#manipulation babey!!!

[shadow0-1]

The route was clear

[dance-in-the-morning-glow]

new year, same me. still obsessing over these two. they’re terrible for each other, and yet i’m over here treating them like my problem children </3

Until the Legs Have Swung (103,024 words, most of them angsty) — an ode to toxic dynamics, questionable choices, and my inability to write anything resembling emotional stability

[tyrannuspitch]

okay so the thing that's making me throw up blood from my old notes

i have long maintained that loki is subtly but insidiously treated like a servant (or slave) by his family. but of course that prompts the question: what kind of servant is he? he's clearly not a domestic servant. he is a warrior, but his role as a warrior seems, at least officially, on par with his peers. and he hasn't come into his role as puppet king yet. until canon begins... his role, his service, his usefulness, seems to be defined by companionship to thor. by love.

in TDW, loki watches prisoners being brought into the dungeon and says, sarcastically, "odin continues to bring me new friends. how thoughtful."

and on one level, loki is trying to draw attention to his terrible conditions, including near-total isolation. but he's also equating himself to the other prisoners. and... he refers to friends. to a father giving his child prisoners as a gift. that's not just sarcasm. that is, in a way, what loki is to thor.

and yes. i know. i know exactly how the prisoner-companion-gift thing sounds. to be clear, i don't think there's any actual sign of thor and loki's relationship not being platonic. there is sometimes rape imagery around loki, sometimes involving members of his family, but i think what it's really meant to convey is abuse/humiliation/violation plus gendered power dynamics. basically everything but the sex itself.

but. i would argue it is no less fucked up for being platonic. perhaps, in a way, even more so. because if this were sexual abuse, loki could, potentially, draw a distinction between the physical and the emotional, and decide that it was only physical.

but there IS no physical side. there is ONLY the emotional, and loki is being manipulated and conditioned so his emotions are what his captors want them to be. he's not being forced to partake in an intimate physical act symbolic of love, he's just outright being forced to love. no symbolism, no proxy, no dissociation, no escape.

it's all-encompassing and yet far subtler for it. it's a profound and insidious form of abuse with almost nothing concrete he can point to and say: here is what they did to me.

loki is a servant who isn't allowed to act like a servant. no professional distance, nothing to shield his heart. and he is a servant who still has to fear his lord, but cannot show it too openly. because instead he has to show love. thor's imperiousness is more immediately visible than loki's deference. loki's lowliness is quiet and normalised. he fades into the background. gaslit and silenced. they own his heart!!!

and on top of that, this is a household where openly displaying love is a form of weakness and subservience too. loki is the only one who can actually bring himself to say the word love. his parents and his brother do not. they say: you are my son. you are my brother. you are mine. and they expect it to be an equal comfort.

what happens to a family when one of the children is the parents' prisoner of war? what happens to a prisoner who is raised to see their captors as their family? how can you love them - and how could you not? how can you ever learn to see love as anything but a horrifying violation on the most fundamental level? and how could you not long for it, even so?

[tildemoe]

keyart for filomena, my valorant agent from sicily !!

[shummthechumm]

yellowfang genuinely believing that because brokenstar was "cursed" and that her (being manipulated into) giving him up...her loosing her daughters at birth...and that this meant she was incapable of birthing and raising a cat like firestar....ooooo...

then later projecting herself onto leafpool having the three...which, as old as their prophecy is, i would imagine causing some unrest in starclan....her children having a "pre-determined" destiny, being born against the same rules that brokenstar was...

both leaf and yellow and their similar powers...its all too much really

[missingn000]

WHO'S FUCKING HYPE FOR YUKI VS CHOSO

[eye-of-yelough]

i’m insane. by the way

[befuddled-calico-whump]

I don't quite have the right words for it but something about how Sahota and Vic went from being referred to by first and last name (respectively) to last and first name. And how it seems to align with Sahota being brought up to more of a teacher position like Vic, which is something that Sahota clearly feels uncomfortable becoming (whether he'll admit it or not). Its like a cycle of abuse he's watching spin out his turn to pass on the trauma.

My next thought would be how long this cycle has been going on for. On this account we have not gotten anything from Vics perspective, which would definitely help give some insight, at the very least, to his thought process with how training works. It's clear that he's sadistic, but I wonder if it's a trait he learned from his own mentor.

