayer and the other denizens of the Upside Down been planning? It feels like the stage has been set for a huge showdown and I can’t wait!

[georgeavillart]

Making Histories

Bernard Buffet

Buffet’s portraits have always been hugely prevalent in my discipline; his signature exaggerated dark eyebrows and eyelashes are consistently translated into my paintings, lino prints and photography. The solemn aura consistent in each of his paintings is something that also always resonated with my own work which is often based around mental illness and a sense of confusion or lack of ownership of self. Buffet is undoubtably the first painter that I ever really connected with and the undeniable impact his work has had on my own will likely always remain.

Suzanne Césaire

In addition to her important literary essays, her role as editor of Tropiques can be regarded as an equally significant (if often overlooked) contribution to Caribbean literature. Tropiques was the most influential francophone Caribbean journal of its time and is widely acknowledged for the foundational role it played in the development of Martiniquan literature. Césaire played both an intellectual and administrative role in the journal’s success, the journal established a dialogue with surrealism both as a means of cultural liberation and as a means to obscure political messages for the censors. In her contributions, Suzanne Césaire heavily reappropriated colonial stereotypes such as the ‘cannibal’ and the ‘lazy negro’ as provocations for both coloniser and colonised to re-examine deeply internalised (self)perceptions.

Leonor Fini

Alike Césaire, Fini has been frequently forgotten in mainstream education despite her large contribution associated with the Surrealist movement. Fini’s self-portraits and mythological paintings focused on eroticism and dreams; “Paintings, like dreams, have a life of their own and I have always painted very much the way I dream,” she once said. Fini’s eccentric lifestyle of cross dressing, carrying on homosexual relationships, and eating dinner with her 23 cats, continued throughout the decades. She notably designed the costumes for Federico Fellini’s film 8 ½ in 1963, and was the subject of many photographs and poems during her lifetime.

Der Blaue Reiter

Der Blaue Reiter was a German expressionist group originating in Munich in 1909. A number of avant-garde artists living in Munich had founded the ‘Neue Kunstler Vereiningung’, or New Artist Association. The most important of these were Wassily Kandinsky Franz Marc. In 1911 Kandinsky and Marc broke with the rest of the Neue Kunstler Vereiningung and in December that year held in Munich the first exhibition of Der Blaue Reiter. This particular painting by Kandinsky relates to my work through the use of colour, to him, copying from nature stifled artistic expression. Kandinsky's thoughts on colour were similar to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's belief that different colours can convey certain emotions. The warm colours - red, yellow, and orange - are usually considered lively colours that can sometimes be harsh. The cool colours - green, blue, and purple - are considered more peaceful and subdued. Kandinsky was especially fond of blue. In my paintings the ‘subdued’ and ‘harsh’ connotations of colour are parallel to each other, suggesting a conflict in technique where Kandinsky’s piece’s between 1914-1921 embody the large scale turmoil as Germany declared war on Russia.

Sigmar polke 

The painting “Modern Art”, an angst-stripped remake of Ab-Ex, both amuses and unsettles. In terms of style it includes every standard ingredient of abstract painting — vigorous gestures, contemplated shapes, a splash of deep texture, a spiralled flourish — but absent of all the conceptual substance of any self-respecting abstraction. Though aesthetically pleasing in style, it could be argued that the artist hardly needed to have added the white margin and caption at the bottom; it’s already pure textbook material. The same critiquing could become apparent in my own work, have I been subtle enough in my comparisons and challengings? The concept of challenging contemporary techniques are common themes in our work and influenced some of my preconceived ‘abstract mark making’. However, with its nod to 20th century abstraction seeming at once nostalgic and sarcastic, the influence of the Nazi reign where all forms of abstraction were deemed degenerate could be being commentated on. This puts my work in a very different, much lighter angle.

Georges Seurat

Georges Seurat is prominently remembered as the pioneer of the Neo-Impressionist technique commonly known as Divisionism, or Pointillism, an approach associated with a softly flickering surface of small dots or strokes of colour. Seurat combined a traditional approach, based on his academic training, with a study of modern techniques, such as Impressionism. His work also derived from contemporary ideas of quasi-scientific theories about colour and expression. Seurat was inspired by a desire to abandon Impressionism's preoccupation with the fleeting moment, and instead to render what he regarded as the essential and unchanging in life. Nevertheless, he borrowed many of his approaches from Impressionism, from his love of modern subject matter and scenes of urban leisure, to his desire to avoid depicting only the apparent colour of depicted objects and instead to try to capture all the colours that interacted to produce their appearance.