Sahota, on the other hand, does not take any satisfaction from the crew fearing him (and I'll assume their pain), expressing it in "The Return." But it is what he thinks he should be feeling, because that's what he sees Vic displaying. Will Sahota fall into Vics mindset? Does Vic have an internal monologue similar to Sahotas, albeit much more oppressed? Can I stop hyper-analyzing these two and focus on the rest of the cast for more than five minutes? Also I have like fifty questions about the organization Vic and Sahota are apart of but that's a bigger ask for a later night.

-⌚anon

hhhhhhh analysis (you should know I eat these like they're delicious little treats)

the cycle has definitely been going on past just Vic and Sahota, though I'm not sure how much time I'll spend exploring it. I might eventually do a Vic pov chapter, but getting in his head will be a challenge lol

I will say that Vic started out with some sadistic tendencies, but his own training and experiences have significantly sharpened them. If he would've lived a more "normal" life, they may have never risen to the surface at all

[adhbabey]

I feel so angry at everyone, angry at the world, angry at myself. But I am the me that I criticize the most. That is why I have not accepted that I am autistic for less than 20 years of my life.

Anyone else in my position would have the absolute right to be angry, and those around me could agree. I've seen so many testimonies from people like me, that are filled with anger at oppression.

But for me? I have to edit the way I speak all the time to speak to the public, I have to tone myself down a lot, I have to fit into societal standards just to be able to be understood. Just so I won't be mistaken as a bad person. But that's not me. The me that I am is complex and enigmatic and mysterious and strange. The me that I am is something other people would cringe at. The me that I am is not angry, just tired.

This protective shield around my heart is after years of belittlement, by not just abled people, but disabled alike. I was horrifically bullied by people that were in the same special ed study period, where I saw their aids look upon me with pity, as the faces I remember harassing me, where in the same position as I am. I wasn't treated with kindness by those who shared the same disorder as I.

I was ostracized by, what it felt like, everyone. Even now, I am not accepted by other autistic people. Because I don't fit in to that ideal. I am not like them. I am too different. So its completely devastating that I found out that I was autistic. How could others be so cruel, how could I fit in, if I never felt like I did. How can I accept that I'm different, if it feels like no one like me does?

No one tells you how to deal with it when you're sad, because all they expect of you is that you're angry at the world. Yes, parts of me are angry, I would be lying if I didn't feel their emotions. But me? how can I possibly feel liberated, even through anger, since I never felt understood by other autistic people in my own head?

I wish I could show people my true self, every day. I criticize myself for being upset, that the few who do get it, is enough. That I don't need approval from other people. But I don't find solace in understanding who I am, not right now. I feel so hurt that no one else is crying either. Please stop judging me.

Maybe I'll feel better later. But I am not happy. I am not angry. I want understanding in the misery. I want to be known, but not as I've led you to believe. Just as the tears flow. Just as the girl unknown, if she is even a girl at all.

[troublcmakcrs]

//mr & mrs tweak are my favorite sicko4sicko ship

[dragonsrcool4real]

i can’t believe y’all have gotten to the point ur saying women should NOT trust their gut instinct when dealing with strangers because it’s transmisogynistic and racist and ableist somehow. incredible. disgusting

[brucewaynehater101]

Tim drake ruler of worlds

Ok I am an outsider but I think ppl are focused too much on the brucequest. Imagine the comedic potential of none of the batfam knowing but the loa does. Damian arrives and shows respect to Tim bc even the demons heir knows when they are outclassed (by several planets worth of people). Batfam + jl don't realize this until a force appears that overtakes planets and sees Tim. Tim says "fuck off". They promptly fuck off. What the jl doesn't know is that they only overtake weaker planets without a good defense. Planets Timmy has multiple planets to act as a defense and should not be counted. He wouldn't ask them but the second those planets hear of the threat to their beloved rulers planet???? They shall take this strain from his shoulders!!! He has done so much!!! (What if he thinks we are too much work) We can do this small act for him!!!

They hear of one (1) threat and are like but what does he get from ruling us?? (Mental health boost from millions saying how great he is, stress relief tbh, the ability to take days off while he feels like he's still being useful). We Will Keep Our Overlord!!!!

Better if they have longer lifespans and so Tim being 17 is like.. Smart Baby!! Babey so clever!! We love him!! Earth babies are clearly such good rulers!!! We should recommend?! But wait?? He tries to KILL earth?? THATS WHERE OUR BELOVED BABY RULER IS??

Tim is like people electing a bear to president because it clearly can't make anything worse right? But then he makes it BETTER?!??!??

I fucking love this so so much. I can't with them electing him for the morale boost (baby for overlord), and Tim somehow doing well anyways.

Just planets of people who love their mascot overlord who actually does really good work.