Patrick Caulfield

Patrick Caulfield was an English painter and printmaker associated with the Pop Art movement, known for bold images created in a strikingly graphic style. Employing references to Photorealism, his paintings are characterized by their flat planes of colour and cartoonish black outlines, creating an uncomfortable ambiguity between the real and the illusionary. At the Tate I was predominantly drawn to Patrick Caulfield’s work; his paintings explore alternative ways of picturing the world. ‘After Lunch’ was one of his earliest works to combine different styles of representation. In this case, what appears to be a photomural of the ‘Château de Chillon’ hanging in a restaurant is depicted with high-focus realism, contrasting with the cartoon-like black-outlined imagery and fields of saturated colour of its surroundings. Caulfield deliberately makes the relationship between these varying representational methods uneasy and ambiguous, so that the picture appears more real than the everyday world around it.

Harris Glenn Milstead

Milstead "the most beautiful woman in the world, almost" is better known by his stage name ‘Divine’ and is an icon amongst the LGBT community, Divine has always been a prevalent influence in my life as a gay woman but is currently influencing my artwork more than ever. Divine, was an American actor, singer, and drag queen closely associated with the independent filmmaker John Waters usually performed female roles in cinematic and theatrical productions, and adopted a female drag persona for his music career. The characters Divine portrayed present femininity in a way that’s powerful and vulgar in contrast to the frequent connotations of sex with absolutely no depth of character. This possessive vulgarity being the centre piece of artwork is what my photomontage pieces are heavily focussed on.

Erich Heckel

Erich Heckel was a German artist and founding member of the influential German Expressionist group Die Brücke. His angular woodcuts and paintings described both the chromatic world and the inner emotions of the artist. In Die Brücke’s studies toward a modern, expressionistic art, the group regularly sketched, painted, and printed images of two young neighborhood girls they used as models, one of whom, "Franzi," Erich Heckel depicts here. The artists' desire for freedom of expression was mirrored in the free movement and relative lack of inhibition of their young muses. In Heckel's woodcut Seated Nude (Fränzi), Franzi's pose and slight grin indicate a lack of shame about her nakedness, while her small, immature body provides a visual analog for the artist's angularity and simplification of form. Rendered in stark, unmodulated white, her nudity contrasts with the red and green background tones. Not only has Heckel’s simplified technique inspired my own mark making when regarding lino prints, the representation of women in his work provided an alternate depiction that intrigued me with its candid nature.

Robert Mapplethorpe

Mapplethorpe is one of the many brilliant creative minds that were lost in the 80’s due to complication with Aids, the American photographer’s work altered perceptions and pushed boundaries in relation to the male gaze upon the male body. Charting his personal involvement in New York’s gay scene, Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs demonstrated a compelling perspective on the underground queer culture of the 1970s and 1980s. Mapplethorpe speculated that if he had been born in an earlier era, he might have been a sculptor rather than a photographer. In his chosen medium, he underscored the powerful physical presence of his models. With an obsessive attention to detail, he choreographed their statuesque poses and used studio lights to trace the contours of their bodies. His subjects are shot through with dramatic tension and eroticism no matter how benign the scene. A body is never just a body; even so, the classical sensibility that structures these scenes is tempered by a palpable sexual intensity and with the same attention to detail as his most seemingly tame images of tulips. Mapplethorpe is important to me as an LGBT icon but also as a large influencer over my desire to depict vulgarity in droll domestic scenes, the sense of ownership of self is so prevalent in his images serving a subtle commentary on the lack of control these figures really had; a message I want to remind viewers of.

[anasinnovativethoughts-blog]

The tech behind: ‘Once Upon A Time’

Once Upon A Time

The ABC hitshow, first airing in 2011, is about fairytale characters that get cursed from their home, The Enchanted Forest, to a small town in Maine. Storybrooke. It all starts with Prince Charming, played by Josh Dallas, on his white horse, riding through the Forest in search for his true love Snow White, who’s played by Ginnifer Goodwin. He wakes her up with the famous True Loves’ Kiss. This is known as the end of the Disney movie. But for these characters it’s just the beginning. Because the moment they get married, and are about to share a kiss, the ceremony gets interrupted by none other than Snow White’s worst enemy. The Evil Queen, who’s geniously played by Lana Parrilla. And she makes an awful threat, she vows to destroy their happiness, if it is the last thing she does. What she doesn’t yet know then, is that Snow White will give birth to a baby on the night that she casts the curse. Or actually, she does, to make sure that Snow White will really lose everything once the Dark Curse washes over. However, she didn’t expect that the, then, baby, would escape through an enchanted wardrobe. The baby, named Emma, shall be known as the Savior. The one destined to break the curse when she’s twenty-eight. In Storybrooke, the infamous Queen is known as Regina Mills. The town mayor, with a ten-year-old son named Henry, after her father, whom she killed to cast the curse. However, Henry owns a storybook, and knows exactly what’s wrong with the town. And so he sets up a mission in search of his birthmother. Bailbondswoman Emma Swan, played by Jennifer Morrison. On the night of her twenty-eighth birthday he sets out to Boston to find her, sure of it, that she’s the Savior destined to save everyone that’s under the curse. During Emma’s time in Storybrooke, we also see flashes of the backstories of the Storybrooke characters. The Enchanted Forest is a medieval place with castles, knights, princes, princesses, kings and queens. And monsters, like werewolves and ogres. Now there’s one question: how do they do it? making all those castles and ogres? The answer: Green (and blue) Screen. Is it really that easy? Yes it is, because the show owns a huge 360 degree green stage. And not just that, they have 3D sets. Let’s dive into the history and innovations of green screen, green stages and the 3D sets that the show owns.

What is Green Screen?

Another word for ‘Green Screen’ is Chromakey. If you use green screen for your visual effects, it’s called chroma key compositing, or chroma keying. Chroma keying is a visual effects / post-production technique for compositing (layering) two images or video streams together based on color hues (chroma range). The technique has been used heavily in many fields to remove a background from the subject of a photo or video – particularly the newscasting, motion picture and videogame industries. A color range in the foreground footage is made transparent, allowing separately filmed background footage or a static image to be inserted into the scene. The chroma keying technique is commonly used in video production and post-production.

The History of Green and Blue Screen

Before green or blue screen existed producers used double exposure to introduce elements that didn’t exist into a scene which weren’t present in the initial exposure. This was done using black draping where a green screen would be used today. In the 1930s the blue screen method was developed at RKO Radio Pictures. At RKO, Linwood Dunn used an early version of the travelling matte to create "wipes" – where there were transitions like a windshield wiper in films such as Flying Down to Rio (1933). For decades, travelling matte shots had to be done "locked-down", so that neither the matted subject nor the background could shift their camera perspective at all. Later, computer-timed, motion-control cameras alleviated this problem, as both the foreground and background could be filmed with the same camera moves.Meteorologists on television often use a field monitor, to the side of the screen, to see where they are putting their hands against the background images. A newer technique is to project a faint image onto the screen.Some films make heavy use of chroma key to add backgrounds that are constructed entirely using computer-generated imagery (CGI). Performances from different takes can be composited together, which allows actors to be filmed separately and then placed together in the same scene. Chroma key allows performers to appear to be in any location without leaving the studio. 

Green and Blue Screen in ‘Once Upon A Time’

Earlier I mentioned that the show uses a 360-degree Green Stage, and owns 3D sets. Crafting up to 400 VFX shots for each episode of Once Upon a Time is no easy feat, especially when there are 22 episodes each season. But the effects company behind the work, Zoic Studios, has mastered the art of virtual sets and integrated pipeline tools to make those deliveries possible. Having realized the effects for several episodic television series filmed largely on greenscreen sets, Zoic is well-versed in the area of virtual sets. That culminated in the development of iPad app called ZEUS:Scout  to aid in the planning of shots and shooting on virtual set stages. 

“How it works,” explains Zoic visual effects supervisor Andrew Orloff, “is that in the pre-production process the art department put together a SketchUp file and a piece of concept art for each of the virtual sets that we’re going to use, and we build those for real-time 3D playback. We convert them through Unity to our ZEUS:Scout app.” “We upload all of those into a protected FTP site for Once Upon a Time and they have their whole library in the Scout app,” adds Orloff. “So when we’re in pre-production we’ve got the ability now for the director to pull up any of the sets, move around the sets with the controllers that we have in the app, and also use the gyroscope in the iPad to do real-time tracking. If they’re sitting on a chair and they start moving around, they can look around the set as though they were standing in one spot on it and moving a magical window around it. If you’re on a greenscreen we can do a realtime composite as well.” 

As Orloff notes, the Scout app is most helpful in pre-production, helping Zoic and crew members decide on orientation of the actors to camera and the location of objects in the scene. Then when the cameras start rolling, that’s when Zoic’s implementation of a complete virtual set system ZEUS comes into play.

The virtual world

ZEUS, short for Zoic Environmental Unification System, is a combination previsualization and on-set realtime compositing that relies on Lightcraft’s Previzion tech for realtime camera tracking and keying. It allows for 3D sets to be ‘piped in’ to the Once Upon a Time greenscreen stage, helping the actors and crew to get an idea of what the final shots will look like.

Above you see the original plate.

and this is the final shot.

The Future of Green Screen

Looking further into the future, we see a new camera coming up, introduced at NAB by Lytro. The Lytro Cinema, and this camera can, in fact fix the problem, which green screen was created for. The problem of separating foreground and background. How? The answer is simple: Lytro’s primary power is its ability to capture accurate per-pixel depth information. With depth-based separation, you can easily keep or discard areas in the frame according to their distance from the camera. This could mean, that green screen won’t be necessary anymore in the near future. 

The Future of Once Upon A Time’s Green Screen Stage

The 360-degree, 3D stage they use in Once Upon A Time won’t be gone anytime soon, I suspect, as the show is going into it’s 7th season and possibly it’s last. And the shots look fairly realistic, for as far the representation of Medieval times go. But who knows, maybe we’ll see the change to something similar to Lytro if the show gets renewed for an 8th season by ABC next year. Besides, when the show started in October 2011, we weren’t even close to something as Lytro, and so the Green Stage was fairly innovative back in 2011, in a show with so many VFX effects and CGI. Also, the iPad app that’s used: ZEUS: Scout is fairly innovative, you can already see the stage and how it’s going to look while using your iPad. How innovative is that for 2011?