Also, you are correct that Damian (and LoA) knowing about Tim from the get-go would be such a juicy twist! Like, Damian would try to befriend Tim instead. He would try to establish a friendly relationship and connection for the purpose of having him on Damian's side when Damian takes over the LoA or Batman's mantle.

I bet Talia has trained Damian in business relations and how to manipulate people onto your side. Damian would try these tricks (there can still be some conflict with Tim being Robin) and notice months later that they somehow became brothers. Oh well. Tim's proven to be a formidable ally. For those who hurt his family? He's a terrifying opponent. It's truly better this way (and not that he'll admit it even to himself, but he also cares about Tim at this point).

Since Damian knows about the planets and they have a friendly relationship, Tim would take Damian with him sometimes when he visits. He'd show him some of the ropes (training useful for WE or LoA) and implement ideas Damian proposes.

Then! Your whole JL and invading forces ideas??? Fuuuudge. I love that shit so much. I just love dramatic reveals like that

[bonefall]

Do you have any plans for Frost’s littermates in ASC?

It's odd that Canon!Curlfeather is portrayed on the screen as a scheming character who was fully willing to manipulate her daughter into a position of power, and smart enough to know that she needed lackeys to carry out her dirtywork... and yet, seemingly had no plans for her other two kids.

On one hand, I can understand her wanting to "use" her family as little as possible. You could say she's willing to make a sacrifice with Frostkit's comfort, but wants to spare her other children from it.

On the other hand... I just don't feel like that works. I want to portray BB!Curlfeather as someone who truly believes every choice she made was good for her children. She might reconsider some of her beliefs based on her closeness to Morningstar while in the Dark Forest, but in life, she is absolutely the sort of person who would have a use in mind for her kittens.

I'm not super proud of these quick designs I made for Mistpaw and Graypaw, but here's a first draft;

You probably notice that they're all dog-like, and that's because they are direct descendants of Bluestar in BB! WOLF MOTIF BABEY

In fact, this is going to be a massive contributor towards their characterizations. I may be shuffling my tree in some other ways to make for better faction drama in RiverClan, but BB!Curlfeather priding her lineage, especially as it connects to Crookedstar and Stonefur, is very important to how it shapes her identity.

DESIGN AND DRABBLE BENEATH THE CUT;

On the wolf motif as a whole;

To begin with; note the apple-leaf eye markings! They are subject to the Mapleshade Curse.

Something I like to play with a lot is misconceptions about wolf behavior. For Bluestar herself, where this all began, I use the myth of the "lone wolf" as symbolism that she never truly acted alone.

At every turn, she had friends and family. Her sacrifices, her ruling style, everything she's ever done, is based on her love for both ThunderClan as well as the cats in other Clans.

The symbol of her friend group, the Forget-Me-Not, comes to symbolize Fire Alone as an ideology.

So... the Curlkin.

What I'm playing with is the idea that wolves are perfect, ferociously strong predators from birth.

Curlfeather wants to eventually give her children strong, respectable positions in the Clan. For Frostpaw, that's the Cleric position.

For the other kids, she was still assessing them as they were growing. Deputyship would have been for one of them, but she hadn't planned so far ahead that it would have been unreasonable.

"When you see a fish upstream, you don't race ahead to catch it downriver."

So, she wanted Mist and Gray to be strong and always encouraged them to achieve greatness. They were battle training as soon as they could, and never missed a day.

But it wasn't really their interest, and they weren't really "naturally gifted" or anything. They just do what their mom tells them is good to do for their future.

As a result I want all of them to look a little goofy in some way, except Curlfeather herself.

Frostpaw herself is the softest of the lot, but I want to make sure Gray and Mist are pretty obviously sweeter than they seem too.

Unfortunately though, I don't think I captured what I was going for. I'm definitely gonna give the Frost Siblings a second pass, while Frostpaw will just get refined a little.

Graypaw

He's naturally huge. Even as a newborn, people would comment about him being a big fat kitten.

As a result, he was probably the most "promising," early on.

Understand though; this wasn't necessarily nefarious. Having accomplished warriors as offspring is a sign of a great warrior, it makes a strong family.

It didn't mean she only saw her largest child as an opportunity. He just had great potential, which she would nourish.

He's a little bit entitled as a result. He's big, he works hard, his family's a big deal, he knows it.

And that's sort of his "issue," if you want to call it that. He's not really interested in honor for honor's sake, or improving himself for the sake of the Clan, the way his mother would expect a great warrior like herself to be.

He likes the tangible rewards of strength and is motivated by approval.