[gibsongirlselections]

Hillary Was Right About BLM

In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, you may have noticed that some of your white friends and family members engaged in an odd ritual: They filled their social media pages with confessional screeds acknowledging their white privilege and vaguely promising “to do better,” to listen more, and so on and so forth ad nauseam.

The idea that the nation’s problem with overpolicing of poor and working-class neighborhoods originates from some place of internalized white supremacy and that the problem is not going to get fixed until white Americans acknowledge their sins is nothing new. It had been making the rounds on the fringes of political discourse for years, until recently it spilled onto the world stage and was hastily adopted by said white friends and family members of yours.

Look, for example, how this young white woman reacted recently when asked why she was berating black police officers:

White woman yelling at black officers. pic.twitter.com/dEdfTf0Dgw

— Henry Rodgers (@henryrodgersdc) June 23, 2020

“Racism is a white person’s problem,” she shouts. “Racism is my problem. I need to fix it.” Talk about a white-savior complex.

It’s worth remembering that Hillary Clinton was once faced with the same idea. Her response was admirable and no doubt the correct one.

At a primary campaign event in 2015, Clinton met with the Black Lives Matter activists Daunasia Yancey and Julius Jones during a backroom meeting that was captured on video. You can find the fullest available recording of the conversation here (the pertinent moments are between time codes 1:19-3:41 and 8:50-14:20):

Yancey and Jones were there to confront Clinton on her role in promoting the 1994 Crime Bill that contributed to the explosion of America’s prison population over the last thirty years (a trend that has since somewhat changed and, hopefully, with the recent passage of the First Step Act irreversibly so). The intervention was definitely necessary, as Clinton was largely getting a pass for her former tough-on-crime posture, while Bernie Sanders was getting hammered for being somehow blind to the plight of black Americans.

Clinton promised that she now held different views on criminal justice issues, but Jones remained unconvinced. And so, he asked her: “What in your heart has changed that’s going to change the direction of this country?”

The question might on first sight appear reasonable, but it also strangely confines the matter to the realm of feelings.

Clinton would have none of it and put the ball back in the activists’ court, a rhetorical tour de force that deserves to be quoted at some length:

You’re gonna have to come together as a movement and say, here’s what we want done about it. Because you can get lip service from as many white people as you can pack into Yankee Stadium and a million more like it who are gonna say: Oh, we get it, we get it, we’re gonna be nicer. That’s not enough. At least, that’s not how I see politics. So the consciousness raising, the advocacy, the passion, the youth of your movement is so critical, but now all I’m suggesting is, even for us sinners, find some common ground on agendas that can make a difference right here and now in people’s lives.

[…] But at the end of the day, we can do a whole lot to change some hearts and change some systems and create more opportunities for people who deserve to have them to live up to their own god-given potential, to live safely, without fear of violence in their own communities, to have a decent school, to have a decent house, to have a decent future. So, we can do it one of many ways: You can keep the movement going, which you have started, and through it, you may actually change some hearts. But if that’s all that happens, we’ll be back here in ten years having the same conversation.

Christopher Hitchens once remarked that Hillary Clinton’s record is so full of lies “that it can only hope to stay alive on the podium by quacking out the clock […] and saying nothing testable or original or courageous.” This was not one such moment.

To be sure, during her exchange with the activists, there was the fair share of Clintonian prevarication, too (“I’m not sure I agree with you. I’m not sure I disagree.”) But the imagery of Yankee Stadium full of guilt-ridden white liberals is highly amusing, and her insistence on concrete policy proposals around which the nation can gather is absolutely spot-on. Just changing someone’s heart, she argues, is a meaningless exercise. It falls below the threshold of the political because at the end of the day nothing of value will have been done to improve the lives of the poor. Economic well-being and safety from crime will always trump the hollow gestures of contemporary anti-racism.

On these points at least, Clinton had outwitted the Black Lives Matter activists. They, in turn, were right, of course, in reminding her of her central role in promoting the sort of policies that led to a general decline in the quality of living for many of America’s poor.

It also needs reminding that Clinton-style neoliberal politics had a profoundly disempowering effect on civil society. The social and political work that used to be done by trade unions, churches, parent-teacher or neighborhood associations are now monopolized by professional NGOs and non-profits with deep ties to the state and corporate donors. If the Black Lives Matter activists should have probed deeper for any possible change of heart in Clinton, it would have been to find out whether she now believed that voluntary citizen associations should wrestle away power from managerial elites. But that was when Black Lives Matter still existed in somewhat germinal form. Now, it’s a richly endowed non-profit in its own right.