...which causes him to be a bully to those he considers weaker.

That ear got shredded in a fight somehow, I haven't decided yet if there's going to be another set of apprentices around the time, if it was Splashtail or his sister, or if it was a cat from another Clan who got tired of his shit lmaoo

(In any case it was NOT his mother.)

Since him and his sister have "obedient to their mother" as major personality traits, I decided to give them both domestic dog characteristics. Graypaw has a german shepherd "stance."

I really like when people give Gray some cream in his design, so I made him look kinda like how I imagine Stonefur.

I don't really like it, though, especially since he's usually described as "silver tabby."

In my next draft, I'll probably make him look more like "Swansong if he had the wolf motif."

And also fatter. They are not fat enough. These are RiverClan warriors and they are all too damn skinny.

Frostpaw

Since this arc began, I've imagined that Frosty has a sort of "little red riding hood" vibe. It's been mixing in my head with the wolf motif, the phrase "wool over the eyes," and the idea of a wolf in sheep's clothing to result in a sort of wooly cloak idea.

Something about a wolf cub who doesn't know who to trust-- the Big Bad Wolf, or the Lumberjack with a blood-soaked axe.

Lost, confused, their whole world turned upside down.

(hmmm.... maybe I'll do a thing where, before their mom's death, the wool covers her eyes. When she sees her die, the look of shock and horror is etched into her face forever.)

In BB, the Clan cats are monitored by scientists. They wouldn't be spaying or neutering the subjects of their investigation-- so I made her iconic "scars" MUCH bigger.

In fact, they're autopsy stitches. I'm going for a sort of "BROUGHT BACK FROM THE DEAD" vibe there.

Real "there is no way you would have survived those injuries without modern medicine" hours

I'm satisfied with this design, so I probably won't be changing it much besides tweaks. Though, I might make it so her "belly" wasn't exposed before the scientists shaved it to stitch her back up.

NOTE: If you wanna see more Frostpaw Plans, go check out this post where I jotted down a ton of ideas, it's also got further links to explore on BB!ASC thoughts I've been sitting on

Mistpaw

This is the one I like the least. She looks waaaaay too much like an Ivypool.

In my next pass I need to make her look cuter and goofier, give her some curls.

Like Graypaw, she only has one particularly unique scene in ASC so I'm building her personality around that.

Graypaw was a bit of a bully, so Mistpaw's got her mom's silver tongue and sharp wit. She can give a Mistystar speech if she wants.

She's a natural thinker, very curious, willing to question. It's something Curlfeather encourages in her, always coming in with the right answer to keep her satisfied.

"Mom, why do we train so much harder than everyone else?"

"To outdo them, of course."

"But... why train so hard when there's no threat? The impostor is gone, we're at peace."

"Oh, my love. You cannot pack a week's worth of training into the minute before a battle. They come hard and fast, and your attacker will have the advantage of surprise. Only practice will compensate."

Though Gray was a really big kitten and naturally imposing, Mist would be the one Curlfeather would ultimately decide was most fitting as a deputy.

If they'd gotten to that point, the siblings probably would have gotten in more fights as Gray started desiring the position for its benefits.

He'd see his mom was clearly giving Mist more opportunities to prove herself, and demand equal chances.

Mist would start thinking of Gray as a stupid bully who thinks he deserves everything because his shoulders are big.

BOTH of them would probably start trying to get Frost to support them over the other.

It would have been a MESS.

BUT, they never did get to that point. Curl was pretty equally focused on them at the point where she died.

When Graypaw got his ear shredded, Mistpaw thought it looked painful and horrific and "decided" to crop her own entirely, so they could never be shredded in battle. For reasons I covered in this Hearing Loss guide, RiverClan relies very little on hearing while hunting anyway.

I wanted Mistpaw to look extremely practical, and reference the cropped ears of a domestic dog. Give her a sort of "doberman" vibe.

Something struck me that Curlfeather could have talked her daughter into getting her ears cropped, both to show visually that she's politically grooming her just as much as she's politically grooming Frostpaw.

But... I'm unsure if I'll stick with it. I might have both Gray AND Mist get their ears cropped, or neither.

I also batted around the idea of a cropped tail, too, but THAT would definitely be too far since a tail is very important in swimming.

In fact, I made her tail waaaay too short and her build too thin, in the pursuit of that "doberman" idea.

Again; not a fan of this design. I will probably re-use it later or just give it away. Maybe I'll wait until I have a couple of "Rejected BB Designs" and do an adoptable batch lmao.