But instead of insisting on any of these points, Jones somewhat haplessly replies to Clinton that, “if you don’t tell black people what we need to do, then we won’t tell you all what you need to do […] This is and has always been a white problem of violence. There’s not much that we can do to stop the violence against us.”

In a brilliant New York Times op-ed from 2017, Thomas Chatterton Williams wrote that identity politics ironically enough gives whiteness a near-mystical power to mold and control the course of the world in such a way that “those deemed white remain this nation’s primary actors.” White people act, black people are acted upon. This is the way it’s been and, if you ask the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates, this is the way it’s going to remain for a long, long time. It was unfortunate that Jones fell into the same fatalistic way of thinking.

But what felt like an argumentative misstep then is now the law of the land on the left, by which activists like the indignant white woman from the Twitter video above reveal their actual racism. It’s the same sentiment informing those horrid Facebook posts by your friends.

What will be left to the wayside as a result is any meaningful attempt to tackle the issues of overly aggressive policing, unemployment, low growth, dwindling incomes, existential despair, and the skyrocketing homicide rate that’s been haunting our cities since the recent riots and the subsequent retreat of police forces. Black lives are getting lost at staggering rates, and no one who holds the public microphone seems to care.

There was a real moment for genuine reform in the air recently—that is, at least, in the briefest sliver of time right after the brutal killing of George Floyd and right before the looting broke out (with plenty of entitled white progressives stoking the flames, some of them literally). Since then, things have degenerated toward ahistorical acts of iconoclasm against the author of the Declaration of Independence or the Union general and later president who brought the rebellion to its knees and then crushed the KKK. The target in all this is not so much some perceived historical injustice that occurred in the distant past but the belief that “whiteness” has wiggled its way through time, swallowing and destroying all that has stood in its way. It’s the stony memorials to this mythic, all-pervasive whiteness that therefore need to be toppled first before anything else can change. And voila, we’re way past addressing the real problems affecting our country. 

(Perhaps, it’s the advance guard of Joe Biden’s presidency. After all, didn’t he promise a room full of megarich donors that under his administration “nothing would fundamentally change”?)

Far from taking advice on how to fix our problems from the Clintons—they’re the last ones we should consult on literally anything—Hillary’s response to the Black Lives Matter activists remains prudent on its own. Whether she truly meant it and whether she as president would have followed through on her words (she wouldn’t have), it should still be seen as a compassionate plea to black Americans—really, to all Americans— not to feel like the deck is forever stacked against them. True change requires us to engage in meaningful civic activity in order to regain a sense of agency that our corporate-sponsored anti-racist figureheads insist remains confined to the hearts of entitled white progressives.

Otherwise, “we’ll be back here in ten years having the same conversation.”

Gregor Baszak is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a writer. His articles have appeared in The American Conservative, Los Angeles Review of Books, Platypus Review, Public Books, Spectator USA, Spiked, and elsewhere. Follow Gregor on Twitter at @gregorbas1. 

The post Hillary Was Right About BLM appeared first on The American Conservative.

[stratamuzak]

Interview with VoltageHawk

STRATA: What artists in particular you are drawn to (alive or deceased) that you listen to for particular moods? Such as happy/sad/contemplative/etc… Explain why you might listen to one artist for a particular mood.

CHASE AROCHA

When I want to feel inspired I listen to a lot of the different projects of Mike Patton. Be it Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, Peeping Tom, or Tomahawk, the range of styles of music is so diverse that I’ve been listening for like 15 years and I haven’t gotten bored yet, haha. When I want to relax or chill, I love BadBadNotGood, an amazing jazz artist doing incredible arrangements all in a hip-hop context. It's great! Or Ray Lynch, I really love his writing and use of counterpoint melody. Then if I’m getting hyped I put on something like Dying Fetus or Vitriol, or Maximum the Hormone. And any other time I’m blaring Kamasi Washington, Robert Glasper and Sturgill Simpson.

DAN FENTON

I think a lot of the time music finds my mood. Sort of more a spiritual or cosmic connection. When I was a kid my mom would make us watch musicals if we stayed home sick from school. Jokes was on her because I hated school but I loved learning musical scores and how to write dynamic parts and movements. The fact that people like Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra or Marlon Brando were also amazing actors only added to that unlikely education. I learned how to really feel music between that and the intense very bloody hymns we had to sing in church. I understand the sentiment but that shit is harder than a lot of black metal. “Are you washed in the blood of the lamb”. Hard core shit. Sorry, I digress. During the making of our most recent record which is called Electric Thunder and set for release later this year or early next (hard to navigate releases with all this pandemic shit) I listened exclusively to film scores, classical music and radio evangelists. I am not religious but I grew up in a preacher's home and when I needed to get my creative push and anger at its peak, I listened to preachers who were clearly greed driven and motivated by the lust for power. It made my adrenaline rush in anger and it came out in the recording for sure. I am a huge fan of Hans Zimmer and Vangelis. Each of these artists move me in powerful ways. The juxtaposition of darkness and light both in traditional instrumentation and experimental synth based work. Just musical giants. When I am feeling frustrated about the social issues I see everyday in my East Nashville neighborhood I listen to KRS-One, Kamasi Washington, Outkast. A  lot of protest music. I am in love with band IDLES from the UK. Such powerful lyrics tackling issues like the need for male vulnerability, equality for all and the seemingly ironic brutal beat down of toxic masculinity. That band is great if you're happy, mad, sad, whatever.