[mamawasatesttube]

as for kon future careers, i pingpong between several ideas tbh. haven't settled on a single particular one. but my favorite options:

planetarium guide. let him talk to kids about space!!! he loves space and he's great with kids.

high school biology teacher. he's especially passionate abt the genetics unit. <3

taking over the farm. i mean this one's obvious right?? he's a farm boy, and he Loves smallville.

carpenter/handyman. i think he might do this on the side anyways bc he's just good at it. ttk babey

hobby artist. similarly, i think he just has a lil etsy or whatever where he sells some of the ridiculous quantities of ttk fibercrafts he makes in his spare time

veterinarian. he can literally just put his hand on a dog and go "ah, i see... your tummy hurts because you swallowed some string..."

children's librarian. he would love to get the next generation into star trek: the next generation

contract lawyer. inspired by @clarkkent-irons!! he specializes in the contracts of kids in the entertainment industry.

bioethics lawyer/bioethicist. he has some pretty fucking strong feelings about the personhood of clones, so i mean... put that to use babey.

and, as a bonus, something he does as a hero:

EMT training. i think he just shows up to a class one day at some metropolis EMT school, in full costume, like. hi. i have tactile telekinesis that i know i can use to manipulate people's bodies. please teach me how to use it to save lives.

[barbwalken]

They first in game interaction is them about to throw hands 🥺. I love how cyrus was just going to fight them both bosses, who also have legendary pokemon, alone. He is dumb or he really trust palkia 🤔😏

Aww he cares for his devouring creature 🥺. Its funny how giovanni gets to sync with such powerful pokemon like mewtwo guzzlord, and everyone is like "you manipulative evil monster, free them!" But they actually want to be with gio because they too, are little shits like him XD

Babey boy, good luck with that ���. But if they go that route, it would be cool if silver helps him stop giovanni, he did it once and i feel like they still have unresolved shit (or maybe i just want to see more interactions with them 😌)

[canmom]

the adventure of canmom at weird weekend (part 1)

is this 'adventure of' joke getting old? like I've already done the 'translate into scots gaelic' variant. it's not exactly an adventure if it's a half hour bike ride is it? ah fuckit

This weekend was the Weird Weekend film festival in Glasgow! it's the tiny kind of film festival with one screen and folding chairs - they did get their hands on a real beast of a projector mind you...

Look at that concentrated beam of pure film. Kind of awesome to actually see a lightfield intense enough to scatter off random bits of dust in the air honestly.

This is apparently the fourth time this festival has run - though as is often the case I'm terribly out of the loop and only heard about it when @birdfriender told me it was on lol. It's also only my third time going to a film festival (the previous times both being Annecy, a very different kind of festival). It was a great time: the organisers have excellent taste and there's a lot of deep cuts, and made some good friends among the attendees.

On Friday night I showed up for the opening evening of interactive film - this included a short film/video essay commissioned for the festival based on of all things the Goncharov meme (seriously...), followed by a brief history of interactive film including the amusingly ill-fated venture of a certain former Microsoft guy called Bob something (I really should have written this down), and then someone called Puke ("everyone’s favourite genderfluid body fluid") came out dressed like this to oversee the actual event...

...and we watched of all things Final Destination 3 with the DVD feature that lets you switch in alternate scenes at various points (mostly death scenes). This was actually a pretty good time since it was my first time seeing a Final Destination film, and there was a good energy in the audience (although it seemed like the film always picked the opposite of what we voted for - not sure if that's a thematic point or programming error lol), but I'm glad the rest of the festival was more obscure stuff.

On Saturday, the festival proper began! I am reminded of a certain line in Exordia, in which the alien Ssrin gives her assessment of humanity, opening with "You’re a species of gangly distance runners, adapted to sweat and throw stuff. You like watching each other fuck." And indeed, there were few films this weekend that did not offer an opportunity to watch someone fuck. That's art for ya babey.

Looking back the clear highlight was Louise Weard's film Castration Movie I: Traps, but more on that anon - let's start at the beginning. I ended up catching all but one of the films over the course of the weekend and there was maybe only one I'd call an outright miss, so great going in all.

On Saturday we opened with a pair of Hungarian films directed by György Révész, about an incredibly up himself intellectual-in-exile named Dr. János Bátky - the self insert of author Antal Szerb. the first film, The Loves of a Dilettante, sees Bátky going through a series of affairs with women around him - in each case abruptly ending the relationship because it doesn't conform to his specific fantasy. The reasons become increasingly absurd: at first Bátky wishes instead that his partner is a certain Countess, but when he chances to meet the lady herself, he refuses to believe she is who she says she is; at last another woman at the library turns out to be the secret admirer who has been sending Bátky gifts in the post, and he cannot stand to be pursued instead of the manipulative pursuer he fancied himself to be, and spurns her as well.

Bátky is very much the butt of the joke in this film, and the ending sees everyone pretty much done with his bullshit; at the same time, he is an entertaining character, with a nonstop patter full of literary allusions, bizarre tangents and dubious observations. Not so charming that I can quite see why all these women are throwing themselves at him, but that's the conceit of the film I suppose! The actor playing him, Iván Darvas does a splendid job of making this sideburned wanker come across as interesting enough to carry a film.

The second Bátky film, The Pendragon Legend was a major tonal departure from the first - and also featured a different cast, despite including a number of the same characters. (Funnily enough Iván Darvas returns, but as a different character.) This time, rather than a study of Bátky's foibles, we have a complicated conspiracy at a stately home in wales, tying in with biological experiments, immortal sorcerors and the Rosicrucians, assassination plots, affairs; the works. It ends up a lot of fun, although the sheer number of characters made it a little hard to keep track of everything. Here, Bátky is pulled in as almost an observer of all the shit going down, and comes across a lot more sympathetic as a result.

All in all, a pretty fascinating pair of films and window into Hungarian cinema. With both these films set in London and Wales but voiced entirely in Hungarian, it seems to present an amusing alternate universe in which Hungary is the language of the UK, but nobody knows where Hungary is. It's a very old-school 'from outside' view of the UK, full of tea-sipping aristocrats and walks in the park and intellectual conversations in a library - it's quite funny to me. I haven't seen a ton of Hungarian film (mostly animation), but everything I've seen has been fascinating, and terribly literary.

A whole lot of the films in this festival were restorations of various out of print films, and that includes to the next one, Treasure Island directed by Scott King. This film has absolutely nothing to do with Stephenson's book, instead referring to the island near San Francisco where mail was processed during the second world war.

The basis of the story is the historical Operation Mincemeat, in which the British constructed a false identity for a corpse and planted it to mislead the Nazis; here the story is transplanted to the American invasion of Japan, but the focus is hardly wartime intrigue, instead the psychosexual inner lives of the two Americans who are involved in constructing the fake identity for the corpse. One of them secretly has two wives, one a white civilian woman and the other a Japanese woman who works in translation for the military; the other habitually invites other men for group sex with him and his wife and has a whole lot of hangups about how he is not gay, and that corpse is not at all sexy thank you.

As the film progresses, both of them are increasingly struck by visions of the dead man talking to them and the line between 'reality' and fantasy gets blurrier. It's a very well crafted and engaging film; shot in black and white in 1999, it aimed to challenge the rather sanitised and straightforwardly heroic picture of the 'Greatest Generation' who fought the war, presenting a more 'warts and all' look with the sexuality and racism and so forth in full view. I found it very effective! And it was cool to have the director there, a bearded American guy who spoke very confidently about his intentions for the film - I got to ask a question about how he kept all the fantasy and more literal elements straight while scripting the film.

(Do you find that when you get a Q&A session like this, you really want to ask a good question? Because I do. It's very silly. But like if I am going to hold the mic and get the spotlight on me... sure I don't want to waste peoples' time, but also I kinda want to come off well lmao. If I can get people to go 'ooh that's a good question' I feel like I've won audience Q&A, a real thing that is reasonable to want.)

In the afternoon we got a massive block of trans films old and new. We opened with Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucubers featuring Holly Woodlawn; Jaye Hudson of the TGirlsOnFilm Instagram account (which I was not previously familiar with) gave an introduction, telling the story of how Woodlawn came into the orbit of Warhol's 'Factory', and reading out some funny anecdotes about her experience on set. As Jaye talked about it, at that point in the 70s, trans girls were kind of the flavour of the month and we appeared in a bunch of films at the time, of which this was one.

The film sees a girl called Eve Harrington moving to New York in pursuit of the dream of becoming an actress; there she meets a series of weirdos from taxi-driving nuns to 'Mary Poppins', the drag empress of a kind of roommate finding service who's always trailed by worshipful boys. Most of the film sees Eve trying to find an apartment and a boyfriend, and running into various 70s archetypes along the way: a werewolf (also played by Woodlawn in boy mode), political lesbians, a plant-obsessed hippy, and finally a taciturn amnesiac Russian woman and her brother, a little person in a cowboy outfit who does pro wrestling. It's an intriguing slice of the 70s and of New York in particular.