STRATA: Do you have a process you go through prior to writing, playing, and even performing?

CHASE AROCHA

I do a lot of breathing exercises like the Wim Hof techniques. I have generalized anxiety disorder and I used to get horrible debilitating panic attacks, it helped me get into breathing and meditation. Anxiety will never go away but you learn ways to live with it and push through your panic. I think about how much this means to me and how long I’ve spent doing it, I try to see that I value myself as a person and then from that thinking I can just let go and play music. Only approaching it with love and not worrying about mistakes because that’s how we learn.

DAN FENTON

The entire thing is one process. Like a hero's journey of sorts. I listen and meditate everyday, I believe in a cosmic river of inspiration that flows from an energy that is and has always been. I believe if you listen hard enough and give yourself to the music the muse will send your mind transmissions that may only be a section of a song, or perhaps they are an entire album, but everyday I show up. A few years ago I read this book called The War Of Art, by Steven Pressfield. In this book he describes the invisible force he calls the Resistance. The Resistance may be things both “good or bad”, but they are anything that keeps you from showing up for your art. So I show up everyday, you can ask the dudes in the band, they receive a work tape maybe twice a week with new shit to try out. If I don't feel that muse working I don’t force it, but I instead wait on further transmissions from the cosmic womb. All sounds crazy, but my story is crazy, so crazy makes the most sense. In the studio I have many processes. I found while recording vocals I perform better in complete darkness, I have realized how much I live inside my head and how active my imagination is and equally ADD my eyes are. So when I can't see it brings to life the imagery and the passion of the song. I can see all those people I write about, all the landscapes, the love, lust, joy and pain. I also do some method stuff, keep things in my pockets pertaining to a character I may be portraying in a song. Wanna be Daniel Day Lewis shit.

STRATA: Your own current project, discuss the process your music went through as you built each layer. From beginning to the end of it. (Even the artwork and merch that may or may not be apart of it.) *This is your time to be as in-depth as you would like over your current project, remember an interview allows you a platform in which to sell your music to old and new fans.

CHASE AROCHA

This all started with our drummer Jarrad having a vision and going through trials and errors of finding the right people to execute that. Along the way Dan, Tyler, and I all came into the picture and that vision morphed into something we all felt was not even from us. Like we were an antenna receiving a signal and these riffs and lyrics quickly meshed into something I haven’t heard before. Part hard rock, part jazz, part punk and hardcore. All with this message of love and truth being the reason for living. To end the ones controlling our thoughts and dividing us or tribalism and greed. I feel like we made something worth listening to and that’s all I feel like you can really hope for.

DAN FENTON

The self titled record that we have available now on all streaming platforms was two different profound stages in my life all in the making of one record. When we began, Jarrad and I partied a fuck ton, and I was decending into some serious personal shit with alcohol. It was bad, I couldn't get through a day without way too high of a blood alcohol level. Before we finished vocals on the record, I stayed up one night working and drinking, perhaps I had never stopped from how many nights before, who fucking knows. Anyhow, I died for 9 minutes on the side porch of my house. Fully shut down, fucking dead. Mind you, I didn't want to die, I just didn't know how to lay off the bottle. Woke up in the ICU surrounded by my band, my wife and what few friends I had left. At that moment Voltagehawk became a complete family to me. I spent a stint in rehab (Jarrad drove me) and that was several years ago now. When I got out I went back to finish the record, make some amends and chase this thing out for real. So that was some info on the first record. The new Album which is a 13 song space odyssey named Electric Thunder, after our beloved Electric Thunder Studio owned and operated by our resident space wizard producer Geoff Piller, was not so dramatic. After I got my shit together and my mind cleared up I began to write everyday like a mad man. Song after song after song came like never before. I think we cut 15 songs out before we settled on the final 13. Our process as a band is often for myself or one of the other dudes to present a bare bones or often finished idea to the band and we run it through the Hawk Filter. The Hawk Filter is just the decomposition and reconstruction of every rough idea till it fits us. Which is silly to say because if we like, it we do it, not a matter of genre worship. Shit’s good, do it. Always do what's best for the song.

STRATA: Can your music personally be an open door to breath and bend in the world of artistic exploration? In Other Words… how comfortable are you as an artist exploring other types of music and creating projects that might be totally different than what you are creating now?

CHASE AROCHA

There is so much great music in the world in so many styles, why shouldn’t we try to explore them all! I’m always trying something I haven’t done before, not always as a challenge, but I would hope it’s natural for people to do in art. We shouldn’t be the same people we were 2 years ago, let alone 10. I love jazz, Death Metal, and country music. If you can find a really fun and genuine way to blend those then that’s absolutely what you should do! Don’t be tied down to what kind of music you’re making and just make music.