Apparently this film has long been out of print and only narrowly evaded being lost media, so it's pretty sick to see. (And honestly despite the long cultural shadow they cast, I don't actually know that much about the girls around Warhol's 'Factory', so I was glad to get a look in.)

Next up we had 'An Untitled and Perfectly-Legal Coming-of-Age Clown Parody Film' - not hard to figure out what film this is (The People's Joker), especially with the still and trailer right there, but while the courts in the US seem to have come down on recognising it as a valid Fair Use defence, the legal status is still a bit up in the air in the UK.

This one got a lot of buzz for thumbing its nose at Warner Bros.' copyright empire - and of course being part of a recent wave of trans girl directed independent films such as I Saw The TV Glow. It's a trans girl coming of age story built around the Batman milieu, and clearly by people with a pretty thorough knowledge of Batman's cinematic history and DC universe deep cuts (the final act involves a musical number with Mx. Mxyzptlk, played as a puppet, which I'm sure means something if you read the comics).

It's largely shot on greenscreen, with all kinds of mixed media and animation segments - deliberately going for a grungy, chaotic look where it doesn't try to match lighting and animation styles (there's a whole bunch of indepedent animators contributing brief segments here, much as in Barber Westchester). The story concerns Joker the Harlequin, a trans girl who finally moves away from her controlling mother after being drugged with 'Smylex' for most of her life; now in Gotham she can transition, have a dodgy relationship with a trans guy (who is also a version of the Joker, and - spoilers - a former Robin), and build an 'anti-comedy' club with most of the usual Batman villains before going to confront the cultish institution which controls all legal comedy in post-'cyber war' America.

The film's strongest aspect is, fittingly, jokes - throwaway lines about the casually dystopian setting ('drag was outlawed after the explosion at RuPaul's fracking ranch' got a big laugh); a running joke of namedropping cancelled comedians with 'before the unpleasantness, of course' 'of course'; the playful riffs on past Batman films. The core story, though, is a fairly by-the-numbers queer/trans coming of age about self-acceptance, parental mistreatment and finding community, and a bit of a satire on SNL which is perhaps more specific to the director's history - I get the purpose of this kind of narrative and I certainly needed it at a time, and wrote similar stories myself, but it's a kind of story I'm kind of increasingly tired of hearing. I don't mean to say it's bad for that - just it doesn't resonate the way it might have ten years ago.

Honestly, I think trying to make a 'trans movie' kind of paints you into a formulaic corner. A corner very deftly avoided by the next movie, Louise Weard's Castration Movie Part I: Traps. This was the theatrical debut of this movie, though it's been available to download on Weard's gumroad for some time.

Louise Weard made herself kind of notorious for her previous movie, ten years ago, Computer Hearts, but even more so for her castration scene supercut at the Fantastic Fest '100 Best Kills' event a couple of years ago - something that has left her feeling a bit pigeonholed into castration scenes. Part of the joke about Castration Movie is then that it's eight hours (only half of that presently available) of trans girls being sad (emotional drama) without any castration until the very end of the movie. It doesn't even come up in the first half.

Technically, this is a four hour long movie - the first part of an eight hour long movie! - consisting largely of very long takes of naturalistic conversations shot on an incredibly grainy camera, now and then mixing that with musical montage and sex scenes. Something I'd raise an eyebrow at on description, and I want to kind of lead with that because like, no joke, this is legit one of the best movies I've seen; those four hours absolutely fly by. Incredibly sharp character writing, incredibly strong naturalistic acting - and unreasonably funny, just way too much.

The first hour or so focuses on Turner, an aspiring film director who spends his time working odd jobs at a film crew and increasingly torpedoing his relationship with his furry-artist girlfriend - someone he clearly isn't very compatible with and views with little actual interest, and his efforts to try and salvage the relationship ring false in ways he's clearly unable to see. But at every turn he doubles down and builds on his resentment and sense of emasculation, until he's picking fights with a living statue in the street and busting into his ex's room late at night.

Along the way we get all sorts of darkly funny conversations - Weard has an incredible eye for subtext and awkwardness, and can lend an ultimately very unsympathetic character like Turner enough sympathetic motivation to make his downward spiral completely human and convincing. It's both sad and terribly funny, perfectly pitched.