DAN FENTON

That's all we do all day. Everything on this planet, and above it, and in it’s majestic seas and mountains, all these people of all the cultures of all the world and their energy and their culture all influence and musical inspiration is welcome. Our philosophy is never say no, and jump off the cliff, and pull yourself back up. Meaning: try all the musical options then settle on the one we believe is the most amazing. So much of our influence is from cinema and books, video games, you name it. I’ll pluck a support cable on every bridge I see ‘til I am dead just to see if it speaks to me. Sonically there are no fucking rules, and if you impose rules, fuck your rules. We love to create, to talk about creating and then to birth something new is beyond amazing.

STRATA: Are you open to change your style, genre even, and approach to how and what you create every time you enter a studio? Or do you find once you have a formula in place do you find it best to stay with what you know? Many times artists will change how they approach their songwriting and even their recording staff/producers.

CHASE AROCHA

Like I said before, I believe that you should just make music and with that should come constant experimentation. When we record we find sounds from all over the place. From children’s toy instruments, to skateboard wheels spinning to imitate rain. Our writing is kind of always evolving and changing. Dan is an amazing writer who literally has lyrics and melodies pouring out of his hands and face. Everyday he has new ideas and records and sends them to everyone. Jarrad is great at taking those riffs and making suggestions on how the structure could be of a song along with feel. I am obsessed with adding layers of guitars however I can, but I also write a lot and send tracks as well. Tyler is a tone junkie on the bass, filling in the bottom end and has such a great approach to being independent from the guitars with his lines. We send tracks back and forth to each other then we get in a room and flesh them out. The whole time in the process the songs are constantly changing and evolving into the sound we have. We are always open to change and never believe in the word No when discussing music and art. You try every idea and see what works and what doesn’t. Sometimes when one member has a vision of how a song should go and is trying to communicate that, you should respect his idea and see it through. If it doesn’t work that’s okay, we tried!

DAN FENTON

Voltagehawk is ever evolving. As it stands, we spend way too much time trying to pigeon hole what people will refer to our sound as. I don’t care what you call it as long as it moves you. I listen to everything from John Coltrane and Tom Waits to Napalm Death and Motorhead, Antonio Lucio Vivaldi to Kamasi Washington. IDLES and Bad Brains. If you refuse to evolve as an artist, experimenting, growing, trying new methods, all these elements then you cannot grow as a human being. Too many people are happy where they are, just okay, making the same music that their dads made and trying to cosplay some kind of yesteryear. We don't do that shit, we’re us, that's it. We grow, when you hear the Electric Thunder for the first time you will understand everything. If you burn some sage  next to a photo of Carl Sagan while you listen to Electric Thunder, you will see the cosmic river in your mind's eye. The world is full of people with a blockage in their brain. They cannot see that this bullshit we call a life is just a series of labor for hire gigs that leave us rapidly in the middle. We're trying to break away from it all and follow our feathers, our truth, our search for enlightenment on our hero's journey. I’ll leave you with this. Know Thyself.

[barbosaasouza]

Review: Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE: Encore (Nintendo Switch)

I want you to understand straight away that those picking up this game solely because they’re into Fire Emblem are going to be extremely disappointed. The #FE connection is dubious, at best, offering only a few characters, some musical cues, weapons, and references. All that remains of the Fire Emblem battle system is the weapon triangle, and all but one of the FE characters featured in the story are covered in masks. Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE is no more a Fire Emblem game than is Super Smash Bros.

All that said, I absolutely love it. It was one of my favorite games on the Wii U, and now it’s one of my favorite games on the Switch.

The game takes place in modern-day Tokyo where ghostly figures called mirages are stealing “performa” from the unexpecting citizens, causing them to become mumpish. Most people can’t see these mirages, but there are a few out there called mirage masters who can not only see them but also control one of their own. Here’s where the Fire Emblem characters come into play, as each of our heroes gets a mirage based on a character from a couple of Fire Emblem games. They interact with the mirages throughout the game’s story, but more importantly, the mirages become weapons during battles.

Speaking of the story, we mostly follow Itsuke Aoi and Tsubasa Oribe, a young “will-they-or-won’t-they” couple living in Tokyo. Tsubasa has dreams of becoming an idol like her older sister before she disappeared in the first mirage attack five years prior. Itsuke accompanies Tsubasa to a big public audition, and must quickly save her when she’s taken by mirages into an Idolasphere (various alternate dimensions with gateways scattered throughout Tokyo). There, Itsuke discovers his mirage, Chrom from Fire Emblem: Awakening. Tsubasa gets one of her own—Caeda from Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon—after being rescued.

It ends up that Itsuke’s best friend—an aspiring actor named Touma Ikagi—is already a mirage master, so he takes these two to his boss, Maiko Shimazaki. To the public and idol industry, she’s the head of Fortuna Entertainment. She’s to the mirage masters as, say, Splinter is to the Ninja Turtles. Only sexier. And more flirtatious. And probably a heavier drinker. You have to know how to deal with those the idol industry, after all.

The beginning chunk of the game introduces us to the playable characters (seven good-looking young entertainers and their respective mirages) as well as plenty of NPCs both in and out of Fortuna Entertainment. The story is told in chapters, each involving an idolasphere to explore and a boss monster to overcome. Some bosses are named after villains from the Fire Emblem series, but never really bear a resemblance to their namesake. The idolasphers are all inspired by the various components of the Japanese idol industry: pop music, TV, film, modeling, etc.

I’ve focused thus far on the story and scenery because it’s all so absolutely bonkers that it really carries the game. Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE is a constant explosion of color and pep that somehow manages to keep up its frantic pace without ever getting too sugary. There are darker moments, of course, and many of the enemies you’ll battle along the way are quite creepy (if you’re afraid of clowns, just wait until you have to take on Nickelwise), but it’s nothing that friendship, hard work, and a fully animated J-Pop video can’t overcome.

Between each chapter are intermissions in which you can pick up sidequests from the people about town (find this thing, talk to this person, attack these monsters, etc.). The best ones come in the form of side stories for the main characters, through which we learn their motivation for entering the idol industry and help them overcome their insecurities. These are important because they open up new performa that can aid you in battle. Also, they’re often very funny and occasionally quite touching. Every single controllable character in this game is distinctive, interesting, and entertaining.

Of course, none of this would matter if the game wasn’t fun to play, but it is. The turn-based battle system is amongst my favorite ever devised. Although each character has his/her own strengths, you can augment these with skills learned throughout the story—Nintendo fans familiar with Atlus’ Shin Megami Tensei games will feel right at home here. Whether you choose to enhance your natural strengths or try to balance your characters with new ones will affect how they perform in battle.

Battles begin when you bump into an enemy in the Idolasphere. You can avoid them if you prefer, but engaging at all times will keep you appropriately leveled. All battles take place on a “stage” in front of an “audience.” Three members of your party will fight at a time, but you can swap two of them out at will (only Itsuke must remain active). A timeline shows you the order of who attacks when, so that along with your strengths and your opponents’ weaknesses (revealed as you attack them) shape your strategy for battle.

You have a standard physical attack you’ll hardly ever use because the special attacks can set up chains. Here, your attack is followed up by one from your party members who have a complementary skill regardless of whether they’re actively in the battle. I especially like that swapping out party members doesn’t penalize you; the person you pull in gets to attack right away instead of having to wait until the next round. And here’s a pro tip; be sure to swap in everyone during the boss battles as everyone who gets in at least one attack will get experience points, even those who aren’t active when the battle ends. That experience (along with the items you collect after battles) will lead to better weapons, new skills, ad-lib performances, duo attacks, and more. The game helps you keep an eye on your upgrades by pushing them on you after battle and through the game’s Topic system, which is basically a text messaging app that originally popped on the Wii U GamePad and is now called up on the screen with the + button.

Assuming many of you have already played that original Wii U version, I’ll spare you the further gameplay intricacies and look at whether the Encore edition is worth a second look. Honestly, you don’t really get much. The original’s DLC for easier level grinding is now built in, and you get a bonus dungeon that provides new costumes and story elements. The dungeon is perfunctory, but maybe that’s okay considering the complicated and discombobulating mazes that make up the standard Idolaspheres (especially one towards the very end). The costumes are fun, however, and it’s good to not have to spend the in-game cash in order to change the look of the characters (unless you want to, of course).

More helpful is the fact that Tiki (another Fire Emblem character who runs the Bloom Palace where you enhance weapons and learn new skills), Maiko, and Barry (a former metal guitarist and mirage master who’s now a trainer for Fortuna) get to join the end of your session attacks to provide a bit more damage. There’s also a new song to enjoy. None of this is really enough to call previous players back into the arena, but the game is so much fun that it’s worth a double-dip regardless.

I feel I should address the controversy that arose when it was announced that the Encore edition for Switch would be based on the western version of the game which “censored” (some people have difficulty distinguishing censoring from editing for content) certain elements from the Japanese version. Specifically, cleavage is covered up in parts and sexy imagery is randomly toned down. None of this impacts gameplay, and it’s not like there’s not enough fanservice spread throughout the game. It’s much ado about nothing. We still don’t have access to the hot springs DLC, however, and that’s too bad. I couldn’t care less how animated characters are dressed in a game, but it annoys me when there’s available content to which I don’t have access.

Still, none of that alters my overall opinion of Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE: Encore. It’s a vibrant, bonkers, incredibly upbeat game that’s as fun during the downtime as it is in the battles. The lack of an autosave is going to annoy you more than once, and the game does seems to repeat itself quite a bit, but that’s the extend of my complaints.

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