The punchline sees him posting to /r9k/ - and at this point we cut to a new story about 'Traps', the film's actual main character, a sex worker in Vancouver played by Weard herself, who is caught up with the drama of various partners and her own completely unresolved shit around transition to make her an entirely unsuitable would-be mentor figure to her friend Adeleine, who's kind of the deuteragonist of this act, cracking under the pressure of being the only one in the house with a shit but paying office job while her boyfriend gets top surgery.

The first act sets us up a frame to look at the second - Traps is a pretty messed up person, but in a deeply understandable way, and it serves in ways to show that the shit she's going through is not some unique trans girl thing but very much the torment of being a human. Desperate for connection and fucking it up, digging ourselves deeper while convinced it's the right thing to do. Along the way, we see her having various kinds of nasty sex, injecting DIY HRT, taking a bunch of cocaine, a trans guy getting top surgery, and various other fun things that I could never stream on twitch (or you bet I'd be planning a screening right away) - but it's also in many ways incredibly matter of fact about all this shit we get up to in a way that feels incredibly real.

It's a film that benefitted a lot from viewing with a largely transfem audience who would laugh at certain lines in the right spirit - I have no idea how this whole thing would come across if you aren't trans and don't know what 'agp' means (about the person saying it as much as anything) lmao. But if you are, it's like the film I never even knew I needed. It's way too real: from amusing setups like the polycule who has the access to DIY HRT trying to drag you into an argument about Dune before one of them wakes up and has a panic attack or daft conversations about boobs, to the pinpoint depiction of the kinds of neuroses we end up carrying from our shitty tenuous work, and of course the friction and fireworks of trying to care for each other when we're all burned out from carrying our own shit. Weard is fearless, and does seem to rather revel in being transgressive, but this is not edge for edge's sake.

And honestly this is 100% what 'trans film', if we can't help but have such a category, needs to be I think - a story heavily informed by the specific fucked up experiences of being trans but not like, About Being Trans(TM) in the way People's Joker was. Uncompromisingly honest (but with plenty of humour) about how we are, which is to say painfully human, rather than cheerfully painting the sort of freeing subculture we'd like to think we have.

I got to talk to Weard quite a bit on Sunday (ending up in a pub with her and a number of other mostly trans festivalgoers), and it turns out the slightly ludicrous length of the film wasn't even planned, with the original idea to edit it down to something like a standard 90 minutes - but when it became evident after shooting the first forty minutes or so that these long scenes were kind of absolute gold, someone (I forget who now) made the case that they shouldn't be cut down at all and to just go for the full behemoth. And honestly? They were fucking right. This did not feel like a four hour film, somehow. There were definitely other films this festival where my mind wandered and I kind of checked out a bit, but not this one.

As a chaser (ha ha) to that, we had Louise Weard's 'Unsee' segment, screened just once in the hour before the clocks change (which is in a certain sense lost to time, or at least that's the joke of this segment). An elaboration on the experience of presenting the castration scene supercut at the '100 Best Deaths' event, it dives into a reprise of that supercut before increasingly alternating with scenes of a kind of introspective monologue on how people reacted to that event and how far Louise herself started to end up feeling like the butt of the joke (even as random cis women accused her of being transphobic lmao).

As the video progresses it segues into an increasingly ridiculous sequence where two of Weard's friends step in (as substitute Louise Weards) reading out her essay of Lacanian film analysis on castration scenes in movies, while Weard (behind the camera) gives them directions to frame the shot to better show her cis ex's boobs. In between, more castration scenes! So many, most of them unfamiliar to me (funny moment when I finally recognised one and my brain was like hey! that's Sálo! and I found myself turning to face Violet with an excited grin before my brain caught up with that)

Among other things, the narration talks about the whole arc being a transgressive tgirl filmmaker who frequently faced some rather ridiculous accusations of being a transphobe or nazi troll (by TV Glow's Jane Schoenbrun, although it seems they have since made up), all in a time when it seems like a lot of her contemporaries in the transgressive film scene actually do seem to end up going nazi; the trouble of getting pigeonholed as the castration person, and so on - but also kind of playing with like oh, fifteen more castration scenes, that's what you want right? So many swerves, and the supercut was in fact very funny (I wonder if I find it easy to laugh instead of wincing since I actually have been castrated lmao), ending in a scene which is constructed to suggest Louise actually cut her balls off for the bit - though since she showed the prop penis earlier it was pretty clear that she didn't. (Yet..?)

It's a really clever bit and superbly entertaining bit of filmmaking, all told. I'm a full Louise Weard convert at this point, can't wait for castration movie part ii.

This post has gotten pretty long now, so I'll write up Sunday tomorrow. Do go watch Castration Movie tho, it's worth your time.